Aren't we all libs? I mean we all deserve the wall

When we were exposed as incapable, with a trillion dollars worth of advanced weaponry and organization, of defeating ragtag Afghan fighters who wipe their asses with their bare hands. That is Russia's great crime.

Exactly not sure what the US needs protecting from with its super OP position. Thousands of miles of Ocean either side and friendly neighbours to the north and south. When all that is miraculously overcome and this mythical invasion comes you have a few 100 million fighting age armed civilians.

Spending nearly 800 billion dollars a year on your "defence" and maintaining 750 overseas military bases in 80 foreign countries doesn't seem like defence to me more like a provocation.

It's not a provocation, it's a deterrent and a defense of allied countries. And of course it's also a threat of attack, but I don't see how it could be viewed as a provocation.

Depends on your outlook i guess both those statements could be interchangeable to a foreign power. Can guarantee if Russia or China set up bases in Mexico the US would see it as a provocation.

If Mexico was an ally of China and not of the US, it would be expected.

Really a NATO military base in Kazakhstan? Can't find anything about one online.

Russia doesn't want war, that's why they started one.

Well, it would be, wouldn't it, just as it was when the USSR foolishly set up intermediate-range nuclear-missile bases in Cuba, and you'll recall how that worked out. It wasn't the same as US missiles in Turkey (which even Khrushchev admitted he just had to put up with, and they were obsolete anyway), because Russia exists on the shared Eurasian landmass with all sorts of other countries round it, and always has, and the US exists in its own hegemonic 'hemisphere' or, as you might say, bubble. Intrude on that bubble and the Americans will naturally react.

Russia entered into an ongoing conflict and expanded it. There was a civil war going on in Ukraine before Russia invaded. The democratically elected government of Ukraine was violently overthrown by extremists (who else would violently overthrow a democratic government?) and regional conflicts became violent as some people, many of them ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, would not accept the results of a violence based politics. If you follow the thread of democracy Russia is on the right side in opposing the current Ukrainian regime which came to power through, again for those in the back rows or hard of understanding, violently overthrowing the legitimately elected democratic government.

And yes the U.S. had a hand in that overthrow as did a lot of neo nazis. Just some incontrovertible and uncontroversial facts you would want to consider were you interested in reality. You would have an easier time arguing reality is fraying away and has no value than that this war is Russia's fault, that their hand wasn't forced. Then again, maybe also maintaining you are interested in reality while ignoring glaring, crucial contextual factors behind an event is part of the effort to fray away the importance of reality? I'm not really with that so I wouldn't know.

So if Russian manipulations saw the overthrow of the Mexican government and Russia and the new government proceeded to host Russian weapons in Mexico you would be ok with that? Under the principle that countries round us gonna country?

If you believe all of that I genuinely feel sorry for you.

You seem pretty far removed from reality yourself.

Congrats on the mental gymnastics that got you to talking about the brutal autocracy of Russia somehow being a force for democracy.

Why would you feel sorry for someone for knowing true facts? Do you mean like you feel sorry that I have had to expend energy to figure out what is going on while you just relax and absorb propaganda as if through osmosis? Don't worry it's not that much work really. You just find people who cite and discuss the relevant facts in a way conducive to forming valid conclusions. John Mearsheimer is one such source, a prof at U of Chicago. You can just look him up on youtube and watch little by little while you're in the can. Although, I have to say, if you are in this forum discussing politics you must have encountered these facts before so I'm wondering if you have a comprehension issue or what's going on with you. This isn't really debatable, like is a fetus a person or can the government control inflation through a given policy. This is really basic and cannot be seriously agued both ways, only one way, as I and many have outlined with facts which are infinitely citable. The role of the U.S. as the anti-democratic aggressor is documented for anyone to plainly see. Not seeing it is just pretending to be blind.

It seems like those supporting U.S. actions are always making assertions of a vapid or fairy tale like nature, stories of a super powerful evil menace named Putin who wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union and is willing to plunge the world into a nuclear face-off in order to do so.

Those not supporting U.S. actions tend to elaborate on the relevant factual context. There are plenty of reputable public intellectuals and others with high level access or tons of foreign policy experience who "believe all that". That's where I get it.

You know you can just go to establishment-maintained wikipedia and confirm the facts I claim regarding democracy in Ukraine, don't you? Of course Russia isn't fighting the war for the cause of democracy. They are fighting for security and for economic freedom. Putin didn't need to fight the war to maintain power, but now that he has started he needs to win it or his government will probably collapse. So it's not like the Russians are pure of heart or motivated by idealist notions of democracy. But it so happens that, incidentally, Russia is fighting against those who came to power by violently overthrowing a democratically elected government and on behalf of those who lost that democracy.

Russia is fighting on behalf of Russia - or on behalf of those in power and their wants.

I may not know as many details as others, but what I just found with a quick search was that the current president of Ukraine was elected with 73% of the vote in a runoff election that was generally determined to be fair.

The person who was president before the revolution was somehow elected with less than 50% of the vote in a runoff election between two candidates.

Russia sent their usual cadre of mafia thugs in police uniforms (albeit foreign police uniforms this time around) to kill protesters in Ukraine, and they were welcomed in by corruption at the highest level of Ukrainian government. This was the Maidan square protests in 2013.

Ukraine, somewhat miffed by their government literally inviting in killers from Russia, gave their president the boot and held a new election.

Then in 2014 Russia sent soldiers dressed as Ukrainians, started a war and sent local residents to concentration camps. After their usual tack of moving Russians in and sending locals to the camps, they installed collaborates as local governments and held "elections" where they invited members of European far right parties (which they have paid off for years) as election observers.

The Western response was to encourage the Minsk agreement, a laughable treaty that was so weak that the Russian invasion would still go on in in the background after the treaty was signed and very few western officials batted eye.

We'll skip some details and jump ahead to the election of 2019 instead. Here Ukraine elected a Russian-speaking native outsider who spoke of moderation. This would be Zelensky.

Then in 2022, Russia invaded with 200 000 men with no regard for civilian lives or infrastructure. At every opportunity to withdraw or scale back, they have instead escalated.

-

In the intellectual hellscape devoid of sanity and reason that is the overlap between conspiracy theorists, the far right, "conservatives" and "free thinkers" all of this is the result of an egregious abuse of powers by the US and NATO who according to them installed an anti-Russian puppet regime.

It's annoying, but not unexpected. Everybody has bias, but this particular sphere allows no reality to shine through if it comes at the cost of their opinions.

Personally I find the leftist tankies even more annoying. I've been against war my entire life, but I can't say I've ever seen a situation before now analogous to where I support arming Ukraine to the teeth, for as long as it takes, as a moral imperative.

Of course before the invasion you ere saying....

Before it happened thinking it was imminent was US propoganda, now that it has happened it was a completely predictable and justifiable response to a violent overthrow of an elected government! That's low rent even by crappy apologist standards.

We'll all defer to your expertise on this.

I dont think that sending billions a week in weaponry to neo nazis is morally unambiguous.

the NATO loving center right liberals are more annoying in general bc they went from not knowing a thing about Ukraine to fully supporting them at all costs overnight bc Twitter told them to. they also love reposting war porn.

I could have sworn that the weaponry was going wherever a Jew was saying it was needed.

Russia is the country where the resident Nazi party gathers 10-20% of the votes for parliament, the country which pays foreign far right politicians, trains far-right extremists, the country which speaks of ethnic warfare, the country which uses concentration camps, the country with literal death squads from OMON and FSB, the country where nationalist ideology is mandatory in school and the country where actual political opposition and free media is illegal.

Ukraine has its problems, but to frame the conflict as Russia vs Nazim is intellectually pathetic; the only issue Russia has with Nazism is etymological, they prefer their homebrew terminology.

As usual, people with very little background knowledge pick their information from talking heads looking to score points, with a predictable outcome.

This is disingenuous. Nobody framed it as such. I assure you that if the USA was shipping billions to Russia then I would be just as critical.

Your last paragraph is a very good description of the Ukraine support from Westerners. Overnight Twitter was full of Ukraine flags. You think those people are more informed than everyone else?