There’s a much better candidate for the comparison: Saruman, the guy whose whole deal was resisting Sauron by adopting all of his means.

Look, everyone is saying Saruman is just as bad as Sauron, but here’s the thing:

Yes he is moving towards Sauron strategically on specific issues, but these issues are important to his base and he has to throw them a bone.

Yes he is illegally killing Rohan civilians, but nobody claimed the defense of the regions west of his Stone Circle system would be painless.

Yes his armies look and foreign policy look eerily similar to Sauron’s, but he promises he’s trying to stop him actually.

You purists in the Shire keep saying it’s not necessary to destroy the whole forest of Fangorn but he got the endorsement of Lurtz, so he clearly knows more about politics than you do.

Anyone serious understands that resisting Sauron means voting for Saruman.

I don’t think China wants to be the enemy of the US. They are the largest trading partner of the US. They seem genuinely interested in cooperating and bettering their own society. USians seem to be the ones bent on enmity. The US apparently thinks building infrastructure and developing the economies of other nations is ‘malign influence.’ The US killed citizens of allied nations through propaganda to ensure they wouldn’t become friendlier with China, who was offering them vaccines while the US and Europe were hoarding their own.

The US sees ‘being a large country and having influence’ as threatening, there’s no way to peacefully coexist with a country that sees everyone else as a threat by default.

Well we could devote those resources to solving the problems they are criticizing maybe. It would improve the lives of USians and undercut the arguments being brought up.

Spending billions to tell other countries that more infrastructure is actually bad is probably counterproductive and wasteful. Like how we spent money to kill Filipino people by telling them to avoid the Chinese produced covid jab.

Uhm actually, if you think about it it’s still harm reduction:

Think about how many Republicans Trump would appoint? Checkmate

"Would you please disarm yourselves while we aggressively posture and arm your neighbors? It would be very uncooperative of you to refuse. "

Uhm, isn’t there someone you forgot to ask?

Yeah, the news I trust is always reliable and is produced for my benefit so I can be reliably informed.

But have you considered that they fly their jets close to our spy planes that are hovering around their airspace? Menacingly?

It’s great that this will be how he is remembered. He deserves worse but it’s something.

I poked into r/politics to see what was up and there’s a bunch of libs wondering how this old guy snuck in and became the nominee somehow, and how whoever did that should be fired. It’s really weird to see the about face, I thought he was a phenomenal candidate with a sterling record last week.

People who don’t want Russia to acquire resources and think they should be stopped from getting them by force are not pro-Russia. Graham ALSO wants them to fight, you are in complete agreement with him. Are you also a Ruzzian stooge?

I think one thing that’s getting lost in the discussion here is you keep talking about governments as if they are people. Ostensibly liberal states exist to protect human beings and their rights. At the point where “you” have to let “your” values slide in order to deal with “your” existential crisis we are talking about the governent as if it has feelings and its own aspirations that deserve to be treated with the same seriousness we theoretically want to apply to human welfare.

I feel very bad for Ukrainians, to be clear, I think they’ve been mistreated by the US who used them to try and get one over on an adversary in the knowledge that other people will be the ones dying if it goes poorly. That’s certainly very bad.

However you feel about the justice of the invasion, though, we’ve reached the point where even people who support the war and want Ukraine to win are defining winning as a negotiated settlement where they give up territory. If NATO is not willing to fight Russia directly (clearly they aren’t) and continuing the aid to the conflict is not even providing a reasonable way for Ukraine to retain its territory and even cheerleaders who are on the side of Ukraine’s government believe they will have to negotiate a settlement then WHY ARE WE NOT PUSHING THAT? More Ukrainians are being expected to die, against their will as you freely acknowledge, for no long term strategic purpose.

The death and destruction from this war is a human tragedy. It will be more tragic if it is prolonged for years only to end in the same way it could have within months.

Yeah the optics are shit and hard to massage. You have to make it about protesting being violence and antisemitism because there’s no way to sugarcoat all the dead children in Gaza and the rolling discovery of mass graves.

Wait your position is that landlords are renting out places in major US cities at a lower cost than the mortgage? Are they billionaire philanthropists?

Is there any plan in the works to take this stuff back? Like, they spent months hyping the spring offensive (do they still have any of that territory? I thought I read Russia was retaking it) but I’m not hearing anything about their plans to regain the initiative. If their position is only going to degrade from here they might want to consider negotiations.

Smdh danged RuzZian disinformatsyiiiia in lemmygrad, better luck next time tankies, you’ll never get me!

I think there might be a difference between what US officials say and what is actually true. They’re having a real hard time meeting recruiting quotas. Plus recent invasions haven’t really supported the idea that the US is able to win invasions it starts.

They need something to run on, I think. Abortion is a losing issue that Trump doesn’t care about, this and the border stuff are attempts to spin up issues they can run on besides culture war bromides.

Yeah but they’re trying that. The Saudis tried that for like a decade before they started. It’s harder than it appears to bomb a nation into submission.

Edit: just in case someone says some genocidal thing about collectively punishing an entire ethnic group, if you’re from certain communities in the fediverse I probably can’t see your comments, but that would obviously be a horrific crime to actually do.