futatorius

Translation: Germany must force Ukraine to capitulate to the Russians.

And of course that will mean that Putin will not continue to invade other nearby countries to reconstitute the Russian empire because his need for “security” is insatiable. Just appease him: we all know how well that has worked in the past.

Just kidding: Tood has been repeating Putin’s talking points and conspiracy theories since 2001 and hasn’t been right since his oddball prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he based on an extraordinarily long chain of inference starting with statistics on women’s deaths in childbirth.

Funny, the polls contradict you.

New ideas don’t emerge out of nothing, and people with new ideas don’t start by having wholly adopted those ideas. It takes time to work out the contradictions and the hypocrisy. And some get there sooner than others. Some never get there at all.

It’s certainly the case that Reagan sending Friedmanite “advisers” to the Russians botched the privatization process, massively increased the suffering of the Russian people and led to the current rotten oligarch/security state. Bush Sr and Clinton continued that policy.

We should have done a Marshall Plan for Russia. Instead, we sent them recent grads who were dim enough to have not only read Ayn Rand but to have believed that sad bullshit.

That doesn’t in any way change the fact that we have no choice but to oppose the Russian attempt to seize control of Ukraine. That was a war of choice. Nobody held a gun to Putin’s head and forced him to commit an act of imperialist aggression (well, two counting Crimea) against a smaller state. But if we’d treated the Russian people as friends, we could probably have avoided the rise of Putin.

Also, Sachs seems to buy into the idea that Russia, with the world’s largest land area and world’s longest border, is entitled to enslave adjacent countries to force them to be buffer zones between them and any other power. This is a mentality rooted in imperialism and is absurd on its face. If a Baltic state wants to join NATO, in order to get protection from the Russians attempting to annihilate their right to self-rule, what is the moral reason to tell them no?

I’m going to set up a bet on whether Trump or Biden dies first. My money’s on Trump.

I’d also lay some heavy odds on Trump getting a dementia diagnosis before Biden, but that outcome can be biased by extreme likelihood that Trump’s camp would just lie about it.

Hate it a bit more, maybe then you’ll stop using it.

The reality of the situation is that the US doesn’t have all that much leverage against the Israelis. If we cut them off completely (and we should), it’s unlikely that Likud’s murderous policy would change in any way.

And while they’re at it, why not hand over Trump for his support of the Saudis’ genocide against Yemen, the family separation policy, and the hundreds of thousands of covid deaths caused by his malice, corruption and deliberate goal of withholding aid from Democrat-voting areas?

And what do you think Trump is? Trump would be vocally cheerleading the genocide instead of spinelessly quibbling with the Israelis over details of who gets massacred and when.