The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[NOTNOThyzmarca]

Your bloodlust for Russian lives is not appealing to me.

Perhaps that's because you lack the capacity for basic empathy and compassion.

[MGuy]

I don't think bloodlust is the path to empathy or compassion.

[Kaelik]

It is interesting how quick people are to say things like "Throughout history Russia's COIN strategy has always been the much simpler expedient of getting rid of the local population" based on basically no actual evidence.

I mean there's definitely some weird ass anti USSR dumb shit going on in the rest of the post, which is definitely not true because, lmao, the USSR was an extremely multiethnic empire, but also if we confine ourselves to looking at post USSR Russia it's still obviously wrong. Russia has conquered one or two areas post USSR break up, depending on how you count Georgia, and in neither case did it engage in mass elimination.

But people are just full on jumping on board saying shit like "Obviously Russia has the goal of killing every single Ukrainian. And we know this because in a War Russia has killed THOUSANDS of civilians! Unlike the US that killed way more civilians in all of it's many wars, and also is currently killing hundreds of thousands in Yemen and millions in Afghanistan. So this obviously proves that Russia is planning to kill all Ukrainians, and that's why we can safely say that Russia is not doing the exact same thing that the US does, it's doing something way worse and we are the good guys again yay!"

Russia is killing civilians for the normal reasons that armies always kill civilians when they do wars of conquest, because managing the local population is hard, because they have all these bombs and they love using them, because they don't give a fuck about them, because they can't tell the difference between insurgents and civilians, ect.

If anyone seriously tells you that if Russia had rolled into Kiev in a week they would have replaced Kievs government with a Russian one and then begun the systematic mass murder of everyone in Ukraine they are a fucking moron who has completely lost the plot.

Those glorious freed Crimeans who bravely and freely and fairly voted to be annexed by Russia will tell you the truth of what would have happened. "Wow, we used to live under a previous shit government, but now we live under a new shit government." It wouldn't have been great for the people of Ukraine, but it absolutely would not have resulted in the kind of eliminationism shit that the US did itself and is still helping countries do to this day, but that US people have to pretend their enemies do to convince themselves the enemies are worse instead of just different from the US.

While total death numbers are always going to be of questionable accuracy in an ongoing war, the UN current number 3,404 dead civilians. Even if we assume the real number is double that, and we are really talking about 7 thousand dead, this is still less then the 15,000 civilians who were directly targeted as civilians for death by the US coalition forces in Yemen (Hundreds of thousands died from things besides direct targeting) and a rounding error next to the 1 million CHILDREN the US is estimated to kill in Afghanistan in the next year, not all civilians, just children.

Russia can be bad without making up fake claims of how they want to do genocide. A war to conquer where you bomb civilians because you think there might be military assets in the blast radius too is bad all on it's own, and Russia has gone a few steps more evil then that!

You'd think this is a lesson the west would have learned when they wrote a bunch of scholarship about how the Holodomor was definitely a genocide, and then when the USSR collapsed and they went through the soviet archive it turned out that actually the Russians just implemented policies they thought would produce more food, but they didn't, and millions starved including Russians, and there was no attempt at genocide and in fact secret relief efforts were attempted but hidden because Russia didn't want to admit it fucked up.

But of course, why would they learn from that lesson, since no one has ever suffered any consequence for being wrong about US enemy nations.

[PseudoStupidity]

Hyz is also bringing up things that are flatly not true, like saying Russia is killing all the Ukranian teachers. Russia is having teachers be retrained so they teach Russian language courses and follow other Russian teaching standards. This is not good, as Ukraine deserves to have its own teaching standards and Ukrainian people deserve to speak whatever language they want, but it's not killing all the teachers as Hyz claims. I need to see a credible citation of mass killings of teachers instead of retraining camps being set up in Crimea and other areas. I could not find claims of mass killings of teachers, but I did find ones about the retraining camps that Russia would obviously need to set up to train people in conquered areas. You know, like the US does in its imperialist wars.

You don't need to lie about what Russia is doing or how they're doing in the war to make them look bad. Their military is underperforming, their action are wicked, but they aren't a horde of orcs or some shit. They're doing regular imperialist war stuff in a regular imperialist war.

One thing I do think is funny, but also sad, is Hyz's talk about slave labor. I live in a country that openly does slave labor, it's called the United States of America, and we have no intention of ever stopping. Slave labor is bad, but holy fuck this is not some unique evil thing Russia is doing. Why the hell do you care about slave labor in Ukraine enough to want to destroy a whole country over it, but not care about slave labor in the USA enough to want to destroy a whole country over it? Why do you have a double standard when it comes to what's good and bad?

[Omegonthesane]

You don't need to lie about what Russia is doing or how they're doing in the war to make them look bad. Their military is underperforming, their action are wicked, but they aren't a horde of orcs or some shit. They're doing regular imperialist war stuff in a regular imperialist war.

The word "regular" spells out why people feel the need to exaggerate bad stuff when the US's enemies do it.

Because it's not enough for Russia to be a far right capitalist autocratic state which is attempting to use its military power to steal territory and resources from other countries. If we condemned that in the general case, we'd go all the way to Amerikkka Delenda Est. The story has to be the most cartoonish atrocity propaganda, because if it isn't, then the USA comes out looking worse than its enemies in the majority of geopolitical affairs.

[NOTNOThyzmarca]

You'd think this is a lesson the west would have learned when they wrote a bunch of scholarship about how the Holodomor was definitely a genocide, and then when the USSR collapsed and they went through the soviet archive it turned out that actually the Russians just implemented policies they thought would produce more food, but they didn't, and millions starved including Russians, and there was no attempt at genocide and in fact secret relief efforts were attempted but hidden because Russia didn't want to admit it fucked up.

Go suck a barrel of cocks you motherfucking genocide-denying asshole.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Go suck a barrel of cocks you motherfucking genocide-denying asshole.

[Omegonthesane]

You'd think this is a lesson the west would have learned when they wrote a bunch of scholarship about how the Holodomor was definitely a genocide, and then when the USSR collapsed and they went through the soviet archive it turned out that actually the Russians just implemented policies they thought would produce more food, but they didn't, and millions starved including Russians, and there was no attempt at genocide and in fact secret relief efforts were attempted but hidden because Russia didn't want to admit it fucked up.

Go suck a barrel of cocks you motherfucking genocide-denying asshole.

So, the academic consensus among researchers of the Holodomor is that it was a horrific crime against humanity, a man-made famine where the Soviets put political interests over human lives, and tried to deny that their agricultural policy in Ukraine had led to disaster rather than take the L and provide proper food aid to starving peasants.

It is also the academic consensus that, even after the opening of the Soviet archives, there is no evidence that the deaths of Ukrainians was the point of the exercise - no evidence of some plan to intentionally take food away from Ukrainians so that they would starve. Intentionally covering up a famine and allowing millions to die because admitting that a famine was happening would make your political project look bad should really be reason enough to condemn Stalin on its own. With that in mind, there should be no need to go further than what the evidence shows in castigating the Soviet Union for its agricultural policy in Ukraine in the early 1930s; and there is certainly no need to cheapen the extremely high charge of genocide by lumping a catastrophic mistake and a subsequent callous cover-up as if it was an intentional ethnocide from the beginning.

It is also worth mentioning that more Kazakhs than Ukrainians died during the Holodomor, because the famine was not isolated to Ukraine and in fact hit the broader Soviet Union as a whole.

[Thaluikhain]

Er, you wrote Holocaust instead of Holodomor there.

[Omegonthesane]

Edited. Thanks for picking that up before it got used as a gotcha against me. Really I should've been more careful before commenting on something this serious.

[PseudoStupidity]

You need to stretch the definition of genocide a lot to make the Holodomor fit. Here are some things I believe you'd need to consider genocides if you want to call the Holodomor a genocide: US sanctions against Afghanistan (and really any US sanctions that involve food and medicine, as they are an attempt to destroy the nation they are foisted upon). The Bengal famine. The Irish famine. I'd need to list a whole lot of famines here, but you get the point, right?

Edit: Removed the Great Leap Forward because that was too much of a stretch after thinking about it for a bit.

I don't think we want to start calling all those things genocide, because then we'd need another word to describe the special kind of wickedness that genocide represents. Genocide is more than neglect and more than neglect combined with a coverup, it is an active attempt to eliminate an entire ethnicity or cultural identity (like the Nazis did to the Jewish people, or like the United States and other settler-colonial nations did to many indigenous peoples). Let's try not to water it down to "crime against humanity", because we already have a term for that and it is the one I just used.

[Omegonthesane]

You need to stretch the definition of genocide a lot to make the Holodomor fit. Here are some things I believe you'd need to consider genocides if you want to call the Holodomor a genocide: The Great Leap Forward. US sanctions against Afghanistan (and really any US sanctions that involve food and medicine, as they are an attempt to destroy the nation they are foisted upon). The Bengal famine. The Irish famine. I'd need to list a whole lot of famines here, but you get the point, right?

According to most scholars of famine, you'd have to consider literally every recorded famine, ever, for the list. The general academic consensus is that death by famine should always be considered "man-made" insofar as there is generally food somewhere that could have been transported to where it was needed and summarily was not.

As it happens I was originally going to bring up the Great Leap Forward as a massive man-made catastrophe that is frequently used in anti-communist propaganda and is not generally labelled a genocide.

[PseudoStupidity]

According to most scholars of famine, you'd have to list literally every recorded famine, ever. The general consensus is that death by famine should always be considered "man-made" insofar as there is generally food somewhere that could have been transported to where it was needed and summarily was not.

I agree. I was trying to think of famines where government policy caused (or at least exasperated) the famine but then the government refused to acknowledge it or actively tried to cover it up. That's still an awful lot of famines, though. Famines are virtually always crimes against humanity and among the worst sort of crime any government can commit.

[Thaluikhain]

You need to stretch the definition of genocide a lot to make the Holodomor fit. Here are some things I believe you'd need to consider genocides if you want to call the Holodomor a genocide: US sanctions against Afghanistan (and really any US sanctions that involve food and medicine, as they are an attempt to destroy the nation they are foisted upon). The Bengal famine. The Irish famine. I'd need to list a whole lot of famines here, but you get the point, right?

I can't speak for the Holodomor, as that's a topic I do not know about, but I'd say that the Bengal famine can be counted as a genocide without changing the definitions much. Not only was it caused by British mismanagement and Churchill refused to do anything about he, when subordinate leaders decided they could spare a proportion of their own supplies to send to famine relief, Churchill ha their supplies reduced by that proportion to prevent this from happening. That's not merely neglect, that's intent.

[Omegonthesane]

Yeah, given the "in whole or in part" qualification, there's clear intent on Churchill's part to cause the deaths of Indians, and that this intent was driven by their ethnicity, so doesn't even squirm out of the UN definition that was carefully workshopped to avoid finding any of the signatories guilty by its own terms as written of the crime that it described.

[Kaelik]

I would also add that based purely on a podcast I heard recently I think the Irish Famine also counts as genocide given the many and repeated claims by some of the principal actors that they needed to reduce the Irish population.

But indeed the Holodamar was not an intentional attitude to kill ukranians. It was a bad policy that caused starvation across the nation and Ukrainians fared better then some and worse then others.

And in fact this is the scholarly consensus. So go yell at the historical scholars who wrote that the holodamar was genocide while the USSR existed and then on reviewing the archives post ussr literally wrote the scholarship saying "Hey no. It wasn't. (Still bad though.)" And tell them you are very mad about their genocide denial.

[PseudoStupidity]

I did not know those things about the Bengal famine or Irish famine, I thought they were purely mismanagement. Well, shit, I can't wait for Hyz to talk about how we need to destroy the UK.

[NOTNOThyzmarca]

we need to destroy the UK.

We already did a while ago.

[Stahlseele]

Nah, we do not need to destroy the UK.
They are actually very competent at doing that themselves.
Are they really talking about breaking the North Ireland Protocoll and thus THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT which the USA allready told them TWICE they are forbidden from doing so?

[erik]

From what I've read and watched about Holodomor, it sounds like a genocide in that it was an intentional amplification of famine along with other punishments and refusal of aid, and that it was intended in part to punish and remove some Ukrainian leaders to keep their people in line. The reason it doesn't hands-down get considered genocide is because people in other parts were dying of famine as well, so only an edge case in that perspective, but Stalin made choices that caused Ukrainians to die at triple the rate of the rest of the country despite their producing food. Stalin leveled collective punishment that caused disproportionate death on specific people. That they were fuck-ups and were also starving elsewhere seems like a shitty cop-out.

If a state is having a famine and they decide to take food away from people of a certain ethnicity to give it to others, that seems like genocide to me. It's targeted eradication.

https://holodomor.ca/resource/was-the-h ... -genocide/

[Kaelik]

From what I've read and watched about Holodomor, it sounds like a genocide in that it was an intentional amplification of famine along with other punishments and refusal of aid, and that it was intended in part to punish and remove some Ukrainian leaders to keep their people in line. The reason it doesn't hands-down get considered genocide is because people in other parts were dying of famine as well, so only an edge case in that perspective, but Stalin made choices that caused Ukrainians to die at triple the rate of the rest of the country despite their producing food. Stalin leveled collective punishment that caused disproportionate death on specific people. That they were fuck-ups and were also starving elsewhere seems like a shitty cop-out.

If a state is having a famine and they decide to take food away from people of a certain ethnicity to give it to others, that seems like genocide to me. It's targeted eradication.

https://holodomor.ca/resource/was-the-h ... -genocide/

I mean unsurprisingly "holodomor.ca" is perhaps not the best source.

Many people legitimately believed the things you just said throughout the west prior to the collapse of the USSR. However, once scholars had a chance to review the archives of the USSR, the most prominent ones changed their mind when it turned out most of that isn't true.

Ukrainians didn't die at triple the rate of the rest of the country, Stalin actually instituted aid programs to help Ukraine, but those aid programs were ineffective at least in part because Stalin implemented them in ways that kept them secret (to avoid admitting the problem) and the secrecy was in conflict with effectively helping people.

See The Years of Hunger, Robert Davies & Steven Wheatcroft, and Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited, Michael Ellman.

Ellman in particular goes into detail about a possible expanded definition of genocide based on a lack of intent (since the evidence is that Stalin did not have any intent to cause Ukrainian deaths more then other ethnicities) and based on what amounts to negligence, that he knew or should have known his actions (mostly post famine started) would have caused more deaths. He shows that if that standard is used, it would require saying that Stalin genocided Russians as well (and other ethnic groups), and concluding that basically all the existing powers at the time would also have been doing genocides at the same time period, rendering genocide so broad it wouldn't mean much.

[Kaelik]

I love when Biden appoints Mitch McConnell's aide to the Postal Board. This to me, is winning.

[Kaelik]

In the ongoing attempt to be as evil as possible the biden admin is asking all the cities and states that haven't already used unspent covid funds to pay for more cops to use their unspent covid funds for more cops.

Because there will never be another variant or wave, covid is over, zero people are being infected, no one will ever need a booster let's just tell cities to hure more cops to make everything worse.

[tussock]

That 5th circuit ruling about how federal agencies don't actually have the power to do anything, there seems to a be a lot of lawyers suggesting this will be catastrophic, like, described as an openly nihilist approach to government.

But, like, where normally the SC would bin that, because, lol, regulation by legislation in the US senate obviously can't work, but, this is just full on dismantling the federal government now, right? No agency may do anything not clearly and plainly specified in law, after a jury trial. Like, as much as Biden just won't get shit done, that's functionally gunna make it impossible for anyone to get anything done, ever again.

And attacking through the people who deal with fraud, like, you can't actually legislate for every concievable kind of fraud, it has to be loosely worded.

Like, if your bank kicked you onto the street and stole all your money, they're kinda saying that's fine, you can hire a lawyer and sue them, and they'll be able to appeal all the way to the supreme court if they want, so like, in twenty years you might get a fraction of it back.

[Kaelik]

The federalist society has been salivating at dismantling the administrative state for decades and this was always coming but they aren't going to say and didn't say you can't do anything. They said everything the admin state does gets to be reviewed by the federal courts before it happens.

Their goal is to set up their extremely packed undemocratic lifetime judiciary appointments as barons who get to rule.

Just as Marbury v Madison was a power grab of the courts taking power from the legislature this is a power grab of the courts taking power from admin state.