You're viewing a single thread.
"Defending" would imply that it's not Ukrainians who are the ones dying in a ditch while they lose more ground every day on the way to inevitable defeat in absence of a peace deal. Neolibs have the most cringe internal hero monologue while they sentence other people's children to die...
damn Russia really should have thought of the children before they started unprovoked invasion of a soverign nation with intent to conquest #3
the hell kind of abusive victim blaming mindset is this? "Clearly ukraine is in the wrong for defending themselves against an invading force"
Russia did think of the children!
Well, they did think of the Ukrainian children they kidnapped and are selling off to Russian families. Not the ones they killed.
I don’t read that as saying Ukraine shouldn’t defend themselves, but rather it is saying Ukraine is defending the west, putting their lives at risk and doing the dying while the west otherwise sits comfortably at home.
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, but it sure isn’t us putting our lives on the line for democracy like the Ukrainians are.
Yes, in some ways Ukraine is defending the West... proxy wars are nothing new, and this is definitely a proxy war by any definition of the term.
HOWEVER, if Ukraine didn't want to defend themselves and wished to preserve life, they would have rolled over, gotten rid of their president, and handed the country over to Putin by now. They've proven they are not above driving out their president and upper leadership by public demonstration, they have done it before specifically to get rid of a pro-Russian president and parliament prior to Putin's invasion of Crimea. They chose this path for themselves in 2014, they do not want to be involved in Putin's authoritarian state. It is up to us in the west to support that path and right to self determination.
It is also in the best interest of both to not get the west directly involved (yet, anyway), because Russia can and will take NATO troops being deployed as an invitation to start a broader hot war, and then everyone loses.
Both Ukraine and the west understand Russia doesn't stop there. Appeasement has never, ever worked with egotistical empire building dictators in the past before, and it will not work now. Just letting Russia have Ukraine would save lives, but inevitably cost more in the long run.
Yeah, Russia's bad and is clearly the aggressor. They're also going to win eventually. Ukraine is their backyard, thus why Obama sheepishly just let them take what they did in 2014. So the question is how many Ukrainians you're willing to throw into the meat grinder en route to a negotiated peace. Seems like "all of them" is the answer.
As long as Ukraine wants to defend themselves against Russia I support their choice to do so and wish my government would provide even more support for them to do so.
And this is why we never have any money for investing in domestic programs to improve anything. If it's not Korea, it's Vietnam, if not Vietnam, it's Kosovo, if not Kosovo, it's Iraq, if not Iraq it's Afghanistan, if not Afghanistan, it's Ukraine. Have you ever questioned why there's always a new crisis that makes Raytheon execs rich, but mysteriously leaves nothing to spend on civilians here at home?
Have you ever questioned why there’s always a new crisis that makes Raytheon execs rich, but mysteriously leaves nothing to spend on civilians here at home?
Imagine thinking that's why we don't have well-funded social services.
In 2020, when corporations that had just received three years of outrageously large tax cuts and stock buybacks were frightened of losing revenue, the Repub government fabricated trillions of dollars in handouts to pass around with little to no oversight.
It is not the spending on Raytheon that is preventing spending on citizens at home. It is that half the country has oppositional defiant disorder about any service or policy that would help poor people.
Yes, all of these handouts to our ruling class are also why we can't have nice things, but I'd argue engineering marvels that literally murder large numbers of human beings are worse than a direct handout. Maybe we just need welfare for Lockheed Martin. Also, if you want to get super technical about the economics, taxes in a fiat currency economy of our size is actually a purely inflation-management mechanism. There's no dollar-to-dollar relationship between income and expenditure, really, so a tax cut isn't really "spending" in the same way, you're just egging on inflation by failing to remove dollars from the economy (not to be pro-tax cut, obviously inflation is bad and regressive taxation of its own, but its important not to play into the right's misconceptions of how the economy works).
And this right here is an example of someone not knowing how their own government works.
You got me, there is no war machine. I'm making it up. Eisenhower was lying when he warned us about this.
Never said there wasn't.
I'm just pointing out that you don't even know how your own government works, that is, if you're even American.
You should use this keen awareness of how the government really works for the benefit of mankind. I do like going straight to the Russian bot thing, always a winner.
Gee, I didn't know not being American means you're automatically Russian. Either way, you're intentionally missing the entire point of my replies. You don't know how your own government works. Helping Ukraine in no way is draining tax payer money, ya dunce.
I'm all about modern monetary theory, so I get that taxes do not 1-1 equate to spending, taxation is an arbitrary anti-inflationary mechanism while spending is an arbitrary inflationary mechanism when you're a large country with a big economy people want to business in while printing 'me' bucks -- and I get the argument that "it's creating American jobs," but mostly it's making defense company execs rich, which is overall inflationary, which is a regressive tax on us all in the end... so... every $100 billion we spend there like it's nothing isn't entirely non-impactful on our economy. Also, now that treasury bonds aren't at effectively 0% anymore this is producing net drag on the budget, insofar as how congress sees it, and they do the budgeting, ergo the $x billion we're paying on the $y billion we've sent to Ukraine is reducing funding to something domestic in budget negotiations, or will eventually when the interest compounds back into the debt and the GOP goes all "Austerity forever!" the next time they're out of power, which in your ideal world will be next year.
And this is why we never have any money for investing in domestic programs to improve anything. If it's not Korea, it's Vietnam, if not Vietnam, it's Kosovo, if not Kosovo, it's Iraq, if not Iraq it's Afghanistan, if not Afghanistan, it's Ukraine. Have you ever questioned why there's always a new crisis that makes Raytheon execs rich, but mysteriously leaves nothing to spend on civilians here at home?
It's absolutely not the reason lol. The reason you can't invest in domestic programs like universal healthcare or post-secondary education financing reform is because half of your fellow Americans oppose it, and vote accordingly. Convincing others matters.
You know, every time this topic comes up I just sit back and remember how well appeasement worked last time. You remember, with that toothbrush mustache guy? Boy, I'm sure glad capitulating led to nothing happening after that!
Russia hasn't lost on their home turf in 500+ years... Enjoy the winter, Napleon.
Good thing Ukraine isn't their home turf
Good thing Ukraine isn't Russia, then, and that the war is happening in Ukraine. Afghanistan, ahoy!
Ukraine isn't mountainous terrain that's hard to navigate both on foot and with even modern aircraft. It isn't a subsistence economy that has been at war for a thousand years. It isn't home to people who made a life raiding into India for women and livestock, fierce mountain vikings, even before becoming the graveyard of empire as they cut their teeth on three world powers in a row, getting stronger with each they drove out, generation by generation. These are farmers and programmers and project managers, who are dying in trenches on a flat field as surely as the Flemmish before Germans in WWI, and yes, the line can hold forever, but it takes X lives every day to make that happen, and there's no endgame where Russia gives in, because it needs the fresh water from the non-Crimea shit to hold Crimea, which has no rivers, and their whole Black Sea naval operation is out of there, and they're not going to cede the whole Black Sea.
Ukraine isn’t mountainous terrain that’s hard to navigate both on foot and with even modern aircraft. It isn’t a subsistence economy that has been at war for a thousand years. It isn’t home to people who made a life raiding into India for women and livestock, fierce mountain vikings, even before becoming the graveyard of empire as they cut their teeth on three world powers in a row, getting stronger with each they drove out, generation by generation. These are farmers and programmers and project managers, who are dying in trenches on a flat field as surely as the Flemmish before Germans in WWI, and yes, the line can hold forever, but it takes X lives every day to make that happen, and there’s no endgame where Russia gives in, because it needs the fresh water from the non-Crimea shit to hold Crimea, which has no rivers, and their whole Black Sea naval operation is out of there, and they’re not going to cede the whole Black Sea.
What absolutely bizarre hagiography.
The funniest thing about you neolibs is the casual islamophobia from the DEI set... not even islamophobia here, I suppose, since they were Buddhists for half the history above... anti-Pashtun accomplishment? Afghanistan is literally known as the graveyard of empire for good reason. You can't point to them as equivalent to Ukraine, a very post-industrial country, with no specific multi-generational warrior culture, on a flat plain where the primary obstacle for oncoming tanks is mud. The Russians will not be caught in Ukraine forever, they'll gain mile by mile until we negotiate a worse peace than we could have had a 100,000+ dead ago.
Absolutely bizarre fascist-style warrior-culture rhetoric.
I don't think it's hard to understand that people who have been raised for generations with the constant presence of war and weapons from a subsistence economy would be better at doing endless war than IT consultants used to having iPhones and electricity, but I guess I'm wrong? Also, do you not get how mountains work?
Yeah I'm sure the West is planning a massive land invasion of Russia in the middle of winter, you figured it out.
Lol you're so dumb
You got me. I've been trying for years (presumably unsuccessfully) to hide it, but you nailed me. SAD.
Russia might think they will win, but it will rather be NATO against Russia than Ukraine losing.
Win eventually? Lol. Russia already lost. Their 2 week battle plan to take over Ukraine and dissuade other countries from joining NATO has turned into a two year conflict that has caused multiple neighboring countries to submit NATO applications. The absolute best Russia can do at this point is get a bit of dirt.
Their military has already been downgraded from a near peer to a peer at this point. It used to be The US, China and Russia. Now it's just The US and China. Their economy is in shambles and they've resorted to cooking the books to pretend it's not. Russia already lost.
Think about this in the future when this war is over and you start claiming that it was a great victory for Daddy Putin because they end up being able to annex a few kilometers of unusable land.
Thank you for demonstrating what simping for a fascist state looks like.
You don't need to love Russia to perceive that they're winning and were always going to win against a much smaller state right in their back yard. I guess you do need to disabuse yourself of your delusions of grandeur, though.
Go back to your cave, orc.
