Is self defense immoral for nations or individuals?

[Hereward]

Putin renounced the lease in 2014 on the grounds that the base was now a part of Russia. Even if he hadn’t, the attack on Ukraine would have rendered it moot.

[Varysblackfyre321]

14 hours ago, Werthead said:

suspect in the long term some nuances will emerge, but these will be things like Ukrainian soldiers perhaps not treating Russian POWs

For example parading them in front of the camera to talk shit about their country.

Insuring that the soldiers could never go home without fear of being imprisoned or murdered.

@Ser Scot A Ellison I implore you to change the title of the thread to something to the degree of proportion one can engage in for self defense 

[Varysblackfyre321]

17 hours ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Yeah, it's all spoken with the same tone deafness as Trump's "both sides" remark the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. 

He’s not saying Nazis are good: he’s just saying they’re not worse than their opposition.

This is nuance

[Darzin]

Sevastopol is administrativley seperate from the Republic of Crimea within the Russian Federation. A direct vote in Crimea as it is set up now would still leave Sevastapol in Russia. Which might end up being important in an eventual compromise.

[SeanF]

On 5/6/2022 at 12:14 PM, Heartofice said:

I'd say we are almost certainly being fed quite a bit of positive propaganda from Ukraine, and over time we will learn that the Ukrainians have committed some pretty appalling acts, as well as the Russians. This wouldn't be surprising at all, because it is a war, we shouldn't be idealist in what occurs in war, horrible things happen. 

None of it really changes the main facts of the war, those being that Russia invaded Ukraine. There is a tendency by some to just become distracted from that main point and focus on 'things they aren't telling you'.. which I think is a little irrelevant.

Fair point.  It would be astonishing if Ukrainian soldiers have not committed war crimes.  But the balance of good and evil is pretty clear cut, in this case.

[Rippounet]

News of the day: absolutely appaling.

It's now increasingly certain that the Biden administration has, in fact, no clue about what it is doing, and is gambling with nothing else than the collective fate of humanity, as we now find ourselves in the cosmically-ironic situation where we must count on Putin being the sanest of individuals. In other words, we must now hope that Western propaganda is in fact 100% wrong about Putin - which it most probably isn't.

This is where a morality-based foreign policy gets us, to the point where you have to count on your enemy being more rational than you are. Utter madness. As if there were no alternatives! But of course, it was too tempting to go down the self-righteous route, just to remind the world that you do actually believe in your own shit, so no one gets to fuck with the pax americana. No one gets to out-bully the US of A, no sir, and certainly not the sick, dying autocrat of Russia.

Who would have thought Donald fucking Trump was actually the better option for the world... Though in retrospect, history did show us how dangerous the Democrats could be, so the writing was probably on the wall all along.
And to add irony upon irony, the latest Star Trek show basically tells us that World War 3 is our future, but that we'll grow past that kind of nonsense some day. Those of us who'll make it, that is, and it seems it won't be us in the West after all, as we're hell-bent on preparing our own come-uppance. Not undeserved, I guess.

Hysterics aside, seven hells. I hoped I was wrong last month, and I hope I'm wrong today. Regardless of the outcome, these are some deeply foolish choices. I guess that, as bad as things are, you can always count on a US government to make them worse somehow. Bravo!

[Heartofice]

What is that in reference to? I haven't seen anything that would make sense.

[Darzin]

Me neither. Also this exact same thing has happened in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. It's hardly anything new. Hell Korea had actual Soviet pilots participating. 

[Consigliere]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

What is that in reference to? I haven't seen anything that would make sense.

I'm assuming he's talking about Biden signing the Ukraine lend-lease act into law.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/

[Heartofice]

22 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

I'm assuming he's talking about Biden signing the Ukraine lend-lease act into law.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/

So how is this different to the way countries have been supplying arms to the Ukraine already?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

News of the day: absolutely appaling.

It's now increasingly certain that the Biden administration has, in fact, no clue about what it is doing, and is gambling with nothing else than the collective fate of humanity, as we now find ourselves in the cosmically-ironic situation where we must count on Putin being the sanest of individuals. In other words, we must now hope that Western propaganda is in fact 100% wrong about Putin - which it most probably isn't.

This is where a morality-based foreign policy gets us, to the point where you have to count on your enemy being more rational than you are. Utter madness. As if there were no alternatives! But of course, it was too tempting to go down the self-righteous route, just to remind the world that you do actually believe in your own shit, so no one gets to fuck with the pax americana. No one gets to out-bully the US of A, no sir, and certainly not the sick, dying autocrat of Russia.

Who would have thought Donald fucking Trump was actually the better option for the world... Though in retrospect, history did show us how dangerous the Democrats could be, so the writing was probably on the wall all along.
And to add irony upon irony, the latest Star Trek show basically tells us that World War 3 is our future, but that we'll grow past that kind of nonsense some day. Those of us who'll make it, that is, and it seems it won't be us in the West after all, as we're hell-bent on preparing our own come-uppance. Not undeserved, I guess.

Hysterics aside, seven hells. I hoped I was wrong last month, and I hope I'm wrong today. Regardless of the outcome, these are some deeply foolish choices. I guess that, as bad as things are, you can always count on a US government to make them worse somehow. Bravo!

Can you please unpack your statement?  I certainly have no idea what news you are referring to?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

27 minutes ago, Consigliere said:

I'm assuming he's talking about Biden signing the Ukraine lend-lease act into law.

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/

That doesn’t make sense.  How is that different from what has happened before?

[Consigliere]

Just now, Heartofice said:

So how is this different to the way countries have been supplying arms to the Ukraine already?

It just expedites the process of sending military aid to Ukraine.

 

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That doesn’t make sense.  How is that different from what has happened before?

Dunno. Rippounet will have to answer for himself. His post was moaning about Biden though and the only thing Biden has done recently wrt Ukraine was signing the lend-lease act into law so that seemed like the most likely cause for his post.

[Gorn]

IMO, the only way to assure long-term world peace is to make sure that aggression against other countries is forcefully responded to, that nuclear blackmail never works, and that any autocrat making a risk-reward calculation about starting a war of conquest gives up on it as more trouble than it is worth.

The only correct answer to a WMD threat is to ignore it. The world in which "nuclear diplomacy" becomes normalized is the world in which a nuclear war is almost certain to start, because eventually an actual red line for one of the nuke-owning powers will be reached.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

News of the day: absolutely appaling.

It's now increasingly certain that the Biden administration has, in fact, no clue about what it is doing, and is gambling with nothing else than the collective fate of humanity, as we now find ourselves in the cosmically-ironic situation where we must count on Putin being the sanest of individuals. In other words, we must now hope that Western propaganda is in fact 100% wrong about Putin - which it most probably isn't.

This is where a morality-based foreign policy gets us, to the point where you have to count on your enemy being more rational than you are. Utter madness. As if there were no alternatives! But of course, it was too tempting to go down the self-righteous route, just to remind the world that you do actually believe in your own shit, so no one gets to fuck with the pax americana. No one gets to out-bully the US of A, no sir, and certainly not the sick, dying autocrat of Russia.

Who would have thought Donald fucking Trump was actually the better option for the world... Though in retrospect, history did show us how dangerous the Democrats could be, so the writing was probably on the wall all along.
And to add irony upon irony, the latest Star Trek show basically tells us that World War 3 is our future, but that we'll grow past that kind of nonsense some day. Those of us who'll make it, that is, and it seems it won't be us in the West after all, as we're hell-bent on preparing our own come-uppance. Not undeserved, I guess.

Hysterics aside, seven hells. I hoped I was wrong last month, and I hope I'm wrong today. Regardless of the outcome, these are some deeply foolish choices. I guess that, as bad as things are, you can always count on a US government to make them worse somehow. Bravo!

Are you going to Damn the Finns now?

 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Are you going to Damn the Finns now?

 

Biden's nefarious doing! 

[SeanF]

Lend lease to Ukraine seems eminently sensible to me.

[Zorral]

If Rip's referring to Ukraine and lend lease -- and even says Trump was better -- medication check in order, because so much of this hideous situation the world is in IS DUE TO TRUMP and the Republicans going back donkey's years, including particularly that of McCain, as Steve Schmidt's essay, “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth,.” on a Substack publication called The Warning, details.

https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?

Quote

 

... Schmidt’s biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin’s government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump’s campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort’s partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin’s interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that “McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro.”

“There were two factions in the campaign,” Schmidt tweeted, “a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction,” led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin.

McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin’s claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because “[t]hey’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska” became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit).

But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: “He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” The authors detailed Davis’s work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin’s control and concluded that either McCain “was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care.”

Trump’s campaign and presidency, along with Putin’s deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort’s business partner all the way back in 2008. ....

 

So wtf calling out Biden????????

Or, is Rip thinking about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/us/politics/china-taiwan-weapons.html

U.S. Presses Taiwan to Buy Weapons More Suited to Win Against China
The Biden administration’s push for Taiwan to order missiles and smaller arms for asymmetric warfare has gained urgency since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I admit I thought of Rip when I first read this story.
 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

What is that in reference to? I haven't seen anything that would make sense.

Clearly, the new Star Trek show causes people to go into a deranged fervor.  Viewer discretion advised.

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

If Rip's referring to Ukraine and lend lease -- and even says Trump was better -- medication check in order, because so much of this hideous situation the world is in IS DUE TO TRUMP and the Republicans going back donkey's years, including particularly that of McCain, as Steve Schmidt's essay, “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth,.” on a Substack publication called The Warning, details.

https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/no-books-no-money-just-the-truth?

So wtf calling out Biden????????

Or, is Rip thinking about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/us/politics/china-taiwan-weapons.html

U.S. Presses Taiwan to Buy Weapons More Suited to Win Against China
The Biden administration’s push for Taiwan to order missiles and smaller arms for asymmetric warfare has gained urgency since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I admit I thought of Rip when I first read this story.
 

I always thought McCain was a dipshit from even before his choosing Palin as a running mate. There was always something off about him.