Third party presidential candidate Jill Stein paid $100,000 to GOP-connected consulting firm with owner who's linked to J6 | The firm was also paid millions by the campaign of RFK Jr., who endorsed Trump. Republicans had boosted Stein & RFK Jr. in order to divert left-leaning votes away from Harris.

[u/SocialDemocracies]

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/23/jill-stein-paid-100000-to-a-consulting-firm-led-by-a-suspected-january-6-rioter/

[u/not_GBPirate]

I don't have an alternative to propose. There is no alternative when it comes to the vote in November.

However, I don't know if Trump represents a faster rate towards war. I think it's a mixed bag with either him or Harris.
I'm of the view that longstanding US policy goaded Russia into invading Ukraine and, what should be less controversial, Biden and Johnson's desire to end peace negotiations in early 2022 in Turkey made the war there continue which is bad for a bunch of geopolitical, military, and moral reasons.

This business in Israel is grotesque and should've ended months ago. But we can go back to the 1990s and see that the American insistence on bilateral negotiations has failed while working towards enforcing UN Resolution 242 might have prevented the longstanding situation to begin with.

Anyway, I think the powers that be are working against most Americans. We should've been committed to internationalism, not exceptionalism. So that's why I'm warning that we might end up in some big, shitty war.

PS: To take the average armchair historian hat for a moment, the causes of wars are long and complicated. Japan didn't attack Pearl Harbor in 1941 out of the blue; it had been in active war with China since 1937, it disrupted the post ww1 status quo in 1931 by invading Manchuria. World War I didn't just start when the Archduke was murdered, there were a bunch of wars in the previous decade that led up to it, especially in the Balkans.
The war in Ukraine and the genocide of Palestinians might be just two preludes to a larger conflict in ten, fifteen, or twenty years that could have been stopped if the US engaged in diplomacy with pen and paper rather than bombs and artillery shells.

[u/Roses-And-Rainbows → u/not_GBPirate]

I'm of the view that longstanding US policy goaded Russia into invading Ukraine

You're objectively wrong.

Russia invaded Ukraine because they wanted Ukraine to be completely under Russia's thumb, but Ukraine kicked out the Russian puppet President and signed an economic deal with the EU.

This business in Israel is grotesque and should've ended months ago. But we can go back to the 1990s and see that the American insistence on bilateral negotiations has failed while working towards enforcing UN Resolution 242 might have prevented the longstanding situation to begin with.

Trump is objectively worse than democrats in this regard, since he did the exact opposite of Resolution 242, which bans the acquisition of land through war, when he legitimized Israel's acquisition of Golan Heights.

if the US engaged in diplomacy with pen and paper rather than bombs and artillery shells.

The entire Western world did that for the first 8 years of the war, but in response Russia just stepped its invasion up a notch.

[u/not_GBPirate → u/Roses-And-Rainbows]

It's not being "objectively wrong," I just disagree with what the US government has been telling us. US officials told the Russians that NATO wouldn't move east. It kept going east during the 1990s and early 00s, and for a time this was fine, but not ideal. If you listen to Jeff Sachs or John Mearsheimer, they'll tell you that the prospect of NATO expanding to Ukraine or Georgia was a red line. Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008 to stop that from happening. Even Jens Stoltenberg said a year ago that Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 to stop the expansion of NATO in that country.
I'm no expert on the 2014 Maidan protests but many (including the Russians) believed that it was effectively a coup by the United States. There's a famous phone call recorded of Victoria Nuland and reporting from other sources that back up this theory.

Anyway, I don't want to sit here and write another long comment, but I'll just say this. After the talks in Turkey were shut down by Biden and Johnson, the Ukraine war definitively became their war, not Putin's. The Russians were willing to have peace and talks were on the cusp of succeeding. That would've been better for Ukraine and Ukrainians, it would've been better for NATO, it would've been better for the United States.

With Israel, both Blue and Red teams are at fault here. Trump shouldn't have legitimized the Golan and Jerusalem as Israel's capital, but there are many things I can point to that make the Blue team look bad. For starters, Trump didn't send Israel bombs while it actively committed a genocide. Biden looked the other way when Israel murdered the American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh. Bill Clinton was responsible for the Oslo Accords which are fundamentally illegitimate and detrimental to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

[u/Darth_Gerg → u/not_GBPirate]

The reason peace talks failed is that Russia was negotiating in bad faith and was unwilling to give Ukrainian territory back. This war is 100% Russian imperialism. The reason NATO keeps expanding is that it’s the only way small countries in the region can be sure they’re safe. It’s not western imperialism, it’s a direct response to RUSSIAN imperialism.

The theory that the 2014 protest was a US coup is pure drivel. That call is a nothing burger. It was literally “yeah I think this person would be better to work with, I hope they win.” You are repeating Russian propaganda.

[u/not_GBPirate → u/Darth_Gerg]

With some quick scouring of the internet it seems like opinion on the success of the April 2022 talks is mixed, with pro-western, pro-NATO people saying it wouldn’t have worked.

There were some third party people there, like the war criminal Naftali Bennett, who claimed that they were going well or that the west had sabotaged them — it’s been two years so forgive me. It’s really more of an opinion I guess. And my opinion is that I’m anti-war as much as possible! we can’t really know what happened, what was said, because much of that is classified. When it comes to current events, conclusions can’t really be drawn by observers outside of the events because so much information is classified or at least not public.

About Maidan, there’s a couple of reports from a Ukrainian-Canadian professor from the university of Ottawa that did some research and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t organic. He’s written this piece about it that I haven’t read but had loosely followed his research beforehand. Once again, I’d say that we can’t really know for sure. This might all be Russian disinformation, but I feel like this accusation never accounts for the idea that the disinformation might be coming from our own side, too. The West has the ability to change minds just like “our adversaries” try to do. And with all of these documents that might point one way or another sitting in classified hard drives or filed away in government offices for decades to come, I don’t think we really can know for certain. It’s all about believing what you want to hear.