You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that humanity is not an intrinsically violent species, and that if we all held hands and sang Kumbaya we'd be able to get along peaceably and without need for defensive tools.
Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe.
The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.
> enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted
The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.
Regardless of any “Pax Americana”, nuclear weapons have been the greatest force for peace in history.
Before them, we had two devastating world wars in the span of about three decades, with over 100,000,000 dead total. Now we’ve gone over seven decades without another.
Let’s hope the deterrent holds through the current, ongoing, and horribly irresponsible brinksmanship.
That loss of life is not enormous if you look at the overall graph of civilian and military war-related deaths throughout 20th and 21st century. It very obviously trended downwards, especially after the Cold War, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused a spike. Then again, communism resulted in millions more civilian deaths in the same time period. The US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason, it's as if people are entirely unaware of events like Holodomor and The Great Leap Forward.
> US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason
It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea.
Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.
Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?
Same goes with other nations, it sounds nice from your perspective but not so much when others do it too, you think you’re enforcing “peace” but reality is completely different, for that reason MIC exists and thrive for these “peaceful” wars, that we all know they are far from being peaceful. Sure, it’s naive to think that everyone will halt offensive/defensive work, but trying to justify it that it’s to protect the “herd” and bring “peace” is far more naive, there are no wolves, it’s another dogs and other herd too, it’s always about dominance and power struggles.
Anyone can come up with a list of mistakes made by any major actor in any sphere you care to name. OK, sure, people and even countries make big, dumb mistakes sometimes.
That doesn't prove anything other than humans remain human. I'm no blind supporter of Uncle Sam but things are just a little bit more complicated than your comment seems to suggest.
The US army has helped stop the russians from killing me and my friends in Ukraine.
The russians launch missiles and drones at civilians, like me.
Last October, I was sitting at my kitchen table, writing Haskell and working on my startup, when outside my kitchen window the local air defence successfully blasted a Shahed 136 out of the air. Both the missile trail and the cloud from the explosion hung in the air for several minutes. I have a good photo of it.
The air defence doesn’t always work. Sometimes it’s extremely loud, even when we’re sitting in the underground shelter during an air raid. Sometimes people die. So far it’s mostly been women and children.
I might have misinterpreted your comment, but “it made the sheep less safe” seems both wildly inaccurate and offensive. And to characterise it as the sponsoring of “Banderites”, well, I’d ask you which department of the kremlin you work for.
You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style.
I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.
FYI as it was a little obscure, “sheep” and “sheepdogs” is a reference to a quite famous article by USMC LTC Dave Grossman, author of a widely read book “On Killing”:
It is not meant as a disparaging remark in this context to call people sheep.
ChatGPT's summary: Dave Grossman explores the concept of three distinct types of people in society: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. He characterizes "sheep" as the general populace, who are peaceful and vulnerable; "wolves" as those who prey on the sheep, representing criminals and threats to society; and "sheepdogs" as individuals who protect the sheep, often law enforcement and military personnel. Grossman emphasizes the importance of recognizing and supporting the sheepdogs who keep society safe, and he encourages readers to understand the roles these groups play in maintaining a secure and orderly society.
My own note: to the sheep the wolves and the sheepdogs can often seem the same. They both have scary fangs, make growling noises, chase and bite, etc. It is common for the sheep to fear both wolves and the sheepdogs. Some sheep fail to distinguish the two, and if sheep wrote political essays they might call for defunding the sheepdogs as they are a menace to society. But wolves and sheepdogs are not the same, and it is a mistake to equate defensive investment in military capabilities to keep the peace (even if that sometimes involves military interventions and/or small-scale preemptive wars) with hostile, aggressive conquest of the sort we see carried out by actors like Russia, or the genocide conducted by Hamas.
I appreciate the clarification, but I should also clarify that it's not the use of the word "sheep" which I find offensive or inaccurate. Instead, it's the idea that Ukraine is full of Nazis (which is implied by the constant use of "Banderites"), and the idea that civilians in Ukraine are somehow less safe with a military force to protect them.
The reason why Ukraine still exists today is because Ukrainian soldiers managed to kill so many russian invaders and destroy so much russian armour in the first couple of months of the war. This is largely thanks to Western ordnance.
You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style.
I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.
You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style.
I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.
A discussion about the involvement of NATO is fair game, but "Ukraine bombing the Donbas" is a 100% Russian propaganda lie. I own my own platform, and such a statement would be an instant ban of that account.
I'm all for free speech, but like I showed, Russian propaganda poses a real threat for us here in the EU.
So in my defense, "Russian mouthpiece" was a factual statement ;), but I understand it's also a personal attack.
You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style.
I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.
A smaller nation adopting the old symbols of what their current attackers deem the greatest threat to their existence that they had ever faced, seems like a surprisingly hard concept to understand. People should really read more biology, defenseless species of animals adopting the bold and provocative colors of another, poisonous species, that look somewhat like them, is not an unheard of form of mimicry.
Russia invaded Ukraine for the same reason it started a war with Chechenia and Georgia. Let me tell you: it has absolute zero to do with NATO. NATO however, has everything to do with Russia constantly trying to invade their neighbours.
Besides, NATO is already at their doorstep with Finland. Did it change anything?
And how can you negotiate with a country like Russia? Peace deal now is an invasion in 5 years.
To be fair, in hindsight I can see why Russia felt threatened by NATO after Ukraine jumped from its lap feb 2014. But framing the Maidan events as some sort of US sponsored Nazi coup seems a bit of a tangent.
Putin felt threatened because he couldn't understand how his puppet was ousted, as he doesn't believe in the concept of grassroots political opposition or the existence of the Internet, and came to the irrational conclusion that it must have been Americans. Yet another proof that out of touch old men in power bring ruin to their people.
No, it isn’t. If it was, they wouldn’t be moving ordnance and personnel from Kaliningrad and their borders with Finland to Ukraine to bolster their invasion.
My previous assessment hasn’t changed. You are either blissfully ignorant of the reality of the war in Ukraine and russia’s aims, or you are deliberately spreading misinformation here.
I think your previous assessment is right. I asked my initial question because it's not typical for someone to use the word Banderite. Combined with an account creation in Jan. 2022 and a history of comments like this. Well, it's strange.
Is Anduril(and by extension Palantir...?) Russia connected? The -M suffix used in the weaponized version is reminiscent of Russian nomenclature("Modified" or "Modernized" in Russian spelling).
We’re currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates.
The waste of the US military in Iraq, the defeat in Afghanistan, the failures of domestic spying and PSYOPs dividing the nation, and the failed war in Ukraine has precipitated a state of weakness where rival countries are jockeying for position in both the Middle East and SE Asia. China is openly waging irregular warfare against the US, killing 100,000+ Americans per year in the Second Opium War. Our borders are regularly not only breached by Mexican paramilitaries, but the invasion assisted by DOD flights.
The failure of the “sheepdog” to keep the herd safe is happening right now.
Edit:
If you disagree with my conclusion —
I explained why I thought that in my post, so please explain either where you thought I was wrong or what you know that I don’t.
Rather than trot out the very tired “muh conspiracy theories!”
> We're currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates.
And yet before the end of December you'll likely see the USAF working with Brazilian armed forces in Guyana against Maduro's invasion, and now the B of BRICS is out of the equation.
You should stop reading Russian propaganda as if it was news…
I think you need to re-evaluate your sources of information, because what you wrote in this comment comes across as a bunch of unfounded, conspiracy-addled fantasy world nonsense.
Not only is "NATO vs BRICS" not escalating, there is no "NATO vs BRICS". What are you even on about.
Ukraine is a sovereign democratic state. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and a full scale invasion in 2022.
Is it surprising to you that Ukraine wants closer ties with Western Europe the same way Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, etc has done? All these countries were able to prosper. Russia is a shit non-democratic country that wants to go back to the soviet days where everyone under their rule lived in shit.
How you could say this was a "US army sponsored Banderites" with a straight face is just plain retarded. At least US didn't kill millions of Ukrainians, unlike Russia.
In reality, the “sheepdog” ends up being a government surveillance state that keeps you compliant with spending all the money on peacetime military waste, rather than serving any of the citizens.
Ok so tell me: why has the US and its allies been largely free of risk from territorial invasion, for such a long time that people like you feel comfortable lobbying for the elimination of the military? Why didn't Stalin continue his march into Western Europe after defeating Germany?
Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe.
The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.