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As someone who generally enjoys your writing - please don’t fall into the trap of granting assent to Putin just because doing so runs contrary to the disingenuous mainstream narrative. He really is an enemy of freedom; almost a quintessential looter type out of Rand novels
Too late. Retrospectively, this development makes sense - Kulak always stood out from rat-influenced writers with his passionate diotribes relying less on well-thought, charitable arguments than evocative and sharp language mercilessly cutting through all the things, ideas and people many of us resent so much. Not exactly academically strict discourse, but fun to read, so whetever shortcomings he had were easy to ignore.
Alas, I strongly suspect that from now on, when stumbling on his posts I will remember that one time he managed to get his opinion entirely coincide with most hilarious excerpts from Russian state TV, chuckle a bit, and close the tab.
Farewell Icarus, it was fun to watch you fly before you burned your wings.
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I broadly agree with Kulak's take here. Putin isn't great yeah, but the leadership of Ukraine isn't exactly Jeffersonian classical liberals either. It's a standard regional power struggle that America has no real interests in.
If the Ukrainian people desire independence enough to really fight for it, they're welcome to it. If not, whatever, not my problem. I'm fine with selling them a bunch of weapons, but giving them huge amounts of money or direct intervention ought to be off the table IMO.
Bleeding Russia dry is in America's interest surely.
I kind of agree with this, though I'd phrase it more as being moderately irritating to them rather than bleeding them dry. I did say I'd like to sell Ukraine lots of weapons - both because it makes them a bigger thorn in Russia's side and because it gives us information about how well our weapons actually perform against Russian weapon systems in the hands of the proper Russian army.
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Not really... Russia was positioned to become a US ally as late as 2008-2012, partner in the global war on terror stuff... another nuclear armed, economically dependent, ethically suspect appendage of American empire like Israel or Pakistan... Not really democratic, but good at keeping the locals in line...
Then the woke stuff hit, Putin was a white man who was anti-gay and the democrats went from mocking republicans for treating them as a geopolitical rival ("The 1980s called they want their foreign policy back" said Obama to Romney) to hating any republicans agreed with the take Obama had in 2012...
Its all Trump and Gay Marriage.
That's why Ukraine was treated as a major geopolitical happening in 2014 when Russia-Georgia was completely ignored, or how we're going defcon 1 with sanctions now... but didn't when Putin was propping up Assad in Syria back in 2015.
There can't be a white country that isn't woke. and Russia's the only Asia regional power Americans consider white... So when Turkey wages war on the Democratic and freedom loving Kurds, who have been America's allies for 30 years... no one gives a shit. But when Russia wages war against an ultranationalist not really democratic country that's been commiting warcrimes for 8 years... defcon 1.
Trump, Gay Marriage, white skin. Those are the driving forces of US foreign policy on this. Those are the only things that separate Russia from Turkey or Pakistan or Egypt... or any other Faux democratic, kinda belligerent regional power with dozens of different border disputes.
Not in my news it wasn't. I remember smugly listing it as a counter example to the notion that no two democracies have ever attacked each other. Of course, back then I was under the misapprehension that Russia was a democracy because I was a child.
Actually I think this has a lot more to do with that time Putin's boys shot down a commercial airliner. That was big news and generated a lot of animosity towards Putin.
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What's a huge amount, as a percentage of US GDP?
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Do you not suspect that this lip service to the idea of freedom is only paid as long as there's a credible risk of you and others like you effectively or literally defecting to the far group, should the trust be thoroughly betrayed? And that, as soon as there is nowhere to defect to, the hegemony secured forever – the show's over, your carrot is taken away and into the meat grinder you go?
Yep. The western elite has seen Ukraine bar the leaving of the country, ban critical newspapers, murder dissidents, ban opposition parties, imprison opposition leaders... and they have called it the height of democracy and encouraged us to be more like them.
There is no doubt in my mind the American, Canadian, and European elite would gladdly do the exact same things, selectively conscript their ethnic rivals and send them to the suicide units the second they got an excuse.
This is why I'd prefer Putin win... it might result in regime change in the west. I understand you feel the exact same, if not worse, hatred for Putin than I do for my government...
But Putin doesn't want my family dead, and the western elite does... Toronto Star (state funded newspaper) litterally ran front page stories about how th Unvaxxed should be denied medical treatment, and senior regime figures encouraged doctors and nurses to covertly not treat the unvaxxed... this while I was split open and going through multiple surgeries.
Russia is a very long ways away, and I knew people disfigured and unbanked here.
Regime change.. towards what? Alright, suppose Putin wins and suppose it triggers some regime changes in the West — a few European Putin LARPers might come to power — then what? Is your vision of the future a world littered with dysfunctional authoritarian states on the range from Putinist Russia to North Korea?
Then about the vaccinations… I made a Pfizer shot last year. It’s actual effect on my life is zero. Yes, I get it, it’s a bad precedent. Yes, I get it, the governments should stay the fuck out of regulating what you do to your body. Yes, I get it, it can and will get worse i the future. That said: trading a Western government for a Russian one is trading away a whole lot of your actual, important, substantial freedoms for something that is not (at least yet) a big deal.
John Galt had a hidden valley in the mountains, we the Russians have the western countries; where would you go if you achieved your stated ideal of dismantling the western regime? Don’t delude yourself thinking you’d fare well in Russia. That requires either doing nothing of importance (what kind of life is that), swearing fealty to degenerates, or indeed going against the govt and winning.
No putin larpers wouldn't win. The enemies of the regime would win.
You're acting as if a socialist would want the Tzarist forces to lose the Russo-Japanese war because they want Shintoism to take over russia... No they want the Tsarist regime humiliated so the revolution of 1905 could happen (though they wouldn't like that that revolution failed).
Likewise Putinism to the extent its an ideology is already prettymuch failed and dying... I want the Liberal Globalist order to lose to that failing and dying ideology not to prop up putinism but to humiliate and ruin the Liberal international order so that the homegrown ideologies already taking off in the west can have their revolutions as detached from putinism as Liberal Constitutionalism and Socialist revolutionaries were from Shinto-Imperialism.
distant enemies of my enemy can be quite useful.
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If i were to describe the Ukraine war I describe it like the Iran-Iraq War... Two awful regimes you'd never want to live in grinding conscripts and people with no better prospects against each other. And also maybe Iran was a better place to live than Iraq during the time... low bar. (or maybe Iran just happens to be the only middle-eastern country with a movie industry so it seems better)
Ultimately I'd like them both to lose, and the cynical western backers drawing out the war to lose even harder....
Picture the map of the region rendered in stained glass... and then picture all the lines if you hit that stained glass repeatedly with a hammer... Those are what the borders should be. I wouldn't trust any of these people to govern a man 10 miles away let alone 400, and even then I'd want that local subject to be heavily armed.
Putin is awful... don't get me wrong. But Ukraine is literally executing civilians for continuing to live in occupied areas, has shelled civillians since 2014, has banned every rival political party, banned a free press, banned its population from leaving... Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point... and this is what our leaders hold up as their ideal and model of democracy for the rest of us.
Fuck that.
To quote Marylin Manson: "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers, I don't need to choose a side."
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Not letting your citizens leave the country is a very VERY unique horror with very few precedents. And one I am very fucking sensitive to having just lived through the Canadian lockdowns.
It's not unique at all, it was standard fare for half of my parent's lifetime doe to them being born in People's Republic of Poland, a vassal state of the dearest USSR. The standard fare for getting a passport was to become an informer for the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (Security Service), spying on your family and friends. And that was during cold "wartime", not war-wartime. While I'm not much a fan of Zeleński, calling wartime conscription of males a very rate precedent show only one's narrow historical and geographical perspective.
And "Ukraine's government is corrupt, therefore their cities getting shelled and their people getting warcrimed in a manner typical to Red-- I mean Russian army is just business as usual in the region" is an embarassing non sequitur.
No for most of human history there was no effective means to enforce border controls and people could just leave if they wanted, except for totalitarian states for which literally any violence is justified to end their existence. It remains a horror to the average American that any soviet countries could have existed without the populace flaying the flesh from their tyrants in the night.
that a "democracy" equipped with the technology and surveillance tech to actually prevent its citizens from leaving, has chosen to restrict mass cross-sections of the country from exercising basic freedom of travel, and has done so that they might be imprisoned and fed into the war machine is a very unique fucking horror and one no westerner has EVER tolerated in a democracy.
At the height of the Vietnam War the US did not control americans leaving. That's how draft dodgers got to Canada, they just fucking drove. If the US had set up checkpoints on the other side of the road and started interrogating anyone trying to leave the country, there would have been armed insurrection and those guards would have been firebombed in their homes with their children inside.
The fact you treat a totalitarian country like Soviet Poland as an at all acceptable comparison as if its very existence wasn't an insult to the human race, says a whole lot about those willing to support the Zelensky regime.
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Live free or die. Any regime that gets remotely close to these restrictions demands endless armed insurrection until the populace is free of it or until no one is left alive within it.
In the post above, you write
which implies that you're a Leaf, so I don't see how stealing USA's hypothetical 60s valor, or speaking about "average American's" horror is of any use here. But more to the point: how come you're still alive, then? Why didn't you live up to your proclaimed ideals, why didn't you take up arms against Trudeau regime, or died trying?
The difference between Vietnam and Russia's 'special military operation' is that the latter is fought on Ukraine's home soil. I thought that this was obvious, but apparently it needs pointing out. No western country had a war on their turf since 1945. If they did, the just-so-stories about how their superior civil liberties flow flow their citizens' moral superiority would melt rather quickly.
Also, there's no such thing as "Soviet Poland", Poland (along with Czechoslovakia, etc.) was not a soviet republic, but a separate state. Authoritarian, not totalitarian, and you having two factual errors in one sentence makes me think that you're getting it wrong on purpose, although I fail to imagine what it might be.
But it the American soul is truly as pained by my country's predecessor's existence as you claim, I'm afraid they have mostly their former president to blame. FD Roosevelt mad a deal with Stalin, and so the iron curtain landed to the west of Poland, instead of to the east. I guess "live free" only goes so far, and sacrificing entire countries' freedom as a bargaining chip was acceptable to 40s Americans.
Also, while great men theory of history is probably wrong. Thousands of above-average men can make a dent, at least in the short term. As it happens, some 22000 of Poland's cream of the crop were murdered in the early stage of WWII, which made mounting a successful resistance to the Soviets rather difficult. And the culprit was... would you look at that, Russians! I mean, Soviets! But surely, my antipathy towards Russia must only be because of the Western propaganda.
First, LOL if you believe this as if the poles weren't 100% a conquered people and your administrative status mattered. Sure. And the East German stasi was ethically better than the pre-45 Stasi... absolutely a free republic.
Second FDR 100% deserved the gallows for destroying American freedom and bringing about the administrative state. Fascism in all but name. I reccommend reading Herbert Hoover's Hsitory of the second world war Freedom Betrayed
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Third, something big happened in Canada in response to the lockdowns, rebellions, blockades of the worlds busiest bridge, violent confrontations with the police, and occupation and encampment in -20 to -40... I neither confirm nor deny my involvement in any illegal activity. And BTW the truckers won. The government blinked, almost all restrictions were dropped across the board, and half the political spectrum of Canada is being purged of those who supported lockdowns.
Forth, English Canadians are a made up people. There is no cultural difference between us and the US. Its like Germany and Austria, but without even a significant history of cultural difference or conflict. Hell I've lived in apartments that looked into the US.
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Finally, I'm not some pro-Russia shill. You hate Russia? Good you probably should, as far as I can tell almost everyone in europe is 100% right to want almost everyone else in Europe dead. What I loath is the North American elite sending our money to support centuries old ethnic conflicts, treating violent authoritarian states as if they're some moral exemplars everyone over hear should admire, and risking an escalation to world war over a third world country and its conflict with its second world neighbor.
I want the US and Canada disentangled from Europe.
How would you feel if your government was sending billions of your dollars to prop up regimes in the South Pacific? How would you feel if you were edging closer to nuclear war over some bullshit conflict in West Africa? It does not concern us, we have no meaningful economic or geopolitical interest tied up in it, and there's no way the Ukrainian moral claims hold up to the slightest scrutiny compared to any other global conflict, especially on costs.
I don't really care whether Russia or Ukraine wins in the abstract, I care that my government is trying to get us further entangled in geopolitical conflicts that don't concern us and could end with nukes landing in our cities.
Canad-Anschluss when?
I feel more at home in Toronto, or even in Quebec, than I do in many parts of the United States. Canadian independence is mostly hypothetical anyway in the field of foreign policy, and our conflicts on trade et al are less aggressive than internal conflicts in Canada or the USA.
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Understandable, but it would also be understandable if this intensifies your passion on this issue beyond what is reasonable.
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Universal conscription is pretty common in small countries with bigger and more powerful neighbors. Finland, Israel, South Korea for examples that would generally be considered free countries. Russia too as it happens, though they have apparently loosened up on their terms of conscription.
Of those three Finland is the only one I'd possibly consider free or non-horrifying... and I suspect that's probably just my ignorance and it actually is horrifying in some way I haven't yet heard of, given it feels entitled to enslave its male population... and largely not even give them a vote on the matter since conscription begins at 18 and voting only occurs 1/4 years.
Most conscripts who've die in wars of "Democracy" die for a country they were never eligible to vote in.
This probably deserves its own thread to explore properly, since it's a tricky question. Technically it's true that it could be seen as a form of slavery. But on the other hand, if you aspire to live in a country with any political freedoms, don't you basically have to take some level of responsibility for physically defending it from hostile aggressors who would crush that freedom? Feels pretty abstract in a country like America, but not so much in places like the above where powerful and far more numerous adversaries are only a short distance away, could invade at any moment and crush any illusion of liberty you might have had.
Political freedom is not a function of the state but the individuals ability to commit violence against the state. Knights were free and serfs were slaves not because of some deriliction or philosopgical disposition of the king, but because the knights could rebel and offer violence to the king but the serfs could not even offer violence to the knights.
Likewise the North American colonists were able to gain so much more freedom than their European counterparts because they were armed and could murder government officials... Even Canada has had more rebellions in the past 200 years than Brittain.
Making oneself subservient, even in an armed role, to the state does nothing to gain one liberty Ask all those russian concripts who died with no political freedom under communism.
One does not gain freedom by fighting the state's enemies. One gains freedom by making the state your enemy
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If the government can unilaterally send you to die in the trenches then your freedom is already crushed
Likewise if a country cannot raise enough people who care about it enough to fight for it on their own volition, then perhaps it ceasing to exist as an independent entity is not such a bad thing
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Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
A principled stand for freedom here is worthwhile, but probably only if your particular set of borders has a bunch of nukes/is part of a nuclear alliance.
Universal mobilization means you are now an element of the war machine, and leaving is desertion. It has happened everywhere at different times for different reasons, and exists as an option for all developed nations in the world as we speak.
I have written about concription several times on the motte... In every instance I've argued it demanded lethal violence against thos administering it. Up to ands including killing the volunteer members of the draft boards
If we are indulging in fantastical arrangements for society, I think we should all just get along, man.
The french revolution pulled the cork this particular bottle, and Napoleon smashed it and fired the remains into the sun. Until technology removes the need for mass participation of humans on the home front and the war front, any state that elects to leave this particular option on the table is tying it's hands for principles sake.
we can abandon chemical weapons because they don't really work on organized first tier militaries; we cam restrain ourselves from Nukes and Bio 'cause of MAD and escalation. You can't have a war without people, though.
I don't care if the hands are tied. I want free people to exist not states.
I'd rather A country be reduced to Afghanistan and lose a chunk of its territory and free people exist somewhere in the uncontrolled territory than no free people exist anywhere because the state propped up its own existence by enslaving them.
Yes this goes for WW2. Yes this goes for the civil war. I have not seen a single faction in a single war in any moment of human history where i thought their propping up their war efforts by resorting to litteral slavery was at all an improvement.
the 20 million who died fighting for the soviet union might have lived had they murdered their commissars and officers instead of being fed into the Soviet Unions horrific efforts at self preservation.
The worst enemy you have no matter what is the man who has you at gunpoint and is issuing orders... he is always the first person you need to kill. And if a nation and a people... even call themselves your people are standing behind him demanding your death, then they are your enemies too.
There is no one more sympathetic in WW2 than the soviet citizens who volunteered for the Nazis, or the German citizens who volunteered for the soviets or allies... They accurately assessed who their greater enemy was: Their own governments.
I also want a stateless classless society where property is abolished and all receive according to their need, hail Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
We need to advance a touch more as a society in a variety of ways before we get there though.
Again, if you want to stand by your principles hell or high water, you have to accept that what is going to happen to you when the floods come is that you will drown.
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Hardly. The Nazis weren't asking nicely. They were asking far less nicely than the Soviet government demanded, by all accounts known to me. It wasn't "accurately accessing that their own government was the greater enemy", it was accurately accessing that Stalin and the Red Army were far and the Wehrmacht and the SS were very, very close - close enough to have them at gunpoint and issuing orders.
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Also there's both overt Western involvement that mainstream media portrays as good and proper, along with covert Western involvement, without which the conflict probably wouldn't have happened, that won't be talked about in mainstream sources for decades, if at all.
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That is also my perspective.
Except why condemn the cynical western backers in this particular case? For all we know they might have the same assessment; surely it’s unreasonable to expect them to broadcast it in their media right as they supply Ukraine with armaments and promises
The amount of otherwise reasonable people who seem to have drunk the coolaid in earnest gives me a pause too, though
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