Why is only one side of this story published?

How short your memory is. We were involved with trying to remove Assad. Russia stepped in here too, largely because we were on the wrong side of the war. We accused Asaad (an Alawite) of using gas attacks on poor defenseless Syrians. Like most of our crap in the Middle East, we did not officially declare war, since that might involve a draft.
And more importantly, it would involve taking some damned responsibility when the claim turned out to be false.
https://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542

As for Iran. Well... off and on, even by CNN's fake news standards.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/01/world/us-iran-conflict-timeline-trnd/
But there was also Iran-Contra (from which we have the cool video game).

And those wars made the US unpopular. Your belief that because the US attacked countries in the past, you should be able to find **** Ukraine shirts doesn't make any sense. The sins of the US do not excuse the sins of Russia towards Ukraine.

There's nothing wrong with my memory. The US was never at war with either Iran or Syria. You are making **** up.

And I opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq at the time, you're only mentioning it now because of your love of all things fascist.

And Assad used chemical weapons.

Try reading a reputable news source for once instead of pulling 'facts' out your arse.

No, you're taking this out of context.

It is because there is a strange lack of market on Amazon.

Look, Amazon can be trusted to be mercenary. They don't care if you're left, right, or center. In fact, I will find tee shirts about neutrality and political centrism.

I did not find any tee shirt logos for centrism (apparently "stay neutral" isn't a great slogan outside of cosmetics) but there were plenty of books about this.

Amazon will sell to any political party any mugs or hats or what have you. This behavior is predictable. So it serves as a red flag or bullshit marker when there is absolutely no other side. Hell, I even typed in "no vaccines" when the anti-vaxx movement has been very controversial and it is certainly not Amazon's stance (they are pro-vaccine so far as I can tell).

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=no+vaccines&ref=nb_sb_noss

The page not only has a small "learn about COVID vaccines" ad leading to CDC's own propaganda but they have signs, tee shirts, and so on.







So when I see only one side of this being sold, I get just a teensy bit suspicious.

Maybe I should make a tee shirt myself.

I'm not taking anything out of context. You are saying you should be able to find any opinion expressed on Amazon regardless of whether anyone actually supports it. Yes, Amazon is mercenary. If there is a market, there will be merchandise. If there was a sizable pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine market in the US, you would see stuff but you don't so the take from Amazon is there is no market supporting the baby killers against the valiant defenders of democracy, either because there is not a lot of support or because no one really wants to wear something like that. Look up pro-Hilter shirts. Are you upset at the lack of merchandise? The idea that "there must be a market for any idea" isn't valid. There might be supporters out there but those people have to want to buy stuff and enough stuff to make the effort worthwhile. It's not indicative of some major conspiracy.

Yes, you should make your own shirt! Make them for sale. Those stands selling shirts outside of Trump rallies are making serious bank. Set up a stand outside a Trump rally with your "**** Ukraine" shirts and if there is a market, you will be raking it in. That's how capitalism works, find an underserved market and strike hard and fast.

As far as I know, Ukraine did not plan to apply for membership into NATO.

If Ukraine were to apply, it would need a unanimous vote to be accepted as a new member. I do not think that it would have received a unanimous vote.

I think that most of the people of Ukraine lean toward the West and a free society.

There was a Ukrainian opposition figure on the BBC a few weeks back. He said he did not vote for Zelensky and had problems with his policies until now.

However, the one thing he loves about him is that, unlike Putin, he was democratically elected.

That may be so, but irregardless (irregardless is totally a word), our "esteemed" Kamala Harris made a faux pas worthy of starting a war by suggesting it.



1. America is not a free society. If I were to sleep outdoors, I would probably be harrassed by police and asked to move along. I am not free to be an outdoorsman, but rather am treated as homeless when camping on government-owned land. And increasingly, the government owns most of the land. All of it, really, since they also exact property taxes on the rest. Nor is it truly a free society in other aspects. When commerce can be shut down at a whim by a rumor of disease, your right to gather has been suspended. When unpopular ideas are shut down because of being outside "free-speech zones," we don't have free speech. When websites can be taken down by censorship, we don't have freedom of the press. So in what way are we free?
2. More importantly, Ukraine is not an independent state. It is at best a buffer state, and at worst a puppet state of either the US or Russia or some neighboring state. It doesn't matter what its ambitions are. Ukraine's geographical position is too close to other states for it not to have an impact. 3. To give an idea as to the impact of adjacent countries making a decision, I want you to think of the effect of Italy being surrounded by hostile Protestant countries. Russia has several adjacent buffer states (Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, etc) acting as walls against invasion by the West and China.

While Ukraine may not seem to matter much, the borders of its *ahem* properties are in effect its own borders. If part of its border decides to join the rest of the European Union, they have lost that stretch of land.
https://www.theworldbriefly.com/buffer-borders-russia-s-security-policy-explained/
Russia's philosophy of country defense is kinda derpy, but I very much understand it. They are attacking because their buffers are joining (or threatening to join) NATO. It's crappy, it's immature (akin to a spurned lover trying to take back an ex), but I totally understand it.

"Free Society" is a relative term. America is a free society compared to China and currently Russia (not to mention other countries). There are many homeless tent camps around the US that have been allowed to exist.

Ukraine IS so an independent state. It is not, at the moment, a puppet state. The only one who may think it's a "buffer state" would be Russia.

Ukraine cannot 'decide to join... NATO'... they can request, but it has to be approved. To date, it's publicly off the table.

Nobody has or had any intention of invading Russia - this is all disinformation on Russia's part. I don't think NATO or the USA have any intention of expanding into previous USSR countries, so this is all hogwash.

Under your understanding of Russian defense strategy, Russia needs to take Poland as a buffer against Germany and Germany as a defense against France and the US should take Mexico as a defense against Panama. The whole idea of a "buffer state" is ridiculous, only an excuse to confuse some people who consider the world like a Risk board with blue, red and yellow teams. Those other countries are not options for you to move your armies to when it is your turn, they are independent countries with their own rights.

Then, why did we fight in Korea and Vietnam?

I think you and those who now speak about realpolitik like it was a figment of our global imagination aren’t speaking in terms of reality, but popular current feel-good slogans.

The superpowers did indeed cut the world into a gameboard, and although the US outplayed the USSR, the USSR’s former seat isn’t unoccupied.

The US has two oceans as buffers.

There is no comparison at all. The Korean war was completely legal, the action was sanctioned at a UN security Council meeting. At the time China's seat and veto was taken by Taiwan and the Soviets boycotted the meeting. They didn't boycott anymore meetings after that.

Vietnam was something else. I remember my Tory mother giving money to trade unionists collecting for the North Vietnamese.

She thought the soldiers were a bunch of drug addicts, she had nothing good to say about them. I was very young at the time and hadn't come to much of an opinion about the war until then.

Having said that the US was invited in by the South Vietnamese government.

Putin invaded a sovereign nation with no justification whatsoever.

The US has been at war with both Mexico and Canada, so much for ******* buffer zones.

Buffer zones are a concept of imperial thinking with various empires rubbing up against each other, it has no place in free independent nations.

Engineer said:

“The whole idea of a "buffer state" is ridiculous, only an excuse to confuse some people who consider the world like a Risk board with blue, red and yellow teams. Those other countries are not options for you to move your armies to when it is your turn,”

While I agree with the morality behind his statement, I lived through an era when the two ‘superpowers’ most definitely did use the world as a metaphorical chessboard. The wars / military actions in Korea and Vietnam are evidence. The phrase proxy war is evidence.

As is shown by the box, Risk is not a game about two nuclear powers facing off against each other, it's about rival empires in the Napoleonic era.

Engineer,

There is new photographic evidence that your claim of red, blue, and yellow teams in the game of Risk was incorrect.

Then you're strawmanning my understanding. Russia already has an existing buffer. They don't need to expand it.

But neither will they let third parties (US) westernize it or liberalize it.

All countries have defensive strategies. This one is centuries-old and backwards as hell, but it largely works. Israel has a wall and anti-missile tech. I suppose you'd like me telling you that your country's defenses were too aggressive and start trying to dismantle them. Suppose your country has an internet mainframe, and I hack it. Or a system of caves, and I fill them in with dirt. Would that be acceptable behavior? Or would this be rude?

You're conflating Russia's wall of countries with Nazi invasion of Poland. But these don't stack up. Germany is already two countries away. They don't need a buffer state from a country that far away. But they do need an overall buffer against the West. Which they already have.

Yeah, suppose the EU started to fill in those oceans by freezing the water or something. @engineer Don't you think maybe it's acceptable for the US to then want to "reconquer" that buffer by cracking or melting the ice?



All of this assumes Ukraine's status as a sovereign nation. What if you're wrong? After all, Ukrainian people are only racially different (larger percent of Jews) not a different text, and the sham of government it has is mainly propped up by UN and EU intervention. Otherwise, it would be a daughter state to Russia. As it stands now, it is a puppet to US interests. Ukraine's only hope for sovereignty is on the provision that it provides at least token defense to Russia, if it becomes wholly a property of the West, it loses claim to sovereignty. Ukraine, as pushed on both sides, would basically have to day loudly to both "We're not getting involved in your land tussle." Instead, it's pulled back and forth. It's not sovereign .

https://newswithviews.com/the-ukraine-crisis-facts-versus-lies/

No. That doesn't make sense on a couple of levels, but at the highest level, you are comparing an unpopulated stretch of the ocean to a country with 43 million people in it. The US does enforce its 12 mile territorial limit, but it's not killing people to do it.

Countries don't need buffers, that is something Russia made up to allow them to control nearby countries. Countries have boundaries. The idea that countries also have the right to control countries outside of their boundaries "just because" is ridiculous but for some reason we keep hearing it. The people of Ukraine can look around for themselves and adopt what policies they want. Russia not liking their choices doesn't warrant a massive killing spree.