- May 6, 2020
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Come now: We both know why.Why?
Come now: We both know why.Why?
Something Something Why does America get to get away with Imperialism Something Something It's only fair if we also let Russia get away with it something something.Its funny that those against American imperialism paradoxically take the stance that America should embrace Russia as a partner in Imperialism and divide an unwilling Europe between them. America forcing Ukraine, and possibly the rest of eastern Europe to submit themselves to a Russian dictatorship is a breach of those countries sovereignty. Its America and Russia jointly subverting the will of both the peoples and the institutions of those nations. Of course this approach also has the added benefit of flattering Russia, allowing it to pretend to be an equal to the US and a superior to Europe rather than a dismal backwater who's entire state resolves around a finite resource.
So is American imperialism justified if it helps Russia feel like an Imperial power again?
"Such a historical injustice. I didn't get to nuke them even once."I've heard people try to justify Russian Nuclear threats by "Well, the US nuked Japan. Twice even!"
You would lose nothing by simply removing the words "given the context of US global empire". It is predictable and normal for Russia (like many states) to seek dominace over its neighbours. Russia was doing so long before the USA had any meaningful presence outside the Americas. Before then it was Germany, or Sweden, or Poland, whoever else suited the justification at the time.Russia chose its own interests over those of Ukraine; Russia's invasion has been selfish and immoral in that respect. But that selfishness and immorality is predictable and normal given the context of US global empire.
Firstly it should be noted that Russia is absolutely no stranger in destroying countries through invasion and annexation. Russia is not the nation under threat by foreign powers. Its the nation threatening other powers. The post cold war order actually placed very little restrictions on Russia. It was allowed to get filthy rich from oil and gas trade, establish the most brutal dictatorship they desired and even keep several Soviet perks like their UN seat and being considered a great power at least by courtesy. Seemingly the only restriction on Russia was that they weren't allowed to brutally expand beyond their borders and even that one proved pretty darned negotiable until recently.It is predictable because of the threat that empire poses to Russia as well as the US's history of violently enforcing its will and destroying other countries by invasion, assassination. It is normal because this sort of invasion is how the United States reacts even to non-threats like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Russia's actions are justifiable in terms of its own security,
Yes.''Russia's security'' in practice always comes down to other countries having to surrender sovereignty and territory just so Russia feels secure. As such its hardly a ''tragic misunderstanding'' that the west just fails to see Russia's ''defensive'' goals.
Then Mr Gandhi should not have threatened the peace-loving Maori people with nuclear annihilation if he didn't want his people slaughtered and his cities razed to the ground.this drunk-civ-player kind of rationale.
It's important to remember that most of the military's day-to-day is carried out by people younger than 27. This covers junior enlisted through junior NCOs as well as junior officers. A 21 year old who enlisted at 18 has fully trained and settled into their career, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an intelligence service member (this airman's job) to have and require access to classified information. The real question and issue is less why did this airman have access to the info and more how was he able to remove it from the secure systems it resides in without triggering red flags; major gaps evidently need to be addressed there.
6 facts about the U.S. military and its changing demographics
The demographic makeup of the country's active-duty force has changed over time, and those changes tend to reflect trends in the broader society.www.pewresearch.org
Time to start burning shit down for Russians, I suppose.
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Until now, military recruitment officers have had to go in person to deliver a paper summons to a draftee's home or workplace.
That system will now be supplanted by electronic notifications — i.e. emails — issued through systems including the web portals that Russians use to pay their utility bills, taxes and other services.
The electronic notification will be binding from the moment the government hits send.
And with the new law, draftees are immediately banned from leaving the country.
Those who fail to show up at a recruitment office promptly will soon face a raft of new restrictions related to banking, selling property and even gaining access to a driver's license.
Because of how non-coincidentally your defense/indulgence of Russia resembles similarly hypocritical defenses of Israel, it's incredibly easy to flip this around. You are the one arguing that a state with one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals is existentially threatened by some hypothetical invasion by a defensive alliance. You're happy to reference the UK's military spending to imply some kind of militaristic ambition while ignoring that Russia's military spending is (on paper) around the same (while also benefitting from numerous advantages like greater purchasing power and not needing to pay competitive salaries).This thread has instead been home to fantasist rambling about the irrelevance of concerns about NATO beside what is framed as Russia's imperial ambitions (which are simultaneously mocked because the enemy must be both too strong and too weak).
It was an air force guy, right? So, at least it wasn't a military leak.
I executed the order with this very hand, I killed the children. You understand, by order. The fact that we… We were given the order to wipe out and kill everyone… We went and killed everyone – women, men, pensioners and children, in particular, the small ones, 5 year-olds.
Residents were going outside. And there was an order: everyone aged 15 and over – shoot all of them at once. 20–24 people were shot, 10 of them were 15-year-old and 17-year-old teenagers.
This is the force that Russia's government has entrusted with a central role in the conflict in Ukraine, trained on Russian military bases and sponsored with government money, and now financed to set up a military tech centre in the Russian capital.Mainly with a knife. We cut the throat. We film it. When Prigozhin said sledgehammer, we took a sledgehammer and killed [a man] with a sledgehammer. This is his method. He is a horrible person.
Lucky for him he was just following orders then. /sSome key quotes:
I dunno, something is sus there.During the interview, they openly state they've executed children as young as 5 or 6; were involved in killing hundreds of civilians; and killed wounded prisoners of war.
I don't think you're wrong, but I have to say that Wagner seems like the right company to make strides in dehumanizing the enemy. I mean, during World War II, the US Army saw a marked increase in soldiers' effectiveness in killing the enemy by just switching from plain bull's-eye targets to human silhouettes in basic training and shortening shooting drills so that the trainees didn't have time to think about what they were shooting at. We even have a name for this- "killology".I dunno, something is sus there.
There used to be this deeply weird group of people who would go around pretending to be holocaust survivors. Some of them even got quite famous by publicizing accounts of their made-up holocaust experiences, but what tended to catch them out is that those experiences were almost always too perfect. Like, it wasn't enough to have survived the holocaust, the entire holocaust needed to have happened to them.
This gives me similar vibes, but obviously in reverse. It seems like someone who has a deep psychological need to see and present themselves as dangerous and powerful, a trait that is coincidentally common in both convicts and neo-Nazis. This doesn't mean it's all bullshit. There's enough evidence to say pretty conclusively that Wagner certainly do like to video themselves killing POWs. But I'm not buying for a second that this cirrhotic suicide squad reject and his fellow LARP Nazis killed 10% of the estimated remaining civilian population of Bakhmut in a single day without anyone noticing. Darwin doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.
Killing people, real people with a limbic system and a desire for self-preservation as opposed to video game NPCs, is not particularly easy. In order to carry out genocide, the actual Nazis had to develop these very convoluted systems and procedures for managing the potential for resistance amongst large groups of people. Walking into a basement with 400 frightened and panicking people seems like a good way to find out that humans are still fundamentally apes and why noone wants to end up in the chimpanzee enclosure.
Good point. That incident supposedly took place in March-- after the majority of the remaining civilian population of Bakhmut had already been moved into bunkers. On the other hand, March did mark the time Russia/Wagner seized the ~half of the city east of the Bakhmutka river, so a lot of additional area/buildings fell under their control. It's probable that will have included chunks of the civilian population.I dunno, something is sus there.
There used to be this deeply weird group of people who would go around pretending to be holocaust survivors. Some of them even got quite famous by publicizing accounts of their made-up holocaust experiences, but what tended to catch them out is that those experiences were almost always too perfect. Like, it wasn't enough to have survived the holocaust, the entire holocaust needed to have happened to them.
This gives me similar vibes, but obviously in reverse. It seems like someone who has a deep psychological need to see and present themselves as dangerous and powerful, a trait that is coincidentally common in both convicts and neo-Nazis. This doesn't mean it's all bullshit. There's enough evidence to say pretty conclusively that Wagner certainly do like to video themselves killing POWs. But I'm not buying for a second that this cirrhotic suicide squad reject and his fellow LARP Nazis killed 10% of the estimated remaining civilian population of Bakhmut in a single day without anyone noticing. Darwin doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.
Killing people, real people with a limbic system and a desire for self-preservation as opposed to video game NPCs, is not particularly easy. In order to carry out genocide, the actual Nazis had to develop these very convoluted systems and procedures for managing the potential for resistance amongst large groups of people. Walking into a basement with 400 frightened and panicking people seems like a good way to find out that humans are still fundamentally apes and why noone wants to end up in the chimpanzee enclosure.