I fail to see how the it benefits the working class conscripts to have no weapons to defend themselves with.

One last thing: NATO membership is something used by western countries to influence domestic policy in countries like Ukraine. Since Zelenskyy came to power, there's been a transformation of Ukraine to low cost labor source for the rest of Europe, causing GDP to crater and lots of people to already leave the country before the war started. This is how NATO has been since its founding. Being anti-NATO is supporting the working class.

The background issue to Crimean annexation and the war in Donbass was the trade agreement with the European Union, not NATO membership, which became impossible as the war was an on-going territorial dispute.

Though Ukrainian corruption ought not to underestimated, the decline in GDP since the beginning of Zelenskyi's term in 2019 is mostly attributable to the on-going COVID19 pandemic.

I find the focus on NATO bizarre for two fold reasons.

First, it ignores the immediate backdrop to war in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, namely Ukraine seeking closer connection with the EU, which didn't suit Putin, but which also distinctively isn't NATO. In fact in 2013 Russia warned that the treaty recognizing Ukrainian border would be invalidated by the signing of the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.

Secondly, before Russian aggression against Ukraine, European NATO allies had been making their armed forces smaller rather than larger and the US has focused on other areas in favor of Eastern Europe. It is difficult to read these as provocations. The increases in military build up have happened after Russian aggression.

I do think that Bush administration had a negative impact that has been reflected in Russia, but the Trump administration sought to warm the relationship, to no avail.

I seriously feel like we are back in 2002 and if you're not baying for an invasion of Iraq, you were being told "Say hello to Saddam Hussein for me!"

Well the point is to be in 2022 and not live in the past.

I think flooding the country with guns and turn the place into another proxy war, calls from all quarters of the "Serious People" to establish a no fly zone, etc need to be spoken out against.

It's certainly no proxy war as Russia is directly involved in it and for the most part it's in fact not the Serious People who are calling for a no-fly zone. Scholars in international relationships generally oppose, as do most media outlets and NATO. Zelensky might want one, but he's not getting it and the way I read his message to Congress is that he knows this, which is why he laid out alternatives. Biden didn't support Zelensky's wishes either.

It's absolutely TRUE that NATO has no leg to stand on calling out Russian aggression with our record. We do need to condemn NATO for the role it did play in leading up to this.

How did NATO lead into the war?

None of this is to say "No one should care about the plight of the Ukrainian people." It's to say "Hold your got dang horses, let's not dive headlong into another damn war."

But the DSA IC is also opposed to sanctions, which are not warfare. What sort of means of opposing powerful states trying to annex weaker ones are you for?

I'm just finding the appeal to Jacobin and Noam Chomsky to be signs of parochial and a sign of inflexibility, inability to develop self-standing expertise and research outside of one's own echo chamber, but it is also snark just as /u/devtesla said.

There's value in being level-headed, and let's be real: the statements of the DSA international committee do not affect anything anywhere at all. Why even bother getting pressed about it

But I enjoy dunking on them. There's a distinct pleasure in it. If I were positioned better, perhaps I could have slight impact on discrediting them enough for them to be replaced, but alas, I don't hold myself to have such powers.

Fundamentally, this thread they've published isn't even about the war! It's about how the war has been exploited by moneyed interests!

I certainly didn't get the impression myself. Rather mine was that the explicit purpose of the thread was to oppose war hawks, but even then I find it untenable to conflate them with moneyed interests.That is, I ain't no vulgar Marxist on the war in Ukraine.

On the analytical side of foreign policy, I find it most regrettable that Iraq war has so much shaped leftist anti-imperialism, especially so given how enthusiastically the false explanation through greed of oil is still being endorsed as an explanation for that war. Wars are no mere repetitions, but have their own complex sets of causes.

What are you talking about???

I just find it cringe to so strongly appeal to saint Noam and The Jacobin. It reeks of parochialism concerning a conflict in Eastern Europe, which is a bad look for an International Committee, like they were just indulging in some light reading from vaguely lefty spaces and making things up as they go.

There's people actively advocating for a no fly zone, not sure why you're acting like it's a distant possibility.

Biden and NATO are opposed to it because it goes against their own interests, mostly. The popular opinion likely won't matter, as it often doesn't in politics and some of the proposals have been fantastical, such as a 'non-kinetic no-fly zone' being operated from space.

A no-fly zone goes against long standing thinking in nuclear deterrence, which is the basis on which NATO was originally found upon. NATO didn't think that they could win a conventional war against Soviet Union (and the position of West Germany strategically fragile in such a conflict), which lead to a lot of theorizing on the use of nuclear deterrence instead. To enforce a no-fly zone, NATO needs to destroy antiair weaponry in Belarus and Russia (to keep its own air superiority in tact), but from a Russian point of view, it's impossible to distinguish between conventional and nuclear payloads and both them and the US has not disavowed the option to use first nuclear strikes, for strategic nuclear deterrence reasons. To this day, Russia still has a fail-deadly system known as Perimeter in place. The potential price of escalation is thus high.

I have seen exactly one person argue that the risk of nuclear war is no barrier for establishing a no-fly zone, but I can't imagine Biden or NATO leadership willingly sacrificing themselves to the Ukrainian cause.

There's nothing in that thread that disagrees with that anarchist statement.

I praised them for their moral clarity. That is, I found the DSA IC to be muddled in comparison and too close to sitting by sidelines. Appeals to hypocrisy just can't hold candle to the light of principles.

Not really sure what you're going so hard in here for

I was mostly just ranting myself, thus I kept myself from positive proposals and I didn't want to spent effort into debunking either. If I was writing a serious piece, I'd discard the OP as my first draft and write a couple more before starting to polish it up.

Addendum: a good Twitter thread on the deficiencies of arguments from hypocrisy, which largely apply to DSAIC here as well.

"Sunshine Protection Act"? Talk about the creeping Orwellian language in politics! Who will protect the morning sun? I believe in morning sun!.

I read too many US news for my good and also know some peeps in Canada so I'm clued in to the continent save for Mexico, so it's a reasonable guess! But my origin and surroundings shall remain as mysterious as the fog shrouded Finnish town I post from.

Where I live there's standard time RIGHT THIS MOMENT.

You can still riot and storm the capitol.

I'm so disinterested in NFTs that I don't even care enough to sneer at them, despite the bros spamming a lot, but this is hilarious.

Yeah it did - I slept marvelously - though I'm surprised that I told you about that lady who wanted to cyber with me. lmao. I don't regret spilling the beans but I'm not that open usually. I had no idea she was attracted to me so it was a big adjustment.

I came here to fight you but by now I have only upvotes to give my gentle sir redditor.

She uses the time effectively, imho. Though it could have been an actual essay, I think the format suits the content quite well. (It's commenting social media on a social media platform, which I think is relatively justifiable not only through audience overlap - people willing to watch an hour long video on social media beef are going to be invested in social media - and given that Sarah Z does not have a platform in legacy media and couldn't reach audiences in similar way through other media.)

I remember when html5 was supposed to help herald another age of small little flash game like games. Nah, said the gods.

I made a Chinese potato dish once since the concept appeared to me to be so mundane and exotic simultaneously. It was OK, I am more than willing to try iut more Chinese potato dishes.

I have yet to read this piece, but let me just say how much I appreciate the availability of book piracy nowadays. I'd be trapped in a prison of unaesthetic ignorance without it, for sure.

It's almost conventional to write about how I still buy books and want to support authors etc. after admissions like these, but eh, why bother? It will take a long time to come up with alternative systems of supporting creative labor.

This has the appearance of not having written any tests whatsoever! Amateur hours.

Actually I didn't mean to contradict that. I feel like what the artist finds sexually attractive is basically a list of floating disembodied traits and objects. They need to be brought together in humanoid form, but the object of arousal is not the whole but its parts.

It's like they're fetching hotness criteria from a database and the artist is trying to only pass the bare minimum the specification requires. Like code golfing