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Ukraine War


BehoId, The Underminer!

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1 hour and 17 minutes?  I'd rather watch the first half of the Sugar Bowl we lost to VaTech.
Could you cliff note it for us?  Needs more crypto/Chuck E. Cheese coupons?
 

My rule is simple: when someone links a lengthy video in a discussion of a political issue, I don’t watch it. Ever.

95% of the time, it’s stupid shit. If it’s well-reasoned enough to discuss, then it’s reasonable enough to write down. That, and I can read the same amount of words in an hour-long video in 5-10 mins. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
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34 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


My rule is simple: when someone links a lengthy video in a discussion of a political issue, I don’t watch it. Ever.

95% of the time, it’s stupid shit. If it’s well-reasoned enough to discuss, then it’s reasonable enough to write down. That, and I can read the same amount of words in an hour-long video in 5-10 mins. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Spoiler

My advice: stop after :45

 

 

 

 

Edited by Bullneck
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14 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

There is  0 chance he watched it himself

Of course I did. He’s worth listening to. He warned pretty clearly about the disaster that was brewing with Russia/Ukraine. Plus he has a nice, grandfatherly cadence to his speech that I find easy to listen to. 
 

1) He reiterates how preventable this was. 
 

2) At this point there’s no viable diplomatic solution. Ukraine will want territory back. Russian non starter. Russia will want guaranteed Ukrainian status as “neutral” state. Only possible with security guarantees from nato/US thus effectively Nato state. Non starter. 
 

3) Nuclear weapons on the table. Paradoxically, the better Ukraine and allies do, the more likely that nukes come into play. Ukraine without nukes has no deterrence. If great power has poor options they take extreme measures.  Cited Pearl Harbor and also our dropping nukes on Japan. His opinion, challenged pretty strongly by the interviewer, is that Russian use of any nuke on Ukrainian territory would likely result in West standing down. We’d realize that it means more to them than us and not worth thermonuclear war. He feels this risk is underplayed.

4) Believes China should be our focus. They are peer competitor so there’s a different calculus. Where he sees Ukraine as not a core strategic interest, believes we should strongly defend Taiwan. Thinks we have to defend against China having regional hegemony in Asia like we own the Western Hemisphere. 

 

Muh it’s too long I need sound bites  

 

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So here’s what you do, unlike workwithseed.

Tell us what the discussion is about, say what you agreed with, and differed from, and put some fucking time stamps to the discussion. Absolutely nobody is watching an hour video, especially if we’re the ones that have to do the critical thinking, thought explanation, and conclusions.

Fuck

Its like answering a goddamn essay question with “Please see textbook”

Edited by StassneyHorn
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5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

1) He reiterates how preventable this was. 

Of course it was preventable, but we weren't willing to assassinate Putin, and he's purged or imprisoned everybody that could be a threat to him, so actually not that preventable.  And we weren't willing to add Ukraine to NATO after Crimea was taken, since it's against the NATO charter.

Putin has been wanting this for years and has publicly made that known multiple times.  When Vladimir Putin tells you that he wants something, fucking listen to him.

5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

2) At this point there’s no viable diplomatic solution.

Russia could leave Ukrainian territory diplomatically.

5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

Ukraine will want territory back. Russian non starter.

Russia doesn't get to make that call.  

5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

3) Nuclear weapons on the table. Paradoxically, the better Ukraine and allies do, the more likely that nukes come into play.

No they aren't. Not even close. He can't drop battlefield nukes near the areas that Ukraine is pressing the Russians from, because the fallout will kill/affect the Russian soldiers as well as the people that Russians claim are pro-Russian. 

If he drops on Kyiv, he takes out a shitload of embassies from other countries, and he poisons the Dnipro which ends up in Crimea's water supply.

So that leaves Western/Southwestern Ukraine, which risks drifting into NATO territory. That's a worst-case scenario as Article 5 kicks in.  

And even if he could magically avoid all of the pitfalls above, he's been strongly warned by the United States, NATO, and China not to do the nuke thing.  Putin is ultimately a bully, and therefore a coward, as evidenced by his fear of either COVID or assassination attempts (witness his long tables), and this fuckery means a lot of people will come hard for him.

5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

 His opinion, challenged pretty strongly by the interviewer, is that Russian use of any nuke on Ukrainian territory would likely result in West standing down. We’d realize that it means more to them than us and not worth thermonuclear war. He feels this risk is underplayed.

Then he's a fucking moron if he thinks the West will back down.  And there is nowhere he could drop nukes that wouldn't kill a shitload of civilians.  Which means that even if we don't attack Russia, the current sanctions and limited isolation we see now will pale in comparison to the full-on isolation that will occur when China closes its borders to Russia, when Iran and India and Syria, etc. all end their relationships with Russia, .  Nobody wants that kind of Russian stink attached to them.

5 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

believes we should strongly defend Taiwan. Thinks we have to defend against China having regional hegemony in Asia like we own the Western Hemisphere. 

Which we are doing.  And Taiwan has a far easier task since they have a big-ass 100 mile moat between them and mainland China - those civilian cruise ships that China would press into service show up really fucking big on radar, because, you know, they have this huge fucking radar signature.  And Taiwan has far better toys than the Ukrainians had back in February, and Taiwan has had 8 months to see what works well.

But again, Taiwan has 100 miles of ocean between them and China.

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51 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Then he's a fucking moron if he thinks the West will back down

I don’t know, but do you see the whole world deciding to blow itself up over Ukraine? I don’t. You have a lot invested in this, but you have to think reasonably. 
 

Basically all the hawks like yourself underestimate the consequences of pushing a great power to the brink. 
 

50 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Nukes. He is concerned about nukes. Ok, we all are. If Putin launches something we will be ready to kick his ass.

Kick his Ass! Calm down keyboard warrior, you’re going to get us incinerated while you’re mowing a lawn. 
 

I’m glad you’re not in charge. You’re arguing against the realist view. You would risk global nuclear war over Ukraine. I wouldn’t. That’s straight up regarded. Give me a break. 

Edited by Humble Beast
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8 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Of course I did. He’s worth listening to. He warned pretty clearly about the disaster that was brewing with Russia/Ukraine. Plus he has a nice, grandfatherly cadence to his speech that I find easy to listen to. 
 

1) He reiterates how preventable this was. 
 

2) At this point there’s no viable diplomatic solution. Ukraine will want territory back. Russian non starter. Russia will want guaranteed Ukrainian status as “neutral” state. Only possible with security guarantees from nato/US thus effectively Nato state. Non starter. 
 

3) Nuclear weapons on the table. Paradoxically, the better Ukraine and allies do, the more likely that nukes come into play. Ukraine without nukes has no deterrence. If great power has poor options they take extreme measures.  Cited Pearl Harbor and also our dropping nukes on Japan. His opinion, challenged pretty strongly by the interviewer, is that Russian use of any nuke on Ukrainian territory would likely result in West standing down. We’d realize that it means more to them than us and not worth thermonuclear war. He feels this risk is underplayed.

4) Believes China should be our focus. They are peer competitor so there’s a different calculus. Where he sees Ukraine as not a core strategic interest, believes we should strongly defend Taiwan. Thinks we have to defend against China having regional hegemony in Asia like we own the Western Hemisphere. 

 

Muh it’s too long I need sound bites  

 

you're such a traitor cunt

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7 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

I don’t know, but do you see the whole world deciding to blow itself up over Ukraine? I don’t. You have a lot invested in this, but you have to think reasonably. 
 

Basically all the hawks like yourself underestimate the consequences of pushing a great power to the brink. 
 

Kick his Ass! Calm down keyboard warrior, you’re going to get us incinerated while you’re mowing a lawn. 
 

I’m glad you’re not in charge. You’re arguing against the realist view. You would risk global nuclear war over Ukraine. I wouldn’t. That’s straight up regarded. Give me a break. 

Holy shit you are a simpleton.  NOW I understand the mind behind your obsession with crypto.  

Negged for being disingenuous.  

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41 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Mearsheimer:

 

 

Hey, anybody want to know who else is a realist?  Me.  "Bullneck, American Realist."  Seriously the dude must not have any qualifications at all.

Also, I'm sure MB is jacking off looking at that Real Wood furniture and book shelves with all those books and LOOK AT THE BIG GLOBE.  The whole world is on that globe.  Those people do whole world shit in that room.  And the dictionary!  For looking up words!  That's a straight up knowledge room.  Move that room to 'Merica, add a hanging vine plant or two, get a 'Merican flag, and a eagle statue and you could rule the world.  Seriously, that's not an office, it's a museum.

(Edit: who is Balzas Orban?  The Hungarian version of Donald Trump, Jr.?)

Edited by Bullneck
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9 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Calm down keyboard warrior, you’re going to get us incinerated while you’re mowing a lawn. 

I do agree that we risk our lives more by not appeasing, but that means going from 1% to 5.  I also think appeasement kills a lot of Ukrainians and ends their self determination.  And of course appeasement is usually part of the journey, not the end of it.  
 

In other words, we need to remember that appeasement is selfish.  We need to bear some risk to make the world better overall. 

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12 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

Kick his Ass! Calm down keyboard warrior, you’re going to get us incinerated while you’re mowing a lawn. 

So appease the murderer? Just give him what he wants?

Fuck off. 

Ahb laid it out clearly why he won't or can't. You concern trolling isn't going to make your stash of rubles worth any more.

There isn't going to be a nuclear war. No matter how much you or Mearsheimer want to scare us into thinking it's possible.

So, since you won't shut the hell up with the bullshit and it's a gray and drizzly Friday prepare for the negs.

 

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8 hours ago, Bullneck said:

Hey, anybody want to know who else is a realist?  Me.  "Bullneck, American Realist."  Seriously the dude must not have any qualifications at all.

Also, I'm sure MB is jacking off looking at that Real Wood furniture and book shelves with all those books and LOOK AT THE BIG GLOBE.  The whole world is on that globe.  Those people do whole world shit in that room.  And the dictionary!  For looking up words!  That's a straight up knowledge room.  Move that room to 'Merica, add a hanging vine plant or two, get a 'Merican flag, and a eagle statue and you could rule the world.  Seriously, that's not an office, it's a museum.

(Edit: who is Balzas Orban?  The Hungarian version of Donald Trump, Jr.?)

Balzas Orban is not related by blood to Viktor but is sort of the intellectual firepower/apologist behind Viktor. He’s his advisor and confidant and grey cardinal. 
 

Mearsheimer wrote some great books including one that can be called a classic of IR theory and now became an asshole. He’s proving the adage that if the only people who like what you’re saying  are assholes, then you’re one too. Note also that he’s a general IR theorist and not an expert on Putin or Zelenskyy or Ukraine.  He’s not even fairly a dilettante. 
 

It’s not worth engaging on his ideas, especially ad they’re presented here. They’ve been addressed at length. At this point he’s just a useful idiot for the Kremlin. What’s the chef’s kiss is seeing someone who watches YouTube videos acting like he’s got some amazing insight.  We’re all just a bunch of assholes here but anyone who follows this thread and the one in DT will pick up that some assholes actually know shit about fuck.

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I also want to drop here, for whomever it’s helpful, what it means when Mearsheimer says he’s a realist. Because being an IR scholar realist is not a reflection of actual reality. As with any theory, it’s complicated but they all agree on the following:

- The international system is completely anarchic

- States are the only real actors (not leaders, individuals, supranational orgs, corporations, etc….) AND they are basically billiard balls that bounce off each other in pre-determined ways. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether it’s Bush or Gore or Putin or Yeltsin or Chamberlain or Churchill. 

- States are selfish and pursue their own narrow self-interest at the expense of others 

- States are narrowly obsessed with power and security above everything else 

People like Mearsheimer sniff down their nose at people who do things like learn languages or learn about people like Putin as irrelevant. It’s an attempt to turn something absolutely non-scientific (war, peace, diplomacy) and irrational into a science. (A big unstated reason for this is political science jealousy of real science).

It should be obvious to anyone but a simpleton that this way of looking at how countries interact is at best grossly simplified and at worst not a great representation of reality. And simpletons seize on the term “realism”’ as some sort of trump card because after all, who wants to be “unrealistic”). 

Edited by 956 Worldwide
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7 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

People like Mearsheimer sniff down their nose at people who do things like learn languages or learn about people like Putin as irrelevant.

This is something that really annoys me about some IR scholars.   Really fucking pisses me off.

Putin has publicly told the world for a long time that he intended to finish taking over Ukraine after 2014.   Way too many of these people ignored that (especially in the run up to last February) and just would not account for the actions of an irrational totalitarian leader, even though he published a paper about it last year, even though his official propagandists talked about it.  Hell, I bought into some of that, thinking that the cost would be too much to bear for the country, ignoring the fact that Putin was obsessed with doing what he said he would do.

It was literally a case of “listen to what he says, he’s literally telling you who he is and what he intends to do.”

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A nuclear exchange is inevitable. (I don't mean specifically this conflict) That was always going to be the case when we invented the bomb. If the US didn't, someone else was not far behind. When have humans ever failed to use a technology? If it CAN happen, it WILL. The best we can do is work to mitigate it.

Appeasement will not work. And there will be a lot more pain to come regardless.

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I think it’s inevitable as well, although it’s possible it’ll just be one side.  Either a non-state actor or something like Pakistan/India spiraling out of control when the wrong person/group is running Pakistan. 

As the memory of what a actual nuclear bomb drop looks like recedes out of living memory, I think the chances of this go up. If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that otherwise intelligent people have huge gaps in their understanding and are willing to make very strident claims based on arguments thin as cotton candy. If you think it’s an option to nuke a hurricane, and millions of people nod and say, “Yup, he’s right” anything can happen. And that’s here in the worlds leading nuke holding country.
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I think this is more likely: there will be a day in which every single human alive on the planet will not see a nuke used against an enemy in their lives.  
 

In about 35 years, all those alive in 1945 will be dead.  And for the next 120 years after it it doesn’t happen again as power continues to consolidate with people that want stability. 
 

The list is already long of nuclear powers getting into non nuclear wars. That even includes wars the nuclear power lost.  

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On 12/4/2022 at 7:32 AM, Chad Fuck said:

As the memory of what a actual nuclear bomb drop looks like recedes out of living memory, I think the chances of this go up. If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that otherwise intelligent people have huge gaps in their understanding and are willing to make very strident claims based on arguments thin as cotton candy. If you think it’s an option to nuke a hurricane, and millions of people nod and say, “Yup, he’s right” anything can happen. And that’s here in the worlds leading nuke holding country.

I see this all the time with people in their 20s and 30s (and even early 40s) who didn't grow up knowing somebody who fought in WWII, and they have a hard time grasping the Holocaust, or even something much more recent such as the moon landings.  For them, it's something very vague that was in a school book or on some documentary on  TV that they were flipping through, and there is very little there to resonant with them, which is why they don't get alarmed about the fucking nutcases denying the Holocaust or the moon landings or whatever.  It's like armybrat having a very vague memory about the War of 1812, because he was a couple of generations removed from it.

On 12/4/2022 at 7:37 AM, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

I think this is more likely: there will be a day in which every single human alive on the planet will not see a nuke used against an enemy in their lives.  

I would love to believe this, but if the dudes who flew into the WTC on 9/11 had an easy way get a nuke and then get it into downtown NYC, they would have done so, as would the various ISIS groups.

On 12/4/2022 at 7:37 AM, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

The list is already long of nuclear powers getting into non nuclear wars. That even includes wars the nuclear power lost.  

It's because we know the repercussions would be too severe, and because we actually give a shit if we were to suddenly be isolated from the rest of the world.

Even though Putin is an irrational actor and and pretty fucking stupid in a lot of areas, to the point where he's willing to tank his country's economy and kill over a hundred thousand Russians and wound/maim hundreds of thousands more, he's also very much aware that using nukes or bio/chemical weapons in Ukraine will mean a truly complete isolation of his country and its people, along with probably putting him on a hit list of sorts.  China, India, Saudi Arabia, etc. will be done with him, because none of them will want to be put on the same sanctions list as Russia (plus China would feel Russia is wildly unstable at that point, and that's not something they want to deal with).

I'm not worried about existing state actors though (outside of Pakistan and that's more about losing control of their nukes).  It's the fucking ISIS/Al Qaeda types.  Or it's Saudi Arabia getting one and giving it to a third party to hit Iran with.  For these people, the "fight" that they are in is an existential crisis in their minds, and they'd be more than happy to annihilate their enemies, regardless of the fallout (no pun intended even though it's there).  If you told the Saudis they could completely decapitate Iran in one shot by helping a third party out, some of those Saudis would jump on it in a heartbeat.

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It's because we know the repercussions would be too severe, and because we actually give a shit if we were to suddenly be isolated from the rest of the world.
Even though Putin is an irrational actor and and pretty fucking stupid in a lot of areas, to the point where he's willing to tank his country's economy and kill over a hundred thousand Russians and wound/maim hundreds of thousands more, he's also very much aware that using nukes or bio/chemical weapons in Ukraine will mean a truly complete isolation of his country and its people, along with probably putting him on a hit list of sorts.  China, India, Saudi Arabia, etc. will be done with him, because none of them will want to be put on the same sanctions list as Russia (plus China would feel Russia is wildly unstable at that point, and that's not something they want to deal with).
I'm not worried about existing state actors though (outside of Pakistan and that's more about losing control of their nukes).  It's the fucking ISIS/Al Qaeda types.  Or it's Saudi Arabia getting one and giving it to a third party to hit Iran with.  For these people, the "fight" that they are in is an existential crisis in their minds, and they'd be more than happy to annihilate their enemies, regardless of the fallout (no pun intended even though it's there).  If you told the Saudis they could completely decapitate Iran in one shot by helping a third party out, some of those Saudis would jump on it in a heartbeat.

I’m just quoting for the War of 1812 shout out. Well done.
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On 12/2/2022 at 4:04 PM, Huckleberry said:

When the world is faced with an expansion hungry megalomaniac in charge of a world power the best and most peaceful long-term solution is to violently crush him as soon as possible.

We must violently crush the warmonger to preserve peace says man living under the most violently expansionist regime on earth

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1 hour ago, Pig Bellmont said:

[buzzer] I’m sorry. We would have accepted The Mongols or the British Empire. This is laughably incorrect 

even if he just meant present day, i can't see how it even makes sense.  the biden regime is violently expansionist?  isn't it just the opposite?  we get criticized by how sudden our withdrawals have been.

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26 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

even if he just meant present day, i can't see how it even makes sense.  the biden regime is violently expansionist?  isn't it just the opposite?  we get criticized by how sudden our withdrawals have been.

I think he's still blaming John Tyler.

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27 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

even if he just meant present day, i can't see how it even makes sense.  the biden regime is violently expansionist?  isn't it just the opposite?  we get criticized by how sudden our withdrawals have been.

The troll is just spouting Russian propaganda. He’s not trying to make sense. Just neg him and move on. 

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