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You continue with the false equivalences trying to smudge reality. And assuming that if I recognise facts, it's because I belong to the tribe that currently rec

• mjburgess 1y ago
  I can give you the relevant facts here that will undermine your confidence in this position, but I'm not talking about ukraine -- i'm talking about LLMs and the base of facts they use; and how people feel about sets of alleged claims. I invite you to reflect that this sensation your feeling is not about the status of facts in the world, its about "morality" as you say -- you have connected, in your mind, a sensation which accompanies justice to the need to believe certain claims. This is just the emotions of tribal affliliation and identity -- and it shows that our psychologies are not of a suitable makeup for this kind of adjudication of "what is true" --- this is why in liberal democracies, we have tried very hard to deprive the state from control over the press. But in matters of foreign policy, the media is entirely controlled by the state. Nothing I believe about russia/ukraine comes from russia: it's by having listened to american senators on cspan as they were disposing the ukrainian government in 2013 -- its having listened to the tapes of us state department officials discussing who they will replace the leader with at the time. I mean, you can go and find interviews with Kissinger discussing in the 90s what would happen if the US tried to intervene in ukraine. If you want to know what actually happened: the US has been using bribes and threats across eastern europe to turn those states into allies, placing armies and missles in them, for decades. Russia has been protesting this for decades too, and was too weak to do anything about it in the 2000s. They were very afraid they would lose their naval base in crimea (which was always, officially, their land) when the US participated in the overthrow of the elected government in 2013, by siding with one half of a civil conflict. When that happened they took crimea to ensure the US wouldnt gain control of that base -- subsequently, the ukrainian goverment became extemely hostile to russian populations in ukraine, and engaged in lots of destabilising actions against crimea (shutting off water, etc.) --- all the while arms, soliders etc. were flowing in from western states into the country (against agreements france/germany made, which they violated to do this). In the backgrond the entire time, the far-east of ukraine has not been controlled by kiev. After 2014, the ukrianian arming by the west, their increased hostility to internal russian populations, and the on-going civil war in the east reached a critical point where russia decided the detabalisation on its border was a greater threat than a show of force. The original russian plans were just to quickly surround kiev and effect a reigeme change quickly, not to enter a war -- the war was escalated to its current scale in large part by US/UK pressuring ukraine not to regotiate and promising massive arms/aid backing. About two years ago UA fell into a stalemate/loss posisition, and now it may be to late to negotiate terms with putin not to take a much larger area. In part, putin is interested in taking an area of land that puts moscow outside of missle range from ukraine, which is up to about half-way.
  • mopsi 1y ago
    > If you want to know what actually happened: the US has been using bribes and threats across eastern europe to turn those states into allies, placing armies and missles in them, for decades. That's an incredible flood of lies. Starting from the top: name one such missile site. You can't, because there never were any foreign "armies and missiles" in Eastern Europe. This narrative is pure fiction. You've picked it up from some Russian propaganda piece, never bothered to check the facts, and are now preaching it as truth, while carrying an inflated ego as if you had above-average knowledge of the subject, which only reinforces the tendency to cling to these false beliefs when challenged. Propaganda 101.
    • mjburgess 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_complex_in_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_... Literally everything i said is increadibly easy to google and source. It's all public information, from western sources.
      • mopsi 1y ago
        That site became operational in 2023. There were no foreign missiles of any kind in Eastern Europe before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. This is an indisputable fact. The rest of your narrative is just as flawed. For example, you refer to a civil war in Ukraine, but the European Court of Human Rights found in their lengthy and detailed verdict that no such conflict existed: it was a Russian military operation from the start. There was no genuine separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine prior to Russian invasion; the so-called separatism was manufactured and orchestrated by Russian forces. And the claim that Eastern Europe had to be bribed into NATO is outright laughable, comparable to arguing that Mexican laborers are being bribed and coerced into emigrating to the US. Total ignorance of the actual well-documented push-pull factors. Pick up the memoirs of any Eastern European president, cabinet minister or notable diplomat from the 1990s or early 2000s, and you'll usually find a chapter or two devoted to the incredible difficulties of securing an invitation to join NATO. Poland even went so far as to threaten to sabotage Clinton's re-election by mobilizing the Polish diaspora in the US if he blocked Poland's entry into NATO. You don't have to rely solely on "Western sources". Independent Russian sources unaffiliated with Putin's dictatorship tell the same story. Truth is universal.