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MaybeACoordinator

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Everything posted by MaybeACoordinator

  1. Not all of them think in lockstep. Point one. Point two: to humanize the "Orcs." I fear we are spiraling out into a horrific world war over stupid shit just as in World War !.
  2. If you are not even interested in seeing what Russians are saying -- including some dissent -- you brains are fried. You are afflicted with war fever. And where was your outrage over dead Iraqi children?
  3. In the interest of humanity and peace on earth, please watch:
  4. Here is that lack of empathy: Russia does not view NATO as a defensive alliance. Russia has an eternal paranoia about their borders dating back to Genghis Khan. We -- meaning the west -- have rolled back their "defensive alliance" on every front except for the shortest route to Moscow. Instead of settling for bringing Romania, the Baltics, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria into the west, we had to prick-tease Georgia and Ukraine too. It got a bunch of Georgians killed in 2008 and it's getting a bunch of Ukrainians killed today. 1991? Really? A vote in Houston would have nothing in common with a vote that old and it's not because Putin manipulated the electorate. In a just world Crimea would be given back to the Tatars but that's not the world we live in.
  5. Mexico 1845? Snatched half the nation and ravaged the other half. I am grateful because it means I get to live in America but it was a brutal land grab.
  6. So many of you made such similar arguments 20-odd years ago when justifying our invasion of Iraq. You swore you learned your lesson. You clearly have not. This is not a world that operates the way the United States wishes it would. Once you accept the (false) premise that Putin is not a rational actor but instead a diabolical madman, and that the only solution to avoid a potential World War 3 is a Russian general capping his ass, there is no talking to you about facts on the ground. Why is it irrational for Putin to fear hundreds of miles of NATO on his western flank? We don't allow hostile powers in an entire hemisphere, much less on our border. We were ready to destroy the planet over nukes in Cuba, as some of you might recall. And already we've pretty much betrayed the Ukrainian people by emboldening them into taking this stand. Even with all the weapons we are giving them, we are giving every appearance of only being willing to defend their country to the last Ukrainian. And who is going to pick up the tab for the devastation once the Rooskies pull out? I know a bunch of y'all live in this fantasyland where they will be forced to pay reparations, but that's not how this shit works. Personally IDK who will pay for it; I do know it sure as shit won't be the Russians. But y'all are transfixed by the idea that Putin is an evil madman and submersed in every horrific detail of the war the Ukrainian media puts out there. Which is their job in a time of war, but should also, for that very reason, be tinged with skepticism, i.e. why would the Russians invite civiliians to flee by a certain route, and then shell them; why would the Russians "kidnap" tens of thousands of Ukrainians (when it might be possible those are ethnic Russians needing protection from reprisals by Ukrainian partisans); or in short, not beleving what you read until it is reported by an accredited source from an at least ostensibly neutral nation. Again, neutral Ukraine is best Ukraine.
  7. well when a sovereign nations starts slaughtering the blue helmets that's when they've really gone off the reservation as far as I am concerned.
  8. Ask the people of Crimea where they would rather be. This is about popular demand, right?
  9. Putin lacks the capability to be Hitler. False analogy. The choice is not between "part of Russia" and "sovereign state." It is Russian vassal vs western vassal. Neutrality offers them a way to avoid either of those fates and ebnefit from their heretofore cursed position on the map. Again, like Belgium in the 1830s. 200 years later Belgium is the most boring and bougie country in Europe when once it was a bone to be chewed between the Protestant north and the Catholic west and the Germanic speakers and the Latinate speakers. Ukraine exists on a similar fracture zone where the differences are even more subtle. Neutralize and prosperize and if Putin can't deal with that, that's when we attack.
  10. Or alternately, we work toward a truly neutral Ukraine.
  11. Nobody on here wants to hear that kind of pussy talk, esp because so many of them are clairvoyants who can read Putin's mind. They know his secret plans for restoring the USSR and/or the institution of Pan-Slavia and know better than to go by what's he's done in the past and said he would do in the future. Why the fuck does any sane American give a flip if Ukraine gets to determine its foreign policy? Putin would not be well advised to invade a UN-occupied Ukraine and thinking he would is stupid. Y'all's minds are clouded with war fever right now. I've never seen the like, not even in the jihads against Saddam or maybe even bin-Laden, which was the one invasion I backed, but only as a limited time search and destroy misson, not a twenty year failed attempt at nation building. Someone upthread hailed this as the comeback for Neocon foreign policy. Comeback to what? When were the glory days? Where are the success stories?
  12. Why is a UN-mandated neutral Ukraine a bad idea?
  13. What? They are still under embargo to this day. If that's not insane I don't know what is.
  14. The UN. Force Russia to attack United Nations troops. If they think world opinion is against them now, see what happens then.
  15. Being among the last Strong loyalists is no more foolish than believing our CIA-led foreign policy has been right about anything, ever, and here it looks to me like we've goaded Ukraine into picking a fight they can't win. We will defend their country to the last Ukrainian. Or maybe not. The other option is WW3. Some of y'all seem think it will be a breeze but I am not so sure. Russia sucks on the road but is salty at home. 1. Putin is an autocratic thug who kills dissidents on occasion and runs a kleptocracy. That said, he is at reasonably popular in Russia. 2. Over the last 23 years, we (US-led NATO) have been backing him into a corner with two rounds of NATO expansion and worse, the promise of a third for Georgia and Ukraine. 3. We have always known Ukraine is a red line for Russia. We have always claimed it is of no strategic value to us. Why then did we promise them NATO membership? 4. He has responded militarily twice before -- in Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. This invasion should not have surprised anybody (though it did everybody, including me) because this is what he has said he would do. 5. His plans go no further than breaking Ukraine. He does not plan to occupy it, much less go blazing off into NATO-land. Maybe he would like to but he just can't, and more, doesn't have even the potential to do so. 6. To understand global strategy you must have empathy. Not sympathy, but the ability to see things from the other perspective. You continually write off any argument along these lines as Whataboutism, but, fuck it -- well, what about if Mexico suddenly aligned with Russia and wanted to put a joint base in the port of Veracruz? Or had tank muzzles casting shadows in the Rio Grande? Or if Canada and China got cozy and the Chinese fleet steamed into their new base in Vancouver? This is what Ukraine in NATO looks like to Russia. 7. So what, you say. Fuck 'em. Well, here we are. And unless you are prepared to keep escalating this until we reach ww3, this is where we will always be. There is a solution. A neutral Ukraine. Let Putin keep Crimea and the eastern provinces, but he GTFO out of the rest of the nation and we send in the Blue Helmets. He doesn't get to install a puppet -- the Ukrainians get to choose their leaders. Wealthy nations pour money into the country to rebuild. We strive to make Kyiv an international banking hub. If it's a little shady, we look the other way. There is a precedent -- albeit an imperfect one -- in the 1839 Treaty of London that assured Belgian neutrality. Belgium can be seen as a sort of western version of the Ukraine in that it lies on a linguistic (and in Belgium's case, also a religious) fault line and at the time was situated between great warring powers. The treaty was honored until 1914, and when the Germans violated it, the consequences were drastic indeed. This is the only sensible endgame for Ukraine: true neutrality. Otherwise the country will remain a chew toy in a tug of war between east and west forever.
  16. What is the endgame here? Why do we need Ukraine integrated into NATO if by our own admission, it is of no strategic value to the United States?
  17. Because that is what they want him to do. If you think what he has to say will do anything more than rile up the Russians to rally to their dear leader's cause, you are sadly mistaken. I wonder how much that fuck got paid and in what currency to be their tool.
  18. Yeah, but this place was designated in the hopes that it would be like West Mall or the OG Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park in London. Again, in the 50 years I've been going there, maybe it's been in use one time? I can't recall clearly.
  19. There is a designated "Speaker's Corner"-type spot like this in Houston and I wonder if anyone on here even knows where it is without googling. I think I've seen it in use once, by a preacher, and I've been to this place prob 100 times over the years.
  20. Graffito from the tiny shitter downstairs at Rudyard's in Houston, circa 2003: "When I found myself shitting here on a Saturday night, I knew my life was troubled. When I found myself shitting at Lola's on a Sunday afternoon, I knew my life was over." If you know you know.
  21. With Molotov-Ribbentrop, the Nazis kind of tipped their hand. If I was a Ukrainian partisan, I wouldn't see myself as anything other than a pawn, and maybe at first there were enough Ukrainians who thought that like that to render their potential service to the Nazis more trouble than they were worth....It was only when the tide started to turn that the Germans started arming and training them. It's somewhat like the South in the Civil War -- in 1863, General Patrick Cleburne sent out a top secret memo to the top brass proposing arming the slaves and freeing those who fought. Despite his badassery in the field, he could easily have swung from the gallows simply for proposing that idea. It would have defeated the Confederacy's entire purpose and the CSA leadership would have rather seen the entire Confederacy burned to the ground than living alongside their former slaves as putative equals, and so they got their wish. Poor Cleburne, an Irishman, believed all that highfalutin BS about the war being about States Rights, and at any rate, was mown down months later at the head of his men at that stupid and futile charge at the Battle of Franklin. German war aims were not quite that specific but pretty close and so they wavered on the issue of "Untermenschen" in the Wehrmacht.
  22. Mary Jane Wlliams, 1989. Wheelhouse. Reminds me of my first real lust-crush
  23. Of course they are going to draft Willis. Gotta open up that pipeline to Liberty U.
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