So therefore your opposition is cheap or meaningless, or performative if you prefer-- like I actually said, not some other point you think is more susceptible to attack.
Ooook? So what's the point you're making, then? Stuff ain't getting changed by criticism & protest, so might as well not bother? OK, but... you constantly criticise stuff too. Including in countries far away and outside the control of the country you live in. So... hmm.
That and $5 adds up to $5.
Same as all the arguments you've made, too, then. Neither of us are changing anything.
You are "consistent" in opposing the criminal actions of your own government secure in the knowledge such opposition won't go beyond ineffectual protest (and, as Terminal Blue points out, ineffectual sanctions by much smaller economies against your relatively quite rich country) and opposing similar actions by Russia with the full array of coercive forces available to the global empire of the United States of America (including, among other countries, the UK).
In practice this amounts to supporting the greater imperial power against the lesser: the perfect form of 'anti-imperialism' for the social chauvinist in the imperial core. Ineffectual protest of the dominant empire, coercive and deadly measures against any that might challenge that dominion. You support both! Consistent! XD
I might have some sympathy for your viewpoint if you hadn't given up on seeking justice for the invasion of Iraq, or indeed if anyone had actually been held responsible and suffered appropriate consequences or attempted to make amends in a serious way (or at all!). But that didn't happen. That's still a task before you; a debt our countries owe among many others. And until that is resolved or at least moving in the direction of being resolved, the actions you support are hypocritical in the extreme. So you support hypocrisy to the benefit of the most powerful.
What incredible intellectual bankruptcy. It would take quite a while to untangle this Gordian knot of self-contradiction.
So to get this straight: you believe that a country's own ongoing issues must be addressed and solved before that country can play any part in preventing other current atrocities elsewhere. The old "charity begins at home" fallacy chestnut, that's the long and the short of it. And what a complete circus of a position that is: forego any ability we may have to prevent death or save lives, because some unrelated issues haven't yet been solved. Allow things to get worse and worse and worse unless they're addressed in exactly the right order and only one-at-a-time.
And of course, as always, you're unable to apply any standard whatsoever consistently. For Russia need not solve its own severe, brutal repression and oligarchic tyranny before it wades into another country. No, they're free to invade, nary a peep.
And (ineffectually) protesting the US and UK while also (ineffectively) protesting Russia is not somehow supporting the former against the latter. Because preventing Russian wars of aggression is not somehow vital to maintaining Western hegemony. Fucking obviously. If you want to argue that shelling hospitals and annexing smaller countries is vital to ending Western capitalist power, please, I'd love to hear it. But the international working classes are not served by imperialist expansion if it happens to be someone else doing it. They are, in fact, dying.
The most productive thing the United States could do right now is to ... well, actually, it's to give back the ungodly sum of money it recently stole from Afghanistan. But apart from that, it is to do what it can to encourage Ukraine and Russia to make peace-- not by a sanction strategy that is extremely unlikely to do anything except cause pain to innocent people, but by making the reasonable concessions related to security and neutrality that Russia has demanded for the past 14 years-- and letting them keep Crimea (because that appears to be what the Crimeans want) and somehow resolving the Donbass situation to the satisfaction of the people living there. I don't actually know that a peace deal like this is still possible; once a nation is at war and winning, typically they want more from a peace deal than they would have accepted not to go to war in the first place. The US and NATO shouldn't have let it get to this point, and if either had any genuine care about the wellbeing of Ukraine, they wouldn't have. Instead they urged Ukraine to poke the Russian bear without any intention of backing them up in an effective way; to not have any intention of helping Ukraine fight Russia is fine, it makes sense. But in combination with urging them to provoke, it is monstrous. The answer is not to enact sanctions that will have deadly effect on the Russian people (to say nothing of the other pain they will cause Europe and elsewhere) but do more or less nothing to stop the war, it is to stop the delusion of a faux alliance with Ukraine entirely and stop using Ukraine as a proxy to damage Russia.
You would prolong the war and the deadly bombing with the same end result-- except that the swap of territory between the US/IMF puppet state and Russia would be yet more likely to encompass the whole country; the longer the war goes on, the more likely that is.
I would prolong the war and the bombing, he says, while licking the boots of the actual perpetrator.
Agreeing to annexation would not end the war. Because you may have noticed that Ukraine didn't have WMDs, and it didn't matter to Russia. This has been an annexation project from the start. And if full capitulation is offered, then you'll have... what, a few years of "peace" (as Putin carries out the same purges he always does, rounds up and executes gay people and journalists, and completely dismantles democracy)... before he starts to move on Moldova, or Sweden. And then we'll be back here again, with you griping until you're blue in the face that ooooobviously Russia isn't going to invade! Those are just routine manoeuvres! Oh, well, ok, they invaded, but NATO drove them to it! The only way to stop the bloodshed is to let them take it!
