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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   33647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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I agree. The thing I've been seeing is a drip-feed of aid that's perfectly calibrated to maintain the stalemate. My observation is that the collective West doesn't want to put Russia in a position of losing. Personally, I would be more than OK with them losing.

Edit responding to edit...

Yep, still agree. The West has been terrified of even the perception of escalating the conflict. They've gotten a little bit better at it, but still it's a piss-poor performance. We know what the US Military can do when allowed off the leash. The "amusing" battle we had with the Wagner Group in Syria is a testament to that.

The best time to have done that was three years ago. The second best time is now. But no one is doing that, and the option is off the table in reality.

You should either fight to win or devise a way to end fighting.

Is there any way I can opt out of this bloodbath? Or, better yet, have the US opt out?

I'm not sure if you're American or European, but it seems to be mostly Europeans who fantasize about killing millions of Russians, and yet have spectacularly little capability to actually do it without American help.

Full NATO mobilization would have a mean estimated death toll in the millions, especially if we factor in a 1% chance of a nuclear exchange.

I'm American, born here to Hungarian parents. I've was raised learning what the USSR, now Russia, has done for the past century from very personal stories. To state my biases, I'm really rather anti-Russian.

I come at this from a position of morality -- well, my own personal morality, which is about the best I can do. We've given a commitment to Ukraine in 1994 to provide security assurances, and we've reneged on this several times over. The just and moral thing to have done is step up in 2014 to protect her like we said we would, ideally diplomatically, but militarily if pressed. We didn't do that, so it's water under the bridge at this point.

It's pretty clear to me that we're not going to force Russia to capitulate. The next most moral thing (according to me), is to find peace somehow. Continuing to fight this stalemate is not moral.

I'm not a huge fan of Trump's way of conducting business, but this could well be the US opting out. It's certainly going to be a forcing function if the US stops sending over money and materiel. The best-case scenario is probably the EU doing the negotiating. I doubt that Zelenskyy is going to be on board with that though.

As much as I don't want Russia to get a win on this, losing a generation of men (on both sides of the conflict) is worse.

Is there any way I can opt out of this bloodbath?

Easily. You have no chance of being drafted into Ukraine, so all you have to do is stop following Ukraine related news and ignore every Ukraine thread here.

It won't be in Ukraine, but I'm going to die in one of those drone stuff videos

Might want to tune into something or other in case of Emergency Broadcast System messages tho...

I am paying taxes for weapons

America has spent $150B on Ukraine in three years, representing 0.7% of total federal outlays over that period. Sounds pretty ignorable to me.

The law of large numbers I guess. If we spend trillions on SS, Medicare, and debt, it makes a mere $350B (to take Trump's number uncritically) seem like nothing.

That's still $350 billion. It's a lot of money. I don't want my tax dollars funding a war machine, and yes, I am allowed to be upset about it even though it's "only" a few hundred billion dollars.

Edit: Roko says I have spent $16,000 on this conflict so far.

If Trump managed to get himself paid $1 billion from the federal government somehow, I'm reasonably confident people wouldn't just ignore it, despite that being less than 1% of any of the numbers we're talking about.

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