Dont you think it is horrible how people put their political ideologies / viewpoints over human lives
Something that i find prettyd disgusting these days is how certain people put their political ideologies / viewpoints over human lives, for example, celebrating the russian invasion of ukraine because it is "a blow against US / NATO imperialism" completely ignoring all the warcrimes, the deaths, and the suffering generated by that war, the same happening with the palestinian genocide because "Israel is the only working democracy on the middle east", acting like their ideoligies are going to bring back to life all the dead people somehow
The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to "haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged, lol shitlib get owned" are immature teenagers arguing in bad faith or on things they don't understand. That would be what we call a "tankie".
The same goes for those blindly supporting Israel because "omg hamas is terrorist" or whatever the hell they even justify it with anymore. A lot of those may just be quiet racists or fascists happy to see a dictator like Netanyahu have his way with Western support- obviously never thinking for a second that they themselves have an equal chance of being on the receiving end of such treatment, not the delivering end.
Both of these situations are absolutely horrible. But neither can really be boiled down to simple ideology over human lives as much as the lower-quality people love to do so. People want things to fit how they think so that they can feel good about their thoughts. Many things get shaped in that lens and it gets worse every day. And, unfortunately, the only real solution is just not to interact. Their minds can never be changed once they set up their world view to be self supporting.
Your views mirror mine closely. Ukraine's war is awful, but it never needed to happen if Putin wasn't such a trigger-happy, imperialistic dictator. His war is purely for territorial and ideological expansion of control at the expense of human life. Same goes for Palestine, while the operation was framed as being anti-terrorism at first, Netanyahu has gotten completely unhinged and fallen out of line in some crazy drive to control all of Gaza and eliminate Israel's competition. However, I support Ukraine and do not support Israel, despite these being philosophically contradictory in the terms of "preserving human life over ideologies" since Ukraine is still killing people. The context makes the conscience.
The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to “haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged,
I mean that is what is factually happening right now. The US can no longer hold its diplomatic and military weight. The US and its allies are unable to prevent the Houthis from succesfull attacks in the Red Sea. On Israels genocide in Palestine the European countries are dividing. Putin is managing to divide the US internally and to have some European countries break away to his side. China doesn't give a fuck about US sanctions anymore and there is elaborate systems to bypass sanctions. As a result both Russian energy exports are laundered before being sold to the EU and US and western components end up in russian military equipment.
Cheering on the current prospecting alternative is stupid, as it is just another imperialist system.
But it is urgently necessary to realise the changing reality and use the window to create a world order, that puts all imperialists to limits and embraces a rule based international order of equal countries with equal people. Especially the EU could take this opportunity to renounce the remnants of its imperial ways and the subtle and open supremacist believes.
The EU countries made the terrible mistake to consider Trump an anomaly and were all to eager to remain complacent on Bidens presidency. But Trump wasn't just a pimple you wait to pass. He is the symptom of a deeper instability in the US.
The difference between the two conflicts is that the govt of Russia was the unprovoked aggressor in Ukraine, whereas in Israel, the Gaza govt (Hamas) was the unprovoked aggressor.
Israel has gone too far and the war needs to end but the two conflicts are not identical in every way.
Valuing human lives is itself an ideology/viewpoint. A great one obviously, and one I fervently agree with, but once you realize this it's easier to understand how other people can put other viewpoints ahead of this one.
Sometimes, but it's more complicated than that. It depends on the ideology. Sometimes ideologies clash in ways that can't be reconciled without the loss of life. For example, I think it's a good thing that the rest of the world collectively put our ideology above the lives of Nazis, and fought in ww2.
The allies didn't fight the Nazis because they took issue with their ideology, but because they became a threat to their own powers. The reality is, that many people, including leaders of the time, weren't interested in helping those being persecuted, in some cases they even inspired the persecution with their own.
The U.S. and the Holocaust (BBC, PBS) is well worth watching the whole way through, especially for how it mirrors our world today.
Yeah, I'm generalizing here, and that's a very good point you bring up. I think whenever you have an ideology that claims to be the "one true x", which in the case of Nazism was the belief in a racial hierarchy, if that ideology is expansionist, it will by necessity become an existential threat to other ideologies. You can say it became a threat to their power, but is that not also a threat to their ideology? Perhaps I'm using an overly broad conception of ideology here.
I'll have to add that documentary to my watch list. Looks informative!
I think you're missing the point that it doesn't really fit the environment he was in. It says a lot about how much free rent a politician seems to have in his head, when he's likely never met said politician, likely has nothing directly to do with said politician, and was also displaying it in an area where I'm fairly sure the majority already agree with him (knowing this region).
It's just a weird topic to flex in THAT specific environment.
Yea, and I extend that to all Politics. I don’t want to see anti-Trump shirts, I don’t really want to see pro Trump or pro Biden. Politicians aren’t sports teams. Save it for rallies, and what not. Just tired of seeing it.
Yeah agreed. It's so weird to make politics or politicians part of your identity like this and extend it to totally hnrelated situstions by wearing a message. I already barely understand when people do it for sports as if they personally have any connection to the team.
Yeah, I get you. Just remember though, they're trying to take us back in history.
Some people just see humans, all humans, as just another random member of the animal kingdom. Just clumps of cells doing a thing. These people usually end of believing in power, and nothing else.
You know all those villainous chars from films, books, etc? Those attitudes are not limited to fiction. They're inspired by our real life history, that's what we grew up from. Some people want to go back.
I think it’s stupid when they say America is just fighting a proxy war. No, Ukraine is fighting for their independence. Like when France was fighting a proxy war against England back in the day, they weren’t considered the bad guys.
Is this "General", or "General in the US"? I'm not saying it cannot be the latter, but if it is. I'm out. Best mentalt health choice I've done is reduce exposure to American "problems".
It is meant to be General in a global/world sense, not strictly US. It simply happens that many of the people posting and commenting seem to be from the US, going off their posts and comments.
I'd encourage people from anywhere to post here if they'd like, as that would help mitigate the US-centric vibes.
Every political position mostly tries to define in which ways violence is to be used. Realising this and knowing power is already established before you were even born. Seeing violence being used against your oppressor(s) is often times the only thing we feel we can still hope for.
Or from another perspective, is the war in Ukraine worth it for Ukraine or Russia, can you really say a war with so many deaths is preferable to being a russian subject, or an international embarrassment of the Russian state. Is the self determination of Palestinians really worth the terror and the war. We're the PIRA justified in bombing London for their brother's and sisters discrimination and deaths in Ireland. It's ultimately all subjective, wether the violence of the system you fight against is bad enough you can bring yourself to fight.
Nothing brings back anyone but as long as there are people who want to, and do turn us into their machines, we have to rely on our interpretation of that being wrong, and fight them for it.
This is a very grey topic for me. We can use the Russian invasion as an example since you brought it up. You can argue that more lives would have been saved had Ukraine just rolled over and surrendered immediately. But you can also argue their quality of life would be worse. But how do you compare that to resisting and fighting a war? How many lives would you trade for how big of an improvement in quality of life?
Btw I'm for Ukraine resisting, and I support them 100%. I'm just giving an example why it might not be always best to compare in human lives. Or at least, it's really complicated.
I put human lives over political ideologies, and I'm pretty alone with that.
I'm a pacifist to the point that I'm opposed to the concept of "self defense" on a national level.
If someone tries to kill you, by all means defend yourself.
But this concept doesn't translate to groups of millions of people, killing each other for years over who's in charge.
What India did against the British – sabotage all Russian-led businesses in Ukraine, and refuse to cooperate with the occupiers.
It would lead to a great deal of suffering for Ukrainians, but the alternative against which this would have to be measured is the current war – with close to one million dead, several million displaced, and no resolution in sight anywhere.
People have this problem where they subscribe to Us versus Them thinking. They dehumanize certain groups of people and see them as something less than human, and therefore they don't care if they are harmed. Militaries all over the globe do this to train their armies to kill without discrimination.
We see it in the USA all the time with the two party political system. I think if the extremist liberals and extremist conservatives had to share a room, it would turn into a blood bath before any common ground could be found. It's disappointing and disturbing to me that people can't seem to act in a civil manner. People get tunnel vision and lose sight of the fact that we all have to share this planet and we have to compromise on a lot of things. Seems like most people don't want to compromise anymore, they want to destroy the opposing side instead and rule the world. That's so delusional I can't even...
Protecting democracy in the middle east, bud, might save 30,000,000 lives at the expense of 30,000. You mistake that people defending Israel's offensive don't care about human life, we can just see what is at stake for the region, and I think 30,000,000 is a conservative estimate..
Speaking of the Russian invasion of Ukraine... A lot fewer people would have died if Ukraine had surrendered immediately. About 200,000 Russian soldiers' lives would have been saved, and I find it rather unlikely that Putin's repressive measures would have killed more Ukrainians than that. But somehow in this case I find myself putting my ideology over human lives.
Not all ideologies are the same, of course, but you should still consider whether you only see people you disagree with putting ideology over human lives because when you put your own ideology over human lives, it seems so obvious and natural that you don't think about it.
Ah yes Russian soldiers are known for their mercy and self restraint. Even if Ukraine surrendered Russian soldiers would have continued committing crimes against humanity. Children would still be kidnapped, women would still be raped and men would still be tortured to death.
I know, and it's disgusting. People also do it by prioritising finance / career options etc over the lives of unborn babies for the sake of "bodily autonomy"
If you’re going to force a woman to birth a child, you better be willing to pay up to help support that child. Pro-Life shouldn’t stop at birth. All too often I see people advocating against abortion, but refuse to promote real sex education, birth control, or government assistance that would support that life and eliminate more abortions entirely.
If your goal is lowering the number of abortions, we can all agree on some simple measures for that desired result. Otherwise it just comes off as wanting to control women.
I got downvoted for saying AOC shouldn't run for President because she's unwilling to challenge the neoliberal ghouls in Washington. But somehow, I'm the bad guy for not wanting a representative that votes and funds a genocide. Blue MAGA is a joke.
Blue MAGA are the idiot liberals that insist we have to vote for Genocide Joe no matter what. Even if he bombs children or his brain doesn't work. No thanks. I don't like either option, so I'll either vote third party or not at all.