In the end, power is about the capacity to wield brute force. — Olivier5
What is the logic link between being Russian or talk to Russians and having reasons to believe that the Russian aggression of Ukraine is immoral? — neomac
you have moral reasons to not voice your moral condemnation of Putin’s actions even if they are immoral because this would hypocritically deflect attention from Western’s moral responsibilities in the genesis of this war, and would be taken to promote the immoral indirect interventionism of the West. — neomac
Any demand that a ruthless tyrant of a nation can make against another nation (e.g. as Hitler made against Poland or Kim Jong-un makes against South Korea) that goes unsatisfied can be seen by him as a provocation, so should we meet his demands whatever they are to avoid a war and so endangering millions of people's life and wellbeing? — neomac
Is it immoral to fight for one’s own nation’s independence and/or for the freedom that one enjoys in such independent nation? — neomac
Isn’t there any civic duty to fight for one’s own nation against the oppression of other nations’ tyrants? Don’t you really see any moral imperative in trying to contain the geopolitical ambitions of a ruthless tyrant even if at risk of total defeat? — neomac
BTW do you consider the West immoral only when provoking a Russian ruthless tyrant or also when supporting his ruthless regime and ambitious geopolitical goals through economic ties? — neomac
an immoral turd doesn’t need any specific strategic provocation by the West — neomac
If you are against advancing Western strategic interests and any logic of containment of its competitors that would risk a war, then you are indirectly supporting its competitors’ strategic interests, indeed of those competitors who are more aggressive in military terms, and therefore you may be rightly judged complicit in advancing them at the expenses of the West. — neomac
Then Putin’s aggression will result in a total failure if he will not at least put a pro-Russian regime, because the West is already military equipping Ukraine — neomac
Then you can not be sure of Western moral responsibility in knowingly provoking Putin either. Can you? — neomac
talked about attacking Russia, not about land invasion on Russia. — neomac
Yet those demands do not seem enough to guarantee the national security of Russia from a now more likely hostile country. — neomac
So Jeff Bezos? No power at all (bit of a wimp by all accounts). Rupert Murdoch? Completely powerless (I mean, I could definitely have him). Larry Fink? Couldn't influence a child, after all, he's a bit skinny isn't he? Koch brothers? Too old to use brute force, so completely powerless...
What kind of bullshit argument is that? — Isaac
Energy minister... Robert Habeck... predicted “mass unemployment, poverty, people who can’t heat their homes, people who run out of petrol” if his country stopped using Russian oil and gas. — Baden
[A] Russian-supplied missile in the hands of the irregulars had shot down a civilian airliner flying over the conflict zone. Denouncing this ‘unspeakable outrage’, Obama called the West to joint action against Russia. Economic sanctions targeting its financial and defence sectors were intensified. That the United States had itself shot down a civilian airliner, with a virtually identical toll of deaths, without ever so much as apologizing for a virtually identical blunder, was naturally in a different sense unspeakable—the airline was Iranian, the captain of the Vincennes acted in good faith, so why should anyone in the ‘international community’ remember, let alone mention it? So too was the annexation of the Crimea unheard of: why should anyone have heard of the seizures of East Jerusalem, North Cyprus, Western Sahara, or East Timor, conducted without reproof by friendly governments fêted in Washington? What matter if in all these cases, annexation crushed the self-determination of the inhabitants in blood, rather than reflecting it without loss of life? Such considerations are beside the point, as if the power that administers international law could be subject to it.
A glance at Security Council resolutions of the period is enough to see that Russia fell in with the wishes of the West virtually across the board, with the solitary exception of the Annan Plan to dismantle the Republic of Cyprus for a deal with Turkey, which it vetoed on an appeal for help from the government in Nicosia. All told, Russia was more than a reliable and collegial force within the international community. It was the bearer of ‘a civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent’. Under Medvedev, Russian foreign policy bent even further to the West. In compliance with Washington, Moscow cancelled delivery of S-300 missile systems to Tehran that would have complicated Israeli or us air-strikes against the country; voted time and again in the un for sanctions against Iran required by the us; gave a green light to Western bombardment of Libya; and even supplied a transport hub on Russian soil at Ulyanovsk for nato operations in Afghanistan.
Putin’s belief that he could build a Russian capitalism structurally interconnected with that of the West, but operationally independent of it—a predator among predators, yet a predator capable of defying them—was always an ingenuous delusion. By throwing Russia open to Western capital markets, as his neo-liberal economic team wished, in the hope of benefiting from and ultimately competing with them, he could not escape making it a prisoner of a system vastly more powerful than his own, at whose mercy it would be if it ever came to a conflict. In 2008–09 the Wall Street crash had already shown Russian vulnerability to fluctuations of Western credit, and the political implications. Once deprived of its current account surplus, a local banker commented with satisfaction, ‘foreign investors will get a vote on how Russia is run. That is an encouraging sign’—putting pressure on Putin for privatization. Such was the objective logic of economic imbrication even before the Maidan.
...Putin’s regime has attempted to straddle the difference between the old order and the new: seeking at once to refurbish assets and orientations that have depreciated but not lost all currency and, heedless of the hegemon, to embrace the markets that have downgraded them—running with the hare of a military cameralism and hunting with the hounds of a financial capitalism. The pursuit is a contradiction. But it is also a reflection of the strange, incommensurate position of Russia in the present international order, in which the regime is trapped with no exit in sight.
Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister Kozyrev dumbfounded a visiting Nixon by telling him that Moscow had no interests that were not those of the West. With interlocutors like these, representing a government dependent for its continuation in power on economic and ideological support from the West, America could treat Russia with little more ceremony than if it were, after all, an occupied country. When even Kozyrev baulked on being told that it was Moscow’s duty to join Washington in threatening to attack Serbia, Victoria Nuland—currently Assistant Secretary of State for Europe—remarked: ‘That’s what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach. The more you tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.’ Her superior at the time, Clinton’s friend and familiar Strobe Talbott, proudly records that ‘administering the spinach treatment’ to Russia was one of the principal activities of his time in office. In due course Obama would say, in public, that Putin reminded him of a ‘sulky teenager in the back of the classroom’. In the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, Nuland could be heard conferring with the us Ambassador in Kiev on the composition of the country’s government in a style compared by an American observer to a British resident issuing instructions to one of the princely states of colonial India. In condescension or contempt, the underlying American attitude speaks for itself: vae victis.
The argument is that they developed their influence not by killing people, but by creating new media. — Olivier5
the capitalist system commits violence against workers every day that Jeff and the Kochs can definitely be held accountable for. — Benkei
That is true but it's another topic. — Olivier5
Yes, Ukraine will have to give up claims of sovereignty over Crimea too. — Baden
If Russia continues to bomb Ukraine, it's somewhat safe to assume they still have more demands they want met, which aren't being given. Otherwise, it's pointless to continue this war. — Manuel
You cut a piece out of my sentence, a classic disinformation trick. — Olivier5
Well it's gone pretty badly if he had this in mind - having so many soldiers killed must be embarrasing.
At this point, I don't know what he may have in mind, with lowering population levels, a mismanaged economy, Russia does not look good. Having nukes is what sets them apart now. — Manuel
I haven't heard this mentioned too much, but I suspect that part of the reason why China is hesitant to call out Russia internationally, has to do with the issue of Taiwan.
If any issue sparked in that region of the world, Russia would back China as a thanks for this situation. — Manuel
Did you not? — Olivier5
You were saying that there was no way to assert or measure that the propaganda in Russia was more dominant than in the West. — Olivier5
I said there was: the Reporters Sans Frontières index for press freedom, which is based on the degree to which journalists are free to do their job without being physically intimidated, beaten up, incarcerated or killed.
Then you started to argue against that as well. Were you disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing or what? — Olivier5
Per chance, do you now agree that one system of propaganda in Russia is immensely more dominant and forceful than the other in, say, America? — Olivier5
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