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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16770 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Kiev was taken by the Russians in 1667, only a little over a hundred years before the United States existed.

I imagine if New York broke away in a moment of national weakness. We might allow it. But if then China started installing military bases there and buying out the politicians, we would undoubtedly find it galling and invade.

I wish people would stop trying to make tortured analogies like this. The US doesn't have a good comparison in its history to Taiwan, nor to Ukraine, stop trying to force it.

In some respect all circumstances are unique. But gaining access to seaports on the Baltic and Black Sea were foundational to Russia’s concept of itself as a modern state. Losing its Black Sea territory would be a humiliation for them that would be setting them back to before the 1700s.

I understand that is probably the goal of US foreign policy - dismantling Russia into a pre-modern medieval rump state around Moscow. But Russia also understands that is the goal and they have 100 million people and the world’s largest nuke supply to prevent it. Personally, I think we should just trade with each other and get along. I doubt ending the modern Russian state as such will make the world a better place

Ukraine had been Russian for a very long time. Longer than the USA has existed. Much longer than Florida has been a state. These things matter. We are blessed with the world’s largest moat so we have little sympathy for other countries who are faced with the prospect of losing territory.

For us, I imagine our first realistic national humiliation will be when Hawaii is taken by China. I imagine we will fight very hard against that

Yes, Kiev was in the Russian partition.

Calling it a partition is a little odd, since there never was a Ukrainian state until the 20th century. It’s not like the partition of Poland, where something that exists was split into pieces. And the area currently encompassed by Ukraine isn’t a coherent nation, but an agglomeration of several peoples with distinct heritages

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