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Murdering 3000 civilians because you agreed with stopping Sadaam from going into Kuwaitt but wanted the glory of stopping him yourself instead of the US is a bit insane and different, imo.
Right and the key sticking point to me is that even if Ukraine is willing to recognize Crimea and Donbas as Russian, I don’t see how they’re going to be willing to forego NATO membership and shrink their army. I could see them agreeing not to join NATO, but agreeing to shrink their army so that this is easier next time around seems ludicrous. I could also see them joining NATO but agreeing to shrink their military, and perhaps agreeing to specific limits on what NATO can deploy there unless they are being invaded or facing a troop buildup on their border.
And as you also pointed out, Russia is obviously not going to be paying to help rebuild Ukraine, nor are they likely going to agree to allow western money to come in to do that.
Essentially what Putin is going for here is temporary peace because his forces are getting wrecked, but in a way in which Ukraine cannot defend itself as well next time around, nor can it rebuild - hence weakening Zelensky and Ukrainian democracy. I see no reason to expect him not to keep leaning on it at that point, nor to trust him not to invade again in a few years.
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Yeah, there are far fewer casualties and the people in those towers were much closer connected to the evils of the american empire than the russians being starved by sanctions are to the evils of Putin. 9/11 was a far more moral act than US sanctions. Both evil incase anyone needs that caveat.
Yeah, just seems to me to be a larger scale version of “the house reserves the right to refuse your business for any reason or no reason”.
Not really. They are set at the state level and prohibit anyone from making that decision.
The Russians are not being starved. And every indication I’ve seen is that Russian support for Putin is equivalent or higher to American support for GWB, meaning way too high.
I wish the US was sanctioned for the Iraq war, even most of us against it kind of sleepwalked through it.
There is no way to know this. Polling is lol inside Russia.
Those indications might be a bit misleading. A lot of people in Russia are scared to answer honestly if you ask them whether they support the current administration, and with good reason.
If a poll says 50% of respondents support the war, I’d say that, finger in the air, the true number is no higher than ~30%, and possibly a fair bit lower than that.
Exactly, I think Putin is human excrement but if I was in russia for some reason and anyone asked me I’d be the biggest Putin supporter around. And even if it were all true I don’t think falling for propaganda bullshit is a crime worthy of a death sentence because holy shit I’d have been a goner long ago and so would most of the population of the earth.
The pollsters are aware of Russians possible aversion to answering the poll honestly. At least until now it wasn’t that scary for Russians to speak their minds. At least you could look at relative numbers to at least see where it was trending (until now when they’re becoming N. Korea).
Also there are tons of anecdotal reports that support for Putin was sky high after Crimea.
https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/t83fr2/the_fears_from_inside_of_russia/
So, where do we start? I’d say it all started somewhere around 2014. At least it became visible to the people. After Ukrainian revolution our state media immediately transformed to unstoppable propaganda bursting 24/7 that was putting threesimple things to peoples’ heads:
— New Ukrainian government is a Military Nazi Junta
— Most of Ukrainians don’t like them and are against the revolution
— Ukraine has no sovereignty and they just being directly ruled from outside by NATO and USA, which is our worst enemies somehow
They even tried to justify obvious offensive actions in Crimea saying that “If we don’t take Crimea, our fleet base there will be replaced by NATO base and it’s a huge threat to Russian sovereignty”.Thanks to propaganda it was hugely appreciated in the Russian population. Mostly in older strata, who was used to seeing USA as an enemy from the cold war era. Then Donbass was going for 8 years now and all those years Russia was under the sanctions. Propaganda was telling people that they’re good for us and it will boost our economy and internal productions. To make things even better, they declared counter-sanctions, banning European food from Russian stores. It should be mentioned that it became a local meme: every counter-measure from our own government is worse than the sanctions it was meant to address. It goes by “bombing Voronezh”. Voronezh is a Russian city and the meaning behind “bombing it” is just general ability of Russian government of making the situation worse for us every time they want to somehow strike back “western aggression”.
Those 8 years the Ukraine was used as a main theme on Russian TV to distract people from our own problems. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine — Ukraine everywhere for 8 years now. The police just arrested the group of terrorists? Wow, they have Ukrainian flags under the table! This guy was neutralized trying to make a bomb in the center of Moscow? He has Ukrainian passport in his right pocket. And so on. Also they told that Ukraine was bombing Donets almost on a daily basis all those years. To this year our country came separated. Younger people were at most just annoyed by the word Ukraine and mostly understanding what it all was about, and older part of the population were generally sure that Ukrainians want to behead every Russian, Russian-speaking people were opressed all the time and Ukrainian government are just a band of Nazi Puppets of USA.
This literally just came up in my feed. Had the same experience talking to my grandmother recently and gave up. She lived through Stalin for fuck’s sake, she should know better.
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Independent polls that seem legit as can be in an authoritarian state are only part of the reason I think that. In videos of anti-war protestors being arrested, there are crowds of people yelling at them. And the AMA from liberal Russians describe passionate Putin support from the older generation/Russian only speaking population.
I do agree that a majority of Russians wish the war never happened, but I think a majority sincerely supported Putin right up to the point of full scale invasion and that they are rallying around the flag now that war has come.
https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1501417143312789508
Best map I’ve seen. Very good thread too.
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Wow the jump from realism to moralizing sure happened fast.
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There’s no conflict with realism and pointing out the US’s bad actions if you’re a US citizen responsible for those atrocities, like I am. Me and my government have killed a third of a million people in Yemen in support of a dynastic tyrant! That’s, uh, pretty bad, and that war would end tomorrow if the US said so. How in the world does pointing out something like that, or that the awful Iraq sanctions were bad, actually, conflict with realism? It obviously doesn’t.
That’s not the conflict being pointed out here. It’s how you flip between contradictory schools of thought on a dime.
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Which schools of thought am I switching between, and what’s the contradiction?
I am doubtful that Keeed is switching between “schools of thought”.
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