A minute for Mariupol · 9:16pm May 4th, 2023
I'd like you to please take a minute or two to look at this satellite imagery of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Use your mouse to scroll around the whole city. Notice that the harbor, the factories, the warehouses, the commercial districts, the churches are almost untouched except for ones near residences. They targeted only residences. Tens of thousands of them. From the air, you can only see the damage to those that caught on fire: blackened sides of apartment buildings; house walls like garden-mazes after the roofs have burnt away. I think even of them there are tens of thousands. I tried to check the entire city, and didn't find a single undevastated residential district.
This isn't war; it's genocide. Putin doesn't want to incorporate the Ukrainians into Russia; he wants to replace them. So far, they've only killed about 1/10th of one percent of Ukrainians--not nearly as many as 90 years ago, when the Soviets starved 5-10% of all Ukrainians to death. (I should point out that Stalin wasn't Russian.)
Please don't be angry at our Russian brony brothers. I have no idea what private Russians should do now to end this. The private citizens of the US and Europe may have more power over the Russian government than they do.
I think those Republicans who want to cut military aid to Ukraine are misguided. I think those Democrats who want to spend more money on "job creation", solar and wind power, and tuition reimbursement, than on military aid to Ukraine, are also misguided. And I think those who believe we must avoid nuclear war at all costs are as misguided as Chamberlain was in 1938.
[rant deleted 5/12/23]
For those too lazy to click:
The endless pounding of artillery and bombs from The Great War was supposed to be turned into 'Blitzkrieg' by the sequel, which did not 'blitz' quite as fast as certain cheerleaders wanted. The Gulf War was probably as close to that as we ever got, but now we're back to endless bombing and wholesale destruction again. The only good thing about war is the ending, and sometimes that's not very good at all either.
Yeah that is really strange. Not Russian government nor Chinese did not kill so much people or invaded and turned so much countries into the ruins as the US. And they definitely did not call killing, invading, robbing, pillaging and supporting terrorists and local far-right nationalists “liberation“ or “protection“.
I continue to find it strange that we can be in a situation like this without the US being at war with Russia.
Just to the south of where your link points is theater (or, more precise, what was left of it). The inscription in front of the building says "children".
I suspect it is worse in some sense: he doesn't care. (as Stalin too, maybe?)
[Describing, not condoning]
With the decline of Western dominance, the Western mores around "clean" wars are coming to an end. The Old Ways are returning. Defeating the government is a temporary solution to whatever your problem is, and only works if the people obey the government in the first place. Eliminating the people is permanent. Psychotic or not, it's amoral realism. To quote the motto of a Canadian cough syrup: "It Tastes Awful and It Works." It's the default behavior of humanity, it's coming back, and America doesn't have enough munitions, dollars, or recruits to stop it forever.
--from "Might is Right" by Ragnar Redbeard, 1896
5726444
Clean war? From the US? Serbians, poisoned by the US deplated uranium, could read about that with the great surprise. And Iraqis - killed after their country was falsely charged of development and production of biological weapons. And Syrians who fought against the ISIS and other radical islamists, indirectly supported by the US. Russians - who fought other radical islamists in Chechnya, who where likewise indirectly supported by the US and its minions.
And the nazis regimes of Baltic states and the Ukraine - with great amusement. Because the US and other Western leaders prefere not to notice their nazism.
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"Clean" being a relative thing, and frowning on (some? most?) forms of genocide, at least. I don't want to get bogged down in specific historical debates, I'm just pointing out that we can and should expect more of this in the future, not less. Recent history was an aberration.
5726456
That is fun too - because not Russian government nor Chinese were not ever exposed in genocide. Even now in the Ukraine - whatever the Ukrainian far-rights may say.
Well, about avoiding the nuclear war at all costs, I think it has its logic. I mean, if we start a nuclear war, that would led to the complete destruction of United States and Russia, not to mention the vast collateral damage. Despite USA's government is only helping Ukraine for its interest, I'd surely encourage a much mayor USA military aid to Ukraine, because what Russia is doing with Ukraine is, indeed, practically an extermination war, worse than the media are telling us. However..., a nuclear war? I don't know, I see nuclear war as a suicide, a lose-lose situation, in which millions of USA and Russian innocent civilians would die, among many others in other countries. I can't imagine a scenario in which starting a nuclear war is a recommendable option. What do you think about it?
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Mmm..., actually, Russia is doing precisely those same things with the invasion of Ukraine; Russia is not free of that guilt. I think I get what you are saying, that the traditional tale that USA is the protector of liberty and the free world while Russia and China are monsters is a lie, that USA is, in fact, another monster. However, we cannot go to the other extreme and blame only USA while exonerating Russia and China. I see it this way: USA, Russia and China are the three monsters that rule the world (which one is worse?, I don't know, but that's not the point), much to their own citizens misfortune, and the world will be a far better place if these three countries' governments suffer a radical transformation from the inside, but right now one of those monsters, Russia, is attacking Ukraine, a country which has little to do about these quarrels between the West and the East by itself, and USA has the power to prevent Ukraine and its innocent civilians from being eaten by Russia, so the best option for humanity I can think of is for USA to continue providing military aid to Ukraine, as Bad Horse says. Do you agree?
Between the ruins of Mariupol and Bucha, between kidnapping children and claiming loudly that the Ukrainian national identity is purely a fabrication, it's pretty clear that genocide is being attempted. I wish Congress would do more to help Ukraine.
.... as someone from Leningrad I also have absolutely no idea how to stop this, esp. from my below-zero social position (40, single, on welfare due to official disability/high myopia from premature birth, no family to speak off, no status, asexual, wannabe anarchist, ex-animal activist).
To be fair, if we can reduce the world's reliance on oil, we increase the ability of the world to say (this is meant metaphorically, as another way of saying 'Russian warship, go fuck yourself') "Putin, place your walnuts into a blender and press setting HIGH." We just also need to help Ukraine defend itself.
(edits italicized, made within first forty minutes after posting)
5726458
Tell it to the ghosts who didn't get only the 'correct' propaganda. Sorry you have not been very well informed. I hope you at least know that Nazi Germany killed millions, or did you not hear about that either?
5726444
That sure is a take.
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This essay describing how people degrade themselves by straining at gnats and swallowing camels to praise whatever they feel is 'our side,' and to condemn 'the other side,' should be exactly the same whether hosted in the West or in Russia.
(George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language")
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/72/30.pdf
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
Bad Horse, it seems likely to me that you've read this essay already, but it certainly speaks to your interests in good writing and in trying to be fair and evenhanded.
... and as something related but different
https://www.rbth.com/history/328081-surprised-by-russia-wells
Is there possibility The Stalin actually a bit .. snapped in 1930s? I mean, is there ANY non-confrontational way for Russia from 1917 onward if other empires around also not change voluntary and dramatically?
Yes, forced collectivization and industrialuzation were bad, and one can say Stalin completely discredited even idea of Communism, in longer run .. But - for non-industrial (at that time, relatively) country trapped in-between high-tech military forces going into high gear again and one country in particular hating "slavs" to death as policy? Can you just ... take it cool and hope High Powdered royal forces will just leave you alone to play your new thing slowly? Was yestercentury USA also ready to play it cool even after nuclear theory was about to brust into weaponized practice?
I mean, *fundamentally* if most countries already mad can any upstart country/block actually outworm them? As you can imagine "time travelers with xxi century tech visiting Stalin" was popular avenue for althistorical fiction here. But .. I do ot think we accidently invented psychohistory (yet?). I wish(ed) there was or will be way to prove ... some sociology just as you can prove orbital mechanics, materialogy, rockets. Basically, too low level of opposition bad not just because it belived to be, but because otherwise self-amplifying forces will just crush whole system. But looking at how amazingly climate deniers hold their hill ... I do not have even this hope anymore.
Oh, look, framing designed to make it appear as though this is some kind of bipartisan problem. It's almost like I'm reading the Times.
The Republican Party has a sizable faction in it that is not merely "misguided," it is affirmatively on the side of Russia here. The Democrats, on the other hand, are almost completely united in their support for Ukraine and are the driving force behind basically every aid package we've delivered AND chivvying other countries to pony up as well. And when I say "almost completely united" what I mean is "of the three major aid packages voted for Ukraine in 2022, I cannot find a single Democratic nay vote. Not one!" (There are some nay votes on the omnibus defense bills that include aid to Ukraine, but on the three big "this is just about Ukraine" funding rounds? Not a single nay.)
It is true we can (and should) be doing much more, but your sideswipe is fundamentally inaccurate and unfair. It is also true Democrats want to do other things in addition to aid to Ukraine, and that some of those things involve spending more money than on aid to Ukraine, but I guess my response there is "yeah, and?"
More fundamentally, the practical political problems of getting more aid to Ukraine lie entirely on the right rather than on the left in the US. There are leftists who object to aiding Ukraine. They kick up a lot of noise. They're also a tiny fringe and wield no real power. On the right, those who not only want Russia to win, but want the US to look more like Russia does occupy prominent positions in the Congress and amongst their political coalitions party and media apparatus.
These two things are not the same.
I... do not think this is true. Maybe in absolute sense; it's a huge country, you can find "many" people who believe any old thing. Flat Earthers could populate a midsize American city if you scraped them all into one place. But I'm struggling to think of any time there's been significant numbers of people in the US who take the stance of "our domestic policy is uniformly good and right and proper, but our foreign policy is always and forever evil." This seems... dubious to me.
5726439
You do? Why so? The US and the PRC spent four years hurling enormous armies against each other in Korea without being at war. The US was funneling millions of dollars worth of materiel the UK during WWII without being at war with Germany. Russia and the PRC armed and financed the Viet Minh and North Vietnamese regulars without being at war with the US.
This sort of thing is real common.
Nah, I'm all out of fucks to give at this point. We've given over $100,000,000,000.00 in aid, we're giving them tanks, guns ammunition, bombs artillery pieces and everything else they could ever want. Meanwhile, we have a devastatingly open border, rampant drug and people smuggling, a breaking economy, a rampant urban breakdown of law, and severe power grid problems because of this insane push for extreme "green" initiatives that would make our problems worse instead of better.
This is a European problem. let the EU deal with it. Let them give guns, ammunition and tanks. Why is it the United States that has to drop everything and empty our coffers and armories?
5726436
Yeah, I was talking with an Ukrainian user about this, and he told me that once the war with Russia is over, the next step will be to prepare themselves for the next war with Russia that will eventually come. It seems like this has no end in the long term. It's truly heartbreaking.
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Nope. The Ukraine was antagonized against Russia from at least beginning of the century. And there was continuous glorification of nazi collaborators of WW2. The Western world did not do a thing against it and supported the Ukrainial leaders, who were turning more and more anti-russian and far-right, referring that as yearning for freedom.
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I know everything that happened in the Ukraine and Donbass since 2014. Continuous shelling by the Ukrainian military, their attempts to destroy the sources of water and electricity, raping, killing and looting by the Ukrainian military and far-right paramilitary forces, constant referring of the Donbass people and Russians of the Ukraine as subhumans... The Ukrainian politics were not even hiding their far-right views from the 2014.
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That is what once was called "A Little Victorious War" in Russia. At the beginning of 20th century the government of the Russian Empire tried to raise the popularity and support of the regime and tsar Nikolay II and to weaken the revolutionary moods by beginning and winning the war against the Japan. It did not went well - Russia lost Pacific and Baltic Navy and had no victories on land, losing territories. The Russian Empire could still fight and even win - the situation in the economics and military of Japan was even worse - but the blow was already delivered, the popularity and support of the regime lessened even more and lead to the Russian Revolution of 1905.
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I know there is(?) a Nazi problem in Ukraine, but Ukrainian government as a whole is not Nazi at all. In fact, I think the reason Ukraine sent the Azov Brigade to defend Mariupol last year was to finally get rid of them. This cannot be a fair reason for what Russia is doing. Sure, Nazis have more power in Ukraine than in any other European country, and Putin was right when pointing out that there were Western military bases in Ukraine, but... Russia is mass bombing Ukraininan cities. Thousands of civilians are already dead, and thousands more will die. I know Russia had fair reasons to feel threatened, but this reaction is completely disproportionate. Russia is destroying Ukraine. I don't know which other path Russia could have taken, but this is a terrible one. The crimes committed against the Ukrainian population during this invasion are unforgivable. There are better ways to resolve things.
I usually prefer not to comment on non-fandom posts on Fimfiction, especially political ones, but I'll make a small exception here. Mostly keeping to observation rather than trenchant opinion, so here's what I feel is the mainstream view here in the UK at the moment:
1) Putin is detested pretty much across the board -- and I mean personally detested. In a scenario where he walked a little too close to a 12th-floor window and was replaced by another ex-KGB type there'd still be opposition and distaste, but I suspect not quite as visceral. People haven't forgotten Salisbury, and why should they? A British citizen was killed on our own soil.
2) For the first time I can remember, a war with British involvement has made NATO more popular with the mainstream centre-left. There isn't a great gulf of opinion between Labour and Conservative voters regarding supporting Ukraine.
3) The war has also started to move people on from Brexit. The UK is now co-operating with EU states, especially the military powers such as France and increasingly Poland, better than it has for several years. Isolationism is becoming less popular now there's a high-profile war in Europe again.
4) The prospect of Trump returning in the US is starting to concentrate minds. He's unpopular across the board over here (even Conservative voters only give him 30% approval) and I think we'll see European defence spending rise, especially in places like Poland which are technically front-line states already (because Kaliningrad) and certainly would be if Ukraine were controlled by Russia.
5) I don't think there's massive affection for Ukraine except insofar as it's fighting Putin's lot. It's seen as a "proper European country" in a way Russia isn't, but go back a decade and I doubt many people here had strong opinions on it unless they had personal connections. Until we started taking in refugees, the Ukrainian population in the UK was very small -- whereas around 1% of the UK resident population is Polish.
6) Despite cost of living being a huge issue (food inflation here is running at close to 20%) that hasn't really translated into "...and so we need to get out of the war in Ukraine". I think part of that goes back to point 1: people blame Putin, not the UK government, even though said UK government is itself currently unpopular for various other reasons.
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So? There is no glorification of OUN-UPA, nazi collaborators of WW2 anymore? Ukrainian military and nazi paramilitary do not use nazi symbols anymore?
Russian reaction is not disproportionate. It is normal - because the Ukrainian nazi regime threatened the Donbass with genocide and was not even hiding its intentions for it and threaten the Russian borders for a long time. Why the Ukraine was so brave? It felt and had the support of the West. Like "They are nazis but they are against Russia - so they are good". Classics - civilized Europe against hordes of savages from the East. Could that all be prevented? YES! Russia tried for 8 years to implement the Minsk Agreements. And they were sabotaged by the Ukraine all the way clearly saying that they will not fulfill them! And the reaction of Europe, of Germany and France - "Yes, we knew that the Agreements will not be fulfilled and the Ukraine will deceive Russia and use the time to strengthen its armed forces. So what? Bad-bad Russia".
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The West will not get suitable Russian president like Boris Yeltsin anymore. Russia tried to live in peace with the West but the West could not - or did not want - to live in peace with Russia.
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[Describing, not condoning]
Basic Realpolitik. People will stand by as a country is destroyed because they see the alternative as the entire world being destroyed (by a nuclear exchange). Whether or not this is true has about as much relevance as any other truth that kills millions of people, none whatsoever.
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Well, that's becoming a teensy bit annoying.
And?
Well, requiring "nazi paramilitary" not to use nazi symbols seem a bit unfair, since they're, you know, nazi. But could you elaborate on Ukrainian military?
Reaction to what? Shit there becoming too peaceful for Putin's tastes?
encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTOg6sYoL9ZDk_f1V7B1GM4ObWUHx5CtZCUZNg92BymWvp6NLN7xWvuB_uURz0FeHAb4qI&usqp=CAU
(note: data for 2021 is probably incomplete)
What will happen if you plot 2022 data on the same scale?
Ukrainian army kicked rebels from the most of Donetsk oblast' in 2014 (if I remember correctly) and you can observe distinct lack of any mass killings there (or could observe before 2022).
Can you make up your mind?
I'm astounded that an honest-to-god fascist and Russian apologist showed up here. I was expecting one or two liars, idiots, or churls, like that dude who thinks power grid problems are due to green energy initiatives, but I didn't expect to find one of those "actually Russia doing a genocide and acting with intent to conquer Ukraine and re-absorb it into the Russian empire is right, proper, and justified" guys you see on Twitter to show up.
Those motherfuckers always want to talk about how Ukraine, a country with an enormously popular Jewish president and a robust multiparty rough-and-tumble political system (albeit an IMMENSELY corrupt one) that has resisted not one but TWO right-wing attempts to seize power in the past twenty years is actually not just a Nazi state, but is so obviously evil and depraved, and such an obvious threat to Russia, that Russia is justified in its actions.
I'm going to give some context here, not for the benefit of Fascist Cat, but for my own reasons and the benefit of anyone who might care what I have to say.
The proximate cause of the Russo-Ukrainian War was the Maidan Revolution of 2014. (Fascist Cat upthread will almost certainly describe this as "the Maidan Coup." That's right-wing code; look for that. It's only really used by pro-Russian people.) Ever since independence at the end of the cold war, there was a growing political constituency in Ukraine for closer ties to the west. The west was seen as a potential source of money and prosperity (also a source of cultural depravity by many) whereas Russia was seen as... well... Russia, the empire that had been kicking the shit out of Ukraine for hundreds of years. Even the more pro-Russian parts of the country, the south and east, generally wanted closer ties to the west.
Viktor Yanukovych was President of Ukraine in 2014. Yanukovych has always been Russia's man in Ukraine, just straight-up. But one of the few nice things I can say about him is that he generally recognized he couldn't just rule as a Russian stooge; getting slapped down in the Orange Revolution will do that to a man. (The Orange Revolution is a whole different thing; the TLDR is that Yanukovych tried to rig a presidential election and the populace went "no, fuck YOU.") So he always made the appropriate noises about western rapprochement, usually in a political context of "I want Ukraine to be a neutral bridge between the east and west, a prosperous free-trade zone where we make money from them both while preserving our own unique culture!" Smart move. Among other things it won him a presidential election legitimately in 2010 and helped propel his party to the front of the Rada in 2012.
The problem for him was that this position was essentially impossible to square with Moscow's interests. Eventually push would come to shove. That happened in February 2014. The Rada had approved a big new round of economic and political changes establishing much closer ties with the EU. The EU had agreed to all this. Everything was in place. Yanukovych was supposed to fly to Lithuania for a big signing ceremony and everything.
Then he announces out of nowhere that he's scrapping the entire deal, years in the making, in order to pursue closer ties with Russia instead. Doesn't matter what the Rada says, or what public sentiment is, he's going with Russia.
The Ukrainian people were INCANDESCENTLY angry over this. Remember, these are the same people who had taken to the streets ten years before to stop that sort of thing happening. They took to the streets.
Yanukovych responds about how you'd expect; police crackdowns, the killing of protesters, etc. This backfires horribly; the demonstrations get bigger and bigger, and turn into riots, back and forth battles in the streets. Large parts of his governing coalition in the Rada and the opposition start disavowing his actions. He flees like a coward to Russia.
The Rada had never really encountered a situation where the President of Ukraine abandons their post; there wasn't really, you know, a procedure for that. They could have impeached him, but that becomes difficult when the guy isn't present. So they vote to remove him and install a caretaker government en route to elections. The vote on this was INCREDIBLY lopsided, something like 400+ to zero.
Less than a week later Russia invades Crimea. Less than a month after that they annex it. At the same time, they straight-up invade the Donbas, sending tanks and troops in support of their puppet "separatist" governments there. The shit you've seen Fascist Cat talking about upthread about Ukrainian shelling of the Donbas and violations of Minsk and suchly? That sort of elides the fact that there was a major war on there! Ukraine was, you know, attempting to repel an invader whose naked purpose was "we wants your land, so we're going to take your land."
The conflict more or less "freezes" for about eight years, until Russia decides in 2022 it wants all of Ukraine and the time to strike is now. Which is when we get the current war.
This entire thing boils down to "the Ukrainians repeatedly rejected being ruled by Russian stooges and having their foreign and domestic policy dictate to them by Russia. Russia eventually got fed up with this, because they want Little Russia to have the same status with them Belarus has. In the wake of their man being ousted, they carved off a huge chunk of the country, and then they came back for the rest."
I somewhat disagree with our hosts contention that Russia wants to destroy the Ukrainian people. Rather, what it wants to do is turn them into Russians instead. Russia has a severe demographic problem (of its own making) and Ukraine is seen as a source of fresh, new blood. You see this with their ongoing mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children, who are then placed with Russian families. You see it with the Russian ultranationalists talking with avid, fervid glee about how they're going to eliminate the Ukrainian language and culture so thoroughly that in a hundred years everyone will forget Ukraine was ever a thing.
You could argue that if this is the case they should try killing fewer Ukrainians, but that's never really been how Russia works.
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I don't think he is a fascist (and I'm not sure if "fascist" is the best term even for these guys, but lets use it here for simplicity). "Fascists" are pretty honest with what they want and usually don't spend that much effort explaining to others fine details of their cinematic universe. Can't say I understand what's happening well, but Vlad Vexler's youtube videos on russian propaganda, I think, have some relevant insights. That if you want to spend hours of your time digging into fine details of this shit, of course --- it won't change anything about framing of what is happening in Ukraine (and shouldn't). Fascist types are more like Tatarsky, or, heck, Strelkov (maybe, it's them you mentioned under "ultranationalist" label below).
I think you too are trying to ascribe too much of coherent intent to them here ("it"/"Russia" meaning official government here)
Putin doesn't give a flying fuck about that, and it (problem) stopped begin a talking point on TV long time ago.
One could argue they should try killing fewer Russians too
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I take your point. I suppose the word 'war' doesn't mean much, then.
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That is not some kind of vaccine to the nazism.
Yes - sign any treaty with Russia and forget it literally next day. The Ukraine, by its own Constitution and tons of treaties with Russia, should be neutral country and do not enter into alliance with any military alliance hostile to Russia. Just tell me who was pressing forward to the NATO since at least the beginning of the century?
Yes - that was the propaganda of the Ukrainian nationalists. And just one moment - Ukrainian nationalism cannot be not far-right. It was established by fascist and developed by fascists and nazists.
Russia said - "You can have or assotiation with the EU or free trade area with Russia - your biggest, richest and friendliest market nearby. But not both. Think what is better for the Ukraine and choose well".
And Yanukovych decided to pospone the signing of the treaty to gain better economical conditions for his country.
Yes, they mistakenly thought that they will join the EU. Assotiation with the EU and joining the EU are not the same thing - but who will listen or think about it when propaganda promises thousands of euro for pensions and salary?
After the protestors attacked the police, yes. And yes, far-rights were part of the mess from the beginning.
Thats a lie. He was in the Ukraine when was declared abandoned his post.
Do not forget one thing, please. The government signed peace with the protestors and took away the riot police. The nest day - yes, the protestors stomped that peace deal and stormed the government buildings. Just the Ukrainian political methods - forget the treaties you do not like as if they never existed.
Thats is lie - because the whole world knows now what it looks like when Russia really send troops and tanks.
That is lie too.
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And what? The glorification of nazis is good thing?
You mean like The 10th Mountain Assault Brigade Edelweiss? Or the symbol of SS-Panzer-Division «Totenkopf» on the Ukrainian soldier? Or the tattoos with nazis symbols on VSU troops killed and taken prisoners in Mariupol?
You mean the increasing rate of shellings and bombings by the Ukrainian military the days before Russian intervention?
https://www.ft.com/content/ed40d675-16b3-4a35-a157-b9bf0078b507
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-loss-trust-west-will-make-future-ukraine-talks-harder-2022-12-09/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-russia-france-germany-europe-d9a2ed365b58d35274bf0c3c18427e81
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Ukraine, not "the Ukraine." And this, of course, is not true. Ukraine has no provision in its Constitution obligating it to not enter into military alliances that Russia does not approve of. Quite the opposite; its Constitution in fact requires it to seek to join NATO, as amended in 2019. It has no treaty obligations with Russia obligating it to not enter into military alliances that Russia does not approve of either. And even if it did, that would not justify what Russia has done.
It's none of Russia's business if Ukraine wants to join NATO and if NATO will have Ukraine. Ukraine could become a full member and that would justify nothing Russia has done.
If by "propaganda" you mean "true facts" then yes.
This sentence simply doesn't make sense.
"Ukraine." Not "the Ukraine." And he was en route to Russia when that happened, so my statement is entirely true.
It is, in fact, you who are lying. Russia sent something like forty or fifty thousand troops with significant armor support.
The mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children and their placing with Russian families or in camps has been well-documented.
More to the point, however; even if everything you said had been true, none of that would justify what Russia is doing and trying to do in Ukraine. Not a single bit of it. You have said that Russia's response is appropriate; even if every single one of your charges were true, it would not be.
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Thanks for bringing your many facts to the discussion. I selfishly wanna defend myself a little:
That spending is the reason those Republicans give for not wanting to give Ukraine "a blank check" (which is how I heard one phrase it). It's a direct result of Democrats having already spent trillions of dollars on entirely partisan causes that weren't budgeted for, in the blithe faith that the debt ceiling can always be raised and the money will magically always be there.
The Republicans have also spent money on partisan issues, but not at the same scale.
I agree that Trump and his devoted followers are shockingly pro-Putin, and for all the worst reasons. I understand Trump's reason; he and Putin are kindred spirits. I don't understand those who still follow Trump.
You'd have a better case if you applied your argument to China policy. The situation is similar, but the Democrats want to spend money to compete economically with China, so if I had to call it, I'd say they're probably on the right side. (And I think China is a much bigger threat than Russia, and has the more-oppressive, or at least more-competently-oppressive, government. The main reason that I think failing to support Ukraine would be so catastrophic is that I think it would result in China invading Taiwan. Which in and of itself would be a disaster only for Taiwan, if not for the fact that the US has staked so much of its reputation on defending Taiwan.)
Some historians say WW1 was caused by a network of too many mutual-defense treaties. Today, 1/3 of the nations on Earth rely on US promises for their defense. This is a touchy situation in a similar way.
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Not now. But it was.
So... You agree that the Ukraine broke the treaties with Russia when found it necessary?
By propaganda I mean propaganda. Of the Ukrainian far-right nationalists.
You really do not know the history? The basics of ineology established by Dmytro Ivanovych Dontsov who supported the ethno-nationalist model of fascist dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler? The ideology that was totalli anti-russian?
When Russia sent troops to pacify Georgia in 2008 - it was seen and found by everyone who wanted to see. When Russia sent troops to help Syria - it was not secret too. Satellite fotos, media and so on. But nobody can show any evidence of Russian troops in Donbass in the 2014.
I heard the same about the mass rapings of the Ukrainian women and even children by the Russian troops. And what do You think - that was the Ukrainian egregious lie!
Ow-wow-wow, poor, innocent Ukrainian nazis. Russians are bad - they do not let the Ukrainian nazis to kill and loot.
Then the Ukrainian nazis should just die. And let the stray dogs eat their corpses.
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What glorification? If you open
imperialistrussian wiki on specific organization you mentioned, it says at the top that it was anti-Soviet, anti-Nazi and anti-Polish. They did some very bad shit, or course, but remember that standard for good guys here is Stalin.Greatly simplified, it's often a common story for similar organizations: they didn't like Stalin (gee, I wonder why?) and didn't think that Nazi could be worse at first (admittedly, being worse than Stalin is pretty monumental achievement). And just had to deal with being occupied.
Well, providing links would be nice, but I think I remember the middle one.
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This one? It's picture of Zelensky, with soldier in background wearing this patch:
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Which has skull on it. Which wears helment. Which has patch on it (recursion!). Which has Nazi symbol.
I'm sure one can dig up some really bad stuff in principle, but that above was one of _your_ examples of the worst nazism in Ukraine's militaly. Maybe something has gone wrong somewhere?
Ok, your story is that Russia spent half a year amassing almost 200000 soldiers on Ukrainian border, and then treacherous хохлы had woken up one morning, eaten some swastika-shaped сало and decided: "you know what guys? let's shell Donetsk! extra-hard!"? Sure, I can not prove-prove right here that didn't happen, but extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence something?
First link is behind paywall. Otherwise I don't understand the point? Putin said both those things? I can believe that. Maybe I should have been more clear before, but what I've meant is you can't believe both these things simultaneously.
5726619
Yeah, you get Russia!
5726620
In a doubtless futile attempt to reduce the number of things being fought about, I'll say that I think what happened here is Murcushio read "cannot be not far-right" as "cannot be far-right".
5726619
Okay. They're disingenuous liars. That's the Democrats fault how now? "You shouldn't do this because it will be used as a disingenuous excuse by others" seems like a very bad reason to not do something.
This sentence makes no sense to me? At all. Nobody in the government can spend money that wasn't budgeted, because the money has to be budgeted in order to be spent. That's literally how the government spending works; it is in fact illegal to spend without budgetary authorization. People have gone to jail for misappropriating funds in that manner.
I also am baffled on why it is wrong to spend trillions of dollars on entirely partisan causes. Seems to me if a cause is worth spending money on, or not, the fact that its partisan in nature is entirely irrelevant. In fact, adopting this as a rule of thumb is a great weapon to hand bad actors; anyone who wants something to not happen can just work to make it a partisan issue, at which point it becomes suspect.
The debt ceiling thing also seems bafflingly irrelevant. The debt ceiling can in fact always be raised by Congress; indeed, Congress ought to do away with it altogether, because there can be literally no upside to separating it from the normal budgeting process. As for money always "magically" being there, I'm not aware of anyone in Congress who holds this belief. But neither of those two things seem to have much to do with support for Ukraine.
Why should I care about this? I care if what they spend money on is worth spending money on or not, not if its in a partisan cause.
"He hates the same people I hate. Hand me the goddamn ballot."
More seriously, there's been a strong case made that Trump's widespread support is predicated less on ideology than on cultural affinity.
It's more complicated than that. There are SOME Democrats who view competition with China in standard great-power "we're against them because they're getting big and we want to be the only big people" terms. That's a thing. But for the most part opposition to China on the left is rooted in more explicitly ideological terms; we find their form of government loathsome and their imperial ambitions grotesque, and so oppose them on those grounds.
This is a genuine cleavage in the Democratic coalition, mind you; there's still a lot of "free trade brings democracy and stops wars" guys over here, for example.
For now. Single-point-of-failure autocracies can look real competently governed for awhile until suddenly they don't. Deng knew what he was doing with his political reforms; a major thrust of them was to attempt to make the CPC more of a genuine oligarchy, a competition among equals so that nobody could ever again achieve Mao-like control over the party and the country and then go off the deep end in the same way Mao did.
That worked GREAT for awhile. From a pure competence standpoint China was probably never better run in the past century and a half then under Deng, Jiang Zemiin, and Hu Jintao. Xi has centralized power to an unhealthy degree. Xi is competent enough, sure, but there's no guarantee he stays that way or any successor who claws their way into his seat will be.
Well, I mean. Maybe? But I'm sort of primarily focused on "holy hell, the Russians have demonstrated that if they can seize all of Ukraine its going to be an absurd nightmare for the Ukrainians." Political fallout is a concern; Russia proving its possible to go back to a 19th century style of seizing territory but with 21st century style atrocities would make a lot of folks go "hmm," probably including China. But I'm taking a narrower view as long as the Russo-Ukrainian war is ongoing.
5726620
No, it wasn't. It has never been in Ukraine's Constitution that they must remain neutral and give Russia a veto over what alliances they join.
Ukraine, not "the Ukraine." Your inability to correctly refer to the country doesn't lend a lot of weight to your arguments.
And no. Ukraine has never, post-independence, had a treaty relationship with Russia that specified Russia gets a veto over what alliances they join and that they must always remain neutral towards Russia.
And even if they had, this would not in fact justify anything Russia has done to Ukraine over the past eight years.
Plenty of Ukrainian nationalists who weren't and aren't fascist, my guy. Also, what do you care? You're here carrying water for Putin's Russia, a far-right ethnonationalist dictatorship. You support far-right ideology, of which fascism is a part.
This, of course, is not true.
Russia invaded Ukraine. It is they who are killing and looting. This war was started by Russia for no better cause than to conquer Ukraine.
5726628 No, I said what I said. I get where you're coming from, what I'm saying is that the notion of "it's impossible to be a Ukrainian nationalist and not far-right" is bafflingly absurd.
Fascist Cat is kind of a piece of shit and I'm not sure why I'm giving him the time of day, to be honest.
5726582
I think GrandCat is not a fascist (as far as I know, when a person is a fascist, they practically scream that in your face with pride), but just someone who sees reality through a very dense filter that makes them feel like the actual victim. "Ow-wow-wow, poor, innocent Ukrainian nazis. Russians are bad - they do not let the Ukrainian nazis to kill and loot". "Then the Ukrainian nazis should just die. And let the stray dogs eat their corpses". That's twisted.
5726631
Everything is worth spending money on. But we don't have infinite money. Those Republicans think we can't afford to spend money on Ukraine because we've already spent all the money we can collect, all the money we can borrow, and more.
Biden committed the US to spending something like $1-3 trillion over some number of years (much disagreement over what the total will come to) on tuition reimbursement, just by issuing executive orders. There was no budget for it when he issued those orders. But I guess you're correct; the money can't be spent until a budget including it is passed. I hope.
5726619
Doubly so if the citizens of the US get sick of (real or perceived) the government printing money to pay for overseas wars and express that dissatisfaction in voting booths. Such is the danger of relying on someone else's democracy to provide the muscle for territorial integrity.
5726657
Oh, I see. I guess my response to that is "they don't in fact think that. That's a convenient lie."
5726619 5726516
BTW, re. what I wrote:
My brother is the inter-group coordinator for a huge DoD project of just this type, meant to maintain competitiveness with China in a particular area of high-tech. He also has lots of experience with Chinese graduate students who are in the US to study that technology and take it back to China. The Chinese approach (give scholarships to students to study the technology) is much, much more cost-effective than the US approach (pay government agencies, universities, and corporations hundreds of millions of dollars to waste in pissing contests, office politics, personal vendettas, and petty academic prejudices, giving final say on technical and financial decisions to bureaucrats and upper-level managers with no understanding of the technology).
5726695 Please believe me when I tell you that the PRC's own development programs, technological or otherwise, that don't involve simply stealing shit (no judgment; the entire US industrial base was built on stuff we stole from the Brits) are an absolute tire fire of apparatchiks with pathologies that are different in some ways, but no less severe, than our own. ESPECIALLY with regard to their own bureaucrats and upper-level managers having the final say over things.
That said, to air my own prejudices here; I find as I grow older and spend more time professionally enmeshed within them, that I'm a lot more tolerant of bureaucratic inefficiency for two reasons. The first is that efficiency is overrated; "efficient" is another word for "fragile." The second is that we've yet to find a better way to organize large endeavors than a bureaucracy, and with a bureaucracy you have two choices; your bureaucracy can involve giving a lot of stakeholders the ability to air their concerns and be involved in the decision-making process, at the cost of being a lumbering beast with a lot of little competing fiefdoms inside it, OR your bureaucracy can be ruthlessly optimized to obey dictates from above in a fast, competent manner, but at the cost of being a deeply authoritarian structure with very catastrophic points of failure (if the tiny cadre actually empowered to make decisions ends up dysfunctional) and in which very few people are willing to tell the Emperor he has no clothes on.
I've worked in both kinds. The latter often can achieve impressive things in a very short period of time but can be an INCREDIBLY unpleasant place to work in and often prone to rather spectacular implosions. The former have a lot of trouble moving on their feet and were prone to decision paralysis, but they were VERY robust; a hit that would shatter the lean, efficient institution would bounce right off the big, inefficient monster. They were much better places to work because there wasn't the constant oppressive "shut up and fit in your round hole, you round peg" atmosphere.
If there's a better, third kind I haven't seen it.
5726705
I shouldn't have spoken as if sending grad students to the US were all that China does.
But there's a large disparity between the number of such scholarships offered by China and by the US government, and it seems very cost-effective. Doesn't have to be stealing, either; the US govt could offer scholarships to study here in the US. Maybe they do, but I'm not aware of any such programs. I went to grad school to study a critical tech sector, and never heard a whisper about govt scholarships to do so.
In my experience, the "obey dictates from above" is less-competent. But that may be because my experience is in scientific work. "Obey dictates from above" is disastrous in scientific work; senior managers then effectively make the biggest technical decisions despite understanding nothing.
We have found a better way: the for-profit corporation. I've worked in or with a lot of government organizations, like a dozen of them; and I've worked in for-profit organizations, and in for-profit organizations working on government contracts.
In general, work done by DoD employees--and I don't mean contractors like Raytheon or CSC; I mean military and intelligence personnel--is efficient and competent. It's a cultural thing: these people believe in their mission and care about results. All other work done by or funded by government agencies is amazingly fucked-up. I don't have time to enumerate all the common ways government contracts get fucked up, but I'd say over 90% of the US govt contracting money that I helped to spend was a complete waste, as in the entire project is thrown out after completion, or is never completed, or is completed but generates results no one wants, or that no one can use because some other critical piece of infrastructure doesn't exist and it's nobody's job to build it. It reminds me of the time I was in Kunming and saw the Chinese government building a dozen high-rise hotels for foreigners, when the one existing high-rise hotel for foreigners had only 3 people staying in it.
Add the wastage within successful projects, and I wouldn't surprised if the total was over 95%. (In non-scientific sectors, politics is a huge cause of waste.)
And I'm not even counting project scientific failure or setbacks or friction as waste. Most scientific research projects should fail. If they don't, it means you're not doing research; you're doing engineering. I'm not even counting waste due to stupidity. I'm counting only waste that could be called intentional: people not doing their jobs, sabotaging projects that threaten their bureaucratic domain, doing projects no one wants to satisfy Congressional requirements, not asking what the client wants, not having any clients, using a project to prove a point in an academic or ideological argument... I could go on. The incentives aren't in place to get results in bureaucracies.
I worked at the patent office, and that was an entirely different kind of government-fucked-up, driven by lobbyists and the demands of Congress to orient the entire agency away from doing its actual job. The entire agency is directed, from the top-down and by court rulings, to do harm instead of good. The US Patent Office is like one of those colleges that pump out poorly-taught, incompetent graduates for profit.
When people have skin in the game, and could lose or win financially themselves based on project failure or success, suddenly they don't indulge their personal fantasies, tastes, and whims in dispensing millions of dollars; they look at evidence and ask the opinions of experts. The big failures I've seen in for-profit corporations were caused by (a) taking government money, (b) employees with no skin in the game, whose supervisors couldn't understand their employees' work, hence were effectively unsupervised, and (c) lack of VC oversight plus founder megalomania.
(c) is probably an inherent failure mode of capitalism, but I don't think it's very common. I've only experienced it once. The founder of a company is a golden child who grew up on Silicon Valley / Boston dreams, went to MIT, Stanford, an Ivy League, etc., had breathless press coverage from dream-spinners like Wired Magazine, and believes he's a genius destined to change the world. People invest money with him because he went to Harvard / MIT / whatever and has press coverage. He isn't content with making a good profit, but is determined to become a billionaire and a household name in a short time, and so he takes big risks based on overconfidence, probably micromanages everyone, and drives the company bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried is an example.
In my case this boss had had national press coverage calling him a genius by the age of 16. It was indirectly caused by an investor who gave him $15 million and only visited his company once. That's why most companies have a Board of Directors, though in many cases the board does a shitty job of overseeing.
5726734
This depends a little bit on how we're defining cost-effective.
I think the US government should be providing massive subsidies to students for higher education because I believe post-secondary education to be an enormous public good. Indeed, I take the view that post-secondary education should be a guaranteed right in the same way that primary and secondary education is. I was entitled to a free education up to grade twelve merely by showing up; post-secondary education should function the same way, if we're actually serious about education as a society.
However, if you want to approach this from a purely cost-effective way, that's dumb. There's enormous demand for post-secondary education provided by US institutions, to the point that many US colleges and universities regard foreign students (who pay full freight and then some) as an enormous profit center. Their academic departments like to tout international programs for other reasons (which are very good ones!) but when the engineering school boasts about how many foreign-born students they have matriculating, what the administrators hear is "ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching."
And of course people are willing to go massively deeply in debt to receive post-secondary education.
Seems to me if you're approaching this from a cost-effective standpoint, "we have people clamoring to pay through the nose to acquire this thing, more than we can accommodate; why should we subsidize it?"
That depends on definitions again, I think. A highly authoritarian bureaucracy tends to be very, very competent at aggressively pursuing whatever goals it is aimed towards, because its been optimized to make those functioning within it pursue that goal with unquestioning, single-minded zeal or suffer the consequences. That goal might be a shitty one, but the organization will pursue it very competently, because there's nobody in it to try and fight a battle to make it change course.
That's the failure point I was talking about earlier; if the tiny number of people in such a bureaucracy fuck up or become dysfunctional, suddenly you have the whole thing working towards goals that are maybe not good ones, which can lead to an extremely rapid implosion.
... for-profit corporations are all bureaucracies. ALL of them use the bureaucratic form. Which is because we've yet to find any better way to organize large endeavors than a bureaucracy.
Mmm. See, its interesting to me you mention the DoD. The DoD is THE most authoritarian-organized bureaucracy in the entire federal government, for very obvious reasons. Everything about it is designed to operate in an incredibly hierarchical way where the entire bureaucratic edifice is designed to obey dictates from above it in the hierarchy, and there are very, very limited means for pushing back on or changing that. That makes it very competent, very swift, when it decides on a goal.
It also makes it prone to some catastrophic failures when the small handful of people wielding real decision-making power set poor goals. The DoD has had some historically AMAZING fuckups under its belt because competent people efficiently pursued really terrible goals.
You're not wrong per se, but the Patent Office sort of exists to fulfill the dictates put forth by Congress and the courts, doesn't it? It doesn't exist in some platonic form where it willed itself into existence and then set its own agenda; it exists as a tool of the state, and its efficiency and capacity to cause good (or lack thereof) will be determined by the directives issued to it by said state.
To a large degree Congress CAN'T orient a government agency away from doing its actual job, because what its actual job is is... determined by Congress. Congress might issue incoherent and conflicting mandates, of course, but that's sort of how a democracy works.
It baffles me that anyone could look at the corporate form, especially the MODERN corporate form, and think this is the case.
I'm currently working my way through a history of the first powerful modern mega-corporation, the British East India Company. And basically the entire history of that thing, from its charter in the 17th century to its dismantling in the 19th, is an unending litany of people indulging their personal fantasies, tastes, and whims in dispensing of millions of dollars.
Every major corporation whose history I'm familiar with has worked the same way. The idea that corporations operate as purely dispassionate profit-extracting machines is a false one. They DO operate as profit-extracting machines, but ones filled to the brim with people acting on their personal tastes, fantasies, and whims.
God, the last thing I want as an employee is skin in the game. I have spent my entire life attempting to minimize the amount of skin I have in the game.
Boards of directors are very interesting in the context of this discussion because they're supposed to exist as a tool to make authoritarian-style bureaucracies function more as ones in which stakeholders get to be involved in the decision-making process.
In a very real way, a board of directors exists to make a corporate bureaucracy less efficient but more robust. Their job is to slow things down, to force the C-suite and other top-level executives to justify themselves and their decisions, to question corporate policy and suggest ways it can be re-oriented, to basically make sure that the enterprise can't be ruled by a CEO with a singular vision and their cronies.
Of course, CEO's with a singular vision really loathe this. Management as a WHOLE really loathes this, honestly. I'm actually unfamiliar with the forces that have largely neutered boards of directors and left them either impotent or unwilling to do their damn jobs. I have a hazy sense its a weird sense of complicity, but couldn't really say for sure.
5726626
Anti-nazi? That is fun. OUN-UPA was supported by German nazis from the beginning.
I already mentioned the tattoos with nazis symbols on VSU troops killed and taken prisoners in Mariupol.
5726632
The neutras status of the Ukraine was established in the declaration of state sovereignty of 1990. It was the basis of the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine which became the basis of the Constitution of the Ukraine in 1996.
Why do I know it better than You?
The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation - article №6.
Show it to me. But You can not.
For example?
So? Where could I see anything - except the Ukrainian lies?
5726633
You already showed that You do not know the modern history of the Ukraine. So it is natural for You - not to know that the ideology of the Ukrainian nationalists was based in fascism and nazism. And that the OUN-UPA was supported by Abwehr, was the essential part of the Ukrainian SS legions and Schutzmannschafts. Or should I mention that Andriy Melnyk claimed in a letter sent to the German minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1938 that the OUN was ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy?
5726635
The Ukrainism as anti-russian opressive nazist ideology must be eliminated.
5726806
Yes, but you are basically implying that all Ukrainians are Nazis that want to wipe out the Russian people, and that's astoundingly absurd. I try, but I can't understand how can you indiscriminately apply to the whole country something that is clearly the ideology of a little minority of Ukrainian elites and military and encourage the gratuitous slaughter of Ukrainians, whether civilians or soldiers, based on that gigantic generalization. It's horribly unfair.