10 ms·

If find that this comment of your is an excellent example of the reason why whataboutism does not have any merit. It does not advocate for world peace. It does

If find that this comment of your is an excellent example of the reason why whataboutism does not have any merit. It does not advocate for world peace. It does not advocate for the protection and rights of the victim. Instead it advocates for the rights and interests of the aggressor. Please study your comment carefully to understand how. But your comment is even worse because it lowers to the victim blaming. Before there is any change to even have any meaningful conversation you have to agree on the following. Russia is the aggressor. It has no rights over Ukraine or over its decisions about its alliances. Ukraine is acting in its best interests how it sees possible given its own situation and international (geopolitical) realities. If you can't come to agree with this, it is pointless to advance the discussion any further because you are then not participating in it in good faith. Still, I would like to address something to what you have referred already twice under this post. The interview with Arestovich in 2019. Your conclusion is very peculiar. Instead of commending his wisdom, you use it as a solid proof that shows how Ukraine is accomplice in this invasion. Is this your original idea or you have picked it up from somewhere? Think hard. People who understand Russia knew that it is not question of if but when. Arestovich predicts that it will happen soon and he, having for sure thought about all the possibilities, proposes also how it will take place. Let me help you to put it into perspective that is perhaps a little more relatable. Imagine you are living in a country where rule of law is not very strong. You have a daughter who is engaged. On one evening two local thugs appear at your doorstep. One of them demands to "borrow" your daughter for one night. You manage to send them away but you know the following. They will come back. It will happen before your daughter gets married. One of them will probably break in from the front door while another one tries to enter from one window in the back of the house. I would like to continue this discussion but you have to understand your fallacies first.

EGreg 4y ago
You have to understand your fallacies, namely hypocrisy and double standards for what you focus on or advocate. It’s bad enough you do it in your own thinking, but expecting others to be swayed by, say, guilt-tripping them based on total hypocrisy, should not work with rational or fair-minded people. It’s like a guy who’s been beating kids up and then one time he’s punched and he implores everyone to see the injustice and says they’re terrible people if they support it. However, that analogy is unfair, because YOU didn’t invade Iraq. And this is the core of many of your disagreements with libertarians like me. The other fallacy you commit is a category error of conflating individuals, countries and their governments, when applying moral reasoning, which I go into below. Allow me to illustrate it with direct questions, that I expect you to actually answwr. Is there any point at which you’d readily admit funneling MORE weapons into Ukraine is harmful to its civilians, since they all explode in Ukraine and according to the UN investigations they are the #1 source of civilian casualties? In Afghanistan, one MILLION civilian casualties was the price for USSR withdrawing, as US and Saudi fought “to the last Afghan”. Ask yourself whether you’d just as readily support a million of YOUR countrymen and families being killed for a flag. Do a time lapse on youtube of European flags and see how quickly they change — is it moral to volunteer other people’s families to die for a political outcome you yourself arent willing to have your family killed for? Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy. To see this, answer my direct question: how can one point out hypocrisy and flaming double standards, no matter how serious, without engaging in “whataboutism”? You are also wrong that I don’t advocate for more peace and cooperation. I have been screaming from the rooftops what needs to happen, for years. I even wrote some of it in a sibling comment. The difference is that I advocate solutions consistently and everywhere. And not just hypocritical one sided solutions. The victims here are the Ukrainian people. When I criticize politicians for not doing their job (of preventing pandemics or wars) you only think I am engaging in victim blaminng because you have a very widespread “statist” mentality. You identify Zelensky’s government and Arestovich with Ukrainian civilians. You identify Putin with Russia. And so on. You speak of countries as if they are people, when in fact they are composed of many PEOPLE, who think very differently, and who are pushed around by coercive forces and bullied into what to think, what to say and who to fight. But the reality is that the Ukrainian civilians do not want this war and were not ready for it as much as Arestovich was, just as US Americans were not as ready for the pandemic-related market crash as members of Congress (greatest traders ever, amirite?) And the US public did not want to invade Iraq and the Russian public did not want to invade Ukraine, but the mass media and social media gradually radicalized them just as democrats vs republicans do here. The politicians could have allowed trade with BOTH Russia and EU, implemented something like Minsk II, NATI members could have heard Russia’s red lines and security concerns and taken them seriously, Zelensky’s government could have met with the separatists and taken them seriously, Erdogan could have met with the PKK instead of threatening to invade Syria as he does now. The CCP could take the concerns of Tibetans or Falun Dafa or Hong Kong residents seriously, etc. The reason these normal statements that most regular people agree with, are considered unrealistic and laughable, is EXACTLY because politicians and imperialists are given a free pass when they escalate to wars where civilians pay the price. It is like crypto investors shrugging when they get rekt in rugpulls. This is the 21st century and we can do better. But we won’t as long as they have us at each other’s throats, talking past each other and engaging in total hypocrisy rather than asking our own government and industry to do better. I have advocated actual solutions for years… go back on https://magarshak.com/blog https://magarshak.com/blog and read since 2014 when I was writing about Gaza and Ukraine. But I don’t just write about it. I build the solutions, which are by the people and not just for the people: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf I have put more effort and invested more of my work life than most people in solving these problems bottom-up instead of trying to “change the system” by being a single voice in a top-down statist environment everyone is used to . So you could not be more wrong that “it does not advocate for world peace”. The sooner you understand that we have to hold the system and politicians to account instead of blaming individuals for not recycling or getting obese or engaging in whataboutism, the sooner YOU can make real change. Like Steve Jobs and Mark Z and many other tech pioneers and CEOs have done. They do more to improve the world and communication than any politicians do. But even more good is done by founders of open source projects, like Linus Torvalds with Linux, Igor Sysoev with NGinX, the teams behind MySQL and Postgres and Jimmy Wales founding Wikipedia etc. I don’t care if I become a celebrity, I care about getting real solutions adopted and building tech that lets people on the ground organize positive things to collaborate instead of being held captive by a system of statist politicians and media.
- eveningcoffee 4y ago
  Just admit that you hate America and by proxy you hate Ukrainians. You are not a libertarian. So is not your idol Chomsky. You are just an uninformed person who does not have any idea of the actual situation. You have absolutely no idea against what Ukrainians must stand. If you paid just a little bit of attention, you would advocate for sending more weapons and training such that Ukrainians could push Russian invasion out of Ukraine completely such that civilian suffering could end and would not lead to complete genocide. Maxim Katz has made nice video (he includes English subtitles in case you actually do not speak Russian). I linked to the most important part of it for you. Watch this, this section is only about 3 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s Now again, should Ukraine surrender to Russia? If you were libertarian, you would not advocate surrender to the most dangerous Fascist regimes of current time. But for some reason you do. Do you have an explanation for this? Again you have chosen the victim blaming with your Afghanistan example and somehow again favorable toward Russia. Somehow Russian military pretense that happened after they assassinated last elected Afghanistan president it is not a problem. Somehow Russian Army (lets be honest here, decorating it with words like Soviet does not make it less what it is, Russian army) killing civilians is not a problem. The problem is resistance to the killing. Somehow again everybody must surrender to Russia. I think you are indeed fairly consistent: US bad, Russia good, just like Chomsky. This is also the core idea of whataboutism: US bad, Russia good. Always, no mater what. It is not: US bad, Russia bad, no. I do not think that you have right to make decisions for the Ukrainian people. You are not the one. You do not know what they want. I admit that, I actually do not know what they really want. Perhaps they all want to die so it would be already over. Who knows? What you are instead doing is assuming that what people want is the opposite to Zelensky and Arestovych. Somehow people are tricked by them. Does it sound familiar? Does it sound exactly what Russia is claiming? I think it does. Why do you think Zelensky or Arestovych wanted war? It looks to me that for you preparations for the inevitable is wanting it. If you prepare for war, it must mean that you want it. Si vis pacem, para bellum has no meaning to you, I guess. The truth is, this war would be already long time over had Ukraine not prepared for the war. But it had. It must be incredibly inconvenient for the Russia supporters. Why did Ukraine just not lose? The war would be over, Russia would have just killed not much more than few 100k and not deported more than few 1000k, but the life would have gone on, the business would have gone on. With Russia of course, because Ukraine does not exist, it is a fake country.
EGreg 4y ago
Regarding Arestovich: he didn’t just predict it. He openly advocated and implemented politically and militarily aggressive actions (while opposing the Minsk/Normandy diplomatic process or endfranchisement of millions of pro Russians) leading to a “big war with 99.9% certainty” as he himself admitted. Arestovich justified this by unilaterally insisting on a false dichotomy and emphatically ruling out what he called “gradually being absorbed by Russia in 10 years” (while being totally OK being “absorbed by EU” and many countries are “absorbed by USA” are somehow considered lucky by people like him). He figures that, since he is a genius at figuring out HOW the Russians will attack, he also knows better than millions of his countrymen that “being absorbed by Russia” is far worse than “a big war” (in which neither he himself nor most politicians won’t be on the front lines). And he is willing to make the decision for them. Whether or not he is “objectively” right, this is just evidence of the arrogance and motivations of the politicians and that this war wasn’t “totally unprovoked”. He and people like him got into a position of power - advising or exerting influence on the President and the entire government - and their ACTIONS led away from diplomacy and towards war — which you can clearly see he welcomed. I gave this as a clear example of the mentality that we must disenfranchise and deplatform all pro Russian voices same way Uncle Toms, Nazi sympathizers and White Supremacists get marginalized… and then rip the 11 million people and their families gradually away from Russian language, politics, economics and so on. Ukraine had pro West people, pro Russian people and those who wanted total independence from empires. The second one of those was to be gradually eliminated after Yanukovich and Opposition Bloc destroyed. That’s millions of voters. Many imperialists in the USA and Britain were only too happy to “lure Ukraine away” like a guy who has an affair with a man’s wife. While giving them weapons to pummel the pro Russians with, they made sure to bury any chance of Minsk II being implemented. France and Germany tried to create opportunities for dialogue to finally implement Minsk II with the Normandy format but show me one place where US and Britain did anything other than try to pull Ukraine AWAY from the negotiating table with Russia. That’s what empires do, but USA does it 3000 miles away which is unusual in the last 100 years. It’s like the entire world is the USA’s colonial protectorate.
- eveningcoffee 4y ago
  I see that you are not willing to conduct a honest discussion. Only thing I wonder about is how is it possible that the rhetoric and vocabulary you are using is too damn similar to Russian trolls. I recommend you to meditate about it if you consider yourself an American. You are a prime example that shows that whataboutism is exactly what it is thought to be.

EGreg 4y ago

You have to understand your fallacies, namely hypocrisy and double standards for what you focus on or advocate. It’s bad enough you do it in your own thinking, but expecting others to be swayed by, say, guilt-tripping them based on total hypocrisy, should not work with rational or fair-minded people. It’s like a guy who’s been beating kids up and then one time he’s punched and he implores everyone to see the injustice and says they’re terrible people if they support it. However, that analogy is unfair, because YOU didn’t invade Iraq. And this is the core of many of your disagreements with libertarians like me. The other fallacy you commit is a category error of conflating individuals, countries and their governments, when applying moral reasoning, which I go into below. Allow me to illustrate it with direct questions, that I expect you to actually answwr. Is there any point at which you’d readily admit funneling MORE weapons into Ukraine is harmful to its civilians, since they all explode in Ukraine and according to the UN investigations they are the #1 source of civilian casualties? In Afghanistan, one MILLION civilian casualties was the price for USSR withdrawing, as US and Saudi fought “to the last Afghan”. Ask yourself whether you’d just as readily support a million of YOUR countrymen and families being killed for a flag. Do a time lapse on youtube of European flags and see how quickly they change — is it moral to volunteer other people’s families to die for a political outcome you yourself arent willing to have your family killed for? Whataboutism isn’t a fallacy. To see this, answer my direct question: how can one point out hypocrisy and flaming double standards, no matter how serious, without engaging in “whataboutism”? You are also wrong that I don’t advocate for more peace and cooperation. I have been screaming from the rooftops what needs to happen, for years. I even wrote some of it in a sibling comment. The difference is that I advocate solutions consistently and everywhere. And not just hypocritical one sided solutions. The victims here are the Ukrainian people. When I criticize politicians for not doing their job (of preventing pandemics or wars) you only think I am engaging in victim blaminng because you have a very widespread “statist” mentality. You identify Zelensky’s government and Arestovich with Ukrainian civilians. You identify Putin with Russia. And so on. You speak of countries as if they are people, when in fact they are composed of many PEOPLE, who think very differently, and who are pushed around by coercive forces and bullied into what to think, what to say and who to fight. But the reality is that the Ukrainian civilians do not want this war and were not ready for it as much as Arestovich was, just as US Americans were not as ready for the pandemic-related market crash as members of Congress (greatest traders ever, amirite?) And the US public did not want to invade Iraq and the Russian public did not want to invade Ukraine, but the mass media and social media gradually radicalized them just as democrats vs republicans do here. The politicians could have allowed trade with BOTH Russia and EU, implemented something like Minsk II, NATI members could have heard Russia’s red lines and security concerns and taken them seriously, Zelensky’s government could have met with the separatists and taken them seriously, Erdogan could have met with the PKK instead of threatening to invade Syria as he does now. The CCP could take the concerns of Tibetans or Falun Dafa or Hong Kong residents seriously, etc. The reason these normal statements that most regular people agree with, are considered unrealistic and laughable, is EXACTLY because politicians and imperialists are given a free pass when they escalate to wars where civilians pay the price. It is like crypto investors shrugging when they get rekt in rugpulls. This is the 21st century and we can do better. But we won’t as long as they have us at each other’s throats, talking past each other and engaging in total hypocrisy rather than asking our own government and industry to do better. I have advocated actual solutions for years… go back on https://magarshak.com/blog https://magarshak.com/blog and read since 2014 when I was writing about Gaza and Ukraine. But I don’t just write about it. I build the solutions, which are by the people and not just for the people: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf I have put more effort and invested more of my work life than most people in solving these problems bottom-up instead of trying to “change the system” by being a single voice in a top-down statist environment everyone is used to . So you could not be more wrong that “it does not advocate for world peace”. The sooner you understand that we have to hold the system and politicians to account instead of blaming individuals for not recycling or getting obese or engaging in whataboutism, the sooner YOU can make real change. Like Steve Jobs and Mark Z and many other tech pioneers and CEOs have done. They do more to improve the world and communication than any politicians do. But even more good is done by founders of open source projects, like Linus Torvalds with Linux, Igor Sysoev with NGinX, the teams behind MySQL and Postgres and Jimmy Wales founding Wikipedia etc. I don’t care if I become a celebrity, I care about getting real solutions adopted and building tech that lets people on the ground organize positive things to collaborate instead of being held captive by a system of statist politicians and media.

eveningcoffee 4y ago
Just admit that you hate America and by proxy you hate Ukrainians. You are not a libertarian. So is not your idol Chomsky. You are just an uninformed person who does not have any idea of the actual situation. You have absolutely no idea against what Ukrainians must stand. If you paid just a little bit of attention, you would advocate for sending more weapons and training such that Ukrainians could push Russian invasion out of Ukraine completely such that civilian suffering could end and would not lead to complete genocide. Maxim Katz has made nice video (he includes English subtitles in case you actually do not speak Russian). I linked to the most important part of it for you. Watch this, this section is only about 3 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaRUepc-7VQ&t=443s Now again, should Ukraine surrender to Russia? If you were libertarian, you would not advocate surrender to the most dangerous Fascist regimes of current time. But for some reason you do. Do you have an explanation for this? Again you have chosen the victim blaming with your Afghanistan example and somehow again favorable toward Russia. Somehow Russian military pretense that happened after they assassinated last elected Afghanistan president it is not a problem. Somehow Russian Army (lets be honest here, decorating it with words like Soviet does not make it less what it is, Russian army) killing civilians is not a problem. The problem is resistance to the killing. Somehow again everybody must surrender to Russia. I think you are indeed fairly consistent: US bad, Russia good, just like Chomsky. This is also the core idea of whataboutism: US bad, Russia good. Always, no mater what. It is not: US bad, Russia bad, no. I do not think that you have right to make decisions for the Ukrainian people. You are not the one. You do not know what they want. I admit that, I actually do not know what they really want. Perhaps they all want to die so it would be already over. Who knows? What you are instead doing is assuming that what people want is the opposite to Zelensky and Arestovych. Somehow people are tricked by them. Does it sound familiar? Does it sound exactly what Russia is claiming? I think it does. Why do you think Zelensky or Arestovych wanted war? It looks to me that for you preparations for the inevitable is wanting it. If you prepare for war, it must mean that you want it. Si vis pacem, para bellum has no meaning to you, I guess. The truth is, this war would be already long time over had Ukraine not prepared for the war. But it had. It must be incredibly inconvenient for the Russia supporters. Why did Ukraine just not lose? The war would be over, Russia would have just killed not much more than few 100k and not deported more than few 1000k, but the life would have gone on, the business would have gone on. With Russia of course, because Ukraine does not exist, it is a fake country.

EGreg 4y ago

Regarding Arestovich: he didn’t just predict it. He openly advocated and implemented politically and militarily aggressive actions (while opposing the Minsk/Normandy diplomatic process or endfranchisement of millions of pro Russians) leading to a “big war with 99.9% certainty” as he himself admitted. Arestovich justified this by unilaterally insisting on a false dichotomy and emphatically ruling out what he called “gradually being absorbed by Russia in 10 years” (while being totally OK being “absorbed by EU” and many countries are “absorbed by USA” are somehow considered lucky by people like him). He figures that, since he is a genius at figuring out HOW the Russians will attack, he also knows better than millions of his countrymen that “being absorbed by Russia” is far worse than “a big war” (in which neither he himself nor most politicians won’t be on the front lines). And he is willing to make the decision for them. Whether or not he is “objectively” right, this is just evidence of the arrogance and motivations of the politicians and that this war wasn’t “totally unprovoked”. He and people like him got into a position of power - advising or exerting influence on the President and the entire government - and their ACTIONS led away from diplomacy and towards war — which you can clearly see he welcomed. I gave this as a clear example of the mentality that we must disenfranchise and deplatform all pro Russian voices same way Uncle Toms, Nazi sympathizers and White Supremacists get marginalized… and then rip the 11 million people and their families gradually away from Russian language, politics, economics and so on. Ukraine had pro West people, pro Russian people and those who wanted total independence from empires. The second one of those was to be gradually eliminated after Yanukovich and Opposition Bloc destroyed. That’s millions of voters. Many imperialists in the USA and Britain were only too happy to “lure Ukraine away” like a guy who has an affair with a man’s wife. While giving them weapons to pummel the pro Russians with, they made sure to bury any chance of Minsk II being implemented. France and Germany tried to create opportunities for dialogue to finally implement Minsk II with the Normandy format but show me one place where US and Britain did anything other than try to pull Ukraine AWAY from the negotiating table with Russia. That’s what empires do, but USA does it 3000 miles away which is unusual in the last 100 years. It’s like the entire world is the USA’s colonial protectorate.

eveningcoffee 4y ago
I see that you are not willing to conduct a honest discussion. Only thing I wonder about is how is it possible that the rhetoric and vocabulary you are using is too damn similar to Russian trolls. I recommend you to meditate about it if you consider yourself an American. You are a prime example that shows that whataboutism is exactly what it is thought to be.