So if something doesn't make sense, it is possible (but not necessarily so) that it is a skills or ideology issue with the reader.
Note also that detecting ideological bias in oneself is a very difficult thing to do, but it seems like the opposite.
By who? Propagandists trying to rationalize invading a sovereign nation?
If I join one neighbor's neighborhood watch group, another neighbor doesn't get to say I provoked them and burn my house down.
A closer analogy would be a neighborhood club that keeps guns trained on everyone on the street, and sometimes takes people out back to kill them.
Do you think russia was "provoked into invading" ? Just come out and say it.
I'm not making some moral point.
My point was that it was entirely predictable. If you point a gun at someone else, you are likely to get shot. Especially if they tell you repeatedly that they will shoot you if you point a gun at them.
Russia was the one threatening to shoot and shooting people
At the same time, since Putin came to power, Russia has been running massive army reforms and increasing the number of soldiers and equipment on European borders. With each passing day, European militaries were becoming weaker and Russian military grew stronger. Russian "security concerns" are nothing but a cover story for the eventual decision to take advantage of military balance gradually tipping in their favor.
This is like someone saying they will start locking their doors, so someone else says they were forced to rob and murder them.
It's absurd from any perspective except for warped "don't believe your own eyes, ears and thoughts" Orwellian propaganda.
All of these analogies break down because there is no real world equivalent to a purely defense action like locking your doors.
The idea that NATO and the US especially only engage in defensive military actions is what requires an insane level of reality denial.
At any rate, Im not even trying to claim Russia has a moral high ground, just that the situation was completely predictable. At best, it was like putting your hand in a cage with the rabid dog. You can make a moral point that the dog shouldn't bite, but it is still idiotic to ignore the barking, snapping, and foaming at the mouth.
Oh? I'd ask for evidence but I think you're just misunderstanding what NATO is. Just because the US is part of NATO does not mean that anything it does is automatically an action of NATO.
Also now somehow russia is not full of human people but has the intelligence of a rabid animal with a disease affecting its brain and somehow their borders were crossed with aggression?
I'm guessing there is no explanation or evidence coming for any of these claims because if you had it, you would have put it in your comment.
The analogy with the dog is that you know exactly what will happen, not the biology.
What claim do you want evidence for? That Russia was willing to invade Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands? I think the evidence speaks for itself. They were willing to do it.
Maybe we should start with the basics. Do you realize you made claims? Do you realize you gave no evidence?
Russia was threatened by EU actually. The initial 2013 crisis, Crimea / Donbas invasions happened as a consequence of EU association agreement which was pulling Ukraine away from Russia.
Russia isn't threatened in the sense that NATO will invade Russia proper - the nukes pretty much guarantee that can't happen. NATO / EU are "invading" what Putin considers to be Russia's sphere of influence. In case of Ukraine, Putin plans/planned to unite Russia, Ukraine and Belarus into one country - the creeping integration of Belarus serves as a template.
Most of the eastern Europe entered NATO without an incident. Baltics is closer to Russia's power centers (St. Petersburg and Moscow) than Ukraine is. Finland and Sweden entered NATO without incidents. Entering NATO was undeniably beneficial for these countries, since it has a very good safety record of protecting its members. Russia tends to invade countries which didn't yet make it to NATO.
I agree NATO membership is beneficial for basically all its members. It provides a great deal of security to be under the US umbrella. NATO aspirations did not work out well for Georgia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
The US being a part of NATO does not mean all actions the US takes are on behalf of NATO.
The US doesn't spend billions defending foreign countries out of altruism. The US doesn't need help from tiny European countries to defend itself.
Nobody cares what Ukrainians want, people and the media speak of "Ukraine" as if it's one guy that made a decision rather than a bunch of US operators who pulled off a coup. Or worse, Ukraine is a woman raped for wearing a short skirt (which as a metaphor thankfully died out when the West got back to hating women), or a long-bullied child. The discussion allowed in the West outside of intellectual circles is forced to stay at this sort of a childish level, because the people selling weapons and carving up Ukraine want people to buy into their childish defenses of creating a generation of dead Ukrainians for adventure.
Killing half a million Ukrainians so that a country whose population is a third Russian doesn't vote for the Russian-friendly candidate over some Western-backed candidate who wants to exterminate and expel Russians, in the name of some manufactured notion of Ukrainian ethnic purity that maybe 25% of the population conforms to, is no deal that the "Ukrainian people" would take willingly, or that anybody sane would take. If NATO would keep them safe, they want to be in NATO. If Russia would keep them safe, they'd want to be aligned with Russia.
This is how the American far-right and far-left sees it. But how do the Ukrainians themselves see this?
Nowhere near a half a million have been killed.
The country identified as 17 percent Russian in the last census.
No one one from the Ukrainian side was going to, or is ever going to expel or exterminate anyone.
No one from Ukraine I talk to (including people very close to events at the time) gives any credence to the "coup" theory.
You obviously have no understanding of the Language Law, or what it actually does. And anyway it was passed in 2019 and so had nothing to do with events of 2014.
People in the West talk about the Ukraine situation all the time, from every angle, include quite obviously very pro-Russian angles. Not just online, but right there on major channels like Fox and CNN. There are no "allowed" or "disallowed" viewpoints, or any other repercussions or constraints.
Everything you're saying above is sheer lunacy, basically.
The question is, why should we avoid doing it rather than let them escalate and use this opportunity to stomp the bully. Which is in the works and will happen in few years.
There were people talking like you among JFK’s chief of staff during the Cuban Missile crisis. Same argument. Had JFK listened to them, we very likely would not be here today.
But unlike in a computer game, in the real world, that would you have labeled your enemy, does not simply disappear. If anything, you’ll create a vacuum. And I am not sure where you are taking the confidence that who or what ever feels that vacuum will be better than the status quo. The Americans have tried that in Iraq and Syria. The Vietnam war as well. And I believe the result, in every case, has been anything but that nice clean victory that “finishing off” of your enemy in a computer game promises.
In my view, this comes down to Chesterton’s fence. Before you tear down a fence, it would be helpful to understand how it came to be erected in the first place.
Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but pretty much the only time the strategy of killing of an enemy regime worked was Hitler. That was a man who applied industrial processes to murdering humans - rail networks, assembly line processing, gas chambers. This is not the level of evil we are facing here, at all.
If Putin is anything as evil as you think he is, he will surely have systems in place that will ensure the destruction of major cities in the United States in case of anything happening to him or his regime. You schoolyard, bully, metaphor, while having the benefit of being easy to understand, carries with it a risk - 1%, 5%? - that our children will find themselves in the world of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Putin is just as evil as hitler and even more stupid and inept. While the West was developing, russia deteriorated. Nuclear capacity of russia is no longer believable. Attempts at demonstrating capacity for delivering icbm payloads ended up with crater on the launch site. The best they could do was Oreshnik that they try to sell as a new weapon which it isn't. The degree they try to lean into it and present it as a credible threat clearly shows that they have nothing else at this point and very few of that. 45 nuclear threats all ignored without consequence don't look good either.
It's even debatable how much of a threat Soviet Union really was at the height of its power because myth of its power was mostly manufactured and reinforced by USA that could use it as an excuse to funnel money to military industrial complex which otherwise would be hard sell with largely isolationistic public. It could be plainly seen when Soviet Union collapsed and USA was briefly aimless until it found new enemy to blow out of proportions in the form of terrorism. It was crap so they switched quickly to China. They no longer have a need for russia so they no longer are going to be doing marketing for putin.
Bully had a gun but he kept in in damp cellar. So the time to stomp him is now, even if there's some risk remaining, before he steals some money, to buy some solvent and oil to clean the gun he thought he won't ever need to use.
Some nukes might fly, and even a few might land but it's the best time there will ever be to turn russia to ex nuclear power. History doesn't stand in place. Thousand of nukes were already detonated on Earth. Few more from russia arsenal that might still actually launch and explode will make a very small difference. And retribution for using any nukes will be more terrible than what anyone can even imagine.
> Please keep it an intra-slavic conflict!
Here's that pesky isolationism that had to always be circumvented in order for USA to dominate the globe the way it did and getting rich of this the way it did.
What makes you think russia has any intention to keep the conflict intra-Slavic with constant talk about multipolar world with them in one of the leading roles? Trying to cosplay it a little bit already with BRICS? Why the biggest hit to their ambitions since 2022 was them getting pushed out of Syria? How's that intra-Slavic? Domination over their self-appointed zone of influence is just a stepping stone as it always was.
Putin is not even on the same axis as Hitler in terms of evil. I can only take your words to mean that you have no idea who Hitler was - making you, ironically, much closer to a Chamberlain than a Churchill.
The idea that intelligent people like you can draw such conclusions makes me unspeakably sad.
It reminds me of a passage in Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” in which he is shocked to see how, weeks before WWI, peasants in a French village cinema turn into a war hungry mob the moment the German Kaiser appears on the screen.
Quote:
> At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.
> The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder.
Primal hatred towards such people is warranted and even necessary.
It's not that civility is thin layer over savagery.
Instead savagery is the underlying foundation of civility, held back savagery is what makes civility possible.
This is textbook whataboutism and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
in this sense Russia was provoked.
Russia was not provoked in any sense.
"I want what you have" as a rationalization for murder would be classified as the trait of a psychopath: A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/psychopath
The rest of your comment makes even less sense and the sentences don't even connect to each other coherently.
Try hypocrisy
> nothing to do with the topic at hand
im saying that all imperialist powers are essentially the same and equally bad. including the us (the only country to date to have used nuclear weapons). if you want something closer to the point at hand see Iran Air Flight 655
> Russia was not provoked in any sense
as an imperialist power it was provoked in every sense. the US knew they were provoking russia. maybe they thought russia wouldnt go to war. but its obvious they were provoked
'explains' is the word you are looking for, which is what you asked for
> it is not evidence
evidence of what?
Again, what you write doesn't get under my skin or "stings". To me, it's just dumb. Makes as much sense as defending a guy who beats his wife because "she made him do it". What's there to sting?
My world view doesn't involve glorifying countries or having double standards. This is not sports where you blindly defend your team and I blindly defend mine. For example, you criticise the US for invasions and for being imperialistic and then defend Russia for doing the same. I don't. You are incapable of criticising a country you support. I'm not. I'm far from being perfect, but I'm not that bad.
But don't let me stop you from doing Russia's dirty work for them. Keep defending their actions, their wars, their resource exploitation in Africa, and so on... blame it all on the evil west and anyone that doesn't accept the "russkiy mir".
Everyone needs a vent, but you called me out personally whilst i dont care to remember who you are.
Funny enough seeing my previous engagements it is always the same people arguing the US story, pretending to be Ukranians
And this is the big difference between you and me. I think that was wrong. You instead use it as a "it's fine because the West did it before".
You don't give a fuck and support it as long team Russia is the one benefiting while I think it's bad independently of who does it and refuse to support it.
> Everyone needs a vent, but you called me out personally whilst i dont care to remember who you are.
That's good for you mate.
> Funny enough seeing my previous engagements it is always the same people arguing the US story, pretending to be Ukranians
I'm not from the US or from Ukraine and have never pretended to be. And unlike you I don't come here to defended the actions of an aggressor.
> You instead use it as a "it's fine because the West did it before".
actually mainly im saying that this is all expected as it is part of the rules of the game set by the West
anyway lets be honnest, you obviously support the US and NATO, and you are simply having a tantrum because someone has an opposite view. what else is the point of this exchange? your guys do so much crap to the world and answer to no one. israel (your side) killed 4x more civilians in a year than russia in 3 years. your lads litteraly think it is their god given right to rule the world. true, i think they are a bigger threat to world peace than Russia, but i would never say that Russia is 'right' or that i support Russian imperialism, but I do think that right now maybe they are less wrong in some sense. if Ukraine had a true independence movement, one that wasnt a lackey for another world power (for example like viet cong, plo, yugoslav partizans, polish resistance) I would support Ukraine completely. unfortunately it does not
as for africa, what on earth do you think uk france and US do there? also ukraine seems to be arming islamists there. what do you think about that?
From that point of view, since everyone's playing the same game now, you can't complain when the west does it. It's "all expected".
I'm not like you. If it's bad, it's bad. I won't go "oh, the US can invade Mexico because Russia did it too".
> anyway lets be honnest, you obviously support the US and NATO, and you are simply having a tantrum because someone has an opposite view. what else is the point of this exchange? [...]
I support the US and NATO when they deserve my support. I don't support them when they do something I disagree with. Only brainless morons support a side no matter what... With this said, I'm not going to blame the US, NATO, or Ukraine for a war Russia - and Russia alone - decided to start in 2014 and expand in 2022.
I'm fine with different points of view, but you take it so far that you blame everyone else but Russia for Russia's own actions. That's fanboy behaviour, plain dumb stuff. It makes me shake my head, not have a tantrum.
There was no exchange here. I didn't reply to you, you replied to my comment. I warned others that you are a simp for Russia that are incapable of criticising them, thus any discussion with you is a waste of time (yes, I know this is a waste of my time). You'll blame someone else, point at what someone else did, criticise those being attacked, but never, ever, criticise Russia. In one comment you point out the Africa that the "West enslaved and colonized" and on the other point out that it's "all expected" if Russia is doing it. As I've said, based on your comments on HN, you are a modern day tankie, a useful fool for those doing shitty things. And since you like sides, yes, my side also has many useful fools... and I like them as much as I like you.
I don't know what you mean by "your lads". Am I part of some group now and no one told me? And where exactly have I defended Israel and what made you think that I'd be okay with it? Which part of "bad is bad" don't you understand?
Regarding Ukraine... you know what they say about opinions... we all have one. But Russia doesn't have any right to invade and annex parts Ukraine and no amount of "buts", "ifs", and finger pointing at those you don't like changes this. What they're doing is either right or wrong. If you think it's right, then fine, but cut the bullshit and the excuses. I on the other hand think it's wrong and won't defend it.
> as for africa, what on earth do you think uk france and US do there? also ukraine seems to be arming islamists there. what do you think about that?
A turd is a turd, independently of its nationality. Unlike you, I won't call it a nice turd just because it's French... or Russian. Do you get it now or will you ask me again if <something wrong> is good or acceptable to me if done by the west?
What will be your next "what about..."? Who are you going to blame next for Russia's own actions? Can't wait for more victim blaming!
While I'd loooove to discuss how Russia is "less wrong in some sense" when they invade their neighbour and to see you blame a country for not accepting being annexed by Russia, I have more interesting things to do. Bye bye!
> I support the US and NATO when they deserve my support.
that is the difference between you and me. i would never support any imperialist group: russia/usa/nato/israel including their proxies like the current government of ukraine
but tbh at the rate you are going you will start dreaming about MEDO-BEAR
__ __
/ \.-"""-./ \
\ - - /
| o o |
\ .-'''-. /
'-\__Y__/-'
`---`Says medo-bear, which supports Russia and their imperialist affairs. Oh wait, it's not imperialism if it's Russia doing it. My bad!
> but tbh at the rate you are going you will start dreaming about MEDO-BEAR
oh no.
[edit: this is a reply to the first version of your comment, not the updated, longer one.]
> Says medo-bear, which supports Russia and their imperialist affairs
not supports but explains. like dont pat a dog from above or else it might bite you. or dont try to bring a sworn enemy to the doorstep of your more powerful neighbour or else it might invade you
If you don't support or defend Russia's actions, then I think you're doing a bad job communicating your position. I say "Russia did this", you say "what about that thing the US did". You make a good point about Israel, but then use it to minimise what Russia is doing. You criticise the west for their actions in Africa, but when confronted with what Russia is doing today, you ask about what France, the UK, and the US are doing instead of criticising Russia too. Russia starts a war and the only logical explanation if the victim resists is that they're controlled by the west. You criticise NATO's expansion, but don't see that it's Russia's behaviour that causes countries to want to join NATO. And so on.
Hopefully you can understand why I said you were a useful fool. It's a lot of whataboutism and deflection (and little explaining), especially for someone that disagrees with Russia's actions.
you accused me of being a tankie in support of putin or russia or whatever. my influence on world events is completely insignificant so even if i hold these positions you shouldnt really waste this much time on me
however what you fail to realize is that the ukranian government has allowed itself to be THE useful idiot for US interests with extremely deadly consequences. this is why i do not support the Ukranian government and its war effort. moreover i am extremely against their conscription drive. i find it disgusting
i really am morally against putins war on ukraine. i also dont like putin as a politician. but again this is inconsequential. however what i can also say about it is that it was completely predictable and expected.
again i am completely convinced that the US is using ukranians as cannon fodder for its own interests. in fact i even suspect that alot of western politicians are privately enjoying the fact that two biggest slavic nations in europe are killing eachother
you can call things i point out whataboutism, i see them as examples of prevailing hypocricy. it is important to ask these questions because the US and its propaganda arm always talk about rules based order international law etc while carring for none of that when it comes to its own interests. and this war is 100% between US and Russia with the Ukranian government acting as useful idiot for the US and ukranian prople caught in the middle of everything. it is very sad
finally ... i find it quite curious that there are few of you determined to keep this exchange going with me and you are all using quite the same terminology and manner of communicating. are you the same person?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
ive also seen what western interefernce looks like when the west wants there to be a war. for example compare this to boris johnson torpedoing the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022
On 18 March 1992, all three sides signed the agreement; Alija Izetbegović for the Bosniaks, Radovan Karadžić for the Bosnian Serbs and Mate Boban for the Bosnian Croats. The plan had assigned each of the 109 municipalities to be divided amongst the three ethnic sides. The allocation of the municipalities was mostly based off the results of the 1991 population census that was completed a year before the signing of the agreement. The agreement had stipulated that the Bosniak and Serb cantons would each have covered 44% of the country's territory, with the Croat canton covering the remaining 12%.[3]
On 28 March 1992, after a meeting with US ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann in Sarajevo, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and declared his opposition to any division of Bosnia. What was said and by whom remains unclear. Zimmermann denied that he told Izetbegović that if he withdrew his signature, the United States would grant recognition to Bosnia as an independent state. What is indisputable is that on the same day, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and renounced the agreement.[4][5]
Ukranians should take note that the Bosniak side came out even worse after that war, while the Serbian side today controls half of the country in a defacto almost independent state
Good, I must assume then that you hate Putin for starting war, killing and bombing Ukrainians and surely campaign for Putin to pull back to the internationally recognized Russia borders, right?