OBJECTION!

Ah, well you see, China doesn’t have a casus belli to claim all of Russia. Of course, they might have deployed their foreign minister over to Fabricate Claims, but if so, they haven’t had much success with it. The most they could take right now is a duchy or a county, and it’s just not worth the Prestige penalty, or the costs of keeping their levies raised long enough to get their Warscore to 100%.

Remember when the US was opening a port to provide aid to Gaza and we just had to wait for that and then they finished and then Israel blocked the aid like they did with everyone else and the US said “Oh well” and packed it up after accomplishing jack shit?

They’re just just trying to make it look like something is happening, just stalling for time indefinitely, constantly saying stuff is right around the corner while delivering on jack shit (except unconditional military aid to Israel). Anyone still buying this crap is a grade-A sucker.

The executives of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin thank you for spit-shining their boots.

I could not give less of a shit about Ukraine’s “rightful lands.” No, it’s not worth ordinary people dying to preserve the land of a reactionary state.

It’s so ridiculously easy to fool you into supporting wars. Literally the exact same playbook every single time and you’ll fall for it every single time. “We have to stop them here or they’ll keep coming,” heard it all before. Where are all the 9/11s, now that we lost in Afghanistan? It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now. Some of us are able to learn from history. It’s unfortunate that others refuse to learn and keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.

It’s very funny that you call me a keyboard warrior, I still haven’t heard your excuse for why you believe in drafting others against their will to fight for a cause you believe in, while you cower at home. Almost as if you don’t actually care about the well-being of Ukrainians at all 🤔

I’m not the one who wants all that to continue. How many more lives must be senselessly thrown into a meat grinder just to move a line on a map?

If you care so much about it, why don’t you go volunteer yourself? Ah, but you don’t want that, what you want is for people to drive around, grabbing people off the street, and forcing them to fight your battles against their will. Because you don’t actually care one bit about the people’s wellbeing, you want to use them in pawns of the Great Game, which you seem to mistakenly believe benefits anyone outside of the 1%.

Anyway you’re not going to have any luck with that terrorist line. That’s literally the exact thing that they said about Iraq and Afghanistan, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists,” I’ve heard that shit my whole life. I wasn’t with them then and history has validated that completely. We’ll see how many people have to die this time before the liberals finally realize that war is bad, yes, even this time.

Can’t think of a time in history where both sides in a war didn’t claim it was about defense and security, whether it was or not. I remember when they said “Either we fight them over there or we’ll have to fight them here,” and went off to kill a million people in the Middle East, and then they lost, and now, where are all the terror attacks they said would happen? I remember too (though I’m not old enough to have lived through it) when they said if we didn’t go out and kill 4 million people in Vietnam, they’d keep expanding all over and eventually we’d be fighting them here. Well, we lost that one too, and nothing bad happened afterward. So forgive me if I’m just a little bit skeptical of the latest pretext for pouring ridiculous sums of money into the pockets of defense contractors so the rich can get richer while our schools, roads, and hospitals decline further and further into dysfunction.

I am a tankie, yes, because tankies seem to be the only people interested in spending less money on tanks and more on human wellbeing.

Not everyone who went into Iraq or Afghanistan was an American either, the leaders of plenty of other countries supported it too.

Also we’re talking about American politician JD Vance and what he wants to do regarding US foreign policy, so the history of US foreign policy is obviously relevant.

It’s wild how eager people are to look at the exact same people who lied us into Iraq and Afghanistan and say, “Yeah, I trust them to have the people’s best interests at heart when they lead us into another conflict.”

Yes, it would be bad to start another war somewhere else.

Vance doesn’t want that, he just wants out of this particular conflict so he can start shit somewhere else.

democratic processes

“Democracic processes,” you mean seizing power through force in a coup and then banning major opposition parties.

Tankies hate JD Vance too. The only reason he wants peace in Ukraine is to start shit with China. We tankies don’t want to make peace in one place just to fight somewhere else, we want peace and deescalation all over the globe.

The COVID lab leak conspiracy theory was promoted by high level politicians and news outlets. The origin point is largely irrelevant as it could’ve happened anywhere. China’s response was much better at containing the virus than that of the US, which is why fewer people died per capita. Public opinion of China was majority favorable in 2018, so the argument that it’s just because they’re a competitor doesn’t hold water.

The steep drop in opinion that you see in those polls is only really explainable as, like I said, the product of a massively successful propaganda campaign, the reasons for which I stated, to distract from the horrible mishandling of COVID in the US and to justify defense spending.

The US fucked around with saber-rattling and scapegoating China for COVID (causing a massive rise in AAPI hate crimes btw) and now they’re finding out. Maybe if our leaders had tried deescalating tensions before shit hit the fan, then they could’ve been more successful in trying to isolate Russia, but no, always gotta have an enemy to justify the military-industrial complex, long-term consequences be damned.

And yet, still zero evidence 🤔

The claim I’m disputing is that people would deny that this is happening, not that they’re insufficiently critical according to your standards. I’m not interested in evaluating that purely subjective claim (a discussion in which the goalposts could easily be shifted all over the place), what I’m interested in is disproving the objectively false claim that lemmy tankies deny this specific story happening.

The fact of the matter is that the person I responded to lied. That’s all I’m saying. And for pointing out that objectively true fact, rather than anyone who disagreed supplying evidence, they just downvoted me, because apparently they think popularity is a substitute for truth.

Posted it myself, just now, just for you.

To be clear, what you’re suggesting is that stories that the Chinese government is actively talking about would be censored on lemmy.ml. Let’s see if that’s true! Can’t wait to find out!

Well, since we have a disagreement about what’s true, then there’s one surefire way to settle it, right? Evidence. If you’re saying that I’m lying and rejecting reality, surely you can point me to evidence that I’m wrong, right? So link me to the comments you saw of people denying this story.

Oh wait, you can’t, because it didn’t happen. Because y’all make shit up about us all the time and never have the receipts, because fundamentally, we believe in basing our beliefs on evidence and you do not.

Nobody’s denying this, there’s plenty of Chinese sources reporting on it.

Funny how even when you actually have a true story to talk about you can’t resist making shit up.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

No, obviously, in the same way it would be ridiculous to claim that every single person who supports separatism is a secret agent for Russia. The claim in both cases is that the movement received foreign support, allowing it to convince more ordinary people to support it than they would have otherwise.

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR.

Russia is not the USSR. And most people experienced a decline in quality of life, across every objective metric, following its collapse.

It’s also well known that many people in eastern Ukraine have ethnic, cultural, and family ties to Russia, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of them wanted to have more favorable relations with them. This goes back to when the Soviets transferred the territory to Ukraine in the first place.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Americans don’t actually care about Ukrainians, most people barely knew they existed and couldn’t find the country on the map. The only reason people started caring is because they started being relevant to state interests.

Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

No it won’t. The Ukrainian people do not have the option to vote on whether or not to accept territorial concessions, because they don’t have a democracy, and even what pretense of democracy they used to have has been suspended due to the war. The Ukrainian state may get to decide that, but that is not the same as the Ukrainian people. You don’t seem to be separating the state’s interests from the people’s interests at all.