Image Transcription:
An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying "Russia".
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with "Russia".
The third panel is Phoebe saying "has invaded".
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back "has invaded".
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying "Ukraine".
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back "Ukraine".
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase "Russia has invaded Ukraine".
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming "NATO just started a proxy war".
Ukraine isn't part of NATO. Also, NATO should've been disbanded after the cold war. Really shows the sincerity of working towards peace when you keep an antagonistic organization around looking for a purpose to justify their existence. The post-cold-war intentions of the US were made clear with the leak of the Wolfowitz Doctrine but apparently that's lost to many.
This is the Russia is the victim propaganda that Putin has been spewing for a long time now. When there’s a mafia state next door with the world’s largest cache of nukes I think it’s completely justified to keep NATO around, especially given Russias predilection for invading their neighbors.
You squawk about propaganda while spewing it yourself. The US shits its pants to this day about Cuba, now imagine if a larger country next to the US was being enticed into the sphere of influence of another country. What do you think should be done about the US with its predilection for invading countries around the entire world?
Here we see a classic, the “No u” argument. “I’m not the propaganda, U R the propaganda!”. There’s also some whataboutism sprinkled in at the end. I don’t see where I was squawking, but I’d appreciate it if you could elaborate, please.
Let’s agree, in retrospect recent US wars were bad in a multitude of ways, but are you saying because the US can do it, Russia is justified in its invasion of Ukraine?
No, here we see the classic double standard where the US does a lot worse than many other countries but calling it out is "whataboutism" because the talking heads on the TV said we should all be mad at this thing and not think about what led up to this.
Russia is not justified in invading Ukraine, but let's not ignore that Ukraine is yet another proxy war that the US uses to destroy other countries and retain sole superpower status. Do you not see the increased rhetoric against China as well? Any country that could ever potentially rise up or aid in the rising up of a country that isn't the US gets smacked down. Just like how the US was screaming about Japan taking over the world in the 80s while engineering financial collapse through things like the Plaza Accord and that was their ally. This behavior isn't some insane conspiracy theory, it's all laid out in the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
It costs a lot to invade a country and nobody does it willy-nilly. The US has been fucking around in Ukraine for decades and has pushed to economically cut off Russia the entire time. Putin played into their hand by invading and he was absolutely wrong to do so, but he was losing Ukraine anyway so he probably figured "fuck it".
Well there ya go, what else is there to talk about?
Golly, how could Russia have possibly avoided this war? Hm, maybe by not invading.
Ooh, sounds scary. I guess if the US wants to be the sole superpower, it makes anything Russia does in order to try and be a superpower totally ok, and we should let em do it.
"Fuck it, if these people want to voluntarily, democratically seek closer economic and political ties to Europe, what's the difference? I should probably kill hundreds of thousands of my own troops and hundreds of thousands more civilians in a devastating military fiasco riddled with war crimes."
You can see how that's not better, right?
You obviously see the world in black and white. Someone can be not justified in doing something yet have reasons for doing them, just like how someone isn't justified in physically beating someone up over words but you could see why it'd come to that, depending on the words and the situation. "I would simply not invade" is a braindead take for something as vast and complicated as geopolitics. Seriously, put some thought into your worldview. You have about as much nuance as a picture book for kindergartners.
Then again, your stance appears to be "I guess if the US wants to be the sole superpower we should let them" Then you follow it up with literal CIA propaganda about "the people" wanting this or that. Golly gee the people have spoken here https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k
That would be like saying "the people" wanted Jan 6th to happen but the big bad government quashed the people's movement.
I guess Russia had better invade us so they can ensure we do the thing we actually wanted to do all along, but at gunpoint!
If the discussion was about US imperialism sure, but it wasn’t. You used it as a way to shift the argument to something else. It’s fine though, I asked you a question back about the same thing, but don’t act like I’m some how making your double standard argument here which you shoehorned in. Then to assume you know where my information is coming. How about this, I can do the same thing. I can assume you get your information from crackpot conspiracy theorists that want to sell you vitamins for your brain…
It’s interesting you keep bringing up Paul Wolfowitz and his doctrine. It failed as a means of control, doing more harm than good. How many US administrations are we removed from Bush and that way of thinking? Whatever the US doctrine is at the moment isn’t that.
So we heard a lot about Ukraine before the invasion, and then surprise! They were invaded. Xi Jinping has been making aggressive moves as of late, not just rhetorically but literally. His move on Hong Kong for example. Taiwan seems to be up next. I’m sorry, why wouldn’t we be hearing about China? If anything US doctrine is to react not pre-empt.
I don’t understand your last paragraph. You start off by saying no one gets into a war Willy-nilly then go on to say Putin just said “fuck it” as his reasoning before going to war.
Virtually all global politics involve the US, so yes, the discussion has to include US imperialism. It wasn't like the US was hands-off until Russia invaded out of nowhere and then that's when the US decided to get involved.
You're naive if you think the Wolfowitz doctrine and its ideologies have simply gone away with the Bush administration. This has been the blueprint for US foreign policy since the end of the cold war.
Yes, we did hear a lot about Ukraine getting invaded and then they got invaded, but the trouble didn't start like a couple weeks before the invasion. Funny that you claim that I'm merely assuming I know where your information is coming from when you keep repeating US mainstream media talking points over and over. Following your logic, North Korea would have dropped multiple nukes on South Korea and Japan by now. You hear a lot about China conducting military drills or encroaching on air space, but you won't hear the same about the US even though they do the same. Is it because you can trust the US? Is it because the US owns all airspace on Earth and thus can go where they please?
"Fuck it" in this context doesn't mean "I got off the wrong side of the bed this morning, I think I'll go invade a country today", it means "I believe I've run out of options and I will do this out of desperation".
I dunno, let's ask Ukraine about it. :P
Yeah, let's ask Ukraine about Iraq or Yemen or Syria or Libya or...
I mean, I protested in the streets against the Iraq war voted against the administration that embarked on it, so I'm not too fussed about your nonsense.
I'm not sure how setting the expectation that every big country ought to be able to invade every little country is an improvement here. That's what you're saying, right? "The US did something bad, so Russia should be able to do something bad too, no fair!"
No, I'm saying we should take a look at what led up to this invasion so that it doesn't happen again. I'm also calling out the hypocrisy I've seen.
How do you suggest Ukraine should avoid being invaded again?
In this case it would've been avoided by the US not staging a coup and trying to cut Russia off from important oil and gas markets (which make up its largest exports).
Ah so Ukraine can avoid being invaded by ensuring its government is always pro Russian and its people are always buying Russian products?
Being pro-US and always doing the bidding of the US is how countries avoid being invaded or having a coup done in their country by the US. Guess that's just the nature of imperialist asshole nations.
So?
Why? The reason NATO still exists seems pretty self evident, a bunch of European countries seem like they want to be in a defense pact with the US, why could that possibly be.
Russia could have avoided it by (and I know this sounds crazy) not invading their neighbors.
The reason that NATO still exists is self-evident more than two decades after the end of the cold war? It took a while but they got themselves some job security, eh? It is a nice little grift they've got going, having the US mess about in foreign countries with the CIA, upsetting local powers, and then running to the rescue when those local powers get upset enough to invade. Of course, Russia could've not invaded Ukraine and let the US lure Ukraine over to the west purely through "soft" powers.
Well, that would have involved hundreds of thousands fewer people dying and Ukrainians getting the thing they generally wanted, so... win win.
and a massive loss from Russia's perspective. The US has invaded for much less.
See here's the thing: whether the US has done something before has no bearing on whether Russia is justified in doing it.
See here's the thing: I didn't say Russia is justified in doing what it is doing.