This is very very very not good given how accurate they’ve been so far.
https://twitter.com/presssec/status/1501676240180322311?s=21
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hmm are you sure this isn’t somehow 20-40% americas fault?
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This is not good.
https://twitter.com/anamaria_iuga/status/1501680436099133443?s=20&t=-8U2gUfKIsvAvBsEzqNYZQ
Putin is on a complete suicide mission here. Pushing the bounds of rationality.
It’s perfectly rational. Cause as much damage as possible to force Ukraine to sure for peace.
Dropping ammonia on civilians is just the Syrian playbook. They’ve already said that it’s the Ukrainians bombing themselves to make Russians look bad and were going to do a false flag attack to kick off the war but the Americans gave a heads up.
They’ll probably blame the chemical attacks on Ukrainians too.
It’s weird to have a war where regular slobs on the internet know what’s going to happen before it happens.
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Well I disagree that there’s no conflict in the statements you made. Maybe pointing it out is a stupid gotcha or whatever, fine.
It’s not the only possibility but if you want to move in the direction of arguing for shared responsibility, ok. In the end you’re just saying there are people in the world making bad choices and you and I are among them. The world is as it is because the sum of our choices is bad. That might be accurate but it’s not very useful and I don’t need Realism to get there.
It rather seems to me that Realists would prefer not to allow shared responsibility. At least that’s not their usual starting point. Maybe they just like it highly concentrated.
How is the US responsible for trying to maximize its sphere of influence or minimizing Russia’s? How is Russia responsible for attempting to maximize its sphere of influence? Thats merely what countries do.
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https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1501624483647475719
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1501624907825831957
JFC - he’s completely on the payroll. It’s possible to have dangerous chemicals in an agricultural research lab without it being a weapons lab ffs.
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I think there’s a lot of debate ITT that could more effectively be held if several terms (“influence”, “responsible”, “fault”) were defined and potentially differentiated.
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What’s the conflict?
Realists are taking a single country’s point of view (in the OP video, Mearsheimer is examining things from the US perspective), and then treating opposing great power’s choices and reactions like clockwork reactions to those choices, based on the assumptions of offensive realism. Great powers will act offensively to enforce their regional hegemony, blah blah blah.
But of course you can do the same thing from non-US perspectives. You can imagine Mearsheimer giving a lecture saying that the Soviets putting the nuclear missiles in Cuba was a big mistake. “Great powers don’t like it when you put a bunch of military forces right in their backyard, especially when dealing with a people as mercurial and violent as the Americans!”
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1501688491603902466
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1501689364010704899
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1501689930589822988
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1501690761347280901
Here’s hoping.
But regardless of your justification what you are doing is analyzing Russia’s actions in realist terms and the US actions in moralistic ones. Here you go and do it again by correctly backing the point that ordinary Russians have no say in where Putin has led them then turning around and claiming responsibility for Biden or Trump’s sorry ass decision making. The fact is the amount of influence and moral burden one individual citizen has anywhere is dubious at best.
Why can’t I just oppose imperialism and aggression whether it’s us in Iraq/Yemen, Russia in Ukraine, or Chinese adventures in Taiwan, and lend my support towards freedom and sovereignty? If Australia decides tomorrow to send weapons to Yemen because they are horrified at the genocide, would you be yelling at them to stay out of it because it’ll piss someone off?
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Occam’s razor says he is just doing it for the Substack followers and Tucker appearances. Incomprehensible cravenness and evil either way.
You don’t agree but it still seems to me you’re saying x and not x.
The clockwork argument is an option to shared responsibility. But then you get into a who did what to who first argument that fizzles out in the dawn of history or again ends up in shared responsibility. Or maybe you can work in prime movers of some kind. God vs. the devil or something. Still not very useful. Again, you don’t need Realism to get here.
I think Realists would like to say that countries have a different kind of responsibility than individuals. But that breaks the link because then why would I, a moral entity, care about what a country does? It would be like saying clouds are immoral for raining on me. And just as useful.
I’m getting the encourage everyone to get involved notice.