Well, I think we could have agreed to his demand for Ukraine’s continued neutrality, and some kind of truce between the Russian speaking residents of the border provinces and the Ukranian nationalists, in exchange for his promise not to invade.
Of course, skilled negotiators would have also offered him other advantageous trade type deals that would have motivated him to keep his promise,
and would also have kept him from forming an alliance with the CCP.
Are you sure Ukraine’s neutrality was what he wanted? Are you sure he did not want Ukraine?
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Well he may have. But he could have been persuaded not to take it by skilled negotiators.
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You say, “… the Russian dictator has done what the US would do if Mexico signed a set of economic and miltiary agreements with China, had its military trained by Chinese ‘advisors’, bought Chinese military equipment, made a military alliance with China, and looked like bringing in a few divisions of Chinese troops and nuclear missiles.”
What did/does the West threaten Russia with (if anything at all)? Democracy?
Is the threat of democracy equivalent to the threat of communism?
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The Russians have been invaded from the West four times in the last two centuries. They see the world differently from a power like ours, which has huge ocean barriers to invasion, and non-threatening neighbors north and south.
The US has invaded lots of countries, and/or helped pro-American militaries inside them overturn democratically-elected governments.
Please note: I am NOT saying ‘Oh, look at Evil America, overturning kindly demoracies’. Life is complicated, and anyone who reads these Wiki histories closely will see that the usual Leftist portrayal of the situations in each case is false. It was the Cold War, and we played to our strength and had a better-safe-than-sorry attitude. I don’t think it was usually the right thing to do, but my objection is tactical, not moral.
Most recently, we took the side of the Croats and Muslims/Albanians against the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. We destroyed the Libyan government, and now Libya is a battlefield among various Muslim tribes. (I have read that Putin has watched repeatedly the vidoe of Gaddafi being sodomized to death with a bayonet – about which Hillary cackled, “We came, we saw, he died.”)
We invaded Iraq, although its dictator had nothing to do with 9/11. We invaded Afghanistan, not just to destroy Bin Laden, which we didn’t, but to remake it in our image. Could have learned something from the Russians there, on whose border it was.
So I’m sorry. The US is a liberal democracy, Russia is an illiberal autocracy. Anyoe who believes in limited government should see that our system is far better than theirs.
But I don’t think we – or rather, our Deep State – are angels and I don’t think they’re demons. We’re a great power (for the time being) and we don’t do moral crusades to bring ‘democracy’ to others. If it appears to be in our interests, we may support the ‘democrats’ in other countries – if not, not. (Saudi Arabia?) And supporting the ‘democrats’ – interfering at all – is often a stupid thing to do. Witness Afghanistan. (I think we got seduced by our good results with Germany and Japan, and later with South Korea – none of which appeared to be fertile ground for the seeds of liberal democracy, and, of course, pro-American governments.)
In any case, our Deep State was perfectly happy with really blood-thirsty murderous military governments, so long as they were ‘on our side’.
Thus, I think the Russians are perfectly justified in being deeply suspicious of NATO (read, American) encirclement of their country.
Not to mention the usual interference in their internal affairs:
(How I laughed at all the Lefties screaming about ‘Russian interference’ – ie buying a few Facebook ads – five years ago. What hypocrites!)
However, please please please everyone … let’s agree to disagree on this one, because if the Left carry though with their so-far pretty successful onslaught, it won’t make any difference who’s right. What’s done is done. The world has changed. We’re facing the Enemy Within, in a way, far more deadly than Russian or Chinese Communsits were. We’ve got to have a United Front, of everyone who loves this country, against all those who don’t.
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I think that is in agreement, Doug.
What is…is. What should have been done is a moot point. Why it cannot seem to be settled with some sort of negotiation is a bugaboo. Why hasn’t it? Why is it continuing? Who is benefiting? Where has the money gone?
Although, you might see a “cat fight” brewing, it is not. We are allowed to disagree here. There are so few of us, you see, that we refuse to let our disagreements matter too much.
The question of “who is benefiting” by the wars continuance I think is the most important question to figure out.
As to your later post…good post. There has been disagreement here about this Ukraine mess from early on in its history. It is not a forum breaker.
Doug writes:
However, please please please everyone … let’s agree to disagree on this one, because if the Left carry though with their so-far pretty successful onslaught, it won’t make any difference who’s right. What’s done is done. The world has changed. We’re facing the Enemy Within, in a way, far more deadly than Russian or Chinese Communsits were. We’ve got to have a United Front, of everyone who loves this country, against all those who don’t.
We know and we care. We are together…right, Jillian? Liz? Cogito? Damon? Claire? Most everybody else? Else why would we be hanging around? Right?
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Of course he wanted Ukraine! Who wouldn’t? But he can’t have it. He took a bit and even a bit more…and should have left it alone after that.
There are several former Soviet satellites that Mother Russia wants back…and gawd knows what else to fulfill her need to build back the empire. But…she can’t just take them. Right? Putin shouldn’t have been able to do what he has done so far. Right?
Now what? What a mess…
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Thank you, Jeanne. I think we all recognize that disagreement on this issue can occur among good patriots.
As for ‘hanging around’. I think atheist conservatives could do something good for the cause, if they wanted to, and were willing to do some minimal co ordination. Exactly how good, I’m not sure.
But here’s my idea: there are a significant number of liberal atheists and skeptics and free-thinkers – whatever they call themselves – who are increasingly uneasy at the where the Left is taking things.
For instance, one Leftist trope now – a logical conclusion from the post-modernist insanity that overtook the liberal academy thirty years ago – is that there is no such thing as scientific truth. No, there are many truths – the view of primitive peoples on how the world works (not that these virtue-signallers would use the phrase ‘primitive people’), is just as valid as the view of modern physical and biological science.
The latest Free Inquiry has an editorial by the organizations’s CEO on this issue [ The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It | Free Inquiry ]
I could assemble another half-dozen examples of liberals and even hardline Leftists recoiling from where the Left is going.
Now … what about if we all, over the next few weeks, registered on the dozen or so atheist/free thinker/secular humanist forums … and maybe even on some ‘neutral’ forums, and even one or two outright Left forums, like ‘Democratic Uncerground’.
And then … began posting links like the one above. We wouldn’t have to bait the leftists directly … just say, “Here is something interesting … of course science is true!”
The idea is to open up divisions among non-religious people who are not (yet) conservatives. We want to encourage truth-loving liberals to get into fights with the post-modernist all-cultures-are-true idiots.
It would only take an hour or less for people to register with a dozen or so atheist/secularist forums. I can supply the links.
And then, five or ten minutes a day, two or three days a week … and watch the fun!
What about it?
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Oh yes, Russian Federation Birth Rates. Here is data on Total Fertility Rates for the place, broken down regionally, and over time. I think the data are as valid as we’re likely to see – I was given them by someone who is an expert on the issue:
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What use are you intending to make of all those figures?
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Well, I posted a link to a Richard Pipes essay (about 10 years old), which mentioned Russia’s demographic/birthrate problems. You replied with some rough figures, as I recall. So here are what I believe are the latest and best figures.
Note that modernization is happening to the Russian Federation’s Muslims too: women are stopping having babies at replacement level (2.1). (This is true even in Iran.) Exactly what this will mean for Russia, I don’t know. Mark Steyn, commenting on a similar phenomenon among European Muslims, says that it’s still a question of ‘last man standing’.
Anyway, reliable data sources are a good think to have. Anyone interested in Russia should copy the link.
By the way, for an extended argument about the population implosion and its effect on the whole world, Google ‘Peter Zeihan’. I’m still reading him and about him, but he makes some points that cannot be ignored. [Peter Zeihan - Wikipedia]
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Kind of proves that feminism was one of the left’s most lethal forms of agitprop.
And it exposes the leftist narrative that we must depopulate at all costs as a fraud.
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It’s remarkable how many people still think we have a “population explosion” problem instead of an “implosion” problem. And the latter is an especially tricky question since it intersects the ‘demographic issue’. Leftists of course must believe if, say, Somalis became the majority in the US, that would be just fine. They don’t believe it, of course, but they must say it.
As for ‘feminism’. Like all words ending in ‘ism’, it’s suspect. The way I see things, the last few hundred years have seen, centered on but no longer confined to ‘the West’, the promotion to full citizenship of an increasingly large number of categories of people.
The most dramatic of these promotions has been that of women. If you look back at the situation in the world at the beginning of the 20th Century with respect to women’s role in the world, and compare it to today … the change has been astonishing. It’s been the Left who have championed and trumpetted this, not the Right, so our side has been a bit uneasy about talking about it, but we shouldn’t be.
We’re the real champions of Reason, not the Left, so why wouldn’t we welcome the fact that the potential pool of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, technicians, entrepreneurs … has been enlarged significantly? It’s the natural result of a free society – basically, a widening of market (free choice) relations embracing ever-broader sections of the population.
Orthogonal to this change is the issue, is there some fundamential (ie, biological) difference in the way human males and females think and act?
For example, it used to be claimed that the fact that almost all great mathematicians were male, was due to some difference between the male and female brain. Some of the ‘evo-devo’ psychologists (as we had to call ‘soco-biology’) put it down to superior male spatial awareness, supposedly selected for in men because they hunted … or something. (This field is especially prone to Just-So Stories.)
Whatever the truth of that, the fact is that it was social convention that held women back in the science and mathematics fields. As that has changed, their participation in these areas has grown dramatically. A few years ago, we had the first female winner of a Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics. (She was an Iranian, too, although living in the US.)
So … whatever the reality of ‘biological differences’ – and I’m pretty sure there are some, although, like the stars according to astrologers, they incline but do not compel – the fact is that it was mainly social convention, not biology, that kept women out of mathematics and science and advanced economic fields in general.
BUT – there is no supernatural power directing change, still less one doing it to advance human welfare. It’s just the natural result of underlying social forces. And the emancipation of women – in particular, their ability to enter the skilled labor market – has brought us a new problem … with which this post began.
We’re running out of people. Only women can bear children, and until a child is two or three years old, someone must look after it full time. These facts together mean that a young woman faces a choice – have children, or have a career.
And very many of them are choosing to have a career, perhaps having one child when they are in their 30s.
So, the populations of advanced, civilized societies are in long-term decline. No one has found a solution to this. The Scandanavians have tried various socialist measures – child support payments, mandated child care at work – and these have had a measurable, but small, effect.
So eventually the indigenous populations of Europe and the US will be overwhelmed by more fertile immigrants from less advanced countries, where the women-into-the-workforce effect has occurred later or not at all.
No one knows what to do about this. The Left doesn’t admit that it may be a problem, indeed, they celebrate it.
If there is a benevolent God-thing, it will allow our progress in medicine and biology and artificial intelligence to bring us to the point where our death and debilitation rate slows way down, on the one hand … and our method of producing new humans can be made artificial: you and your intended mate provide samples of your reproductive cells to the nice doctor, and 9 months later FedEx delivers your baby to your doorstep, where the robot nurse takes over, while Mum gets on with being an elecrical engineer or a marketing manager or whatever.
I think we’ll get there, so long as we don’t have a big stupid war and so long as at least one large, wealthy, advanced country is allowed to continue the necessary research and development.
So pray for there not to be a big stupid war, and for the (modern, post-modernist) Left not to take over in China. If you’re really ambitious pray for the patriots to retain control of at least a big chunk of America, but for that you’d probably have to sacrifice an extra goat.
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Doug, love your heart.
I visit TAC Forum for a bit of intellectual stimulation, then delete my emails, pay my bills when due… and my time online is over. I am not retired, nor is my husband. My daughter and her family (kids 6 and 3.5) live through the door in my library, which enters into their large kitchen, where much of living goes on. She has several debilitating conditions, but often she feels very good. There is a reason they live in the second storey section of our big house and we live in the old rancher section. Our family is busy, busy, busy nearly all the time with grain farming, poultry raising, school for kids and our teacher DIL, and our brewery/restaurant. Oh, yeah…home-making/house cleaning…toss that in too.
When I do get on the forum and decide to post a reply, it often takes me a long time , because I strive to make my posts as lucid as I can…get facts straight…do a search if needed…and increasingly it seems, checking my spelling and grammar. Heavy sigh, Jillian… 
More power to you, Doug, go to on your program of multiple forums and posts to encourage “truth-loving liberals.” I am glad you can do it. I cannot.
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YES! Overall women prefer to attend to other humans and think in that manner, while men prefer to tend to things and think in that manner.
But, every human is different, and must choose for themselves and that freedom to choose how he or she will spend their life or much of their life is what feminism was supposed to be. Things change.
Now about the care of a child until 2 or 3, that would be a bad job of being a nurturing parent to the child. Nurturers are born, not made. It is not even a job. Either you do or you don’t…and if one half of the couple doesn’t want to, then don’t have children. Then again, things change.
I tested high in mechanical aptitude and I love manual labor, but more important to me was the fact that I wanted to marry a farm boy, have children and rear them on our farm. The mechanical aptitude comes in handy, as does my worthless college degree at times. I use that more here and in all the other atheist or atheist/christian forums where I have debated and discussed for decades. I love words and books, but for me my career has always been my husband and my family and extended family.
Anyway…men and women are indeed different. I believe that families have suffered because of the advance of feminism’s influence upon the sexes, and I think both sexes have suffered as well. Wasn’t it enough to bring freedom to choose to the sexes? I guess not.
Our men and boys are diminishing in various manners, while our women and girls are pushed to advance at all costs or they face shaming. It seems that males MUST be diminished so that females can be forced to advance. The other way around was never healthy…and this isn’t either.
Doug writes:
If there is a benevolent God-thing, it will allow our progress in medicine and biology and artificial intelligence to bring us to the point where our death and debilitation rate slows way down, on the one hand … and our method of producing new humans can be made artificial: you and your intended mate provide samples of your reproductive cells to the nice doctor, and 9 months later FedEx delivers your baby to your doorstep, where the robot nurse takes over, while Mum gets on with being an elecrical engineer or a marketing manager or whatever.
That would not be beneficial to humanity, not to children, not to men, not to women. Why do you think it would be? If I prayed to a deity in which I believed, that would not be my prayer.
BTW, America is also below replacement level. A lot of reasons why that has happened…
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No problem! Everyone’s situation is different.
AND … I don’t do it because of some high sense of duty. I enjoy tormenting liberals, and I enjoy interacting with patriots, and trying to organize people on our side.
But I’m sure there are some other people out there who would enjoy being part of an online ‘strike team’. I know that an abstract argument about how much more effective we would be if we were organized …even a few dozen of us … is, ultimately, beside the point. Either you enjoy it or you don’t.
On the other hand, I suspect if I could convince people that even ten minutes a week carrying out an internet intervention – say, just posting a comment, the essence of which would be made available beforehand, on a Youtube video’s comment page, on the part of a few hundred patriots, might make a difference … maybe some people would be willing to do it.
Anyway, I would love to see anyone else’s ideas about how we can be more effective against the enemy. There seem to be dozens of forums like this, where conservatives/patriots meet for fellowship and information exchange. An underutilized resource.
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Doug, I refer you again to Republican Atheists: https://republicanatheists.com/
That is where you should spend some time.
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Thanks! I haven’t looked at them for a while.
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