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