I’ll be honest, it’s not a conflict I’ve followed closely either. Direct Western interventions usually go poorly, though. Arguably because we don’t care enough to expose our own people to the risks our allies have to face. All Afghans saw was a giant bunker with a loudspeaker that belted out (broken?) Pashtu about something called “human rights”. Not very convincing.
I’m not sure what your position is. Mine is that the world is full of political bullshit and I’m a nobody, so I do whatever small thing I can to make it suck incrementally less. Explaining why freaking out over 9/11 20 years on is dumb when that many people die of worms or whatever each year is part of it. If I was in charge I’d be all about multilateralism and transferring wealth aggressively to the third world where their institutions are strong enough to accept it, but I’m not.
The people talking about “imperialism” in a non-historical context tend to be full of shit. I advise you to not take them too seriously; normal people use different words now that the actual empires are all dead (minus Russia, sort of). The people talking interventionism are almost non-existent post-Afghanistan.
Edit:
So, what is it? Is there a world police or are there things you leave to the locals to sort out on their own?
I’m definitely pro-world police. We’re just a good long time from anybody being able to do that effectively.
My position is simply that no other conflict in the world, including Gaza, can be compared in priority to something that is happening at the scale and in your borders like Ukraine, like you happened to suggest.
I mean, show me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts in this map, which conflicts do you consider useful/ethical/moral/whatever to put in the news or send UN troops to and which ones do you consider “dumb” and ok to ignore?
I would love it if there was a newscast that weighted coverage by humanitarian impact.
Geopolitics - as in how to manage the politics of the actual non-ideal world order - is unfortunately a separate thing. I’m glad we’re confronting Russia, because they did a major escalation and they definitely don’t care about human rights. NATO laggards like my own country need to beef up spending.
I’ll be honest, it’s not a conflict I’ve followed closely either. Direct Western interventions usually go poorly, though. Arguably because we don’t care enough to expose our own people to the risks our allies have to face. All Afghans saw was a giant bunker with a loudspeaker that belted out (broken?) Pashtu about something called “human rights”. Not very convincing.
I’m not sure what your position is. Mine is that the world is full of political bullshit and I’m a nobody, so I do whatever small thing I can to make it suck incrementally less. Explaining why freaking out over 9/11 20 years on is dumb when that many people die of worms or whatever each year is part of it. If I was in charge I’d be all about multilateralism and transferring wealth aggressively to the third world where their institutions are strong enough to accept it, but I’m not.
The people talking about “imperialism” in a non-historical context tend to be full of shit. I advise you to not take them too seriously; normal people use different words now that the actual empires are all dead (minus Russia, sort of). The people talking interventionism are almost non-existent post-Afghanistan.
Edit:
I’m definitely pro-world police. We’re just a good long time from anybody being able to do that effectively.
My position is simply that no other conflict in the world, including Gaza, can be compared in priority to something that is happening at the scale and in your borders like Ukraine, like you happened to suggest.
I mean, show me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts in this map, which conflicts do you consider useful/ethical/moral/whatever to put in the news or send UN troops to and which ones do you consider “dumb” and ok to ignore?
I would love it if there was a newscast that weighted coverage by humanitarian impact.
Geopolitics - as in how to manage the politics of the actual non-ideal world order - is unfortunately a separate thing. I’m glad we’re confronting Russia, because they did a major escalation and they definitely don’t care about human rights. NATO laggards like my own country need to beef up spending.