Getting more tanks ain't it. More war also not it.

Russian empire needs to be dismantled. But unlikely UKR waging war on russia will do it.

So basically you have put no thought into this except that you don’t like war.

I think most people will agree with you that war is bad. But if you get attacked, then all you can do is either give up or defend yourself.

Afghanistan chose to give up to the Taliban, and now their rights are being taken away.

Ukraine chose to defend themselves, and the jury is still out on whether they’ll be successful and what the cost will be.

But there is no third option where you simply will war out of existence.

Diplomacy works with certain enemies, and that will hopefully be the outcome in Ukraine too, but that too will come with a heavy price, such as giving up major amounts of territory.

Plenty of people have put thought into what to do to end war. You don't need original thoughts from me.

The natural corollary of someone attacking you is not to get into an arms race.

Afghanistan didn't choose Taliban. Pakistan and Saudi chose Taliban and armed them enough to take over. War obviously works.

What's going to happen in UKR is that the warlike will win and then naturally turn their guns towards the locals. Exactly like in Afghanistan. You can arm them as much as you like, but they will not turn into gandhis with an excess of guns.

My point is not that war doesn't work. My point is that we should all be fighting against war.

> My point is that we should all be fighting against war.

By what, asking nicely?

Yes. Be very persuasive. But restrict yourself to persuasion.

The way is for the antiwar people to be more successful than warriors and turn war into the losers' choice.

I refuse to arm myself, refuse to serve in militaries and refuse to support war as much as i am able. If antiwar people are successful, war will evolve out.

Persuasion has already been tried and failed. If someone comes to kill you will you fight, or just lay down and die? In the real world sometimes those are the only two options. To believe otherwise is simply utopian naivety.

Do you think Ukraine can persuade Putin to call off the invasion? If they didn’t defend themselves, they’d be a Russian province or puppet state today.

That’s always the unfortunate downside of relying on only persuasion. Some people will just take what they want if you don’t force them to stop.

Just read about how well persuasion (aka “appeasement”) worked in the buildup to WW2. Spoiler: it didn’t.

In the specific case of Ukraine, a people's war of national liberation is a pretty classic form of nation building. That's how a lot of nations came about. The Taliban are a particularly bad analogy, because they represent regionalist resistance against central government in Afghanistan. Countries like Italy, the USA, or Vietnam were formed in this manner.

> the warlike will win and then naturally turn their guns towards the locals

Whether they do that as a democratic government, a dictatorship, a paragovernamental entity, or a set of mobs makes all the difference in the world.

Anyone pointing a gun at me is not my friend. Anyone that chooses a gun to get their way is not my friend.

I don't trust people with guns. They are the same because they all choose violence to get their way.

"Democratic" gun holders point more guns at me today than mobs.

The main problem with a pacifist approach is Darwinism. When the violent can herd/control/kill the non-violent. Then the next generation of people are likely to be of the dominant.

Words and persuasion are all very good, until you meet people who simply don't care.

The nature of the entire thing is that usually there is exactly one of those entities pointing their guns at you. So yeah, that one will have "most guns pointed at you".

You can have more than one, but it's a huge life vs. death issue. You can't have zero.

The Talibans are the Afghanistan, or a bit part of it.

"Afghanistan" is a western colonial construct made up of many groups. Most states are western colonial constructs. We might need to move past that.

Who is "we"? At this point, western colonial powers no longer occupy Afghanistan. If the Afghans want to break up their country into multiple separate states based on traditional ethnic boundaries or whatever they're free to do so.

Not the OP, but they should seek for peace as soon as possible, that will reduce the number of dead Ukrainians and also the amount of territory that they might further lose.

Ideally the Zelensky regime should have gotten the message and should have left for the West as soon as the Russian paratroopers landed at Gostomel. The Czechoslovaks in '68 and the Hungarians in '56 had done exactly that. Yes, that would have probably meant a couple of decades of a Russian-backed puppet regime in Kyiv but the future would have been open for anything. As things stand right now Ukraine has almost no access to the Black Sea anymore, about 7 million people have left their homes, not to mention the tens of thousands of civilians dead in this war.