Dems lost the election for many reasons. Supporting Ukraine was definitely not one of them tho.

They shed 12M votes between 2020 and 2024, in large part thanks to failing to deliver on promises to their constituents. While Biden was throwing up his hands and insisting he couldn’t afford to relieve student debt, extend health care subsidies at the tail end of COVID, or defend the civil and labor rights of his constituents, he was shoveling money out the back door for Israel and Ukraine.

Russian bribery and blackmail only works on politicians

They work just fine on American business interests. But then American businesses are perfectly happy to bribe people directly. You had Elon promising to cut $1M checks to GOTV in swing states and TPUSA dropping much of its $85M war-chest across the critical swing state of Arizona in the run up to the election. Both groups pulled their fortunes from the post-COVID asset inflation of the American plutocracy. And they spent the money to buy up voters that Biden had allowed to languish.

Always curious to hear how NK has no electricity, but they manage to hack the systems of a trillion dollar conglomerate on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean.

The contradictions abound.

You can only do so much with forced labour.

There’s a certain irony in this statement, coming from folks who consume it regularly.

Yeah, and its curious to see you getting downvotes for the intra-departmental outsourcing that’s been rampant through the tech sector for a while now.

What we’ve got isn’t some nefarious plot by the Chinese-Adjacent to invade our precious trillion dollar tech industry. Its the deliberate consequence of sanctioning a country to the hilt to devalue local labor, then exploiting the sanctioned locals to extract labor at below market rate.

It’s the steady support of Ukraine that would cause Russia to turn back one way or another.

Has it worked in the last twelve years? NATO has been fully in support of Ukraine since Maiden. Nothing has improved as a result.

If trump and the gop hadn’t been such idiots, and just held the line, Russians would see no possibly advantageous end game and putin would probably be in exile or hung by his balls in red square by now

Dems lost the general election in 2024 because they were more interested in bailing out Ukraine than covering domestic priorities.

These people have made their own bed.

Starving the supply to Ukraine wouldn’t stop this war.

The tens of billions squandered on an ill-managed war would have been far better spent on refugee services and industrial development in the surrounded Eastern European block to absorb displaced peoples.

Rather than aiding actual Ukrainians and fortifying the NATO block against further Russian aggression, Europeans have pissed away a meager military surplus trying to bleed Russia into defeat. Meanwhile, the 7.7m displaced Ukrainians face joblessness, homelessness, poverty and a multitude of legal hurdles and sanctions that prevent them from resettlement.

If Europeans actually gave a shit about “Ukraine” the population rather than “Ukraine” the physical territory, we wouldn’t see Polish political leaders denying Ukrainian expats civil rights

A steady and resolute supply of arms and other resources to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to make Russia’s efforts clearly useless

This is a bald-faced lie. Arms into Ukraine didn’t help the country in 2018 when Trump championed it. It failed to grant Ukraine the ability to retake the Donbas, much less Crimea, even when Putin’s own mercenary company turned on him.

And that’s what this fight is supposed to be about. Zelensky’s government wants the Donbas back. Putin is refusing. And now we’re asking… how many more Ukrainians to die over a real estate negotiation? 10k? 50k? Another 100k?

We’re already talking about a war that’s killed roughly 400k Ukrainians and displaced a full quarter of the country’s 44M population. And we want to keep this up until when exactly? Until Russia stops existing? Until we get a more favorable territory settlement? Until the next US Presidential Election?

This is the same stupid shit we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Korea, too. An endless war against an Ontologically Evil enemy that fuels a massive market bubble for the MIC and still ends in dismal failure.

But Mercs? Come on now.

You’ve got a lot of folks drafted into this conflict on false pretexts. Others are being lured in the face of collapsing economies at home.

Men are fighting on the frontline of a war they have no stake in, with weapons they have little training to wield. Sky News examines how South Africans are being tricked into joining Russians on the frontline in Ukraine.

Thousands of South American soldiers head to Ukraine front line looking for better pay

This war is exploiting the poor and the “undesirables” on a global scale.

At the end of the day, Ukraine is the victim in this war

Ukraine isn’t a person. And the persistent belief that real estate is people is so fucking Libertarian it chills the soul.

There are plenty of Ukrainian natives victimized by the conflict, both through the violence inflicted by invading Russians and the callous ineptitude of the reining Ukrainian leadership. Now that much of the adult male population of the country has been exhausted as cannon fodder, both countries are drawing in surplus males from the international community.

Starving the beast of conflict should be the goal of the international community, not fanning the flames. But because so many of these countries see this conflict as a profit center, and surplus men in their own countries as a threat, we’ve created a real economic incentive to fund the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and the internationally unemployed on one budget line.

The only benefit to beliefs like yours

You’d rather live a righteous lie than recognize the bitter truth? This isn’t a matter of benefit, its a matter of dispensing with delusions. This conflict is not about reconquering the Donbas from an Evil Enemy. It is about war-profiteering and refugee disposal.

I don’t think anyone expects there to be less bloodshed or an end to violence.

That’s right there in the headline. “Money today or blood tomorrow”

Where are the calls for Russia to lay down arms and retreat?

Brother, its all over the EU. But its a hard sell for a country that’s gaining territory in the face of a fracturing and deteriorating coalition of (increasingly il)liberal western states.

I don’t want violence but to act like it doesn’t have a place in our world?

It’s entirely insincere to pretend more arms to Ukraine will result in less bloodshed. At best, you can argue “at least the right people will die” assuming you squint and tacitly ignore all the conscripts and mercenaries and civilians involved in this conflict.

But it’s insane to pretend we’re heading towards an end to violence doing exactly what NATO has been doing for the last three years.

Ukraine aren’t the ones that started the war

That hasn’t spared them from dying in it.

“We need money to buy the weapons”

“Whatcha gonna do with the weapons?”

“Make a lot more blood splatters”

you don’t even own data that’s on this small all-in-one device

If I don’t own it, why does everyone keep insisting I stole it?

Shit like this makes me miss the USSR.

merely identifying a fallacy is an instance of argument from fallacy

When the comment begins and ends with “That’s an <X> fallacy” and ending any further introspection?

“My mom said the sky is blue”

“That’s an Argument from Authority! Fallacy!”

When “fallacy!” becomes a thought-terminating response, it’s just debatebro shit.

Why are people not trusting experts?

People are trusting “experts”. That’s how they’re getting the information necessary to distrust other experts.

Dr Oz has “Doctor” right in his name! If he goes on Oprah - the show that brings on a parade of ahem “experts” to explain the world to a population of shut-in housewives - and warns that vaccinations are why your kids aren’t Ivy League Material, people listen.

It’s because they believe their ignorant opinion is just as valid as a researched conclusion.

Their opinions don’t just emerge Ex Nihilo. And they aren’t breaking arbitrarily for or against certain topics. They’re polarized around a set of reactionary beliefs because they’re trained into it by reactionary media, reactionary politicians, and reactionary local institutions.

This is a moronic take.

It’s just a capital gains tax

Maybe they’re confusing the literal name with the language? Idk.

I grew up on Perl and holy fuck… Rust is fine.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t real. Same for misinformation.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. People aren’t “anti-intellectual” in the broad sense, they’re biased to a certain worldview or partisan to an ideological lens. You can get liberals and conservatives to agree on quite a bit if you just channel the message through a trustworthy proxy. You can get them to split by making them watch Crossfire for an hour a day.

Vaccination is a great example of this in action. Big church groups that value being able to meet in public do a 180 on the jab when they see the impact a disease has on its congregation. Meanwhile, woo-woo liberals living in heavily insulated suburban communities can get very cavalier about vaccination when they hear an Oprah spokesperson claim it impacts their childrens’ academic performance.

I remember when COVID first hit and we got an earful about needing to conserve medical masks. “Don’t bother wearing them, just socially distance, they don’t really help” was a thing we initially got from liberals. Conservatives were masked up and liberals weren’t. And then the zietgeist flipped and it was liberals clutching them while conservatives were tearing at the gazy discount paper covers screaming “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!”

What we like to call “anti-intellectualism” is, at its heart, a trust issue. Which professionals do you consider credible? Which personal experiences inform your worldview? What do you value - personal safety? financial success? self-expression? religious dogma?

If you’re living in a country that functionally eliminated measles 30 years ago, you can get pretty fair on herd immunity and never have to see your beliefs challenged. Then, when your bubble is breached by the outside world, all those warnings about Diseased Immigrants ruining your pocket paradise are reinforced by the same crop of reactionary news shows and fascist politicians who raised you.

Dude’s practically a cyclops.

Fuck me. Can’t argue with that logic.