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More Arguing on the App Formerly Known as Twitter
Last time I was arguing with Trump supporters. When I was doing that I was obviously a RINO “cuck”, a NeverTrumper who didn’t learn my lesson in 2016 and was probably on Ron DeSantis’ payroll. (Or was it George Soros?)
This time my afternoon was taken up arguing with a supporter of the US throwing trillions into the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. That means I am obviously a MAGA cultist, an alt-right nut job, AND simultaneously in the back pocket of Code Pink.
That makes me the most schizophrenic SOB on the planet or it just means that our politics have descended into cartoonish dimensions. I think I’ll side with the latter.
Ask what the American interest in Ukraine is and you get cartoonish answers. “A clear cause of liberty.” I’m sorry. When I think of Ukraine I think of a corrupt kleptocracy, not a bastion of “liberty.” That argument has as much depth of thought as a WWI recruitment poster. “But if we don’t stop Putin here, he will go for the Balkans!” The Balkans? Really? And exactly what part of the 20th Century is it where you live? The majority of the Balkans are NATO members. Invading them would trigger WWIII just as easily as invading Poland or the Baltic states.
If there’s anything we should have learned over the last 18 months, it’s that Russia is not the Big Bad Bear of our 1960s nightmares. Who believed more in the capabilities of the Russian military? Putin or American NeoCons? And, of course, there is the other disconnect — the idea that Putin is a madman just itching to invade this neighboring country and that neighboring country but always a “rational actor” that would never press the nuclear button.
But beyond all that, should Ukraine fall tomorrow, at what disadvantage does that put America? What vital American interest falls (or rises) with Ukraine? And I’m not talking about some esoteric horse hockey psychological answer about “emboldening our enemies.” I mean real, substantive strategic impairment of American interests. We will we starve without Ukrainian wheat? Does our Navy desperately need Ukrainian ports? Will New York freeze without Burisma natural gas? No, no, and hell, no.
But then again, I’m a “right-tanky vatnik f*wit piece of s***,” or so I’ve been told. But if we’re going to descend into name-calling condensation… “How’s that Raytheon stock working for you?”
Published in General
If the population of Ukraine consisted solely of corrupt oligarchs, I wouldn’t much care what happened to it.
But it doesn’t.
Do you remember the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800? Good times with everyone polite and upright about the whole thing. Yes, those were the days.
Name a country that doesn’t have good people in it. Are we responsible for the defense of all them?
You speak of the days when it took some people 11 months to find out who actually won that election from the time they had cast their votes. Today ignorance is willful.
No, but, didn’t we make a promise to Ukraine based on their giving up the leftover nukes? No it wasn’t a “Treaty” etc, not that a “Treaty” would stop FJB from reneging on it. But if they hadn’t given up the nukes, how likely is it that Putin would have invaded?
I speak merely of the civility of the discourse, sir.
In a word, no. The nukes that were on Ukrainian soil belonged to the Soviets. Not only did the Ukrainians not have operational control over them, they did not possess the capability to upkeep them. Russia would have never turned them over to the Ukrainian government and most likely would have sabotaged them as they evacuated the silos.
I’ve seen some analysts give a similar explanation for Crimea. It was always Russian from the time Catherine the Great, or whoever, acquired it. Moscow gave administrative control of it to Ukraine in the 1950s, I think because they were next door. However, since it was all the Soviet Union, it was a distinction without a difference.
Strawmen of the world, unite!
Putin knows that the Ukraine is the USA’s proxy,and that although the Ukraine might not have nukes right now, it has the full backing of all of our submarines loaded to their gills with nuke missiles, as well as the nukes of NATO countries like France and Great Britain.
EJ, if you need some sound bytes for any future arguments, here is the spectacular interview of Colonel MacGregor by Tucker Carlson.
The money our MIC is planning to spend over there is over 10 trillion. (According to MacGregor.)
Also Russia having a fully trained and operational military consisting of 750,000 warm bodies is a speaking point that I wish every American understood.
@CarolJoy That is a frightening interview.
It’s a speaking point, but is it true? Or are the Russia armed forces, as currently constituted, poorly trained, under-equipped with archaic materiel, underpaid, poorly motivated, led by jackals, hampered by archaic logistical paradigms, and relying on convicts to die in meat-grinder attacks? Opinions differ.
That, and how many of those bodies actually exist, vs being just fraudulent paychecks, and stuff?
I have to wonder, if they were that well off, why did they need The Wagner Group?
I don’t rule out the possibility that there is a rational – as opposed to emotional – reason for funding the continuing slaughter in Ukraine: I don’t really frequent the places such an argument would be made. Maybe the numbers of military and civilian casualties just aren’t that big compared to the other goals to be achieved – lots of rearmament cash in supplementals; bleeding the Russian war machine (in order to… ?); dissuading other European countries (Belgium? Monaco?) from invading their neighbors…. Perhaps there is a secret treaty where the West softens up Ukraine for a future Polish takeover in return for … free polka lessons? Perhaps there is a group of high-placed Russians in contact with Western intelligence just waiting for – something – to stage a coup and push the Big Red Reset Button. Or perhaps it’s all being done for the likes.
You sound like there should have been no American Revolution, and that France and others shouldn’t have helped us, because there was so much… killing. Ick.
Oh, and that Civil War? Better to just let slavery go on.
And really, how bad could the world be if Hitler and/or Stalin ran everything?
Mercenaries give you plausible deniability when it comes to war crimes. “Yes, they were fighting on our behalf but the rapes and the slaughter of children? Well, we never authorized that…”
The world was different before August 29, 1949.
I think there is a lot of Cold War nostalgia driving our involvement in the Ukraine land war. A lot of boomers never got over being denied a war with Russia.
The idea that Russia is a threat to us, or that Ukraine has strategic value to us, is preposterous. But the Chinese are loving watching from the side as we run up debt and deplete our arsenal. Meanwhile, the BRICS are getting stronger. And frankly, I am rooting for them a bit. The American Ruling Class has become far too arrogant and need to be taken down.
I have also seen this schizophrenia in action as well. I have made my position clear. The charges against Trump are entirely politically motivated pony crap. I broadly agree that Trump represents a bloc of people who have been left out and left behind by the two political parties. I believe in America First. But, I think also Trump has demonstrated twice … in 2020 and 2022 … that he is toxic to a significant portion of the electorate and has zero chance of winning in 2024. We should thank him and move on.
The way Trumpers react, you would think I had offered up their mothers as sex slaves to illegal immigrants. And this, after years of being called a “MAGAT” for defending Trump from criticism I thought was unfair.
Why do you think France intervened on behalf of the rebels: because they shared their ideology, or because it was part of a larger strategy of opposing Britain?
Which foreign powers supplied significant amounts of arms and aid to which side in that conflict? And why? Was it selfless support of the expression of a favoured ideology, or was it in pursuit of their own aims and interests?
Pretty bad. There would be vital American interests at stake in allowing such a thing, so we should definitely do something about it. (Of course, in the case of Stalin, it was vast amounts of US aid that allowed him to roll over Eastern Europe in the first place. To be clear, it would not have been better to leave such places in the hands of Hitler. Ideally such places would have been liberated from Hitler without being enslaved by Stalin. The world is seldom ideal.)
To return to your comment:
The American experiment was a wonderful thing. But with the Republic now seeming to want to re-enact Mexican political history, but in reverse, it might be an idea for some of the states to petition to rejoin the British Empire… But that is another topic.
It sure doesn’t look to me like genferei’s concerns had anything to do with that. Just “slaughter,” i.e. killing.
I agree that opinions differ. You are quite right.
But since I was already coming into adulthood back in the day when McNamara kept telling the public about how well equipped our “grunts” on the ground were in Vietnam, and how the body count of the Viet Cong was escalating, and how if we simply stuck it out another 6 months then we would realize that ours had been a clear path to victory, and all of that turned out to be his opinion, I think every single American needs to hear both sides of the story. (McNamara was the USA’s Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968.)
Speaking of Vietnam, Ukraine has lost more soldiers in the last 18 months than the U.S. did in the entire Vietnam war.
I offered your comment a “like” as it is true that there are now some people who are so overly committed to Trump that they refuse to understand that he too has made major bad decisions.
It is almost like there are two Trumps.
There was the Trump who went out on a limb and saw to it that Boeing’s “Max” airliners were grounded. For this he received huge amounts of big media criticism and ridicule.
It was only because Captain “Sully” – an American hero for his saving the plane and its passengers in NYC – went to the press and forced them to realize how Trump’s decision to ground these airliners was the right one, that the criticism did then die down.
Then there is the Trump who pledged to his base of Christians who view their bodies as temples that he would install Robert F Kennedy Jr as his major health advisor. But once in the Oval Office, that pledge was forgotten and instead he appointed a Pfizer executive as his top health adviser.
Did the fact that Pfizer had placed one million dollars into his campaign coffer have something to do with the decision? Or was this decision due to how Robert F Kennedy Jr can be annoyingly Democrat-Party influenced? (Kennedy is of course currently backing away from many of the Dim Leaders’ policies. Although he still holds onto a disdain for the 2nd Amendment.)
Anyway, due to being under the spell of Pharma, Trump easily capitulated to demands that COVID be declared a health emergency, without looking into what that meant. His announcement of this emergency came about on March 13 2020.
Once the COVID infection officially became a national public health emergency, it basically meant that the DoD and FEMA, and their proxies in government health agencies, could run our nation and its economy into the ground.
Trump was known to use a team of lawyers to handle so many of his major decisions. Why he went and made this decision without talking to that team, I will never understand. The result of that decision was catastrophic damage to our lives, our sanity, the US economy and even the 2020 election results.
Probably not the best comparison. More like, how many did Ukraine lose vs how many did South Vietnam lose? And then get into comparing sizes of countries and populations, etc.
From a quick search, estimates are that South Vietnamese military deaths were 4 to 5 times the number of US deaths.
Dude. In a war of attrition, Ukraine cannot win.
The fact that the Ukraine cannot win makes it a much more appealing war for profits than if that proxy player could achieve victory over the next 6 to 18 months.
This is the kinda war the US MIC absolutely depends on.
Are you assuming that the entire population of Russia would fight the entire population of Ukraine?
That seems… rather unlikely.
Meanwhile…
South Vietnamese military losses were just over 1% of the total population.
If Ukraine has lost 60,000 so far, that’s less than 0.2% of the total population.
And, the population of Afghanistan is about equal to that of Ukraine. Yet we don’t see Russia ruling over Afghanistan.
Maybe Russia has better motivations to rule Ukraine, but Ukraine is also getting more help, etc.
Are you assuming the entire population of Ukraine will be conscripted? Every man, woman, and child from 0 to 99?
Of course not. But I’m not the one claiming “attrition” either. I’m the one who pointed out that Afghanistan, which Russia DIDN’T conquer, had a population roughly equal in size to Ukraine.