@mia
I suspect you're just misreading my descriptive statements as prescriptive; African Americans insisted they wanted extremely harsh policing and drug enforcement, and now they want the exact opposite, but although their prescriptive demands have flipped, they still want the same thing; less crime and drug abuse. Although I fall more on the "Send more aid" camp and P, well, somewhere not on it, this is not me being "pro Ukraine" vs P being "pro Russia". I don't want to discuss prescriptive strategies because it is boring, gets too fucking heated, and involves a lot of loose guess work and predictions that we can't actually calculate the likelihood of being right.

The only "should" I said was "I am not even saying what we should or should not do", but P did delve into whether we should "free the shit out of" Ukraine, but you can't simultaneously complain I'm writing books over here, and also that I don't address his prescriptive opinions if I myself am trying to avoid that. I don't want to advocate my prescriptive opinions, even though I do have them, I just don't know how I would convince somebody else of them; I wrote a whole "book" about my grandfather to better explain where I am coming from, but you seem to have missed the point of that and brushed it aside as prescriptive war mongering.

TLDR: If you need a tldr, just don't involve yourself in concersations you don't have the attention span to read.

@p
>-it might be better to just ask, and then we're communicating instead of trying to push something.

I still plan on Saturday or Sunday compiling a little list of questions about some historical facts leading up to the Ukraine Russia war; they'll be formatted like "Do you believe X happened before Y". I'll also give you a link to some sources/articles so if you'd rather your first reply be more of a refutation of my potential refutations, you can do that.

As much preamble as this was, I think setting the stage for a discussion that isn't bad faith evangelizing, where we steel-man each other's opinions instead of straw-manning them, is always worth it; there is no shortage of yelling matches online, and not nearly enough honest discussions. :)