Don't forget that Ukraine has a pretty good donation website setup if that happens to be a cause you are willing and have the financial resources to give to.
As a Ukrainian, I'd like to caution that perhaps there are two funds you may want to consider over UA24 - one of which has full transparency and spotless track record (there have been concerns over UA24) where-as another used to be a political activist for a long time turned media personality turned biggest fund who directly sources thousands of FPV drones (more than 150k at this moment) and has the best proven quality of the "produce":
I donate monthly to the latter (alongside donations towards my ex-colleagues and acquaintances serving at the front lines and supply, but those are usually private), but I think western audience may be more comfortable with the former. Either way we appreciate your support in this tragedy of a war. Thank you.
https://u24.gov.ua/
You can choose the allocation of your donation, defence, or if you'd rather donate to other causes, humanitarian aid, demining, rebuilding (...)
A few months ago in my city, an ambulance shelled by Russians in kharkiv was shown. It was quite destroyed, and chock full of holes. It was quite moving
I guess he's saying that hn is "non tilted/neutral" toward any political stance, and as such pinning a comment to a Ukrainian donation gov website could be seen as "supporting" someone
It's an age old debate for sure but "bullshit for cowards" isn't reasoning about it, it's propaganda wording just as easily employed by the aggressor trying to silence people who don't support the war. Since there's no need to mask the real reasoning here, why employ those kinds of attacks?
I could have written it nicer but I was annoyed. Thanks for calling me out.
But I stand by the point. What is not clear? If A attacks B, and B would be happy to revert to back to state before the attack, then C saying it's not it's problem, it's neutral or that it only supports "peace" (letting A win by making B surrender) is not C being neutral. It's direct support of the attacker.
I think what's least clear about your framing is how and why e.g. someone wanting to remain neutral/peaceful can ONLY imply their opinion is "B should surrender so A can win" or similar type statements. Thoughts like "if you don't support B then you must hope A wins" or "If you want peace it means giving A what it wants" are not full arguments in themselves, they are just the claims repeated.
For example, there are certainly those who want Ukraine to just surrender some of its land for peace (the POTUS seeming to be one). That by itself does not explain they MUST be supporting Russia, it just opens the door for such a possibility. Some along these lines of wanting peace/surrender don't support Russia but don't think there'd be anything of Ukraine left at all if the war were to escalate further. Others of completely different opinion believe de-escalation over time towards peace talks will lead to better and better "A and B returning things to the way they were" type results given enough time - but only if the pressure/interest/escalation/pile-on is lowered instead of raised. Yet others have different takes on why/how to be neutral/peaceful and what they think it will end with. And, of course, some genuinely don't support Ukraine because they view the situation as a risk themselves - we just can't jump to that being the only possibility without more reasoning for the rest first.
Now I'm not here to try and argue you should agree with these arguments or that if you respond to just the above points you've now countered the full spectrum of opposing opinion by any stretch of the measure. The only reason I bring these examples up is to show how repeating the conclusion "being neutral is only supporting the attacker" isn't as much providing a point as conveying your current stance. To argue points around it is to try to give credence to why that is the only (or most) correct conclusion and approach and where the other opposing ideas all fell short.
When the depth of consideration of counter-arguments instead comes across as "the other side are just bullshit cowards" or "it's just clear" the best you can hope for is a lot of "ooh-rah" for people who already agreed and a coinciding complete write off from those who disagreed.
As an addendum: Folks (not necessarily you, people like to AI summarize comment history) sometimes take what I say to mean I personally don't support Ukraine or that I explicitly support Trump's actions around this or whatever else they come up with. I personally support Ukraine to fully return to its pre-war borders, disavow most of the government of Russia's actions, and am severely disappointed with Trump's treatment of Zelensky (bringing things back to the original thread). I just have relatively strong opinions about how tone of conversation can be overall damaging for a ideology regardless of the intent or literal stance.
I don't think I did any personal attacks. I simply pointed out that, if they think Neutrality is for cowards, they should probably join in the fight that they believe in instead of not acting, aka neutral.
That "if you feel so strongly why don't you go fight" trope is a cliché of personal attack, since it insinuates hypocrisy and cowardice. If you say you didn't mean it that way, I believe you, but it would still land that way with many readers, so it's necessary to disambiguate these things more clearly.
Most come to news.ycombinator.com expecting see ycombinator activities and content from fellow users, not to find out what Dang's latest endorsement is. When we all feel a certain importance to something content about it appears and bubbles to the top automatically.
It's commendable and brave to publicly stand up and show that you have values. I wish more people understood that by watching Zelensky over the past three years.
If you want the actual number, about 13 bucks per month per taxpayer[1]. So about what, three to four coffees a month to protect 40 million free people from defending themselves from autocracy?
You took the $165 / 12 and arrived at 13 bucks per month per taxpayer.
But if you had read the rest of the transcript, you’d arrive at this beautiful part:
“The numbers we came up with, the $165 per person and the $11.25 per person, aren't really real because they are based on this idea that everything we sent to Ukraine and everything we sent to Israel came from tax revenue, and that's just not the case.
MCMANUS: The revenue that goes in is not necessarily connected to how the government is actually budgeting. What we're paying in taxes just does not have to match what we spend. So the whole exercise is sort of irrelevant.
GONZALEZ: It's irrelevant because of one big elephant in the room, which is deficit spending. We spend more than we bring in as a country.”
And from who is the US borrowing most of their money from? It currently owes China roughly 850 billion USD, and it has to pay interest on this.
And how does it pay this interest?
Either it borrows more, growing the problem, or it is a portion of your taxes going straight to China <3.
>And from who is the US borrowing most of their money from?
The American people, largely. China owns roughly 3% of America's debt. The overwhelming majority of American debt is hold domestically (and thus eventually returns to US citizens) But if the 13 bucks weren't precise enough for you, the 4% interest America pays on 10 year bonds I suppose bring the monstrous bill up another 50 cents per decade, truly a game changer when it comes to defending the free world.
Are there actual, living people thinking that donating to Ukraine will influence anything? These donations might as well be a margin of error compared to government funding, aid packages and what not.
The Ukraine is simply too small of a country to actually win a war against Russia, all that these aid packages are doing is prolonging the war that Ukraine cannot win.
It's like saying "if only Germany had <insert Wunderwaffe> it would've won WWII". At some point they were going to run out of men anyway (they did). Sort of like how Ukraine will eventually run out of men if they continue.
Ukraine just recently got at parity in artillery with russia, which is why they are pushing this ceasefire and this is why Zelenskyy is walking away from it just like that.
