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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Withdrawing from Ukraine would mean that Russia is essentially allowing NATO to forever expand and threaten its borders,

Russia has neither the authority to allow or not allow other countries to have their own relations. Russia does, however, have a nuclear deterrent if faced with invasion.

and also that genociding Russian minorities on Russia's borders is not a big deal.

The Russian minorities on Russia's borders are not being genocided.

Per the standing international law defining genocide, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide-

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with

intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as

such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Russian state's claims of genocide of Russian ethnic groups tends to rely on language policies, such as whether Russian is taught in schools or as a language of governance. Language policies of these sort do not constitute genocide. While the Russian intervention in the Donbas has been used to claim the Ukrainians are targeting the citizens there, this has not been reflected in areas under Ukrainian control, indicating a lack of deliberate targetting.

By contrast, the Russian policies in Ukraine, ranging from filtration camps, torture centers, artillery campaigns on civilian infrastructure, targeting of essential power infrastructure during the winter, and the population relocations of Ukrainian civilians into Russia would qualify.

That's not cutting losses.

Accepting an undesirable state is precisely what cutting losses entails. Even if what you claimed were all true, it would still be a lower cost than suffering the Ukraine disaster AND having all of the other items still occur.

Sounds like head cannon from the same people that came up with WMD in Iraq for what?

Your hearing and/or memory is off.

To a lot of countries the problem of nuclear proliferation is probably not whether or not it's happening but who is holding the nukes above their head.

You framed in a global perspective, you get a global perspective response. The regional/local perspective will, of course, be based on observation of what other nuclear users are able to get away with in the multi-polar order that Russia pre-emptively claimed success in creating.

Go tell the Donbass civilans they gotta keep taking the bombs because otherwise nuclear proliferation bad.

The Donbass civilians are being bombed because of a multi-year Russian intervention in the Donbass following the failed NovaRussia campaign intended to spark an anti-maiden counter-uprising, not because nuclear proliferation is bad. The Russians turning the Donbass into a warzone was a policy choice.