But will their lives really be any different whether they win or lose? It’s not like they’re being invaded by a country with a different economic system.
Edit: Look at Crimea, how’d that go for the average Crimean? Any significant differences in their quality of life?
If you see no differences between the Ukrainian government, flawed as it has been, and the Russian government under Putin... you may need to look a little deeper.
I’m going to over to your place, take over the nicest room, lock a few people in the basement if they complain, and you’ll be going to work everyday to pay for this. Sound good?
Edit: the reason you should not use household finances as an analogy in this is because households do not control monetary policy and most people don’t really understand national and international financial policy (or their own finances half the time).
In this case, a neighbor making an unprovoked takeover of your house in order to take advantage of the people living there is exactly what happened. The invasion hinges on “might makes right” so it stands to reason that should be fine in the locale of your home if it’s ok for a Ukrainian’s home near the border.
So by that logic, Ukraine and in fact every country that Putin sets his eyes on should just roll over and surrender?
The mere threat of violence should allow a dictator to take over, as long as the country is moderately corrupt?
I hate to break it to you, that’s nearly every country in the world, so Putin (or any other dictator) could become the world’s emperor if they just made a credible threat?
Yet somehow almost every nation that’s neighboring Russia is ready to fight Russia just for the privilege of not being in Russia. We cannot all be just delusional.
Well yeah, it’s up to them, but I don’t think they’re monolithic. They’ll eventually negotiate once they run out of men or weapons. I don’t think they’d be slaves if Russia captured Kyiv either. Perhaps without political rights, but that wasn’t much different than before.
That depends where you live, what your cultural upbringing is. If you are from Russia, sure. There, it is a myth, and democracy is something to scare people by.
I used to be a huge Kliban fan back in the day. I’ve still got various t-shirts with his art on them.
From memory:
a cat wearing a Japanese headscarf presenting (/selling?) sushi
2 karate cats getting into it; one has the other by the tail
a cat dressed as a sumo wrestler
a cat playing the guitar and singing the blues: “Love to eat them mousies / Mousies what I love to eat / Bite they little heads off / Nibble on they tiny feet”
That last one is one of my all time faves. I would “sing” it to my friends whenever someone commented on my shirt, complete with the standard blues riff.
Another random one (not a t-shirt): 2 cats, one says “Mao”, the other points and says “Mousie dung”. It was a very oblique, random and context-free reference to Mao Zedong. So random, I think the only point of it was to illustrate the pun. If there was a clever political reference, it was lost on me.
When I was a kid, I was super curious, almost annoyingly so. Now, it’s hard to indulge in it, because of how depressed I usually am, because I don’t have a job. I hate being an adult…
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