If you believe the western media, the west no longer believes in or upholds its values, and watches while Russia pushes westward while China builds up a military and eyes Taiwan, both more than happy to destabilize the middle east in pursuit of their goals. The west needs to wake up, we're slowly sliding towards a world conflict. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Edit: Russia is pushing westward not e…
The decline of "The West" (really The US and client states err Europe) is inevitable now that Russia and China have dismantled any social unity we had. Americans all hate each other and that division is not getting reconciled. They will continue to use it to disrupt us. You can basically destroy momentum in the US by bombarding the population with propaganda and forcing political destabilization. We are screwed in th…
Alexei Navalny has died
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#872Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why he went back to Russia.
It's the Office Space Michael Bolton argument: "Why should I abandon my country? He's the one who sucks." From a practical point of view it may not be wise, but as a principled decision, it sends a very powerful message.
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#873Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fan fiction, but: Civil wars might do it, the Russians need to overthrow Putin, Xi in China, and we need to elect peace hawks in places that have democracy. People would have to really really really really not want a word war. On the history part, I have no clue, but I do know that today the citizenry is more connected and able to strategize for ourselfs than at any point in history before.
"the Russians need to overthrow Putin, Xi in China, and we need to elect peace hawks in places that have democracy." We overthrew communists in 1991, USSR crumbled, in 1992 Pentagon declared that America's "first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival" [0] and 17 years later NATO, after multiple rounds of expansion, announced that it would expand into Georgia and the Ukraine [1] despite all the promi…
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#874Earlier quoted context omitted.
Navalty had some pretty scary things to say about Ukraine as well. To summarize: He thought there are no differences between Ukranian people and Russian people, he thinks that Crimea is rightfully Russia's (finder's keepers!), and he thinks it would be nice for Belarus and Ukraine to just be absorbed by Russia and become part of Russia again. He was only against the war in Ukraine when it became obvious it was not go…
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Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#875Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Things were set in motion years ago and they are slowly unraveling. When the West rejected Russia's deeper integration into its structures after the Cold War ended and expanded NATO towards the East this path was set in stone. The late 2000s were the absolute breaking point. Your point would have been better made without weaseling in a Mearsheimer apology for authoritarian states. Russia snatching Ukraine has absol…
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Fyi, EU is economic union not NATO
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#876Earlier quoted context omitted.
Martyrdom. Navalny calculated that this process would be watched and documented through to the very end. He hoped that might be significant, perhaps even sufficient.
Yes. Unfortunately, he miscalculated and threw his life away by failing to appreciate the conditions. Similar to standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, this was and now proved to be a ineffective and futile act in a country whose populace refuses to stand up to Putin, oppression, or corruption. It's likely Putin will continue to be the de facto "elected" dictator of Russia until he dies and his oligarch pal…
They lack secure communication tools in the first place. I believe Telegram is backdoored by FSB and Whatsapp just bent over without fight.
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#877Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of the man's views. Your sequencing is not construable to a new fact. He did recant any notion of Ukrainians being Russian. He also asserted ukrainians Right to independent self-governing.
> I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of the man's views. Your sequencing is not construable to a new fact. > He did recant any notion of Ukrainians being Russian. He also asserted ukrainians Right to independent self-governing. I never followed Navalny very closely, but my understanding was he opposed Putin but he was also a Russian nationalist , so (at least pre-2022) there wasn't tons of distance between th…
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#878So in latest news, last opposition figure in Russia dies together with any hope for regime change while Russia's war effort is starting to get some traction with it's overwhelming man power and Ukraine is forced to cede more territory all while west is busy either with it's in-fighting or comparing each others superior GDP and how Russia will crumble just any day now (TM). Man, are we in for a ride next decade in Eur…
Europe deciding to depend on Russia for their energy and not focusing on defense spending is the unbelievable part to me, but they've been doing this for quite some time now. They walked right into it. Russia is doing what they've always done and always will do.
Do you think those stereotypes are really helpful in understanding geopolitics? Traditionally what russia has always done(after it conquered its east), was being invaded, loosing lots of land, let the invader bleed out in the winter and then push back and win new territories.
Then russia as a monarchy was quite different to the sowjet union, the result of a marxist revolution with marxist agenda. And russia after the sowjet union was first weak and now they try to find strength in the traditional empire values again, religion and tsar. But it is not a given, that they will keep that, only if it works out for them. I hope it doesn't.
Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#879Re: Alexei Navalny has died
#880I love how naive and gullible most people can be... Just google past the first result and you'll see that he is a carbon copy of putin - they are literally the two sides of the same coin. His personal views were perfectly in line with the russian leadership for the past 300 years: believed in imperialism and ethnic superiority. He played opposition for one reason and one reason alone: personal gains. He softened down…
Yeah, he did it all for the immense personal gains of … getting poisoned, imprisoned, and dying in an Arctic prison colony before reaching 50. Navalny being a Russian chauvinist should be utterly unsurprising: it would be significantly stranger for Russian opposition to be a stereotypical '60s hippie as opposed to, you know, Russian.