Posted on 02/03/2024 10:24:37 AM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Your insisting upon conflating "support for Ukraine" with "leaving our Southern Border undefended" is, indeed, a non sequitur.
You are either committing the "False Dilemma" Fallacy - by implying that we can't do both (i.e., defend our border AND support Ukraine) - or are willfully attempting to roil the waters and confuse the issues!
I repeat: I would happily divert the entire budget of, say, the Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare to strengthening and sealing our Southern Border. I would gladly assign military helicopters to constantly patrol our Southern Border.
But your harping on the Southern Border in a thread about Ukraine is a diversionary tactic and a non sequitur.
No one here is arguing that support should be given to Ukraine at the expense of defending our Southern Border! So please stop saying that!
Regards,
That is a legitimate point - but, given the gross polarization of opinion here at Free Republic, I think that it would be best, tactically, to focus on Realpolitik.
Many of the pro-invasion voices here at Free Republic frequently cite humanitarian arguments and are even so cynical as to claim that an immediate Ukrainian surrender would "save lives" and "end the killing." These voices claim that we FReepers who advocate continuing support for Ukraine must be "war-mongers" and have no respect for human life.
So my advice: Go easy on the "humanitarian" aspect of supporting Ukraine; they'll only use it against you!
Regards,
One more thing, understanding Russian thinking and world view is a difficult task. Like the Middle East we tend to think everyone thinks like us, have values of life, liberty and pursuit of freedom. They don’t
The example I give is most American moms could never conceive of celebrating their child blowing themselves up in the name of God, so they look for some other reason, racism, society, mental illness.
Likewise with many Russians their mind set of russia against the world, Russia is the third Rome, and gods chosen is real and it is actively promoted
Examples, Russian othodox church, may be real to members, but it is controlled and directed by Kremlin. Leader is KGB or was if that matters.
History little if anything is mentioned of “others” involved in ww2 and aid given by US, and certainly that soviets began the war allied with Nazi Germans, that the Germans were granted access to soviet land to train and perfect tactics
Listen to RT, watch man on the street interviews where “normal “‘Russians call for the genocide of Ukranians, that Russia was attacked first
Just more of my 2 cents
I honestly don’t care about the reasons.
A large number of us are just tired of the excessive propaganda polluting the Latest Posts feeds.
In China, Xi has carefully avoided significant commitments to Putin’s war. It probably did not improve Putin/Xi relations that the Chinese tires on the Russian trucks headed for Kiev in Feb. 2022 were a total failure. In the link below you will see Videos referring to Chinese equipment, even aircraft carriers as like “bad tofu” that crumbles into pieces.
From the looks of things Xi has similar problems of poor military equipment, and with massive unemployment has even cut military and police salaries in half. The link below offers many videos indicating just how bad things are these days in China. As I scrolled back to videos offered 3 months ago it is obvious how things were worrysome back then and seem to only have gotten worse for the situations this week. Of course Covid and draconian shutdowns and even locking people in their homes did not lay a good groundwork for the present, but foreign companies have also decided to leave en mass or get their goods from Vietnam, India and elsewhere. These Videos are all bad news. Does anyone have any positive information on China or confirmation of this bad news? Last night 60 Minutes had a segment on large numbers of Chinese illegally crossing our southern border. They looked rather middle class and some spoke reasonable English and pulled good suitcases with wheels.
https://www.youtube.com/@ChinaObserver0/videos
“The only winners in this bloodbath are the corrupt oligarchs. The Big Guy and Zelensky being two of them.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Talking about corruption and human trafficking... :
Russia is ranking among the record bottom countries when it comes to human trafficking. They are in the TIER 3 category (the absolute worst), alongside Venezuela and a few other rogue nations.
So there goes the so called “Christian values” narrative about Russia.
The Human trafficking world map : (Russia is apparently hell)
https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/681392.png
LASTLY:
When is comes to the CORRUPTION level, Russia is among the worst in the world as well:
CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX:
(Ukraine doing much better than Russia)
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023
Russia rank : went from 137 to 141 (worsening)
Ukraine : went from 116 to 104 (getting better!)
USA: 24 vs 24 (stable)
France: went from 21 to 20 (getting slightly better)
Sweden: 4
Denmark:1 (a true champion of non-corruption!):
Two corrupt countries duking it out?
As I’ve said many times before: I DON’T CARE.
The only things I care about are the needless loss of human life and the fact that my money is funding the war efforts of one of them.
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