Big Bad Politics!

TheBridge
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@IvanSatoru  
Though I maybe not the most sympathetic to who is having their stuff stolen I completely agree that it is concerning It is blind warfevor and it totally could be turned on us someday. Starting with somebody unsympathetic (like Alex Jones? Rememeber how they assured us on that?) and then expanding it to everybody is a tried and true tactic.
 
 
@UrbanMysticDee  
This is the problem with this whole conflict and any mass moral stand fueled by social media nowadays: it’s utter arbitrariness and ignorance for what is the current status quo.
UrbanMysticDee
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@TheBridge  
It’s not arbitrary. The enemy has always been Russia. For centuries Europe was united against the spread of Islam but when Russia became a great power and launched wars to get the Turks out of Europe the rest of the Ancien Régime said “Russians? Eew! They’re sub-human! We’ll side with the Turks, who have been our enemy for centuries and have tried to eradicate us.”
 
Then the sub-human German barbarians launched two world wars to exterminate the Russians and the Americans, who saw themselves as the inheritors of real European culture then started a now century long war against the Russians. Several times the Russians have tried to join forces with the West, the USSR and later modern Russia have tried to join NATO and the West, who sees themselves as the master race, told the Russians to drop dead. Khrushchev tried to end the Cold War and America, going so far as to suggest the joint destruction of all nuclear weapons and a US-USSR joint Moon mission, and America responded by doubling down on building bombs and launching proxy wars. Then after the Cold War the Russians came to the West and said “We’re not socialist now, we can be friends right?” and the West told the Russians to drop dead because they see all Russians as sub-human. They’d rather import infinity billion black African Muslims and turn Europe into the rape capital of the world before they give one inch toward admitting Russians have the right to exist.
 
 
@Amagan  
@IvanSatoru
 
The UN only cares about genocide when they can get the US to launch a war there to get oil. Resource poor countries and client states like Saudi Arabia can commit genocide if they want and get away with it.
ponypony221
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@Amagan  
The UN is just wider NATO. The US doesn’t care about Sudan, so nothing happens. The US in fact doesn’t care about genocide or war crimes of any kind and is more than happy to participate when it suits them.
IvanSatoru
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Angle-Considerer
We must save our values and ensure democracy around the world it’s who we are and our very existence revolves around the democratic principles of free rigged elections and state-enforced gay sex with children!
 
@UrbanMysticDee  
The (((West)))
IvanSatoru
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@ponypony221  
If it’s what it takes to defend our democracy and our values we will point guns your way. If you point guns our way it obviously means you are a terrorist threatening our values and who we are as a democracy, thus justifying our actions. All our actions are justified and fair if you put our values at risk. We can’t just sit idly while you mind your own business and live your life in peace with everyone surrounding you— that’s not who we are. You must accept our values, otherwise you are threatening us and we will do everything to make you accept the democratic values we hold dear.
TheBridge
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@ponypony221  
Actually Israel has been taking a bit of heat for not being supportive of Ukraine enough
 
@IvanSatoru  
Even if I don’t fully agree on the Russia thing these attitudes are real and getting that level of creepy at times.
 
@UrbanMysticDee  
>It’s not arbitrary. The enemy has always been Russia. For centuries Europe was united against the spread of Islam but when Russia became a great power and launched wars to get the Turks out of Europe the rest of the Ancien Régime said “Russians? Eew! They’re sub-human! We’ll side with the Turks, who have been our enemy for centuries and have tried to eradicate us.”  
Interesting. I am not sure I would agree 100% with my understanding of history but I am always open to persuasion.
 
the USSR and later modern Russia have tried to join NATO and the West,  
USSR proposals were total politics. A faux offer of peace that included the United States removing it’s presence from Europe and (if I recall, correctly) a latter somewhat more plausible plan to join NATO that was still unexpected to be accepted by NATO. All of which was playing games over Germany and wanting a check against NATO potential to be used against them. I have no sympathy for the commies and I wouldn’t want them in my military alliance after that swallowed up so many of my neighbors. Modern Russia’s proposal I can sympathize with at, least some, anyway; I think they were hoping for NATO to be replaced by a new European wide security organization and for the US to withdraw because the Cold War was over.
 
Khrushchev tried to end the Cold War and America, going so far as to suggest the joint destruction of all nuclear weapons and a US-USSR joint Moon mission  
Never heard of that. Funny enough, I recall Kennedy being the one proposing a joint moon mission.
Anonymous #A374
i heard palestinians is just another name for arabs. arabs conqured egypt, iran etc so fuck them.
UrbanMysticDee
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@Anonymous #A374  
Yeah, the “Palestinians” are Arabs. They didn’t exist as an ethnic group until 1923 when the British decided to divide the Mandate for Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. The Arabs were supposed to get 75% of the land called Trans-Jordan (now just Jordan) and the remaining 25% was supposed to go to the Jews, but the Arabs complained and made up a fictitious ethnic group that had never existed before and claimed they lived in the largely abandoned remaining 25%. They’ve been fighting over a blatant lie for the past century because their plagiarized holy book written by their pedophile rapist false prophet said that the Muslims should own the entire world.
 
 
@TheBridge  
Kennedy was the one who originally proposed the joint Moon mission and Khrushchev rejected it at first but his son convinced him to accept the proposal a few months later. Unfortunately it wasn’t long after that that Kennedy was murdered by the military industrial complex for wanting to end the war in Vietnam in 1964 with a full troop withdrawal.
 
Khrushchev’s proposal for total nuclear disarmament and the scaling back of all military forces, was made before the UN in September 1960. He wanted to redirect the money that was going toward the military (and was realistically going to bankrupt the USSR and could be argued that it bankrupted the US too a couple decades later) toward improving the general welfare of the people. A year later he made a speech before the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union promising full communism by 1980 (a true classless, moneyless, stateless society). This could only be achieved if the Cold War ended and the money that was being hemorrhaged by the military went toward general welfare.
 
I think Khrushchev was a true believer, and I think Kennedy was too. Not necessarily in the same things, but they really wanted to end the war and work toward the mutual benefit of both nations. That’s why Kennedy had to be murdered and Khrushchev replaced by a military pupped. There was too much money and power riding on keeping the war going to allow two starry eyed idealists to ruin the world with peace.
 
As for NATO, I think what the USSR did was as unfortunately necessary as France building nukes. Neither wanted the German bastards to invade and occupy significant territory and murder a whole generation a third time in one century. France never really recovered from the First World War, and Russia today hasn’t recovered from the Second in terms of population. All because a half-baked fake empire that didn’t exist until a millennia after France and Russia “wanted their place in the sun” and the whole world was just supposed to bend over backward and give them a global empire or risk the biggest temper tantrum in history that swallowed up tens of millions of people needlessly. The Russians needed a buffer against German aggression and the US and UK, fueled by anti-Russian race hatred, wanted to re-arm the Germans and exterminate the Russians for being rightly paranoid about the whole world plotting against them.
 
NATO’s implicit purpose was the anti-Russia club. The re-unification of Germany (something France protested) was a blatantly anti-Russian move. The expansion of NATO, after the Cold War ended and its purpose had ostensibly evaporated, was blatantly anti-Russian.
 
In the past century there has been untoward Russian aggression, particularly against the Poles, but most of the horrible things Russia has done has been a self-fulfilling prophecy of a West that has never even considered peace for centuries except for very very briefly in the early 60s.
TheBridge
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@UrbanMysticDee  
>Kennedy was the one who originally proposed the joint Moon mission and Khrushchev rejected it at first but his son convinced him to accept the proposal a few months later.  
Didn’t know that. May or may not have ended the Cold War but a massive amount of good will and peaceful precedent would have been established.
 
>I think Khrushchev was a true believer, and I think Kennedy was too. Not necessarily in the same things, but they really wanted to end the war and work toward the mutual benefit of both nations. That’s why Kennedy had to be murdered and Khrushchev replaced by a military pupped. There was too much money and power riding on keeping the war going to allow two starry eyed idealists to ruin the world with peace.  
Interesting. I will certainly look into more of Khrushchev. I am a bit critical on and have a less idealistic view of Kennedy than some but I certainly agree: Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a lone wolf. Clearly Kennedy had contemplated such himself with his interest in Seven Days in May
 
>NATO’s implicit purpose was the anti-Russia club. The re-unification of Germany (something France protested) was a blatantly anti-Russian move. The expansion of NATO, after the Cold War ended and its purpose had ostensibly evaporated, was blatantly anti-Russian.  
NATO’s purpose in the Cold War as a anti-Russian club I don’t see much of a problem so much as the natural way such a military alliance would be, even if I could agree that there was opportunities to cool down the Cold War. The expansion of NATO I think was done just as much, if not more, “the End of History” mentality. We had won the Cold War and we were going to spread the wonders of capitalism and junk food to every country and it was thought that Russia would be eventually just another one of those newly liberalizing states even if it took a little longer. Ignorance that even the most pacified liberal Russia would not fit neatly in that world.
 
>In the past century there has been untoward Russian aggression, particularly against the Poles, but most of the horrible things Russia has done has been a self-fulfilling prophecy of a West that has never even considered peace for centuries except for very very briefly in the early 60s.  
Not sure I would agree 100% with this but certainly I think you can make that case with some parts of Western policy, like our current war!  
There are two ways to prevent conflict: strength and diplomacy. Consider the American Eagle depicted on the Great Seal of the United States that’s also on our dollar bill. In one talon, the eagle clutches 13 arrows, and in the other it clutches an olive branch. This reflects our nation’s understanding of how to make and maintain peace since our founding: strength and diplomacy. This administration failed on both fronts.
First, President Biden failed to project American strength when he gutted our energy independence, canceling the Keystone pipeline on his very first day in office and restricting domestic energy production. Meanwhile, other NATO countries like Germany made themselves even more dependent on Russian gas by shuttering their nuclear power plants. Putin must have concluded that the West needed his gas too much to sanction him effectively. Next, the Biden administration botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Afghan army that we had spent many years and countless billions of dollars to “stand up” was exposed as a fraud in a matter of days. Then our troops and their local allies beat a chaotic retreat from the country that revealed tactical incompetence in the general corps, with zero accountability to follow. Lastly, in the crucial days and weeks leading up to the war, Biden appeared to give the green light to a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by Putin’s forces, suggesting that wouldn’t necessarily trigger the sanctions and other penalties.
But of course in Washington there is never a shortage of those who will chide an administration for failing some test of strength in foreign policy. What is rarer and therefore more vital is to point out failures of diplomacy, which can just as easily lead to unnecessary war. And I believe our State Department failed in its diplomatic mission in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion.
Ever since the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, when NATO opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, the Russians have indicated that membership for these two border nations was an unacceptable “red line” for them. They quickly proved their seriousness later that year by invading Georgia and securing territory where predominantly-Russian populations were located. (Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar?) For the last 14 years, Putin and the entire Russian elite have spoken with one voice: NATO membership for Ukraine was an intolerable security threat. We ignored this red line, continuing to push for NATO expansion and transitioning Ukraine’s military onto a NATO platform even before official membership.
In response, a Russian troop buildup began on Ukraine’s border around the beginning of last year. This had the intended effect of getting the new president’s attention. Biden called for a summit and met with Putin in Geneva in June last year. We don’t know exactly what was said in the room but we do know that Biden said publicly at that time that corruption in Ukraine prevented its entry into NATO. Putin seemed mollified, and tensions seemed to abate. According to recent reporting by The Intercept based on U.S. intelligence sources, the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border started to subside after the Biden-Putin Summit and did not increase again until October/November. So what happened in between to upset the apple cart?
On September 1, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky visited the White House. This was the first such visit by a Ukrainian head of state, fulfilling one of Kiev’s long-standing diplomatic objectives. On that day, the U.S. and Ukraine issued a “Joint Statement” affirming deep economic and military ties between the two nations, including support for Ukraine’s NATO membership. This likely reflected weeks of back-channel negotiations that preceded Zelensky’s visit, suggesting Biden’s reassurances to Putin were dead-letter virtually from the day he made them. On November 10, Secretary of State Blinken and the Ukrainian foreign minister signed a massive 10-year Charter Agreement, which was the long-form version of the Joint Statement issued earlier.
Predictably, the Russians hit the roof. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said they had reached “the boiling point.” They delivered a virtual ultimatum to the U.S. in December demanding written assurance that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. A month of furious negotiations began in January between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lavrov, during which Blinken gave no ground on NATO membership. In fact, he seemed proud of western intransigence, making statements like “There has been no change; there will be no change.” And: “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”
Yet that’s not what Blinken was saying privately. We now know, thanks to a stunning recent interview by Fareed Zakaria, that Zelensky was privately told that Ukraine wasn’t going to be admitted into NATO but that the door had to remain publicly open.
What could possibly be the rationale for this diplomatic approach? We refused to accede to the Russians’ most long-standing and important demand even though we privately admitted to Ukraine that we had no intention of following through. In other words, we refused to give the Russians “the sleeves off our vest,” a concession that was largely meaningless to us but of paramount importance for them.
Was it really so hard for us to imagine that the Russians might have a genuine concern about being encircled on a 1200-mile border by what they regard as a hostile military alliance? Aren’t diplomats supposed to be able to put themselves in the other guy’s shoes? Even if we see NATO purely as a defensive alliance, is it really inconceivable that Russia could see that vast military power as having offensive potential? After all, they watched NATO take offensive action to topple Moammar Ghaddafi in Libya and to bomb their Serbian allies during the Kosovo War. Is it really so hard to understand Russian paranoia about having American troops, weapons, and bases on their Ukrainian border, from which they’ve been attacked throughout history? The United States itself was willing to risk a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets over offensive weapons placed ninety miles off our shores in 1962, yet we treat the same concern by the Russians as crazy or a bluff.
 
Now, I disagree with some parts of this, but I am too tired to go into right now. The words “self fulling prophecy” certainly could fit with the United States dealings with Ukraine.
TheBridge
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@UrbanMysticDee  
Not the biggest fan of Musk, part of me thinks that he may have genuinely been cowed or thought that it was too much trouble from the wrath he would get for it. Still, if Twitter explodes from him buying it I will be amused on the short term at least.
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