Conversely, one could bring up the literal war in a particular European country, downfall of women's rights and rising LGBT+ intolerance in a certain developed country, rising income inequality and climate change.
We are living in the most peaceful time in history and one war doesn't change that. You are a victim of media. Try reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling and getting off the internet, it will do you some good.
Sure, you can cherry pick bad events that happen throughout history. But the truth is that:
- the war in Ukraine is significantly less deadly / destructive / etc than basically every other major war in the last 100 years.
- not even sure where to start with this one? Downfall of women's rights... where?
- LGBT+ are more accepted globally (and in the US) than they've ever been.
- Income inequality is a silly metric to care about when actual poverty is going down.
- More people and companies care about climate change than at any other point in history.
Are you seeing the trend? Just because some things might be "bad" by your standards doesn't mean they're not the best they've ever been, and doesn't mean they're not getting better.
To be fair not really… other states have been involved in bigger and overall more terrible wars since then. Not USSR/Russia
Chechnya was much shorter and on a smaller scale. Russia has already lost several times more several times more troops in Ukraine than they had during the entire war in Afghanistan (9 years) of course the civilian and Afghan casualties were mich bigger.
Their involvement in other conflicts was indirect, relatively limited or quite short term (Hungary etc.)
Yes, I wasn't really worrying about the indirect/direct distinction, given that the comments I was replying to were trying to make a point about overall global suffering and evil "winning". It doesn't really matter if Russia is invading Ukraine directly or arming insurgents in [insert proxy war here] – the result is still having a hand in creating suffering, and Ukraine is no worse (better in fact by most metrics) than what they've been doing since WWII.
Mind you I don't think the US/UK/whomever has been doing that much better, but Russia is being picked on because that is who menus singled out.
