Our politicians are like weathermen who tell you the weather 40 years too late. They are telling us the Russian Federation is trying to take over Europe, like the USSR once contemplated, somewhere back in Stalin's day. They are threatening today's major military powers, believing they are as defenseless as they were a very long time ago. How can we get our own 'leaders' to stop making threats their countries can't and don't want to implement.
Where/who is claiming russia it wanting to take over Europe? Any credible data? Or is this thread like the poll, non existent.
The Putin = Napoleon meme was tested on large audiences and found to be very successful. Oddly, a core element was the claim that Putin was of below average height, the same as Napoleon and therefore had the Napoleon complex. My counter argument was Zelenskyy is also 5ft 7inches, and so was the French guarantor of Minsk - Francois Hollande. The French inch was different from the English so the often reported height of Napoleon of 5ft 5inches might be a bit under, the German guarantor of Minsk was actually 5 ft 5.5inches. This line of discussion soon becomes evidently banal, but it is very influential among those who know little of the war in Ukraine, and particularly among those who claim 'Russia started it'.
Look around a long thread on the war in Ukraine here on PF and you may see it a number of times, even professional writers, politicians and pundits have said it.
I thought that you Democrats were gung ho for aid to Ukraine because if we don't stop the Russians here, they were going to attack other European countries once they had taken the Ukraine.
It's hard to say where Putin would stop. It seems he would like to re-establish the greatest prior extent of the Russian/Soviet empires. I don't think he would actually "take over the world" if he had the power to do so, but he would want Russia to be its greatest power. It's all a dream, of course, but that doesn't mean he couldn't destroy more countries given free reign.
hmmm... does any of this sound familiar to y'all? vietnam, cambodia, laos? korea and our many questionable forays into the politics of central and south america? face it folks, the cold war never ended. it can't be allowed to end. without an "evil empire" the u.s. and its dependents in nato can't see themselves as the white knight, running in to save the day. there was a time when we filled that role admirably (well, as admirably as any political structure can), but creeping authoritarianism and innumerable power grabs have turned us away from that path.
What the hell is a 'you democrat'? I don't vote for either party. I vote for the best person regardless of party. Russia wanting to take back countries that used to be USSR is not the entirety of Europe. I guess the 'you democrats' and other non trumpers, knows what a map of Europe looks like.
You claim you are an “independent” yet every post I read from you is pro Democrat left. I put you on “ignore” for a while because I got tired of reading it. Life’s too short to get riled up over a lefty. Given your site name and your avatar, I take that you are in the farming business. With all the land can capital equipment that requires, I wonder why farmers seem to be left wing. Yea, I know you have been concerned about too much debt since most of the 19th century through the Great Depression era.This Democratic Party symbol from the 1908 Bryan campaign summed his core of support. Still the left poses threats to the family farm because excessive inheritance taxes, fuel prices and the push for EVs which would require you to build charging stations in the middle of corn fields (hyperbole, I hope.). The left has already attacked farmers in Europe with their agenda. Maybe I will see you become a bit more middle of the road in the future, but so far I've not seen it. And no, I am not "MAGA." I wish that Trump were not running. I want new, younger candidates from both parties. The trouble given the choice between Trump and Biden, my choice has to be Trump. I can't support a senile old man, who really isn't in control of the presidency, with a far left agenda.
My perception is that Putin wants to recreate the old Soviet Union and the satellite states of the Warsaw Block. When that existed, the Soviet Union's goal, until perhaps the Gorbachev era, was to expand that influence into western Europe. The other places you cite in Southeast Asia and Korea involve different dynamics. The attitudes expressed by North Korea is a threat to the world, but I imagine you don't agree with that.
When one is to the right of Atilla the hun, everything is left to them. Which in no way makes those in the middle left on the so called invisible spectrum. You said you were going to put me back on ignore because you get tired of me calling out you RW conspiracy theories. You keeps saying to don't want trump running. But you support him and will vote for him for a 3rd time. Your choice doesn't have to be trump. It could be 3rd party. It could be no one at all in a protest non vote.
Yet one just did. You proved my point. You will vote for trump for a 3rd time. Because you are so far RW that's all you know. Along with all the conspiracy theories the RW side pushed daily.
We probably should have refrained from WW1 and WW2. Then we would never have become the world's police.
For you “moderate” is slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders. Anyone who is to the right of that is “MAGA” even if he or she has reservations about Trump. Your claims for “moderation” are futile after you have taken that position.
I believe that in every place you mentioned our interference, the opposition was using Russian or Chinese weapons. The best weapon our opposition actually used was the propaganda war to convince us we should be ashamed of ourselves. Not at all unlike the one now being waged against Israel.
It comes to the same action - we need to go to war with Russia to prevent them from taking over European countries. How is it Ukraine and Russia resolved conflicts by paying amounts of money, until the US got involved in 2014, then there was a low level conflict in Ukraine until the neocons arrived in 2021, then when the weapons had reached the front by Feb 19 2022 the bombardment of Donetsk became heavy, and people say Russia should have stayed out of it because Donetsk was part of Ukraine and Ukraine can do what they like with their own cities, especially Russian speaking ones?
I guarantee you, at least as far as Biden is concerned, that if Russia stopped invading neighbors, there would be no proxy war against them. Propaganda has you confused. The subjugation of people in what is now Ukraine by the Russian empire goes back hundreds of years at least. The more recent independence of Ukraine was mostly a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire. As Putin rose in power, he tried to make them a puppet/vassal by doing things like attempting to assassinate the pro-western candidate. As that effort failed, he escalated it eventually to full scale war.
i've heard your "perception" touted ad nauseum, but it just doesn't track. only a great fool believes you can turn back time and i don't believe putin is such a fool. the soviet union failed because it was untenable, it required the sort of force that was impossible to keep up indefinitely, and recreating it would be a fool's errand. what i believe putin is aiming for is simply to have russia considered a major player on the world stage, a super-power to rival the united states. post ww2 russia was a shattered nation, having taken much damage and expended a generation's worth of lives and treasure to repel the 20th century's most violent rogue nation, and it quickly became one of the most feared and respected powers on earth. sounds admirable, doesn't it. the cost of achieving and maintaining that role under the collectivist ideology of those times was a population that suffered tremendously under the police state necessitated by a perpetual war footing. the ussr was the last great empire in an age where empires were becoming passe and recreating it would be an anachronistic blunder that no intelligent person would seek to undertake. no, the warsaw pact is dead. the empire collapsed under its own weight (with a little help from its enemies) and the age of empires is no more. there is more than one reasonable reason for russia's current foray into ukraine, but i'm not going to rehash that mess. yang has already beaten that horse to death, at the risk of being called a russian troll, an enemy of democracy and several other even worse epithets. no, the "dynamics" of our current situation are no different than they have always been. whether it is in asia, europe, south america or even africa, the divide has always been about the differing global outlooks and the decisions of political animals to utilize those differences to consolidate their own power. the concept of the evil "other" is a useful tool for the authoritarian instincts of those in power. there are always enough useful idiots willing to believe they have the moral high ground in the eternal struggle of good versus evil and to become pawns in a game they don't even know they're playing. firstly, the aftermath of ww1 caused ww2. had the victors not been so dead set on vengeance, germany could have redeemed itself and taken its rightful place on the european stage. while i am no big fan of the idea of our being the world's police, i am also averse to the sort of isolationism that would have kept us out of ww1. our participation in those wars gave us the international standing to make positive change in the world. we could have taken the high road, but we didn't. we instead used violent force, our own and that of others, to attempt to remake the world in our own image and we're still doing it.
IN the USA the right wing really hasn't changed much. Reagan conservatives are pretty much the same as Trump supporters. Why you claim people are so RW is that the left in this country has gone bonkers. In 2020 every democrat running for president was a gun banner. In 1968, HHH was the Pro gun candidate and McGovern was less anti gun than Nixon. In the 1980s, Democrats weren't supporting Jihad either
do you know what the "opposition" was saying? "the opposition is using u.s. and nato weapons. the best weapon our opposition is using is the propaganda war". you have bought into this good versus evil paradigm that allows us to believe we have the moral high ground. the whole thing reminds me of an old dave mason song in macrocosm, but we can't seem to learn the lesson that was so easily put forward in that song. seldom are there definite good guys and bad guys. bad things happen and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. we can run around playing world police, but history has shown us that this will only make things worse.
