Only if the targets are government/oligarch controlled including state media. Civilians deserve no harm.
I know what I would do if I were Ukrainian. My targets would be picked to maximize harm to the Russian economy.
What does this mean? You use it casually but it’s not even googleable.
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The news isn’t great. Boomers, and most others, get their news from government controlled TV. Putin used propaganda to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine. Are Russians buying it? - Vox Most think it’s a “security operation.”
My antivax stepdad went off the deepend on facebook and is now corrupted by Russian disinformation. (My mum died 8 years ago and he wasn’t gone when she was married to him, but he was always pretty stupid with rage issues). He posted similar stuff to his facebook page today and I replied with “or you could realize that you’ve been getting your disinformation from Russian trolls when the antivax sites you’re on suddenly shift the conversation to a seemingly unrelated war.”
My parents really both remarried really low down after their split. I know my mum told me months before she died of cancer that it was a huge mistake to have left my dad.
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That’s a heavy regret to admit in your deathbed.
You can’t believe what fell, from rounders, I’m
Not sure why he keeps saying it
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A smug Russian gangster splashing the pot confident he’s defeating his nemesis is kind of fitting for this situation, we just have to hope Ukraine can pull a Mike McDermott and turn over the better hand.
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VFS is our Sweet Summer Child of this whole Ukraine thing.
I hope he’s right, but I don’t like the odds.
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It’s the difference between drawing a red line and guaranteeing that you’ll defend it BEFORE Russia takes any action, and coming in when Russia has already invaded and guaranteeing a conflict between nuclear superpowers.
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Hopefully it’s missing a couple side windshields soon, too.
An interview with John Mearsheimer in the New Yorker. He comes across as perfectly sane and logical
I was cheered to read that because I know you think of yourself as a tough, crusty old guy who doesn’t talk about morality, but it seemed to me you were suggesting that there was a moral dimension here. I’m curious what you think, if any, of the moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.
I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what I’m saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move nato eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.
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I get all this, I really do. I’m just not confident that it’s really the right position, it’s hard to watch thousands die for what seems like something that’s based more in our own biases and perspective than anything else. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just really frustrating.
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It’s brutal to watch, I’m right there with you. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over it and can’t get some of the things I’ve seen/heard on social media out of my head, and probably won’t for a long time.
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Sure he doesn’t come off as deranged. But this passage is just asserting things that in no way can he know for sure are true.
Putin is a totalitarian dictator. No one can predict with 100% certainty where their ambition will stop.
He’s also saying that Ukraine needs to be more like Russia and shun the West. So I guess the Ukrainian people have no right to self-determination? They have to shun the protection on NATO and the economic benefits of the EU to *maybe* appease a tyrant?
Is he seriously arguing that’s the path they should have chosen? Elect another Lukashenko and be another Belarus? No freedom of the press, no economic freedom, disappeared for speaking up against the state? Apparently they’d rather risk dying en masse.
Still just not buying in any way shape or form that this is somehow the fault of the West and everything would be rainbows and unicorns if we just hadn’t expanded NATO.
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This seems like a gross negligence with respect to history. He absolutely should know about the holodomor if he expects us to take him seriously on Ukrainian geopolitics, but his argument seems to completely neglect it for no reason except to hide the fact that it is a massive hole in his claim. The Ukrainians, in living memory, were genocided by the Russians to the tune of 20+ million starved to death deliberately, despite being loyal subjects at the time. It is absolutely reasonable to defy a great power if submitting to them means drawing live to that again.
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I think you missed the sarcasm.
In the online cardroom I play in, there definitely seems to be less traffic tonight, and there are usually at least 3 multi-tabling, Russian regs, none of whom are around tonight.
I wonder if this is somehow related to the war?