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As someone who generally enjoys your writing - please don’t fall into the trap of granting assent to Putin just because doing so runs contrary to the disingenuous mainstream narrative. He really is an enemy of freedom; almost a quintessential looter type out of Rand novels
If i were to describe the Ukraine war I describe it like the Iran-Iraq War... Two awful regimes you'd never want to live in grinding conscripts and people with no better prospects against each other. And also maybe Iran was a better place to live than Iraq during the time... low bar. (or maybe Iran just happens to be the only middle-eastern country with a movie industry so it seems better)
Ultimately I'd like them both to lose, and the cynical western backers drawing out the war to lose even harder....
Picture the map of the region rendered in stained glass... and then picture all the lines if you hit that stained glass repeatedly with a hammer... Those are what the borders should be. I wouldn't trust any of these people to govern a man 10 miles away let alone 400, and even then I'd want that local subject to be heavily armed.
Putin is awful... don't get me wrong. But Ukraine is literally executing civilians for continuing to live in occupied areas, has shelled civillians since 2014, has banned every rival political party, banned a free press, banned its population from leaving... Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point... and this is what our leaders hold up as their ideal and model of democracy for the rest of us.
Fuck that.
To quote Marylin Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers, I don't need to choose a side."
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Not letting your citizens leave the country is a very VERY unique horror with very few precedents. And one I am very fucking sensitive to having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns.
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
A principled stand for freedom here is worthwhile, but probably only if your particular set of borders has a bunch of nukes/is part of a nuclear alliance.
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
I have written about concription several times on the motte... In every instance I've argued it demanded lethal violence against thos administering it. Up to ands including killing the volunteer members of the draft boards
If we are indulging in fantastical arrangements for society, I think we should all just get along, man.
The french revolution pulled the cork this particular bottle, and Napoleon smashed it and fired the remains into the sun. Until technology removes the need for mass participation of humans on the home front and the war front, any state that elects to leave this particular option on the table is tying it's hands for principles sake.
we can abandon chemical weapons because they don't really work on organized first tier militaries; we cam restrain ourselves from Nukes and Bio 'cause of MAD and escalation. You can't have a war without people, though.
I don't care if the hands are tied. I want free people to exist not states.
I'd rather A country be reduced to Afghanistan and lose a chunk of its territory and free people exist somewhere in the uncontrolled territory than no free people exist anywhere because the state propped up its own existence by enslaving them.
Yes this goes for WW2. Yes this goes for the civil war. I have not seen a single faction in a single war in any moment of human history where i thought their propping up their war efforts by resorting to litteral slavery was at all an improvement.
the 20 million who died fighting for the soviet union might have lived had they murdered their commissars and officers instead of being fed into the Soviet Unions horrific efforts at self preservation.
The worst enemy you have no matter what is the man who has you at gunpoint and is issuing orders... he is always the first person you need to kill. And if a nation and a people... even call themselves your people are standing behind him demanding your death, then they are your enemies too.
There is no one more sympathetic in WW2 than the soviet citizens who volunteered for the Nazis, or the German citizens who volunteered for the soviets or allies... They accurately assessed who their greater enemy was: Their own governments.
I also want a stateless classless society where property is abolished and all receive according to their need, hail Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
We need to advance a touch more as a society in a variety of ways before we get there though.
Again, if you want to stand by your principles hell or high water, you have to accept that what is going to happen to you when the floods come is that you will drown.
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