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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Ah the false equivalency of the unreasonable metaphor. What a useful technique to avoid your rhetorical failings.
My brother I offered to debate you on factual terms and you said no I wanna construct narratives. I literally told you, that's going to be a waste of time because it's just us shouting narratives at each other.
I can point out the broken planes and broken heating systems. You can point out the shut-down steel plant and Germany's industrial sector dropping by 2% in 2023. None of it means anything. It's just little data points. But you chose this silly rhetorical environment, not me.
Oh, also, I'm interested in your explanation for this: When everything kicked off, Russia simply kept any airliners it had leased, effectively stealing them from the West. That's a big part of why they're fucked on maintenance, because any goodwill they might have had to get some help keeping them in the air is permanently gone. The West is still examining the legal options for confiscating frozen Russian sanction-money and using it to fund the war, but it hasn't done so yet. Why not? How would you compare and contrast these two actions (assuming that you acknowledge them both as reality)?
you mean like the 300 billion dollars the US effectively stole from Russia?
300 billion is the worldwide total, not the US total.
So my point in contrasting those two situation is that the vast majority of that money is still sitting there, frozen, and actually "stealing" it is still considered a big deal 2 years in, with a lot of debate about when and how to go about it through legal means and whether to do it at all. Whereas with the planes, it was just right away "yoink they're ours now."
One of my other interlocutors said, more or less, that of course they can't take the sanctions money completely, because it would be such a blatant theft that no one would ever trust the West again. Which, I don't think that's completely a wrong take on it, but then... what about the planes? How does that fit into that? That was my point.
The West stole 300 billion dollars and imposed illegal "sanctions", after which Russia decided not to return a few planes; quite a difference in scale. And yes, "freezing" money is still theft -- if you steal something and refuse to return it, "I promise I won't do anything with it" is not a valid excuse
So if someone else breaks the law first (sanctions), it's permissible to ignore the law in your dealings with them going forward (keeping the planes). Yes?
(Edit: I don't agree with that statement in general; I'm asking whether you agree with that statement, because it sounds like that's what you're saying.)
"Permissible"? Not according to international law, but if your adversaries completely ignore the law and receive no punishment for doing so, why should you continue to follow it? (Worth noting that Russia kept NordStream open despite the sanctions because they wanted to honour contracts with European countries, despite the latter's hostility)
Okay. Using that logic, if Russia completely ignores the law by invading neighboring countries, tampering in our elections, and assassinating residents of our countries, why should we continue to be bound by law in how we deal with them?
You chuds are the ones constantly bleating about the rules based order, yet you never follow the rules you preach. Literally everything you moan about in your comment is something that the burger empire constantly does around the world. So, the question is why should other countries respect your rules while you prance around and play world police.
I don't completely disagree with that. A lot of US foreign policy is the same type of naked exercise of lawless power that's all of a sudden a big emergency when someone else does it to our guys, yes.
That said, I wasn't the one who started "bleating about the rules" in this instance. My whole point was, it's a little weird to start shooting, bombing, and raping your neighbors, run away with whatever property you happen to have inside your borders, and then say the West "stole" the frozen sanction-money, when you can still up until the present day have it back any time you stop breaking international law in a big hundreds-of-thousands-of-dead-people way.
It's weird because it's a false narrative divorced from reality. It was NATO that continued expanding towards Russia until eventually Russia said enough is enough. NATO has been invading and destroying countries for decades since the end of USSR. Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria are just a few examples of that. So, why would anybody expect Russia to tolerate an aggressive and hostile military alliance on its borders?
Furthermore, Russia tried to resolve this situation diplomatically since 2008 with Minsk agreements that western leaders now openly admit were a delaying tactic by the west.
Finally, section IX of Ukraine’s 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty states the following:
The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles: to accept, to produce and to purchase no nuclear weapons.
The whole legal basis for the existence of state of Ukraine is predicated on Ukraine staying neutral and not joining military blocs. Ukraine broke the very basis of this agreement when it tried to join NATO.
I can partially agree with the context you want to add to the situation, yes. That doesn't change the fact the Russia is in a very literal sense shooting and bombing Ukrainian cities right now. Their explanation for why they're doing it doesn't mean it's all of a sudden not what they're doing.
Surely we can agree on that much?
Ukrainian negotiators are now admitting that Russia and Ukraine had a tentative agreement last March and then Ukraine decided to sabotage it because of the pressure from the west. The west is literally the reason the war started and continues today.
Could Russia have continued to try and find a diplomatic solution after a decade of being lied to, perhaps they could've tried longer. However, we now know for a fact that the west and Ukraine never intended to have good faith negotiations.
To sum up, Russia tried to find a peaceful solution for close to a decade. The west refused to play ball. Then Russia did a show of force and brought Ukraine to negotiating table. The west sabotaged negotiations. Now, Russia is fighting a proxy war with NATO in Ukraine because of that.
Do you have a source for this?
Why did Russia not explain this at the start of the war? They claimed they had no plans to invade Ukraine at all and it was all a Western lie. Why?
Do you believe that "pogroms" or similar against ethnic Russians in east Ukraine were the motivation for the invasion? To what extent do you think that they were going on?
here's Arestovich saying it https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1975okx/ua_pov_arestovich_in_english_says_he_and_the_rest/
here's another member of negotiating team confirming this https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/11/24/7430282/
They did explain this many times and very clearly. Why did the west not listen is the actual question.
Absolutely, and it was going on to an extent that even CNN reported on this back in 2014, here's a clip you can watch https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
There's also an hour long documentary from France on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
Are you seriously arguing about another country breaking laws as a resident of the US? Even if we just limit it to this conflict, planning and funding a fascist coup in Ukraine in 2014 was a blatant violation of international law
Citations needed; specifically, citations containing some kind of evidence, not just anecdotes
Make up your mind. You don't get to decide which facts matter and which don't. Every fact you've thrown out has been devoid of the critical context. Every fact I've thrown out you have said "doesn't matter because it isn't the right fact".
You're right, Russia should have returned every one of those planes immediately. What a doofus you are.
No you fuckwit. It's the sanctions. Goodwill doesn't allow US companies to sell parts to Russia under fucking sanctions.
LOL, sanction-money. You're so delusional. The West is still trying to figure out if it should STEAL the money and assets of Russian citizens that were held in accounts in Western institutions. It hasn't done so because it has no international legal basis for doing so, and if they did it would open up precedent for retaliation by every colonized country in the world to seize US assets. That money, however, while not seized, is still frozen, so from the Russian perspective it literally doesn't matter because the assets are unusable while they remain frozen. The USA is not doing it because of a desire to maintain goodwill. They already collectively punished Russian citizens by freezing the assets. The seizure would create so much backlash from the rest of the world, it's a self-preservation technique. Seizing assets in German institutions would actually violate the German constitution.
You're the one constantly trying to craft narratives from decontextualized facts. It blows my mind that you don't see it.
That's 100% accurate, yes. What I'm saying is, I'm doing that now because you derisively rejected the idea of putting things in numerical context, or testing the overall picture against overall data. I'm glad you're up to speed on what a waste of time it is to throw individual data points, in any number, at each other without context. Glad we're agreed on it now.
What was the international legal basis for keeping the planes?
Honestly, don't answer that. I think the point is either made or it isn't. I probably won't continue after this; like I say, I think this style of argumentation is mostly a waste of time.
If I'm being real honest, I think you just like arguing. This whole thing started again when I came in more or less agreeing with you on a topic we should be roughly on the same side of, but you clearly don't want that -- I think you just want someone to play to role of your enemy so you can be hostile at them. That's why you immediately abandoned the conversation about the atrocities in Gaza, when you got agreement about genocide against the Palestinians, and started coming back to Ukraine, so you can go on with yelling at me.
I kind of tried it out, like hey let me throw some zingers in about the Russians, but the whole thing feels stupid. I don't know man. I'm just a person making sense of the world, and I like talking with people with all kinds of different points of view. If all you're interested in is, well, this, then I'm not into it.
HOW DO YOU RETURN PLANES DURING A HOT WAR? Listen to your fucking self. The legal basis for keeping the planes is that LEASES are nothing but contracts and international contract law relies on good standing between the parties. Without a court that would be willing to actual rule on the contracts, the contracts are essentially nullified during a hot war and it will only be AFTER the war that the winning court system will decide on how to proceed with the violation of a private agreement across international borders with completely different legal regimes.
It is, but not for the reason you believe, though.
You're psychologizing me, creating a fantasy of who am I and how I think and what I want so that you can make sense of why someone would be so irate with someone like you, who clearly has faults but never really deserves to be pushed so hard, because your heart is in the right place. Fuck off.