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Comment by jevgeni | Hacker News Reader

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> I think if you equate "helping Ukraine defend itself against ethnic eradication" with "support an awful war" your judgement on what is a balanced debate is not reliable.

I said I support the Ukraine, but I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us. What you said there is quite a jump from what I said and exactly the type of nonsense that people would say in order to silence any meaningful debate.

I think if you believe that the support which the Ukraine gets from NATO countries is only to "help the Ukraine" and that NATO has no underlying geopolitical agenda and you don't wonder why we didn't support other nations at war with similar enthusiasm or why we never held ourselves accountable for the crimes committed in Iraq then I think your judgement on a balanced debate is not reliable. But that's okay, we both should be able to voice our thoughts and opinion and neither of us should get bombarded with replies which make us uncomfortable to debate and effective silence us.

> I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us

You're being super vague. Just say what you don't believe, out loud.

You don't believe that there's people out there calling for eradication of ukrainians? Just go on Twitter, my dude. There's even american personalities calling for it. Do you see this shit? https://twitter.com/realstewpeters/status/164670071474641305...

You don't believe "what's happening" in Ukraine? I mean, why don't you go there; it's not inaccessible, and you don't have to take up arms to do so. But fine if you don't, just.. look at people who do. There's millions of people there right now, most of them with phones, and plenty of tourists and non-tourist foreigners.

Because he is of the belief that if he doesn't explicitly say something, he can never be called out on it. He wishes to engage in criticism of others while never having to invite criticism to himself. He will sit there and tell you every single problem everything else has and why he is so rational and correct in these opinions, while offering no real solutions. Also, despite being so clear of vision and prescient of problems coming down the pipe, he's only moderately successful in that "is able to keep down a decent job and live an upper-middle-class" is successful. Which, it is, but it's hardly the resume of a world-beater.

But, as always, we tell on ourselves even with how we use language.

He always refers to Ukraine as "the" Ukraine. That itself speaks to someone who is considerably older than the Russian Federation or someone who likes to parrot the opinions of that Federation. Because Russia sees Ukraine as its territory. It is a region of Russia. But it is not. It is its own sovereign country. We don't say "the" Japan or "the" Germany or "the" Ireland.

The guy is the quintessential "enlightened centrist", finding the prevailing opinion of a place and then putting himself squarely on the opposite side "to provide balance".

It's only a jump if you deliberately ignore what russians themselves are saying.

As I've mentioned somewhere else in this thread, russian government and russian mass media outright call for ethnic cleansing. Putin in his speech at the start of the war said "that he has taken steps to finally solve the Ukrainian question". Solovyev and Skabeyeva - very prominent, prime-time media personalities - are actively promoting ideas of ethnic cleansing, like Skabeeva saying that the gruesome beheading of a Ukrainian POW by Wagner is righteous and should happen to all Ukrainians who oppose russia. Prigozhin publicly claimed that they have "killed most of the active Ukrainian male population" (which is BS) and therefore "achieved the goals of Putin's Special Military Operation." (which is an super significant statement about their intent!)

In light of this, your whataboutism is both tiresome and irrelevant, because you are outright ignoring explicit statements by one side. This is per definition unbalanced.

It is not a jump. When it comes to genocide, you are either for it or against. There is no center, no above, no neutral. The only other option is being unaware. What is being done in the west is people continuously being made aware and forced to make a choice. It's not a pleasant choice to make either way, so it's understandable that people are not happy to have to make it. But trying to carve out a neutral position where there is none, is not going to work.

> is not going to work.

What are you going to do about it, tiger?

You can't force anybody to think the way you want them to think. You are only going to frustrate yourself with your power trip fantasy.

It is true, we can't force people to think the way we want, nor should we want to. What we can do, hopefully, is make them live with the consequences of admitting the way they think, whatever that entails.

There are countries where it is not against the law to be a nazi, but you still get to live as a nazi.

Just let Putin genocide supporters to admit that they support Putin's genocide instead of supporting Ukraine's right to defense is good enough ;)

Expecting people to adhere to humane values is not a power trip fantasy.

"but I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is tellin"

What is the mainstream media? Is there a conspiracy between unrelated news organizations around the world to help Ukraine?

Russia doesn't believe a country called Ukraine exists. Instead they believe a region called 'the Ukraine' does. Funny your choice of words.

I think US Aid should exclusively come via NATO, and in proportion to what the other NATO nations are willing to contribute., hell I would even accept a 2:1 contribution (meaning for every $1 or every Missile other NATO members contribute the US gives 2... )

The world complains about the US being the "world police" until they want us to spend all of our resources to defend them...

US Aid to Nato is an investment in global economic stability that is repaid via increased commerce. It is a long term investment and it has paid off time after time.

I would disagree on both assertions.

Many nato members are already providing much more than the US per capita.

First I disagree with using per capita numbers, that is in improper way to judge this type of thing.

However even if we look at the percapita number, the US out spend all other nato nations. Between January 24 and November 20, 2022, NATO members committed at least 75.2 billion euros of that 47.8 came from the US.

Per Capita for that period breaks down as

US: 142 Euros / citizen

UK: 117 Euros / Citizen

Canada: 96 Euros / Citizen

Germany: 70 Euros / Citizen

France: 21 Euros / Citizen

Germany would have to 2 double their per capita contributions just to match the US.

Great you omitted the big spenders, and picked France and Germany who have been stepping on the break from the beginning. If you don't like per capita we can do % of GPD where the US doesn't even break in to the top ten. Unsurprisingly the biggest member of nato (by far) has given the biggest bag of money. But US is nowhere near being the most committed nations.

I picked the top spenders of NATO.

Who in NATO has given more than US, UK and Canada?

Show your sources

Estonia is 300 EUR per capita.

https://vm.ee/en/estonias-aid-ukraine

Where do they commit this money? As in: what does it pay for exactly?

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