(February 25, 2022 at 6:06 pm)arewethereyet Wrote:

That' s like the pope giving a guy advice on muff diving......

right, if they fight, they won’t be buying afghan opium and burka

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/not-on...cades-ago/

Enough of the blame game.

Suicide In The Trenches, by Sigfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum, 
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet though his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Go home and pray you'll never know
The Hell where youth and laughter go.

Boru

If self reflection is generally beyond our capability, then the blame game is the only hope we have remaining for at least some of us being able to learning a tiny percentage of the lessons our own mistakes have to teach.

when a country elects to fight several discretionary wars, and loses them all due to same basic cause, it is indication of some deep seated malaise in its society that fossilized its self perception and prioritizes other things than solving manifest internal problems.   that kind of problem is by nature resistant to correction through ordinary experience.

Since none of these defeats were very bloody for us when counted against a population it 350 million  I imagine we will go on loosing more until we eventually receive some disasterous defeat that can’t glossed over that directly affects a large portion of the society at something much deeper than superficial level.    In this case I might argue our nuclear deterrence and our location in what is effectively an island continent militates against us.

(February 25, 2022 at 6:06 pm)arewethereyet Wrote:

The western arrogance cracks me up. Still, the UN is useless, the USA abandoned Ukraine and ran away just like it did against the heroic Taliban.

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(February 25, 2022 at 7:31 pm)Belacqua Wrote: https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/not-on...cades-ago/

America and the West pour gasoline, then ran off when things got real. Biggest fail ever, nobody will ever trust the west again.

Yes, blame the west for what Russia is doing. Crawl back under your rock.

(February 25, 2022 at 6:06 pm)arewethereyet Wrote:

"We shoot little girls who want to go to school but don't intensify violence guys"

(February 25, 2022 at 10:38 pm)WinterHold Wrote: The western arrogance cracks me up. Still, the UN is useless, the USA abandoned Ukraine and ran away just like it did against the heroic Taliban.

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Mighty warriors heroically chops off the nose and ears of a teenage girl so villainous and reprobate as to try to escape a forced marriage, to him.

Another epic feat of Taliban valor truly worthy of poetry for the ages.

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(February 25, 2022 at 10:53 pm)arewethereyet Wrote:

Yes, blame the west for what Russia is doing.  Crawl back under your rock.

In this case, blaming the west, or particular the US, for what Russia is doing is spot on.   What Russia is doing is entirely reasonable under the circumstances.    We would be doing, and indeed have done, the same thing when we found ourselves facing a situation that is analogous to what Russia face now, as during the Cuban missile crisis.

The difference is soviet Union then, in the same role as where we find ourselves now, behaved more reasonably and respectably, and less hysterically, then we are doing now.

No contrived, self serving concept of rights can overshadow the fact that when nations are faced with critical strategic threat that can nullify its ability to act as an independent power, and it can address such a threat effectively by military means and no other, it will address it by military means.

Don’t put nations that can address critical threat by military means under critical threat and then deny it any other means to address it.    We heed and hawed and spewed all sorts of flimsy bullshit to deny Russia the means to address it by non military means.  So here we are.

Just because ideologues rule american political discourse and lawyers rule american society, and we think we are so great, we think our ideologues and lawyers will overawe other country’s strategists as well.

Quote:The western arrogance cracks me up. Still, the UN is useless, the USA abandoned Ukraine and ran away just like it did against the heroic Taliban.

Heroic people who are allowing their own people to starve