patrick.net

You are so far gone in this 'prison' theme you've forgotten how Freedom is achieved and preserved.

lostand confused says

SoftShell says

You keep twerking back to this off-topic prison theme.

You sound like a bitter old ex-con whose forfeited a good portion of his years behind bars...

You are so far gone and lost deep in the republican talking points that you do not know what freedom means-sad.

All you talk about is 'prison' and 'freedom'...
Where'd you serve your time??

lostand confused says

SoftShell says

You keep twerking back to this off-topic prison theme.

You sound like a bitter old ex-con whose forfeited a good portion of his years behind bars...

You are so far gone and lost deep in the republican talking points that you do not know what freedom means-sad.

SoftShell says

You are so far gone in this 'prison' theme you've forgotten how Freedom is achieved and preserved.

What a sad pathetic example of a human-unless you make your living with the prison industrial complex or the military industrial complex. Then everything you post makes perfect sense. Your livelihood is based on destroying people's lives and families and coating it under "freedom".

What a naive childish mind you have, thinking the world is full of easter bunnies and santa clauses who want nothing other than to shower you with Rights and a glorious constitution.

Oh look! Someone posted about the similarities of current day events, and events leading up to WWII....BADBADBADBAD!!!!

lostand confused says

SoftShell says

You are so far gone in this 'prison' theme you've forgotten how Freedom is achieved and preserved.

What a sad pathetic example of a human-unless you make your living with the prison industrial complex or the military industrial complex. Then everything you post makes perfect sense. Your livelihood is based on destroying people's lives and families and coating it under "freedom".

So you are saying it's ok to let the baltics join NATO, but come crunch time tell them to go fuck off....they ain't worth it...

What does that tell the other members of NATO about your commitment to come save their collective asses??

Rin says

Are you guys missing the point?

Is it up to the US and NATO allies (basically the UK & Netherlands), to sort out the issues with the former Soviet Union?

For one, I don't think so. Western Europe and the Americas come first. And then afterwards, we can worry about eastern Europe.

SoftShell says

What a naive childish mind you have, thinking the world is full of easter bunnies and santa clauses who want nothing other than to shower you with Rights and a glorious constitution.

Alright then so you make your money by destroying lives and need people to be dumb and compliant and never ask questions.

I ask a logical question-how can we be the country that arrests the most people in the whole world and yet go around the world preaching about freedom. I thought it flew right over your head, but I now wonder if this is your livelihood and so you refuse to see the truth-because you would lose your pension. But hey -I guess you need a bogeyman to keep the charade going and any body who questions the status quo must be terrifying to you. No matter, keep going on. You thrive in hypocrisy-it is your way.

And I answered as I did because you are talking apples and oranges.

People lose their freedom through the 'arrest' process due to performing illegal activities.

Countries lose their freedom through the militaristic acts of tyrants.

Your question is an intentional diversion from the thread topic. Very troll-like, I might add....

lostand confused says

I ask a logical question-how can we be the country that arrests the most people in the whole world and yet go around the world preaching about freedom.

You are kinda right.
I program the phones that deliver the social media that take people off into an electronic wonderland never to be seen or heard from in the flesh again...

lostand confused says

Alright then so you make your money by destroying lives and need people to be dumb and compliant and never ask questions.

I guess I must be freaking myself out then, as I am the one questioning the status quo of the Russia/Crimia situation.

lostand confused says

But hey -I guess you need a bogeyman to keep the charade going and any body who questions the status quo must be terrifying to you.

SoftShell says

along with the loss of all the gains achieved as a result of it's dismantling under Reagan.

Sorry, the berlin wall came down under Bush I. History isn't your strong point I guess

au contraire..
The wall did indeed fall under bush, but the dismantling of the Soviet Empire occurred under Reagan.

bob2356 says

SoftShell says

along with the loss of all the gains achieved as a result of it's dismantling under Reagan.

Sorry, the berlin wall came down under Bush I. History isn't your strong point I guess

SoftShell says

And I answered as I did because you are talking apples and oranges.

People lose their freedom through the 'arrest' process due to performing illegal activities.

Countries lose their freedom through the militaristic acts of tyrants.

Your question is an intentional diversion from the thread topic. Very troll-like, I might add....

Nope. Your mind is so closed that you can't see the obvious. You get all worked up about Crimea-which was a part of Russia for 300 + years and is majority Russian and you compare that to hitler. Yet our country makes up laws against personal freedom-drugs and throws millions and millions in jail. States legalize marijuana and republicans push Obama to enforce federal laws and arrest all those people in those states that have legalized marijuana-state rights be damned. yeah the party of small govt.

Then when I question that you assume I must have been in jail. Then you talk about tyrants and foreign countries. Step outside and see how illogical your position is. We can arrest people for their personal choices-even when it harms no one-but by golly Putin does something -oh he is more evil than Hitler.

Oh you think tyrants just toss people in jail for no reason. In some countries criticizing the dictator is a crime or not crying enough or not going to communal grieving sessions and crying in public is a crime punishable by labor camps. By your argument they deserved it, because the act they commited was illegal.Yet more people are thrown in jail here than in any nation on earth.

me-I refuse to believe that Americans are the worst, most criminal people on the earth. I believe the govt has run amok and made a wide variety of victimless crimes as crimes and it time to take a look a serious look at ourselves and get OUR FREEDOM back.

But your kind will fight tooth and nail-because for many that is their livelihood. if drugs were made legal, the DEA would be disbanded and a huge chunk of police, jails, lawyers, courts, judges would be out of a job with no alternative career. They have everything to lose and actually want the status quo.

if they could turn the public's attention on Putin or some other issue-they can continue heir charade and keep lying that freedom is what they support-while they arrest and destroy even more folks and families.

SoftShell says

au contraire..

The wall did indeed fall under bush, but the dismantling of the Soviet Empire occurred under Reagan.

bob2356 says

SoftShell says

along with the loss of all the gains achieved as a result of it's dismantling under Reagan.

Sorry, the berlin wall came down under Bush I. History isn't your strong point I guess

au contraire times 2. protests started in summer 1988. the first countries pulled away in the summer of 1989 and dissolution was complete in december 1991. Reagan is highly overrated as the architect of the fall of the soviet union. It would have happened if Jimmy Carter had 2 more terms.

SoftShell says

What does that tell the other members of NATO about your commitment to come save their collective asses??

I don't know how to say this ... but culturally speaking, America is only close to Mother England.

And thus, it's really about how the US deals with its relation, to its mother nation, whether or not, one's heritage is 1/16th British or 1/2.

As much as I'd wished things were different, this is how things come down.

From the current pov, that means that western Europe comes first, and others, last.

Therefore, since the US's relation to eastern Europe is distant, I understand this gap.

Well...you just want the thread topic to be about our current drug laws and how they are enforced, instead of bloodless war coupled with illegal annexation.
And you want to weave the two together comparing them from a moral standpoint.
And that's all nice and dandy.
But it looks and smells like a thread diversion...

Your comments are reasonable and on topic when you talk about Russia/Crimia history, but invariably go off into a rant against current US drug law. I don't know what you are bitching about, Obama/Holder are not enforcing most of the drug laws on the books...it's a free ride for you.

As far as the US having the largest prison population in the world, laws are laws, don't break them and you won't go to prison...if you don't like the law, work to have it changed, or go live somewhere where the laws are more to your liking..

lostand confused says

SoftShell says

And I answered as I did because you are talking apples and oranges.

People lose their freedom through the 'arrest' process due to performing illegal activities.

Countries lose their freedom through the militaristic acts of tyrants.

Your question is an intentional diversion from the thread topic. Very troll-like, I might add....

Nope. Your mind is so closed that you can't see the obvious. You get all worked up about Crimea-which was a part of Russia for 300 + years and is majority Russian and you compare that to hitler. Yet our country makes up laws against personal freedom-drugs and throws millions and millions in jail. States legalize marijuana and republicans push Obama to enforce federal laws and arrest all those people in those states that have legalized marijuana-state rights be damned. yeah the party of small govt.

SoftShell says

As far as the US having the largest prison population in the world, laws are laws, don't break them and you won't go to prison

Music to the most brutal dictator's ears. Since the thread title is Hitler-I would dare say , he felt the same.

I don't know on what planet you guys live, but from where I sit it looks like NATO all but captured most of a previously Russian-allied Ukraine.

It's a huge set back for Russia - unless they invade now the rest of Ukraine.

Which means either way it's a setback.

Well, I'm not "all worked up" about Crimea.
I'm point out patterns that existed pre-WWII.

German is Austria's official language.
Russian is Crimia's dominant language

Austria and Germany have been tied at the hip off and on for the past 5 centuries.
Same goes for Russia and Crimea.

Germany's initial move leading to WWII was to occupy and illegally 'annex' Austria against their wishes.
Russia is in the process of illegally 'annexing' Crimea, a part of the sovereign country of Ukraine, against Ukraine's wishes.

Me thinks you are the one worked up by the obvious similarities I've pointed out.
lostand confused says

Nope. Your mind is so closed that you can't see the obvious. You get all worked up about Crimea-which was a part of Russia for 300 + years and is majority Russian and you compare that to hitler.

Oh, and lets not forget this similarity:
Neville appeased Hitler.
Obama, with the wrist slap sanctions, has now appeased Putin.

lostand confused says

You get all worked up about CrimeaSudetenland-which was a part of Russia settled by Germans for 300 500 + years and is majority Russian German and you compare that to hitler.

FIFY

The process of dismantling the soviet union started when we outspent them on military during the 80's....The walls coming down were the final act of the dismantling process.

But there were more immediate causes for the collapse. In the middle 1980's about seventy percent of the industrial output of the Soviet Union was going to the military. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB official who defected to Britain, asserted that at least one third of the total output was going to the military. British intelligence could not believe such a high figure but later Western intelligence sources estimated that it was at least fifty percent. One can only imagine what a severe shortages of industrial goods there were for the rest of the economy.

In the U.S. the Reagan Administration increased the budget for the military and presented the possibility that it would implement a Star Wars antiballistic missile system. To maintain a parity with the U.S. under those developments would have required an even larger share of industrial ouput going to the military. The planners and decision-makers had to face the fact that it was economically impossible for the Soviet Union to increase the share of its output going to the military. The Soviet authorities then ended the arms race and called off the Cold War. When the justification of an external threat was removed there was no reason for the Russian public to toleratel the totalitarian regime and the political system fell apart.

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sovietcollapse.htm

bob2356 says

SoftShell says

au contraire..

The wall did indeed fall under bush, but the dismantling of the Soviet Empire occurred under Reagan.

bob2356 says

SoftShell says

along with the loss of all the gains achieved as a result of it's dismantling under Reagan.

Sorry, the berlin wall came down under Bush I. History isn't your strong point I guess

au contraire times 2.

SoftShell says

Same goes for Russia and Crimea.

Only since Stalin moved lots of Russians there after WW2.

SoftShell says

The process of dismantling the soviet union started when we outspent them on military during the 80's....The walls coming down were the final act of the dismantling process.

I guess you didn't read the rest of the article. The soviet union would have collapsed no matter what Reagan did. He probably accelerated the process but it was going no matter what. I never believed the Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union hype and I was there. Reagan's policies in the long term have proved more destructive to the US than Johnson's great society. I even voted for Reagan the first time, then I realized I had been rolled.

"But there was a more immediate explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union provided by Yegor Gaidar, who had been acting prime minister of Russia from June of 1992 to December of 1992 and a key figure in the transformation of the Russian economy. In his last work,

Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, published in 2007 Gaidar provides a powerful explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet agriculture had stagnated in the 1980's but the demand for grain in the cities was increasing. It was necessary to buy grain in the international market. While the price of petroleum was high it was feasible to finance the purchase of grain from internal sources. When the price of petroleum fell in the last 1980's the Soviet Union needed to borrow the funds from Western banks to purchase the needed grain. This severely restricted the international activities of the Soviet Union. It could not send in Soviet troops to put down the rebellions against communism in Eastern Europe because such an action would have resulted in a refusal of Western sources to lend the money needed. Likewise the attempted coup d'état was doomed to failure because the coup leaders would not have been able to borrow the funds needed to stave off starvation in the major cities. "

Good point!

zzyzzx says

SoftShell says

Same goes for Russia and Crimea.

Only since Stalin moved lots of Russians there after WW2.

I guess you discount a country investing 50%-70% of it's industrial output to it's military as the major source of it's eventual demise.
You are not connecting the dots. The major reason the USSR had to borrow to feed it's people was the drop in oil revenue,coupled with the fact that the majority of what revenue was coming in was being spent on the military industrial complex to try to keep pace with Reagan's military budget.

If Russia did not have to keep pace with US Military spending, they would not have had to borrow to feed their people. Of course, with much smaller military spending they still would not have had enough power to put down the rebellions against communism in Eastern Europe, so they were doomed either way. But most likely they would not have had to dissolve the USSR.

bob2356 says

SoftShell says

The process of dismantling the soviet union started when we outspent them on military during the 80's....The walls coming down were the final act of the dismantling process.

I guess you didn't read the rest of the article. The soviet union would have collapsed no matter what Reagan did.

http://www.ronpaulchannel.com/video/russia-coverage-rt-liz-wahl-media-bias/

Around 5 minutes you'll see Ron talk about media nonsense out here in US related to Ukraine. Our media is full of sh**.

SoftShell says

I guess you discount a country investing 50%-70% of it's industrial output to it's military as the major source of it's eventual demise.

Reagan/Bush presided over the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union but the fact remains that it would have collapsed during ANY US administration. The Democratic administrations of Carter, Johnson and Kennedy were just as confrontational as the Republican ones. For example during the Carter years in 1979 NATO accelerated the arms race with the Double-Track Decision. It was initiated by Schmidt, the Social Democratic chancellor in Germany at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_Double-Track_Decision

When Reagan was calling for the wall to come down I remember thinking that it was a great acting performance to take credit for the eventual collapse. The real credit has to go to Gorbachev and his foreign minister Shevardnadze who later said that Reagan's star wars actually made their job convincing the Russian conservatives to reduce the military and reorganize the economy that much more difficult. It could have easily turned into a reactionary coup by the Soviet hardliners because of the cowboy foreign policy mentality of Reagan. Please stop perpetuating the myth of Reagan defeating the USSR.

SoftShell says

German is Austria's official language.

Russian is Crimia's dominant language

Austria and Germany have been tied at the hip off and on for the past 5 centuries.

Same goes for Russia and Crimea.

Germany's initial move leading to WWII was to occupy and illegally 'annex' Austria against their wishes.

I think you got that part wrong. Austrians voted about 99% for reunification with Germany at the time. The only illegal aspect of it was that it broke the Versailles treaty which was aimed at keeping Germany small and split in two.

Austria was not only part of Germany from around 900 to 1866. It was the most important German state during most of that time and presided over the others during the Habsburg dynasty. It was the North Germany rival Prussia under Bismarck that kicked Austria out of the union under heavy protests of the other Germans. So when you say off and on it was mostly on. Only today if you ask Austrians they would consider themselves independent. But it doesn't matter now since both are in the EU and the borders are open anyways.

That is not comparable to the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine has its own language. If you want to draw any comparison it would be more like Germany and the Czechs. I know all these comparisons with Hitler are flawed, but I would say that Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania which are in NATO are like Poland before WWII which had the unconditional backing of UK and France. I think we should draw any line for Putin when it comes to NATO countries. Outside of that it is a matter of economic boycotts and appealing to the moderates in Russia to avoid more confrontation.

First of all ... it's time to descale the so-called expanded NATO.

It was designed, as the USA-UK alliance, and its sphere of influence against the Soviet's Warsaw Pact.

This sphere includes Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, and Turkey. And thanks to the Cyrus situation, letting in Turkey probably wasn't the best idea, since Greece and Turkey have been at odds for ages.

Then, for some bizarre reason, when the Cold War had ended, every nation looking for free military assistance started signing up for NATO.
Sorry, but that's not how an alliance is suppose to work. It's not a bridge club with annual dues.

NATO is a defense union. If Tunisia were to launch an attack on Sicily or Morocco against British Gibraltar, NATO forces will respond. Western Europe & the USA are very tight in that regard.

By expanding NATO, however, the central tenant of the organization had dissipated, as additional members have their own territorial disputes, like Croatia & Slovenia. What would NATO do their own members decide to go to war against each other?

Rin says

What would NATO do their own members decide to go to war against each other?

Easy answer: The same applies inside NATO as applies outside. If any member state attacks another member state it draws a response from all other members.

Rin says

It was designed, as the USA-UK alliance, and its sphere of influence against the Soviet's Warsaw Pact.

I disagree. It was designed as a defense treaty against the USSR. It was not a way to get free military assistance. For example if Turkey were to be attacked by Syria, Iraq or Iran today all 28 nations would be obligated to drive back the invader. As far as I know NATO countries already deployed missile shields in Turkey to protect against any Syrian war party trying to draw Turkey into the conflict.

On the other hand NATO did not have authority to intervene in Yugoslavia or Iraq. It NATO member countries entered into those conflicts it does not require other NATO countries to follow. Most abstained in Iraq. NATO is a defense treaty and I don't like it if in the media it is treated as an offensive military organization.

libero says

Austrians voted about 99% for reunification with Germany at the time. The only illegal aspect of it was that it broke the Versailles treaty which was aimed at keeping Germany small and split in two.

Yeah, nothing illegal except they invaded sovereign country, detained the lawfully elected government, arrested and sent to concentration camps 70,000 of potential political dissenters, abrogate voting rights of 10% of the population. The fact that the vote was non-secret, i.e. the voters were handing their ballots to the voting officials instead of inserting them into the closed box was just an icing on the cake.

Fuck, I can't believe there are still uninformed Nazi apologist like this dude in the age when access to information is so easy. Read something on the subject, you moron, even fucking wikipedia will do.

you'd have thought he would have seen 'The Sound of Music' once or twice....

Straw Man says

Read something on the subject, you moron, even fucking wikipedia will do.

SoftShell says

you'd have thought he would have seen 'The Sound of Music' once or twice....

I wouldn't rely on Hollywood for historical accuracy.

My point was that comparisons to reasons for WWII are flawed. It is even more flawed if the vote in Crimea was secret as you said it was not in Austria. How can you keep suggesting that we are on our way to WWIII? Call me an appeaser if you want but I think cooler heads will prevail this time. Both Russians and Germans had valid grievances with the status quo and starting to bomb them is not the solution I prefer.

I wouldn't either.
But it was too good a line to pass up...
libero says

SoftShell says

you'd have thought he would have seen 'The Sound of Music' once or twice....

I wouldn't rely on Hollywood for historical accuracy.

My point was that comparisons to reasons for WWII are flawed. It is even more flawed if the vote in Crimea was secret as you said it was not in Austria. How can you keep suggesting that we are on our way to WWIII? Call me an appeaser if you want but I think cooler heads will prevail this time. Both Russians and Germans had valid grievances with the status quo and starting to bomb them is not the solution I prefer.

Who said anything about bombing anyone? I was pointing out the parallels.
Everything is not black and white...there are shades of gray...