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I broadly agree with Kulak's take here. Putin isn't great yeah, but the leadership of Ukraine isn't exactly Jeffersonian classical liberals either. It's a standard regional power struggle that America has no real interests in.
If the Ukrainian people desire independence enough to really fight for it, they're welcome to it. If not, whatever, not my problem. I'm fine with selling them a bunch of weapons, but giving them huge amounts of money or direct intervention ought to be off the table IMO.
Bleeding Russia dry is in America's interest surely.
I kind of agree with this, though I'd phrase it more as being moderately irritating to them rather than bleeding them dry. I did say I'd like to sell Ukraine lots of weapons - both because it makes them a bigger thorn in Russia's side and because it gives us information about how well our weapons actually perform against Russian weapon systems in the hands of the proper Russian army.
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Not really... Russia was positioned to become a US ally as late as 2008-2012, partner in the global war on terror stuff... another nuclear armed, economically dependent, ethically suspect appendage of American empire like Israel or Pakistan... Not really democratic, but good at keeping the locals in line...
Then the woke stuff hit, Putin was a white man who was anti-gay and the democrats went from mocking republicans for treating them as a geopolitical rival ("The 1980s called they want their foreign policy back" said Obama to Romney) to hating any republicans agreed with the take Obama had in 2012...
Its all Trump and Gay Marriage.
That's why Ukraine was treated as a major geopolitical happening in 2014 when Russia-Georgia was completely ignored, or how we're going defcon 1 with sanctions now... but didn't when Putin was propping up Assad in Syria back in 2015.
There can't be a white country that isn't woke. and Russia's the only Asia regional power Americans consider white... So when Turkey wages war on the Democratic and freedom loving Kurds, who have been America's allies for 30 years... no one gives a shit. But when Russia wages war against an ultranationalist not really democratic country that's been commiting warcrimes for 8 years... defcon 1.
Trump, Gay Marriage, white skin. Those are the driving forces of US foreign policy on this. Those are the only things that separate Russia from Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt... or any other Faux democratic, kinda belligerent regional power with dozens of different border disputes.
Not in my news it wasn't. I remember smugly listing it as a counter example to the notion that no two democracies have ever attacked each other. Of course, back then I was under the misapprehension that Russia was a democracy because I was a child.
Actually I think this has a lot more to do with that time Putin's boys shot down a commercial airliner. That was big news and generated a lot of animosity towards Putin.
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What's a huge amount, as a percentage of US GDP?
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Do you not suspect that this lip service to the idea of freedom is only paid as long as there's a credible risk of you and others like you effectively or literally defecting to the far group, should the trust be thoroughly betrayed? And that, as soon as there is nowhere to defect to, the hegemony secured forever – the show's over, your carrot is taken away and into the meat grinder you go?
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
Regime change.. towards what? Alright, suppose Putin wins and suppose it triggers some regime changes in the West — a few European Putin LARPers might come to power — then what? Is your vision of the future a world littered with dysfunctional authoritarian states on the range from Putinist Russia to North Korea?
Then about the vaccinations… I made a Pfizer shot last year. It’s actual effect on my life is zero. Yes, I get it, it’s a bad precedent. Yes, I get it, the governments should stay the fuck out of regulating what you do to your body. Yes, I get it, it can and will get worse i the future. That said: trading a Western government for a Russian one is trading away a whole lot of your actual, important, substantial freedoms for something that is not (at least yet) a big deal.
John Galt had a hidden valley in the mountains, we the Russians have the western countries; where would you go if you achieved your stated ideal of dismantling the western regime? Don’t delude yourself thinking you’d fare well in Russia. That requires either doing nothing of importance (what kind of life is that), swearing fealty to degenerates, or indeed going against the govt and winning.
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
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