[ninkendo]

Please look up "victim blaming" and understand how it applies in this context. If Islamic terrorists say "if you depict Muhammad, we will attack you", and someone depicts Muhammad and are attacked, we don't say "wow, they really shouldn't have depicted Muhammad, this is their fault". We say "wow, those terrorists are awful." Russia's red lines were never acceptable in the first place, and their existence does not justify war crimes.

> However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea

Oh those poor Russians, they can't even violently annex neighboring territory without getting sanctioned. I feel so bad for them. We should have just uttered "tsk, tsk" and kicked them out of the olympics. That'll teach 'em!

No, the "economic tranquility" was the period after the Soviet Union fell and the entire western world was welcoming Russia in with open arms, and the economic integration was well under way. Until Putin came in and decided "no, I like things the way they were" and has been trying to bring back the USSR ever since. He doesn't want any economy he can't directly control by force. You think Putin wants economic integration? He wants his soviet union back.

None of what you're talking about is "politics" unless you think Russia actually has a leg to stand on with any of this. They don't. They never have. They're the aggressor here and none of the "warnings" they gave justify any of this.

[mightyham]

I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law. The recipient of the violence is a victim of an infringement of rights garunteed by the government which has authority through the social contract. On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves. Ukraine has certain objectives to secure their prosperity like, procuring a large conventional military or nukes so that they can defend their borders. Russia also has certain objectives that secure their prosperity, like maintaining access to the black sea and building natural gas pipelines into Europe. When these nations have objectives that conflict there are only two options: compromise or war, that's it, that is the reality. In this case neither side wanted to compromise, so there was a war.

It's also important to note that this conflict is not one-sided. Ukraine has dedicedly become a proxy for US and European power projection. This is not a genocide or some other form of needless violence. This is a classic example of powers butting heads and all parties refusing to take de-escalatory actions.

[ninkendo]

> I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law.

Lol so we can only pass judgement on something if there exists a law that it violates, and an authority that can prosecute it. If there’s no ability to prosecute something, it must be fine, just fine!

> On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves.

> This is a classic example of powers butting heads

I keep imagine you looking at Hitler’s actions in the 1930s and concluding “there’s no higher authority than nation states, so this is all just geopolitics, powers butting heads” and refusing to make a judgement on good vs bad.

Maybe a good checksum on your world views is “if it results in what Hitler did being fine, maybe I need to reevaluate”.

--

I'll edit this to add: You bring up "distinctions between [my] moral language and the language of geopolitics"... that's what the whole objection to Kagi's founder is about. Confusing geopolitical decision making like "what should U.S. foreign policy be, if we want to maximize the chance of peace", and moral judgements, like "is invading your neighbors to get what you want ok", is the very thing Kagi's founder is doing that I find objectionable. Because you should be able to pass a moral judgement on an action without conflating that with whether the U.S. and its allies made the right strategic moves. It doesn't matter that Russia signaled their actions in advance, it's still not ok to invade another nation. One should be able to clearly see this to be true, and not just sweep it under "it's just politics." Calling it politics is both strictly speaking true, and also a cop-out, because you get to avoid actually making a judgement about whether you think it's right. Kagi's founder did that, and you're doing that here.

[mightyham]

This is just idiotic equivocation. The difference between Russia and Hitler is that Russia has legitimate national security concerns, for instance, not letting the world's largest military alliance (NATO) which is antogonistic to them, build defense infrastructure along their border, or choke off their ability to have a navy. The Nazis made no attempts to conceal the fact that one of their main national objectives was to invade eastern Europe and create a colonial German empire. Clearly you can see these two things are not the same, right?

[ninkendo]

If Russia's national objective is to have access to the sea, and doing so means they have to take access from another nation, then no, I don't see how the things are different, except for maybe in magnitude (Hitler just did what Putin is doing, but more. France was building defense infrastructure along its border with Germany too, if you don't recall.) It's the exact same logic though: If you excuse states for invading each other because they have "national security concerns" that involve taking what they want from other nations, the same logic excuses Hitler's actions too. Putin has also made it very clear that one of Russia's goals is to essentially reestablish the soviet union (similar to hitler's feelings about germany's humiliation after WW1), the parallels here are stark.

The US could easily say today that it has a national security concern that it needs Greenland in order to have a good defensive posture against Russia now that the north sea is becoming more navigable. Does that make it morally right to just... invade and take Greenland? I assume that is your position, because it's essentially exactly what Russia is doing. (You don't need to respond if your answer is "Yes". This thread is getting long and if your position is indeed that countries can take what they want if they have "national security concerns", we're far enough apart that there's no reason to continue debating.)