The point of that line was to motivate the importance of ads for content creators, not to explain the desire of people to block ads. I.e., "we need ads to survive, because you won't pay for shit, and now you're blocking ads too!!" Not saying I agree, but that was the intended meaning.
That's why I RPG'd the fuck out of that air ambulance that flew over my house. I didn't know if there were some pedophiles in there spying on MAH CHILDREN.
Typical prejudice. No better or worse than judging someone by the color of their skin. Ho, ho, ho. Redneck from Kentucky.
You're completely right so far.
I'd say the only person with a seriously misguided moral compass is the jerk who expects anyone to believe he wasn't flying over somebodies with the intention of spying on them.
Holy mother of a hard left turn. You're gonna end up murdering some poor bloke who knocks on your do ask you to call AAA, aren't you?
How is voting based on Google search rankings better than not voting at all? In fact I'd interpret this research as an argument against mandatory voting...
But let's be clear - circletimessquare also read your post in the exact same way
Is that really what you're going to back yourself up with? That there exists at least one more person as eager to assume they're talking to a pro-Putin boogeyman as you are? Weak.
"Well, it sure as hell impressed opportunistic American politicians who have been expanding NATO for 20 years without seemingly any sort of awareness of the provocation towards Russia it entailed"
Yes, you never said it was America's fault NATO expanded eastwards indeed. Unfortunately you can't disown things when you've published them to the internet, what you said is there clearly for all to see.
In one sentence you admit you were wrong, and in the very next you suggest I want to disown something I've said... Why would I want to disown any of that? The only things I've tried to disown are things you've put in my mouth, like that I "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander."
Speaking of which -- can you copy something I've said that you think indicates that I either "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook", or that I believe "Russia is just an innocent bystander"? Do that, and I'll honestly tell you whether a) your interpretation matches my intention, b) your interpretation doesn't match the intended meaning, because I didn't express myself well enough, and you have my apologies, or c) your interpretation is a complete logical non-sequitur. But be careful -- if while quoting me you intentionally leave out important context for what I said that misrepresents my position, you'll dig yourself even deeper in the hole of strawman-fighting you're in.
I've gone back as you suggested and don't see anything different- your original post was still a suggestion that America is wholly at fault for expanding NATO eastwards,
I'm happy that you've finally stated in black and white, for the record, that you are entirely insistent on jumping to a conclusion that is in no way inherent to what I said due to your itching need to argue with someone you image me to be. Now that that's on the record, I don't have to bother with you anymore.
I could try to, yet again, explain to you that what I said did not involve any moral judgement, but was rather simply about the motivations that drove Russia to act the way we've seen. But I've done that so many times already, and here you are admitting plainly that you refuse to face that simple truth. My suspicion is that somewhere deep inside you fully understand that the way you initially interpreted my post was a mistake, but you have gone so far out on a limb of self-righteousness and condescension that you can't allow yourself to admit that out loud. It's OK, you don't need to. We both know what happened, we can just have a silent mutual understanding about it.
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state
HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU ACTUALLY THINK THAT'S WHAT I WAS SUGGESTING!?!?! Dude you're fucking hilarious. All that stuff I said about strawmen and putting words in my mouth was 10 times worse than I thought it was, considering that what I was saying was very close to the exact opposite of that.
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state.
No, that was what you chose to infer, to the contrary of all the effort I went to to explain myself in as simple a way as I could manage.
You ignore the fact that it wouldn't,
No, you ignore the fact that that was my whole fucking point.
But really at this point your whole argument now seems to be that you never argued anything. I shall assume therefore that this is your desperate attempt to wriggle out of your own bullshit now that I've demonstrate why it's a load of tosh.
Yeah, it must seem that way to you. I made a fairly simple statement that any idiot should find entirely obvious and non-controvercial, and we've spent the entire time since then going back and forth with you putting outrageous claims in my mouth and me explaining that I never said such things. So yeah, of course, if you go by pure percentage of text, the vast majority of what I've typed has been me explaining that I haven't said, because you seem obsessed with jumping to ridiculously unfounded conclusions about my views like that I "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander."
Here's a little suggestion -- years from now, if you manage how to temper your preconceived notions and learn how to actually listen to what people are telling you, go back to the very beginning of this conversation and re-read what it is you were replying to. You'll have a great laugh when you realize how ridiculous your response was. I know I am.
Would you be in favor of journals having a data (or even code) "registration" requirement? Something like any data you use has to be submitted to some third party curator, with full technical documentation detailing the experimental design. I don't necessarily mean that this should entail giving up ownership of the data -- just as a means of making sure that the data itself, and important metadata explaining it, doesn't get lost when the PI or students move on to other things. I've been a part of that myself -- I published something as an undergrad that has seen a moderate amount of citations since, but I've left that field, and the professor I worked with moved to a different university, and I don't even remember if he ever had a copy of the most up to date and final version of all out data and code by the time I left. I still occasionally get emails asking for data/code that I usually just ignore...
"No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is."
Yes it is, a hypothesis demands that you hypothesise about something that could be. Something in the past that simply was not by definition cannot be. You seem to be failing at even basic English now in a desperate attempt to defend your unreality which you use to justify your pro-Russian bias.
Oh now you're going to resort to argue over dictionary definitions? That's just sad... It's clear that a person capable of abstract reasoning should be able to envision something as basic as a historical counterfactual. You are either incapable of it, or you choose not to do it, I'm not sure which is worse.
(By the way, you're wrong -- you invented that definition of what a hypothetical is, it's literally been used in the exact context of history before. Not that it matters, as I said above, the exact word is irrelevant. A healthy adult human should be regularly engaging in that sort of reasoning to gain perspective and insight, there's no excuse for you not to be familiar with the concept unless you suffer from some sort of mental disorder that limits your empathic or cognitive faculties.)
But questions like "What if this unreality was actually a reality?" are absolutely meaningless unless you want to, say, write a fiction book. They tell us nothing about the reality, and about the now, and that's why your world view is fundamentally broken- you're too caught up in your fantasy world
You explained better than I ever could why you are incapable of taking on somebody else's perspective. "But I'm not actually you, why would I see anything from your point of view, that's an unreal fantasy world!!!."
That's probably really part the problem then, and at least explains why you're not aware of basically everything Putin has been saying, and everything about Russian thinking over the last decade. The irony is you talk about the Russian perspective, but you now admit you've no idea what that even is. It's not surprising then that you're arguing based wholly on things that never happened, and arguing against things that simply are.
Another unfalsifiable statement. If I read Russia Today, then I'm brainwashed. If I don't read Russia Today, then I'm uninformed. You are so good at these!
- you still seem determined to argue that your fantasy alternative universe makes NATO the bad guy.
I've never said or implied that NATO is the bad guy. It's not my fault if you chose to interpret something I've said that way.
By the way, I see you've conveniently omitted replying to the stuff about Cuba. Why is that? Don't tell me pointing to actual historical fact invalidated your "DURR that's a fantasy world not reality" defense mechanism, so you had to hide from it?
Oh, and going back to something you said earlier:
from the very outset you have this ISIS style "US is the great satan" outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander.
Again, that's something you imagined me saying. I never said anything implying the US is any sort of "great satan", and I never said Russia is in any way innocent. It's not my fault that you're apparently frothing at the mouth to fight some sort of Putin-thumper, and decided it had to be me.
"Meaning, you agree with me that the mutual defense clause is a sham."
No, I'm saying that a conventional response from the world's largest combined military force by a factor of 20x is just as effective a deterrent as the nuclear option which you assume is the first option.
Oh I see, you're just wiping your ass with MAD. Somebody should have thought of that sooner.
"I guess even your vocabulary is fundamentally incapable of allowing you to see things from somebody else's perspective."
Again, I apologise if more than the most basic English confuses me, I keep forgetting how undereducated you apparently are. But no, a hypothetical scenario is something that could actually happen, the things you're proposing are historical and didn't happen but are using to drive an argument as if they did, and are therefore non-realities.
No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is. See, this right here is the problem. You're incapable of engaging in abstract reasoning like "what if A had happened instead of B?" That's why you will never understand what I'm saying. You will never understand what it means to imagine "what if the Warsaw pact had extended to the US borders", so you will never be able to imagine a perspective that isn't your own.
"Well yeah, that's my whole fucking point. When the Soviet Union stationed nukes in Cuba, the US responded to that provocative action by bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation."
But again, you give lie to your pro-Russian bias in the way you phrase this, you claim it's the US that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation by threatening, not Russia by actually deploying and aiming nukes.
And the US doing the same in eastern Europe is... also Russia's choice? So, let's summarize: Cuba aligns with Russia = Russia's choice. The US responds, resulting in the missile crisis = Russia's fault. The US extends NATO to the Russian borders = Russia's fault. Russia responds via invasions = Russia's fault.
And you have the gall to call me biased...
This is why you're incapable of offering any rational point to this discussion - from the very outset you have this ISIS style "US is the great satan" outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander. That's obviously false.
Once again, that's your strawman talking. I never said anything of the sort. This must be what it feels like to talk to someone with schizophrenic hallucinations -- I have to keep explaining what I actually said vs. what you imagined me saying.
"When the US expanded NATO all the way to the Russian border"
You do it again here, this is just broken. The US didn't expand anything, NATO grew when countries asked, off their own democratic back to join. Your whole world view is based around this idea that Russia gets to decide what everyone can and cannot do. Rather than realise that these countries asked to join NATO off their own back precisely because Russia had been dicks to them for decades and that that's Russia's own fault, you instead try and argue that the US expanded NATO as if the US somehow forced these countries to join, and as if it's anyone other than Russia's fault that they chose to join the West, rather than continue to sit under the East. NATO is not at fault for Russia's hostility and trampling of it's neighbours pushing them West.
I have a horrible feeling of deja vu, but whatever, let's do this again -- did NATO not have any say in whether those countries decided to join or not? Is NATO obligated to accept anyone that wants to join? So, when Castro was aligning himself with the USSR, were they obligated to put missiles in Cuba? Or was it a choice the USSR made, that had consequences in the form of the US response?
You can't understand that countries join NATO because they want to because all you know is the Russian way- and tha
You still don't get it - you still don't understand that what America would do to defend it's own soil isn't inherently what it has to do to defend foreign soil under NATO.
Meaning, you agree with me that the mutual defense clause is a sham.
But importantly, NATO isn't touching Russian soil, so your argument is wholly meaningless, Russia is however touching foreign soil, albeit not NATO soil yet. Your argument seems to be that NATO nations shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves against Russian aggression - that's great for you as you're a Putin apologist, but you're simultaneously claiming it's not fair if NATO were to do the same to Russia, no shit, so how is it justified that Russia is the only one doing it?
No, I didn't compare NATO expansion to the invasion of Ukraine, I compared NATO expansion to Mexico and Canada joining the Warsaw pact. Pay attention please.
Anger wont resolve the inherent paradoxes your irrational position has created. You'll need to try harder than that to fix your broken world view.
It's not anger, it's sarcasm. Or did the strawman thing go over your head? Never mind then.
It doesn't have to, it's irrelevant, your whole argument makes no sense and is built on fantastical non-realities, non-realities you've had to create to counter the fact that your nonsensical ideas don't make sense in the context of actual reality.
LMAO. Your word for "hypothetical scenario" is "fantastical non-reality"? I guess even your vocabulary is fundamentally incapable of allowing you to see things from somebody else's perspective.
This highlights the hypocrisy of your viewpoint, Russia stations nukes on America's border, pointing at America, and America has created an almost nuclear holocaust. What? Any rational human being can see that both sides escalated that one, I'm pretty sure the Americans didn't ask for those nukes to be positioned there and pointed at them.
Well yeah, that's my whole fucking point. When the Soviet Union stationed nukes in Cuba, the US responded to that provocative action by bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. When the US expanded NATO all the way to the Russian border, Russia responded with small-scale invasions of their neighbors. Those invasions didn't happen in a vacuum, much like the US response to the missile crisis didn't happen in a vacuum. How can I possibly make that clearer?
Once again, you are arguing against something that the little strawman of me you've constructed in your head is saying, not me. If you actually opened your eyes and paid attention to what I'm saying, I think even you'd be capable of understanding that your counterpoints are entirely irrelevant.
So carry on apologising for Putin, being wrong, and talking about non-realities that justify your otherwise non-points. But you still haven't done any of that research I suggested, so you're continuing to be completely wrong and continuing to talk nonsense. Not much of a surprise.
What research is that? Research disproving things your little strawman told you? I'm not him, I have no interest in understanding how wrong his viewpoints are. If you want to keep talking to him, go stand in front of a mirror and stop bothering me.
Mutual defence, doesn't imply immediate escalation to nuclear defence. You're still entirely making that up. It just means mutual defence. Your rhetoric about guaranteed nuclear war is still nonsense, because the fact that world came out of the cold war nuclear war free is still proof of that. I don't know why you're even engaging in this discussion when you demonstrate exactly no knowledge of the cold war.
Mutual defense means an obligation to respond to any attack as if it was on the home soil of any member. If Russian tanks were rolling towards the white house, would there not be an escalation to nuclear war? For fuck's sake man, the only reason the cold war didn't end with nuclear war is because both powers avoided attacking each other directly. NATO has spread the definition of "attack directly" to include a bunch of countries most Americans can't even find on a map. Assuming the mutual defense clause isn't hot air, NATO extends MAD to those very countries. So one of two things is true -- either NATO is a house of cards as far as those countries are concerned, and Russia can do to them what they're doing to Ukraine, or every American president is willing to destroy the world as we know it for the sake of every one of those countries, because that's what he would do if Russia attacked American citizens on American soil. What's so hard to understand about this...
Russia's worst fears are that it's neighbours wanted nothing to do with them? That's NATO's fault why exactly? You can't blame anyone but Russia for the fact that everyone around them wants to get as far away from them as possible.
Russia's worst fear was that the US would extend the "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU! I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!" doctrine to their very borders. Remember the Cuban missile crisis?
I understand that things like paradoxes and fallacies are too complicated for you, so I didn't expect you to understand
Yeah, it's pretty hard for me to understand, considering that you haven't pointed to anything I have actually said as paradoxical or fallacious. You assign imaginary claims to me, and then scoff at how stupid I am for saying those things. Yeah, my fragile little brain is too weak to logically argue the position of the strawman in your head.
You weren't aware of the Warsaw pact
You're right, I wasn't aware that the Warsaw pact included Mexico and Canada and Brazil. That's definitely news to me, and it completely invalidates everything I've said. For my education, could you point to like a Wikipedia page or something on the history of Warsaw pact countries on the American continents?
Just make sure you don't bring up Cuba. Because Cuba was the closest counterpart to countries like Poland and Estonia being in NATO, and the American response to that was to bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, which makes invasions of Georgia and Ukraine seem downright insignificant by comparison. So yeah, don't ever mention Cuba, it would create an unacceptable risk that you might suddenly catch a glimpse of things from the Russian perspective, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?
It went over my head because it makes absolutely no sense. Your argument is that NATO's only response to a Russian invasion is nuclear. That's obviously nonsense, if Russia carries out an invasion of a NATO nation in this manner NATO can simply respond in kind, either by say, fuelling Chechen separatism, or by similarly supporting the Estonians - mostly just giving enough weaponry to make such an invasion costly enough for the Russians to change their mind is sufficient. This basically describes pretty much every proxy battle in the cold war - nuclear war didn't happen, why do you think that's different now and the nuclear option is the only option? It isn't, you're simply spouting nonsense.
Then what's the point of NATO? You just wiped your ass with the mutual defense clause. If the mutual defense clause is obeyed, and Russia attacks one of the signatories, then nuclear war is inevitable for the same reason that nuclear war between the US and Russia has always been inevitable in the case of any war between the two. What you're saying is that the response to Russia will be the same as it was without the mutual defense clause. That means NATO was a house of cards all along, at least as far as those tiny eastern European countries are concerned that no American or Brit would be willing to risk annihilation over.
No, but obviously if nothing else, Putin isn't stupid. Before 2008 he knew full well his military wasn't upto it, he assumed it would be in 2008 and found that it still wasn't. This isn't really rocket science, I'm amazed you're struggling with it. The average person wouldn't, much less someone with even a modicum of intelligence above that.
Hahaha, that's awesome, basically your argument is that anything they did is evidence of your position. They didn't invade anyone? Obviously they couldn't! They invaded someone? Obviously imperialists! They stopped invading anyone? Obviously they realized they couldn't! You've set yourself up a nice little unfalsifiable fort there. Rocket science indeed.
"Afghanistan and Iraq were bad, therefore, the US is bad.
Huh? What's the connection there?
Russia hates the US, therefore, Russia is good".
Where did you hear me say that I think Russia is good?
It's perfectly possible for someone to think that both Russia and the US have done a lot wrong
Oh I see, when I accuse of you not seeing Russia's perspective on this because of American-influenced propaganda, you assume I'm accusing you of not knowing the US has done bad things. What were you saying about average intelligence..?
If Russians want to sit all paranoid that's fine
How is it paranoia when the 25 years since the fall of the union have confirmed all their worst fears?
Russia is guilty of all the US' wrongs and then some.
I'd hate to be on the jury that had to decide which one was "more guilty".
But when your worldview is fundamentally broken in that way, it's not terribly surprising that you're also saying things that are either naive to what went on during the cold war, or simply make no sense requiring the enforcement of false choices. Fallacies are of course the only way you can fix the paradoxes in your mind that your broken, nonsensical and hypocritical worldview has inherently created.
Haha that reminds me of those overly vague endings from Grey's Anatomy that were just sort of rambling without really saying anything relevant.
one person can do something evil because somebody else did
Where did I say anything like that?
1. "somebody did something bad so i should be able to do something bad"
Where did I say anything like that?
2. "the reason i did something bad is because of what someone else did that does not actually logically imply my action, but whatever"
Oh I think being strategically threatened by NATO totally logically implies the Russian response, and I'm not the only one, people who were paying attention have been warning about it for 20 years.
i actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work with you or is related to you/ friends with you. you're obviously a horrible piece of shit in the way you think about what is justified or not in this world according to #1 and #2 above
Dude, you're slipping. The assumptions about me you made in earlier posts were way more entertaining.
So on one hand you have a purely defensive organisation where everyone is an equal, and on the other you have oppressive Russian imperialism.
I can't really argue against this level of delusion, so I'm gonna let that be.
"How about if instead of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia, we're talking about a quarter of the Norwegian offshore oil drilling operations? Would you be willing to destroy hundreds of millions of human lives, including your own, and plunge the planet into decades without sunshine to stop that?"
I really have no idea what the fuck your point is. Given that those aren't even choices that exist and hence there is absolutely no context around them then you're not really making any sense. You seem to be suggesting that NATO would randomly start a nuclear war over something relatively trivial. That's a theory you've come up with with absolutely no grounding in reality.
Haha, I should have known that would go over your head. What I'm asking is -- if NATO is this amazing defensive organization that's keeping Russia from doing anything to its members, would you actually be willing to follow that to the logical conclusion of a NATO war with Russia -- meaning, nuclear war -- if there was a semi-ambiguous Russian invasion of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia taking place, like the one in Ukraine? Or would your politicians twist and turn however they needed to prevent a nuclear holocaust for the sake of a little piece of land that your people don't ultimately really care about?
I don't think you have even the slightest clue what NATO is. It is primarily a security pact couple with military coordination and training. If Russia joined that then it would inherently be protected from NATO as a member itself, and would be involved in NATO's decision making. The fact Russia still has imperialist ambitions and seeks to grow it's territory with force is not in any way NATO's fault, and wholly Russia's. NATO doesn't force anyone to join - countries ask, and even when they do NATO is incredibly careful about membership, hence why Ukraine and Georgia are not yet members.
Yes, and children are "involved" in their parents' decision making. I don't think that level of autonomy is something particularly attractive to most Russians.
"and a couple of other countries entering a pact of mutual defense with the Soviet union wherein they were obligated to attack the US in unison if any of them were attacked by the US"
Er, so you're talking about the cold war and you've never heard of the Warsaw pact? You should probably stop now.
No, I'm asking what the American reaction would be if the scary Warsaw pact involved Mexico and Canada. It's not my fault you forgot the beginning of the paragraph before reaching the end, man, it wasn't even a big one...
Well, you know, these things cost money. They don't come for free. When your country has basically gone bankrupt it starts to take a while before you can save up your roubles enough to create a viable force, and even then they'll be rusty and may still need further training and support, as Putin learnt the hard way in Georgia when his forces took way more casualties than they should have in 2008.
Russia was recovering by 2002. With that size of a standing army, a small invasion isn't going to make or break the bank. Plus, how could something Putin learned when invading Georgia in 2008 have prevented him from doing something before that? Does he have a time machine or something?
Oh, and I'm not American.
Yeah, but your refusal to consider another perspective has "Made in USA" printed on it in red, white, and blue.
Stop being a Putin apologist when you don't know the first thing about him. You don't have to listen to me, but you should at least listen to people who most definitely do know the situation before spouting n
That's how counterexamples to a universal claim work. I cherrypicked a counterexample, thus, the claim is false, end of story. Further, some of these counterexamples are pretty damn broad, like computers or air conditioning.
Except it's not a universal claim, it's a claim regarding a universal trees. If you find a tree growing sideways, you won't have disproved that trees tend to grow upward.
Which again is patently false. The US has being industrializing for a long time and the power of the worker has increased for most of that time.
Yes, via decidedly extra-capitalistic forces like the lives of labor activists that were slaughtered by the decidedly capitalistic hired guns of steel magnates. I feel like you're confused about something -- the US is not an example of unfettered capitalism. So you can't simply point to something in the US and say "see! that can happen in capitalism!" You have to put in the extra couple of seconds of thought to figure out whether said phenomenon occurred due to capitalism, or in spite of it.
That labor is competing with foreign labor that is vastly cheaper. Further, the US have a lot of supposedly pro-labor regulation, policy, and law that has made this particular problem worse. When you interfere with employment and drive up its cost, sabotage new business creation, and just in general, make your society a crappier place to employ people, then it's no surprise that employees have less bargaining power than they used to.
Again, you're supporting Marx there. Capitalist forces using the state to further take advantage of workers was one of his main themes.
You know, I'm pretty sure you have some kind of emotional need to believe that you disagree with Marx, without knowing what it is you're actually disagreeing with. Is it the propaganda-instilled instincts doing their work, or what?
first off fuck the usa. it's committed many crimes in this world. but more importantly, your "two wrongs make the right" thinking only goes to show you lack morals and principles.
No, it just shows your lack of reading comprehension. Go back and find any mention in my posts of morality. It's OK. I'll wait.
2. if NATO did not exist, russia would be doing the same, or worse.
Yeah, sure they would. But what's that got to do with anything I said?
why do you blame the malice of one party on someone else? it's like you lack a basic abstract social model of cause and effect in your mind, something developed by most people in elementary school
Yeah it could be that, or it could be the fact that I was trying to explain to you that Russia's actions were not merely motivated by a need to "impress" their own citizens, as you implied, but were rather the actions of a fairly strategically ingenious and amoral entity seeking to protects its interests against the encroachment of their essentially only military rival.
according to your wife beater logic
Dude, what's with you and wife beating? It's like a verbal tick for you or something. Maybe you should look into that....
your country is probably some broken shithole with many problems all due to local corruption and bad domestic choices, but blind pride means you believe what some chest thumping demagogue feeds you "it's all the usa's fault because they did bad thing {X} to our country in the cold war 50 years ago" and so you never take any responsibility for your own failures, invent fantastic bullshit cause and effect chains of reasoning for why what you do wron gis actually someone else's fault, and you never fix your fucking problems or even admit you created them
The US has never done anything to my country (well, nothing bad at least), and either way I can't say I have much pride in it.
But keep going, I love watching you trying to figure out which cliche you can cast me in.
Oh nonsense, Russia had every opportunity to join NATO and become a modern progressive nation itself.
Why in god's name would Russia join a military alliance headed by their biggest geopolitical rival whose sole purpose for existing is to surround Russia with thinly veiled sworn enemies, army bases, and missiles aimed at their cities and military forces? What you're talking about is on par with saying the US had every opportunity to join the Soviet satellite states like the Eastern Bloc.
NATO is a security organisation and by increasing membership it increases security.
Hmm, you sure about that? Let me ask you this -- would you be willing to end human civilization as we know it in order to prevent "pro-Russian separatists" in the Ida-Viru region of Estonia from "exercising their right to self-determination" by declaring independence from Estonia and joining Russia?
How about if instead of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia, we're talking about a quarter of the Norwegian offshore oil drilling operations? Would you be willing to destroy hundreds of millions of human lives, including your own, and plunge the planet into decades without sunshine to stop that?
Perhaps NATO isn't everything you think it is, at least not against Russia.
Bringing Russia on board was a key aim because that would be the ultimate stability pact for Europe, but Putin killed all that and put the final nails in the coffin when it invaded both Georgia and Ukraine. Putin plays the victim because it suits, but NATO isn't the aggressor here.
So, let me get this straight -- if, back during the original cold war, the US was faced with Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua, and a couple of other countries entering a pact of mutual defense with the Soviet union wherein they were obligated to attack the US in unison if any of them were attacked by the US, you do not think there would be any Americans feeling as if that was an in any way aggressive move? If Russia had anything close to as far-reaching and actively defensive as the "Monroe Doctrine", they would have launched the nukes when the Berlin wall fell.
Putin would've done what he did regardless, if anything NATO restricted how far he was able to go - certainly it blocked him from annexing the whole of Georgia proper, and places like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and so forth would likely be stuck once more with Russian puppet governments were it not for NATO.
I'll never understand why Putin waited nearly 15 years for NATO to keep expanding before he decided to try to do all those things that he totally intended to do all along. You'd think it'd have been a lot easier to, say, annex Georgia back before they had much in the way of ties to the EU or the US, and same for the rest of those countries. Well, I guess he must be really stupid.
Putin is an imperialist, and no amount of appeasement will or would have ever changed that. He was there as a KGB agent when the USSR collapsed and he's never forgiven that. You wont change him, and you wont help him, all you can do is stand up to him and keep him in check. He believes soviet Russia was always right, and he's determined to try and rebuild the empire he believes was stolen from Russia, failing to realise it wasn't stolen, merely that the people Russia oppressed for so long were taking their freedom back.
Could you give me the phone number for Putin's psychiatrist? I'd love to talk to him, he seems to have told you a lot of interesting things about Putin's character.
Oh, what's that you say? You haven't actually talked to Putin's psychiatrist? And you're basing all your opinions on the typical American "if you're willing to put yourself in our enemies' shoes and consider things from their perspective it obviously means you're a muslim terrorist commie and you hate America" thought-stopping cliche? Well color me surprised.
ukraine is begging to get into NATO. all the new eastern european states begged to get into NATO. fuck what the usa or what the west thinks. fuck what russia thinks
Oh, I see, you just don't know what NATO is. It's an alliance headed by the US. So what the US or west think is rather central to what NATO does.
only moscow matters? only washington dc? you utterly dismiss the wishes of poles, slovaks, bulgars, etc? that makes you a patronizing, condescending asshole
I fail to see any way in which I dismissed what any of those people want. They have their own concerns, and Russia has its own, and NATO has its own. Where's the dismissal?
the USA of course has done plenty of vile imperialist things. of course. what does that change?
so two wrongs make a right? the usa does something bad so it's ok that russia does something bad? that's how morality works to you? i knew a guy once who killed someone so it's ok if this other guy kills someone? do you have principles or mindless contrarianism as your motivation?
I don't recall ever discussing right and wrong here. This whole thing started with my response to your statement that "if you think the kgb thug chest thumping by putin on small, weak georgia and ukraine is supposed to impress anyone other than propagandized neoserfs in a walled media garden inside russia. no". I wanted to explain that said "kgb thug" was looking for a lot more than impressing Russians. What does that have to do with right or wrong?
if warsaw wants to be in NATO, who gives a flying fuck what moscow thinks. why should what moscow thinks be the ultimate point about what POLES want? why?
How about because when NATO ignores Russian security concerns and expands recklessly, Russia responds with low-level, plausibly deniable invasions and destabilizations in the states they feel are strategically within their sphere, much like the US does with literally the entire Western hemisphere.
the only thing worse than a russian propagandized idiot on this topic who thinks russia is the victim here is some airhead western moron who thinks russia is the victim here. at least the russian has the excuse of nationalism and wall-to-wall propaganda. what is your excuse for being so unprincipled and unintelligent on the topic?
I'm not "western" either, but keep trying. Maybe one of your ad hominems will eventually stick.
The difference is that Dr. Gallo both never claimed to have a cure and never had that cure fail repeatedly and spectacularly in the real world.
Again, what does the cure have to do with the critique? Had Dr. Gallo proposed a cure that was shown not to work, would you be barebacking Nigerian prostitutes?
The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences.
I don't even know how to begin responding to this. Labor unions grew out of socialist movements in order to organize workers against capitalist forces. In the analogy, claiming that labor unions somehow disprove Marx's observations regarding capitalism is like claiming that condoms disprove AIDS. And that's without even mentioning the fact that Marx would have been very much pro-union, despite your claim of "the abject failure of Marx's solutions". It's just that he knew capitalist forces would continuously fight to erode the power of workers, even unionized ones, which, again, is exactly what's happened in the US from the 70's onward.
Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?
You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers (though in the case of hiring practices, I'd argue most recent changes have been horrible for workers), but that's not what the quote is about. The claim in the quote is that the more industrialized production becomes, the less the power of the worker, and the larger the alienation of the worker from the fruits of their labor. The massive increase in prevalence of high turnover, low-wage, low-skill jobs in the US over the last several decades is stark evidence that what Marx was talking about is still happening to this day. This isn't some sort of hypothetical, many people can see that this is happening and it's being discussed heavily in society, especially since the recession. Hell, the very article whose comment section we're in right now is about this!
Well, dunno about sexy dresses, but methinks if, say, a country close to the US -- like, for example, Cuba, or Guatemala, or Chile, or Nicaragua, or the DR, or Venezuela, or Brazil -- showed hints or being chummy with a rival state, then the US would respond with all kinds of measures to address that threat. Like, say, by orchestrating coups..?
but of course, you spin that as evil NATO expanding and tricking poor poland, czech, hungary, romania, lithuania, etc... good soviet member states tricked by the evil west, right?
they all hate and fear russia now, moron!
they run to the west as fast as they fucking can
NATO expansion has nothing to do with what NATO did, but everything to do with how maltreated those states were under the russian thug's boot
Are you suggesting that NATO had no choice but to expand to those countries? Like, because they wanted to be NATO members, NATO had no say in it?
ukraine are, *were*, your slavic brothers for centuries.
I'm not Slavic.
pathetic, stupid, the logic of the wife beater and the beaten ignorant propagandized serf wives who swallow and accept that mafia thug shit
If the irony of this statement wasn't lost on you, we could both share an awful hearty laugh.
Gotta love this country. All it takes is a single unfounded *suggestion* that someone's children, especially female, are under some sort of threat, and the bloodlust takes over all rational thought. Evidence?! Proportionality?! Get the fuck out of here, we have CHILDREN to THINK ABOUT!
Soft skinned animals don't typically have exposed vital spots made of thin, brittle plastic spinning at thousands of RPM. I can't kill a rabbit with a gently lobbed golf ball either, but I'm willing to bet it'd be pretty effective against at least some quadcopters.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of that line was to motivate the importance of ads for content creators, not to explain the desire of people to block ads. I.e., "we need ads to survive, because you won't pay for shit, and now you're blocking ads too!!" Not saying I agree, but that was the intended meaning.
TIL criminals and ISIS are fictional like Mayor Quimby and Santa Claus.
That's why I RPG'd the fuck out of that air ambulance that flew over my house. I didn't know if there were some pedophiles in there spying on MAH CHILDREN.
Typical prejudice. No better or worse than judging someone by the color of their skin. Ho, ho, ho. Redneck from Kentucky.
You're completely right so far.
I'd say the only person with a seriously misguided moral compass is the jerk who expects anyone to believe he wasn't flying over somebodies with the intention of spying on them.
Holy mother of a hard left turn. You're gonna end up murdering some poor bloke who knocks on your do ask you to call AAA, aren't you?
How is voting based on Google search rankings better than not voting at all? In fact I'd interpret this research as an argument against mandatory voting...
But let's be clear - circletimessquare also read your post in the exact same way
Is that really what you're going to back yourself up with? That there exists at least one more person as eager to assume they're talking to a pro-Putin boogeyman as you are? Weak.
"Well, it sure as hell impressed opportunistic American politicians who have been expanding NATO for 20 years without seemingly any sort of awareness of the provocation towards Russia it entailed" Yes, you never said it was America's fault NATO expanded eastwards indeed. Unfortunately you can't disown things when you've published them to the internet, what you said is there clearly for all to see.
In one sentence you admit you were wrong, and in the very next you suggest I want to disown something I've said... Why would I want to disown any of that? The only things I've tried to disown are things you've put in my mouth, like that I "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander."
Speaking of which -- can you copy something I've said that you think indicates that I either "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook", or that I believe "Russia is just an innocent bystander"? Do that, and I'll honestly tell you whether a) your interpretation matches my intention, b) your interpretation doesn't match the intended meaning, because I didn't express myself well enough, and you have my apologies, or c) your interpretation is a complete logical non-sequitur. But be careful -- if while quoting me you intentionally leave out important context for what I said that misrepresents my position, you'll dig yourself even deeper in the hole of strawman-fighting you're in.
I've gone back as you suggested and don't see anything different- your original post was still a suggestion that America is wholly at fault for expanding NATO eastwards,
I'm happy that you've finally stated in black and white, for the record, that you are entirely insistent on jumping to a conclusion that is in no way inherent to what I said due to your itching need to argue with someone you image me to be. Now that that's on the record, I don't have to bother with you anymore.
I could try to, yet again, explain to you that what I said did not involve any moral judgement, but was rather simply about the motivations that drove Russia to act the way we've seen. But I've done that so many times already, and here you are admitting plainly that you refuse to face that simple truth. My suspicion is that somewhere deep inside you fully understand that the way you initially interpreted my post was a mistake, but you have gone so far out on a limb of self-righteousness and condescension that you can't allow yourself to admit that out loud. It's OK, you don't need to. We both know what happened, we can just have a silent mutual understanding about it.
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state
HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU ACTUALLY THINK THAT'S WHAT I WAS SUGGESTING!?!?! Dude you're fucking hilarious. All that stuff I said about strawmen and putting words in my mouth was 10 times worse than I thought it was, considering that what I was saying was very close to the exact opposite of that.
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state.
No, that was what you chose to infer, to the contrary of all the effort I went to to explain myself in as simple a way as I could manage.
You ignore the fact that it wouldn't,
No, you ignore the fact that that was my whole fucking point.
But really at this point your whole argument now seems to be that you never argued anything. I shall assume therefore that this is your desperate attempt to wriggle out of your own bullshit now that I've demonstrate why it's a load of tosh.
Yeah, it must seem that way to you. I made a fairly simple statement that any idiot should find entirely obvious and non-controvercial, and we've spent the entire time since then going back and forth with you putting outrageous claims in my mouth and me explaining that I never said such things. So yeah, of course, if you go by pure percentage of text, the vast majority of what I've typed has been me explaining that I haven't said, because you seem obsessed with jumping to ridiculously unfounded conclusions about my views like that I "have this ISIS style 'US is the great satan' outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander."
Here's a little suggestion -- years from now, if you manage how to temper your preconceived notions and learn how to actually listen to what people are telling you, go back to the very beginning of this conversation and re-read what it is you were replying to. You'll have a great laugh when you realize how ridiculous your response was. I know I am.
Would you be in favor of journals having a data (or even code) "registration" requirement? Something like any data you use has to be submitted to some third party curator, with full technical documentation detailing the experimental design. I don't necessarily mean that this should entail giving up ownership of the data -- just as a means of making sure that the data itself, and important metadata explaining it, doesn't get lost when the PI or students move on to other things. I've been a part of that myself -- I published something as an undergrad that has seen a moderate amount of citations since, but I've left that field, and the professor I worked with moved to a different university, and I don't even remember if he ever had a copy of the most up to date and final version of all out data and code by the time I left. I still occasionally get emails asking for data/code that I usually just ignore...
"No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is." Yes it is, a hypothesis demands that you hypothesise about something that could be. Something in the past that simply was not by definition cannot be. You seem to be failing at even basic English now in a desperate attempt to defend your unreality which you use to justify your pro-Russian bias.
Oh now you're going to resort to argue over dictionary definitions? That's just sad... It's clear that a person capable of abstract reasoning should be able to envision something as basic as a historical counterfactual. You are either incapable of it, or you choose not to do it, I'm not sure which is worse.
(By the way, you're wrong -- you invented that definition of what a hypothetical is, it's literally been used in the exact context of history before. Not that it matters, as I said above, the exact word is irrelevant. A healthy adult human should be regularly engaging in that sort of reasoning to gain perspective and insight, there's no excuse for you not to be familiar with the concept unless you suffer from some sort of mental disorder that limits your empathic or cognitive faculties.)
But questions like "What if this unreality was actually a reality?" are absolutely meaningless unless you want to, say, write a fiction book. They tell us nothing about the reality, and about the now, and that's why your world view is fundamentally broken- you're too caught up in your fantasy world
You explained better than I ever could why you are incapable of taking on somebody else's perspective. "But I'm not actually you, why would I see anything from your point of view, that's an unreal fantasy world!!!."
That's probably really part the problem then, and at least explains why you're not aware of basically everything Putin has been saying, and everything about Russian thinking over the last decade. The irony is you talk about the Russian perspective, but you now admit you've no idea what that even is. It's not surprising then that you're arguing based wholly on things that never happened, and arguing against things that simply are.
Another unfalsifiable statement. If I read Russia Today, then I'm brainwashed. If I don't read Russia Today, then I'm uninformed. You are so good at these!
- you still seem determined to argue that your fantasy alternative universe makes NATO the bad guy.
I've never said or implied that NATO is the bad guy. It's not my fault if you chose to interpret something I've said that way.
By the way, I see you've conveniently omitted replying to the stuff about Cuba. Why is that? Don't tell me pointing to actual historical fact invalidated your "DURR that's a fantasy world not reality" defense mechanism, so you had to hide from it?
Oh, and going back to something you said earlier:
from the very outset you have this ISIS style "US is the great satan" outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander.
Again, that's something you imagined me saying. I never said anything implying the US is any sort of "great satan", and I never said Russia is in any way innocent. It's not my fault that you're apparently frothing at the mouth to fight some sort of Putin-thumper, and decided it had to be me.
"Meaning, you agree with me that the mutual defense clause is a sham."
No, I'm saying that a conventional response from the world's largest combined military force by a factor of 20x is just as effective a deterrent as the nuclear option which you assume is the first option.
Oh I see, you're just wiping your ass with MAD. Somebody should have thought of that sooner.
"I guess even your vocabulary is fundamentally incapable of allowing you to see things from somebody else's perspective."
Again, I apologise if more than the most basic English confuses me, I keep forgetting how undereducated you apparently are. But no, a hypothetical scenario is something that could actually happen, the things you're proposing are historical and didn't happen but are using to drive an argument as if they did, and are therefore non-realities.
No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is. See, this right here is the problem. You're incapable of engaging in abstract reasoning like "what if A had happened instead of B?" That's why you will never understand what I'm saying. You will never understand what it means to imagine "what if the Warsaw pact had extended to the US borders", so you will never be able to imagine a perspective that isn't your own.
"Well yeah, that's my whole fucking point. When the Soviet Union stationed nukes in Cuba, the US responded to that provocative action by bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation."
But again, you give lie to your pro-Russian bias in the way you phrase this, you claim it's the US that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation by threatening, not Russia by actually deploying and aiming nukes.
And the US doing the same in eastern Europe is... also Russia's choice? So, let's summarize: Cuba aligns with Russia = Russia's choice. The US responds, resulting in the missile crisis = Russia's fault. The US extends NATO to the Russian borders = Russia's fault. Russia responds via invasions = Russia's fault.
And you have the gall to call me biased...
This is why you're incapable of offering any rational point to this discussion - from the very outset you have this ISIS style "US is the great satan" outlook whilst implying Russia is just an innocent bystander. That's obviously false.
Once again, that's your strawman talking. I never said anything of the sort. This must be what it feels like to talk to someone with schizophrenic hallucinations -- I have to keep explaining what I actually said vs. what you imagined me saying.
"When the US expanded NATO all the way to the Russian border"
You do it again here, this is just broken. The US didn't expand anything, NATO grew when countries asked, off their own democratic back to join. Your whole world view is based around this idea that Russia gets to decide what everyone can and cannot do. Rather than realise that these countries asked to join NATO off their own back precisely because Russia had been dicks to them for decades and that that's Russia's own fault, you instead try and argue that the US expanded NATO as if the US somehow forced these countries to join, and as if it's anyone other than Russia's fault that they chose to join the West, rather than continue to sit under the East. NATO is not at fault for Russia's hostility and trampling of it's neighbours pushing them West.
I have a horrible feeling of deja vu, but whatever, let's do this again -- did NATO not have any say in whether those countries decided to join or not? Is NATO obligated to accept anyone that wants to join? So, when Castro was aligning himself with the USSR, were they obligated to put missiles in Cuba? Or was it a choice the USSR made, that had consequences in the form of the US response?
You can't understand that countries join NATO because they want to because all you know is the Russian way- and tha
You still don't get it - you still don't understand that what America would do to defend it's own soil isn't inherently what it has to do to defend foreign soil under NATO.
Meaning, you agree with me that the mutual defense clause is a sham.
But importantly, NATO isn't touching Russian soil, so your argument is wholly meaningless, Russia is however touching foreign soil, albeit not NATO soil yet. Your argument seems to be that NATO nations shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves against Russian aggression - that's great for you as you're a Putin apologist, but you're simultaneously claiming it's not fair if NATO were to do the same to Russia, no shit, so how is it justified that Russia is the only one doing it?
No, I didn't compare NATO expansion to the invasion of Ukraine, I compared NATO expansion to Mexico and Canada joining the Warsaw pact. Pay attention please.
Anger wont resolve the inherent paradoxes your irrational position has created. You'll need to try harder than that to fix your broken world view.
It's not anger, it's sarcasm. Or did the strawman thing go over your head? Never mind then.
It doesn't have to, it's irrelevant, your whole argument makes no sense and is built on fantastical non-realities, non-realities you've had to create to counter the fact that your nonsensical ideas don't make sense in the context of actual reality.
LMAO. Your word for "hypothetical scenario" is "fantastical non-reality"? I guess even your vocabulary is fundamentally incapable of allowing you to see things from somebody else's perspective.
This highlights the hypocrisy of your viewpoint, Russia stations nukes on America's border, pointing at America, and America has created an almost nuclear holocaust. What? Any rational human being can see that both sides escalated that one, I'm pretty sure the Americans didn't ask for those nukes to be positioned there and pointed at them.
Well yeah, that's my whole fucking point. When the Soviet Union stationed nukes in Cuba, the US responded to that provocative action by bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. When the US expanded NATO all the way to the Russian border, Russia responded with small-scale invasions of their neighbors. Those invasions didn't happen in a vacuum, much like the US response to the missile crisis didn't happen in a vacuum. How can I possibly make that clearer?
Once again, you are arguing against something that the little strawman of me you've constructed in your head is saying, not me. If you actually opened your eyes and paid attention to what I'm saying, I think even you'd be capable of understanding that your counterpoints are entirely irrelevant.
So carry on apologising for Putin, being wrong, and talking about non-realities that justify your otherwise non-points. But you still haven't done any of that research I suggested, so you're continuing to be completely wrong and continuing to talk nonsense. Not much of a surprise.
What research is that? Research disproving things your little strawman told you? I'm not him, I have no interest in understanding how wrong his viewpoints are. If you want to keep talking to him, go stand in front of a mirror and stop bothering me.
Mutual defence, doesn't imply immediate escalation to nuclear defence. You're still entirely making that up. It just means mutual defence. Your rhetoric about guaranteed nuclear war is still nonsense, because the fact that world came out of the cold war nuclear war free is still proof of that. I don't know why you're even engaging in this discussion when you demonstrate exactly no knowledge of the cold war.
Mutual defense means an obligation to respond to any attack as if it was on the home soil of any member. If Russian tanks were rolling towards the white house, would there not be an escalation to nuclear war? For fuck's sake man, the only reason the cold war didn't end with nuclear war is because both powers avoided attacking each other directly. NATO has spread the definition of "attack directly" to include a bunch of countries most Americans can't even find on a map. Assuming the mutual defense clause isn't hot air, NATO extends MAD to those very countries. So one of two things is true -- either NATO is a house of cards as far as those countries are concerned, and Russia can do to them what they're doing to Ukraine, or every American president is willing to destroy the world as we know it for the sake of every one of those countries, because that's what he would do if Russia attacked American citizens on American soil. What's so hard to understand about this...
Russia's worst fears are that it's neighbours wanted nothing to do with them? That's NATO's fault why exactly? You can't blame anyone but Russia for the fact that everyone around them wants to get as far away from them as possible.
Russia's worst fear was that the US would extend the "I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU! I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!" doctrine to their very borders. Remember the Cuban missile crisis?
I understand that things like paradoxes and fallacies are too complicated for you, so I didn't expect you to understand
Yeah, it's pretty hard for me to understand, considering that you haven't pointed to anything I have actually said as paradoxical or fallacious. You assign imaginary claims to me, and then scoff at how stupid I am for saying those things. Yeah, my fragile little brain is too weak to logically argue the position of the strawman in your head.
You weren't aware of the Warsaw pact
You're right, I wasn't aware that the Warsaw pact included Mexico and Canada and Brazil. That's definitely news to me, and it completely invalidates everything I've said. For my education, could you point to like a Wikipedia page or something on the history of Warsaw pact countries on the American continents?
Just make sure you don't bring up Cuba. Because Cuba was the closest counterpart to countries like Poland and Estonia being in NATO, and the American response to that was to bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, which makes invasions of Georgia and Ukraine seem downright insignificant by comparison. So yeah, don't ever mention Cuba, it would create an unacceptable risk that you might suddenly catch a glimpse of things from the Russian perspective, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?
It went over my head because it makes absolutely no sense. Your argument is that NATO's only response to a Russian invasion is nuclear. That's obviously nonsense, if Russia carries out an invasion of a NATO nation in this manner NATO can simply respond in kind, either by say, fuelling Chechen separatism, or by similarly supporting the Estonians - mostly just giving enough weaponry to make such an invasion costly enough for the Russians to change their mind is sufficient. This basically describes pretty much every proxy battle in the cold war - nuclear war didn't happen, why do you think that's different now and the nuclear option is the only option? It isn't, you're simply spouting nonsense.
Then what's the point of NATO? You just wiped your ass with the mutual defense clause. If the mutual defense clause is obeyed, and Russia attacks one of the signatories, then nuclear war is inevitable for the same reason that nuclear war between the US and Russia has always been inevitable in the case of any war between the two. What you're saying is that the response to Russia will be the same as it was without the mutual defense clause. That means NATO was a house of cards all along, at least as far as those tiny eastern European countries are concerned that no American or Brit would be willing to risk annihilation over.
No, but obviously if nothing else, Putin isn't stupid. Before 2008 he knew full well his military wasn't upto it, he assumed it would be in 2008 and found that it still wasn't. This isn't really rocket science, I'm amazed you're struggling with it. The average person wouldn't, much less someone with even a modicum of intelligence above that.
Hahaha, that's awesome, basically your argument is that anything they did is evidence of your position. They didn't invade anyone? Obviously they couldn't! They invaded someone? Obviously imperialists! They stopped invading anyone? Obviously they realized they couldn't! You've set yourself up a nice little unfalsifiable fort there. Rocket science indeed.
"Afghanistan and Iraq were bad, therefore, the US is bad.
Huh? What's the connection there?
Russia hates the US, therefore, Russia is good".
Where did you hear me say that I think Russia is good?
It's perfectly possible for someone to think that both Russia and the US have done a lot wrong
Oh I see, when I accuse of you not seeing Russia's perspective on this because of American-influenced propaganda, you assume I'm accusing you of not knowing the US has done bad things. What were you saying about average intelligence..?
If Russians want to sit all paranoid that's fine
How is it paranoia when the 25 years since the fall of the union have confirmed all their worst fears?
Russia is guilty of all the US' wrongs and then some.
I'd hate to be on the jury that had to decide which one was "more guilty".
But when your worldview is fundamentally broken in that way, it's not terribly surprising that you're also saying things that are either naive to what went on during the cold war, or simply make no sense requiring the enforcement of false choices. Fallacies are of course the only way you can fix the paradoxes in your mind that your broken, nonsensical and hypocritical worldview has inherently created.
Haha that reminds me of those overly vague endings from Grey's Anatomy that were just sort of rambling without really saying anything relevant.
one person can do something evil because somebody else did
Where did I say anything like that?
1. "somebody did something bad so i should be able to do something bad"
Where did I say anything like that?
2. "the reason i did something bad is because of what someone else did that does not actually logically imply my action, but whatever"
Oh I think being strategically threatened by NATO totally logically implies the Russian response, and I'm not the only one, people who were paying attention have been warning about it for 20 years.
i actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work with you or is related to you/ friends with you. you're obviously a horrible piece of shit in the way you think about what is justified or not in this world according to #1 and #2 above
Dude, you're slipping. The assumptions about me you made in earlier posts were way more entertaining.
So on one hand you have a purely defensive organisation where everyone is an equal, and on the other you have oppressive Russian imperialism.
I can't really argue against this level of delusion, so I'm gonna let that be.
"How about if instead of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia, we're talking about a quarter of the Norwegian offshore oil drilling operations? Would you be willing to destroy hundreds of millions of human lives, including your own, and plunge the planet into decades without sunshine to stop that?"
I really have no idea what the fuck your point is. Given that those aren't even choices that exist and hence there is absolutely no context around them then you're not really making any sense. You seem to be suggesting that NATO would randomly start a nuclear war over something relatively trivial. That's a theory you've come up with with absolutely no grounding in reality.
Haha, I should have known that would go over your head. What I'm asking is -- if NATO is this amazing defensive organization that's keeping Russia from doing anything to its members, would you actually be willing to follow that to the logical conclusion of a NATO war with Russia -- meaning, nuclear war -- if there was a semi-ambiguous Russian invasion of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia taking place, like the one in Ukraine? Or would your politicians twist and turn however they needed to prevent a nuclear holocaust for the sake of a little piece of land that your people don't ultimately really care about?
I don't think you have even the slightest clue what NATO is. It is primarily a security pact couple with military coordination and training. If Russia joined that then it would inherently be protected from NATO as a member itself, and would be involved in NATO's decision making. The fact Russia still has imperialist ambitions and seeks to grow it's territory with force is not in any way NATO's fault, and wholly Russia's. NATO doesn't force anyone to join - countries ask, and even when they do NATO is incredibly careful about membership, hence why Ukraine and Georgia are not yet members.
Yes, and children are "involved" in their parents' decision making. I don't think that level of autonomy is something particularly attractive to most Russians.
"and a couple of other countries entering a pact of mutual defense with the Soviet union wherein they were obligated to attack the US in unison if any of them were attacked by the US"
Er, so you're talking about the cold war and you've never heard of the Warsaw pact? You should probably stop now.
No, I'm asking what the American reaction would be if the scary Warsaw pact involved Mexico and Canada. It's not my fault you forgot the beginning of the paragraph before reaching the end, man, it wasn't even a big one...
Well, you know, these things cost money. They don't come for free. When your country has basically gone bankrupt it starts to take a while before you can save up your roubles enough to create a viable force, and even then they'll be rusty and may still need further training and support, as Putin learnt the hard way in Georgia when his forces took way more casualties than they should have in 2008.
Russia was recovering by 2002. With that size of a standing army, a small invasion isn't going to make or break the bank. Plus, how could something Putin learned when invading Georgia in 2008 have prevented him from doing something before that? Does he have a time machine or something?
Oh, and I'm not American.
Yeah, but your refusal to consider another perspective has "Made in USA" printed on it in red, white, and blue.
Stop being a Putin apologist when you don't know the first thing about him. You don't have to listen to me, but you should at least listen to people who most definitely do know the situation before spouting n
That's how counterexamples to a universal claim work. I cherrypicked a counterexample, thus, the claim is false, end of story. Further, some of these counterexamples are pretty damn broad, like computers or air conditioning.
Except it's not a universal claim, it's a claim regarding a universal trees. If you find a tree growing sideways, you won't have disproved that trees tend to grow upward.
Which again is patently false. The US has being industrializing for a long time and the power of the worker has increased for most of that time.
Yes, via decidedly extra-capitalistic forces like the lives of labor activists that were slaughtered by the decidedly capitalistic hired guns of steel magnates. I feel like you're confused about something -- the US is not an example of unfettered capitalism. So you can't simply point to something in the US and say "see! that can happen in capitalism!" You have to put in the extra couple of seconds of thought to figure out whether said phenomenon occurred due to capitalism, or in spite of it.
That labor is competing with foreign labor that is vastly cheaper. Further, the US have a lot of supposedly pro-labor regulation, policy, and law that has made this particular problem worse. When you interfere with employment and drive up its cost, sabotage new business creation, and just in general, make your society a crappier place to employ people, then it's no surprise that employees have less bargaining power than they used to.
Again, you're supporting Marx there. Capitalist forces using the state to further take advantage of workers was one of his main themes.
You know, I'm pretty sure you have some kind of emotional need to believe that you disagree with Marx, without knowing what it is you're actually disagreeing with. Is it the propaganda-instilled instincts doing their work, or what?
first off fuck the usa. it's committed many crimes in this world. but more importantly, your "two wrongs make the right" thinking only goes to show you lack morals and principles.
No, it just shows your lack of reading comprehension. Go back and find any mention in my posts of morality. It's OK. I'll wait.
2. if NATO did not exist, russia would be doing the same, or worse.
Yeah, sure they would. But what's that got to do with anything I said?
why do you blame the malice of one party on someone else? it's like you lack a basic abstract social model of cause and effect in your mind, something developed by most people in elementary school
Yeah it could be that, or it could be the fact that I was trying to explain to you that Russia's actions were not merely motivated by a need to "impress" their own citizens, as you implied, but were rather the actions of a fairly strategically ingenious and amoral entity seeking to protects its interests against the encroachment of their essentially only military rival.
according to your wife beater logic
Dude, what's with you and wife beating? It's like a verbal tick for you or something. Maybe you should look into that....
your country is probably some broken shithole with many problems all due to local corruption and bad domestic choices, but blind pride means you believe what some chest thumping demagogue feeds you "it's all the usa's fault because they did bad thing {X} to our country in the cold war 50 years ago" and so you never take any responsibility for your own failures, invent fantastic bullshit cause and effect chains of reasoning for why what you do wron gis actually someone else's fault, and you never fix your fucking problems or even admit you created them
The US has never done anything to my country (well, nothing bad at least), and either way I can't say I have much pride in it.
But keep going, I love watching you trying to figure out which cliche you can cast me in.
Oh nonsense, Russia had every opportunity to join NATO and become a modern progressive nation itself.
Why in god's name would Russia join a military alliance headed by their biggest geopolitical rival whose sole purpose for existing is to surround Russia with thinly veiled sworn enemies, army bases, and missiles aimed at their cities and military forces? What you're talking about is on par with saying the US had every opportunity to join the Soviet satellite states like the Eastern Bloc.
NATO is a security organisation and by increasing membership it increases security.
Hmm, you sure about that? Let me ask you this -- would you be willing to end human civilization as we know it in order to prevent "pro-Russian separatists" in the Ida-Viru region of Estonia from "exercising their right to self-determination" by declaring independence from Estonia and joining Russia?
How about if instead of the Ida-Viru region of Estonia, we're talking about a quarter of the Norwegian offshore oil drilling operations? Would you be willing to destroy hundreds of millions of human lives, including your own, and plunge the planet into decades without sunshine to stop that?
Perhaps NATO isn't everything you think it is, at least not against Russia.
Bringing Russia on board was a key aim because that would be the ultimate stability pact for Europe, but Putin killed all that and put the final nails in the coffin when it invaded both Georgia and Ukraine. Putin plays the victim because it suits, but NATO isn't the aggressor here.
So, let me get this straight -- if, back during the original cold war, the US was faced with Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua, and a couple of other countries entering a pact of mutual defense with the Soviet union wherein they were obligated to attack the US in unison if any of them were attacked by the US, you do not think there would be any Americans feeling as if that was an in any way aggressive move? If Russia had anything close to as far-reaching and actively defensive as the "Monroe Doctrine", they would have launched the nukes when the Berlin wall fell.
Putin would've done what he did regardless, if anything NATO restricted how far he was able to go - certainly it blocked him from annexing the whole of Georgia proper, and places like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and so forth would likely be stuck once more with Russian puppet governments were it not for NATO.
I'll never understand why Putin waited nearly 15 years for NATO to keep expanding before he decided to try to do all those things that he totally intended to do all along. You'd think it'd have been a lot easier to, say, annex Georgia back before they had much in the way of ties to the EU or the US, and same for the rest of those countries. Well, I guess he must be really stupid.
Putin is an imperialist, and no amount of appeasement will or would have ever changed that. He was there as a KGB agent when the USSR collapsed and he's never forgiven that. You wont change him, and you wont help him, all you can do is stand up to him and keep him in check. He believes soviet Russia was always right, and he's determined to try and rebuild the empire he believes was stolen from Russia, failing to realise it wasn't stolen, merely that the people Russia oppressed for so long were taking their freedom back.
Could you give me the phone number for Putin's psychiatrist? I'd love to talk to him, he seems to have told you a lot of interesting things about Putin's character.
Oh, what's that you say? You haven't actually talked to Putin's psychiatrist? And you're basing all your opinions on the typical American "if you're willing to put yourself in our enemies' shoes and consider things from their perspective it obviously means you're a muslim terrorist commie and you hate America" thought-stopping cliche? Well color me surprised.
ukraine is begging to get into NATO. all the new eastern european states begged to get into NATO. fuck what the usa or what the west thinks. fuck what russia thinks
Oh, I see, you just don't know what NATO is. It's an alliance headed by the US. So what the US or west think is rather central to what NATO does.
only moscow matters? only washington dc? you utterly dismiss the wishes of poles, slovaks, bulgars, etc? that makes you a patronizing, condescending asshole
I fail to see any way in which I dismissed what any of those people want. They have their own concerns, and Russia has its own, and NATO has its own. Where's the dismissal?
the USA of course has done plenty of vile imperialist things. of course. what does that change? so two wrongs make a right? the usa does something bad so it's ok that russia does something bad? that's how morality works to you? i knew a guy once who killed someone so it's ok if this other guy kills someone? do you have principles or mindless contrarianism as your motivation?
I don't recall ever discussing right and wrong here. This whole thing started with my response to your statement that "if you think the kgb thug chest thumping by putin on small, weak georgia and ukraine is supposed to impress anyone other than propagandized neoserfs in a walled media garden inside russia. no". I wanted to explain that said "kgb thug" was looking for a lot more than impressing Russians. What does that have to do with right or wrong?
if warsaw wants to be in NATO, who gives a flying fuck what moscow thinks. why should what moscow thinks be the ultimate point about what POLES want? why?
How about because when NATO ignores Russian security concerns and expands recklessly, Russia responds with low-level, plausibly deniable invasions and destabilizations in the states they feel are strategically within their sphere, much like the US does with literally the entire Western hemisphere.
the only thing worse than a russian propagandized idiot on this topic who thinks russia is the victim here is some airhead western moron who thinks russia is the victim here. at least the russian has the excuse of nationalism and wall-to-wall propaganda. what is your excuse for being so unprincipled and unintelligent on the topic?
I'm not "western" either, but keep trying. Maybe one of your ad hominems will eventually stick.
The difference is that Dr. Gallo both never claimed to have a cure and never had that cure fail repeatedly and spectacularly in the real world.
Again, what does the cure have to do with the critique? Had Dr. Gallo proposed a cure that was shown not to work, would you be barebacking Nigerian prostitutes?
The obvious rebuttal is that the premises are false. For example, labor unions are a typical social construct in capitalism that doesn't result in the claimed consequences.
I don't even know how to begin responding to this. Labor unions grew out of socialist movements in order to organize workers against capitalist forces. In the analogy, claiming that labor unions somehow disprove Marx's observations regarding capitalism is like claiming that condoms disprove AIDS. And that's without even mentioning the fact that Marx would have been very much pro-union, despite your claim of "the abject failure of Marx's solutions". It's just that he knew capitalist forces would continuously fight to erode the power of workers, even unionized ones, which, again, is exactly what's happened in the US from the 70's onward.
Or consider job search engines. Are workers worse off because the hiring process has been improved a bit? Are we, workers worse off due to technological improvements to worker productivity like computers or air conditioning?
You can certainly cherry pick examples of technological improvements which seem to have benefited workers (though in the case of hiring practices, I'd argue most recent changes have been horrible for workers), but that's not what the quote is about. The claim in the quote is that the more industrialized production becomes, the less the power of the worker, and the larger the alienation of the worker from the fruits of their labor. The massive increase in prevalence of high turnover, low-wage, low-skill jobs in the US over the last several decades is stark evidence that what Marx was talking about is still happening to this day. This isn't some sort of hypothetical, many people can see that this is happening and it's being discussed heavily in society, especially since the recession. Hell, the very article whose comment section we're in right now is about this!
but of course, you spin that as evil NATO expanding and tricking poor poland, czech, hungary, romania, lithuania, etc... good soviet member states tricked by the evil west, right? they all hate and fear russia now, moron! they run to the west as fast as they fucking can NATO expansion has nothing to do with what NATO did, but everything to do with how maltreated those states were under the russian thug's boot
Are you suggesting that NATO had no choice but to expand to those countries? Like, because they wanted to be NATO members, NATO had no say in it?
ukraine are, *were*, your slavic brothers for centuries.
I'm not Slavic.
pathetic, stupid, the logic of the wife beater and the beaten ignorant propagandized serf wives who swallow and accept that mafia thug shit
If the irony of this statement wasn't lost on you, we could both share an awful hearty laugh.
Gotta love this country. All it takes is a single unfounded *suggestion* that someone's children, especially female, are under some sort of threat, and the bloodlust takes over all rational thought. Evidence?! Proportionality?! Get the fuck out of here, we have CHILDREN to THINK ABOUT!
Soft skinned animals don't typically have exposed vital spots made of thin, brittle plastic spinning at thousands of RPM. I can't kill a rabbit with a gently lobbed golf ball either, but I'm willing to bet it'd be pretty effective against at least some quadcopters.
Was that man's face made of brittle plastic and rotating at thousands of RPM?