1: it's new. News is stuff that doesn't normally happen, and this doesn't normally happen.
Counter point.
Yes it fucking does normally happen.
And it isn't normally news when it does. Certainly not like this is.
It normally happens further away from Europe, and it normally doesn't happen to white people in the vicinity of Europe.
That doesn't mean that it SHOULDN'T be news when it happens further away from Europe, but there is an identifiable difference that might cause the media to give a fuck in this instance when they were willing to write off the deaths of infinitely many brown people far away.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
there is no "internal sabotage" that OPL can do by having representation.
Right, sure. Except for the part where Russia is trying to replace Ukrainian loyalists with their own people as they march in. Like they did to the mayor of Melitopol. And oh shit, Galina Danilchenko, their chosen patsy replacement, is a member of one of the parties that Ukraine subsequently banned! What a fucking coincidence.
Ukraine is basically a football, I feel bad for regular Ukranians who just want to live their fucking lives and can't stop being coup'd and manipulated by two different imperialist powers. Anyone who thinks the removal of Yanukovych didn't have coup written all over it is stupid, because the inciting incident for his removal began with unidentified snipers shooting at cops and protestors alike (but definitely the cops were being shot first, if the BBC is to be believed) and his removal was undemocratic (Yanukovych wanted another election). But of course Yanukovych was also corrupt.
Now Ukraine is in a stupid meatgrinder war because Russia can't leave them alone, and the only reason they are capable of fighting Russia (using Ukranian lives, of course) because the West is flooding them with weapons. The people of Ukraine are dying because nobody can ever leave that fucking country alone, but such is the history of Ukraine. Perhaps we should stop sending weapons so that the undemocratic Ukranian government can trade Ukranian lives for Russian lives, and instead focus entirely on humanitarian efforts? Haha fuck no, Russia bad and Lockheed Martin needs more money. Go get them Ukraine!
there is no "internal sabotage" that OPL can do by having representation.
Right, sure. Except for the part where Russia is trying to replace Ukrainian loyalists with their own people as they march in. Like they did to the mayor of Melitopol. And oh shit, Galina Danilchenko, their chosen patsy replacement, is a member of one of the parties that Ukraine subsequently banned! What a fucking coincidence.
This makes no sense. Do the people stop existing when you ban their party? No, you just take away the elected offices they already have.
Nothing about a party opposing the Russian invasion having 40 members of Parliament matters for "replacing loyalists." Whether Russians install "local mayors" or even "a new parliament" of people who are not currently elected has nothing to do with whether you expel current members of parliament. The authority of any Russian propped up officials is grounded on the Russian army, not "well sure I didn't win an election but I'm a member of an existing political party, instead of just being a random person who was declared mayor, so that means you have to obey me."
If Russia wants to declare that someone occupies some political office, their party affiliation of lack there of is irrelevant.
This isn't about "preventing Russia from being able to insert their own people" it's just vanguardism. You don't like the positions the OPL stand for (cool, lots of people don't, that's why they aren't a majority party in Ukraine!) so you think they shouldn't have representation. That's vanguardism.
If you explain that you are a vanguardist and you support the People's Republic of Cuba, that's cool. There are worse countries to support (like the US). But it doesn't make it democratic because you say "well it sure seems like one person who used to be a city council member for a party that since then has fractured into two different parties is doing some treason, so we ban both the two parties that grew out of the one she used to be a member of when she was on the city council."
I want you to really imagine for a minute the horrible dread scenario where no parties were banned and the war continued. In what way is it worse? Is Galina Danilchenko, who since the party has been banned, was obviously just dragged out into the street and hanged, still alive? Since she's now the illegitimate unelected mayor backed by Russian forces instead of the illegitimate unelected mayor backed by Russian forces, but used to be a member of a political party that actually fractured into two and one of them had some power but she wasn't a member of that faction, obviously that definitely led to a revolt right? If Russians conquered a new city tomorrow, would they find a sudden deficiency in people to appoint fake mayor?
Let's take a second to consider Russia's goals here. Since they went for an attack on Kyiv right away, we can rule out simply trying to annex the contested regions. They're obviously concerned with the entire government of Ukraine. So do they want:
A) total and permanent military occupation, where people backed by Russian forces don't need any local legitimacy
OR
B) a quick coup with a change to a more Russian-aligned regime, maybe annex some more oil and gas fields, and bounce
The second one requires some semblance of local legitimacy. Otherwise you have to sit there with your guns as long as you want to keep your people in charge.
Banning pro-Russian parties makes them less legitimate if Russia tries to put them in charge. That means Russia can't simply replace the current leadership in a special military operation, but needs to win an actual war. Something their army is very clearly not able to do.
If you want to know Russia's goals it perhaps would not hurt to look at what they have repeatedly and consistently said they want.
As for their actions and strategies, they have held that a little closer to the chest, but Russia has had at least some fairly consistent things to say about those too.
Now I'm not saying you will get a 100% correlation with their secret inner wants and plans, but I think its a good starting point that the western media has pointedly refused to explore.
For some reason. It's probably nothing. Right?
Edit: also... is it clear the Russians cannot win the war? Or did the western media just tell you that. While Russian forces seemingly steadily overwhelm Ukraine and the only schedule or goal they are behind on is one made up and promoted by the western media as well?
- The rarely observed alternative timeline Phonelobster
Russia cannot "win the war" in the sense of utterly overwhelming Ukrainian opposition on a time scale consistent with their initial pre-scheduled "news" releases, if only because their original deadline has already passed. Russia, on the other hand, can almost certainly "win the war" in the sense of out grinding the smaller Ukrainian army with their Soviet-era surplus and having to deal with a decade long insurgency that makes Lockheed and Raytheon a new reliable income stream - assuming, of course, that peace talks do not at any point come to a settlement that all parties involved find to be preferable to continued conflict.
The media, of course, would like everyone to think Ukraine will pull through, because the possibility of genuine victory (not just insurgency, but victory) makes it more palatable to give Western weapons to Ukrainian Nazis to fight off the Russian invaders instead of confining foreign interventions to those of a humanitarian nature.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
My take on the media's motives is 1. To do their unstated duty and repeat, uncritically, whatever the department of defense wants them to. 2. A continuation of the anti red hysteria that I guess I'll just be subject to for the rest of my life now. 3. Giving me the feeling that the people heading our military want Ukraine to be like Afghanistan so that the Russian war machine can get mired down in their own conundrum for the foreseeable future.
If Putin is sane my guess is that he wants the things to keep NATO (the federation of states explicitly opposed to his state) away. There is no reason to look at this in anyway that isn't a big ass fucking state not wanting the states aligned against itself to hassle it. There's also no reason to doubt that they are acting on information (some we can clearly see and some that we don't have access to) that suggests that the West very much isn't fucking off. This is not a conflict that's about good/evil but states being states trying to act in their perceived best interest regardless of the body count necessary to do so.
Ukraine, like most states and the people that lead them, is not good. It just so happens they are a minor military power caught in between the power struggles between bigger military powers. In an ideal world Russian (the state and it's leaders not the people) aggression would be paid for by bringing the leaders to justice for war crimes and launching this war in the first place. However, considering the US has/is/enables this shit on a regular basis, we clearly don't live in that world. We also see that all the very serious people instrumental in getting the US citizens comfortable with the US doing war crimes will not be judged terribly by history so this evil and insane Putin thing should be laid to rest. It doesn't matter if the thing that he's doing is bad because, just like our state department, he does what he wants regardless of the bad look. The problem is that making Putin out to be a crazy monster limits the peace process because it makes dealing with this in a nuanced, peaceful way harder to stomach by the casual observer. I think that tactic works for getting votes in some edge cases but it doesn't do a lot of good with international conflicts (at least if your goal is to push for a peaceful resolution). This rabid push for hostilities is exactly why Biden gets bad press for ending a war we can now widely acknowledge was bad.
Assuming all the people involved are actually just shitty people who are trying to act in their own self interest perhaps the leader of Ukraine, a person who logically is interested in consolidating power, is actually using the crisis to consolidate that power. I don't think we shouldn't mistake that for a 'necessary' part of the war considering he does not run the war machine. It certainly shouldn't be just assumed. Kaelik asked the right question. What actually would've changed if they just hadn't done that? These kind of acts have consequences that will echo far beyond the conflict so doing them is not good long term. Pro Russian sentiment should not be an excuse to disenfranchise people.
On the sidelines here, powerless to really do anything, think about Ukraine's options and the future looks bleak. As far as I can tell, their options are to either placate Putin, since he represents the military power that's right next door, or become an Afghanistan that the whites can care about. The powers in the West want the latter. What the people of Ukraine want matters less here because the conflict just involves them but isn't really about them in particular. I don't think that's what Putin wants what the West want in this case. When the US started the wars in the middle east it was because the US wanted to do empire shit. The US isn't physically in the middle east so it certainly wasn't for the protection of it state. It was for resources and furthering global domination. Putin is operating in his own backyard. That isn't as good for Russian business as the US's continuing operations are good for it. Since Putin took this extreme course of action then Putin believes it is necessary. Most of Putin's demands are extremely clear and doable as opposed to the US's vague and amorphous 'security concerns'. That's a sign, to me at least, that he isn't looking to do this for 20 years. If I were to imagine I was being actively opposed by and continuously threatened by various other Western states then at some point I'm going to have to show I'm serious and demand concessions. If course while I'm doing that I want to have a strong hand in negotiations. Done night think that applying a lot of pain and horror night make the opposition more willing to bend. Why push hard and fast? Speed is war and the more territory you take over and threaten the more desperate the opposition might be.
Last edited by MGuy on Fri Mar 25, 2022 2:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
The first rule of Fatclub. Don't Talk about Fatclub..
If you want a game modded right you have to mod it yourself.
Banning pro-Russian parties makes them less legitimate if Russia tries to put them in charge. That means Russia can't simply replace the current leadership in a special military operation, but needs to win an actual war. Something their army is very clearly not able to do.
The current ruling party of Ukraine was created in 2019. The banned parties were ALSO created in 2019. You have a strange version of legitimacy where you think banning opposition parties so that the hypothetical Russian puppet government party has to have a different name from the name of a party that didn't win a majority of seats in 2019 makes them meaningfully different in legitimacy.
This just isn't the US. They invent new parties every election in Ukraine. They aren't co-opting the brave legitimacy of the 3 year history of a minor opposition party.
The US invasion of Iraq (major nuclear power invading nation of ~40 million) was wall to wall news for like six months, the main difference was the treated the US side as truth and the minor Iraqi successes along their steady defeat as propaganda so weak as to be laughed at. Literal comedy shows doing pieces on "haha, they said they held us off for a couple days, then we killed them all, hahaha". Iraq is weak, US is brave and heroic, etc etc.
US levels the odd city, starting with the hospitals, well, fog of war, innit, told them to leave. Post-facto military targets, you know. The resistance are all terrorists anyway.
Where, Russia in Ukraine (major nuclear power invading nation of ~40 million) is wall to wall news for, a bit less time. And here, it's Ukraine's minor successes along their steady defeat taken as truth and everything Russia says is lies to be laughed at, or to be terribly afraid of, or both at once. Russia is weak, Ukraine is brave and heroic, etc etc.
Russia levels the odd city, starting with the hospitals, well, deliberate war crimes and dastardly Hun threat to all white nations. Suddenly everyone has a burning desire to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of US-made weapons systems, and then sit on them for 40 years while they rot.
--
I do find it interesting that the Russians said they were going to demilitarise Urkaine, which they've basically done, it has no air force or tanks or artillery or substantial arms stores left. Said they were going to denazify the place, which, interestingly that group of their own got dropped in Kyev early on and wiped out was a bit of a fascist paramilitary group, and also Azov division basically no longer exists and has suffered massive casualties. Said they were going to secure Donbas, and well, have basically secured Donbas. And then held a press conference about it, just to point out they were kinda finished.
And the western nations all saying Russia was going to storm right through and then move onto Europe turned out to be full of shit. Which has been passed off as a Russian failure to live up to the threats that the West was imagining of them. I mean, I figured they were going for Kyev too, on account of my news kept on saying that, but then, this is quite a small part of Russia's army, and just because the US fights that way, doesn't mean Russia does.
Also a few popular but notorious Russian generals of an age to retire and enter politics are now dead. I'm sure Putin is terribly sad about that.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
A guy slapped another guy at the Oscars. Sorry Ukraine, it's no longer your turn to be in the news. People are sick of hearing about it and are moving on to something more important!
Anyway, Germany is apparently preparing for the possibility of Russia just turning the taps off. And... if that happens, it's just going to force their hand on hurrying the fuck up re: renewables and/or nuclear energy production, which is actually a good thing.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
The US invasion of Iraq (major nuclear power invading nation of ~40 million) was wall to wall news for like six months, the main difference was the treated the US side as truth and the minor Iraqi successes along their steady defeat as propaganda so weak as to be laughed at.
I'm not going to try and verify everything in your post, but you are incorrect in your first sentence. Iraq did not have a population of ~40 million in 2003, when the US invaded it, it had a population of ~25 million.
What the fuck? I know it’s a meme at this point that you are always wrong, but goddamn. Like every single thing. Dump your cache and cookies and start getting information elsewhere. It can only be an improvement.
I actually don't know whether it's better or worse that the useful idiots who repeat Kremlin talking points here are obviously genuine dupes instead of paid shills. I'm going to say that it's worse, because at least shills would shut up if/when the money stopped, while dupes will probably sunk-cost-fallacy this nonsense to their graves.
Being a paid shill comes with the different implications of what they do when they aren't repeating what they've been paid by the Kremlin to repeat, which on the whole probably isn't as bad, yeah.
The only "Russian Talking Points" Tussock repeated were the public ones about their goals.
Which again. Maybe you should actually pay attention to rather than listening to feverish western propaganda about the secret inner mind goals of Putin and the Russian military as determined by intelligence community crystal ball operators with no actual sources and no actual guarantees and a track record of lying to your face about these things.
Russia may genuinely have different goals other than securing the "independence" of Eastern Ukraine and neutralizing heavily armed Nazis.
BUT, lets say they "fail" these definitely real other goals and "just" achieve those things. I know the west will declare that a Western victory... but if they achieve everything they said they wanted to all along... who is immersed in propaganda then?
And hey, if they achieve something else they can just say "yay look we did extra!" but really, maybe it's their real position, maybe its their fall back, but ignoring it just because they say it is indoctrinated propagandized stupidity.
- The rarely observed alternative timeline Phonelobster
Russian asset media is legitimately capable of being nuanced. Redfish Media larps very well as an "independent media" source while really just being a Kremlin asset, and the piece that really brought that side of it on the map was a 100% factual piece of whataboutism flagging how the media doesn't take attacks seriously when they don't happen to white people.
The flip side of this reality is that just because something is being used for Russian propaganda doesn't make it false. If Putin said the sky was blue, it wouldn't turn green in spite.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
I don't think the main point or even all the individual facts (the US did bomb hospitals in Iraq [and Afghanistan], but I'm not sure if any were post-facto described as military targets or we just did the usual thing where we say it was unintentional and nobody gets punished) of Tussock's post are wrong; The US invasion of Iraq was similar to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of Russia having no right to invade Ukraine and both of them committing similar atrocities (aka doing a war that involves bombing cities). The part about Russia intentionally sending in the Wagner group so they'd intentionally get wiped out doesn't seem like it's even got a kernel of truth in it though, given they also sacrificed regular armed forces in similarly hopeless attacks in and around Kyiv at the start of the war. I think they got a bunch of their own soldiers killed because they underestimated Ukraine after 2014 was a cakewalk.
I doubt anyone here is a Russian shill, Tussock is always wrong but he's not a propagandist. He'd be significantly more convincing if he was a propagandist, or at least I'd fucking hope.
Honestly I took tussock's comparison of Russia's supposed military goals to their actual results to be more of a "ok thats actually kind of funny" observation rather than in any way indicating that their stated goals (especially the dEnAzIfIcAtIoN bollocks, not that Ukraine isn't in dire need of denazification but that pretty clearly isn't an actual goal Russia actually has) were their actual goals.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Honestly I took tussock's comparison of Russia's supposed military goals to their actual results to be more of a "ok thats actually kind of funny" observation rather than in any way indicating that their stated goals (especially the dEnAzIfIcAtIoN bollocks, not that Ukraine isn't in dire need of denazification but that pretty clearly isn't an actual goal Russia actually has) were their actual goals.
As a general rule I don't believe in the "denazification" claims of anyone who really really hates communists a lot and talks about it all the time, and for this particular war I'm filing Putin's claims under that same category.
I believe in the denazification goal about to the point where I believe they want to call all Ukraine military opposition nazis to support their other public goal of demilitarization. The fact that there are definitely nazis is just a propaganda win that helps make the goal of "hey yeah we basically want to kill all the armed soldiers" more palatable. And how are you going to call them out for exaggerating? There ARE a prominently a lot of nazis in their targeted group, the rest is quibbling over details they know we can't prove.
Good propaganda works off cores of truth like this. We know Putin doesn't really care that much about the Nazi angle, but he knows we can't really call him on it, because there are a lot of Nazis there, they are his enemies, publicly prominent among the fore front of them in fact, and he IS in fact fighting them. So good luck with piercing through the fog of war and determining when Russian forces are going up against definitely not nazi forces.
This is one of the reasons the Western propaganda is so poor. All too often it doesn't rely on a core of truth and relies on ingrained and reflexive biases, unfounded anonymous claims and baseless repetition. How much of the Western coverage has for instance relied on "Don't even try and make sense of Putin, he is 100% irrational insane and driven by PURE EVIL alone!"?
And while I'm here I want to point something else about Tussocks post out.
The comparison of Ukraine to Iraq is not a Russian talking point.
It appeared much earlier on in the media as a WESTERN talking point. There was a strong push early on to make that comparison, to try and project every dumb thing the US did with Iraq onto Russia. Then try and use the comparison to rehabilitate the image of the USA and empire by effectively trying on "but look they're doing it too! and at least we MEANT well! Ours was an oopsie theirs is PURE EVIL. You should let us do more Iraqs so they don't get to!" etc...
Later on I think some more pro Russian angles appeared and carried the comparison on to say "hm, actually, the comparison doesn't look that great for the USA when examined closely and it certainly looks hypocritical regardless". But that's not how it started. Another example of poorer underlying quality in western propaganda.
- The rarely observed alternative timeline Phonelobster
I believe in the denazification goal about to the point where I believe they want to call all Ukraine military opposition nazis to support their other public goal of demilitarization.
I don't think they wanted to call all Ukranian military opposition nazis. I think they wanted to call all Ukranians Nazis, period. Kill as many Ukrainians as possible, move loyal Russians in to replace them, call it denazification. It is a pretty standard ethnic cleansing tactic.
Can't dehumanize people by calling them untermensch anymore, that's not kosher, but you can still dehumanize people by calling them Nazis.
Combine with rhetoric about how Ukraine isn't a country and Ukrainians are just delusional Russians and you've got a recipe for "it can't be genocide because they're not a real race" and "we're just defending ourselves, they're the ones that want to destroy us."
I don't think they wanted to call all Ukranian military opposition nazis. I think they wanted to call all Ukranians Nazis, period. Kill as many Ukrainians as possible, move loyal Russians in to replace them, call it denazification. It is a pretty standard ethnic cleansing tactic.
You act like the Russians invented the ethnic conflict in the Ukraine and it would otherwise not exist. For all they are almost certainly exploiting it, it is worth noting that it was the Ukraine, and specifically far right and Nazi's within the Ukraine that started the ethnic conflict.
It's also worth noting what "Demilitarize" or "Reduce enemy soldiers" can come to mean to an invading military force in a country that outsiders have flooded with huge amounts of weaponry. Any and all people old enough to hold a rifle can become combatants in the eyes of an opposing military force.
And that's a real big problem and we know militarys rationalize like that because hey it's happened basically every time. Need I point out, say, the utter insanity that is the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial in Australia just as a little window onto that world.
There have been plenty of, western propaganda driven, accusations of war crimes against Russia. And while I'm sure a lot of those are complete fabrications, I'm also sure that even if the Russians were saints (which they aren't) there are real and significant war crimes and civilian deaths (accidental and otherwise) happening.
But you know, they CAN commit war crimes and target most of an adult population as combatants without having an outright ethnic cleansing agenda. It's just harder to talk about because that's what we normally do and when we do it we rationalize, justify, and shuffle it under the rug.
But gee sure is nice propaganda to instead say it's an outright war of ethnic extermination instead.
- The rarely observed alternative timeline Phonelobster
But you know, they CAN commit war crimes and target most of an adult population as combatants without having an outright ethnic cleansing agenda. It's just harder to talk about because that's what we normally do and when we do it we rationalize, justify, and shuffle it under the rug.
I hear the vile evil Russian baddies are counting every male over age 16 as an enemy combatant in their casualty data to justify their bombings as not killing large numbers of civilians!
