Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR. Of course there’s enormous pushback when politicians in power try to strengthen ties with Putin (and cut ties to EU countries), it would be really weird if there weren’t. The same would happen in Poland and many other Eastern European countries who were staunchly anti Putin long before the invasion, even though they don’t have an immediate threat from a shared border with Russia.

In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent, so there just wasn’t any political pressure to do something.

As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests

Western countries just stood by in the first days and did nothing, as they had no hopes for Ukraine surviving for more than a few days. If the Ukrainian public weren’t willing to push back, they would’ve had no chance to stop the Russian advances and their government would’ve collapsed in days, just as both Russia and the West predicted.

It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled from the occupied territories, and accepting that they will never get their relatives and homes back will be unthinkable for a large part of them, especially after the reports of forced relocations from occupied regions into Russia (including thousands of children) and all the suffering that Putin has brought upon Ukrainians. Maybe they will reach the point of making concessions if they see no hope of retaking the territory. Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

You said that they are a reactionary government, but you also implied that their reactionary justification to invade is legitimate.

You said you “don’t fully agree” with Russia intervening in the civil war (by shelling kyiv I guess, because theres definitely civil war there). As if they didn’t provoke it in the first place to justify their invasion.

I also wouldn’t expect people who are criticial of war to say that they “don’t fully agree” with Russia waging a war of aggression and commiting mass murder and war crimes in Ukraine, I would expect some actual condemnation of such atrocities.

Yeah, I don’t fully agree with their decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war

Of course Russia had nothing to do with the war. They would never fund and support the separatists, or spread anti Ukrainian propaganda amongst the Russian speaking population, because Putin loves democracy and just wants the best for everyone, of course. /s

Read the second paragraph again. I explicitly said that I’m not happy about their suffering, regardless of their political opinions.

It’s just disingenuous to claim that people merely take issue with their opinions when it’s the actions that are the real problem, although that still doesn’t justify schadenfreude.

This is “people with a different political opinion are suffering, yaaaaaay!”

To be fair, the issue isn’t that they have “a different political opinion”, the issue is that they will cause insane amounts of suffering and deaths down the line if they get their way. Climate change will kill millions of people, and trump and his supporters seek to make it even worse for short term political gain (aside from the attempts to install an authoritarian dictatorship and all that stuff).

That being said, I’m also not happy when indoctrinated people suffer, regardless of their murderous ideologies. Imo it’s more of a cultural issue, and nobody has any direct control over the culture/social environment that they grow up in.

Veganism requires the overuse of pesticides

What makes you think that? Why would growing grain for humans require more pesticides than growing grain for animals, for example?

The NSDAP had no issues working with Russia, as long as it was in their interest.

We’ve already come a long way on price, thankfully. When I go to local supermarkets or discounters (Lidl, Kaufland, Aldi, Penny,…), the store brand meat alternatives are already as cheap as their factory farmed products. Same for the milk alternatives, soy yoghurts, and so on. So price parity has already been reached in many cases, at least here in Germany.

I guess now the issue is that many of the discounter alternatives don’t taste the same as meat yet (although they’re getting better), and the premium plant-based products taste great, but are still more expensive than the cheapest meat products.

Serious question, what could possibly convince them?

We all learnt about the atrocious living conditions on factory farms long ago. We all know that the meat industry is terrible for the environment and climate. We learnt about the avian flu being spread on cattle farms, with owners hiding the cases from the authorities, with 0 regard for public safety. We all know that migrants and children are systemically exploited by slaughterhouses, many get PTSD or become alcoholics, some get severely injured or die because of accidents.

Yet after all of that, meat eaters still happily give their money to these places every time they go to a supermarket or restaurant.

The meat industry got people so hooked on animal products that they can get away with basically anything, change my mind.

BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.

It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.

The neat thing is, you can add stuff like range checks and logging for getters and setters without changing every call. Separation of concerns is also vital in larger projects.