[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by verme (prevaricator)

...

(cont.)

re: the ukraine war. to me ukraine * really fucked up strategically when they gave up their nukes in exchange for western promises of protection. sachs's unstrategic peacemongering conveniently forgets to mention that.

sachs also patronizingly glosses over the right of ukraine's aspirations to join european prosperity freely, instead of submitting to be a province of the authoritarian disgrace next door. i mean-- if he's gonna tug at heartstrings, play the whole harp not just some choice notes

mearsheimer on the other hand speaks from a clear point of view, he's for strategic american interests, period. agree with him or not he's very clear about what he means and says, it makes perfect logical sense. he's infinitely more persuasive to me than sachs's "grandchildren"

anyway strategically putin's attacks were also a massive blunder. he didn't want nato next door, but it drove sweden and finland into the arms of the delian league. i mean nato lol. right there on the baltic, gave them no choice. breaking finland's neutrality was no easy feat but he did it. what a champ

and: western pressure or not, it was putin's choice to invade an independent country and start killing people instead of negotiating. "oh look at what they made me do". sure whatever

if you're sentimentally placing the death toll as the sole responsibility of *your own alliance* well idk what to tell you. you're going to switch sides and fight for russia? join a brigade? christian army vs. the secular liberal democracy devils maybe? i think those tentacles have already been extended both ways (eg tucker carlson). please just speak plainly instead of hinting

i'd rather see russia as part of europe than outside of it, but it looks like that ship has sailed now. score is 2-2, all of them own-goals i guess

we'll see what happens next. trump claims he'll fix it. i'll try to have neither fear nor hope

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* deleted "and georgia", which was a mistake

[!@#$%!]

in other interesting news, trump's choice of bessent for treasury secretary boosted market confidence today

(best buddy's pick was not chosen. awaiting reaction...)

bessent used to work for soros! is a member of the council on foreign relations! (yes that very website i linked before is theirs: https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/wha...y-want-ukraine )

oh, what will the paranoids say about this? hahahhahaa!

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*morgellons for all*

*and a jewish laser to you*

(heard on an underground strip club on k street)

[Skuj]

If you could pick one thing about Trump that tops all the other things about him, what would it be? (I know - this is hard.)

For me, it is his uncanny ability to escape accountability for his myriad fuckups, time after time, again and again, going back decades, but especially now that all the legal cases must be dropped. (God I'm pissed at Garland, but that is for some upcoming book.)

Many of Trump's minions think of him as some Christ figure. I'm beginning to lean towards this point of view, given this Houdini-like ability.

For the next 4 years on this forum, he shall be referred to by me as Teflon Don.

[verme (prevaricator)]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

for me it's not that this is a war about morality or that "it doesn't really matter how many people get killed in the process"

it's that i have no control over it

Biden did.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

now, MEARSHEIMER--FUCK YES! that there is the light of reason. he makes perfect sense to me

I'm repeating myself, but if you prefer to hear it from Mearsheimer's mouth, here I'll get you the transcript:

I don’t want to absolve previous administrations, going back to the George W. Bush administration. I mean, George W. Bush was in charge when this all started in April 2008, and all his successors have contributed to this fiasco, but Biden bears principal responsibility for the present war, and he was aided and abetted in very important ways by individuals like Lindsey Graham. I believe they bear responsibility for the destruction of Ukraine. It’s just absolutely horrible what’s happened here.

These people, of course, didn’t want to settle the war when negotiations were taking place in March and April of 2022. These negotiations started right after the war began. They were perfectly happy to see us walk away—or to have Zelensky walk away—from those negotiations and continue the war. And what’s the end result? It’s the destruction of Ukraine.

If we had not pushed to bring Ukraine into NATO in April 2008 and continued to pursue that foolish policy, I believe Ukraine would be intact today. There’s no reason to think otherwise. I believe Crimea would still be a part of Ukraine. NATO expansion is the key element in the destruction of Ukraine.

Now, of course, people in the West don’t want to believe that, because it means we bear principal responsibility for this bloodbath. My view is that we do bear responsibility. But people in the West want to blame Putin—it can’t be us; it has to be Putin. We, of course, are always the good guys, and the Russians are always the bad guys. So, we created this story that Putin is an imperialist, that he’s bent on conquering all of Ukraine and making it part of Greater Russia, and that he’s going to reestablish the Russian Empire.

Thus, people argue that expanding NATO was a good idea. Some even say it’s too bad we didn’t expand NATO earlier, because we were dealing with this highly aggressive "second coming of Adolf Hitler." That’s the story people tell. But, as I said before, there’s no evidence to support this. In fact, what was going on here was that we thought we could shove NATO expansion down Putin’s throat. Every time he protested, we doubled down. The president who really doubled down on this was Joe Biden.

If you look at the decision-making process in the West in the run-up to the war—this is the period from November and December 2021 through January and February 2022—it’s hard to believe, but we made virtually no effort to avoid a war. There was all sorts of evidence a war was going to happen. In fact, the Americans were saying a war was going to happen, and they were having a tough time convincing Zelensky that it would. So, it wasn’t like we didn’t see the war coming.

I ask you: What did we do to prevent that war? Virtually nothing. And then, when the war started, as I said before, we actively undermined the peace negotiations. During the Israeli and Turkish tracks to settle the conflict, we—the Americans and the British, principally—went to great lengths to tell the Ukrainians, Zelensky in particular, to walk away from the negotiations when it looked like they might bear fruit.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by verme (prevaricator)

Biden did.



I'm repeating myself, but if you prefer to hear it from Mearsheimer's mouth, here I'll get you the transcript:

ah, see, yes, i much prefer to hear it from his mouth, thats a very good fucking argument! much more understandable than all the dance hahahaha

what he says there makes a lot of sense. i can't tell if it's all true because i just read it and cannot check his facts about negotiations etc, but it makes a lot of fucking sense, in a formal way. and yes that is the story i "know" about putin, etc, and he makes a coherent argument, so now i'm interested

thanks for putting it in plain form. if all this is true then biden was stupider than we thought--or maybe it was just the institutional logic of the professional bureaucracies he delegated the work to, as he and sach claim in the other video.

i'm curious about the role of the british too (sir humphrey appleby likely was involved if the above is true), and in the other video he mentions i think the french...

very interesting stuff

i'll look at this other one later, thanks