Shag Nasty

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@GreenPlusAnE @Joe27409 Yes. You are. Given what I paid in, no one should be funding the payments I’ll get.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@GreenPlusAnE So tired of these whiny beta males that the U.S. has produced.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@GreenPlusAnE You’re wrong. I’m never getting back what I’ve paid in.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@anneapplebaum What a dumb take

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@chrisorzy Why not just euthanize them?

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@jimcramer And given the behavior of Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Germany over Iran, why should we consider them allies? They’re not, only ungrateful parasites.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@jimcramer I wish Trump had achieved Russia and the USA becoming allies. In my view, Russia should have joined NATO.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@NickKristof False analogy. The humiliation occurred in 2014.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@bethanyshondark An economic illiterate

[Richard @ricwe123]

February 2014. Maidan Square, Kyiv. John McCain filming the protests, standing shoulder to shoulder with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, while Victoria Nuland stands just behind them.
A striking snapshot of Washington’s direct involvement in Ukraine’s political upheaval.

The same officials who spoke so confidently about democracy were right there amid the turmoil surrounding the removal of a democratically elected president.

This raises an uncomfortable question: was this truly about defending Ukrainian democracy, or about Washington advancing its own geopolitical agenda at Ukraine’s expense?

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

Agreed

[Iuliia Mendel @IuliiaMendel]

I don’t know if Zelenskyy watches the news, but the mood in France, Italy and Albania is not good. Large protests are underway, sometimes turning into clashes with police. In southern Italy roads are set to be blocked for the next two days. People are protesting bad education, poverty, soaring fuel prices and actual shortages of diesel and gasoline in some regions.

Against this backdrop, six months before elections in France and Italy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is asking for another €70 billion to fund an endless war that Ukraine is losing. The previous €90 billion were already extracted with huge difficulty. Hungary and Slovakia have already said they will not take part in this new financing.

This is not about whether I support Zelenskyy. The economy in Ukraine is nearly stopped — by Russian strikes and by the incompetence of a wartime government. The Constitution is on pause, as one of Zelenskyy’s own friends has said.

The war is taking more lives and more land, and the only answer we hear is “give Ukraine more money”. Money that Europeans no longer want to give and can no longer afford to give. Every third euro in Ukraine is now Western borrowing.

To save the country we need a deal and a chance to rebuild. I do not believe Ukraine can remain an equal partner while it is this dependent on the West, or that this strategy has any long-term future.

It breaks my heart that this war is destroying so much in Ukraine and causing such degradation. It also breaks my heart that European countries, including France, Italy and Albania, are going through such hard times.

That is why I say again: let’s end the only war in Europe so that all of us can start building a future.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@AmericaFirsst Fake news. I can’t believe there are two men who are attracted to that woman.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@RobGilbey Pro Peace = Pro War. Got it.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

RE: The Midterms and National Survival

The Democrat Party has been hijacked by an alliance of literal Communists and Islamic jihadists who now wear the mantle of Tip O’Neill and Sam Nunn like a skinsuit while espousing the most radical, anti-American agenda the USA has ever experienced.

These are people who want the Constitution eviscerated, capitalism extinguished, Sharia law imposed and your very way of life destroyed. If they achieve power, the lawfare you saw in 2020 will be NOTHING by comparison. If you hold traditional conservative values and/or if you are a practicing Christian or a Jew, they want you destroyed—economically, politically, practically, reputationally and—if necessary—they want you in a Gulag or to pay with your life.

This is not hyperbole, nor is this something that will happen overnight if we lose the midterms. However, if they win the midterms this will be for them a major step towards their ultimate goal of domination, a domination where the Bill of Rights has no meaning and all elections are pre-determined.

I really don’t care how much you dislike RINOs or how upset you are that Trump did not fully fix your pet issue in less than two years or how irritated you get filling up your gas tank. If you sit out these upcoming midterms to “send a message,” all you are doing is participating in your own demise.

If this is you, please wise up. This is NOT POLITICS AS USUAL. National survival is at stake in a way it never has been before.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

Funny stuff 😁

[PhillyGodfather ® Sports Bettor @phillygodfather]

I spit out my coffee.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@Clemanns1984 Putin isn’t interested in taking Ukraine. Catch up!

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@_pinkrantz We can always dream.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@marcthiessen @TheStudyofWar Consider the source. No one would expect any other opinion from this outfit. It’s always more bombs.

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

@bisonfan86 @SenKevinCramer Fight to the last Ukrainian, right? It’s better for all of them to die and the entire country destroyed if it weakens Russia in some fashion!!!

[Shag Nasty @DanHartsfield3]

Fair analysis.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who wrote an article literally titled "Why Mearsheimer is wrong on China" (https://t.co/8mqY524iLg), it's clear I'm no diehard fanboy of the guy.

However, on Ukraine, honesty requires recognizing that he was more right than most, starting with predicting the war in the first place. At the beginning of the war I wrote a long thread listing all the strategic thinkers who predicted it (https://t.co/Yme3Cdrc8l), and Mearsheimer's prediction really stands out as the most complete, almost like a script of what followed.

It is true, though, that since the war started, he's sounded a bit like a broken record in announcing Ukraine's imminent collapse, which hasn't exactly materialized.

He has this bad habit of running everything through the iron laws (according to him) of great-power competition, the very same framework that leads him astray on China.

A framework that, as per his own admission, doesn't leave any room for the individual characteristics of a state: as he himself puts it in his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics “The theory pays little attention to individuals or domestic political considerations such as ideology. It tends to treat states like black boxes or billiard balls”.

Which is very unnuanced: it’s painfully obvious to any student of history that there is more to geopolitics than raw power, and that a nation’s history, culture, sense of itself, contemporary zeitgeist and ideology are absolutely critical in shaping its behavior.

In many ways, Mearsheimer's "offensive realism" is the lazy man's approach to geopolitics: it spares you the trouble of reading a country’s history or understanding how its people see the world.

Mearsheimer actually tacitly recognizes this. If you listen to him on his own country, the US, what he is ironically very good at predicting is how they WON'T follow his theory: in the same breath, he’ll tell you the US should stop wasting resources in Europe and the Middle East to focus on China, and that it won’t, because of the Israel lobby, a crusading liberal ideology and the groupthink of the "blob". In other words, because of domestic politics, ideology and individuals: precisely what his theory tells you ought to be ignored.

Which shows that when it’s a country he actually knows from the inside, he has no trouble seeing that the black box/billiard ball is in fact a living, breathing nation in all its complexity and nuance.

All that being said, what is his main point on Ukraine? Famously, and bluntly, that “the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

With about a fifth of its territory under Russian control, about half a million Ukrainian casualties (https://t.co/DLwPDaZ13U), a population that has shrunk from almost 42 million before the war to around 29 million in government-controlled areas (https://t.co/7kinxp04xv), 14% of its housing stock damaged or destroyed (https://t.co/VJiel2DHDx), an economy a fifth smaller than before the war in real terms (https://t.co/HKjT1jhA8Y), and a state whose entire civilian budget is financed by foreign aid (https://t.co/afZ6U1Mn7m), it’s hard to think of a more fitting word.

Ukraine is, factually, wrecked. Still fighting, with a courage and resilience no black-box theory could have predicted, but wrecked.

I don’t think anyone can seriously argue otherwise. The most direct responsibility lies with Russia, which made the choice to invade. But nobody - on either side - can be happy with that outcome, or deny that more could have been done to avoid it.

Which is, when you strip it down to its essence, the gist of what Mearsheimer is saying. It's not that sophisticated but it's also common sense, and probably the most humanistic position one could have held: for all his talk of black boxes, he turned out to be the one most concerned with the people inside them.

So, no, long story short: Mearsheimer hasn’t “discredited himself over Ukraine”. The ones who should worry about their credibility are those who led Ukraine down the very primrose path he warned about, and still haven’t had the decency to admit where it took the country.