Ukraine

[SilentPony]

So I find myself feeling oddly cynical about what Biden and American politicians have been saying over the weekend about a hardline with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons deployed in Ukraine.

So Putin can invade a sovereign country, send covert kill teams to assassinate their leaders, bomb hospitals including the neo-natal ward, killing newborn babies, their mothers and medical staff, bomb movie theaters and gyms being used as refugee housing, bomb actual civilian homes, rape women and young girls, destroy entire cities and towns, have Russian soldiers gunning down the elderly, the infirm, women and children on camera in the street, and target journalist and foreign aid workers. All of that, and the West is just "money and guns."
But he drops a nuke on a city, and suddenly he's gone too far?! The use of artillery, missiles and conventional troops to destroy a city and violate its population is totally fine, but if he does it with a nuke then suddenly its game on? Dead is dead. Babies and mothers in a hospital are not any more dead if killed by a nuke than a cruise missile. This just feels like toothless political grandstanding.

 

[Silvanus]

You believe yourself to be happier reveling in ignorance?

Twitter: the only alternative to ignorance.

You don't find it the least bit interesting that Ukrainian Nazis would be playing up a connection to NATO specifically to begin with? That's a bit weird, but OK.

I'm not in the habit of taking things Nazis say at face value at all, honestly.

Here are some financial things.

Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev - Institute of the Black World 21st Century

If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call.

ibw21.org

Main takeaway: there were targeted donations to Ukrainian media from various western organizations specifically to promote the Euromaidan and its "anti-corruption" targeting of Yanukovych but not similarly corrupt pro-western politicians. I noticed that several of that article's links are broken... now. Others are not. Various websites seem to be deleting old articles about western involvement in Ukraine. We saw a similar playbook in Brazil deployed against Lula and Rousseff.

So Western organisations put money into Euromaidan. This really is a lot of nothing; this is inevitable given the global nature of money nowadays. You'd be unable to find a single movement that wasn't drawing funds from overseas.

If you think the presence of foreign money wholly delegitimises an election, that's a hell of a hill to climb, and applies to damn near every democratic state on the planet. And if you think that foreign money actually decided the outcome of the last election, you've simply not done your research. The better funded parties lost. You're simping for the big-money establishment candidates here, I'm sorry to have to tell you.

Of course, we could utilize a more general type of reasoning and judgment and look to the results of the Euromaidan as measured against its demands. And what would we find?

Why Zelensky’s Ukraine Is Becoming Increasingly Autocratic

We are witnessing the establishment of a pro-Western authoritarian regime in Ukraine, where power is concentrated in the hands of the president.

nationalinterest.org

Jesus wept, we're now pushing Richard Nixon's arch-conservative pet publication, are we?

We would find that, quite conspicuously, the only Euromaidan demand to be achieved other than Yanukovych's removal from power was the signing of a trade agreement with Europe. The domination of Ukraine's politics by oligarchs is untouched. Corruption remains rife. Police and judicial reform are absent. Investigation into the killings of protestors never reached a result. The Euromaidan was so successful in delivering democracy that the people chose another candidate largely for not being involved with it-- and then Zelensky's outsider status delivered nothing substantial in terms of political change (which should be no surprise as he was also a servant of Ukrainian oligarchy, specifically the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, before and after his election). Zelensky turned out to deliver just a slightly more subtle form of oligarchy. In that respect we might compare the United States: we may choose freely among a limited selection of bad choices that all will operate in much the same way irrespective of the wishes of the public. Both are managed democracies which is also to say that they are not democracies at all-- obviously.

But to focus more on the point: the one policy change that the west wanted out of the Euromaidan was what the Euromaidan achieved. And basically nothing else. And you want me to believe that the west had nothing to do with this. Despite the various western groups funding various Ukrainian initiatives aimed at privatizing Ukraine's economy and integrating it westward since the Orange revolution ten years earlier, including the media vehicles which kept the Euromaidan protests prominent in the public consciousness and viewed favorably by almost half of the population of Ukraine. It's just a great coincidence that the result included only the stuff the western ruling class cares about.

A government failed to deliver on its campaign promises. Surely justification for invasion and annexation, then.

Cry me a fucking river. An independent press does not legally exist in Russia. Russia slaughters journalists at a rate that makes that seem like child's play. Russia has no free elections whatsoever. And Ukraine is also a far more financially equal country than Russia, which has one of the worst Gini coefficients on the planet. On every single one of these metrics-- bar none-- Russia is a hundred times worse.

Please stop pretending you actually care about these things, like freedom of the press, ending oligarchy, etc etc. It's so transparent. You're happily sacrificing every one of those principles if the executioner happens to wear a flag you like.

Ukrainians appear to be divided on whether the Russian invasion is a good or bad thing

Absolute fucking dross. You cannot expect a single thinking person to believe this. As Russia carpet-bombs hospitals, schools, pregnancy units, kindergartens; it takes someone truly brainwashed to watch that and conclude that the civilians burning to death and fleeing are happy to see you arrive.

Naturally, because you are consistent, you condemned all support for Kurdish anarchists in Syria by the United States and support Bashar al-Assad in maintaining the territorial integrity of Syria under his leadership. Oh, wait, no-- unlike the people who took power as the result of a right-wing coup involving neo-Nazis, Assad is evil. And quite unlike the United States, Putin is evil and manipulative; anything that has received Russian support cannot possibly be at the same time an expression of the feelings of the local population. The United States, because it is so righteous, is free to support whomever it wishes with weapons without any automatic adverse judgment against the recipients.

You're drawing an analogy between... the Kurdish fighters in Syria, and the Russian invasion? You know, the latter being an invasion by a foreign Imperial state, aiming at annexation, regime change, and the dismantling of democracy, and the former... uhrm, not being that. In any respect.

That might take the cake as the weakest argument yet.

What's quite sad is I can actually remember when you used to be coherent. You truly have gone down such a rabbit hole.

 

[tstorm823]

You believe yourself to be happier reveling in ignorance?

Zero information is not the epitome of ignorance. Bad information is worse than none at all. You are more ignorant than the day you were born because of the information you choose to believe.

 

[Seanchaidh]

You're drawing an analogy between... the Kurdish fighters in Syria, and the Russian invasion? You know, the latter being an invasion by a foreign Imperial state, aiming at annexation, regime change, and the dismantling of democracy, and the former... uhrm, not being that. In any respect.

That might take the cake as the weakest argument yet.

What's quite sad is I can actually remember when you used to be coherent. You truly have gone down such a rabbit hole.

I have to wonder why you're being so disingenuous or whether you're truly this oblivious or bad at reading or..? Look, I'm of the opinion that I'm not putting anywhere near enough time or effort into this to be making the best articulated case (nor do I particularly want to), but come on now. Literally this is what you're responding to:

Meanwhile you're utterly fine with the Ukrainian regime making war against the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics for eight years-- because a new Ukrainian government without the legitimacy of a constitutional transfer of power but with the legitimacy conferred on it by the endorsement of European and American diplomats and politicians-- claimed those territories.

Naturally, because you are consistent, you condemned all support for Kurdish anarchists in Syria by the United States and support Bashar al-Assad in maintaining the territorial integrity of Syria under his leadership. Oh, wait, no-- unlike the people who took power as the result of a right-wing coup involving neo-Nazis, Assad is evil. And quite unlike the United States, Putin is evil and manipulative; anything that has received Russian support cannot possibly be at the same time an expression of the feelings of the local population. The United States, because it is so righteous, is free to support whomever it wishes with weapons without any automatic adverse judgment against the recipients.

It should be so clear what comparison I'm making, even if you cut it up into smaller bits so as to remove context. But if you pretend not to be able to read, I guess I just made the weakest argument yet! OK, Silvanus, lol

So why did you make up some other bullshit to argue against? And then with the grandstanding and lamentations about former coherence? You just catastrophically failed at reading, that's the whole explanation of how "weak" the argument was.

The DPR and LPR are not the same thing as Russia. Your whole deal with the Donbass is apparently pretending that Russian support of separatists entirely delegitimizes them and makes Ukrainian aggression against them acceptable, including the more than ten thousand civilians that have perished from Ukrainian shelling. And, you apparently believe, Russia's support of those who are defending themselves from that shelling is deplorable. But when the United States aids Kurdish separatists, you think that's just fine and dandy. Indeed, that the United States was honor bound to continue supporting them. The United States, in your view, is allowed to have a foreign policy that is 'humanitarian' (lol) even if accidentally, but Russia can have no such thing; it is entirely impossible, even by accident. Any cause supported by Russia, by the mere fact of that support, demonstrates the illegitimacy of that cause in its entirety. You are accepting the arguments for United States imperialism from the left controlled opposition perspective and so you fail to be consistent even by your own standards-- to the extent you have to pretend not to be able to discern what I'm talking about even when it is explicitly stated.

 

[Seanchaidh]

(this post originally came before the previous one, but it wouldn't post in one chunk)

Twitter: the only alternative to ignorance.

It isn't, but tstorm823 seems to think the problem is information which he disagrees with. Twitter has a lot of that.

I'm not in the habit of taking things Nazis say at face value at all, honestly

You seem perfectly content to take Ukrainian and western propaganda at face value, even when it comes from outlets which ignore Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem (which is all of the mainstream ones now).

So Western organisations put money into Euromaidan. This really is a lot of nothing; this is inevitable given the global nature of money nowadays. You'd be unable to find a single movement that wasn't drawing funds from overseas.

USAID, NED, and other organizations do indeed fund a lot of shit, but that doesn't make them not responsible for the outcomes of what they do fund, regimes successfully overthrown and so on.

If you think the presence of foreign money wholly delegitimises an election, that's a hell of a hill to climb,

The Euromaidan wasn't an election. It was a coup in which the elected president fled because of threats to his safety and a new government was picked apparently by US officials.

and applies to damn near every democratic state on the planet. And if you think that foreign money actually decided the outcome of the last election, you've simply not done your research. The better funded parties lost. You're simping for the big-money establishment candidates here, I'm sorry to have to tell you.

Zelensky isn't significantly different from the candidates he beat. And it's really weird that you continue to ignore that his media career was funded by an oligarch and amounted to a ton of free advertising beforehand. Zelensky had his own scandal related to hiding assets overseas, and he worked and continues to work for the oligarch Kolomoisky.

Jesus wept, we're now pushing Richard Nixon's arch-conservative pet publication, are we?

Are you OK? I guess this is what you say if you have no reply to the facts they pointed out. But yes, President of the United States Richard Nixon, well known beforehand for his work on the House Un-American Activities Committee (he was the second most famous McCarthyist after McCarthy himself) was very well known for his pro-Russian perspective.

Like, what, do you think they made up the fact that Ukraine remains dominated by oligarchs, that Zelensky hasn't been able to implement the campaign promises he ran on, and so forth?

A government failed to deliver on its campaign promises. Surely justification for invasion and annexation, then.

That government was making war on its own people. According to the United States, that is indeed justification for invasion... if you're the United States or its allies.

Please stop pretending you actually care about these things, like freedom of the press, ending oligarchy, etc etc. It's so transparent. You're happily sacrificing every one of those principles if the executioner happens to wear a flag you like.

You're happy to go along with a coup, supported by the United States and other foreign funding that succeeded in overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government in large part because neo-Nazi groups cynically orchestrated the killing of protestors and successfully (with the help of foreign-funded media) blamed that massacre on the government. You can read about that here: Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine_APSA_Conference.pdf (orientalreview.org)

Me? I just think we (meaning our governments) ought not to sanction one side when it is hardly worse than the other or ourselves, nor should we engage in meddling with other people's politics nor, when we have done so, pretend that we never did. That you want to morph this into support for the Kremlin is understandable, in that you surely know that would be easier to argue against, but also not persuasive to anyone closely following-- close following is what your arguments seem designed to try to prevent, as they always seem to shift to this bullshit about supporting Russia's capitalist hellscape when you run out of salient points, which is basically always as you seem to be running on empty. My "pro-Kremlin" attitude of not wanting to inflict suffering on people overseas in order to strengthen the global empire of the United States. You got me, Silvanus!

When the topic is Euromaidan, here you are defending the meddling of the United States in Ukraine and taking the State Department line on the illegal coup. Such principle. Such consistency. Truly, my heart is aflutter.

Absolute fucking dross. You cannot expect a single thinking person to believe this. As Russia carpet-bombs hospitals, schools, pregnancy units, kindergartens; it takes someone truly brainwashed to watch that and conclude that the civilians burning to death and fleeing are happy to see you arrive.

There are civilians in Eastern Ukraine that have apparently been quite happy to see Russians arrive. I don't know what to tell you about that; journalists have gone to the Donbass and been shocked to find out. Your perception of the war may be the result of a design to ignore their perspectives, or indeed to portray the Russian invasion as substantially more bloodthirsty than it has really been so far, especially in comparison to the American approach in Libya or Iraq, and of course without the context that many of these people have been living in fear of attacks by the Kiev government for the last several years. Yes, some people are greeting the Russian military as liberators. That's... really demonstrative of just how low the bar is in (especially Eastern) Ukraine, but it is what it is. If you consider that substantial portions of people have been under attack by their own government for awhile, it's not that weird. Especially if you also consider that their government has been incorporating neo-Nazi militias into its armed forces; that's not just some abstraction, it has real effects on how those armed forces operate.

 

[Thaluikhain]

But he drops a nuke on a city, and suddenly he's gone too far?! The use of artillery, missiles and conventional troops to destroy a city and violate its population is totally fine, but if he does it with a nuke then suddenly its game on? Dead is dead. Babies and mothers in a hospital are not any more dead if killed by a nuke than a cruise missile. This just feels like toothless political grandstanding.

On one hand yes, but on another, keeping nuclear (and biological and chemical) weapons taboo isn't a bad thing. There've been no nukes used in 76 and a bit years, which has greatly lessened the body counts of all the wars during that time. Dead is dead, but the numbers will change if nukes become accepted.

 

[Kwak]

Ukrainians appear to be divided on whether the Russian invasion is a good or bad thing, so why would I take a position on it?

What. The. Fuck.?
You think Ukrainians are not sure whether THIS is a good or bad thing?

Kharkiv’s heart ‘ripped out’ by relentless Russian bombardment

For weeks, Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the border with Russia, has been under a constant artillery barrage.

www.aljazeera.com

Or this.? I mean it's only a quarter of the population that has left, so the other 3/4 are probably fine with it I guess?

Although the war is less than one month old the fighting has already produced a total of roughly 10 million displaced persons, which is nearly one-quarter of the entire population of Ukraine.

As of March 20. UNHCR estimates there are nearly 3.5 million total Ukrainian refugees. The rate of border crossings continues to decline daily, however, with a steady reduction in the numbers entering neighboring countries ever since the peak daily crossing of 209,000 people on March 6.

Analyzing the Scale of Ukraine’s Destruction - Ukraine

Analysis in English on Ukraine and 7 other countries about Health and Protection and Human Rights; published on 23 Mar 2022 by Direct Relief

reliefweb.int

You're a fucking monster.

 

[Satinavian]

There are civilians in Eastern Ukraine that have apparently been quite happy to see Russians arrive. I don't know what to tell you about that; journalists have gone to the Donbass and been shocked to find out. Your perception of the war may be the result of a design to ignore their perspectives, or indeed to portray the Russian invasion as substantially more bloodthirsty than it has really been so far, especially in comparison to the American approach in Libya or Iraq, and of course without the context that many of these people have been living in fear of attacks by the Kiev government for the last several years. Yes, some people are greeting the Russian military as liberators. That's... really demonstrative of just how low the bar is in (especially Eastern) Ukraine, but it is what it is. If you consider that substantial portions of people have been under attack by their own government for awhile, it's not that weird. Especially if you also consider that their government has been incorporating neo-Nazi militias into its armed forces; that's not just some abstraction, it has real effects on how those armed forces operate.

That is just not true.

Even in the Eastern Ukraine, even in the ethnic Russian regions, even in the Donbass people did not welcome the Russian invaders at all.

And the reason for that is that contrasting what Russia claims, people there have not been livimg in fear of attacks by the Kievan gouvernment. Because Ukraine did not actually wage a war against its own population or anything like this.

Furthermore, yes, the Russian invasion is way more bloodthirsty than the American one in Iraq.




But the problem is, you can't admit that you are wrong on any of those points, can you ? Because when the Ukrainian gouvernment are not just American puppets, it would it would make the Russian invasion just an uprovoked war of agression. And if the Ukrainians are not engaging in some genocidal actions, nothing would even remotely excuse all the violence the Russians do.

You are excusing an uprovoked extremely bloody fascist invasion. That is what you do. And frankly, it seems that is what you really stand for at heart.

 

[tstorm823]

contrasting what Russia claims...

Don't you see? If you doubt Russia's claims, you're embracing ignorance!

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

What. The. Fuck.?
You think Ukrainians are not sure whether THIS is a good or bad thing?

Kharkiv’s heart ‘ripped out’ by relentless Russian bombardment

For weeks, Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the border with Russia, has been under a constant artillery barrage.

www.aljazeera.com

Or this.? I mean it's only a quarter of the population that has left, so the other 3/4 are probably fine with it I guess?

Analyzing the Scale of Ukraine’s Destruction - Ukraine

Analysis in English on Ukraine and 7 other countries about Health and Protection and Human Rights; published on 23 Mar 2022 by Direct Relief

reliefweb.int

You're a fucking monster.

You just don't understand. Surely Ukrainians would rather die violently to loving Russian munitions than continue to breathe freely under the yoke of US imperialism! Now shut up so that Putin can recreate the USSR and humiliate the West like it deserves.

 

[Silvanus]

I have to wonder why you're being so disingenuous or whether you're truly this oblivious or bad at reading or..? Look, I'm of the opinion that I'm not putting anywhere near enough time or effort into this to be making the best articulated case (nor do I particularly want to), but come on now. Literally this is what you're responding to:

It should be so clear what comparison I'm making, even if you cut it up into smaller bits so as to remove context. But if you pretend not to be able to read, I guess I just made the weakest argument yet! OK, Silvanus, lol

So why did you make up some other bullshit to argue against? And then with the grandstanding and lamentations about former coherence? You just catastrophically failed at reading, that's the whole explanation of how "weak" the argument was.

Yes, the direct analogy is between the Donetsk and Luhansk Kremlin puppet-states and the Kurdish fighters. What a huge distinction! They're totally not regional proxies for the imperial ambitions of their neighbour! How could such a mistake have been made?!

This makes the analogy precisely... no more credible.

The DPR and LPR are not the same thing as Russia. Your whole deal with the Donbass is apparently pretending that Russian support of separatists entirely delegitimizes them and makes Ukrainian aggression against them acceptable, including the more than ten thousand civilians that have perished from Ukrainian shelling.

No, Russian support does not delegitimise them. Plenty of things that have Russian support globally are perfectly legitimate. What delegitimises them is that they're the result of a foreign, armed overthrow of a democratically-elected government.

What's really odd is you seemed to be arguing that the presence of foreign finance in Euromaidan delegitimises it... yet here we have a movement that was 1) far more violent; 2) far more dominated by foreign finance; 3) Actually involved foreign military personnel secretly and illegally involved; and 4) Unlike Euromaidan, was not followed by any election or referendum for the actual populace to decide the composition of the government. How strange!

---

But let's investigate this idiotic idea that the DPR and LPR are entirely distinct and independent of Russia. Firstly, a reminder that until.... less than a week before the invasion this year, Russia officially supported Ukrainian sovereignty over the entirety of Donbas. It had also made a separate binding international commitment to respect Ukrainian territorial borders as they stood.

All the while, they were secretly trafficking arms and other financial support to the insurgency, as well as disguised Russian military personnel.

And now, those breakaway "states" serve as the casus belli for Russia to invade Ukraine... including going far beyond the Donbas, and shelling Western Ukrainian population centres.

In short, if you can't see that this is a transparent re-run of the Crimea situation of 6 years ago, a thin veneer to disguise yet another obvious annexation, then I don't know what to tell you. I suspect you do actually know all this, because you're not an idiot. You just want it to happen.

 

[Silvanus]

You seem perfectly content to take Ukrainian and western propaganda at face value, even when it comes from outlets which ignore Ukraine's neo-Nazi problem (which is all of the mainstream ones now).

No, you simply reduce and dismiss any and all media which doesn't fit a predetermined narrative as the result of "western propaganda". I'm the only one here who has provided legitimately independent Ukrainian outlets, without any financing from the eeeeevil west.

The Euromaidan wasn't an election. It was a coup in which the elected president fled because of threats to his safety and a new government was picked apparently by US officials.

Even if we accept that skewed and simplistic characterisation of Euromaidan: the government was decided by the 2014 election. Which was not controlled by "US officials".

But even if you were to believe that... the government that emerged after Euromaidan was the Poroshenko government... which was then defeated by Zelensky in 2019. So the current government isn't even the fucking same one. It's the one that defeated the one you're moaning about.

Zelensky isn't significantly different from the candidates he beat. And it's really weird that you continue to ignore that his media career was funded by an oligarch and amounted to a ton of free advertising beforehand. Zelensky had his own scandal related to hiding assets overseas, and he worked and continues to work for the oligarch Kolomoisky.

Wah, you don't like the winner of a democratic election.

Working for oligarchs, free advertising, hidden overseas assets etc, all factors that you believe delegitimise an elected head of state, but are willing to entirely overlook for a dictator. Even though for the latter they are all far more pronounced.

Are you OK? I guess this is what you say if you have no reply to the facts they pointed out. But yes, President of the United States Richard Nixon, well known beforehand for his work on the House Un-American Activities Committee (he was the second most famous McCarthyist after McCarthy himself) was very well known for his pro-Russian perspective.

Like, what, do you think they made up the fact that Ukraine remains dominated by oligarchs, that Zelensky hasn't been able to implement the campaign promises he ran on, and so forth?

Well known for his anti-Communist perspective. Today's Russian government, Christian-nationalist and ultra-capitalist, is far more in line with the more authoritarian veins of the US Republican Party. There's money to be made, after all, and the Russian government is happy to oblige the global capitalist class.

That government was making war on its own people. According to the United States, that is indeed justification for invasion... if you're the United States or its allies.

Puppet proxy-states created as a tool for the imperial ambitions of a neighbour =/= "its own people".

If the US sponsored a "breakaway Republic" in Siberia, provided it with endless money and disguised its military personnel to defend it, you'd be cheerleading for the Russian defence. This is solely about who's doing it for you, not what they're doing.

You're happy to go along with a coup, supported by the United States and other foreign funding that succeeded in overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government in large part because neo-Nazi groups cynically orchestrated the killing of protestors and successfully (with the help of foreign-funded media) blamed that massacre on the government. You can read about that here: Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine_APSA_Conference.pdf (orientalreview.org)

Fail to see a single thing I've ever said that could rationally be interpreted as support for that. You gripe that others are "inventing" positions for you to hold one minute, then do exactly the same thing to others the next.

Another quick reminder that the government that followed Euromaidan (which was also elected) is not related to the current government, which defeated it.

Me? I just think we (meaning our governments) ought not to sanction one side when it is hardly worse than the other or ourselves, nor should we engage in meddling with other people's politics nor, when we have done so, pretend that we never did.

But none of these principles apply to Russia. They can do whatever the fuck they want, because they don't like the US.

There are civilians in Eastern Ukraine that have apparently been quite happy to see Russians arrive. I don't know what to tell you about that; journalists have gone to the Donbass and been shocked to find out. Your perception of the war may be the result of a design to ignore their perspectives, or indeed to portray the Russian invasion as substantially more bloodthirsty than it has really been so far, especially in comparison to the American approach in Libya or Iraq, and of course without the context that many of these people have been living in fear of attacks by the Kiev government for the last several years. Yes, some people are greeting the Russian military as liberators. That's... really demonstrative of just how low the bar is in (especially Eastern) Ukraine, but it is what it is. If you consider that substantial portions of people have been under attack by their own government for awhile, it's not that weird. Especially if you also consider that their government has been incorporating neo-Nazi militias into its armed forces; that's not just some abstraction, it has real effects on how those armed forces operate.

The Russian government has also incorporated Neo-Nazi militias into its armed forces. Far larger ones. Five fucking times larger. And even the main Russian military has been instructed to pursue some pretty fucking quasi-fascist approaches, including the intentional focus on civilian infrastructure, and the hunting-down of foreign reporters.

Your perception of the war is a result of a blanket unwillingness to acknowledge atrocity, if it's committed by a side with which you have pre-existing sympathy. And whenever such evidence emerges, the reaction is a kneejerk dismissal, attributing it to "propaganda", regardless of whether the outlet is entirely independent, free of foreign finance, etc.

The end result is someone who can see direct and credible evidence of the targeting of hospitals and schools, ignore it, and then immediately instead turn to Twitter nobodies or right-wing US rags, and repost them completely uncritically, if they happen to bolster whatever view he already holds.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

Ukraine war: Russia to 'fundamentally cut back' military activity near Kyiv and Chernihiv - but West says they're just playing for time

The Kremlin also appears to be on the verge of agreeing to a presidential meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

news.sky.com

"Yes we left those areas out of goodness of our hearts and not because of we were losing too many men."

 

[Hawki]

Russia is dying out

Putin is terrified by his nation's demographic crisis

unherd.com

What's quite sad is I can actually remember when you used to be coherent. You truly have gone down such a rabbit hole.

Um, guys, when was Sean not down the rabbit hole?

None of the stuff he's posted here is out of place with what he's posted elsewhere.

 

[tstorm823]

Um, guys, when was Sean not down the rabbit hole?

None of the stuff he's posted here is out of place with what he's posted elsewhere.

As much as I enjoy arguing with people here, it can also be really nice to sit back and watch people realize that disagreeing with me was all they ever had in common.

 

[Eacaraxe]

On one hand yes, but on another, keeping nuclear (and biological and chemical) weapons taboo isn't a bad thing. There've been no nukes used in 76 and a bit years, which has greatly lessened the body counts of all the wars during that time. Dead is dead, but the numbers will change if nukes become accepted.

The problem with this, is "the red line" being the deployment of specifically NBC weapons, normalizes the use of "conventional" weapons up to and including even those the deployment of which is a war crime -- cluster and incendiary munitions, toxic munitions not expressly banned as chemical weapons (there's a difference), and anti-personnel mines, to name four directly relevant to this conversation.

Now, what's telling about this is what's not included -- radiological weapons. Munitions that incorporate depleted uranium aren't just toxic munitions and therefore nominally prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907, they're radiological weapons. [Which, given what is now understood about the toxicity of lead which wasn't a century ago, unjacketed rounds would also be nominally banned but for the issue being moot. The 1899 Convention de facto prohibited unjacketed rounds.]

And between the firebombing campaigns against Japan and Germany in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, those are issues on which the United States has zero moral authority to say a damned thing. Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's body counts are, frankly, barely a footnote compared to what the US achieved with "strategic" bombing.

 

[Kwak]

As much as I enjoy arguing with people here, it can also be really nice to sit back and watch people realize that disagreeing with me was all they ever had in common.

Why. are you a sociopath?
Oh that's right, you're a self-identified "conservative", so yeah.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The problem with this, is "the red line" being the deployment of specifically NBC weapons, normalizes the use of "conventional" weapons up to and including even those the deployment of which is a war crime -- cluster and incendiary munitions, toxic munitions not expressly banned as chemical weapons (there's a difference), and anti-personnel mines, to name four directly relevant to this conversation.

Now, what's telling about this is what's not included -- radiological weapons. Munitions that incorporate depleted uranium aren't just toxic munitions and therefore nominally prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907, they're radiological weapons. [Which, given what is now understood about the toxicity of lead which wasn't a century ago, unjacketed rounds would also be nominally banned but for the issue being moot. The 1899 Convention de facto prohibited unjacketed rounds.]

And between the firebombing campaigns against Japan and Germany in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, those are issues on which the United States has zero moral authority to say a damned thing. Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's body counts are, frankly, barely a footnote compared to what the US achieved with "strategic" bombing.

True, though I don't think those conventional weapons are going to go away regardless. A ban on nuclear weapons has been accepted by the global community, that's just not going to happen with, say, firebombs and (to an extent) booby traps.

(As an aside, aren't lots of pistol calibre rounds (and shotgun slugs) still unjacketed?)

 

[crimson5pheonix]

True, though I don't think those conventional weapons are going to go away regardless. A ban on nuclear weapons has been accepted by the global community, that's just not going to happen with, say, firebombs and (to an extent) booby traps.

(As an aside, aren't lots of pistol calibre rounds (and shotgun slugs) still unjacketed?)

Pistol rounds can be jacketed, semi-jacketed or unjacketed. Shotgun slugs I think can be jacketed, but I'm unsure if I've ever actually seen one. In any case, only military rounds have to be jacketed or leadfree. Civilians (barring certain situations or individual laws) are free to use lead ball.

 

[Generals]

Russia is dying out

Putin is terrified by his nation's demographic crisis

unherd.com

If he truly wants to repopulate Russia and believed the Russian speaking population in Donbass was facing genocide why didn't he offer asylum to all of them instead of starting a bloody rebellion followed by a full scale war?

Um, guys, when was Sean not down the rabbit hole?

None of the stuff he's posted here is out of place with what he's posted elsewhere.

Indeed, I am confused at Silvanus's surprise considering it was him who had a lengthy discussion about the treatment of the Uighur in China, which according to Sean is totally normal and fine.