The person I'm directly replying to said the war in Ukraine is causing oil prices to increase. What else would be using major amounts of oil in a war?
But like I said it's beside the point. The price of oil is effectively set by the production volume of Saudi Arabia. Ukraine does not factor into it at all.
Their exports are humming along just fine as they've made new agreements with China and other countries to get out of the petro-dollar hegemony. It's been over a year and the sanctions against Russian oil exports appear to have done nothing.
If I posted as frequently within the short amount of time as you have on this topic, my account would have been throttled. My account is frequently throttled for posting more than 5-7 times per hour, and yet, your recent history shows a far higher rate of posts in defense of Russia with no evidence of throttling.
That's very interesting. I wonder if limits are relaxed above 8k karma.
I also wonder why what is basically Russian propaganda account has no limits and how it got to 8k karma, when it has basically nothing to say.
I know there is practice of buying established accounts with bunch of karma / followers to use for both marketing and propaganda purposes so that might be this case.
Respectfully, you are delusional if you think I've been on HN for years, posting in lots of unrelated threads, etc. to be some apparatus of Russian propaganda.
It's time to realize real, normal people are fed up with this useless conflict. That's the takeaway here that you refuse to see.
"Everyone who disagrees with my point of view must be ignorant or evil" is a terrible argument and only strengthens his point.
What a juvenile and reductive way to view people and relationships. Have you ever self-reflected and considered maybe you might be wrong about anything, ever? Have you ever extended any generosity of argument?
We are talking about genocidal war where the first thing the occupiers establish in occupied territories are torture rooms. Just last week, Russian soldiers admited on camera they had orders to murder children and went along with it.
What kind of self reflection would make people who are ok with that not complete filth I wonder?
Maybe some people don't realize that russian soldiers rape, torture, and murder men, women, elderly, children, in areas of Ukraine they control (as confirmed by UN war crimes investigations)?
Maybe these people are simply okay with that happening because they are 'tired'?
I'm an American that's fed up with the continued support of sanctions and this useless war in Ukraine. We have flushed billions of dollars into this conflict and enacted pain on the world for zero gain. It's time for the west to admit failure on this and push Ukraine to bargain for a cease fire, even if it costs them contested territory like Crimea or Donbas. The history of conflict in those regions is quite complicated and zero concern for the US--we have far bigger problems at home to worry about.
Your biggest adversary, one that's cast a dark shadow over your country and it's allies, one that's consumed trillions of dollars of defence spending over the last 75 years, is now being ground down and exhausted with approximately zero of your countrymen's lives at risk and all for a mere few billion dollars. You're getting a bargain.
The USSR was a major adversary for roughly 45 years, 1946 to 1991. The US provided them major economic aid in WWII which they leveraged into a massive expansion and had minimal interaction before the war.
Russia is a politically distinct fragment of that empire, just like Ukraine.
The best response I've heard to this is: Tell me which part of the US you would willingly give up to Russia if it threatened to attack. If your response would be for them to pound sand, why should we expect or want any different for the Ukraine?
The US doesn't launch artillery into its own states like Texas for example. This is why I say the history of conflict in Crimea, Donbas, etc. is complicated--Ukraine government for years has done much aggression against ostensibly its own people (including firing on them with artillery!).
This is not a cut and dry, "Russia bad!! Russia invade!!". Some people in those contested regions welcomed Russia as protectors against Ukraine extremist aggressors.
As an American I have no skin in this fight and nor should I, this is a conflict for Ukraine and Russia to sort out hopefully through diplomacy. Russia has been a world power for decades post USSR fall and clearly have not been on a megalomaniacal quest for world domination. I see no reason to assume they want to start another world war.
The US most certainly has launched artillery into its own states, including Texas [1]. There's no benefit to doing so now, but if Mexico were to occupy all of Texas tomorrow, I guarantee the US would bomb inside Texas. Similarly, if Mexico just supplied support to get Texas to secede, there would also be violence.
The southern states started the civil war in protest against moves to end slavery which they profited from directly. It was not northern states deciding to be aggressors against the southern states for no good reason. The circumstances were completely different and you know it (it's in the wikipedia article you cite!).
It’s a lot more complicated than that as the Wikipedia page mentions. The southern states had ‘succeeded’ months before fighting broke out. Lincoln made some concessions but wasn’t willing to relinquish federal land in southern states or accept them having actually left. Meanwhile congress passed many new laws once southern state senators had left.
the history may be complicated, and that's why it's up to the UN, or bilateral negotiation between russia and Ukraine, to resolve the issue, rather than russia using force and trying to genocide Ukraine because russia is mad they don't get everything they want
indeed, as soon as russia abandoned the former, diplomacy, and resorted to the latter, force, they lost all benefit of the doubt and all rights to anything they wanted
and that's to say nothing of the fact that russian soldiers rape, torture, and murder men, women, and children in areas of Ukraine they control, so ceding control means allowing that to happen, which obviously means it wouldn't actually lead to peace, because who would be peaceful sacrificing THEIR friends, family, and countrypeople to that? You?
This war is catastrophic to Ukraine, but relatively costs pennies to western countries. They absolutely should continue armaments as long as Ukraine is willing to fight. Not doing so would mean allowing fascism and outright genocide to spread on European soil, and that would have an astronomical cost in the long run.
US and EU would be very, very shortsighted with their own interests if they didn't ship everything Ukraine wants.
In the UK I was filling up the other day and reflecting how I'd being paying the exact same price 10 years ago.
My current car costs me 15p/mile to drive. Back in 2000 I remember it was costing me about 13p/mile -- that was in a car with worse mpg, but either way it feels it's never been cheaper to drive in the UK.
In 2004 it was 80p a litre, or £1.57 in today's money [1]. I filled up for well under £1.49 - I don't recall exactly.
In 2008 petrol peaked at £1.20 or £2.05 in today's money, about the same peak as last year's £1.90 a litre.
In real terms petrol today is well below 2018 levels
But like I said it's beside the point. The price of oil is effectively set by the production volume of Saudi Arabia. Ukraine does not factor into it at all.