“There’s nothing here but war, where the murderin’ cannons roar, And I am sick and tired of this hard fighting.”

They specifically said you can be mad. It’s the first sentence in OP’s comment. WTF are you on about?

These people are morons with 8th grade reading comprehension skills.

Come to think of it, maybe they are in fact 8th graders?

On its own it’s not, but it definitely is in the current political and cultural context. There’s no getting away from that. It’s going to provoke a political reaction in any conservative and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

I won’t name any specific organizations, but the upshot is that you need to consume a variety of news sources from different countries and in different formats. It also pays to get into very specifically focused news organizations.

That’s a fair take and may well be accurate. I am no expert and accordingly don’t have a strong opinion either way, and that’s leaving aside the rather obvious point that most/many of our so-called “experts” keep getting it wrong in the first place.

Remember when Kyiv was going to fall in a matter of days, then that got adjusted into a matter of weeks and then months and now here we are a year and a half later?

The loud and clear lesson from that is that the so-called experts often don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

Where did I “[spend] paragraphs telling [you] an argument is bad”?

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Maybe you’ve mistaken me for someone else.

I used a few short and simple sentences to explain why your position is crap. That’s it.

This doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It’s not the case that Russia is somehow holding back and has huge additional reserves and resources that it can throw at the conflict. The Russian military isn’t about to collapse or anything, but it’s not doing great either and has largely been exposed as far weaker than was previously supposed.

No, you shouldn’t do it because it’s stupid. If you had real arguments you would use them, but you don’t, so instead you trot out this garbage. It’s a sign of intellectual weakness and dishonesty.

I’m not talking about anyone being justified; I am talking about realpolitik and the fact that in international relations it’s often the case that what ought to be is often in direct conflict with what actually is.

It would be awesome if we could live in a world of absolutes wherein national interests never conflicted with moral ambiguity, but that’s just not reality at all, sorry to inform.

You would have a point were I simply speculating, but I’m not.

I am simply stating what the most well-informed and knowledgeable sources are saying.

You would know this if you had sanitized and healthy media consumption habits, but you obviously don’t.

Doubt it. The smart money says that he did it because he does a ton of business with the Chinese and is very nervous about being seen to actively take sides in a way that would cause them to see him as a potential security threat.

I don’t think I follow your arguments. Is there a way you can rephrase your point such that a dummy like myself might understand it?

Unfortunately NATO wasn’t designed in a way that conceived of a rogue member state like Turkey. This means that it has a very limited toolkit for reigning in Erdogan’s excesses. He also has a huge amount of leverage due to Turkey’s pivotal role on the Black Sea which is obviously critical to everything happening in Ukraine. For now, NATO really does have its hands tied with regard to Turkey.

The argument would be that their findings are therefore somehow tainted and unreliable. However, without any evidence that this is so, simply pointing it out as if it’s some kind of “gotcha” is in fact fallacious, as you suggest.

I think Iraq is a fair point. The rest are weak sauce as fuck for a variety of reasons that I’ll not trouble myself to enumerate.

That said, I myself was never onboard with the US invasion of Iraq or our long time presence in Afghanistan. They were both bullshit and never would have happened had it been up to me.

The Cold war ended more than 30 years ago.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one though.

Where, oh where are all of our apologists?

Maybe still figuring out what the “talking points” will be?

We’re all waiting for the inevitable bullshit.

For most people most of the time it’s a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it’s a huge country with tons of variation so if you’re looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.

What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.