Ukraine Crisis

[Sculptor]

"Go get 'em, boy!"

I would give up everything I got to have my record expunged and given a visa so I could go over there and fight for the Ukrainians. That shit over there is like straight guerilla warfare, bro, and I'd be like a veritable Che Guevara 2.0. I would thrive in that environment, and when it was all over I would be revered as a national hero, even if we lost. You know how many Svetlanas and Natalias would want to get with me, dude?

Real shit man. My life over here is so excruciatingly boring I'd be on a plane in a minute if I could.

Bullshit alert.!!!

Just fuck off and go. Wot no passport?? Wot never been out of your hometown?

[henry quirk]

I found out who Henry has been watching...

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=50809 ... &ref=notif

[popeye1945]

Dear philosophers, please read the brief interview below from lifelong US political activist and dissident Noam Chomsky. Is the US pursuing an antiquated foreign policy based on Cold War strategy and concerns? Should we leave Ukraine a neutral country? After what happened to Russia in two world wars in the previous century is Russia "justified" in feeling threatened by Ukraine potentially joining NATO? Should we allow Russia/Putin to have some breathing room as it were--by making Ukraine a neutral state--so that Russia doesn't feel threatened from the West? Is it OK to make concessions to avoid stoking the flames of a potential conflict between two nuclear-armed states?

https://chomsky.info/20211223/
What are your thoughts?

Hi Gary,

Take a look at the colonial expansion of the United States, it has a long history of colonialism, not quite the same brand as the British Empire. The British would make war on a native population until they were subdued, then take over the governing of the colony/another form of slavery. With the first world war the British became aware that they could not get all their own way in the world anymore, they needed the United States, and so, a slow transition of power began, the States filling the void the British left behind. Unlike the British the States colonized with their corporations, economic colonialism with puppet governments doing its biding, still the natives needed beating down now and then and still do. The point is I think, both are empires and empires desire only two things, expansion, and survival by any means necessary. One thing I noticed about the American empire, it accuses other countries of doing what it is itself doing or about to do. Empires are innately aggressive and this is the situation with the Ukraine situation the states moving ever eastward is a direct threat to the Russian people, a reckless aggression I might add, for the American empire is a nasty piece of work, and they put the world at large in jeapordy. If you have any fingers of accusation to point, point them at the American empire. The apple pie rotted long ago!

[promethean75]

Because the political class, which is not the working class, competes to obtain, increase, and maintain profits secured by trading commodities and services produced by the citizens of the countries they govern. The world, under this model, is a perpetual economic war between nations and countries. What is to be noted is that the political class, by and large, does not suffer the decisions they make. The working citizens do. The only way to resolve this nonsense is to raise the working citizens to the level of government and excise the political class.

How much do you imagine the typical working middle class Russian has in common with the typical working middle class Ukrainian? Quite a bit, yeah? So then why are they fighting each other? A long story, that. Has to do with drawing imaginary lines in the dirt to divide the proletariat so that they will fight each other to defend the wealth of the ruling classes that govern each imaginary country.

[Belinda]

Because the political class, which is not the working class, competes to obtain, increase, and maintain profits secured by trading commodities and services produced by the citizens of the countries they govern. The world, under this model, is a perpetual economic war between nations and countries. What is to be noted is that the political class, by and large, does not suffer the decisions they make. The working citizens do. The only way to resolve this nonsense is to raise the working citizens to the level of government and excise the political class.

How much do you imagine the typical working middle class Russian has in common with the typical working middle class Ukrainian? Quite a bit, yeah? So then why are they fighting each other? A long story, that. Has to do with drawing imaginary lines in the dirt to divide the proletariat so that they will fight each other to defend the wealth of the ruling classes that govern each imaginary country.

But the proletariat of both countries don't want Russian style police-state kleptocracy.

[iambiguous]

Read it and weep?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... r-threats/

On Feb. 27, Vladimir Putin, a commander in chief with an estimated 1,588 deployed nuclear warheads and 2,889 in reserve at his disposal, issued an apocalyptic threat by putting Russia’s nuclear forces on alert and transferring “the deterrence forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty.” It was the second ominous warning in one week from the Russian dictator, who faces no constraints on his decision-making. Earlier he had warned that any country that interfered with his war in Ukraine would face “consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”

Only one other country in the world, the United States, has the same nuclear capability (1,644 deployed warheads and 1,964 in reserve). But no U.S. president has ever made such a threat. Until this week, no Russian or Soviet leader had ever uttered such frightening words.

As codified in the New START pact signed in 2010, the United States and Russia committed to maintaining mutually assured destruction (MAD). Neither country can win a nuclear war. Both countries, as well as much of the world, would be completely destroyed by a nuclear exchange. Only a madman would entertain launching a nuclear attack against either the United States or Russia.

Putin’s threat reveals his frustration and desperation. In invading Ukraine, he has miscalculated. After 22 years in power, he is now profoundly isolated, surrounded only by yes men who have cut him off from accurate knowledge about the resilience of the Ukrainian people, the resolve of the West, the low morale for this war within his army and the unpopularity within Russian society of the senseless invasion. The initial attack has not gone according to plan. Now Putin feels cornered and compelled to double down: both in the conduct of the war and in words. His recent emotional statements suggest instability. Rational leaders do not hint at launching a nuclear holocaust.

Putin has a long history of engaging in highly risky behavior: authorizing assassination attacks across Europe; ordering an invasion with alleged war crimes in Syria; interfering in repeated U.S. and European elections; poisoning political opponents in Russia with chemical weapons; and invading Georgia once and Ukraine now twice, followed by annexation and recognition of regions of these two countries as independent entities. More than ever, his decision-making is marked by this willingness to take risks and his arrogant dismissal of advice.

On the international stage, Putin thinks he has only one peer, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and one central enemy, President Biden. Earlier in his career, he maintained warm relations with several Western leaders, including German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and even President George W. Bush for a time. Aside from Xi, he respects no other international leader today. He is alone — and evidently listens to no one.

It is the job of intelligence officers to assess probabilities about security outcomes, including nuclear war. My guess is that those estimates are still very low. But even if they are at 0.1 percent, the job of policymakers is to shape and decrease these probabilities. The horrific consequences of being wrong about nuclear warfare are too great to not do everything to reduce its likelihood.

First, Biden was right to respond to Putin’s threats by declining to raise the alert status of U.S. nuclear forces. He and European leaders should continue this policy of restraint. It serves no purpose to match Putin’s maniacal threats with others that would only increase international panic.

Second, every nuclear power in the world must reach out privately to Moscow to seek clarification about Russia’s position. In January, the five major nuclear powers signed a new declaration that affirmed “nuclear weapons … should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war” and also avowed “none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.” Every leader who signed this declaration, especially Xi, should call Putin to confirm his commitment to this document.

Given the disturbing and likely falsified referendum in Belarus this week reversing the country’s non-nuclear status, these leaders should also remind Putin of Russia’s commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In parallel, and maybe more importantly, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley should call his counterpart, Chief of the Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, to seek the same reassurances. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin should do the same with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Third, Biden must signal to Putin — again, privately — that the United States and the West would be prepared to relax sanctions if Putin withdraws his soldiers from Ukraine. If Putin continues his slaughter of innocent civilians or arrests and kills President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, this offer ought to be withdrawn. But, today, Putin should be offered a way out of the corner in which he has trapped himself.

Tragically, Putin’s increasingly unhinged discourse, coupled with inhumane war tactics, suggests that he has little interest in off-ramps regarding his war in Ukraine. Let’s hope he can still be persuaded to back down from future threats of using nuclear weapons.

Also...

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN in the NYT:

The good news for most?

"The most important innovation in this war is the use of the economic equivalent of a nuclear bomb, simultaneously deployed by a superpower and by superempowered people. The United States, along with the European Union and Britain, has imposed sanctions on Russia that are crippling its economy, critically threatening companies and shattering the savings of millions of Russians at an unprecedented speed and scope that bring to mind a nuclear blast."

The bad news for all?

"Putin has now figured that out — and said so explicitly on Saturday: The U.S.- and E.U.-led sanctions are 'akin to a declaration of war.' (Vladimir, you haven’t felt the half of it yet.)

"If the economic nuclear bomb that the United States and its allies just detonated in Russia crushes its economy as quickly and deeply as I suspect it will, there is a danger, however remote, that Putin will go to greater, even unthinkable extremes, like launching a real nuclear weapon."

Just in case...

https://www.survivenature.com/fallout-s ... ear-me.php
https://www.ready.gov/nuclear-explosion

[iambiguous]

NYT headline:

"Hit by Sanctions, Russia Accuses U.S. of 'Economic War'"

How can this not all come down to what is "here and now" unfolding in the mind of but a single human being. But one who has the power to launch an actual nuclear war!

Can the existential nature of dasein be any clearer?

There is what motivates Putin, and there are all those pontificating [philosophically or otherwise] as to what ought to motivate him.

Then the part where those who gloat about how the West is crippling Russia come face to face with the possible consequences of that if Putin does threaten nuclear retaliation if the sanctions aren't lifted.

What if nuclear war takes them out?

Each morning now many wake-up dreading what the headlines might be.

Shades of the Cuban Missile Crisis for some of us.

[iambiguous]

In fact, here is Thomas L. Friedman coming to grips with what may well be at stake here now for us...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opin ... a-war.html

"Putin Has No Good Way Out, and That Really Scares Me"

"If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.

"I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks will radiate from Russia — this country that is the world’s third-largest oil producer and possesses some 6,000 nuclear warheads — when it loses a war of choice that was spearheaded by one man, who can never afford to admit defeat."

And...

"So either he cuts his losses now and eats crow — and hopefully for him escapes enough sanctions to revive the Russian economy and hold onto power — or faces a forever war against Ukraine and much of the world, which will slowly sap Russia’s strength and collapse its infrastructure.

"As he seems hellbent on the latter, I am terrified. Because there is only one thing worse than a strong Russia under Putin — and that’s a weak, humiliated, disorderly Russia that could fracture or be in a prolonged internal leadership turmoil, with different factions wrestling for power and with all of those nuclear warheads, cybercriminals and oil and gas wells lying around.

"Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world."

So, are you ready to die for Ukraine?

[iambiguous]

And then the age-old "idealism" vs. "realism" debate regarding foreign policy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/opin ... -west.html

Ross Douthat at the NYT:

'It’s a curious feature of Western debate since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that a school of thought that predicted some version of this conflict has been depicted as discredited by the partial fulfillment of its prophecies.

'From the 1990s to the 2010s, from George Kennan’s opposition to NATO expansion to John Mearsheimer’s critique of American involvement in Ukraine, thinkers associated with foreign policy realism — the school known for its cold-eyed expectation of great power conflict, its doubts about idealistic visions of world order — argued that the attempt to integrate Russia’s borderlands into Western institutions and alliances was poisoning relations with Moscow, making great-power conflict more likely, and exposing nations like Ukraine to disastrous risks.

'“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,” Mearsheimer averred in 2015, “and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

'But now that Ukraine is, in fact, being wrecked by a Russian invasion, there’s a widespread view that his realist worldview lies in ruins too — that Mearsheimer has “lost his reputation and credibility” (to quote the Portuguese thinker Bruno Maçães) and that the realist conception of nations as “pieces in a game of Risk” with “eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals” (to quote Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic) should be discarded on the evidence of Vladimir Putin’s invasion and the Ukrainian response.'

Or, perhaps, as Bob Dylan once speculated...

"Democracy don't rule the world
You better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that's better left unsaid"

[seeds]

...here is Thomas L. Friedman coming to grips with what may well be at stake here now for us...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opin ... a-war.html

"Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world."

So, are you ready to die for Ukraine?

Alluding to something I have ranted about in other threads, if you are an American, then it's not a question of being ready to die for Ukraine. No, it's a matter of being ready to die from the necrotizing returns from the negative karma we've been sowing across the globe for the last seven or so decades.

And part of that necrotizing karma has come to us in the form of this cancerous tumor...



...eating away at the "brain" of the American political system.

Furthermore, what really blows my mind is the witnessing of the stunningly brazen display of hypocrisy of Americans condemning Russia for invading Ukraine after what we did (and are still doing) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm reminded of a news report I watched the other day in which a commentator (David Ignatius) spoke of the fear and anguish that a Ukrainian mother must have felt as she tried to comfort her child as a Russian jet flew by.

To which I thought to myself, yeah, but probably nowhere near the anguish that those Afghans experienced as they picked up the pieces of their children who were blown to bits by one of America's missiles a few months ago.

Now, of course, I'm not defending Putin's madness in any way, I am simply pointing out how, again, the hypocrisy of America's response to all of this is off the charts, and I'm getting sick of it.
_______

[iambiguous]

...here is Thomas L. Friedman coming to grips with what may well be at stake here now for us...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opin ... a-war.html

"Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world."

So, are you ready to die for Ukraine?

Alluding to something I have ranted about in other threads, if you are an American, then it's not a question of being ready to die for Ukraine. No, it's a matter of being ready to die from the necrotizing returns from the negative karma we've been sowing across the globe for the last seven or so decades.

And part of that necrotizing karma has come to us in the form of this cancerous tumor...



...eating away at the "brain" of the American political system.

Furthermore, what really blows my mind is the witnessing of the stunningly brazen display of hypocrisy of Americans condemning Russia for invading Ukraine after what we did (and are still doing) in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm reminded of a news report I watched the other day in which a commentator (David Ignatius) spoke of the fear and anguish that a Ukrainian mother must have felt as she tried to comfort her child as a Russian jet flew by.

To which I thought to myself, yeah, but probably nowhere near the anguish that those Afghans experienced as they picked up the pieces of their children who were blown to bits by one of America's missiles a few months ago.

Now, of course, I'm not defending Putin's madness in any way, I am simply pointing out how, again, the hypocrisy of America's response to all of this is off the charts, and I'm getting sick of it.
_______

I agree with your assessment of American hypocrisy. It tries to portray its own foreign policy as predicated on human rights and on spreading freedom and democracy, when in fact over the decades it has put into power and then sustained some of the most brutal dictatorial thug regimes the planet has ever seen.

Both Democrats and Republicans have pursued the same realpolitik agenda abroad. The pursuit of cheap labor, markets and natural resources. At least overall.

After all, if America was serious about regime change in places like Russia and China and Saudi Arabia and many other autocratic nations, it would forbid American companies from doing business there until the countries become true democracies.

With Ukraine though we are talking about the potential for nuclear war. The more the hard-liners insist that America must confront Russia more aggressively -- no fly zones, the introduction of America troops etc. -- the more they might be risking their own skins in the event Putin truly is a "madman", willing to go all out in pursuit of his own agenda.

For some that might change everything.

[Sculptor]

I agree with your assessment of American hypocrisy. It tries to portray its own foreign policy as predicated on human rights and on spreading freedom and democracy, when in fact over the decades it has put into power and then sustained some of the most brutal dictatorial thug regimes the planet has ever seen.

Both Democrats and Republicans have pursued the same realpolitik agenda abroad. The pursuit of cheap labor, markets and natural resources. At least overall.

After all, if America was serious about regime change in places like Russia and China and Saudi Arabia and many other autocratic nations, it would forbid American companies from doing business there until the countries become true democracies.

With Ukraine though we are talking about the potential for nuclear war. The more the hard-liners insist that America must confront Russia more aggressively -- no fly zones, the introduction of America troops etc. -- the more they might be risking their own skins in the event Putin truly is a "madman", willing to go all out in pursuit of his own agenda.

For some that might change everything.

Ukraine is no exception here.
The EU and the UK have been courting the Ukraine for a couple of decades encouraging and supporting the middle class/ right wing coup in 2014 and disrespecting the stability of the neutral zone.
Now the shit has hit the fan they have pretty much left the Ukraine to fend for itself.
The eastwards expansion of the Western Sphere was always going to have this result.

[promethean75]

"in the event Putin truly is a madman"

It'll never happen. Even now among the ranks of the highest generals, there is talk about a coup to stop Putin from pushing the button. I promise ya.

The only way a nuclear war will start will be if a religious zealot - likely a Muslim - lights a dirty bomb of low grade uranium made in a garage somewhere.

[Dontaskme]

Non-violence is violence.

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

- Carl Sagan

The Violent Universe.

Nothing Changes.

The rest is history, and history always repeats. Said when something that has happened in the past recurs in the present. Because there is only the present.

The idea of the eternal return—the prospect of having to live one's life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy—becomes all the more potent when one thinks about having to relive that life, to its terrible end.

Oneness had no argument with itself. Opposition is the death of I

But no one wants to die. The battle battles on infinitely for eternity within the illusory dream of separation, aka opposition.

Resistance is futile.

[Dontaskme]

Dear philosophers.

If the West’s aim/ goal is to expand. And the East’s aim/ goal is to expand.

Where is the red line going to be drawn?

Said of two things are too different to ever be agreeable or harmonious. East is East and West is West, you won't waste time trying to convert people to your views.

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet?