ChiGoose

Currently winning the war is not the same as having won the war. Ammunition gets depleted, equipment breaks or is destroyed. The idea that we stop providing supplies once Ukraine has the momentum would only serve to prolong the war as it would stall Ukrainian advances and allow Russia to push back as UA equipment is depleted. Putin has invaded Georgia and then Ukraine twice. If he succeeds in taking over the southern border of Ukraine through Odessa, there is about a 0% chance he wouldn’t move into Transnistria as well. For a small fraction of our budget, we can destroy the Russian war machine, show Western superiority, make China think twice about Taiwan, and strengthen our alliances. Seems like a bargain.

What is the alternative to supporting Ukraine? Also, independent reporting shows Ukraine as currently winning. They have secured the north, and are continuing to make slow progress in the east and south. Leaked communications from the Russian front shows them as disheveled, unprepared, and unable to successfully push back against Ukraine. The only way to end this immediately is to give Putin what he wants. And even then, he'll just end up wanting more and we'll just end up back here again in Ukraine, or Georgia, or Moldova, or elsewhere.

Just a reminder that V-E Day was before the nukes. In any case, what's the alternative here? Just let Russia genocide an entire culture? Force Ukraine into a peace deal that gives Putin what he wants and doesn't deter him from doing this again in Ukraine or somewhere else? It's easy to throw stones, but it's much harder to come up with a viable solution to this because the guy behind it all is a murderous dictator who will attempt to take advantage of any perceived weakness.

When you have been the murderous ruler of a kleptocracy for decades, you end up surrounded by the most sycophantic people, not the brightest. Putin created an echo chamber of yes-men and is now learning the cost. Of course, it's not him out there dying in the trenches, so no reason to change course yet...

Wait, do you think the elections held in the Donbas were legitimate? Or that there weren't Russian forces driving the "revolution"? You should ask the Russians what the goal of the war is since they started it. Ukraine is the defender. They didn't ask for this. What kind of peace deal would be acceptable to Ukraine is an interesting question. Early on, maybe they would have settled for returning to Minsk agreement. But after the war crimes in Bucha and other areas, I'm not sure Ukraine would accept any Ukrainians living under Russian rule and therefore would want to go back to the original borders from 1991. In any case, a defeat of Russia in this conflict is good for the US.

You're right. What I should have said is that it's against DoJ policy to comment on ongoing investigations. Comey didn't seem to care about that, and likely handed the presidency to Trump when flouting DoJ policy. I'm not sure Garland had much of a choice but to go public about the investigation since Trump was calling for the information to be released and he was the subject of the investigation waiving privacy concerns.

The FBI has an open investigation into Hunter Biden and does not comment on ongoing investigations. That being said, we do have reporting that the FBI sent evidence it believed constituted crimes committed by Hunter to the US Attorney's office. So if that's true, it doesn't really mesh with the idea that the FBI is covering for the Biden family. I think stating that they've "locked it up and forgotten about it" is making assumptions that are not necessary supported by the facts.

If the FBI had told Twitter to spike the laptop story, it would have been the first email Taibbi released. If they did it via phone to avoid a paper trail, there would be emails between the legal department and the content moderation team discussing the phone call and what they were going to do about it. The fact that no such documents have been released makes it EXTREMELY unlikely that it's coming in the 9th+ release. It would have been in release one. Instead, what we have is the FBI telling them to look out for cyberattacks and the release of hacked materials. When the NY Post story came, the companies took their own actions, with Facebook and Twitter taking very different actions. If the FBI was censoring the laptop story: Why don't we have an email from the FBI to Twitter mentioning the laptop? Why don't we have internal emails from Twitter discussing what the FBI told them about the laptop? Why were Twitter and Facebook able to take different actions in regards to the story? Why was the NY Post allowed to keep the story up? I have a hard time understanding how someone can look at the facts and come to the conclusion that the FBI was censoring a story that was never taken down from its source, left up at basically every website that had posted it, and only taken down on one site for about a day.

Occam's Razor is anathema to this board...

There is absolutely zero evidence that the FBI talked to Twitter about the Hunter Biden laptop.

Eh, I think Very Online Brain / Brain Worms is a real thing. People who spend far too much time online get their minds warped and are unable to challenge the false reality they’ve created for themselves.

Your problem is with Twitter. The government did not violate the first amendment nor did it censor anyone.

I really hope there is someone in your life who cares for you and can help you because you are just spouting non-sequiturs that make me concerned you are in trouble

So nobody has died. It’s all fake. It doesn’t mean anything? It’s just (((Soros))) doing… something? Is that right?

Rejecting more than half of the requests is doing them a favor? Look, you can search between the lines for whatever conspiracy you want, but the bottom line here is that Twitter is bad at content moderation. If the FBI was actually censoring content, then Twitter wouldn’t be able to reject more than half their requests. And I’m not saying the FBI was right! There’s a good discussion to have about their role here. But saying this is censorship requires ignoring the facts in favor of feelings.

Are you having a stroke? Is there someone nearby who can help you? Obviously the ghost of Kyiv was fake. Does that mean there is no war?

What are you even talking about? You made a statement implying you don’t believe the war even exists, I asked about that and your respond with this non sequitor? Are you ok?

Do you think there is no war?

Actually, it’s really about a private company struggling with content moderation. The “government class” has virtually no ability to make Twitter do anything outside of a court order. But, it’s much more fun to point to a big bad “other” than to acknowledge reality.

I don't think supporting Ukraine to this extent was the original plan. If I remember correctly, the Biden administration offered to pull Zelensky out of Kyiv and set up a government-in-exile when Ukraine inevitably fell to the Russians. Based on the poor performance of the Ukrainian military in 2014, there was little expectation that they would have much success against the much larger and better-resourced Russian military. But after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Ukraine changed it's military posture from a post-Soviet strategy to one aspiring to NATO standards. The goal was to better adhere to how Western militaries worked (valuing the lives of the soldier, delegation of control to NCO's in the field, advanced Western weaponry, etc.) instead of continuing the Russian model of meat grinders and a kleptocratic military leadership, which had clearly failed. What we didn't realize was how successful they had been. I think if we had known, we may have provided them more arms prior to the invasion. But we thought this was basically the same army that got its ass handed to it 6 years prior and had basically no chance of winning. Instead, they surprised the world and repelled the initial invasion in the north on their own, though they still struggled in the east and south. Once it became apparent that the individual Ukrainian units were far superior to their Russian counterparts, the question became: what support do they need to actually win this thing (or at the least, get back to the 2014 borders via truce)? In the end, a Ukrainian defeat of the Russian army aligns with the United States' global strategic goals and diminishes the powers of those who wish to take the global hegemony away from us and put it in the hands of the China-Russia-Iran (and maybe India?) axis. For just a fraction of our budget and none of our blood, that seems a worthy investment to me.

Not a defense of this per se, but my understanding of why it happens: We have a two-party system, which means that elections are zero-sum. You win, I lose and vice versa. As long as we have a first-past-the-post election system, it'll always be two parties, and it'll always be zero sum. Doesn't matter if we put in term limits, campaign finance reform, etc. So long as the goal of every candidate is securing a plurality of the votes against a single opponent, the other side will always be seen as the bad guy. Governance is not supposed to be zero-sum. It's supposed to be negotiation, compromise and getting less of everything you want (and a little that you don't want) in exchange for actually making a difference. In the less polarized times, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. There were urban conservatives and rural liberals. The rise of cable news, the internet, and social media has lead to geographical and ideological sorting. This has led to an almost unprecedented level of polarization. So now zero-sum politics has infected the governance. Passing something when your team is in charge is bad for my team, even if the bill being passed is overall beneficial to my constituents. Therefore, I will vote against my constituents' interests to deny a win to the opposing team (of course, given that no bill is perfect, I will find some fig leaf of a provision, claim it is unacceptable, and blame your team for putting it in there). Regular order breaks down and whatever team is in charge just puts everything into a giant package, horse trades billions in earmarks, and rams it through at the last minute when the alternatives to not passing it are somehow worse than the bill itself. If you're Mr. Smith who went to Washington, the end result of this is that you're given the following choice: vote for this monstrosity of a bill or potentially let the American economy collapse. What's the least bad option? Can you blame even the best-intentioned member of Congress from swallowing their pride and voting for this, vowing it'll be the last time (but knowing deep down in their heart that it won't)? The only solution for this is electoral reform that returns the power to the people, not Washington, and creates incentives for cooperation, not invective polarization. But that would require those benefitting from the current system voting to replace it...

Absolutely anyone can flag Twitter accounts for violating the TOS. Twitter decides what to do with that. Doesn't matter if it's you, or me, or the FBI. The fact that you're spending your time railing against the people flagging the accounts instead of those making the decisions seems weird. Especially since Twitter rejects 60% of the items flagged. I suppose if you want to, you can just pretend that Twitter felt it had to act on the FBI flags despite the evidence showing otherwise (and the fact that, as people have pointed out, Twitter had a lot of ex-FBI people on staff so they would know that the FBI can't make them do anything about accounts). So we have a scenario where the FBI is flagging items (I'll even grant that they flagged things they shouldn't have), Twitter is deciding what to do about them and decides not to do anything about 60% of them (even at one point telling the FBI that if they really want Twitter to actually do anything, they better get a court order because Twitter doesn't have to take something flagged down if they don't want to). The only way that this is censorship is if you just make up what words mean or have no idea what censorship is. The frustrating thing to me is that there is a good debate about where to draw the line on the appropriateness of the FBI flagging accounts (not flagging them at all seems like a bad idea to me, having seen the ISIS recruitment on Twitter back on the day), but people just seem to insist on yelling about censorship in a story where all of the evidence points to there not being censorship. It's just Twitter not being good at content moderation (which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has used Twitter). Nunes is a nice strawman, but sure, I'll bite. I don't remember the specifics of the claim you're making but I'm sure you have plenty of evidence to share. PS: for someone who doesn't know anything, I nailed how weak the Sussman case was and what the probable outcome was. But I'm sure that's just all a deep state plot anyway...

The current total amount given since the start of the war is less than 6% of the annual budget. It’s not 6% every time, the number is annualized. Did you know that?

Currently winning the war does not mean they have already won the war. Ukraine is winning right now, but they cannot win it with the weapons they have on hand. The nature of war is that ammunition gets used and weapons systems break or are destroyed. Russia has more troops and (probably?) still more arms than Ukraine, but Ukraine has the quality and home turf advantages. If the supply of advanced weapons and ammo does not continue to meet their needs, Russia will be able to turn the course of the war in their favor. Spending about 6% of the defense budget and less than 1% of the overall budget to destroy the Russian war machine without risking US soldiers, support democracy, drive a wedge between China and Russia, make China think twice about invading Taiwan, and strengthen alliances seems like the deal of a century to me. If we're concerned about the cost, maybe we can cut back on some corporate welfare to defray the costs.

So you’re still living in the fantasy world where the FBI talked to Twitter about Hunter Biden, something that there is no evidence of, huh? And you still have no idea what’s actually going on, or what censorship and coercion actually are? The twitter files show that the FBI censored exactly zero things but somehow you read that as the FBI censoring things because it makes you feel good? And then you just project your ignorance to the world and make fun of people who point out the inaccuracies and leaps in poor logic based on no facts? It’s like someone made a Dunning-Krueger chat bot and unleashed it on PPP. The FBI being overzealous in flagging election misinformation is not censorship because Twitter makes the decision. Twitter screws that up a lot but if they were kowtowing to the FBI, then how come they reject 60% of the requests?