kava

my dad always taught me not to let the workings of the world affect my personal mood

even if the world is going to shit, you can carve out a little slice of life for yourself and the people you love. take care of those people, take care of what you own, do the things you're passionate about and let God worry about the rest

and I say that as an atheist. it's a metaphor

ok let's go over piece by piece to try and again reach a base set of facts we can agree on

I’m mostly curious if and why you think Russia had the right to invade.

i don't think Russia had a right to invade. i do recognize, however, that idealistic platitudes doesn't ultimately matter in the dynamics between nation-states. russia believed, for a confluence of factors, that invading was the correct decision and therefore they made that decision.

i'm not making any moral judgements. if it were up to me we'd all be singing Kumbaya, nuclear weapons would all be dismantled, and we'd live in a communist utopia. i don't get to decide though. i only get to be a third party observer, doing the best i can to arrive at the closest version of the truth

what i am doing, along with you, is discussing the material conditions that led to this war and the nature of the dynamic between both ukraine and russia and the ukrainian war relative to recent history

A & B: Ukraine has had an election since 2014 so apparently there’s public support for a western friendly government.

Ok let's once again reiterate what started this inquiry

“the ukrainian war is in a way a war of independence”

a) the ukrainian government had a radical change overnight due to a violent protest/revolution/coup

the fact that Ukraine had an election since 2014 and that there is public support for a western friendly government does not change that there was an abrupt change in government in 2014. these things are not connected

just because people supported the French revolution, doesn't mean it wasn't a violent revolution, correct?

b) the old government was pro-russian, the new government was anti-russian

once again, the fact that the old government (president being Viktor Yanukovych) was pro-Russian does not change whether or not there was an election post-2014 and that there is public support for a western friendly government

neither a) nor b) change based on your statement. so please

do you agree or disagree with A) and B)? they are objective statements of fact. easily provable or disprovable. can we agree to a base line reality? if we can, we can move forward

C: preparing to defend yourself from invasion doesn’t justify invading

"the new ukrainian government realized that Russia was about to invade because of this radical change and therefore they prepared for war by bending the knee to the US"

we are not talking about justification. the statement c) states that the new Ukrainian government, post Euromaidan, recognized they were about to be invaded and immediately started cooperating with the US.

again, objective statement of fact. you either agree or don't agree.

if you cannot state "Yes this is true" or "No this is false because xyz" then you are not actually saying anything and I'm going to assume you are not discussing in good faith

i'm making every effort here to be generous to you

yeah exactly. when the system is about to blow up, they turn a valve and release a little steam

that's one of two paths we are headed towards today. the pressure is building up. we either need to turn the valve soon OR we're gonna blow up

i have a feeling though we're headed for the explosion route

i dont want to sound like a moral relativist and i'm hesitant to respond because i also don't want to be a hitler apologist

but I think it's really hard to categorize a person into a "totally bad" position. for example, Hitler had a big ego but he probably genuinely wanted the best for Germany. He cared for animals, was a vegetarian (for the most part, especially in later years of life) and advocated for animal cruelty laws.

if he genuinely believed that eliminating the jews was necessary in order to secure the autonomy of the German people, does that make him a bad person? To a Nazi, the Jew is an evil parasite on society that needs to be eliminated for the good of the entire population.

now please understand I'm speaking from their perspective not saying it is correct

but this type of anti-semitic ideology did not spring up spontaneously in the 1930s but was something deep that developed over the course of hundreds of years and ultimately culminated in the genocide we saw

but if for example, we took everyone in this thread and raised them in 1890s Germany- how many of them would believe in tolerance and racial equality? I'd honestly be surprised if there was a single person

I don't know. I understand there are good things and bad things. but the difference between good and bad people is more complicated. bad people i typically relegate to those individuals that get pleasure of out cruelty or suffering

i think most legislation is explicitly for the capitalist class. that much we probably agree with

but i do think every once in a while, when there is a ton of pressure and the elites are scared, they throw a bone to the working class.

it happened with the antitrust act, it happened with the New Deal, and it happened in the 1960s with the Civil Rights era and the end to Vietnam

yes, capitalism will eat itself. it's what we're essentially seeing right now in slow motion. but there is something there in democracy beyond just capitalism. even if it's buried deep down and impotent

i think it was perfectly timed

a) after the primary was informally settled

b) a couple weeks before the candidate was formally sworn in

If that was the case, they would have done it sooner

sooner and there may have been a real primary contest. too risky. they did it with just enough time to sort of "zerg rush" Kamala into the primary without giving anyone time to mount a meaningful attempt at the primary

and unprecedented, move. It’s a huge risk to drop the incumbent in favor of somebody else.

unprecedented, yes. it's the first time in US history since we've been using the primary system that a candidate got the party nomination without a single vote being cast for them

risky, also yes. but they (I think correctly) determined that Biden was a lost cause.

so it was either a) go with the guy you know you're gonna lose or b) go with someone you will probably lose with

b is the logical choice

it's an eternal battle. every once in a while we pass legislation to try and reign in corporate power. like for example the anti trust act in the early 1900s

the issue is that public attention is temporary. eventually we move on to the next crisis and people forget. grow complacent.

corporate interest, however, is eternal. it's persistent and never gives up. it keeps pushing, infallibly, in order to weaken the structures meant to reign in their power. whether by legislation/policy (AT&T and friends unilaterally killing Net Neutrality some years back, Disney signing into law expansion of copyright, etc) or through more subtle methods (buying politicians and getting people into positions of power that have no intention of enforcing the laws)

this is inevitably what happens with every democracy. eventually the vigilance fails and the structures of power are hijacked by opportunists.

although having said all that, I don't think greed had much to do with the inflation we saw. Sure, some companies took advantage and raised prices more than they needed to just to inflate that extra juicy profit margin.

but realistically we're headed to war and war means massive government spending which means inflation

And it wasn’t. The supply chain breakdown would have happened no matter who was in office

if i remember correctly, COVID brought our inflation up to roughly 6%. then the Ukrainian war took it the rest of way where it peaked near 9% (over 10% in my home state)

these things would have happened anyway, although choosing to prolong the Ukrainian war as long as possible most definitely increased inflation. people think we only gave 2 or 3 hundred billion, but realistically the American public has paid more than a trillion in the invisible tax that is inflation. hundreds of thousands of layoffs because of higher interest rates are also connected to this

Bernie lost in the primaries

DNC primaries are a joke. look at this last primary. oh wait we didn't actually have a primary.

they intentionally waited until the "primary" was over so that Biden could get the incumbent automatic primary votes and then let him drop out so they could rush in Kamala without having a real primary.

i firmly believe if Democrats were not trying to game democracy this presidential cycle, DNC would have had a chance to beat Trump

another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.

i'd lean towards "i don't know enough about the facts to make a definitive statement"

public education isn't great and even good public education rarely dives deeply in the life of Adolf Hitler beyond the obvious "he was a megalomaniac dictator who killed Jews and wanted to take over the world"

Hitler became Hitler because of his life experiences. He served in the German military during WW1, he was homeless in Vienna, he grew up poor with a sick mother. These events, along with the movements of the then-current cultural zietgiest, radicalized him in certain directions. It's a complex story that is hard to break down into simplistic moral platitudes of "good person" or "bad person"

It’s because, in the liberal and activist communities, it’s become customary and accepted to treat men like shit.

this is just as dumb as the opposite "they didn't vote for Kamala because she's a woman"

people don't like Kamala because she's an extension of Joe Biden and Biden has been a failure. that's why she lost. she offered status quo when people want change. the DNC is incapable of changing quick enough to avoid fascism

i think you give too much credit to Trump. the economy has been rigged against the working class for a long time. it's just getting progressively more brutal which makes people feel increasingly insecure.

an insecure working class elects strongmen who promise simple solutions