PhilipTheBucket

Not in exchange for peace, in exchange for a vague promise of peace in the future which won't be kept. I get why Trump can't see that, but it is weird for it to get reported on as if it was not a transparent scam perpetrated on one of the dumbest people in the world.

Also! Inflation and whether or not it was the president's fault, and all the Palestine protests and how Democrats (only Democrats) were facing a lot of heat for their support of Israel. Almost as if our media is corrupted by partisan influences that are trying to mislead and influence people, and it works shockingly well.

By the statute, he's 100% guilty. And there's no particular guarantee that he'll get a jury of people who are willing to say "Yeah but fuck Trump at the end of the day" (or even that he won't get whisked away to some kind of ICE tribunal that are going to make him the test case for "deporting" citizens or something).

I'm 100% behind the guy, and honestly I would be cheering for him to fight the case because fuck Trump also, but I'm just saying that it's way way different when it's you in the seat start facing down "sacrifice the rest of your life" consequences.

Yeah. It's a fucking disgrace.

Read "Sky Over Kharkiv" for some generally excellent picture of the war from the Ukraine perspective, with some occasional bitterness about the cowardice and apathy of all the Western allies about helping Ukraine to any pivotal extent.

Dan Ellsberg also had some great writing about how this all functions from the POV inside the Western military machine. He called it "the stalemate machine": We're motivated enough to help you not lose, but not motivated enough to let you win. And so, you just keep dying, month after month and year after year.

Yeah, I'm just coming in this thread and saying totally weird counterfactual nonsense, just kind of anything that serves the narrative I am trying to portray. It doesn't even have to make sense.

Ukrainians are mostly killing foreign mercenaries, prison conscripts, and the elderly surplus population?

Yeah! That's in "The Art of War," right? You're supposed to send your "elderly" and other random dregs you can dig up first to fight a critical war. And then, once you've depended on all those "surplus" people for several years, you move on to your trained troops, the actual military. Obviously. It's just part of the Russian mastery of military strategy that meant they ~~took over the country in three days~~ ~~slowly pushed forward and got the mission accomplished and went home in a few months~~ ~~fought a Pyrrhic victory over the space of a year and a half and then negotiated a partition and then started rebuilding and preparing for next random invasion of some neighbor country~~ got stuck at the border for years, ruined their economy and any respect their military or kit might have had on the world stage, and are now scrounging around for any possible military-age males they can lay hands on to keep feeding into the grinder, hoping that if they keep it up long enough, it'll work.

I have more to say about the rest of your ridiculous message, but I don't think it's really necessary.

Unfortunately, they're outnumbered by more than an order of magnitude. They're getting ground down as time goes on, and for all its stupidity the Russian military is not small or fragile. Basically, the Russians only have to win once to win, Ukraine has to survive every month that goes by, time after time.

The good guys don't always win. Just ask the Palestinians.

Deep cut 😀

Unlike in Vietnam, I'd say "they're trying to kill us all and take our home, but we're killing them instead" is a pretty good model of success for the Ukrainians.

It would be great if they had other options. Hanging Putin and demobilizing everyone, and rebuilding both countries, would be a great start.

Seriously. The conviction

Yeah, Reddit is super weird. There are a bunch of rabidly pro-Israel people who have infiltrated its world news communities in exactly the way that some Lemmy people love to imagine that they have done on Lemmy.

They've killed about a million Russians so far, and held the invasion a few hundred km from their border. I'd call that something they can do about it.

They have the luck ("luck") of the entire first world funding them to defend against Russia, instead of Gaza where it's 100% the opposite, so they're not in the horrifying situation the Palestinians are in. Which I'm sure frustrates Russia to no end.