What is the over under on the return of Hilldog?

I find it almost impossible to believe they will continue running Biden, but then again I did not expect them to let him run again from the start.

You’ll get labeled as terrorists regardless.

They are just edging this bill till nobody pays attention. Democracy at work!

To defeat the Tories, you must first become the Tories.

You seem to conflate questioning a narrative with banning a narrative, I have the intent nor the means. I value being able to have an open discussion on topics as important as war, especially based on substance rather than resorting to personal insults and such.

What do you think started, and kept WWI going, narrative. Every party believed or was sold that they could win this thing if they just kept climbing the escalation ladder. With the result that an entire generation of boys and men was gone for basically nothing.

What if I put a couple of my friends on the border of your house, and explicitly said, hey if you try to do X Y or Z then I might have to kill you.

For a start I would not do X, Y and Z, this is the whole idea of realism, accept the world as is. Threats work, I’m sorry. If your response is to call the police, there is no police in the world of international politics, you have to play the hand you’re dealt.

And in the case of Ukraine this was sadly a very bad hand, that is why I don’t blame Ukraine for much. You could of course blame Ukraine for being lured by the power of the US, and that they could thus safely ignore dire warnings from Russia. But as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, so I choose to put the blame at the hands of Russia and the US.

You switch cause and effect, realism tries to describe the word as is and not as it should be and then bases policies on that. Of course basing your policies on realism changes the world, but US policy has mostly been based on liberalism for the last 30 years, and yet the world is still made up of poker chips and superpowers.

Of course the policies you choose based on realist principles can be used to increase your power as a country (and thus use poker chips cynically) or it can be used to build a prosperous and peaceful world (given the limitations of the natural anarchic state of international politics).

As a Dutch person I accept that the US can decide to turn the Netherlands into a nuclear testing ground whenever it wants and there is nothing we can do about that, but given this fact we should still try to create a peaceful world.

I’m not trying to represent all of Hexbear, my views differ from the norm (just as yours seems to differ from the lemmy.world norm).

Second, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m certain on everything. It just seems very clear to me that the current narrative is dangerous and risks leading to escalation beyond Ukraine and has already caused a lot of suffering, (I think in this I echo Mearsheimers views, see the recent interview on the Spectators Americano podcast). Wether it was intentional or accidental I purposely left open in my original comment because, like I said, it’s very hard to judge at this point. But given the US trackrecord it’s probably a healthy dosis of both overconfidence in their power as well as cynical intent.

To me it’s hard to imagine that after Russia put their army on the border and explicitly said, Ukraine stays neutral or war, that the US wasn’t aware of the consequences. Clearly Ukrainian lives were not on the forefront of their decision making process at that point. So then the question is what was.
But these are my personal opinions, and I’m happy to be convinced otherwise (but calling me a Russian bot is not very convincing I find).

You are defending US foreign policy.

This is not a whataboutism, I’m saying two imperial states are destroying a country as part of their power politics, as a counter argument to Russia are the bad guys and the US can be trusted.

I’m not asking what you want the US to do, I’m asking what do you think the US would do.

The US has done everything you (correctly) accuse Russia of in Iraq, Vietnam, and South America (either directly or via proxies). What does that make the US?

Imperialist states do imperialist things, the least we can do (coming from a European perspective) is to try to maintain peace by a combination of international law and pragmatic ad hock peace deals where international law is unattainable.

And about the NATO thing, what do you think would happen if Mexico and Canada tried to join a military alliance with China?

I’m not victim blaming, I’m blaming the US and Russia for playing cynical geopolitical games and destroying a country along the way.

John Mearsheimer among others, were do you get your views from?

This is such destructive rhetoric, everything you disagree with is Russian propaganda. Yes of course Russia is trying to influence western opinion with war propaganda, because that is what countries at war do. But the US has shown so clearly in the past that they can not be trusted to be the single source of truth, because spoiler alert: they are also a country (de facto) at war.

If this is a honest question I will try to give some honest context, I do not represent a Hexbear, so these are just some views that I have that make me sceptical of the narrative that currently exists.

After the cold war there were calls to establish a common security structure including Russia to try to ensure peace in Europe. Instead the US (with pressure from past satellite states of Moscow, Poland, Czechia, etc) chose to maintain NATO and on top of that invite everybody except Russia, many foreign policy experts already warned that this was a recipe for war, but wether it was malice or incompetence they were ignored.

Fast forward to 2008 the US suggests inviting Ukraine (and Georgia) to NATO, and Russia makes extremely clear that this would not happen, that this was a red line for them. Now you can disagree with Russias right to say anything about the military alliances of its neighbours, but the fact that Russia is a military regional power with nukes is something you need to deal with. Again wether it was incompetence or malice is hard to say but the next 14 years are basically a chain of escalatory actions by the US combined with a series of stronger and stronger warnings from Russia that this would lead to war.

During the events themselves it is hard to judge as a civilian what exactly is happening in geopolitics, the US has a very clear trackrecord of treat inflation or simply lying about its true intentions or the truth on the ground. It could of course be that this is one of those rare cases where the US are truly the Good Guys™️ or it could be that this is a ploy to weaken a rival with the only price being the destruction of a country they don’t care about and the death of hundreds of thousands of military age males they don’t care about.

Up next: PayPal introducing new AI that purchases random shit for you.

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They invented the progress piechart.

Having lived in Utrecht, yes all those stores in the picture, completely empty, also all the people on bikes are happy to finally have the chance to sit after spending their day in a house without furniture.