Was Putin right about Syria? (of course he was)

[Xavier_Onassis]

Finland  and Latvia were not part of Russia. Latvia was a Soviet Republic, Finland has been independent since 1919. Both are members of the EU and I do not think they need to be worried.

Chechnia is part of the Russian Federation and was part of Tsarist Russia as well. Chechnia is Muslim, as are several other areas.

[Plane]

  Your point being that even if a country has a seat in the UN , if it ever has been conquered by a Czar, Putin can demand it back?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Putin knows that no one is going to prevent him from taking Crimea (which was not traditionally a part of Ukraine anyway) in any meaningful way. Europe depends on Russia to stay warm in the winter, and a lot of cars run on LNG from Russia as well. Europeans are not going to boycott Russia gas and oil. Due to logistics (gas pipelines cannot be run under the ocean) gas from the US is unlikely to replace gas from Russia.

It is not a matter of justice. Many Ukrainians in the Eastern part of the country see that Putin is a strong leader and Russia is increasingly prosperous, while Ukraine so far has only elected corrupt and incompetent leaders (ostensibly of two political persuasions) and the economy is in a shambles.  Crimea is backward, most of the people are not Ukrainians, and the economy depends on tourism. There is not a lot of Ukrainian tourism because Ukraine is in a state of economic collapse: Russian tourists are the ones that many of Crimea's inhabitants would prefer.

Many Ukrainians would prefer to switch from being impoverished Ukrainians to being richer Russians. Ukraine did pretty well under the Soviet system. It has been mostly a corrupt disaster as an independent nation. And there is not all that much difference between Ukrainians and Russians anyway. They have different accents, but the understand each other. They have different recipes for kreplaks, kvass and borscht. The culture is not greatly different: think Manitoba and northern Minnesota.

Putin knows what he can do and what he cannot do. He understands Russians and Ukrainians quite well. I am sure that if I were Russians I would oppose him, but he is no dummy, and he knows what his limits are. And I am not a Russians and do not think like a Russian.

[Plane]

   Would any of those reasons work for converting some Caribbean or Middle American territory into US territory?

     Somewhere that is not up to US standards of prosperity and honest government?

      Putin is a skilled leader that knows his people well , but he is leading them to miss opportunities at advancement because he does not understand the benefits of democracy.

     What he is winning for Russia is the kind of respect your worst neighbor gets for being strong and bad tempered.

[Christians4LessGvt]

   Would any of those reasons work for converting some Caribbean or Middle American territory into US territory?   

Did XO use the same reasoning when President Reagan invaded Grenada?

[Plane]

   Welllll....


    It really isn't personal, I like to challenge XO , but I like it best when he is up to the challenge.


     In regards to going to war , XO is pretty dependably against it, that is what I expect .

      That doesn't mean that his logic won't be interesting.

 

[Xavier_Onassis]

The US believes that it has a right to invade any misbehaving micronations in the Americas that it wishes (Grenada and Panama being the latest) but it does not annex them, because it does not want Grenadians and Panamanians swarming into tthe US. It prefers to put in place a way by which American business interests can benefit economically without any cost to the US. Grenada is still a bit of an economic disaster, a tiny micronation where the main industry is tourism by very wealthy people where the resorts are owned by US and other foreign interests. Panama has become rather prosperous, since the US needs the Canal and an impoverished Panama would be bad business.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were destabilized by goonish rightwing governments until the US managed to get a grip on the economic systems of these countries. Now there is a huge amount of urban gang violence that never existed before, as a result of the wars dislocating peasants to create free fire zones, and the result has been that children fleeing violence and wishing to live with their parents who work as underpaid servants in the US. Reagan's nasty secret wars are the cause of this, but somehow Obama gets the blame.

Putin does not need subterfuges like the US uses. The Russian people like to see the citizens of the former Soviet Republics suffer bad government and corruption. It serves them right. Putin is a strong figure and as such he is supposed to strut and posture.

[Plane]

The Russian people like to see the citizens of the former Soviet Republics suffer bad government and corruption. It serves them right. Putin is a strong figure and as such he is supposed to strut and posture.

  So what is wrong with our policy , and again what was it you didn't like about Reagan?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Reagan was a shitass puppet of the oligarchy. He ruined millions of lives of people in Central America who posed no threat to him or any American. He or his handlers conspired with the Ayatollah to sabotage Jimmy Carter, who was tricked by Kissinger into that entire hostage crises.

There was not one goddamn thing that I liked about Reagan. He was simply a very good actor, playing his part for the thieves who wrote the scripts. He was not my kindly old grandfather, he was a hireling of the oligarchs that have ruined my country.

And don't tell me I have to prove that Reagan was a treacherous old lying sumbitch.  I do not have any obligation to disprove that Reagan was as close to evil as it got until Cheney came along.

[Plane]

   The most amazing thing is that you do not think he was smart.

    Handlers have been invented for him to retroactively explain how he could debate rings around his opponents .

[Xavier_Onassis]

He could not do this. He was a great speaker only when he was rehearsed. He was ignorant of a huge number of facts.

His intelligence or lack of same was not what I hated about the evil old bastard. It was what he did to the country: he mongered unnecessary wars and invasions in Lebanon and Grenada, he ruined the S & Ls for the profit of his hirelings, he catered to racists and Klansmen, he started the deci=line of the middle class.

[sirs]

His intelligence or lack of same was not what I hated about the evil old bastard. It was what he did to the country

Perhaps now, the good professor can start to appreciate how most of his critics see Obama.....with prescious little having to do with the color of his skin.

[Plane]

He could not do this. He was a great speaker only when he was rehearsed. He was ignorant of a huge number of facts.

Walter Mondale made his living as a political speaker, How do you rehearse a debate?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Oh, come on, they do it all the time. The issues are all defined, everyone has a pretty good idea of what they are going to hear the other guy say.

I did not find Reagan to be particularly good at that debate.

Reagan was an excellent actor, as I said. He was as shitty a president as this country has ever had the misfortune to have, but he played the part of grandfatherly old president very well. Americans do not like to think. They like to think they are thinking. Reagan was good at what he did: acting. He was very good at it.

But he left the country worse off when he left it.

[sirs]

But he left the country worse off when he left it.

And boy oh boy, are we getting a boat load of that now.......in spades yet.  And he hasn't even left office