TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Thanks for the link. So he basically said he would... keep doing what Biden was doing, but "bigger" in an unspecified way.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Huh? Nobody's obligated to either respond to an entire post or nothing at all. I called out a bit I found particularly objectionable.
I could easily turn it back on you: why did you respond to MY comment without addressing the issue of whether a statement like "is too stupid to be allowed to vote" should be disallowed or not?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
It wasn't with the opposite valence but rather in a goofy thread about bats vs knives about a month ago. The use of the word "retard" probably didn't help, but the part about not being able to vote was also quoted by the mod giving the person a warning.
And I'd say that probably should be a warnable or banable thing to say. Saying a group of people is so stupid that their right to vote should be taken away is a textbook case of "boo outgroup".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war.
You're talking about 2014 here, right? If so, then sure, that checks out.
Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war.
There was the frozen conflict that had been bubbling since 2014, but 2015-2021 was massively different from the invasion in 2022. There was little reason that status quo couldn't continue for another decade at least from the West's perspective, but then Putin decided he was unsatisfied with the state of affairs and that's how the invasion came to be.
I'm not saying there was no conflict prior to 2022. I'm saying the massive invasion itself that happened in 2022 was Putin's doing.
I don't think we're disagreeing on this point.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
This was not a change, at least on the US's part! The US didn't let Ukraine join NATO, but they didn't rule it out either, same as 2015-2021. The US wanted to kick the can down the road some more (or indefinitely) by keeping Ukraine in limbo, and it was Putin who said that wasn't good enough now.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
If you're implying I haven't been paying attention to the Ukraine war, you're very mistaken.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'm talking about proximate causes. The long term reasons for competition between Russia and the West exist, and anyone can trot out Mearsheimer if they want the Russian view, but for the immediate causes of the war there wasn't really anything other than Putin. There was no reason he couldn't have kept it a frozen conflict for another decade.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
sending most of their men off to die in trenches
This is not congruent with reality. Russia itself claims UA has lost 444k soldiers killed and wounded up to 2/27/24. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split of males:females, this means they have lost (KIA or WIA) around 2% of their prewar male population. And of course that number is coming from Russia, so that's massively inflated for obvious reasons, as well as for reasons unique to Russian reporting statistics. That's obviously a huge tragedy in human terms, and there's also the ~5M mostly women and children that have fled as refugees, but it's nowhere near "most of their men dying in trenches".
On the other hand, Russia's aims have always been transparently genocidal. The "misguided mini Russians" need to be put in their place according to the Russian government, and that's how stuff like Bucha happens, or that video of Russians decapitating a screaming Ukrainian POW, or the various castrations of POWs. Real ethnic solidarity there.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Strelkov was important in 2014, but pretty marginal in 2022. Putin alone was indeed the main instigator of the war. Nothing had changed in 2022 in terms of Ukraine's ability to join NATO, as the US refused to let them in as it had for the previous 8 years. Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
It did no such thing. It had trigger clauses that would allow the USFG to take measures above and beyond what they're currently capable of doing. The DHS authority is to get around the court clog of the DoJ, which is currently responsible for one of the main loopholes via missing court dates. Here's a good primer. It was the most conservative immigration bill in a generation, and Trump ensured its death for purely self-serving reasons. It makes sense, given he was basically no better than Obama when it comes to actual illegal detainment numbers.
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
Crimea would have been an easier target than the original breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Had the UA offensive succeeded in pushing to Azov, they could have plausibly disabled the Kerch bridge, and then the entire southern front would have been a redo of Kherson. If UA retakes the imitative then that's still plausible, although the modern situation so heavily favors the defense that it is indeed pretty unlikely even if the UA does fix its medium term issues.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I mean, you also didn't respond to Dean either, who wrote more eloquently than I did about the faults of the position. I'll also note the bolding here wasn't present on the original post.
It's just bad logic that Europe has no agency, that they're all US puppets, and that the US is for some reason sending Boris instead of Blinken or Biden. Was Macron's recent remark about sending troops also a threat that the US was about to intervene with troops of its own?
When the US is funding 90% of the war
This isn't true today, and was never true before. If you look at total commitments, the combined EU outweighs the US by quite a lot. You probably would be frustrated with me for making a point like this and say you clearly implied it was for lethal aid, but even that wasn't true either. Poland + the Baltics sent pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down in the first few days, and other European powers like Germany have slowly ramped up their commitments to pick up the slack thereafter. The US remains the largest single source of military aid, but its handily beat by the combined EU today.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Some Hungarians are there but they're only a tiny fringe along the Carpathians. Ukraine is indeed split with some supporting Ukraine (and the West) and some supporting Russia. But having a Russian contingent isn't unusual, as the Baltics and Moldova also have that. I doubt most Estonians would want a chunk cleaved out of their territory to appease the ethnic Russians.
credibledefense bans all opposing views... it's an echochamber like most of reddit.
It has a UA tilt, but they definitely don't autoban pro-RU people. Glideer for instance is pretty prolific and often gets downvoted, but the threads are sorted by new so his posts aren't hard to find. There are also plenty of rather eloquent pro-UA but pessimistic people, like Duncan-M.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Source on this part? So far I've only seen articles saying he'd force UA to give up land, or else risk getting cut off from all US aid, and maybe other punishments on top. I haven't heard his idea of strong-arming Russia.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Oikophobia in the traditional clinical context usually arises from the patient's home not feeling like a home.
You specifically are not oikophobic since you don't live here, but it'd still be bad to say the West is indistinguishable from wokeness, and thus to wish death upon it. Wish for the rejection of the ideology, not the death of the collective nations or peoples.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
is too stupid to be allowed to vote.
Calling people who support Ukraine aid "too stupid to vote" is just "boo outgroup", and if the valence was flipped it would probably be considered banworthy.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
GAE
This acronym is impossible to take seriously. It's like if the dissident right came up with some acronym that spelled HOMO, then told you to "fear the HOMO".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Trump escalating isn't entirely out of the question given how prone to escalation he was with Iran, but thus far Trump has only indicated that he'd strong-arm Ukraine into essentially surrendering.
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw?
It's continually baffling to me how the majority of this forum thinks that defending your own lands from a hostile foreign invader somehow makes you a puppet. At least this thread isn't as bad as the one yesterday that explicitly called them an American puppet, and when pressed for evidence they produced several articles relating to Boris Johnson, apparently entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Further, the idea that Ukraine is doomed and should just surrender now to prevent more bloodshed is only ever really advanced in bad faith. It's clear a lot of people on the right hate the woke left so much that they end up hating the entire West for having given birth to wokeness. Instead of specifically targeting the excesses of wokeness, they do the oikophobic thing and say the West itself must be destroyed. Since the invasion made the West seem more unified and righteous, they've been earnestly hoping for a Ukrainian defeat. They post as concern trolls similar to this, claiming they just want to stop the bloodshed of the Ukrainians, who after all are really just misguided mini-Russians.
The eventual resolution of this war is still very much in flux. It's looking more negative than it was post-Kherson, when there had been 3 big pushes liberating land. Now, Ukrainian leadership seems unable or unwilling to resolve the conscription issues, and House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest. That said, more aid could arrive through a different aid package or through Europeans boosting their own efforts. Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement, but how much and whether they have real security guarantees afterwards is still an open question. I'd go into it more, but this forum isn't particularly great for that so I'd just point anyone interested to the daily threads on /r/credibledefense.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Yes, something like this would be great to have at the top of the post. Most of this could be understood by carefully reading the entire post, but something like this would be helpful to know if reading the post would be of interest in the first place.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Whites were never under threat of being virtually extinguished in the US in the 1600s - 1800s.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
It also applies to South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If there are any nations one would consider woke in the Pacific, it would be Australia and New Zealand. Wokeness is a Western mindbug, not an American one.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace
This was the UK, not the US. And by UK, it was really just Boris Johnson, and it's not like he was strong arming them to prevent them from making peace, but rather encouraging them to stay in the fight. It still looks bad in hindsight, but there's a large gulf between one head of state saying essentially "hey you guys can do this and we'll help you" vs the implied notion of forcing them into a voluntary conflict.
The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors since at least November 2022.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Your posts always seem interesting. I wish they were comprehensible (to me), at least without really digging into them.
I'd really recommend a full paragraph of summary at the top, with no rhetorical flourishes or weird words (like "blahaj and leekspinners") that only make sense in the context of someone who's been following the situation. This screenshot that you linked does a fairly good job. You have that first sentence saying someone linked to the Linux community got banned, but you need more in a place like this where all the topics get jumbled together. I want to know if a topic interests me before I read any further, and you typically only have a single paragraph to hook people like me before my eyes glaze a bit and I scroll down.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
America be flooded by Africans
My dude, what the heck are you talking about? The top countries of origin for immigrants were Mexico (24 percent of immigrants), India (6 percent), China (5 percent), the Philippines (4.5 percent), and El Salvador (3 percent). So El Salvador sent more immigrants to the US than any nation in Africa. Concern about the US being flooded by Hispanics would at least be grounded in reality, although most indicators show them following a similar path that the Irish went through.
Capgains taxes are fine, and even desirable if you want to lower or stabilize the gini coefficient. Rich people tend to get most of their money through their existing wealth, not through directly working which would be subject to income taxes. It's the closest thing to a tax on wealth that most societies can really achieve. A society that lets wealth accumulate unhindered ends up looking like France in the Belle Epoque period, where dynasties of the ultra-wealthy control almost everything.
You can say something similar for a sales tax, where post-tax money is taxed again, and if inflation happens then the absolute value of the tax increases. None of this makes either tax "unfair" or "absurd".
I do agree that trying to fix the problem by subsidizing housing for the young is silly. It's treating the symptoms instead of the cause, which is almost certainly NIMBYs and zoning restrictions like it is in the USA. But those are typically local issues that the national government doesn't have jurisdiction over, so they try to seem like they're "doing something" by just throwing money at the problem.
It's really a scheme to tax old people and give the benefits to younger people, which isn't the worst idea but the underlying issues of the housing crisis really do need to be resolved as well.
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