The problem have isn't that they don't have all the same goals as me. The problem I have is that they're idiots who are going to lose everything they care about because they refuse to accept reality and they'll be mostly fine while the rest of us suffer for their failure.
If it is on a collision course we probably have time to do something about it. If we don't do anything about it it'll probably hit the ocean and it's not big enough to cause any kind of crazy mega tsunami or anything like that. If it does hit land it'll probably hit in the middle of nowhere and kill, like, 12 people, and if it does manage to beat all the odds and hit a major city it will be a major disaster, but it's not going to be the apocalypse or anything.
That sounds like a massive waste of time and money for something that people will only ever notice when it goes wrong. How about making a good game instead of spending millions of dollars on fancy window dressing?
We're just going to go in circles at this point, so I guess I'll just let Iraq, Afganistan, and Vietnam know they've been conquered and are part of the US now and resistance is futile. Or maybe only the US can fail? I'll let Afganistan know they're part of Russia instead then.
Or maybe I should just stop trying to have a rational discussion with a troll and go to bed.
That's not military occupations work. There are tens of millions of people in Ukraine. Even if you could kill them at a rate of 1 per second and they never fought back that would still be decades of killing. North America started with a lower population before white guys showed up and had every plague on the planet hitting the Americas at the same time to do most of the dirty work and it still took centuries. The sheer logistics of trying to kill everyone in Ukraine are just beyond the capacity of Russia to achieve, even if they didn't resist. And that's even assuming they lose the war, which got a lot more likely, but still isn't a given. There just isn't the political will in Russia to commit to centuries of genocide against serious opposition, no matter how much Putin wants it to be true.
The power dynamic just isn't skewed enough here for that. Ukraine is not exactly a major world power, but Russia's not exactly looking like a superpower either. Even if the US switching sides is enough for them to plant a flag in Kyiv, the simple fact of the matter is that Russia does not have the capacity to occupy a country the size of Ukraine. Planting a flag in Kyiv is the EASY part. It only gets harder from there. You only have to look at any war the US has been involved in to see that in action.
What, you think Ukrainians are going to stop defending their homes just because Trump stops sending them fancy weapons? That's not how this works. The war isn't going to end. It's just going to get a lot nastier.
Look, I don't know what I'm failing to communicate here, but I absolute understand that. What I'm saying is that even if someone around here wanted to pretend what they were doing was good for people in Africa it would be to say that they'd be better off without our help. That us giving money to dictators that just end up spending it poorly is doing more harm than good, and Africa would be better off without us. That's the opposite of a white savior complex.
Heck, if we weren't also supporting dictators in other ways for the purpose of exploiting the people and resources of Africa while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability I might even agree with that.
Mostly though, they don't talk about Africa, because they don't think about Africa, because they don't even pretend to care about Africa.
Unfortunately the strategy is probably just to start so many awful things at once that we just can't make a fuss about all of them, and then they'll just follow through on whichever ones don't get enough attention. Even if we can get everyone complaining about Musk's garbage and Greenland at once, there's just something else almost as bad that they'll do instead.
Fair.
I live in a small town where I have neighbors who fly confederate flags in their front yard despite never having been within 1,500 miles of a confederate state. I don't need you to tell me what racists are like, thank you very much. Maybe it's a regional thing or something, but I guarantee that there are a lot of racists in America who do not want to save anyone from anything. They just want to pretend that everyone is just like them, and get very, very mad when they're reminded that other people exist.
I thought the box was too small for him, but he proved me wrong.
Oh come on. Seriously? They're going to lose "freedom", and democracy, and the economy is going to go to shit, and the world is going to be less stable, and also they're not the ones who are going to end up homeless and destitute and worrying about the government killing them. It's not that fucking complicated.