Quote (Goomshill @ May 5 2024 03:31am)
The war in Ukraine started 8 years before Russia went balls deep in it. The civil war was underway as soon as the Maidan occurred, and both the US and Russia joined it with masked interventions before taking the gloves off 2 years ago. You can blame the Ukrainian nationalists for starting the conflict and we can never really know how involved the CIA was and whether they only co-opted it when it was underway and manipulated the outcome, but 'who started it' matters as much as it does to an elementary school teacher, it doesn't matter that Russia didn't start it, they chose to commit to it, and Joe Biden chose to turn it into a proxy war.
If Russia was going to attack NATO it would have done it back when it was the soviet union. If you corner an animal and poke it with a stick until it bites back, you're not proving its dangerous, you're proving you're dangerous.
And again, we're not gaining from this exchange. We sabotaged the petrodollar and aligned all the unaligned world powers against us. Russia is seizing critical resources, we're being given a bunch of impoverished mouths to feed.
Who cares if Russia is diminished? How is that to our advantage? How do we benefit from Russia's loss? They aren't our competitor, they aren't going to eclipse us. I don't think we need to tear down Botswana for fear of the ascendant Botswani empire spreading across the EU and Asia. Botswana isn't digging economic tendrils into the world with its belt and road initiative, carving up the map for influence and resources. We don't benefit when Botswana is cut down to size.
Just to be clear, this is a fringe position even among Trump cultists. Trump cultists don't like Ukraine because of absurd conspiracy theories endorsed by Trump, and as a result of that, Trump tried to hijack American foreign policy in order to leverage Ukraine in favor of his political interests. He was impeached because of this.
Goom pretends to oppose Ukraine because of other reasons, but his lodestar is wherever the Trump/Tucker Carlson axis lands. These weirdos endorse a bunch of Russian talking points, pretending the Ukrainian people have simply been manipulated by Western intelligence agencies. There's no space where Ukrainians desire to be their own nation and not be raped/tortured/murdered by Russians.
There's also an aspect of "everything the enemy supports, we must oppose". Reasonable politicians support Ukraine(that's why the Speaker was able to pass the recent bill). Therefore, the nutty Trump cult must oppose whatever the "establishment" supports. It's more about tribalism than a coherent worldview.