
Коментарите в България сигурно са още по-трагикомични, но засега нямам сили да си ги причиня.
Moderator: Moridin
Кажи ти какво мислиш по въпроса?
Не, не е тяхна вината. ЕС е дефакто икономически съюз, а ООН, както и ОН преди това, е хартиено коте, върху "кожата" на което 99% от държавите по света са се подписали да са добрички и готини, докато... не са.
"Това не са бежанците, с които сме свикнали. Както каза австрийският канцлер, това са наши роднини, семейство. Това са европейци, интелигентни, образовани хора, част от тях са програмисти. Ние, както и всички други сме готови да ги посрещнем. Това не е обичайната бежанска вълна от хора с неясно минало. Никоя от европейските страни не се притеснява от тях", каза Петков.
Един интересен пост от редит който следя. Не съм съгласен с някои неща. Но основната идея - че като цяло САЩ и ЕС са подвели Украйна на тема колко подкрепа могат да очакват мисля че държи сериозно.The interval was filled by Radio Free Europe, which took it upon itself to interpret American attitudes, urging Hungarians to step up the pace of their revolution and to reject any compromise. For example, on October 29, Radio Free Europe greeted Imre Nagy’s installation as the new Prime Minister with this hostile broadcast:
Imre Nagy and his supporters want to revise and modernize the Trojan Horse episode. They need a cease-fire so that the present government in power in Budapest can maintain its position as long as possible. Those who are fighting for liberty must not lose sight even for a minute of the plans of the government opposing them.6
When, on October 30, Nagy abolished the one-party system and appointed a coalition government composed of representatives of all the democratic parties that had participated in the last free elections, in 1946, Radio Free Europe remained unconvinced:
The Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior are still in Communist hands. Do not let this continue, Freedom Fighters. Do not hang your weapons on the wall.7
Although Radio Free Europe was funded by the American government, it was run by an independent board and by administrators who did not receive official instructions from the administration. However, it was too much to expect Hungary’s freedom fighters to understand the distinction between the United States government and the pronouncements of a radio station which had been expressly created as a vehicle for promulgating the “liberation” policy which the Secretary of State had claimed to be his own invention.
For 8 years the US has armed, trained and funded an anti-Russian regime on Russias doorstep that was actively engaged in high casualty warfare against ethnic Russian separatist states which had claimed independence by more or less representative plebiscites.
We don’t needto ask what the US would do in such a hypothetical, we have history.
In 1995 the US invaded Haiti to overthrow their government
in 1989 the US invaded Panama to overthrow their government,
in 1983 the US invaded Grenada to overthrow their government,
in 1965 the US invaded the Dominican republic to crush the Constitutionalist rebel faction,
in 61 they tried to overthrow the Cuban government in Bay of Pigs invasion but failed
Note: the ones list above were just the marines on the ground invasions in the western hemisphere since ww2. If we wanted to list every CIA back coup and invasion throughout Asia Africa and the middle east we’d be here all day.
.
The Idea that Ukraine could side against Russia, shell ethnic Russian separatists who’d had more or less legit plebiscites on independence, take billions upon billions in Weapons, training, and funding from russia’s main Geostrategic rival, and work desperately to join alliance networks against Russia, all while sharing a land border?
The US HAS invaded both Canada and Mexico over vastly less, and overthrown South American governments in living memory for vastly less dangerous or threatening activity.
If the US had shown Putin’s restraint in the 1980s Manuel Noriega would have died a free man, Grenada would be a weirder tourist destination, and cocaine would be vastly cheaper.
Only one time did any country in the Americas try anything close to what Ukraine did... and that was Cuba, the US did launch an invasion, they just failed, and it almost started WW3.
Bailing Ukraine out for the fatal mistake of believing American bullshit is not worth risking this escalating into a theater war or a nuclear war.
And rather than blaming Putin for responding exactly as America would have, but after 8 years of trying to negotiate... we should ask ourselves what the hell our leaders were doing egging on the Ukrainians and gaslighting them into thinking America or Europe would back them up when we obviously couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Friends don’t let friends antagonize larger nuclear armed neighbours with armed forces in the millions of men.
Of course america never treated Ukraine like a friend, they treated Ukraine like an expendable chess piece, they couldn’t wait to drive a wedge between two slavic peoples who should be building tighter economic and personal relations after a century of war and totalitarianism, and instead actively armed, enabled and drove the region to a new war.
I'm banned and I accept that, But Russia
My account was banned because YouTube is being flooded by Russian bots reporting on masse against anyone who speaks out against the war criminal Dictator Putin.
YouTube, you're being attacked, and your human account holders are being kicked off your platform by a flood of Russian bots.
Do something and stop sitting on your hands over Russia, their money will not make up for the crimes they are currently committing, and it makes no financial sense to allow your audience to be evicted and replaced with bots.
Small actions are worth a million platitudes and hashtags.
Side note, now my account is gone I have lost my Welsh language music playlists, many of these songs have only 10 views each and will be impossible to find again. Is there a way to unban me but disable my ability to comment permanently so that I cannot break any rulers but still allow me to listen to beautiful music in my native language that is almost dead, while still earning you ad-revenue?
In what was and still is a complete shock to me, alarmists who warned for years of Russia's threat were vindicated, and their opponents humbled. Given what rationalists say about surprise, it shouldn't have been such a shock, which makes reflection necessary.
There's heterogeneity to the no-threat-from-Russia camp. All sorts of Russophiles (hopeless to discuss now, possibly ever) and realist, compromising geopolitical thinkers like Mearsheimer (never got their way) aside, the camp included cynics, both within and without Russia, both bitterly patriotic and smugly dismissive of Russian everything, both mainstream-aligned and wildly conspiratorial. Those who claimed: «Putin is just an oligarch figurehead, a consensus figure of a not-so-shadowy mercanitle cabal». Or: «Putin's entire apparatus is profoundly corrupt, plutocratic, with real estate in London and children in Nice, they'd rather bomb Voronezh than cross their dear Western partners' red lines». Or even: «Putin is a CIA/MI6 agent tasked with overseeing safe exports of Russian natural resources while being a scary but ultimately harmless bogeyman, propping up the end-of-history Atlanticist order that has begun crumbling past the collapse of the Union». There was no shortage of theories as to how Putin is not his own man, or at least not the man to rule Russia on his own. And I share this opinion, or used to. Putin does not have the biography of his own man, the intellectual acumen or balls of one likely to keep power without handing out quite a lot of keys to others, nor the popular support (his overinflated image, dwarfing all of Russia now, might make people think we have a cult of personality here, but nobody gives that much of a shit about the old guy, and there’s no effort going to maintain his macho persona in the last few years, even pro-Putin Youth organizations have dissipated somehow). And his loud words on the issue of building the «Vertical of Power», for the longest time, seemed as much of a profanation as his anti-corruption campaigns, now forgotten. (Parallels to Xi write themselves, although I hope Xi retains some competent advisors).
Yet here we are. And the system is very tight, surprisingly so. Internal forces probably act with less remorse than those invading Ukraine now. I have friends arrested for protests already. I have friends in FSB afraid of saying how much they disapprove on the war. Those riot police types all around seem to live in a parallel universe. Do they answer, ultimately, to Zolotov? What does Zolotov get out of this mess? He appears 100% on board. Is he just a retarded dog with no foresight?
I harbor a deep, homicidal disgust for 90's oligarchs, now mostly irrelevant (and for Putin era batch too, with caveats), but ironically at this point I'd welcome Arkady Rotenberg sneaking in and braining our Dear Leader with a proverbial snuffbox to cut further losses to his business (if not to Slavic lives and relationships). However, it seems that oligarchs, even those of the inner circle, are paper tigers in the modern era. Who isn’t? The incredibly well-informed xxxxxxxxxx speculated, less than a week ago, that Putin’s horsing around Ukraine is motivated by gas business with Europe. Well, seems that state-corporation managers and beneficiaries are also spooked into silence. Some of the richest Russians have spoken out that the coming crisis is a catastrophe, but admitted they’ll have to deal. Is it the triumph of siloviki and pyneviki, the security state? Or just Putin’s personal cronies, to the exclusion of all other voices? I’d have thought so, and there’s good reason to think this is true (read Galeev’s perspective in the link on the post above too). But how small has the circle become?
On February 21st, after Duma “voting” for the recognition of republics (with 25 dissenters), Putin called an extraordinary meeting of Security Council of the Russian Federation (dubbed), a body he supposedly controls even more tightly than some other institutions. After listening to their initial «opinions», he made a point of stressing that this is not scripted, that he had not briefed any of them beforehand and this is happening in the open, and then demanded clear Yes/No statement for the recognition of republics (an act that, in retrospect, was understood as an implicit commitment to wage war). Take this as you will, and I recommend at least skimming the recording/transcript, because this is an eerie and historical moment.
But the most telling and most widely disseminated episode is Putin’s public abuse of his Foreign Intelligence Chief Naryshkin (please watch here for original sound and subtitles), and it really does not look scripted at all.
It looks like Naryshkin, a mediocre spook suit I don’t really have any strong opinion on, milquetoast even in his petty apparent crimes, the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, ex-Chairman of the State Duma, and ex-Kremlin Chief of Staff, is deathly afraid. He tried to support Patrushev, ex-director of FSB, the Secretary of the Security Council and Putin’s trusted man, because Patrushev suggested to have more (doomed) talks with the US presumably to have Biden press Zelensky into a neutrality treaty (and, bizarrely, voted for the recognition of republics at the same time).
Sure, some speakers were more rah-rah, like Shoygu and Bortnikov (acting FSB chief) and Medvedev. but even they were caveating their responses; the tone kept rising, until Zolotov framed it as an existential war with the US.
I think this was something like Point-Deer-Call-Horse plus a bit of Keynesian beauty pageant: Putin has demanded of his retinue to guess at what he actually means and who of the previous speakers know what he secretly means. Right in the course of the meeting, it has occurred to those present that Putin is not leaving anybody any way out. This is an act of binding with blood, and a terrifying loyalty test.
I’ve heard rumors that Naryshkin’s children and family are in Russia, and the same is true for most of the rest of our «elite’s» families who have been lured back under various pretenses. In 2018 his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren all tried to acquire residence permits in Hungary. Abramovich’s daughter is content with her life in Great Britain and posts anti-war “Stories” in her Instagram, as does Liza Peskova, daughter of Putin’s Spokesman, who’s probably still in Paris.
Assuming this is true, what interests me is: who is the innermost circle? Who can surreptitiously get ahold of Foreign Intelligence Chief’s loved ones? And how is this small guy getting more powerful than ever?
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