I don’t believe countries have an inherent right to defend themselves, and if I did then I would say that the DPR had the same right.

It’s not the Donbas war I’m questioning, there’s a reasoning chain that’s understandable. Both geopolitically, strategically and culturally.

It’s the full scale invasion of 2022 I’m questioning. There’s no chain of thought leading to that invasion, other than greed and lust for blood by Putin and his inner circles. The nationalists were not in power by the time they began their invasion. They had already gained control of the region, Donbas, that wanted to be Russian.

There’s just no way to argue the full scale invasion should ever have started.

Somehow, the extreme anti-war stance of not supporting even “defensive” wars makes me a bloodthirsty warmonger

Your endgame argument is national states shouldn’t exist, but today they do. As long as they do exist, national governments should be able to defend against other nations attempt to gain control over them. Because if we do assume, at one point we get a global government and abolish the national states. Then it’s whoever carries the most power (that’s war machines), that’ll be able to decide the values of such a government. And by extend shape the culture that’ll impact everyone.

example, I think China is more democratic than the US.

Both countries are a clusterfuck from a democratic/people decides perspective. The way both countries are ruled is quite similar. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Because my metric for the level of ‘democracy’ in a nation is how closely that nations policies match the will of its people and how happy the people are with its policies

This is really hard to gauge for China specifically, because there’s as you noted no electorally elected officials.

Furthermore it’s an authoritarian leadership, known to punish dissidents. It’s a very complex topic to go into who benefits and who don’t, from the current Chinese policies. Chinas economy is as much, if not more, dependent on gig labour as the US is. The gig labourers are not in better conditions in China, than they are in the US.

It’s not unheard of that parents pay for their adult children’s medicine, because the only income their child could get was from a poorly paid delivery gig.

There’s an issue globally with the elites having grown more greedy, especially in the past four decades. I think one of US, UK, China or Russia is going to see their elite lose power and fall to a popular uprising. Before any other oligarchical society, at which all oligarchs are going to give crumbs back to the people.

Just like European royal houses gave more wealth and power to their commoners as a response to the French revolution.

XiJinpingStanAccount honestly sounds like a parody handle, I’d expect the likelyhood of such a user to actually favour Xi Jinping rather low.

Personally I don’t understand why we’d want less democracy, instead of more of it. Citizens assemblies is the logical move, for anyone wanting more power to the people - But I guess my views are closer to anarchist movements than anything, I don’t want to alter everything. I just want to kill intergenerational wealth.

So that was a lot of words to say nothing.

Do you think Russia is in a right to invade Ukraine?

It’s the most clear cut conflict in the world at the moment, anyone supporting Putin’s aggression has lost themselves to propaganda. Ukraine unfortunately didn’t get enough support early on, this conflict could had cost half the lives lost to date.

It’s miles apart to be against an aggressive occupational force with no clear goals, and not support a country’s right to defend itself.