we don't separate by gender other intellectual pursuits, e.g. best author, best director, jeopardy winner, etc.
[edit]
Just checked Wikipedia, and it turns out Chess mostly isn't separate by gender so I stand corrected:
The majority of chess tournaments are open to all participants regardless of gender. Very few, if any, international tournaments are restricted to men, but a few are restricted to women, most prominently the Women's World Chess Championship and the Women's Chess Olympiad.
We separate pursuits with a vast gender-related discrepancy. And 99 of the top 100 chess players are men.
Some people believe that men and women are statistically identical if not physically then at least mentally. But just because you can see something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist
I find it rather puzzling why people seggregate genders even though the idea is to make society more equal? Wouldn't it be much more beneficial for women and men to share the same room so to say.
Men and women are generally different in physiology, psychology, and many other measurable ways. I don't see why it should be puzzling that there are specific spaces or areas in society that accommodate more of one than the other. This has been demonstrated numerous[0] times[1] by[2] studies[3] (and there are plenty that go both ways, I'll readily admit, but the measurements favor sex-segregated education for certain ages of school children, for example).
It is only people pushing something about "equality" that rejects that men and women are different that take issue with this idea.
You can go create a chess tournament for short people, or vegetarians, or people who have lived in at least three countries, and nobody will stop you. Nor will your decision be contrary to “the idea” of a more equal society.
I guess an open question is if there are two categories of women and everyone, does it imply that the female category is less competitive? And, if so, is that a bad thing? And, finally, if fewer men played chess competitively and the shoe was entirely on the other foot, would male-only tournaments then be acceptable?
> Most of what we believe separates men from women is learned behavior.
I haven't seen convincing evidence to support this.
There's the possibility that the differences we see in the higher echelons of chess arise from biological differences between men and women. But that possibility is not being explored for political/social reasons.
Ultimately we are all products of evolution. While some aspects of our nature are instinctive (no external sensorial input is needed to exhibit certain hebaviour), others we learn from observing the surrounding (external sensorial input). If you say all behavior is ultimatelly biological, well, of course you are right, but you are not considering what could have been observed learned behavior on the way.
The point of segregating physical sports is to give women (people who went through female puberty) a fighting chance.
There’s a famous experiment by the Williams sisters, two of the best female tennis players ever, who got demolished by a guy ranked 203rd in the world. There is no way for a woman to make up the testosterone difference in sports where physical prowess matters.
Hm, interesting. But doing sports do all kind of things to muscles. And physiology wise men have more muscles. But intelligence is the same for men and women.
I've played chess since I was young, have taught many people to play chess, have played in company tournaments, play whoever I can when I travel, and there's just no question that the vast, overwhelming majority of women don't enjoy playing chess.
I can't even speak to a possible difference in gender capability because I've never known a single woman who enjoyed it enough to do anything more than learn how the pieces move.
Is there any evidence to think that? Are there games similar to chess that are dominated by women at the top levels? Is there some reason to think that chess-ability genes are evenly distributed by gender?
My own intuition is that, just like there are more men above 130 IQ and below 70, there are probably more great male chess players than female. This is just the idea of greater male variability which is found across a number of different measures - everything from variation in height to things like polydactyly being more common in men.
In Sweden, a mere 3% of adult chess club players are women. Women and men then evidently feel quite differently about playing chess (I don't have an explanation.)
Although gender is a political correctness nuclear landmine, imagine if chess had aptitude diversity rules. "No, you can't castle if your Elo is 800+."
My impression is contract bridge has somewhat gender parity in terms of who plays it. [0] The ranking of contract bridge players doesn't appear to measure current quantitative strength, which seems to encourage volume of play rather than skill.
> The title of Grandmaster, along with the lesser FIDE titles of International Master (IM), FIDE Master (FM), and Candidate Master (CM), is open to all players regardless of gender. The great majority of grandmasters are men, but 40 women have been awarded the GM title as of 2022, out of a total of about 2000 grandmasters. Since about the year 2000, most of the top 10 women have held the GM title. There is also a Woman Grandmaster title with lower requirements awarded only to women.
It is, and it is not. There are tournaments specifically for women, but there are also loads of tournaments that are "open" and it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. For example: The World Chess Open
Just checked Wikipedia as well, and it sounds like Chess mostly isn't separate by gender so I stand corrected:
The majority of chess tournaments are open to all participants regardless of gender. Very few, if any, international tournaments are restricted to men, but a few are restricted to women, most prominently the Women's World Chess Championship and the Women's Chess Olympiad.
Don't give me this of all time nonsense. Rank 8 at any time is a major accomplishment. You have no idea about chess if you think it's not a huge accomplishment. And yes that's how it works, think Bayesian instead of yes/no.
Because they complained that it’s unfair when both gender compete.
And we do absolutely have special prizes by gender for other intellectual professions like actors, female leaders/entrepreneurs, female writers, female alpinist (“first female to climb X or Y”). As if it’s something unreachable.
Is there a TL;DR, or is this just a complex clusterfuck? I was expecting standard Ukraine vs Russia issues, but the article goes on to describe what looks like a personal vendetta between two top Kazakh players, safety concerns about travel in Delhi, etc etc.
Are these chess tournos usually this dramatic or was this just an atypical combination of geopolitics seeping into sport and other issues gaining purchase out of the sum of the chaos?
I've been following chess tournaments for around two years now. Usually, they aren't this dramatic. In fact, more often than not, you have no clue what tournament is coming up next as there's little to no promotion happening for these events.
For instance, the FIDE World Chess Championship between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren is starting in about two weeks, and there's hardly any hype related to it. However, once the tournament starts and there are some interesting results, hype gradually builds up. Like when Carlsen lost two back-to-back games against Giri and Abdusattorov, there was quite a bit of interest in the tournament. Or the famous Carlsen vs. Niemann controversy.
Looks like FIDE is conducting an investigation. Their Fair Play Commission has recently submitted a report that has now been forwarded to the Ethics and Disciplinary Commission.
Chess, like any other highly competitive international sport has a lot of drama.
One of the big problems with it is that white is heavily advantaged, there's a large incentive for incumbents to play for a draw, and playing back-to-back matches is incredibly exhausting. Any attempts at correcting for this can result in an unfair set of rules for someone.
Not enough money in it either. Highly competitive people arent exactly known for their social maturity, but other sports/comps have entourages and $ to keep them in line. This read like the minutes of an academic department meeting.
Chess lately has been pretty dramatic, Google "Hans Niemann cheating allegations" if you don't already know -- in my opinion, far more dramatic than this.
great example of the versatility of the human mind.
i was about to pipe the entire article into ChatGPT. exactly like the other comment. but i realized it had screenshots of tweets and instagram posts. people do this in case the original authors changed their mind.
ChatGPT can't take images as input (afaik). for a human mind, the text in these screenshots are part of what the article is trying to say.
the medium is changing mid-article, but the story is the same. it could have been a video, a voice recording. a human mind would extract their content and incorporate it back into the main story the article is telling.
EDIT: I originally wrote this to ask if anyone else is bothered by the hypocrisy. If you're going to downvote this, I would definitely appreciate if you at least write why you disagree. Also if you are bothered by the hypocrisy, I'd appreciate if you said so. Either way, am I just being crazy? I know I'm not the only one, but I also want to understand where I'm wrong.
"What appears to be the position of the Muzychuks seems to be aligned with many international sports federations. FIFA and UEFA (football), the IAAF, Formula 1, UCI (cycling), FIS (skiing) and dozens of other sports have outright banned Russian and Belarussian individuals and teams from participating in sporting events."
I am a libertarian, and I am against invasions, occupations, violence, and certainly against war crimes. I'm also against accepting millions of people's lives being destroyed as "collateral damage" and so on.
But this bothers me because my country, USA, has been on a tear since its founding. It took land from Native Americans and drove them into reservations. Then the entire western third of the country (where Silicon Valley is) from California to Texas was simply taken from Mexico in a war, like the one in Ukraine but far bigger territory. It claimed the entire western hemisphere as its protectorate that "foreign powers" could not intervene in. Reading about its "protection" of some of these areas is to read about literal enslavement of its people, e.g. Haiti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ha...)
And having defeated everyone around them (except the Canadians, we tried to invade them but they repelled us), and having a "sphere of influence" that extends in all directions, we then started going halfway around the world and bombing countries that presented no threat to us. Such as Laos, which we bombed more than any country in history... to "send a message" to Viet Nam: https://www.history.com/news/laos-most-bombed-country-vietna...
If you replace "special military operation" with "secret war" and you replace "denazification" with either "domino theory / defeating communism" or "war on terror / islamism" we have justified more invasions, occupations, and regime change wars than anyone else. Just in the last 25 years, USA and NATO bombed Yugoslavia, told them to let Kosovo be independent, then invaded and occupied Afghanistan, invaded and occupied Iraq, destroyed Libya and left it as a failed state, and also armed and trained insurgents in Syria in a civil war.
Now don't get me wrong. Russia is a bad actor. It bombed the crap out of Chechnya. It armed and trained insurgents in Donbas since 2014. It invaded Ukraine. But given that USA has been doing a lot more just in my lifetime, how come not a single athlete from the USA was so much as banned from a sporting event? I'm not even talking about sanctions.
We're the one putting sanctions on countries that present no threat to us like Cuba. More countries in UN vote every year for USA to end their embargo on Cuba, than have condemned Russia, and Obama almost did, but the subsequent presidents put it back... what did they ever do to us: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/06/1094612
So I think it would be much more accurate to say that Russia, China and USA are "great powers" that meddle in other countries' affairs and they all do bad things, and we the people should keep pushing our governments to elect moderates who listen to each other (at least like Kennedy and Khrustchev did during the Cuban Missile Crisis) and push the UN to strengthen rights of individuals (like Uyghurs in China) the same way they passed the Geneva Conventions. We should push our governments to stop using cluster munitions, and stop doing regime change wars, and maybe recognize the international criminal court. We could de-escalate many conflicts if we simply demanded that our politicians have discussions in good faith and publicly on video (as opposed to behind closed doors, where who knows what they even do). They want to know where we spend $600, I want to know where the Pentagon spends trillions.
The reason this is maddening to me is that many like me around the world see that proxy wars are caused by multiple actors. The war in Yemen is caused by Saudis and Iran, not just one side. Same with the war in Ukraine (NATO and Russia). And the answer should be to make peace agreements - like China just brokered between Iran and Saudis. That's great news for Yemen. Now we need that for Ukraine. But instead, we have rank hypocrisy and everyone is bullied into going along with it like that's normal. What's worse than the hypocrisy is that it removes all the actual political impetus to hold politicians on all sides to account, and to prevent such wars from happening going forward.
Is it just me, or does the hypocrisy of banning all athletes from Russia but zero athletes from USA, and the sheer misplace of focus, bother anyone else?
PS: I should also say that US and China have done a lot of good in the world, too. But if the principle is that any country which invades or bombs another country which presents no threat to it, should have its athletes banned, then USA should have had that happen after Laos, Iraq, Libya, and a number of other countries.
PPS: I thought many sporting competitions like the Olympic Games were explicitly designed to be independent of wars and all the terrible nonsense that politicians do. Instead of taking it out on, say, scientists or philosophers from a country, everyone should realize they should instead focus on voting out own war hawk politicians.
Yes, it bothers me. It's tribalism, and that's also exactly why the US gets a pass. They've been bombing other tribes, not ours.
The problem is that the world is not some kind of morally integrated system, it's glued together through diplomacy and trade. Moral principles are still very tribalistic, they only really apply to "me and mine". Look at the way we treat animals; humanely raising and killing billions of them in concentration camps because we like tasty burgers. But we love them.
According to our society's moral principles you are absolutely right, but they don't apply in this case because Russia is not part of the tribe - they're being excommunicated.
This isn't necessarily a moralistic judgement of what's happening, because it's human nature (and arguably all predators) and the only way things like this stop is if our view of who or what is part of our "tribe" expands to encompass all things.
It's not good to be naïve about it because you'll drive yourself crazy, especially when powerful actors are actively trying to demoralise and propagandise the population.
I think the difference is that we’re doing the invading in those instances. This is the opposite, where our literal backyard is being invaded.
They’d have to be stomped on for no other reason than to prevent them doing it again.
I’m also of the opinion that the US and allies probably had more valid reasons to invade any of the countries they did in the past 25 years than Russia had to invade Ukraine.
I feel like the intentions are generally in the right place (e.g. stems from public pressure to do something to help those poor people), and people that are ‘liberated’ are generally happier and healthier afterwards (if they don’t die first). Look at what’s happening now that the Taliban take over again. 20 years of emancipation destroyed in an instant.
That’s the largest crime in my opinion. The west starts a lot of wars, but isn’t willing to see them through to the end. They just fuck up the current stable power structure (regardless of how messed up it is) and then leave.
If you forgive me for saying this, your first line sounds like you were a Russian writing this from Russia. Because it would make more sense - think about it.
How is Ukraine "our literal back yard"? It is half a planet away! What is USA doing there? On the other hand, it is Russia's literal back yard. Actually, more than that, it used to be former Russian territory and they care about the people on it not being bombed.
For that matter, what is the "north atlantic treaty organization" doing with Georgia, which is the Black Sea?
The answer, of course, is obvious. NATO is a military alliance against Russia. And now, QUAD is a military alliance against China. We will try to surround them, and they'll try to resist, like a cornered animal. Then they'll use military force to prevent being totally surrounded with nukes (which is what they believe will happen if they do absolutely nothing like a "good actor"). And their neighbors (e.g. Ukraine, Taiwan) will carry heavy losses.
OR ... we could just stop this cold war proxy war nonsense, and spare places like Vietnam, Laos, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc. Because they're the ones that have to pay the price, not us. And we know that. If it was OUR cities being bombed, we'd do more to avoid the war.
Emancipation of women wasn't the reason Afghanistan was invaded. It kind of became a sort of disingenuous revisionist justification somewhere along the line, but the stated justification at the time was the Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda, particularly bin Laden.
The whole of it seems quite farcical to me, particularly in retrospect, but I wouldn't equivocate it with Russia's invasion of Ukraine because I don't think the American government ever intended on annexing Afghanistan territory. It does however resemble the Soviet Union's own invasion of Afghanistan to topple the (then communist) government of Afghanistan. In that case there was also a fig leaf of humanitarianism, since the PDPA, lead by Taraki and Amin, were massacring civilians and generally losing control of the country. Taraki evidently got cold feet and requested a Soviet intervention, but was subsequently assassinated at Amin's order before that occurred. The assassination of Taraki and the PDPA's general inability to stop murdering people served as the Soviet justification for the invasion. Of course the reality of the invasion was not particularly humanitarian, but the same can be said of the American invasion.
Anyway, all of it was and is shameful and none of it excuses the rest of it.
If we cared about emancipation of girls from Muslim Radicals then we could just do NOTHING because Afghanistan had a revolution and a secular government back in the 80s. Which called USSR for help because muslim radicals didn't like the reforms. Instead, we funded the Mujahideen (who were, ahem, Muslim radicals) and told them to carry on a holy war against their government and the commies. We gave them stinger missiles. USA and Saudis also trained foreign fighters "Afghan Arabs" to go and wreak havoc. In the years that followed, up to 2 million Afghan CIVILIANS DIED. And the country was then ravaged by war, and became home to Al Qaieda the very organization that attacked us.
But it's actually worse than that. In 2001 we went over there ourselves because we wanted Osama Bin Laden.
The Taliban told the USA: "just provide proof that Osama was behind 9/11", and let's have a court case in a neutral third country. (You know, like they do in The Hague etc.)
USA and Bush admin said: "We know he's guilty. We will give you no proof!"
Then in December of 2001 (that same year!) the Taliban said "we unconditionally surrender! We will disband! All we ask is for you to let us live our lives out in dignity."
The USA said in their great wisdom: "NOPE"
Then we fought for 20 years the very group we ceded Afghanistan to last year. And to think, all we had to do is ACCEPT THEIR UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER and we would have saved trillions. And those girls would have been educated!
I get what you're saying and I admire your attempt at a moderate take here. That being said, there is a global concept of civil conduct. It was pretty relaxed in the 1700s (you wont find many who disagree), but now we've moved on to recognizing sovereign nations and solving civil conflict without violence. Russia is resisting this path of conduct and threatening us rather than accepting the peace terms of leaving Ukraine alone. As you'd expect, everyone with a vested interest in maintaining that global civil conduct will denounce Russia's actions, sometimes even protesting their nation outright.
Maybe you think this reflects poorly on them, that's your judgement to pass. They are members of the free world though, we are not to say otherwise.
When did we move onto this? I guess you are referring to the UN, and the "rules-based international order" where you need UN approval to go bomb a country that didn't attack you. Stuff like that, right?
Well, just to keep on that narrow focus (and not even invoking anything else), the USA and NATO has violated it multiple times in the last 25 years alone. Let's just take one relatively tame example:
In 1999, NATO bombed Yugoslavia after being denied approval by the UN. Their rationale: "to stop a genocide of Kosovar Albanians" sounds very much like Russia's rationale: "to stop a genocide of ethnic Russians in Donbass". They bombed it for many days, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Well, thankfully, Russia did not send endless weapons to Yugoslavia to defend itself against NATO, so Yugoslavia surrendered and had to agree to let NATO peacekeepers be stationed in Kosovo. This is not normally considered "NATO occupying part of Yugoslavia", but peacekeepers.
At the very least, we cannot seriously say that "NATO is a purely defensive alliance". And we can't say "Russia's invasion was unprovoked and unjustified" while simultaneously defending NATO interventions in Kosovo, Libya, Syria, or USA invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Many countries did in fact denounce what NATO was doing. And many countries denounced the invasion of Iraq. However, I have heard people bring up ad-hoc justifications for it like "well, it's not as bad because we didn't want to annex any part of Iraq".
Just a question on a tangent: When you refer to Yugoslavia you mean the Federal republic Of Yugoslavia? The one that constituted Serbia and Kosovo? Or are you referring to the old Yugoslavia (the one that Tito ran)?
I don't understand - what do you find confusing about Ukrainian players not wanting to play with those playing under their invader's flag?
What hypocrisy have those Ukrainian players shown? If the US invaded Ukraine they may we'll have decided not to play American chess players.
As for your note that there are multiple "actors" in the Ukrainian conflict, many people don't buy that. They don't think Russia has any legitimate right to "buffer" states.
> But given that USA has been doing a lot more just in my lifetime, how come not a single athlete from the USA was so much as banned from a sporting event?
I’m a fairly patriotic American but yes, I do recognize we’ve done at least comparably awful shit in the last 50 years.
The only answer is “politics”. There’s not a rational reason, it’s just politics.
I do think Russia deserves to be shunned, I just also feel USA has often deserved to be shunned as well.
> If you’re going to downvote this, I would definitely appreciate if you at least write why you disagree.
Downvoting says that “this is not a contribution to productive discussion on HN”.
If it is worth discussing, it is not worth downvoting.
> I am a libertarian, and I am against invasions, occupations, violence, and certainly against war crimes. I’m also against accepting millions of people’s lives being destroyed as “collateral damage” and so on.
> But […]
“Nothing someone says before the word ‘but’ really counts”
Downvoting says that “this is not a contribution to productive discussion on HN”.
If it is worth discussing, it is not worth downvoting.
I happen to think so as well. I don't downvote things unless they are completely derailing the conversation, disingenuous, malicious, etc. Any good-faith argument, especially if expressed clearly and with details, should be upvoted, even if you disagree with it!
I usually agree with pg BUT I disagree with him that downvotes should be used to express disagreement. They should be used to express bad faith, bad form, etc.
You're being downvoted for engaging in whataboutism, which is a variation of the tu quoque logical fallacy [1]. It's been overused in recent times (especially in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and people are growing tired of it (and rightly so, as it merely derails discussion and fuels flame wars - contrary to the spirit of HN).
It doesn't seem whataboutism in the comment, as the author says "Russia is a bad actor", so it's not about someone did something before, so it should be accepted now. It's more about non equal treatment of the same bad situation done by different parties. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
I have been around political discourse long enough to realize that people saying "whataboutism" is a shibboleth that is used to excuse extreme double standards and hypocrisy.
If you are running a sports competition, and you are told "please ban these Russian athletes, because Russia's invasion of Ukraine is unprovoked and unjustified", I do not think it is a logical fallacy to ask "can I also ban US athletes for the same reason"? Or to ask "why doesn't the same principle apply across the board?"
I have heard ideoogically based people on all sides of an issue use "whataboutism" to escape having to discuss basic logic. If someone is trying to convince you that it's imperative you do X, it's not fallacious to inquire about what the principle behind the imperative is. And why the principle is being applied in this one particular case and not across the board. Otherwise it is "rules for thee, not for me". "But why not for thee too?" "Hey, stop the whataboutism!"
But it's even worse than that. Because if US goes halfway around the world and bombs countries to smithereens which present no threat to it, then that's objectively worse than trying to prevent a former ally from joining an enemy alliance and putting nukes on your border. The correct analogy would be the Cuban Missile Crisis, when USA sponsored the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba asked USSR for help, USSR placed nuclear missiles on it, and USA blockaded it and threatened war. One could totally understand USA in that scenario. That's the analogy. Going halfway around the world to bomb countries that don't present a threat to you, is SO MUCH MORE NEEDLESS than what Russia did in Ukraine, that it is all the more deserving of, oh I dunno, 1 athlete being banned somewhere?
> I have been around political discourse long enough to realize that people saying "whataboutism" is a shibboleth that is used to excuse extreme double standards and hypocrisy.
Trust me, not only did I read it, but I also thought through these issues over the years.
"Yes, Politician B did do this-or-that immoral thing, but then again so do other politicians. So what's the big deal?"
This is not what's being said. What's being said is:
We typically want to stay neutral among conflicts. You are pressuring us to take an unprecedented step of banning athletes from country X because country X did an extremely egregious thing B. Sure, let's do it. Can we also ban country Y who did B times 10?
No, you can't. If you try we will retaliate!
So, you aren't really concerned about the principle. You first pick a target country (e.g. Israel) and then you come up with some spurious reasons which you don't actually believe in, just to bully us into taking this action
It's not about "whether it's not a big deal". It's about comparing apples to apples. Having a sense of proportion.
"You must eject this person from the group. They farted. That's beyond the pale."
"But you have been farting far more, and also punching people in the face, and you are still here. Should I eject you too?"
"Stop your Whataboutism! We are only talking about this one person!"
Actually no, it's about moral shifts. The morality of today is very, very, very different from what it was a mere thousand years ago. Brigandry (killing travelers on the road so that you can take their stuff) was once considered a noble profession, for example.
But the world moves on, and morality has a tendency to move in tectonic shifts. Suddenly (it seems), what was okay is no longer okay, because the people say so. "Suddenly", it's not okay to kill passers-by and take their stuff. "Suddenly", it's not okay to treat children any way you please as their parents and masters. "Suddenly", it's only natural that a man doesn't need to be of noble birth to vote. "Suddenly", it's even a woman's right to vote. "Suddenly", apartheid isn't okay anymore. "Suddenly", you're not allowed to kick your dog anymore.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of those "suddenlys". Wars of conquest (i.e. invading and annexing a neighboring country) fell out of favor in the 19th century, with the last major hurrah in the 1930s. The world has moved on, and it's no longer okay to do that. We condemn Russia because we don't allow that sort of behavior anymore. But throwing "what about America doing X and Y?" around would be like protesting anti-apartheid campaigns against South Africa just because racial inequality and violence hadn't been solved in America (in fact, there was a fair bit of whataboutism by those who opposed changing the South African order). It just comes off as crass and self-serving in the end.
If you want real change, you push for a movement and solidarity against evil. That's what these Ukrainian woman have done, and it's beautiful to see. The whataboutism that tears down their supports on the other hand, is a most insidious evil, because you're basically telling Americans that they have no right to stand against Russia's evil acts (the call of hypocrisy, tu-quoque). You shame potential allies into inaction against a clear and present evil, which is a horrible thing to do on so many levels.
The question is simple. Would it be beautiful for you to see people banning US athletes? At this point, I think it would, for many people. Why don't we see it anywhere? That's the question.
I think that speaks for itself. What is the year when it became "not ok to invade, occupy and bomb other countries that present no threat to you and are not even within 1000 miles of you"? Because that's kind of the thing that matters, right? You mentioned 1930. Since then, USA has been involved in 80% of the wars, and has 800 bases around the world while the rest of the world combined has 30. Who needs "conquest" when you can intimidate everyone into doing what you want?
Do you not see the issue here? It's simple ... if we all suddenly grew a conscience, great! So will you join people in calling for sanctions on USA and ostracism of US athletes? Can you link us to a post about that? Here is Mehdi Hassan doing it -- will you?
> Would it be beautiful for you to see people banning US athletes? At this point, I think it would, for many people. Why don't we see it anywhere? That's the question.
This does reach the crux of the matter. Why don't we see Cubans boycotting American athletes and gaining major international support? Why aren't Syrians raising hell at every athletic competition, protesting that Americans and Turks are allowed to compete? Everyone's free to join in and boycott, so why don't they? Answer: Because on the whole it's not important enough to them to warrant the investment of effort and time. Because America's behaviors aren't that far out of the international norm of today (sad to say). That "suddenly" hasn't happened yet, and probably won't for quite some time.
And that's how we measure moral shifts. One day the shittier things America does today will be protest worthy, but our morality has not moved that far yet, and we still have much bigger fish to fry.
So to answer your question: I feel strongly about one case but not the other because they are not equivalent. And worrying about all the little problems before starting to solve the big ones makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
And that's the beef I have over whataboutism: It makes storms in teacups. That's what it's designed for, and why it's rightly called a logical fallacy.
> Answer: Because on the whole it's not important enough to them to warrant the investment of effort and time. Because America's behaviors aren't that far out of the international norm of today (sad to say).
And to elaborate on “important enough” it’s about how beneficial for them is this to take the fight, and not about the moral or how "far out of the international norm". X can be amoral, but if powerful country X is doing it I will loose a lot in this fight, so I won’t take it. But if less powerful country Y is doing the same, there is high chance of winning and I will take the fight.
Asking “How about X?” is highlighting the issue - the more powerful country you are the more amoral things world can tolerate you doing. (The author of the comment doesn’t try to justify the bad actions, but tries to highlight the inequality of treatment).
What Russia is doing is analogous to what USA did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can't allow a neighboring country, especially one that was a former ally, to join an enemy military alliance and pose an existential threat to some of your citizens, by, say, pointing nuclear missiles at you -- neither now nor in 15 years. Any country would react to being surrounded and cornered, including today's USA. That at least has some relation to self-defense and preservation: you don't want to take the chances that a "purely defensive alliance" which already bombed destroyed Yugoslavia and Libya will now stop bombing and destroying.
So what you said honestly seems backwards to me on every level, including logical, ethical, and reality.
Logical: You say we should not "worry about all the little problems before starting to solve the big ones." So are you trying to say that going halfway around the world, bombing, invading, occupying and destroying multiple countries, and resulting in over a million deaths, is a much smaller problem, than invading one country to prevent it from joining a hostile alliance? The number of countries is larger. The death toll is also larger. The destruction is larger. But you have it backwards somehow. If you applied your principle, it would mean we would actually have to prioritize preventing USA from doing this anymore, not Russia. I am saying we should do both.
Ethical: How is going halfway around the world to attack countries that pose literally ZERO threat to your country, less worthy of moral condemnation, than getting militarily involved around your own localized borders in order to stop that same "globetrotter" from flipping your neighbor against you? One has an actual connection to self defense, and the other literally does not. But you have it backwards, again.
Reality: billions of people recognize that NATO's expansion led to this, USA's own experts predicted it, and even the Ukrainians themselves did NOT want to be part of NATO, when George W Bush vowed to bring them into NATO kicking and screaming anyway. Every sound bite you are you told to repeat, including "open door policy", "purely defensive" and "unprovoked and unjustified", is backwards.
I could go on... but my point is it's backwards. This is plain and simple a way for USA to push through a surrounding of Russia at Ukraine's expense ... if they can get it done, great. If not, well Ukraine paid the price, they "wanted to fight" after all.
Aaaaand now we've taken a hard-right into propaganda territory, so I'll get off here.
I would suggest consulting Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyder
So no amount of logic, moral argumentation matter, and links to mainstream sources, words of the very political involved in brokering peace, or polls sampling billions of people are dismissed as "propaganda"? Can you please define what you mean by "propaganda" here -- you seem to be making a category error.
I don't understand. Are all Indians susceptible to propaganda, but you and Timothy Snyder know the actual truth? I can certainly listen to Dr. Snyder (I haven't) but it's going to be one opinion, one data point, for me. Not an absolute authority.
Can you at least answer my questions from a logical and moral point of view?
PS: Just in case your "hard right" implies that somehow this is a right-wing conspiracy or propaganda, I should point out that "the war could have been avoided and we should have peace talks" is understood by people on all sides of the political spectrum. The pope is on the left. The progressives in US Congress are lefties. Noam Chomsky is a leftist. They all say the same thing. Heck even the World Socialist Website highlights thousands of people in Spain protesting the NATO summit in Spain: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/02/ydws-m02.html
Propaganda... you keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means.
> So no amount of logic, moral argumentation matter, and links to mainstream sources, words of the very political involved in brokering peace, or polls sampling billions of people are dismissed as "propaganda"?
Your long, bitter and whiny rants are based on random scraps and fall apart on closer inspection. For example, saying that GWB was forcing Ukraine into NATO is incorrect and absurd; NATO is a very exclusive club hesitant to accept any new members, because it increases commitments of existing members and provides access to their internal defence information.
The initiative to join NATO has always come from Eastern European governments, not somehow forced upon them. This is clear, obvious, well documented. Claiming anything else is either ignorance or malicious lying akin to saying that Bob Hope was the 40th president of the US -- plain wrong without any room for debate.
My whole point as a libertarian is that these governments fail to serve the people well or even represent the people. The people themselves don’t want to fight and kill the other population, or to escalate. You’re attacking a strawman.
When Yanukovich blocks the EU association agreement, to accept a $15B loan and cheap fuel from Russia, you say he is a stooge of Russia, and support a popular uprising that ousted him and destabilized the country (much like happened in Yemen).
But when Yuschenko his predecessor works to get Ukraine into NATO despite a solid majority of Ukrainians opposing it (as per mainstream polls), you don’t call him a stooge of NATO or a Western puppet. Why?
The labels are just tools of public propaganda. Putin and Assad are called brutal dictators, but the Saudi monarchy who don’t even have the pretense of elections are not called unelected dictators, nor are Saudi war crimes and starving of Yemen described in the same terms by USA as they do for lesser things by our stated enemies (Shias mostly). In short, not only is there “room for debate” but every government + media including our own is super biased and selectively paints some groups as bad while other far worse groups are given a pass.
By any measure, Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO any more than Iraqis wanted to be liberated, or Muslims hated us for our freedoms. These were all slogans cooked up by the politicians during Bush admin (“Islamofascist” didn’t poll well so they changed the rhetoric to fit — that’s what they do.)
USA was always going to push for Ukraine and Georgia in NATO, and oust Assad in Syria, not because of anything they publicly say but because that would take away Russia’s last allies, get them surrounded, and we’d rather they fight Ukraine over there than us over here after they got stronger. That’s the real geopolitical calculus, and same coming up with QUAD in China.
This isn’t even that hard to believe — sadly, no country’s government wants its geopolitical rivals healing divisions with their neighbors and getting stronger. They want them divided and fighting. And if they can increase their own influence around the world, they will do it. This is how every proxy war started.
And frankly, if as you say NATO accepted countries when their governments wanted to join, they’d accept Russia. They officially rejected USSR in 1954 “without discussion” calling the application a joke. After USSR fell apart, Yeltsin did everything the Americans wanted, pushing thru Chicago-school “shock therapy” reforms and even firing on the parliament building and arresting his own parliament in the 1993 constitutonal crisis as a result. The USA proudly meddled in Russian elections in 1996 to get him reelected after a 6% (!!) approval rating and Times Magazine featured Yeltsin holding an American flag with “Yanks to the Rescue” on the cover (imagine the reverse). Surely Yeltsin was so much “our guy” that we’d listen to his security concerns, right? WRONG.
Yeltsin officially protesting NATO expansion during Clinton’s admin was met with “sit down boy and be quiet”. And Putin asking for Russia to get into NATO was rejected. Is Russia less democratic than Turkey, a NATO member? Is it more corrupt than Ukraine and Georgia? All these rationalizations for why Ukraine and Georgia but not Russia — never Russia — are a smokescreen for what I said above. It’s realpolitik.
Again, you offer nothing but a barrage of lies. Lets take one lie at a time:
> And Putin asking for Russia to get into NATO was rejected.
Never happened. According to Putin's top advisor on foreign policy at the time, Putin asked Lord Robertson for invitation into NATO. Robertson replied that Russia would have to go through the same integration process as everyone else. Putin got offended by that, replied that he was "not going to stand in line with countries that don't matter", and that was the end of it.
It was never a serious goal that Putin and Russia worked towards, as it was in other Eastern European countries that set NATO membership as their main foreign policy goal and began building a relationship with NATO with the ultimate goal of becaoming a full member. NATO membership comes with political, legal and military obligations that Russia never even set out to meet. You don't get a seat at a collective defense organization and access to allied military information just by asking someone nicely at a formal dinner. In Eastern Europe, it took a decade of relentless political and military reforms to get there.
In most of Eastern Europe, consecutive governments all agreed to this goal and there was no domestic indecision to stall the process. In Ukraine, public support was much smaller indeed, some parties were for NATO membership, others were against it, and as a result, without continuous work towards becoming a member, Ukraine did not become one, even though key figures like GWB signaled willingness to support that bid.
In Russia, there was no work towards NATO membership at all. In contrast, Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution calling for NATO membership as early as December 1993, reiterated the position throughout key foreign policy documents (such as the law on national security, adopted 19th December 1996), joined all sorts of NATO programs and committees, went through a shitload of reforms under NATO guidance and finally achieved full membership in 2004. What did Russia do at the same time? Asked NATO secretary general Lord Robertson a free pass and that's it? That's the whole rejection? Has Russian Duma even once voted NATO membership into their foreign policy doctrine?
In the interest of upholding intellectual integrity, I will admit you have a point, that we don’t actually have a recent official request from Russia to join NATO.
On the other hand, to pretend that this process is somehow all about clear rules and truly open door policies, is very disingenuous. Are you saying that this is what Russia would need to do:
Obviously, it’s silly. There are a lot of unspoken considerations for which country gets into NATO and which country is pushed into it despite what their citizens want. Rule #1 is: Russia never gets in, that would be like China getting into QUAD. If Russia joined NATO, its raison d’etre would be obsolete, and moreover, USA (its main member) would be increasingly unnecessary since Russia would be then selling and using its weapons for European security. That is competition USA does not want.
And look, USSR formally applied in 1954, and was rejected without any formal discussion! That is not a lie but simply a fact, and reported by NY Times back then:
My characterization is quite accurate as to the main causes of this. Some even said Bush was pushing to go into Iraq on “day 1”… whether that is true or not is unclear because governments are opaque, but we DO KNOW that Bush was the biggest force behind the push to keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border and get Ukraine and Georgia in, so you downplaying that is disingenuous. It was a very destructive push by Bush. And nearly all of the foreign policy experts in USA, as well as his own ambassadors etc. ALL WARNED BUSH AND CLINTON against this, and predicted this exact outcome.
In June 1997, 50 prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.”
In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
So this reaction by Russia acting like a cornered animal before it is completely surrounded is not “unprovoked”. It was systematically provoked, and tried every other avenue to stop this — except FORMALLY applying to NATO, which I blame Putin for. Of course, Russia’s politicians are just as negligent and dumb as other countries’ politicians. Putin should have applied every year, and publicly lampooned the rejections year after year. He should have worked on having better PR for Russia’s positions to be heard in the West. RT was not enough.
But to blame solely Putin? No, that is simply regurgitating propaganda.
> we DO KNOW that Bush was the biggest force behind the push to keep expanding NATO to Russia’s border and get Ukraine and Georgia in
This is simply not true. The initiative (or lack of) has always come from Eastern Europe and that has been the main factor that determined which countries ended up in NATO and which ones did not. Nobody has been dragged into NATO "kicking and screaming", as you put it.
Your whole narrative falls apart once you admit this simple fact.
Subverting their democracies and regime-changing their leadership to flip them against Russia is dragging them. If they can't do it by hook, they'll do it by crook. In 2021 they also tried to do the same in Belarus and Kazakhstan, and I'm sure the same narrative would be used: "a silent majority wanted it, they were just afraid to say it, we helped liberate them".
Back in 2008 we see this: NATO leaders promised Ukraine and Georgia on Thursday they would one day join the Western defence alliance after rebuffing U.S. demands to put the former Soviet republics on an immediate path to membership.https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-32818020080403
Some NATO leaders had to rebuff US demands to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Can you admit that Bush and the US were pressing for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at a time when solid majorities of their actual people were against it? Why?
I have told you the reason: they wanted to flip Russia's allies to instead join a hostile military alliance, and eventually host weapons there aimed at Russia. They once had nuclear missiles, which NYTimes says were "all aimed at the United States". To quote them in 1994:
Ukraine, politically and economically unstable since it became an independent state after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has 176 intercontinental missiles armed with some 1,240 nuclear warheads--all aimed at the United States. It also has 592 nuclear warheads aboard bombers, which would be covered by the agreement.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-01-11-mn-10675-...
My explanation of US motivations is simple and clear, and makes sense. You keep ignoring it, and talking about how "anyone is free to do what they want." US straight up helped foment a revolution in 2014, sending very top people to encourage protestors to cut ties with Russia, and they ended up partnering with the far-right to overthrow their government:
Look, I think that Russia is encouraging the same thing in Moldova and Slovakia at this very moment. I don't doubt that CIA in Ukraine, and FSB in Moldova, are always actively trying to regime-change those countries to be more favorable. You speak nothing about this. You act like it's off-limits and dishonest to even put forward basic explanations for why "great powers" do what they do. But we have seen it in proxy wars for centuries. We know how it goes. What makes this time any different?
US failed in 2008 Ukraine, they failed in 2008 Georgia (because of Russian invasion), they succeeded in Ukraine 2014, then both Russia and NATO financed and perpetuated a proxy war in Ukraine since 2014. Russia's invasion isn't "unprovoked", it is the result of 8 years of warnings and peace agreements (Minsk II) that were never implemented, and the CIA was already training an insurgency in Ukraine, training neo-nazi paramilitaries, just as Russians had been doing in Donetsk paramilitaries, for years:
Did I mention NATO in 2009-2011 also coordinated the world's largest disarmament project, by DISARMING UKRAINE OF DEFENSIVE WEAPONS, and then presenting themselves as a solution? They admit it right on their own website, but they spin it as "well, we didn't want the aging Ukrainian weapons to fall into the wrong hands."
NONE of this looks like your (perhaps unintentionally) dishonest characterization of "democracy as usual" in these countries. It's not the majority of civilians choosing to arm far-right militia, nor overthrow their government, nor get pumped full of NATO weaponry. It shouldn't be surprising, since Ukraine was not very democratic and quite corrupt. (The same can be said for Russia.)
> Can you admit that Bush and the US were pressing for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO at a time when solid majorities of their actual people were against it?
This is a lie, no matter how many times you repeat it. For example, you quoted a Reuters headline:
> “Bush VOWS to PRESS for Ukraine, Georgia in NATO”
Yet if you read past the headline, GWB was pressuring other NATO allies (mainly France and Germany) to allow Ukraine start membership negotiations, not pressuring Ukraine to join as you represented it.
Your sources do not support what you are claiming.
Your conspiracy theory hinges on the obvious lie of countries being forced into NATO. Remove this lie, and the narrative of "big scary America preying upon poor little Russia" falls apart, because suddenly NATO membership becomes the initiative of Eastern European governments, and if you ask why, then you'll get a long list of crimes against humanity committed by Russia in those countries in the 20th century (and now 21st century too) highlighting the need for defense cooperation in Eastern Europe to prevent it from happening again.
I never said “big scary America is preyinf upon poor little Russia”. I said USSR, USA, and China have played these games for years and destroyed countries in proxy wars.
But let’s just use your one-sided rhetoric, and see how ridiculous it is. Sure, you’ve convinced me! Big Bad Russia has done things much worse than China and USA have ever done to their neighbors. Their neighbors all want to join an alliance against Russia, unlike all the neighbors of great and benevolent USA and China.
Of course, USA cares deeply about Ukraine’s safety from Russia since 1994, which is why it worked to make sure Ukraine would give up its nukes.
USA and George W Bush cared deeply about Ukraine’s security which is why they pushed NATO to accept the Ukrainian president’s bid to join NATO, even when Ukraine’s own population was against it. They didn’t know what was for their own good. That’s how democracy works, after all.
After Yanukovich was elected and ended this, NATO cared so deeply about Ukraine’s remaining defensive weapons ending up in the wrong hands, that they undertook the largest disarmament program in the world, to rid it of these weapons.
In 2013, USA felt really bad about Ukraine’s economy. They didn’t want Ukraine to have to keep doing business with a neighbor like Russia, who have done bad things like Holodomor and suppressing the Ukrainian language for hundreds of years. So John McCain and other top people went to Ukraine, to help liberate it from the Russian sphere of influence. This was purely out of concern for the Ukrainian people, especially the ones in the West of Ukraine who had voted 30-37% for the far-right Svoboda party. After all, they better some far-right Russophobic ideologies than the fifth column of Russophiles in the east. Ukraine’s destiny lies in Europe!
It is, after all, to improve Ukraine’s own democracy that USA fomented a revolution that overthrew its corrupt, sitting president, who was simply a stooge of Mr Putin. The far-right groups that helped make this happen were merely incidental to what was effectively a people’s uprising — totally different than, say, January 6th in USA. In fact, they were the true patriots, who had Ukraine’s best interests at heart unlike the anti-Maidan protestors, who were astroturfed by Russia.
Russia’s house of cards fell apart. With its stooge gone, it became clear that the vast majority of Ukrainians never really wanted ties with Russia, direct flights with Russia, (not even to visit their 11 million relatives there) to do business with Russian clients, nor even to let people in the Donbas keep speaking Russian in their schools. The USA had finally liberated Ukrainians from having to pretend they liked anything Russian… and Russia should just allow Ukraine to join NATO and stop being such a bully.
But Russia didn’t back down. They armed insurgents in the Donbas because Putin wanted to take over the entire Ukraine and restore the Soviet Union. It was his unspoken dream, because he never says what he really thinks. Thankfully, NATO kept arming the true government of Ukraine, as well as the true patriots (far right paramilitary) who could defend the motherland from the country which had long abused them, and where they had many relatives — and after years of training eventually got the brave Ukrainians to beat the second best army in Ukraine: the Russians, who they always knew were so weak they’d never be able to overrun the country in a few days. It’s not like the CIA planned a destructive Afghanistan-style guerilla war to tear the country apart as long as it can “make the Russians bleed for as long and as hard as possible.” The Russians were know to be weak, and have been losing since 2022, or maybe since 2014. They’ve run out of ammunition and tanks long ago, and are using shovels.
Of course, this is just as preposterous as believing that USA has the best interests of Afghans in mind when the CIA funded the Mujahideen, and waves of Afghan Arabs to tear apart the country. We KNOW that in nearly every other case since Laos, the CIA played a role in fomenting these conflicts in order to weaken their rivals (Russia, China, etc) and not out of a concern for the country.
Look, even if they HAD deep concern for Ukrainians, sending them weapons only makes them LESS safe. Did gulf countries and Iran sending weapons to Gaza ever make the PEOPLE of Gaza safer? The Hamas top leaders weren’t even in Gaza during some of the heaviest bombings — but the civilians were. It’s obscene to volunteer OTHER people to perish in large numbers to achieve some imperialist geopolitical ambitions, if you aren’t actually willing to go and sit under bombs with your family yourself, but force others to! That’s my view.
Entry of Eastern Europe into NATO is now so far in the past that we have a good amount of memoirs and personal recollections in addition to all sorts of documented evidence like laws, policy papers, studies and assessments available from that time. Most of the people who were directly involved are still alive too. But the best you can offer to "prove" that countries were forced into NATO is a small number newspaper snippets blatantly taken out of context. The rest of your long posts is pure rhethorics without any factual substance.
You have made up an alternative reality, which is easy to do if you're on the other side of the globe and have no personal connection whatsoever with those events. But I lived through them and I remember everything very well. I remember the discussions about NATO membership, from the earliest ideas to fully formulated policies, as well as early doubts whether we have any hope of attaining that goal. I remember the stances different parties held in my country. I voted for parties that supported joining NATO, as most people did, and those parties got elected into the government and lead the very long and demanding accession talks that were ultimately fruitful. To say that we were dragged into NATO "kicking and screaming" is plain wrong without any wiggle room.
The memory of atrocities committed against us by Russians in the 20th century, as well as the Russian savagery in Chechen wars in 1990s and 2000s (that reminded us that nothing had changed) were top reasons why joining NATO had near-universal support.
And the current war has only cemented that support. NATO is the reason why Russians can't bomb our cities, can't rape our women, can't kidnap our children, can't take away our land like they are doing in Ukraine. The combined strength is too big for Russia to challenge. Even countries like Finland and Sweden that maintained large armies and neutrality for more than 200 years have re-evaluated their foreign policy and joined NATO to deepen mutual cooperation.
It’s not a fact at all. It is an extremely biased oversimplification and massive equivocation.
“Eastern Europe” is very broad, consisting of many countries. Within a country there are many viewpoints. Anyone can always be found to say “the initiative came” from them, whether it’s Communists in Cuba / Nicaragua / Vietnam whatever, or whether it’s literal fascists like Pinochet’s revolution in Chile, or the Houthi rebels in Yemen, or even the mujahideen in Afghanistan — where we similarly came to “help Afghanistan” in a proxy war that killed 2 million people over there! We did it all for the express purpose of “making the Soviets bleed for as long and as hard as possible” and “creating a Vietnam for them”, not out of any great love for Afghans!
The way proxy wars start, in fact, is that an outside actor emboldens one group in a country that foments a revolution, while another outside actor emboldens another group in the country that launches a counter-revolution. Whether it’s Maidan vs Anti-Maidan, or Houthis vs Saudi Loyalists, or even the Red Army vs the White Army in Russia, we know by now how a revolution can lead to destabilization and a destructive proxy war.
I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?
So now you switched it to “Eastern Europe”. Wow, quite a big switch there, and certainly some other countries, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could be said to have had majorities who wanted to join NATO. In fact, that is what the 2001 article I linked to was about. It literally says:
Mr. Bush declared that he wanted NATO to expand up to Russia's border
Russia allowed this with no wars happening. But that was not enough. Soon afterwards it to be Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. It takes a special bias to look at a Reuters headline like
Everyone in Russia made it clear that this is an absolute red line, not just Putin. They did this for years, in every international forum. Every policy expert WARNED BUSH that this would be the consequence. To say it Russia’s reaction is “unprovoked” is just a total lie. The decision makers in the US simply ignored every single warning, and even now keep telling tons of people in their own government and other institutions to shut up and stop even so much as asking for a peace process. The reason is obvious: this is a push to hopefully surround Russia with members of a hostile alliance once and for all. Because otherwise Russia would be stronger with allies, and we’d rather their own beighbors fight them over there than we have to contend with a significant power with its own alliance on the global stage.
> I have SHOWN you that the actual POPULATION of Ukraine was majority against NATO, for the very reasons given by everyone else — they didn’t want war with Russia and they chose economic and military ties with Russia over NATO. So why was Ukraine’s president working with NATO to get Ukraine into NATO?
Because he thought it was the best way forward. The population didn't think so, so they elected another president who stopped further integration into NATO and ultimately Ukraine didn't end up joining. This is how politics, governance and elections work.
As I've said, whether countries joined NATO or not was up to them. The door was open, but nobody was dragging them in by force as you wrote. That's a lie.
Increase in whataboutism I think is caused by unequal treatment for the same evil actions.
Imagine there is a crime done by a person of a race X who gets a warning and the same crime done by a person of a race Y who goes to jail. Now by amplifying how bad person of a race Y did and asking for a death penalty you only increase that inequality of treatment.
How do you see we push for a movement and solidarity against evil in an equal for all manner in a world where some countries may not have economic power to put sanctions and other countries can ignore UN because of their power?
we don't separate by gender other intellectual pursuits, e.g. best author, best director, jeopardy winner, etc.
[edit] Just checked Wikipedia, and it turns out Chess mostly isn't separate by gender so I stand corrected:
The majority of chess tournaments are open to all participants regardless of gender. Very few, if any, international tournaments are restricted to men, but a few are restricted to women, most prominently the Women's World Chess Championship and the Women's Chess Olympiad.