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@RationalMadman
I didn't mean to be rude or sarcastic. Sorry if I came across that way. Also, for what it's worth I didn't see your post until afterward.
My writing has been stagnant for a long time. Maybe I'm a little less mechanical and clunky than I was as an undergrad, but otherwise it looks the same.
Due to work I've been reviewing the conventions of grammar and good writing. The first chapter in the first reference book involves freshening up on the use of commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, parenthetical vs restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, etc.
One of the first changes I'd like to do is revise my long-term story project along these guidelines, based on the material I learned in Chapter 1 (giving me added incentive to learn this for work, killing two birds with one stone). But the very second sentence raised a question comma-wise that prompted this thread.
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Alright, I think I answered my own question:
As for the latter sentence, there's an implied "being (keen not to)". Hence, the same rule applies as for participles.
I think I'm good now. Thank you me for answering my own question. But if anyone has further clarification, feel free to chime in.
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Alright, it seems that was a participle phrase and not entirely dependent . So let me use a different sentence for reference:
"I opted to stay out of it, keen not to meddle in the disputes of others."
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This is a question for English majors.
Take the following sentence:
"Our beings flared with passion, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."
Our beings flared with passion is the independent clause. In contrast, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole is the dependent clause. There is no conjunction here so I believe that's irrelevant to the question.
The book that I'm using as reference hasn't offered much clarity as to when commas should be used. So I looked online, where I found that a comma should link the two if the dependent clause comes first but not if it comes afterward.
This would suggest that the comma in the aforementioned passage is inappropriate. However:
"Our beings flared with passion bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."
My gut tells me that there should be a comma here.
While it's true that, for the purposes of most people 99% of the time, it doesn't matter if your writing abides to the rules so strictly or not, I would like a precise answer to this question if possible.
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@Double_R
My thoughts:
First (admittedly a bit of an oversimplification, as it excludes regulatory costs), both supply and demand determine price. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a 100% increase in demand for gas from Jan. 2021 to the present, so supply must be a cause of inflated gas prices.
Second, the Biden Administration shuttered the Keystone XL Pipeline and recently canceled federal leases to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR (basically Alaska). The administration changed environmental regulations for drilling so as to put less emphasis on the needs of the fossil fuel industry, which probably blocked new drilling and pipelines in other parts of the country.
Third, while rules restricting future drilling probably wouldn't have a huge impact on current supply, the gas market is, as the Senator Kennedy recently quipped on the Senate floor, "forward-looking". Anticipating future difficulties might contribute to jacking up prices in the present.
Fourth, at the time when Trump left office gasoline prices were, adjusted for inflation, actually rather low, lower even in non-adjusted dollars than it stood at certain points as early as 2006. Additionally, from Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2021 prices did not increase at all. The pandemic had been in full swing for about a year and in fact prices were higher in Feb. 2020, so that couldn't have been the cause.
Fifth, when new American drilling tampers off, it arguably signals to foreign suppliers like OPEC that America is no longer a serious competitor, which might embolden them to raise prices.
Sixth, though Putin's war in Ukraine is surely a major cause, about 50% of the increase from Jan. 2021 had already happened by Feb. 24. That suggests there was more than one cause.
Seventh, the Biden Administration failed to deter Putin from invading Ukraine. There were signs of a pending Russian invasion as early as April of last year, giving the administration about 10 months to come up with an actionable plan, but it did not. While obviously Putin is the only one who pulled the trigger, the whole situation doesn't paint the current White House in a very competent light.
Eighth, the logistics of manufacturing goods and getting them to where they need to go is fuel-intensive. Certain goods, such as cosmetics, plastics, etc., directly require fossil fuels to produce. A rise in the price of gas would trickle down to other sectors of the economy.
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My thoughts:
1. Since the two weeks before Biden's inauguration, all we've been hearing is that it was definitely an "insurrection". By this we see the oligarchs' double standard at work: those whom they've lent the credence of "legitimate" political protesters have a respected right to demonstrate, even if it gets messy and controversial at times. But those who represent supposedly illegitimate causes get no leeway whatsoever. It doesn't matter that the Capitol stormers killed nobody. It got messy and the protesters were Republicans, and they must be punished for arrogantly assuming that they have the same constitutional right to protest as Democrats. If anyone on scene was killed by police or committed suicide afterward, it must be falsely conflated with the Capitol stormers having murdered them. And if any Capitol stormer committed a murder (which they didn't), every member of the crowd must be collectively punished. Every oligarch mouthpiece will parrot these lies.
2. Ever since the January 6 witch hunt began, we've seen frightening and historically unprecedented developments occur which resemble a gradual coup d'etat. For example, the invocation of 14th Amendment clauses to deny public office to sitting Congressmen or Congressional candidates who were lawfully elected thereto, and/or the criminal denial of their right to run for reelection.
3. Rule of law has eroded more sharply from January 6, 2021 to the present day than it did from the 2020 election until January 6, 2021. If Trump deserves to be punished for his role, then so do a huge number of Senate and House Democrats, and possibly Biden himself.
4. The January 6 hearings amount to the appropriation of Congressional time and resources, public tax dollars if you would, for the dissemination of partisan propaganda. There's nothing illegal about that, of course, but it's hard to take the panel as a serious body with a serious reason to exist.
5. In all likelihood, Trump will be the nominee for America's right-leaning party in the 2024 election. We've yet to see strong evidence contesting this fact. The only Republican actually considered to have a chance at beating Trump, Ron DeSantis, isn't really all that popular. There's no reason to consider any action by the federal government to bar Trump from running again as anything other than a mass electoral suppression scheme by one major party against the other.
If this happens, America will be functionally indistinguishable from a one-party state. There would be no further reason to consider this hypothetical version of the USFG a legitimate government over America's 330,000,000 citizens.
6. Most Democrats and most Republicans are in agreement that the actions of the crowd on January 6, 2021 were distasteful. But if the incident continues to be used as a brute cudgel against the Republican Party, then I will sooner call the Capitol stormers heroes and patriots.
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@PREZ-HILTON
Both sides agree on this when you get past the rhetoric of the right and left pretending like they mean getting rid of the presumption of innocence.
"Believe women" is a rather unambiguous slogan. Accusations of sexual misconduct are a zero-sum game where believing the accuser ("women") means disbelieving the accused (presumably a man).
"Hear women" is a far better slogan. It means seriously listening to allegations as opposed to dismissing them uncritically, without the unacceptable connotation spelled out above. The fact that the left chose the more problematic slogan suggests that they really don't believe that accused men deserve the presumption of innocence.
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the US does not have a mental health issue significantly worse than any other developed nation
How many Europeans do we know of who want to kill a bunch of high schoolers but can't?
Not a lot. If it boiled down to it, you could kill a bunch of high schoolers piecemeal, one-on-one at night with a knife or something. Serial killer style. You could take out as many as most of these guys in America manage to do.
Which begs the question of why Europeans aren't doing this in lieu of mass shootings. It's because fewer Europeans want to commit random murders, and I'd definitely say this at least relates to mental health.
While nothing technically wrong with this, it’s clearly the most absurd. We have already seen countless examples where security and police officers fail to properly engage mass shooters, but we expect teachers are going to get the job done?
Honestly, arming teachers would do the trick just fine.
When it comes to police, shooters expect that they have a 15-20 minute jump on the law. That's typically from when the first bullet is fired. In that time, you can do a lot of damage.
But if the people with guns are already inside of the building from the onset, that'd give you pause. In all likelihood your attempt at mass murder would be frustrated by a quick intervention. You know you won't get the emotional satisfaction that you seek from trying, so you'd just decide on something else instead.
Heck, we wouldn't even have to arm the teachers. Just make it legal for them to concealed-carry on school grounds. The likelihood of you knowing for sure that none of the personnel are armed is slim. If just one was, and if that one person intervened, that'd be it for you.
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End of an era. 11 out of its 15 years were good. By the time I joined in late 2013 it was great. Now it's just two guys hurling racial slurs at each other.
That was quite a time. The political right was still interested in justifying its ideology in positive terms (e.g. "Low taxes for the middle class saves them money, and low taxes for corporations is necessary because of the Laffer Curve, opportunity costs, etc.") They still exercised the freedom to speak openly in a non-roundabout way about any and every topic they had an opinion about, including sexual orientation, sexual identity, creation, etc. Winning wasn't merely for the sake of giving one political organization power at the expense of the other. Politics was to advance or defend things which really mattered.
People from sides came together in the interest of honest discussion. There were also a lot of popularity contests and drama on DDO that always helped keep things interesting.
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Agreed. The outrageous thing is not their incorporation into NATO against Russia's wishes but that they're only being incorporated now in 2022.
A common talking point is that each additional NATO member state on Russia's border is a potential flashpoint for the next great power war. But this misses the point: Western civilization's timeless balance-of-power doctrines suggest that each successful conquest by the enemy enhances the danger to your own country.
By this logic, NATO would've probably come to Sweden and Finland's defense anyway. What bringing them into NATO accomplishes is to strengthen the force-in-being that, by merely existing, can serve to deter Russia. If they remain neutral, then they bring no deterrent value to the table.
What their incorporation would mean is hundreds of thousands of personnel, armed with 21st century equipment and trained up to 21st century standards, permanently garrisoned east of the Danish Straits. The single most likely flashpoint for a big war, an invasion of the Baltics, would be much harder for Russia to successfully pull off, lowering the odds that Putin would attempt it in the first place.
As a corollary point, the PRC would like to invade the ROC but is wary of conflict with the US Navy. The breakout of a major war in Europe would divide America's resources, raising the likelihood that China would escalate to that efffect, sparking conflict between the world's two largest economies. Deterring a Baltic War will lower the odds of this happening, as the US force would not be divided and so China would not perceive an unusual opportunity to take what it wants.
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@Bones
If all of the abortions would inevitably be performed by someone else in the event that I refused, then the abortions. At least the toddler could be saved.
But if the abortions wouldn't happen in the event that I refused, then the toddler. It's one life versus 30 lives.
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@TheUnderdog
For the most part, areas lag today that lagged 100 or even 50 years ago. That's not to say they "haven't gotten better", as short of the Sentinel Islands it's pretty much impossible to find somewhere on earth that's as poor today as it was 100 years ago. But they lag behind the old wealthy cores, which have ways of quietly reinforcing their advantages from one generation to the next.
I've noticed that with few exceptions, the places with the lowest taxes, the least regulation,
You mean like China, which attracted so much foreign investment through its status as a beacon of unbridled capitalism that it lifted a billion people out of abject poverty in less than 50 years?
the highest amount of abortion restrictions
Let's have this conversation again in 40 years, when three generations of abortion-induced sub-replacement birth rates will have rendered much of the West chronically short of skilled workers.
(Pro tip: Maybe killing off your next generation in the womb isn't good for your country's long-term economy.)
rural Dixieland) are shitholes
Come again? Have you visited the South any time since the year 1980?
We lag behind the richest parts of the U.S., sure. But we are still solidly first world. And from accounts I've heard, the South was much poorer as recently as 1970, whereas some "rust belt" areas up north were arguably better off in 1970 than today.
Yankee America, EU, Canada
So the places that were wealthy 100 years ago, long before they had abortion-on-demand or gay marriages, are still wealthy today? Who woulda thunk?
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Political ideology is one thing. But religion/spirituality concerns matters that could affect your eternal state. Do not half-ass this.
(P.S.If reading is hard, you might want to try audiobooks. LibriVox is a free database of audiobooks.)
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Eh.
I don't really get the appeal of New Age/Hindu stuff. It's a bunch of flowery feel-good nonsense designed to impress purely by virtue of how elaborate/convoluted it is, while designed to mask a grotesque polytheistic core.
In any case, it seems you don't have a deep understanding of either philosophy nor the theology of religions. And you can't have that without actually reading many difficult texts, slow and comprehensively enough that you grasp their full meaning and can compare, criticize, and ultimately synthesize different ideas.
This isn't easy. In fact, it probably takes as much work as to earn a degree in philosophy and/or comparative religion.
But if you're not willing to put in the legwork, then any conversion is woefully premature.
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What is freedom of speech?
In its basest form, freedom of speech is the right to attempt to communicate irrespective of the content of that speech. In practice, this is a tricky concept for sure. One does not have the right to flash one's genitals at a bunch of children. Nor to dox somebody online or credibly threaten to murder them. But for the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that we generally agree on a few exceptions to free speech and move on.
In American law, there likewise seems to be a link between speech and property, with a higher level of expression allowed on one's own property and a lower level on somebody else's.
^This is where recent controversy has arisen. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are "private property". This itself is an iffy term, given that all of these are publicly traded companies, but whatever. Any use of these services is interpreted as being "on their property".
Generally speaking, users aligned with right or right-leaning politics stand a greater risk of being banned or otherwise censored for their political speech, and for speech unrelated to politics after something political has been uttered. The traditionally pro-corporation party has paradoxically taken to complain about this, while the traditionally anti-corporation party has gleefully denied any problem and stood with the social media giants, citing the fact that they are, again, "private property".
There are two separate ways to resolve this. Though I skew right, having been on the receiving end of this I would in good faith support and strive to protect the same rights I'm about to espouse for all Americans.
#1. Walmart Analogy
Take the small town of Greenville, Green State. The town has a rich history of public discourse in town squares, libraries, etc. However, as if a strange fairy cast a strange spell over the whole town, now people meet at the local Walmart to discuss matters of public importance.
Suppose that the town has two political factions: the Populares and the Optimates. Walmart has sided with the Optimates and banned any political activity by the Populares from their property.
Suppose that, as another condition of the fairy's spell, almost no one has interest in doing or receiving anything political outside of Walmart. The Populares used to distribute their magazine on city streets. Today, their sidewalk distributors are rendered magically invisible to all but a few elderly citizens who've always taken an interest in sidewalk magazines. They can try knocking on people's homes, but this method is, for a number of reasons, dramatically less effective than what used to happen.
The Optimates, on the other hand, are free to distribute their magazine at Walmart. People notice the magazines and many will take a copy home.
In real life, of course, there is no such thing as fairies. Rather, the existence of social media platforms has by nature made communication by traditional alternatives, namely magazines, newspapers, local gatherings, or even cable news, much less effective. By virtue of driving/drawing people away from these outlets, a manner of deprivation happens unless those who would communicate by these outlets have access to wherever the public has since been driven/drawn. Therefore, it is neither freedom of speech nor of property for these giants to deny access to some but not others on political grounds. Rather, it is the active suppression by them of another's speech, even if by admittedly elaborate means.
This raises another issue: not merely the ability to communicate but access to a reasonable platform for it where that speech can be heard. In the past, that was by way of mouth or by writing. But today more advanced platforms exist, and by the fact that speech today necessarily competes against other people's speech (in a variety of contexts, not merely political), unequal access to advanced platforms is a legitimate issue. Next, we'll discuss an ideal framework for speech and means of that speech being heard, AKA its "amplification".
#2. Taking Speech by its Natural Merit
What I'm arguing is this: that, generally speaking, speech ought to be separated from unnatural amplification or diminution.
And what is speech's "natural" merit? It is that which it would have stripped of resources that the average person lacks. For example, if the content which you provide to some segment of the public has proven appealing to them, you might naturally build an audience. Your speech is amplified by nothing but its merit. Or if, for example, you're a celebrity and people naturally want to hear what a celebrity has to say. Likewise, if you're a boor and very few people find you interesting, then your speech will by its own merit be ignored.
Speech can presently be amplified with money. For example, suppose that the next $200 million Pixar production proves a smash hit. Its producer includes a certain message that in today's climate is considered political, and many young people take that message to heart because of the characters in the awesome movie who enunciated it.
Were that same producer merely to tweet about his political values, millions of children would not be influenced by it. Nor would they if, say, he made a movie on a budget of $70,000 dollars that was seen by only a few people because it wasn't blockbuster quality. Which is to say that money amplified his speech in plainly unnatural ways.
Speech can also be amplified unnaturally through the uneven use of algorithms. For example, a tweet that by its own merit wouldn't reach very many people does because the algorithm for that given website is tweaked.
Additionally, what I'm saying is inversely true as well. Or that is, speech can be unnaturally diminished. For example, a producer with different political values who only has the budget for a $70,000 dollar movie cannot convey his ideas remotely as effective as the other producer. Or take an online commenter who's shadowbanned and his content is not seen by anyone, even though some or many people would see it were the given digital infrastructure and its algorithms applied normally.
Now, this is an ideal. But it has obvious exceptions. For example, political candidates must campaign and spend money campaigning. Were they limited to spending no more money on the endeavor than the average Joe has in his pocket, our electoral system would quickly become unworkable. And from 2016, it's clear also that the presidential candidate who spends the most money won't necessarily win. For practical reasons, elected officials or those running for elected office would have to be some kind of exception. However, this could be a rule of thumb for civic discourse among ordinary people, and for speech that might be considered corporate or connected to big money that's not immediately associated with elections or a political party.
Thoughts? Critiques?
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@Username
He's comparing and recommending Ayn Rand novels.
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Bro what happened to your politics?
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Many of the assumptions underlying transgenderism are rooted in gender stereotypy. I've heard anecdotes that even female "allies" have found trans women personally boring because they only ever wanted to talk about dresses and makeup.
The very fact that they must resort to stereotypy suggests that they miss the more subtle point of being the opposite sex: innate personality and tendencies. This is something many trans women can't grasp because they simply have male brains.
I cannot stress this enough: the "mismatched brain" hypothesis serves as a fundamental pillar to the movement's aims. Without that, there's no reason to assume that gender dysphoria can't be treated by means other than gender transitioning.
And even if this is only true for some but not others, then it still stands to reason that it's not "transphobic" to oppose a movement that advocates transitioning as a catch-all cure for 100% of dysphoria patients despite the known and monumental hazards to quality of life.
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@Barney
Given that I got in a lot of trouble for declining the "lawful order" of planting dirty needles in a public park right by a playground, I was done with the military anyways.
Can you explain what this was about?
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@oromagi
I think modern ME Islamic culture is a good example.
The Muslim world is a particularly awful example.
We know that male-on-male sexuality, either pederastic or between adults, was openly celebrated in the Ottoman Empire, and that it's a thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. IIRC there was even a Surah/Hadith along the lines of "Stay away from those pretty little boys. I know they're so hot, but just don't do it. Allah doesn't approve and neither do I." Which suggests it was something fundamentally rooted in their culture 1,300 years ago and which never subsequently died.
In contrast, the Western world post-Constantine doesn't have that same track record so the two cases arguably aren't compatible.
Look at Vatican City or a Buddhist monastery- quite gay.
You have a point. Anywhere from 15-85% of Roman Catholic clergy in the United States are gay. But these institutions do not reflect broader society, nor have they ever. Heterosexual men aren't so quick to join an organization that forbids them from ever feeling a woman's touch so there's a huge self-selection bias at work.
Prison and "boarding school" sexuality are also coercive and more easily explained by a lack of opposite sex partners.
Women are now allowed to hold men's hands and sit on their laps and kiss men in public settings that were not allowed in your Eden of male bonding.
I didn't claim that everything about that time was perfect. Only that it was closer to ideal in one certain respect.
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This is a total crackpot theory but hear me out guys.
I was born in 1996 and obviously cannot have had experiences predating my birth. What was normative behavior so recently as 1980 is beyond me except so far as depicted in records. Those records tend to be either fictional or do not recount the nitty-gritty mundane-isms of American cultural norms. Therefore, short of asking an older person who was there (which would be an awkward conversation to say the least), I have no way of confirming or debunking this.
But anyways:
In the past, male-on-male interactions often took on a flavor that today would be interpreted as homosexual, homoerotic, etc., though in fact the common people of these times generally didn't think much about the subject if at all.
In the 19th century, strange men might rent a room together for the night and sleep in the same bed. Written correspondences between close male friends might read today as if between lovers. As late as the mid-20th century at least, young men might share a space completely nude in certain sports-related contexts. There were no cultural taboos against such things, whereas the men of 2022 are reportedly careful to avoid giving off "gay interest" signals through their body language and eye contact.
Compared with today, the not-so-distant past was an Eden of intimate male bonding that carried none of the connotations it does today. This was parcel and package to a wider condition where social cohesion between men was greater, the near-ideal state of affairs whose passing was lamented by Robert Putnam. This "civic friendship" enabled broad interest in cooperation and sharing of skills and passions toward a diverse array of overwhelmingly positive ends.
This age did pass, and for many reasons. But it also coincided with the rise of the LGBTQ movement. Suppose that, by introducing a dynamic of homosexual possibility to interactions between American men, the coastal elites shattered group cohesion in areas where emotional/social intelligence was lower. Getting very close to somebody of the same sex without making them feel threatened and scaring them off, especially in the post-adolescent phases of life where making new friends was generally harder for men already, took a certain nuance that with a deficit of said intelligence might prove more challenging.
As history is decided by the best organized factions, this was one trick which helped the old bases of power keep their edge beyond what was otherwise natural. To be clear, I am by no means blaming everything on that one thing. That would be silly. But perhaps it was a factor.
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The 2003 Invasion of Iraq was justified.
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At this point the result in Hungary was to be expected. Orban's been in charge quite a while already, anyhow.
What's really interesting is France. Le Pen has a second chance at the presidency and it'll be a wild ride for the whole West if she somehow gets it.
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Rape nowadays is generally defined as any penetrative sexual contact without consent, with consent being revocable at any time.
Suppose that a boyfriend and girlfriend are doing it. They reach a climax, but then the girlfriend says "Stop". The boyfriend is, by now, in a state of mind where he refuses to stop once they've come that far, and proceeds for another 15 seconds until he finishes.
Bullet to the head or electric chair?
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Bush Sr:
Like Trump, George Herbert Walker Bush only served one term. And two events overshadow all of the rest:
The Persian Gulf War and the fall of communism. 1991 was our annus mirabilis if there ever was one. Bush probably can't take credit for the fall of communism, but the Persian Gulf War was his doing.
And to be clear, this wasn't such an easy call despite how it might seem in retrospect. Saddam's army was, on paper at least, possibly as strong as the PLA (albeit without nukes). It had Scud missiles with chemical WMDs and the United States had been humiliated in Vietnam less than 20 years ago.
At the time, it was a respectable opinion that the United States might be defeated in a war by Iraq. Bush was running a risk that could ruin his presidency but he proceeded anyway, understanding that letting Saddam consolidate his gains in Kuwait, and then threatening Saudi Arabia in the future, was even more unthinkable.
This single decision (to commence an air campaign against occupying forces in Kuwait) shaped the next 30 years of human history. Any country that considered invading another now understood that overwhelming retaliation from the US was the most likely outcome. As a result, the global map has held mostly stable up until February 24, 2022.
I'd give Bush Sr. an A.
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Clinton:
This guy was lucky enough to be at the helm during the golden years. The Cold War had ended, Eastern Europe was opening up to Western trade, and America could reap the so-called peace dividend. This was a unipolar era where the United States, driven by its conviction that it had a hegemon's noblesse oblige to make other countries into liberal democracies, gleefully put boots on the ground wherever it wished and Americans still enjoyed the luxury of being absolutely convinced their actions were just.
To untold millions of foreigners, however, this looked like a new age of Western imperialism driven by missionary zeal, only this time bringing McDonald's instead of crucifixes. The conflicts of this era, even if since forgotten by Americans, would shape anti-American rhetoric by Russian apologists and wumaos online to this day.
From approximately 1994 until the Dotcom Burst, the economy was doing great. Clinton worked together with a Republican-majority Congress and many bipartisan bills of great substance were passed during this time. What most people also don't know is that Clinton reformed and improved the civil service.
But, ultimately, Clinton's presidency would end in disgrace. The revelation that the (married) President of the United States was receiving bl0wj0bs in the Oval Office, and then perjured himself concerning this matter on live television, lowered the bar of expected presidential conduct nearly to the floor and surely contributed to why Americans cared so little about Trump's scandals 20 years later.
Clinton had so much going for him, and so much of that beyond his right to take credit, that it's perhaps unfair to give him a higher score than Bush or Obama, who were handed more difficult circumstances from the start. But I'm gonna give him a B.
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Bush:
Suffice to say, the man's presidency was virtually defined by the War on Terror.
This is especially hard to assess. Everyone knows about the endless drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, the forever battlefields of Afghanistan, annoying TSA lines at airports, etc. What's harder to see is the hypothetical alternative, i.e. how many additional terror attacks would've been planned and executed successfully without the War on Terror or what other countries might've fallen to Jihadists aside from Afghanistan by now. Nobody can know the answer and for all that we know, it could be anything between "Nothing was prevented" and "An apocalyptic wave of attacks against the West that would've sunk the United States forever to its knees was prevented". Hypotheticals are funny that way.
It's similarly impossible to assess the Iraq War. As it stands today, the Western-led order is threatened by axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Nobody knows what it'd look like if we added Baathist Iraq to the picture, nor what Iraq would look like today were the vast slew of international sanctions from the '90s all still in place. At the same time, we do know the immense bad that the invasion resulted in and that the casus belli was legally questionable at best under international law.
Abroad also, the Bush administration failed to rein in those elements of the army and three-letter agencies that ignored due process and detained and tortured anyone at will so long as they were foreigners from less-than-prestigious countries. Ironically, this drove jihadist recruitment around the world and undermined the very aim of the War on Terror that put said agencies in a position to commit these illegal acts in the first place.
At home, Bush simultaneously cut taxes and sent federal spending through the roof, trying his hand at reconciling two contradictory schools of Republican thought (fiscal libertarianism and a security apparatus that needs maximal funding because otherwise the nebulous enemy will win).
Bush's presidency ended in a long-overdue collapse of the housing bubble, which was mostly due to factors predating his presidency but which he failed to notice in time and take meaningful steps against. He was reportedly booed as he was leaving the White House. He also botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which morphed into a horror without modern precedent for a Western country.
Grade: So much of this is contingent on speculation that I'm tempted to give him an N/A score like with Trump. However, I'm assigning Bush a D or C.
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Obama:
Offered a hopeful vision to the American public during hard times. When there was a wide consensus that capitalism "had failed", he made people believe a better future was possible without actually gutting the economy in practice. Bailed out certain large companies for which, had they fallen, the infrastructure and collective expertise they had in place would've been lost to the country.
Obama was the first black president. While a politician shouldn't be qualified or disqualified for public office on the basis of their race, having at least one black guy fill the position symbolically shattered a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities in this country and confirmed, once and for all, that a black man can aim for the same peaks of high achievement as his white counterpart.
On a global stage, having a black president gave a non-white face to the country, which likely did a lot to break ground in our relations with the Third World and in particular Africa. Lingering fears that the US harbored a eurocentric foreign policy agenda were dispelled. When Obama showed up to negotiate with the head of, say, Nigeria or South Africa, this wasn't a white overlord coming to dictate terms to them. Rather, here was somebody they could relate to and sympathize with, and by extension with the country that Obama represented.
By the time Obama left office, the economy had recovered from its worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Granted, he had 8 years to do this and it took a while to show results, but he eventually got it done. This, of course, came at a then-unprecedented price tag in terms of the national debt. He successfully negotiated the Iran Deal, and possibly thanks to that Iran still doesn't have a nuclear bomb in the year 2022.
Under Obama's tenure, Congress passed the PPACA. Even to this day, I'm still not well informed about this subject, but I can testify that I personally would not be covered by health insurance today if not for certain provisions contained therein. So I'd chalk that up to a positive.
And now the bad.
Obama's withdrawal from Iraq was premature, though he shared joint responsibility with George Bush. This enabled ISIL's takeover of northern Iraq, the subsequent Yazidi Genocide, and other grave war crimes by the group. From there, it'd take a 3-to-4 year old air campaign to uproot them from their new stronghold.
He was the man in the White House when the Arab Spring happened. In principle, I cannot blame Obama for trying to bring democracy to the Middle East and therefore supporting the rebels in these various states. However, he did this without a plan for what came next. Nobody stabilized Libya and it fell into a second civil war as soon as the first ended. He didn't give enough support to the rebels in Syria for them to win, instead merely prolonging an unwinnable rebellion with not-so-covert CIA training and arms. Yemen, of course, also became a colossal mess.
All of this sparked the largest refugee crisis Europe had seen in decades.
2014 was a hell year for American interests. ISIL aside, it was the year when Russia and China brought an end to the peaceful post-Cold War era and boldly asserted themselves as aggressive rival powers, seizing territory in Crimea and the South China Sea.
Under Obama, FISA Courts came to operate with increasing impunity and with minimal public scrutiny. This court was later weaponized against presidential candidate Donald Trump. Some of Obama's public comments helped egg on the "Black Lives Matter" movement, which largely failed to decrease police brutality while simultaneously raising homicide rates to such an extent that BLM's activism probably led to more black deaths on net balance.
If not for Obama's two successful appointments to the Supreme Court, the decision Obergefell v. Hodges likely wouldn't have been passed. On one hand, this greatly expanded the opportunities of gay and lesbian Americans to choose a desirable partner. On the other, it accelerated the timetable for mass LGBT activism of the kind that re-shaped America as a place utterly inhospitable for millions of religious Americans. I won't comment on whether this was good or bad, but it's worth mentioning.
Grade: Let's give him a B-.
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Trump:
The man was dysfunctional in his personal and public life to a degree that no likely no other politician in human history could hope to match. However, what people miss is that Trump wasn't governing by merely his own expertise and judgment. Rather, the Republican Party had infrastructure in place to provide advisors who could give sound prescriptions wherever Trump was clueless.
What Trump himself brought to the table was the ability to reinvigorate the party's internal machinery and discourse, giving a sense of enfranchisement to the party's softcore paleocon wing that felt previously unrepresented, while raising debate about which ideas were "conservative" and which weren't, putting items and agendas back on the table that the party had rejected by the late 90s. To some, Trump was a Mussolini figure in modern garb. But to others, he was a new Reagan, if not better than Reagan. To say his style of rhetoric made him a failure is to appeal to subjective taste.
In terms of how it governed, the Trump administration did alright. Trump inherited a fairly good economy from Obama and it stayed good, up until covid. He tried to capitalize on this period of strength to renegotiate trade arrangements that were tilted against the US's favor. He succeeded in some part, hammering out new deals with several countries, but fell short of the big prize: China. Though, in Trump's defense, he was close before Covid hit.
This was another thing Trump himself had to offer: a boldness to take short-term risks in the hope of long-term economic betterment that other politicians didn't. This somewhat weakened growth in the years 2017, 2018, and 2019, but the deals that were renegotiated might (very modestly) boost growth for decades to come.
In terms of Covid, much is said of Trump wildly downplaying the virus early on. In practice, however, the United States fared similarly to other Western countries as late as January 2021, suggesting that, whatever its appearances, Trump's unwise talk early on didn't seriously impact the overall course of the pandemic. What Trump did manage to do right, or at least didn't bungle, was the federal handling of the economic recovery, easily the fastest in American history.
Other Pros: Moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. His appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices, raising hopes that Roe v. Wade might be overturned in the next 2 years. Should this happen, it'll be the greatest moral triumph in contemporary Western history since the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camp, and Trump will have played a huge role in making it happen.
Despite claims of him being a Russian puppet, no Russian invasion of Ukraine under his watch. Constructed 450 miles of border wall despite a reticent Congress that wouldn't give him any funding for the endeavor. Passed deals with certain Central American countries that would make it harder for "asylum seekers" (99% opportunist immigrants using asylum as a loophole) to cross the US-Mexico border without permission.
Other Cons: The national debt rose more in one term than in any one of Obama's terms, though the percentage of debt increase was lower.
Emboldened Netanyahu to keep building illegal settlements in the Palestinian Territories. His joint responsibility with Biden for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. His outrageous speech, which degraded the high dignity of the White House. Dozens of miscellaneous scandals, which surely demoralized public trust in the government. Weakened the US's diplomatic standing with many countries. His rhetoric helped make the anti-masker and anti-vaxxer positions seem more legitimate during a global pandemic. Failed to stop Turkey's 2019 offensive in Northern Syria against Kurdish-held areas.
And finally, his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While those who refer to it as a coup attempt are repeating lies, what Trump unambiguously did do was disgraceful and will raise the specter of violence in American elections for years, if not decades, to come.
Grade: N/A. The man is impossible to grade.
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Biden:
Alright, so. Going into his election, Biden's candidacy had two things going for it. First, he wasn't nearly as polarizing a figure as Trump. Second, his decades of political experience, which Democrats hoped would bring a major asset to the White House. The man was milquetoast as all get-out and had a track record on racial issues that actually was not better than Trump's, but whatever. Perhaps an uninspiring moderate was what the country needed.
Or so was reasoned. In practice, Biden's lack of personal scandals is pretty much the only thing he's managed better than Trump.
Inflation was skyrocketing even before Russia's invasion. As were gas prices, and Biden's fossil fuel policies certainly didn't help. He promised that he had a plan to decisively beat Covid in a short time but after all was said and done, the transition from President #45 to President #46 didn't noticeably affect the course of the pandemic.
Most damningly was Russia. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, the Biden Administration didn't exactly look like it had a plan. The administration issued at least one false prediction of the invasion being "on a Wednesday", which didn't pan out.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Biden's decades of experience proved completely useless. Not only did he fail to deter this attack but in fact his actions likely contributed to it.
Which takes us back to Afghanistan. While Presidents Trump and Biden jointly made the final withdrawal happen, and share joint responsibility for that, the Biden administration had no plan in terms of its execution. Billions of US-supplied army equipment fell into Taliban hands, and more than 100K people were stuffed onto planes in a chaotic evacuation at a besieged airport. Anyone old enough to remember Saigon would've been having traumatic flashbacks as they watched scenes from Kabul unfold on cable television. After this, Biden chose to plunder several billion dollars that comprised Afghanistan's foreign reserves and that could've gone to help the country get back on its feet economically.
The administration projected foreign policy weakness to an extent that Trump did not. If not for that, it's at least possible that Europe might not be on the cusp of another continental-scale war and that the globe wouldn't be on the verge of massive shortages of basic commodities like oil and grain.
While Ukraine is defending itself admirably, there's little reason (with publicly available information, anyways) to assume that Biden can take credit for this. Yes, the US supplied them with weapons, but any administration would.
While his administration's barely a year old, thus far I have to give him a D or at best a C.
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Unless he came on DART admitting to illegal acts, or shared illegal material/links to illegal material, or was caught using DART as the grounds on which to attempt said acts, I say it doesn't matter in terms of his right to be here. Unpopular speech is still speech, be that in advocacy of bestiality or pedophilia.
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Honestly, this is too broad. Not all parts of America are necessarily the same and whites in different parts of the country have drastically different average life outcomes.
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@Incel-chud
I do have an honest question:
Assuming you live everyday in a state of ego death, how has that affected your ability to live normally and thrive against the stresses, pressures, and expectations of modern life?
Has it adversely affected your career or relationships? Has it positively affected these things? Or neither?
Can you compare yourself now with the you from before you stumbled across this revelation?
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@Incel-chud
I never hear these things in church though, so not sure where you are pulling the concepts from. Any reading recommendations would be great.
I mean, this is pretty basic stuff. The way I described it had somewhat of a Calvinist bent, but it's really not something that you couldn't pull from a beginner's theological text, or by repeatedly attending a Wednesday night Bible study.
However, you could try reading these:
What you call the heart, I am calling ego.
If I understand you properly, we are not talking about the same thing.
The "heart", metaphorically, is the sum of man's sincerest and most compelling whims. It includes his natural intuition that there's an answer buried inside himself to resolve his dilemmas and his problems, and that by listening to it he can arrive at a higher state than where he was at before.
A man dumped his faithful wife of 20 years for his young hot secretary, who his gut told him was the person he was always and truly intended to have married, suspecting that nothing more than a false consciousness led him to once delude himself about his first wife.
This man "listened to his heart", forgetting that he was once as sure about his first wife as he is now about his new lover. But the heart has deceived him, for it led him to mistake base impulses for enlightenment merely because those impulses were repressed.
Though of course you do not stoop to follow your heart down the path of adultery, the inner voice you're listening to that offers hidden knowledge of reality is nonetheless the voice of the heart.
What you call the ego seems to be the "baseline" (for lack of a better word), or your mundane, everyday conscious understanding of reality. Dissatisfaction with the baseline is normal, and indeed this is something that helps call the soul back to God, but any esoteric solution to said dissatisfaction outside of God, as He revealed Himself in the Bible, is the heart trying to lead you astray.
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@Incel-chud
It came from a combination of ego death
From drug use?
and a few books I was guided to read through circumstances
Guided to read? What guided you to do so?
The Bible doesn't have a single name to describe it, but original sin took us out of the garden of Eden and put us in a world that hid from us our divine spark.
This is based on an incorrect reading of Scripture.
Everyone has the Imago Dei but it's tainted by sin. One does not cure the problem of sin through internal processes, as all of the instruments that you might use to do so are inescapably distorted by the sin nature so as to reach no conclusion not informed thereby. As the Bible warns, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." This is called the doctrine of total depravity, which is often misunderstood.
The solution to the problem of sin is beyond one's self and it is submission to the God who first calls you to Him. Once this happens, God works inside of you in what's called salvation and then sanctification, which superficially resembles the man morally improving himself but its true essence is largely independent of human effort.
The man both saved and sanctified, once both works are finished, is returned to the original design for his being, in which he is a proper son of God, made in the image thereof, and in which the "divine spark" that is his nature as a human son of God manifests as brilliantly and perfectly as it ought to. Until then, however, any effort apart from God to realize the spark and promote its flourishing is nothing more than self-deception.
The Garden of Eden had the status of a "temple", or a designated space set apart where a man beheld God. Man was contextually impure as a result of his sin and had to be made pure before he could return to the temple. As this hadn't yet happened, Adam and his wife were expelled. The place itself, however, never conferred any sort of holiness to man. Only the God who made the temple holy could, but He had to enter the man's heart to do that. If the still impure man externally beheld a holy God, he would have to reckon with his own unholiness, and the penalty was death, both physical and spiritual.
We have this knowledge in our collective unconscious.
What knowledge?
That the world isn't real? Or that our inner potential transcends reality?
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@Incel-chud
Have you not heard about Mariupol? The whole city's been razed by the Russian army.
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@RationalMadman
Nazi soldiers died protecting their homeland too and many had no choice in the matter, much like the conscripted military men of UK and France at the time.
This.
It's the plain truth of the matter but we were born into a time where powerful interests make truths not exist or otherwise unspeakable through sheer force of will. People today are morally developed enough to recognize that the murderous acts of the Nazis were immoral but not developed enough to have any sort of nuanced discussion about the people who lived in that time and why they performed the actions and/or supported the organized systems that they did.
I personally don't understand why the fuck this whole 'remember we beat the Nazis' thing happens every year in the nations that did.
Honestly? It's because the Eastern Bloc countries have so little in terms of civic traditions that they rally to unite around historical myths because it's just about all they have.
People died, remember why they fought and the problems that were in Germany and taken advantage of or suddenly you vote Brexit in the name of Nigel Farage's scumbag movement
I don't think one thing's connected to the other but okay.
Never fall for Fascism masquerading as Populism
When powerful interests won't let an authentic right-wing exist on respectable terms, the "respectable class" will refuse to work with them or represent their political agenda in halls of power. Hence, the rank-and-file will rally behind whoever's offering, even if that only leaves somebody like Donald Trump.
If said interests don't like that, then their press agents shouldn't have spent the last 40 years before Trump tearing down the mainstream right. Because even if they throw resources around to preclude the scientists and technocrats from representing conservatives, conservatives will nonetheless pick somebody to do so no matter what. All the elites accomplished was to pile on some unnecessary bad consequences for when the other side invariably wins at some election cycle or another.
As for accusations of fascism, I don't know anyone who likes fascism or calls themselves fascist, but even if there's some degree of overlap between said "populist" and fascistic personality traits, if the choice boils down to that guy or a completely foreign and hated ideology winning every election and dominating every public institution, no reasonable person could blame them for casting their choice in this binary environment.
Unreasonable people would, sure. But they discredit themselves from the second they open their mouths to do so.
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@Incel-chud
Did you come to this realization yourself or did you learn from a teacher/book/website/whatever?
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In September of 2014, Putin boasted that if he wanted to, he could take Kyiv in 2 weeks.
As of tomorrow, thanks to February being the shortest month and 2022 not being a leap year, it'll have been 1 month since the Russian invasion began, with an early offensive against the capital (located close to the Belarusian border) having providentially stalled after a short time.
I'm no military strategist. However, ideas are arguably as powerful as bullets. Now, Zelensky could decide to capitulate tomorrow. But assuming this doesn't happen, and depending on how long the Ukrainian army can keep dragging this out, this is a timetable spelling out some of the implications of a long war:
March 31: The Ukrainian army and government will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length (35 days) that it took Nazi Germany to seize Poland, despite 80 years of technological and warfighting doctrine advancements.
Granted, the Nazis actually found Poland to be a difficult foe and they might not have won had the Soviets not invaded from the east at the same time, but popular culture imagines Poland to have been a pushover with outdated cavalry charges against German tanks. As such, expect negative comparisons between the Nazi and Russian war machines to flood the internet beginning around this time.
April 7: The Ukrainian government and army will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length of time (42 days) that it took the US to conquer Iraq in 2003.
On the eve of Russia's invasion, one of the biggest risks was that a 21st century "lightning war" against Europe's poorest and most dysfunctional country would serve to promote the Russian military as hyper-competent, and indeed, somehow superior to the "decadent" American forces that recently lost a 20-year counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
If Kyiv holds out until and ideally past April 7, that notion will be much easier to dispel. And with that, the risk that Russia might grow drunk in its newfound sense of invincibility and feel emboldened to soon attack another neighboring state will also be minimized. Whether Ukraine lasts another 2 weeks could help decide the future of Europe.
April 24: The observance of Easter, as the date is calculated in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
If the global orthodox community outside of Russia takes the opportunity to condemn the ongoing war and formally take a stand with Ukraine, it'll be a major challenge to Moscow's credentials as the head of Orthodoxy and serve to ecumenically isolate Patriarch Kirill, hopefully putting serious pressure on Kirill to rehabilitate his image by turning against the war.
Given that more than 3.5 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad, including in majority-Orthodox countries like Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and even Serbia, and given that this number will certainly rise or even double in the next month, the presence of these sympathetic refugees who've lost everything because of Russia could sway these countries' Orthodox churches to finally issue statements condemning Russian invasion.
At Easter, expect high profile statements against Moscow's war by dissenting priests inside the Russian Orthodox Church as well.
April 29: On March 12, it was reported that Russian military equipment losses amounted to more $5 billion dollars. Assuming that rate of loss can be sustained, then by April 29, or Day 64, that figure will have risen to $20 billion dollars. Of course, this doesn't count the combined daily operational costs of 64 days of war, which by this time will likely stand around $30 billion dollars.
In comparison, Russia's annual military budget is around $70 billion dollars.
May 9: The celebration of Victory Day in Russia and other post-Soviet countries.
Putin likely hopes to end the war before this date, so that on it he can celebrate the fresh "de-nazification" of Ukraine that's supposedly analogous to the de-Nazification of Eastern and Central Europe at the end of WWII 77 years ago. This opportunity will be missed.
Outside of Russia, Victory Day implicitly celebrates the role of Russian leadership in defeating German aggression. However, the ongoing 2 and a half month war of aggression against Ukraine by Russia will cause many to question why they're still celebrating this holiday.
If some countries remove the holiday's official status afterward, or do so before May 9 so that it's not observed in 2022, this'll mark a visible unraveling of the very ideal of a post-Soviet sphere.
And so, in summary, a war lasting "just" 2 and a half months longer could cost Russia:
-More than the equivalent of $50 billion dollars in military costs alone
-Its cultural influence as head of the historic bloc that saved Europe from Nazism
-Its religious influence as current head of Eastern Orthodoxy
-Its long-held reputation as a military power that credibly rivals the United States
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Because a substantial part of the social contract (that the government will protect your rights and your right to property against banal class envy and majoritarian prejudices) will be irreversibly undermined, making America into a country with dysfunctional and untrustworthy institutions where nobody wants to do business?
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Because their money belongs to them?
Is more of a reason needed than this?
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@triangle.128k
Suddenly you abandon your principles of popular sovereignty because "um ethnic groups can't steal part of a country without their consent."
I am being entirely consistent with my principles. The fate and future of Ukraine must be popularly decided by Ukrainians. Russian sojourners only deserve a say in the matter so far as they consider themselves Ukrainian and will promote what's best for this Ukrainian nation.
Damn in that case I guess Ukrainians have no right to steal the borderlands from the greater Rus!
The Russian and Ukrainian S.S.R.s actively worked together to leave the Soviet Union as separate countries. Then Russia formally recognized all post-Soviet states as independent countries. And finally, by signing the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for Ukraine's denuclearization, Russia promised to never infringe on Ukraine's right to sovereignty over its territory.
In contrast, Ukraine has given no permission to Donetsk, Luhansk, or Crimea to leave.
The idea of enforcing liberal democracy on the whole world is racist neocolonialism.
Nonsense. The West uses no force against ordinary people. Only against governments that deny their citizens the right of a choice, or against illegal guerrillas hiding within said countries.
I ask you to name one full democracy since the end of the Cold War that the West overthrew the government of.
Some cultures don't like neoliberal democracy
Given that these countries don't typically hold open elections, there's no way to prove that. The fact that they're not risking their lives to topple a government that they could begrudgingly tolerate doesn't mean they'd actively prefer said form of government over a democracy.
You guys are racist because you don't want anybody but people of northwestern European descent ruling the world
Wrong. We don't want authoritarians and dictators ruling the world, as that would be easily the greatest setback to human civilization since the Bronze Age Collapse, if not surpassing even that.
Were China a full liberal democracy with a long track record for respecting human rights at home, and a track record of at least 30 years as a global military superpower that nonetheless did not exercise this realized power for evil, then I suspect most of us would be okay with that.
Can't wait for Russia and China to begin the process of 2nd wave decolonization!
Which is doublespeak for re-colonization. Russia's killing Ukrainians and forcing them back into an illegal political union against their will, China will soon be killing Taiwanese, and so on. What's happening right now is the very definition of imperialism.
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@triangle.128k
Then you should support partioning Ukraine instead of the Ukrainian government since there's a lot of pro-Russian Ukrainians.
If the majority of another country's population voluntarily decides on a national partition, such as in Czechoslovakia post-communism, then it's none of my business.
But no such proposal is supported by the average Ukrainian. Among the Russian minority, perhaps, but ethnic minorities have no right to steal part of a country from its longstanding ethnic majority without their consent. Especially when said minority already has a country elsewhere.
Because they're denouncing their east Slavic Orthodox culture in favor of western neocolonial hegemony
Wrong. Ukrainians are still ethnically and linguistically Slavic, while many/most are still practitioners of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. And nothing about that will change if they join the EU and NATO.
Just like, say, Bulgaria.
What kind of friend overthrows a western neocolonial globohomo puppet government for you to bring you back home? Idk man, sounds like a terrible friend.
Ukraine held open presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014 (after the revolution, in which the main pro-Russia party was free to take part but stupidly chose to boycott it) and then again in 2019.
Which is to say that the current government in Kyiv was popularly and fairly elected by the Ukrainian public.
If the 2014 elections didn't completely legitimize the new government, then the 2019 elections did, as by that time the terms for all pre-revolution officials (such as Yanukovych) had expired.
Liberation from western neocolonialism.
Again, the Ukrainians didn't feel like they needed liberation from anything except Russia.
People were getting tired of the Soviet Union, times and attitudes change.
Then Russia should've put it to a vote.
Demand a second (and internationally monitored) referendum on Ukrainian independence from Russia, with the threat of violence if the Ukrainian government refused, coupled with a promise of absolute non-interference in Ukraine's sovereign affairs going forward if the second referendum proves continued support for an independent Ukraine.
But instead of a vote, they just invaded.
And that referendum was for independence, not a denouncement and cutting ties with Russia.
Not in 1991 perhaps, but the country's later track record demonstrated a popular will toward integration with the EU.
In February 2013, the Verkhovna Rada voted overwhelmingly (with 90% in favor) to take steps to implement the EU's "recommendations" for political reform as a condition for ratifying the EU Association Agreement.
A few short weeks after this, the Yanukovych government passed a plan to further promote Ukraine's integration with the EU. The process only stalled when the government proved unwilling to release Yulia Tymoshenko, a political prisoner.
Had the EU been willing to let that one issue slide, I suppose Ukraine would be an EU member state today. But my point is that the country clearly wished for closer ties with Europe, and that even Yanukovych had apparently wanted as much too.
Ukraine is fine being independent if they stick with Russia instead of sucking up to the west.
Russia's friends are almost all dictators. Not a good deal for the average citizen of these countries. "Sticking with Russia" sucks booty and the Ukrainians had every right to reject that.
Russia wasn't a colonial power.
In that case, neither was Britain, Spain, or France.
Even if Ukraine did voluntary associate itself with the west, that's just evidence of internalized colonialism and being coons.
In other words, if the Ukrainians chose any partner besides Russia, that was proof of them being brainwashed so their choice had to be taken from them so they'd choose the "right" way?
Wow. No wonder Russia's neighbors dislike Russia. The country feels entitled to own them forever, free will be damned.
And why is popular sovereignty important?
Because that's the basis of international law? Because without that, there'd be nothing but constant wars of aggression even in the 21st century?
Attitudes change with time, and people can be misled.
If that happens, then people will eventually get smart and elect better leaders. But if people are "misled" into a bad dictatorship, they can never undo their mistake.
Your staunch support of democracy and demand to enforce it on the whole world just shows your snobbish northwestern Anglo-Germanic supremacist attitudes.
The idea that people of all races and skin colors should be allowed and empowered to choose the governments over them is racist?
And if they have no such right, then why was Western colonialism wrong? Does the ethnic background of your tyrannical overlords really matter?
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@RationalMadman
Of course not. 99% of devout Jews were already circumcised as infants. But if they weren't, then that's something they would be looking into. With today's technologies, it can be done safely and with minimal pain.
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@RationalMadman
To my knowledge, female "circumcision" is already banned. I'd have no problem doing the same with male circumcision.
Provided, of course, that anyone may choose circumcision upon their 18th birthday.
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@triangle.128k
Ukrainians that end up being rabidly anti-Russia to their east Slavic brothers tend to embrace westernization, especially since a lot of it was brought about by Poland-Lithuania. They look to western ideas, values, religions, modes of government, etc
Sure. But isn't that their own choice? Shouldn't they be free to choose Western-ness if they want?
simply to spite Russia
How is it spiting Russia simply to be Western?
They're embracing western neocolonization and hegemony over the world instead of friendship with their east Slavic neighbors.
Friendship?
What kind of "friend" says you're not allowed to leave them or else they'll murder you?
Russia is hardly partaking in colonialism, it's more like liberation
Liberation from what? The independence that Ukrainians wanted to keep?
In 1991, more than 90% of Ukrainians in a high-turnout election voted for independence. A majority in both Donetsk and Luhansk voted for the same. Even in Crimea, so did a majority of those who turned out to vote. The entire country voted for independence.
and decolonization
Given that Russia was the former colonizer of Ukraine, don't you mean re-colonization? In what possible world is forcibly denying Ukraine's national right to self-determination an act of decolonization?
Similar to how India launched a military invasion of Goa to free them from Portuguese colonialism.
Except that no foreign power was occupying Ukraine against its will. Ukraine has voluntarily associated itself with the West. Mere proximity to Ukraine did not entitle Russia to annex it, hence the Goa analogy fails.
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@oromagi
Even Russia itself is not particular Pro-Putin at this point. The only real Pro-Putin people left are Putin's dimwitted henchmen- FOX News, Trump and Trumpists.
I can assure you, there are just as many useful idiots on the left who have such an ax to grind with "American neocon imperialism" that they'll turn a blind eye to anything a non-Western power does.
It's just that, for obvious reasons, the mainstream media would rather put the spotlight on Putin apologists on the right.
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@triangle.128k
And the Ukrainians aren't the indigenous peoples of Ukraine? What about their right to not be victims of Russian colonialism?
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It's sad to think that some people are so xenophobic and bigoted against white people that they'll reject democracy and human rights if majority-white countries are the ones pushing for it.
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