Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
Oof. Ruskie shills all up in these comments.
it’s not “the quiet part” as you imply. your insinuating that we made this war happen for the reasons he gives. no, context is king. he is merely trying to justify our involvement in the face of criticism. russia has long wanted to grab more countries. putin is a dictator, have you heard? he poisons opponents and attacks other countries to smash them back into his idea of what russia should be.
That’s what a win win looks like. No need to be quiet around it. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Now everyone gets to replenish and modernize their weapons, test them in real conditions while making sure Russia gets enough of a bloody nose to not fucking try this shit ever again.
Russia did the ‘fuck around and find out thing’. It was their choice and the only way they can win is by tankies convincing every other country that just saw rape, murder, pillaging and terrorism getting used on another country in Europe by a rabid bear that somehow Russia was justified and should be allowed a free pass. But it’s not working. The rabid bear is rabid, but there’s ways to deal with that.
Because now they makes sure that every country around them is joining the anti rabid bear alliance.
The way the OP framed the article is to create the idea that somehow Russia is good because US military is bad. But that’s a fallacy. The US military is perfectly capable of doing bad shit on behalf of the US, but that does not mean everyone else is good. Sometimes clobbering Nazis is win win and Russia should have know that. Their feeble at reframing may work on Fox brainwashed Republicans who are reduced to “Putins kills gays and is strong so Putin is good”, but it turns out Putin is a cuck taking it into the ass by his own chef.
The alternate reality you live in sounds fascinating.
Anti Rabid Bear Alliance. I’d like to petition to change NATO to ARBA.
What exactly is a tankie? I wanted to upvote this post when I saw its content, but I found the tag from the OP about the “quiet part” to be off-putting as though this quote from McConnell is a negative thing. I don’t like or think McConnell is a good person, but to me this quote reads as a way to sell continued support for Ukraine to the crazier parts of our government. Like a “oh, you don’t want to spend money on Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do? Well here, how about because it’s making money for Americans.” Sure, maybe not the reason I support funding and arming Ukraine, but if it convinces people who aren’t already in support, then I’m for it. If anything, it seems shrewd.
I’ve seen a lot of posts/comments on Lemmy about tankies recently and I’m confused about what that means. Haven’t quite been able to determine from context since the context seems different depending on the post. Sorry if it’s a dumb question.
A subsection of people who are so far right they ended up on the left again, strongly aroused by military (tanks) symbols, manliness and strength while simultaneously being convinced that Russia is the good guys and therefore whatever they do must be good because US is bad.
There’s a few varieties here. Roger Waters and Noam Chomsky for example who basically are the US is bad so anything is the opposite of what US says (down to denying russian genocide in syria because, well, they are against the US).
There’s the cosplay section of milbloggers and western cosplay russian twitter specialists who usually are Canadian or German or Alabama white males in their basement cosplaying to be in Ukraine fighting for Russia
And of course plenty of russian males who actually buy the narratives.
Most of them have one thing in common - they just can’t handle reality and therefore escape into increasingly insane contortion… basically Republicans meet Covid again.
Thanks! Appreciate the in depth response
This is hilarious to read lol. Stop using words you don’t know the meaning of.
You’re right that this war is partially about the US attempting to test and modernize weapons, but the US spending more money on it’s already bloated military isn’t a ‘win’ for anybody except for neo-cons.
You should ask Ukrainians about their opinion on that. They love sending your tankie friends some good old American Himars
Basically it means someone who supports Russia - usually Communists (which is fine) who - for some reason think Russia is still communist (which is dumb)
It’s not a win win for the Ukrainians, who are losing lives. The article shows what’s been said all along: the US doesn’t gaf about Ukraine or it’s people. The US is only involved to make money and to prop up the US’s dying empire.
Without aid Ukraine would lose more lives.
Do you honestly believe that? You honestly think that US aid has saved lives in Ukraine? Some surely has but the weapons? Ig it’s not your family and friends in the cross hairs, your fields poisoned with depleted uranium, or your kids’ cross country tracks littered with cluster munitions. You really think the country responsible for embargoes of medical supplies to Palestine, Yemen, and Cuba, to name a few, is sending aid to save lives?
Ukraine is another Kurdistan to the US. The only question is whether it will take the Ukrainians as long as it took the Kurds to learn that the US is nobody’s friend.
Without the US more ukrainians would die and Russia would have overrun them by now and subjugated them into the shitshow they call motherland.
So it’s a win win.
Ask Ukrainians which version they prefer - US involvement or not. Oh wait, it’s pretty clear they prefer the kill rabid bear with Himars version.
The only version they’d like even more is killing bear with ATACMS and F16.
So fuck off tankie.
Ask Ukrainians which version they prefer - US involvement or not.
Yeah there’s just one little problem here fam: the US backed a coup there and installed pro-war neo-nazis in power, there was no question about it left to the Ukrainians.
In the liberal imagination, history started this morning, every morning, unfortunately. Historical context is practically irrelevant to them once they’ve been told which side to pick.
I’m fairly sure that if you asked Ukrainians, there’d be a clear victory for ‘please can everyone stop aiming RPGs at my grandma’s house and my son’s school?’ although I’d expect regional split in the answers. The only people who root for war like this are (if there’s a difference between them) psychopaths, liberals who are far from the frontlines, and fascists.
Eh, we’re not in there for a couple reasons and they all make sense. It would preclude NATO from ever entering because of the non-aggression portion of the agreement, and it would put Russia in a corner where they have to either admit defeat (which putin won’t do) or go nuclear which is bad for everyone but especially bad for Ukraine.
The article in the OP is explicitly talking about US involvement. The US and NATO are ‘in there’. If NATO isn’t in Ukraine, it was hardly ever anywhere.
Arguing that NATO isn’t involved seems to be either disingenuous or naive. It accepts NATO’s PR at face value and in opposition to the practical reality. NATO/the US tends not announce it’s clandestine work in the tabloids or the broadsheets, especially as it happens but it does admit it sometimes, if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Ukraine, it’s not even hidden. They’ve been bragging about how much weaponry they’ve been sending and how much they’ve been involved in training and instructing Ukrainians how to fight.
Was the US involved when it trained and funded Saddam, Bin Laden, or the Contras? Of course it was. Ukraine is another example of how the US gets involved without ‘getting it’s hands dirty’; although I’ve yet to meet anyone IRL who doesn’t think the US has the bloodiest, grimiest hands of all. The only question is whether people think it’s a good thing or a bad thing. The fact of it is not open to dispute.
I’ll struggle to accept any argument that splits hairs over what counts as involvement, I’m afraid. It boils down to semantics without addressing the crux of the issue.
I’m also struggling to see why more visible NATO/US involvement would require Russia to admit defeat until it’s been defeated. Unless you’re implying that NATO would wipe the floor with Russia. That doesn’t seem right for two reasons:
- The best minds and the resources of NATO have been demonstrably unable to stop Russia so far and
- If Russia looks like losing, it has the nuclear option and shit gets real messy real quick and it’s lose-lose for everyone
3rd party involvement and direct engagement are two very different things. The non-aggression agreement, the one that protects and constrains nato members, only cares about engagement, training and arms are a-ok. What member states agreed to is concrete and well defined, not whatever amorphous definition you’re going by here.
The “loose definition” redtea came up with is bonkers.
Additionally, as you say, words have meanings. When people criticise NATO it is as a stand-in for the imperialist world order. It includes the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the ‘international’ courts and rules, and all their elements and capitalist lackeys. You’re making a semantic argument, which misses the crucial point: that NATO and its member states are concerned only with the wealth and power of their bourgeoisie, regardless of Russia.
I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have an agenda, that we can’t have world peace until there are no more imperialists, which includes and is often, in ordinary language, represented by NATO. If you interpret that as support for Russia, there’s not much left for us to discuss.
The nutbag’s definition of NATO includes Russia.
Ok, and? Are they doing something wrong? Aren’t we supposed to scold someone when they’re doing bads things, and praise them for doing good things, not just shit on them no matter what?
US involvement is unambiguously a good thing morally and for the people of Ukraine. Any other take would lunacy. So why are you taking time to shit on the US and not the ethnonationalist dictatorship invading a democratic neighbor of theirs? Are your priorities that messed up? America bad? Certainly, but it hurts YOU to have a such narrow minded view geopolitics. The US isn’t always the bad guy.
The US has spent 30+ years shit stirring, dismantling Ukraine, running coups, and undermining Ukraine’s relationships with it’s closest neighbours. Now it’s provoked a war and all gullible liberals can say is the same thing they said about the US contemporaneously with all its other wars.
The article in the OP demonstrates exactly what I and others like me have been saying from the start: the US is not involved to be the good guy, it has no moral high ground; it is only involved to make money, and no number of Ukrainian lives is too great a price to pay for US prosperity. The US is involved to steal as much Ukrainian wealth as possible.
It’s not just the ‘profit’ from selling the weapons (which Ukraine will pay for, not the US, so there’s no benevolence in it but self-interest). Every aid package is another tranche of the same kind of loans that the US has used to loot and privatise the country’s assets for decades. The same thing the US does everywhere. The only difference now is the novelty of trying to physically destroy Russia’s military at the same time.
It’s a bit rich to say that I’m the one with a narrow minded view of geopolitics when you’ve reduced a 30+ year conflict to it’s surface details. Events like this cannot be separated from the political economy or their historical context. It’s clear that liberals still haven’t learned to correct a flaw in their framework that was identified 150 years ago (source otherwise only indirectly relevant):
Some people have dug beneath the appearance of things, whereas others accept them in their inverted form.
Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,
But that is not correct. Several U.S. citizen have died fighting in Ukraine.
Fair, but those were volunteers. Obviously he is referring to Americans deployed by the government in some form, nobody died in the line of duty so to say.
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We’re destroying that shithole and ensuring continued Western dominance on the cheap
LMAO, libs on their way to analyze geopolitics: https://piped.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=L2quonm59Kc
Let’s go over some facts we can source from Western sources:
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Russia is outperforming every single EU economy except for Spain
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Russia is firing 40 to 50 thousand artillery shells A DAY while the United States can only produce 30 thousand A MONTH, which allows Ukraine to fire about 4000 to 5000 in comparison. Russia is able to fire IN A SINGLE DAY what the United States takes A MONTH to produce, got it?
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The so hyped Ukrainian “counteroffensive” has been going on for THREE MONTHS and they haven’t even been able to breach the first line of Russian defenses, let alone produce any gains to justify all the equipment and men they wasted
The plan to isolate and crash Russia’s economy failed, so did the plan to send Ukraine garbage Western equipment without proper training while expecting miraculous results from offensives that do not posses air support and are outgunned 10 to 1 in artillery, I’m not so sure if “shithole” and “western dominance” are words that correctly describe Russia’s situation here.
I love seeing “aggressively LGBTQ inclusive” tankies bend over backwards to support a literal homophobic fascist dictatorship and parrot their talking points.
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I wonder if there was a more efficient way of employing people without having executives from the MIC getting almost all the benefit?
There absolutely is a more efficient way if Putin didn’t invade Ukraine, but we can only work with the hand that we’re dealt.
Did we not make weapons instead of providing healthcare before putin invade ukraine? I mean maybe we did and I just didn’t realize it, but I’m pretty sure weapons were already being made in lieu of social investment well before putin was born.
Working for an aerospace electronics startup, I have SO MUCH to say about this and how fucked it is.
Seriously though, where would Ukraine be right now if it didnt have the U.S. right now or even all the other nations donating?
They’d have been fucked.
Everyone wants to joke about Russian military tech but the Ukrainian forces were operating on outdated technology prior to massive NATO overhauls.
The US likely wanted to field modern weapons against Russia so we could 1. Clear out our back stock of older inventory (which Mitch just admitted, basically) and 2. See how said inventory stacked up in a real war against Russia, since we have basically just been fighting rebel insurgents for the last 30 years of warfare and don’t have a good representation of what our modern equipment would be capable of against an actual standing army.
Ukrainian soldiers in 2014 vs 2022.
The U.S. and allies, despite what a lot of people say (usually something like “why haven’t they helped since the war actually started in 2014”) helped transform the Ukranian military into the capable fighting force it is today, and the work started years ago.
Fucked is what Ukraine is right now thanks to US pushing Ukraine into a war it can’t win instead of letting them negotiate.
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Neutral
It would be a neutral country that isn’t in a war. Ukraine and Russia almost negotiated peace back in March last year, then US and UK decided to sabotage it, and Ukraine is in a far worse position today than it was back then. Anybody who thinks US is helping Ukraine needs to get their head checked.
You’re really sitting there pretending like you know exactly what went on during those negotiations?
I’m not pretending anything, there was a preliminary document signed and even western media admits that Bojo ran to Ukraine to stop the deal.
Whilst not suffering a series of mini-strokes on national television, Mitch is as always razor sharp and the epitome of giving zero fucks about any human lives/hides other than his own. May the Sweet Lord Above see fit to drown this nearly calcified ghoul in a bed of his own shit, like real soon. Tomorrow morning would be cool
Americans have died in that war. Just not sent there by force like imperialists like to do and purely out of the instinct to help their brothers in danger.
I guess Putin’s checks are bouncing.
As an American, fuck them Russian oligarch pig fuckers. Sent money and weapons to Ukraine.
Fuck russia but do we really need to be supporting a proxy war at the moment? Why is Ukraine so important to us?
Because we promised to help them, and Ukraine deserves independence.
We supply Saudi Arabia with missiles that hit school busses, we should at least also help protect a democracy from being re-colonized.
Putin’s Russia is cruel and exploitative. The best thing we can do as a world leader is help a smaller country stand up for itself.
We’re not a world police and shouldn’t be acting like this and we very suspiciously only help very specific countries enforce their independence
Because Russia fucked around during the elections, and how are in the find out phase.
On a more serious note, it’s because it sends a message to many other nations (China for example) that invading have consequences. A good example of this was Hitler and Chamberlain: appeasement did not stop, but actually made worse, the situation. It costs less this way in the long term
Also Russia is spending so much money in Ukraine which means they hav less money to fuck with elections. I have seen talk of republican campaigns having serious funding problems now. Hmm why might that be? Russia has been incredibly effective at funding disinformation and promoting right wing fascist candidates compared to what they have spent.
Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
And why shouldn’t he?
Not a single lib will change their minds after hearing this.
Not a single lib will change their minds after hearing this.
Are liberals generally opposed to supporting Ukraine? What opinion are they not going to change?
Opposed? Liberals are fully on board with endless war in Ukraine. It’s a bipartisan consensus.
This thread is evidence of it. The quiet part gets shouted and rather than accepting that this is what MLs have been saying for two years, the libs are doubling down. Will they now accept the truth behind the quip, ‘To the last Ukrainian?’ Not a chance. Oblivious.
Ya that’s my understanding was well. Which is why I asked the question.
Your question was: Are liberals generally opposed to supporting Ukraine?
The answer is no. I dunno what to tell you.
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I can’t hear your over the sound of tanks rolling west
Are these ‘tanks rolling west’ in the room with us right now? Take your schizo- phrenia medication.
Cease your disinformation campaign at once tankie !
Depicted, Russian tanks rolling west, killing civilians https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10590863/Ukraine-war-Elderly-civilian-couple-blown-car-Russian-tank.html
