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I'm embarrassed and disgusted. We should be the ones thanking Ukraine for doing the dirty work of defending Western civilization for us. All we've had to contribute is $120 billion in weapons that probably would have been thrown away. What an absolute bargain. I'm glad that Zelenskyy held his ground and didn't cave into their petty guilt-tripping bitchfest.
What, specifically, about Western Civilization has the war in Ukraine defended?
Peace and prosperity in Europe. To put this in neonazi terms, higher IQ western whites, spearheaded by leadership heavily colored by those born within the Hajnal line, have naturally held this one weird compact: no more brother wars. White western civilization also maintains its near monopoly on functional true democracy (for whatever worth and reality there is in that). And the peace and prosperity furthers the goal of Western civilization constantly getting richer, more technologically advanced, and producing the high levels of human cultural output - instead of being distracted with constant dick measuring wars between worthless dictators playing their own map expansion and coloring games. That latter bit is more the area of say, Africa or the Middle East, with one notable exception.
Weirdly, slavs consistently are the odd man out here. Southern slavs in the Balkans being the exception to European peace in the 90s. And Russia never ever being able to match the civilization level of western nations i.e. they've never had a democracy and similar internal civil development, for some reason, and show no signs of self improvement in the near future.
The Russian war of annexation is symbolically and functionally a civilizational war of oriental despotism and 3rd worldism vs Western Civilization. Resistance against it is resistance said orientalism and lower level of civilization. It punishes the weak and problemed in favor of the thriving and superior. Appeasement is degradation and invitation to further rot.
It's the geopolitical equivalent of a schoolyard bully that comes from a broken dysfunctional home of a whorish single mother and revolving door of boyfriends that occasionally beat said bully. Everyone with half a brain can tell such a bully is going nowhere in life long term, even if he's big right now. He takes advantage of high trust societal norms (non-violent, conflict averse teachers) to let out his frustration, from internal problems, on other students like "nerds" (who are actually higher IQ, more prosocial, and more mentally well adjusted). You'd be a fool to think the "nerds" should just let the bully do whatever he wants under the idea he'll just stop, or even worse sink to his level and imitate him. He's the defect and weak link.
Do they? I'm awash in takes daily about how, actually, Europe is kind of fucking poor. They haven't had a start up that matters globally in decades. Their economies are fractions of a single state. For many of them, their stock markets don't even crack $1T in total market cap compared to the US have several trillion dollar companies. France has the highest, and it's behind the US, China, Japan, India, Hong Kong and Canada.
And peace, well that's debatable. The powers that be have basically invited the barbarians inside the gates, and are throwing anybody in jail who complains.
I'm not sure Europe's thoroughly domesticated population is receiving the dividends for their emasculating behavior you imagine they are.
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Russia is an authoritarian regime that doesn't respect secular liberal values, allies with muslim terrorists, and oppresses its own people. Anyone fighting such a regime, and preventing its incursion into Europe, is defending Western civilization.
England and Germany are also both authoritarian regimes that don’t respect secular liberal values. Australia locked people in quarantine camps against their will only FOUR years ago. Canada debanked a bunch of truckers because they were honking their horns. Various states in the US will de facto kidnap your children and castrate them.
At some point the west needs to remind itself what it means to be the west and what we’re supposed to be defending. Free speech, free expression, free association, parental rights, bodily autonomy; these are non-negotiable.
Russia doesn’t support these things either, and is clearly an authoritarian pseudo-democracy, but “the west” just keeps slipping, and the lack of contrast between us makes it harder to rile me into supporting a war to defend our values.
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Whittling down an ever-shrinking population of young European males even more, to save Western civilization.
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I do not share your "secular liberal values", and am not interested in maintaining them. The median European neither shares my values nor respects my inalienable rights, and are both willing to coordinate meanness against me and has a long history of cooperating with efforts at such coordination. Any claim that Europe is a bastion against Muslim extremism seems laughable on the face, given Europe's obsession with importing as many people from extremist Muslim countries as possible and their evident failure to actually suppress the extremism of their new citizens. Europe as a bulwark of "Oppression" is likewise laughable; the median European would prefer me to be imprisoned than living as I am.
"Western Civilization" does not, I think, have a definition that we share in common, so I decline appeals to it.
Of course Europe is not a bastion against muslim extremism, but I think that's simply a failure of Europeans being too optimistic about letting in highly religious immigrants, hoping they would be converted to secular values. Russia, however, openly sides with dagestani warlords and invites them to rape and pillage Europe. If I had my way, Europe and the US would be completely rid of both christian and islamic oppression. That's not possible right now, but it could happen someday. Defeating Putin's barbarian orc army is a start.
If your starting point in a negotiation is "let's defeat this army first and THEN we can rid the US of your chosen religion's oppression" it seems like you are not going to win a lot of new allies.
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I am highly religious, as are many Americans. I am not interested in helping to build a system for suppressing Muslim extremism when it is self-evident that such a system will be used against people like me first and worst. Not when countries who don't want Muslim extremists could simply choose not to import Muslim extremists, and especially not when I strongly suspect that the enthusiasm with importing them is at least partially motivated by the hope that they'll form a reliable voting block against people like me.
I have no idea what this refers to, but would be willing to read up on it if you had a link. Meanwhile, we allied with child-raping drug dealers for twenty years in Afghanistan.
Yes. And then you wonder why I, as a Christian, am not enthusiastic about facilitating this process with my nation's blood and treasure.
You hate people like me. You'll harm us if you can. You are not a friend or even an ally. You are just as bad an enemy as Russia, and much more dangerous to me that Russia ever could be.
Not at all. I do believe in religious freedom. I just don't want to be governed by religious values, especially ones from outside my culture. I take issue with the way Christianity spread throughout the world, often by force, and displaced traditional European religions and atheism, but I don't blame individual christians for that.
It would not surprise me if you did have a conceptual package of things you approve of and are willing to tolerate that you've labeled "religious freedom". I see no reason to believe that this package has sufficient overlap with the package I maintain under that label, nor to believe that you are in fact committed to this package in any durable way long-term, such that I should base my plans for the future on the assumption that it will protect people like me or work in our favor. When the new arguments about how things which were previously normal are actually weird and harmful and need to be suppressed, or why things which were previously abhorrent suddenly are the purest reflection of human liberty and must be defended, I expect the model "liberal" to update cleanly and arbitrarily in favor of withdrawing tolerance from those who disagree.
Again, the part where Progressives were absolutely in favor of mass-importing radical muslims on the assumption that, in your words, they would "be converted to secular values." "Conversion to secular values" isn't gravity. It's a socially-constructed mechanism that the Progressive tribe built and maintains at considerable expense, and it is and always will be innately hostile to people like myself. Tolerance is not a moral precept; the idea that it was was something between a delusion and a deliberate con.
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The understanding that war in Europe in the quest for control isn't a good idea and should not succeed? NATO's territorial safety? Giving an imperialist dictator a bloody nose? I can think of a couple of things. Why are you so ready to defend russia is the main question? Even if Ukraine hadnt actually defended any western value it was certainly supporting US interests in the region. Throwing an ally under the bus and bullying them like trump did is an obscenity.
I don't care about NATO. Ukraine has never been an ally to me, in either an official or unofficial capacity. Giving dictators bloody noses - this isn't 1942, and it's not as if the bloody noses left across the Middle East have reaped many rewards for myself or their locals. If Europe is concerned about their sovereignty, then they should start acting like it.
The spell of the mythical do-good American hegemony has been assailed from all sides and rotted from within. This isn't a defense of Putin. I'm just done with this bullshit, and no ra-ra'ing is going to pull me back in.
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