By swim I was including things like small (or makeshift) boats. Things small enough that you could quickly cross at night and it would be hard for artillery to accurately hit (unlike say a pontoon bridge). Basically just fleeing with your self and maybe your gun and a bit of ammo, but having to leave behind all your other equipment and supplies.
Of course it is. It’s doing exactly what Russia wants you to do. Never Again doesn’t mean “Sit Idly By and Feel Sorry For The People Being Genocided.”
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That’s exactly what we’re doing right now with the much worse, ongoing genocide in China. That’s what we did in Rwanda. East Timor. Cambodia. Darfur.
Really, I have to question if Never Again is a guiding principle of American foreign policy!
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Man, it’s almost like I can think that US foreign policy can be mostly terrible, but that it doesn’t have to be always terrible all the time.
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it just happens to align with the most pro-russian position there is
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so, you are saying we shouldn’t have sat out rwanda (1m+ genocide) and darfur (tens to hundreds of thousands), and shouldn’t be silent on uygurs? or that we should sit out ukraine like US did there?
multiple leaders, including clinton, said they regret not sending a small force to rwanda to prevent deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Call the manager ikes
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Overall, Kasparov is a bit of a prick (I read his book Winter Is Coming and wasn’t a fan) but he is absolutely right to burn Musk for that tweet.
I think Keeed has a point that you can’t just label everyone who doesn’t want to fund a war as pro-Russian unless your stance is “if you’re not with us, then you’re against us”. An absolute pacifist who opposes all military funding wouldn’t necessarily be pro-Russian. Jeannette Rankin was not pro-Axis because she refused to vote for declaring war during World War II.
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Kasparov went nuts during Iraq. IIRC he was calling for Baghdad to be nuked at one point.
The tweet about the poll is even worse as it labels anyone who thinks we are sending too much funding to Ukraine as pro-Russia. So even if you want to keep sending them aid, but just not at current levels, you’re lumped as pro-Russia.
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Is there anything the US can do to materially help the Uyghurs? Just war theory includes a condition that there has to be a reasonable chance for success. Perhaps, there are non-war ways to help them, but I can see an argument for only trying to help if you think you can make a difference, if you believe in pragmatism.
No, I’m saying that thinking “never again” is some sort of consistent foreign policy principle that the United States has held to after ww2 is laughable. We’ve caused more genocides than we’ve stopped. As far as I can tell we haven’t stopped any genocides at all. And thinking that the US government’s policy now is aimed at genocide prevention in Ukraine is equally laughable.
I don’t think that there is much we could have or should have done in any of those cases. Certainly nothing we can or should do to china short of sanctions.
No. Similarly I don’t think there is much we can do to help Ukraine win that doesn’t significantly increase the risk of nuclear war.
I don’t think the interpretation of the tweet has to be that thinking too much support to Ukraine is the same as being pro-Russian. Even if only half of the people who think the US is providing too much support to Ukraine are actually pro-Russian, that’s still a sign that the pro-Russian position is gaining momentum, but it probably overstates the probability that the Republicans taking the House will end US aid to Ukraine.
Do you think the percentage of Republicans who say we are giving too much aid to Ukraine can increase that much without a significant increase in the percentage of Republicans who are pro-Putin or pro-Russia?
That’s a fair point and maybe your right - but my sense is that these R voters changing their tune on Ukraine aid aren’t doing it to be more (or less) pro-Russia but just changing their tune based on what they are being told to think. So if Trump says less aid to Russia, they’ll say less aid and if he says no aid, they say no aid.
So in that sense, I don’t think there is really a change in R voters being pro-Russia, but that R’s have been beating the drum recently that Biden is wasting US money supporting Russia when we have all these domestic troubles. However, given most R’s are still voting for all the aid packages, I think it’s mostly just bluster and they’ll keep voting for, but criticizing the aid (same way they are all voting against, but taking credit for Biden’s domestic spending).
I think it’s more a matter of more Republican voters identifying being pro-Ukraine as a Democratic position and reflexively taking the opposite position of wanting to decrease aid.
But if I had to guess, I would guess that Putin’s favorability rating among Republican voters has risen since the start of the invasion, while fear of nuclear war has increased.
To expand on this, I’ve said before that probably the US is managing escalation so Ukraine doesn’t win decisively. I don’t think that the US actually wants Ukraine to take Donbas and Crimea because what Russia would do in response is unpredictable and dangerous. If that is actually what American support is aimed at, and/or actually what happens, then I think things could escalate dangerously from there in unpredictable ways. What happens if Russia loses a war that the Russian elite thinks they must win? I suppose you could make a just war case for this but to me the risk is absolutely not worth it.
The more likely US government strategy is providing a level of support that will lead to a bloody stalemate. If that’s the strategy then I think pretty clearly it doesn’t conform with just war theory.
it is the ukranian gov’t’s policy aimed at genocide prevention, for which they are requesting resources from many nations.
and many people would agree that NATO interventions in Yugoslavia did stop genocide from continuing. if you recall, there were many NATO strikes with UN authorization, prior to the one in Kosovo in 1999.
once again, Bill Clinton and military commanders disagree with you, that a third of Rwanda’s genocide could have been prevented with a peace-keeping force as low as 10k. but OTOH there’s “nothing-we-can-do” Keeed, keeeeding it up