this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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This is why you should not defederate hexbear. Good, clean, comment. Just block the troublemakers (it's about 60 of them) and the threads automatically look more cogent.
Am I a troublemaker? I may fit your criteria:
I don't think NATO should support Ukraine.
I'll bite. Why not?
what does Ukraine bring to NATO except liability.
Complete nothingburger. What military capability do the Baltic states bring? Isolated geographical position, small countries with small armies and small economies.
So it's not a factor in the first place. But even if it was, Ukraine handily outranks Poland when it comes to providing capability. They have an extensive (largely state-owned btw) arms industry, very capable engineers, and, in case you haven't noticed, fighting spirit.
Last but not least they're punching above their weight in Eurovision. Oh wait that was EU accession, not NATO.
worse than that what they bring to an alliance is pretty much no extra money or anything else but also a significantly higher chance of getting into a war
frankly I'm of the opinions that everything east of Germany is a pretty cheeky imposition on Russias traditional standing in Europe. You can't just break all the old rules for operating in Europe and not expect consequences
Traditional standing, yes, as colonial empire. It may be cheeky but why would it be bad standing up against that?
You know what Russia could have done to prevent NATO expansion? Not invade Moldova, not invade Georgia, and deal with Chechnya in a manner that doesn't smell of genocide. Make sure that Eastern Europe doesn't feel threatened so that they don't feel the need to join NATO. Of course the Baltics, Poland, etc, joined, they don't want to repeat the experience of being a Russian colony.
And just for the record no I'm not actually a fan of NATO, or better put the US being part of the whole shebang. Only positive thing about that is that without Europe in the mix the yanks would likely be even worse.
they have that standing because they have the guns. They still have the guns so they still have the standing
those rules don't just exist for no reason they are to prevent war between the powers in Europe break those rules and you risk war. It doesn't matter what the Balkans and Poland think they don't have nuclear weapons
Oh yes Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine not being in NATO totally prevented war. How could I forget.
You're a hexbear, so presumably self-identify as being on the left. Which then leads me to the question of WTF are you pushing talking points of geopolitical realists, "there are players and there are chess pieces".
It very much matters what those states think because, as sovereign states, they enjoy freedom of alliance. To deny that means that you think it is all nice and proper for Russia to still treat them as colonies.
I don't want to be allied with them because they bring nothing to an alliance except liability.
Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine not being in NATO prevented war between Russia and America, Britain, and France. And that is the big war that can't be allowed to happen
this isn't a new phenomenon we are talking about the great game of empire and there are very good reasons why it was always the conventional wisdom to not mess with Russia over eastern Europe. If they are sovereign states then let them be sovereign states and deal with problems on their own
That wisdom is called appeasement and has failed again and again. Empires will empire, if you give them a finger they'll wait for a bit and then take an arm.
You seem to be completely realism-pilled. I have my issues with Kraut but watch this, it's good stuff.
If they are unemployed and homeless then let them be independent and deal with problems on their own. The fuck. And you call yourself a leftist.
I agree, the US should be forcibly disbanded by an international peacekeeping force after the last two centuries of imperialism and genocide. No point in waiting for us to get worse, we need to be stopped now.
You joke (I think) but you actually illustrate why so many people are supporting Ukraine. The reaction of a lot of people to "the US should be forcibly disbanded by an international peacekeeping force" would be one of indignation and fury at the suggestion that foreign powers should violate one's home and put their loved ones in danger in order to satisfy global political objectives.
Uhh given the last eight years of ethnic cleansing in the Donbas region by our coup regime in Ukraine, it's really a better example of why so mamy countries around the world are supporting the russian federation here.
I appreciate the sentiment but I don't want to see what certain states will be up to if they don't have the federal level to keep them in check.
Yeah, what if they threaten the world with nukes or open concentration camps on the southern border or something?
The same federal government that let abortion become illegal across half the country?
No it's called a sphere of influence and it's just playing by the old cold war rules.
countries are not people.
You say that as if geopolitical realism was the truth to end all inquiry, the insight to end all history.
your approach seems to be just deciding you want the world to be a certain way and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. You have to live in reality
Watch that Kraut video. It's not my responsibility to educate you.
that video is an hour and a half long. You've watched it and everything you said so far hasn't been anything I haven't heard before or consider worth hearing
Why should we still play the old war game? How do realists decide which country is a poker chip and which is a player (one area where US and European realists differ btw: In the European view, Russia is not a player)? What do you do if a country doesn't want to be a poker chip? Can you really ignore internal forces, can it all be boiled down to power politics? Why stick to a theory that was completely blind-sided by the end of the cold war and after that argued to subsidise the east so that it can continue?
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
we play the old game for the same reason we started in the first place because the major powers have the ability to demand concessions because of the power of their militaries and economies.
Russia is a player because it has a vast army and nuclear weapons
if Ukraine wants to not do as they are told by Russia they are more than welcome to fight them. America and the other powers involving themselves in that fight risks major war however also it has proved ruinously expensive to the actual populations of those countries.
Internal politics only matter if they are backed up by something
this theory wasn't blindsided by the end of the cold war. At the end of the cold war Russia was weak from crisis (incidentally largely because the Ukrainian local government so badly fucked up running a power plant and the early stages of a disaster that all the money in the soviet union was required to clean up the mess) anyway when Russia was weak and eating itself they couldn't enforce the rights they had because of their strength now they are strong again they can
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Why do you think leftists would give two shits about nations as if they were people? Leftism is an internationalist ideology.
Because there's people living in those countries.
Go on, write a letter to an imaginary 6yold niece of yours in Mariopol explaining why it's better that she lives in a mafia-run police state, than for Ukraine to decide its own fate.
Also, states generally refuse to be poker chips, and they have all right to do so. Thus, by insisting that they be, you invariably create conflict.
Lmao you think there are major differences in qol between two neoliberal hellscapes. Actually that's not fair. Ukraine has faired even worse since the undemocratic dissolution of the USSR.
NATO is a defensive pact to protect nations from russian aggression, or other states also of course. Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Plenty of geopolitical experts have discussed how financial support of Ukraine is the best investment when it comes to weakening the Russian military. Which makes them less of a threat to NATO
yeah and if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you
They were very defensive in Libya and Yugoslavia
Nice argument, however the population supported it:
[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/156539/opinion-briefing-libyans-eye-new-relations-west.aspx [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170608060559/https://www.orb-international.com/article.php?s=4-in-5-libyans-agree-country-heading-in-right-direction-according-to-post-revolution-citizen-poll
So it sounds more like you are just anti-NATO from an ideological perspective
Libya ended in open air slave markets lmao, and you're citing western sources saying "well they aaked for it
That is a ridiculous argument and you know it, unless your idealism has blinded you. "Something bad happened later so something good can't have happened before"
Yet you gloss over what it was like in these countries before. Here is an example of how Iraq was before: https://youtu.be/CR1X3zV6X5Y?si=QVE1b277NIVHnOUB
Does that mean the Iraq invasion was good? No. However don't remove all nuance from a discussion about helping the population overthrow a dictatorship, and the potential consequences of that action, just to attempt a cheap shot.
Gaddafi had his problems but sol massively improved under him. Given we back plenty of much worse dictatorships, it wasn't done for altruistic reasons. It was done because he was giving a cut of the wealth to the masses instead of to neocolonial powers. Incidentally, improving sol and education like Gaddafi was doing tend to trend to democratic transitions over time.
The open air slave markets were a direct result of the intervention. The US backed regime didn't have a democratic mandate and didn't have Gaddafi's entrenched power structures and collapsed.
No, a no fly zone was instated because Gaddafi was ordering air strikes on his own citizens, to the extent that his own representative to the UN asked for the no fly zone:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110226113522/http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/201102219941/Libya-Politics/libyan-ambassador-to-un-urges-international-community-to-stop-genocide.html
Are you going to continue just making things up?
Yes, the US which is the largest drone striker in the world and where it is explicitly legal for the president to kill US citizens without trial went in with a moral imperative because of air strikes.
Even if the Spanish sabotaged the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin wasn't made up, and WMD were in Iraq, the cassi belle are not the structural reasons why the invasions happened. You're being intentionally credulous because you think US empire benefits you. It doesn't.
Yeah to be honest I'm a bit done with your mixture of fact and deliberate fiction to try to assist your ideology.
Here is an actual factual paper on the reasons for the Libyan invasion
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/libya-and-the-myth-of-humanitarian-intervention
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12290-017-0447-5
There are plenty of discussion points for you without needing to sprinkle in fiction for good measure.
So did you actually read those links lmao? Because if you did you have to acknowledge you were wrong about what you've said in this thread and I was mostly correct according to your links.
Did you actually read what I wrote?
Yes, that is literally why I brought it up. Is there some subtext to this response I'm missing?
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I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
It is not an alliance against the Russian federation. It was an alliance against the ussr. After that it became a rogue army for enforcing us hegemony. Every time it has been used it was to make the world worse. This mercenary core was originally made of nazi generals with nazi soldiers as well. So it really boggles the mind that anyone thinks they could be good for the world.
NATO is a legacy of the Cold War that was aimless until the Russian invasion lol. The Soviet Union even tried to join NATO when it was first talked about and was rebuffed (and you can't say it's because "muh democracy," as Greece, Turkey, and Portugal - a literal fascist state until 1974 - have all been or are authoritarian states at various points in their NATO memberships).
Plenty also argued from the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion into eastern Europe would antagonize Russia.
Yeah it's pretty clear you're not trying to have a reasonable discussion when you mention that the USSR wanted to join NATO. That was an attempt to undermine the defensive pact by using it's own rules about inter-member conflicts against it.
One of the core strengths of NATO is that if a country is invaded then the other countries can't just vote to kick that state out. There is no mechanism to remove another country from the group, by design. So you are either uninformed or deliberately misrepresenting it when you discuss issues with certain members during their membership
anyone who disagrees with me is a troublemaker
Alabama good ol' boy sherrifs in the 1960s be like: