We're so f*cked

[JDHURF]

There really isn't anything the least amusing with the escalating tensions with Russia. It's enough that only by a miracle human civilization has eluded nuclear holocaust and that though Gorbachev was promised that NATO wouldn't expand beyond the East German border, NATO immediately did so anyways. Since then over a dozen Eastern European States have become NATO members. Since George W. Bush's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and the resulting unleashing and spreading of jihadi groups, such as the Islamic State, which has wrecked a series of states, most catastrophically Syria now, the foreign policy of the United States is now perhaps more dangerous than during the Cold War. As the Doomsday Clock attests.

[Kane]

So if a country wants to admit itself to NATO and applies we should deny them because Russia would be offended?

[exploited]

[JDHURF]

[John Galt]

those assurances were made only to the leader of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is no more, comrade. They were made so that East Germany could be unified with Germany. After the collapse of the Soviet Union those assurances no longer held any weight. The assurances were basically "we don't foresee any reason to expand beyond there"... And they didn't. Because beyond that was the Warsaw pact and the USSR. When that collapsed, the situation changed. The idea that we should be held hostage to that is complete and utter shit. And I don't think you understand what the word "immediate" means. It started happening 7 years later, with final approval 2 years after that.

[Spider]

He's right. Either the nukes terrified us into swearing off full scale war....or we're due.

[John Galt]

Lol all those things you can Google man. Jesus Christ. Ever heard of smallpox? Ever seen a graph of poverty worldwide? Ever read a book about the great world wars of the latter half of the 20th century? Oh right there were none

[JDHURF]

[John Galt]

Yeah I have the book. I bought it on the recommendation of Bill Gates. "A slew of scholars" huh? I thought they were criticizing how he made out natives to be uh... savage. I mean, they were savages. Aztecs were disgustingly violent, sacrificing people by the minute by ripping out their still beating hearts. But some people want to make them all out to be noble, a myth created after we killed off most of them.

But again, all you need to do is Google "when was the last world war?", "How many cases of smallpox were there in 1900 and 2000" or "extreme poverty over time"

[ToddStarnes]

I suggest giving Reality Denial at least a skim. If you don't generally view leftist academia with disdain now you sure will after that.

The dishonesty is slippery. For example, the author criticizes Pinker pointing out that no nuclear weapons fell during the cold war. The author notes that - aha! - America, the great Satan, did indeed drop two nukes in WW2.

What a feeble attempt at a gotcha. Temporally it doesn't even make sense. Come on.

The author goes on to criticize US torture policy and aggression in small wars, and equates economic inequality with violence. For this author, economic equality is apparently a brand new concept created from whole clothe by evil Westerners (probably cis too!). And because it exists now and favors the West, the world simply cannot be getting more peaceful.

I know I know. It's a logical abortion.

He continues with catty conflation and sly equivocation and whataboutism for ages with no discussion of hard data, or just relies on hysterical hand flailing dismissals of estimated death counts from Pinker. He doesn't even bother to propose counters that suggest violence is not decreasing as far as I can tell from reading this on the elliptical.

It's a bad article. Give it a read as a reminder of why Donald Trump won.