1. The US has put sufficient weapons in the heartland of what used to be the USSR that Moscow is having difficulty keeping troops & friendly administrators in power in Eastern Ukraine. Is it realistic that they are going to try to responsible and peaceful approach a 2nd time? It didn't work last time. The Russians might have noticed. I'm not sure I trust the propaganda that Putin is the only one driving their behaviour.
The US has made the peaceful approach look stupid in hindsight. This time they might try a pufferfish-style escalate-into-nukes to try and get the US to back off sending weapons to their enemies. Otherwise where is the line where the US stops pushing forward? Which could realistically doom us all, I hope nobody misjudges in this tense and terrifying situation.
2. War is very chaotic. Things happen that nobody expects, individuals make irrational decisions, people mis-judge the capabilities of entire populations of other people. Realistically, the US doesn't have the power to engineer this outcome. It is rolling dice.
3. Toppling governments routinely leads to the next government being less stable and rational than the last one. It isn't like toppling a government leads to a sudden tradition of stable government.
I don't think it is likely that this happens or that it prevents nukes being launched. Maybe add in a 20% "other" category somewhere on the diagram. Hardly comforting.
This. It seems to me powers behind the throne would rather risk their lives and overthrow Putin, than risk their lives and more in a nuclear MAD scenario.
But there are many many alternatives before either of those two, so I imagine the vast majority are hoping against hope something else plays out, and they don’t have to decide between a risky coup attempt and certain nuclear annihilation.
Often it's because the constitution of their country states that a sitting President can't be brought up on charges - Mugabe is a very obvious example.
But don't worry, Yeltsin had Putin's back...
> President of Russia, ceased to carry out its mandate, has immunity. They can not be held criminally or administratively liable for acts committed by them during the execution of the President's powers
History teaches that very rarely do dictators survive a fall. Putin is likely to face the firing squad. No successor could take the chance of leaving him alive.
> Or “Russian oligarchs put plutonium in Putin’s coffee”.
Saying that about the US president who was bankrolling a trillion dollars-plus invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan would have put one in jail, interesting to see that when applied to another country is now perfectly ok. Relevant Whitest Kids U' Know sketch [1]
I very much doubt that. Maybe an awkward conversation with the Feds would've ensued while they ascertained if you had access to plutonium, much like the awkward conversation I had with Police when my estranged step-brother was threatening to shoot politicians, and they were trying to ascertain if I'd give him access to my firearms. (Fuck no, obviously.)
Given the hyperbole that US politics has descended into, if your theory was true, half of US political Twitter would be in gaol already.
At least writing down that sort of stuff (death wishes against foreign politicians) on a public forum would have been frowned upon and made part of that forum’s TOS, but, as I said, doing this to the boogie man of the day is actually seen as ok.
Trump was (is, actually) also seen as a foreign-controlled boogie man, that’s why the open death threats on Twitter and the like were not reaceiving any action, including from Twitter itself. I haven’t seen any direct threats against Biden, more than that, anti-Biden people had to adopt that Brandon slogan thing in order to pass some of the implicit censorship applied by big tech companies.
Also, see the filth spewed out about any woman who is a minority Democrat congress member.
> anti-Biden people had to adopt that Brandon slogan thing
They chose to adopt it, your belief that they "had" to is not in alignment with the facts.
Given the obvious lineage of "Let's Go Brandon", if your assertion that they chose it to avoid being moderated/banned/imprisoned was true, then why isn't that happening when they mention Brandon? Because we all know what that means. Twitter knows, FB knows, the FBI knows.
Stating that this was forced upon them to avoid some mythical persecution carries the implicit assumption that everyone is an idiot who has no idea what they mean, the logic is severely flawed.
What I really enjoy about the whole Brandon thing is that their "clever" in-phrase has been co-opted and suborned by young Biden supporters, check out /r/DarkBrandon.
I'm really curious, where should I have looked? I'm quite regularly checking on the reddit off-site version of what used to be /the_donald, and I have to say that never have I seen any death threats targeting Biden in there. Of course, there's anti-semitic stuff, there's racist stuff, but no death threats. To be fair though I'm not visiting 4chan/pol or 8chan/pol or whatever it's now called, but most of the people from there aren't real, anyway.
Can't believe 7 months into the war people still buying this kind of news. It looks like an intellectual no-fly zone has been established over the collective mind
1. The US has put sufficient weapons in the heartland of what used to be the USSR that Moscow is having difficulty keeping troops & friendly administrators in power in Eastern Ukraine. Is it realistic that they are going to try to responsible and peaceful approach a 2nd time? It didn't work last time. The Russians might have noticed. I'm not sure I trust the propaganda that Putin is the only one driving their behaviour.
The US has made the peaceful approach look stupid in hindsight. This time they might try a pufferfish-style escalate-into-nukes to try and get the US to back off sending weapons to their enemies. Otherwise where is the line where the US stops pushing forward? Which could realistically doom us all, I hope nobody misjudges in this tense and terrifying situation.
2. War is very chaotic. Things happen that nobody expects, individuals make irrational decisions, people mis-judge the capabilities of entire populations of other people. Realistically, the US doesn't have the power to engineer this outcome. It is rolling dice.
3. Toppling governments routinely leads to the next government being less stable and rational than the last one. It isn't like toppling a government leads to a sudden tradition of stable government.
I don't think it is likely that this happens or that it prevents nukes being launched. Maybe add in a 20% "other" category somewhere on the diagram. Hardly comforting.