You guys literally started it.
Totally not a fan of the guy we have driving the bus right now, I didn’t vote for him, and oppose all war. But now that we’re in it, I’m a bit concerned that this is going to be quite a bit more violent and terrible than we have the stomach for?
I mentioned above I work with some Ukrainian refugees. We are not prepared mentally for what is coming.
You can make the (somewhat weak) case that Russia was provoked, but the first violent strike was made by Russia and Russia alone.
People are great, countries are pretty much all evil.
Up close everyone is great, far away, like from space, everything looks great. It's the middle distances that are problematic.
For a long time I wanted to believe you, and in the past I'd have looked at work camps in China and said "thats bad". Now i look at the US prison industry and go "Is it really that different?". The examples don't end there...
I'm an American and sometimes I'm not sure which is the "least evil game here." Like, the Iranians and Russians are pretty evil, the IRGC killed a lot of people last winter and I'm friends with quite a few Ukrainians. But then also we have the ongoing insanity with ICE and the Epstein files...
The way I see it right now, we have "The Epstein Alliance" versus "The Axis of A-holes." Nobody involved in this is great, but I would rather live in America or the EU than Russia, or Iran.
To be fair, as an American, I don't know enough about what life is actually like in China to form an educated opinion? But by the sounds of it, they suck too.
My intuition is that this whole charade will come crashing down over the next few years as AI starts replacing more and more jobs.
The ignorance of the American people enables this violence-- this is by design. William J. Casey, CIA director under Reagan, "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false". The CIA has employed many hundreds of journalists working at major networks and newspapers like CBS, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Reading the comments on this story, it appears that much of what Europeans believe is false, as well. Someone presented a detailed and accurate account of the recent* history leading up to the illegal, but absolutely provoked, Russian invasion of Ukraine but was accused of lying. Several comments indicate a complete lack of concern about provoking the nation with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world into a direct hot conflict. Even if it stayed conventional, which appears unlikely, Russia has a much larger military than all of Western Europe combined. Insane.
* The history should start much earlier, with US assurances to Russia that NATO would not expand, and then Clinton and all subsequent US administrations betraying these promises.