No, there's theorising by John Mearsheimer which you subscribe to. It's an ideology of realpolitik/offensive realism, I've read it, I've watched it, I know what you mean and that's just a take, a view on the situation, please be mindful of that.
Or even worse, you are subscribing to Putinism, you are validating Putin. And saying you are Ukrainian, what the actual fuck? Stop hiding behind that throw away and deceiving us, like I told you before: it's boring and tiresome.
And still, you don't fucking expand anywhere on your "logical sequence of events". I asked before for you to expand on it and you didn't do it. Worse, you tried using that bizarre sequence of pseudo-rhetorical questions to drive no argument in the end. You are not participating in any discussion...
> Unfortunately, the US is not a free speech country. I'm not allowed to share "incorrect" opinion, which is why I use a throwaway account.
What the actual fuck? You're absolutely free to say whatever you want, you aren't free of the consequences of said speech.
You are not being persecuted, your views are, accept that just like I accept mine to be challenged and do not hide behind a throw away like a coward.
Like, you don't even comprehend what free speech actually means and think you are equipped enough to have not only a political opinion that's being regurgitated from somewhere else, but also that this opinion is the holier than thou one, where it's better because you thought of it. When you didn't even came up with your reasoning, you are copycatting it and not even completely because you can't even start to expose your argumentation.
Get off your high horse, you are being incredibly shallow in your argumentation. I don't care how much taxes you pay, or that you work at some Google-like place with Google-like pay, none of that is even close to relevant to any of the arguments you are trying to shove into this discussion...
Are you angry that your taxes go to war? Boo-fucking-hoo, you live in the US, you chose to continue living there due to higher paying salaries and so on, for that you need to also accept the other facet of your country: it's a hyper-militaristic power and due to that you have the privilege of being well paid, your taxes are funding exactly what enables the US to be the superpower it is.
You can't have the cake and eat it too. If you live in the US your taxes will very likely always be funding some war.
And you are angry about funding a war against an oppressor? Against a regime explicitly calling for the genocide against the people of Ukraine? A state explicitly saying that another state doesn't exist and trying to annex it. Against a real adversary of your country, which has been bled dry by peanuts of spending. That's fucking rich... It's one of the best investments your country has done for its own foreign policy. That's probably one of the wars where the US is actually on the good side of it, fighting for what's morally right.
Seriously look inside yourself and what you are spewing, it makes absolutely no logical sense that you hold all these views at the same time, it's a hodge-podge of idiotic reasoning. And it's disgusting.
I thought FAANG was supposed to hire mostly smart people, guess I was wrong.
It's _not_ only Mearsheimer, but aside from that, why is this view incorrect?
> Or even worse, you are subscribing to Putinism, you are validating Putin.
What if Putin is not lying? There is a mathematical chance that the so called "propaganda" is actually an uncomfortable truth for an average Joe living outside of Russia.
> I asked before for you to expand on it and you didn't do it.
I did. Read my other comment.
> Worse, you tried using that bizarre sequence of pseudo-rhetorical questions to drive no argument in the end. You are not participating in any discussion...
WTF? I brought up straight _facts_. Did you read my comment? 1991 -> 2007 -> 2008 -> Crimea -> etc. What's not clear?
> You're absolutely free to say whatever you want
No, I'm not. Example: BLM is a hoax. The BLM leaders purchased a shit ton of real estate in Manhattan. $200,000 were spent on clubs and prostitutes (see IRS filings). I can't say that in public. I'll be cancelled and my career is done within minutes.
> Boo-fucking-hoo, you live in the US, you chose to continue living there due to higher paying salaries and so on
I chose to live here because my kids were born here. I actually thought of moving back to Ukraine (before the war). I love my country, I lived there for 30 years, but its corruption is so high that I decided to punt that decision. Later, when I helped Ukrainians with aid, I received a _direct_ phone call on my cell phone from one of the organizations telling me that if I keep sending aid to Ukraine, they'll find me in the US and the conversation will be different. I got that call from Lviv.
> You can't have the cake and eat it too. If you live in the US your taxes will very likely always be funding some war.
Isn't that exactly why the war is happening in Ukraine? The US needs its military bases around the world to have a leverage. How hard is that to understand?
> Seriously look inside yourself and what you are spewing, it makes absolutely no logical sense that you hold all these views at the same time, it's a hodge-podge of idiotic reasoning. And it's disgusting.
The reason why I won't is because I always question any decisions irrespective whether they were made by the US or Russian leaders. Both parties have an opportunity to lie. Historically, there was a shit ton of lies against Russia. All these lies, again, according to the history, were pretty much always benefiting the US––not to save lives or promote democracy and throw rainbows around the world.
Let's imagine what Putin is saying is truth. Work backwards from that.
Now image the US is telling the truth. Work backwards from that.
The two paths outlined above will give you a picture in which the US is the sole reason of all the shit that is happening today. Dive fucking deeper. DO NOT READ NYT/CNN/WAPO. Look at the freaking historical facts and make your own conclusion.
You might call me a conspiracy theorist, but I mind you - there are endless number of conspiracy theories that end up being true. Never trust mass media - I worked in the largest mass media agency in NY - they are fucking driven by ad revenue only - there is zero trust. That is obviously a whole separate topic.
Your views are the US propaganda. How cool is that?
Just think about the type of government that Putin and the Kremlin currently are, do you believe this is a good moral standpoint? If so, good luck, if not, then question the fucking propaganda you've been eating.
I'm not from the US, I come from a country that the USA fucked over for decades, the US fostered a dictatorship in my country that killed one of my uncles, it's a country directly under the US sphere of influence because it's in South America, I have all the personal reasons to just hate the USA and go against its propaganda.
And I still can see how, from a moral standpoint, Russia is wrong here. No matter what comes from 1991, 2007, 2008, they fucked up, they are trying to annex neighbours and their regime doesn't care about human rights or anything that I stand for. Stuff that I hope you don't stand for either.
Defending Russia in this is defending Putin's and the Kremlin's morals, if you do you are completely fucked in the head, dude.
Bless your heart and farewell, you are just too far gone. I'm too old to have to keep fighting bullshit, it just takes too much to go around finding sources and giving you other points of view when you can just simply write whatever is living inside your head, bullshit is just too hard to combat. Unfortunately.
Your morals are rotten, I don't think we can really start having a proper conversation when our code of ethics is so different. You believe that in the 21st century it's justified for a country to invade a neighbour, that's absolutely fucked up to me.
Why is J. Mearsheimer's reasoning incorrect, but yours is correct? He is a political scientist with decades of experience.
Here is one more from CATO Institute : https://www.cato.org/commentary/washington-helped-trigger-uk...
So, you are telling me all these people are "fucking dumb" (using your terminology) and all of that is Russian propaganda?
Mearsheimer has as his political philosophy his own offensive realism theory, where great powers only act only on their desires to become hegemonies, that's why I believe he is not entirely correct (not fucking stupid as you) on his take on Russia, there's more at play than just this real politik of offensive realism.
I don't think that great powers will only act to achieve hegemony (as does a number of other political scientists that aren't Mearsheimer). And if those powers do, we carrying the values of human dignity and rights believe that nations shouldn't annex other nations in the 21st century and so it doesn't matter that by offensive realism he states that Russia is correct, morally Russia is wrong and we judge the actions of nations by this morality.
He has developed this theory and so has to be the main supporter of it, and the real believer in it. It doesn't make it true because he has decades of political science studies. People like Herman Lundborg studied medicine and developed a theory where he stated some people of a specific skin colour were genetically better than another set of people of a different skin colour, he studied it for decades, doesn't make him right.
You didn't answer: where does your morality take you? You are not answering any of my prompts and focusing on one aspect to try to focus my attention into it, stop this bullshit and answer: what are your morals? Do you align yourself with Putin's morals? Do you believe it's right for a country to invade a neighbouring country in the 21st century? Do you believe it's right for the government of a country to call for the annihilation of a different nation?
CATO Institute is something that I would not touch with a 10m pole, you are agreeing with the think tank backed by Charles Koch, I hope I don't have to expand much on that after naming him. Yes, CATO Institute is fucking dumb :)
So yes, I'm exhausted, you are a coward hiding behind a throwaway and throwing dumb shit around, that's life I guess.
And again, stop running away from my morality questions, fucking coward.
> CATO Institute is fucking dumb :)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Do you believe it's right for a country to invade a neighbouring country in the 21st century?
I do not support wars. But you can't ask a question like that. It doesn't make sense.
War is a mechanism for dispute resolution. Yes, we, people, don't like such mechanisms. But such is the life. These mechanisms are used by the US all the time. The US shows the world that this mechanism can be used. So, the US can, but Russia can't? It doesn't even matter whether it's Russia or any other country.
In the case of Russian-Ukrainian war, the dispute that the war is trying to resolve comes from the expansion of NATO and military bases next to the Russian borders. No expansion -> no war.
> Do you believe it's right for a country to invade a neighbouring country in the 21st century?
It doesn't matter which century we are in. The society hasn't reached a state in which a fairly complex dispute can be resolved without a war. Right now there is no state in which war is an impossible option. To make it more clear, for example, we are in a state in which the humanity cannot travel with the speed of light. We are simply not there yet. When it comes to wars, we are in state in which a war is a possibility.
When Putin asked the US (early 2000s) why NATO is expanding, they just mumbled some bullshit in response. How can military bases across the world create peace? You can't create peace by throwing weapon around the world. There will always be someone who won't like it.
The US should've take Putin more seriously in the first place, but they kept belittling his requests to stop the expansion for 15+ years.
You don't believe in the values of democracy, you don't like wars but is supporting the side that's starting a war in name of Fascism and you don't even see it.
Do yourself a favour before you repeat history.
And once more you are a coward trying to evade a simple question: what ars your morals? What do you stand for? And I mean for, standing against stuff is an anti-model, it's meaningless as morality. So far you only showed to stand for the justification of Putin's flavour of Fascism, you're eating that and it's sad and enraging to watch.
Farewell.
NATO is the threat. The US cannot simply lie about NATO's good intentions, because in Eastern Europe they are not.
It's unfortunate that Russia has to use "the war" mechanism to prevent the expansion. But such mechanisms are widely used across the globe.
If you stop the US, you'll stop the war.
If you stop US pouring my money into Ukraine, right that minute Ukraine will enter into negotiations with Russia.
There is no need to throw more gas into the fire.
NATO is a voluntary defense alliance, and countries from Eastern Europe want to join NATO due to the (don't even say it's only perceived, as history shows over and over again) risk of being invaded by Russia.
The US are not forcing countries to join NATO.
What do you think is not good about NATO's intentions from Eastern Europe's perspective, besides Russia not being able to invade their neighbors anymore?
If you stop Russia, you'll stop the war. They started it, they can also just put their tanks in reverse and get out.
The outpouring of support, and weapons would disagree with this statement.
> Why do you think the US is pouring money into this war like crazy?
The US gets to decimate an opponents military, damage there arms export industry and damage their economy for just surplus military gear.
The US is destroying Russias military for pennies on the dollar.
> There was no threat from Russia before 2007
Georgia and Moldova would disagree but okay.
> There were no events to push other countries to join NATO.
The wars involving Russia invading former USSR states would disagree.
There was a logic behind Hegel. Marx believed it.
There was a logic behind Marx. Lenin believed it.
There was a logic behind Lenin. Both Stalin and Mao believed it.
There was a logic behind Schopenhauer. There was a logic behind Nietzsche. Hitler believed it.
If the 20th century taught us anything, it was to be extremely wary of fine-sounding philosophers with their arguments about "logical necessity" and "historical inevitability". Way too often it was a rationalization of evil, or at least it was used by evil men to put a veneer of "necessity" on their evil.
Mearsheimer's position may be pragmatic, but it is deeply morally nihilistic. Are you also? Can you even spell "wrong"?
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is wrong. Russia's missile attacks to destroy infrastructure are wrong. Russia's actions toward civilians in the territory they conquered are wrong.
Why is NATO expanding? It's really simple. Because nations on the periphery of Russia are terrified of Putin! They're terrified of Russia's "sphere of influence" being a "sphere of military operations". They've seen it too many times. Why did Sweden and Finland just decide to join NATO, after more than half a century of neutrality? Because they saw what Russia is doing in Ukraine, that's why! It wasn't because they were pushed into it by the US. They were pushed into it by Russia! They wanted a very clear sign that told Putin in no uncertain terms: "Don't try that here."
Your morals are leaving victims to their oppressors because "realpolitik". That's Quisling's morals, and Chamberlain's, and it's sickening.
It's a nitpick but one I believe just expands your point here, I live in Sweden and this country has been neutral and out of wars for more than 200 years. Putin has broken a 200 years stance on neutrality and forced Sweden, under a Social Democrat government nonetheless, to join NATO, something that was unthinkable and unsupported by the population barely a year ago.
Which wars did Russia start before 2007 that the NATO had to expand? There was a peace between the US and Russia up until a massive NATO expansion happened in 2004. How much US propaganda can you drink?
Edit: to add to this. The 2004 orange revolution was sponsored by the US. I lived in Ukraine back then. Everybody knew that. The 2014 coup - the same. Did you not hear the leaked 2014 call between the US officials in which they were deciding who is going to be the next mayor in the capital of Ukraine?! Are you freaking blind?
Here, I even found the 2004 article for you - https://theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
Putin is a fascist, looking for lebensraum/spazio vitale, if you don't see that you are a fucking dumb puppet.
Again, go read "Fascism: A Warning", watch the interview with the Russian mouthpiece here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDCWFHzlq0
You are on the wrong side of history, I hope you can forgive yourself in 20 years. Or probably not, you are deep in it and a true believer, you'll always think you are right.
There's a side here that's right and one that's wrong. The one murdering people, your people is the wrong one.
You stand for truth and justice, unfortunately you don't really know the meaning of that, you actually stand for nothing, you are an empty shell of morality, supporting Putinism based on some cynical view of the world called "offensive realism", you bought into that because of "logic" but your own logic doesn't allow you to see that murdering people (again, your own people) is not right. No matter what Putin wants, or warned against, it's simply and absolutely not morally right.
And you don't stand for that, what a fucking sad state of being.
Chechen War has nothing to do with Georgia/Ukraine/NATO/etc. It's a different conflict.
Moldova was attacked by both Russia and Ukraine you simpleton.
The war in Georgia was the result of NATO welcoming Georgia.
Not a single country before the 2007-2008 events joined NATO to get protected from Russia. You are throwing misleading facts and misrepresenting the reality.
NATO knew that Russia would attack Ukraine because that's what they did in Georgia–for the same fucking reason. That's why the US was packing Ukraine with weapon since 2014.
The US doesn't like China's rising economy and the fact that they are friends with Russia, because this partnership negatively affects the US dollar. The US doesn't like they have less leverage in Europe, because it's the Russia who keeps the Europe warm and hooked.
You are naïve as a 5 year old.
I lived in Ukraine for 30+ years and then 10+ years in the US. I know these two countries very well. You know shit.
> Chechen War has nothing to do with Georgia/Ukraine/NATO/etc. It's a different conflict.
Yes, but it's just another example of Russia being imperialist and invading other countries it feels it has a right to.
> Moldova was attacked by both Russia and Ukraine you simpleton.
The Ukrainians were volunteers, but I guess it was a simple mistake to make, leaving that part out wasn't it.
> The war in Georgia was the result of NATO welcoming Georgia.
So you're saying Georgia was invaded because it tried to join an alliance to defend itself?. Super justifiable war.
> Not a single country before the 2007-2008 events joined NATO to get protected from Russia. You are throwing misleading facts and misrepresenting the reality.
Poland would disagree with this, Poland joined NATO in 1999, inpart at least to protect itself from Russia.
> NATO knew that Russia would attack Ukraine because that's what they did in Georgia–for the same fucking reason. That's why the US was packing Ukraine with weapon since 2014.
NATO has been providing weapons and training to Ukraine to defend itself since 2014, since Russias invasion first started.
> You are naïve as a 5 year old.
Insults like this are against the hackernews rules, please be more respectful in the future.
> I lived in Ukraine for 30+ years and then 10+ years in the US. I know these two countries very well. You know shit.
Appeal to authority is a great logical fallacy but unfortunately, even this appeal is impossible to check as you are using a throwaway. regardless though, just because you "lived" in a country doesn't mean you know anything.
If you see yourself agreeing to many of his points, I'm sorry for your soul.