Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
I fully realize this comment might get me in trouble and it is ad-hominem and "tasteless". I will delete it if mods say so and apologize. It is even embarrassing if I got my basic assumption wrong. Here we go though..
I strongly suspect the real reason is because he is Indian, and the said occasional human rights violations are against Muslims. HBD is a thin veneer used to justify seeing human beings as bugs to be crushed because they aren't technologically advanced enough. Online high-caste Indian men seem to be highly susceptible to such viewpoints, probably because of their experience of living in India of all places, the pinnacle of HDB inequality.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I think this is a bit dishonest. I read through all the discussion yesterday and it is quite clear that the revisionist poster is arguing their case much more successfully, while the other side is acting very offended, signaling disbelief and eventually flaming out. If this discussion was about any other topic, the balance of upvotes would be much much more skewed.
If where did all the Jews go is such a good refutation of their argument, you should go ahead and ask it, and then pursue them until either you get a straight answer or their evasion becomes obvious. Holocaust denial is clearly not a position held by vast majority of the users here so you would surely manage to change the voting balance in no time.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
members of the US intelligence community
Has there ever been a more reprehensible neologism? These people are, at best, wildly overpaid midwit bureaucrats and at worst absolute crooks.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Yeah this is ridiculous. The alternatives are:
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Sausage fest.
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Face checks at the doors which accomplish the same outcome but only the higher status men are allowed inside to mingle with the women.
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Invite only parties where any woman is easily invited while only higher status guys are.
I get the feeling that anyone who cheers something like this simply hasn’t had much of a nightlife.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Is it healthy to dwell so much over it everytime some city degenerate dies and the media decides to make it a “thing”? What would you or anyone else gain from this knowledge?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I don't have much to add about Zelensky's personality, but I would strongly urge everyone to consider that in 5-10 years time you might have a very different memory of the person and the country. Many events and considerations that took place in the first weeks of the war (some of which are likely really not that heroic) are totally unknown right now and Ukrainian government essentially outlawed any real opposition and critical journalism. Western media is in full war footing.
At some point emotions will cool down and Westerners will mostly forget about the country called Ukraine. Just like how nobody even seemed to have realized the recent political happenings in Iraq while it used to be the center of the world for a while. The incredible cost of rebuilding an already crazy corrupt, poor and now depopulated country will become an uncomfortable topic. You will start to hear Ukraine more in connection with Hunter Biden type of corruption stories than "heroic grandma quotes inspired by brave president" stories. Zelensky's hero status will hit the realities of ruling a country like that (is there any past Ukrainian president not totally discredit by now?).
I have the grim prediction that unless if he dies before the end of the war, he will probably go down in the history as someone whom we would prefer to forget.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
And that also means over 90% of people in the last thousand years have been fascist.
I do unironically agree with this. I believe humans have a natural tendency to organize around political forms similar to feudalism, whose combination with industrial society is more or less what most people call fascism. It is certainly what Mussolini seemed to understand when he was referring to his party's ideology. I also think the unique weirdness of the term fascism (it is really difficult to define in a way most people agree) has a lot to do with this underlying nature. Intellectuals of progressive/enlightenment bent keep recognizing signs of fascism everywhere because human societies keep reproducing elements of it adapted to the changing societal conditions.
You are right at recognizing the political terms of right and left can refer to very different positions on issues at different times. But I believe that is because the specific issues are not that relevant when coming up with these labels. What matters chiefly is the direction and speed of political change (or lack thereof) you want. Today's far right might look more leftist than yesterday's conservatism (case in point, Meloni is an unmarried mother of 1 hardly a Catholic motherhood icon) but it is still far right because it advocates for a fast reversal of the enlightenment project while yesterday's conservatism just wanted to conserve the society as it is.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
27d ago
Yes they obviously thought about it quite hard and the solution is to bribe and blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape) to get the American military to complete the job.
“Best” is a meaningful term because Israelis don’t have the means to actually destroy the facilities themselves. If they would, this would change the strategic picture massively.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7d ago
It’s not necessarily looking ugly or strange but the fact that someone can’t figure out that they look off-putting even though they could fix this with some work, is profoundly disturbing. It suggests something unhinged about you as you are the sort of person without anyone in your life to tell you such a thing. What did you do to drive everyone away? What other social norms are you oblivious about?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Universities should be vastly reduced in size and should mainly consist of men. Any loan system should be abolished but the tuitions should be at a level regular middle class family can pay for their children, or, without family support, one should be able to afford with some part-time plus summer-full-time job. Bureaucracy for choosing research subjects and getting funding should almost entirely be abolished.
Until these things happen universities anywhere will simply be nothing more than rent seekers on a piece of paper that promises but rarely delivers upper-middle-class status, adult daycare, enforcers of bureaucratic power on the elite-minds, and speed bumps on actual science and technology development.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
What difference does it make?
Main difference it must make is that Russia isn't the real big baddie of this century from a Western perspective. It is China. If the Western aim wrt Ukraine was to avoid war and come to a peaceful settlement where both sides would become part of some rules based system where the rules are made by the Americans, then it has failed miserably. So it is pretty important to look at why/where things went wrong and take lessons if you want to avoid a proper World War.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5mo ago
Sorry for discrediting myself by describing killing a couple hundred thousand people out of a population of 2 million as genocide.
Eager to hear more of your genocide-free strategy of starving them instead and bombing those “meat shields”. Oh and the final option forcefully cleansing the land of them.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11mo ago
The words occupied and apartheid don't mean what you seem to think they mean
When Israel was much more of a liberal western oriented country, its western supporters had an easy time wordcelling such arguments. It’s definitely not that country anymore and this is broadcasted very effectively to rest of the world thanks to online video sharing.
That's not the behavior of a country consistently struggling to take over land
Israel created massive refugee camps of the native population of its lands and then tried to dump the problem onto the neighbouring Arab states. I can’t gather a lot of sympathy for them for failing at this and having to deal with the consequences of its actions. Also it lost Sinai in a war (incidentally: a war that displayed how extremely vulnerable the country is if its enemies can act with even a tiny bit coordination. Israel’s short sighted and frantic actions are pushing its enemies into such coordination right now)
And your last paragraph is quite telling unfortunately. I mentioned “20th century example” on purpose, as you might be aware that since mid century a western taboo emerged against conquest and ethnic cleansing. Ironically this taboo is what sustains Israel ever since as many western states and peoples feel very bad about what happened to the Jews and thus give Israel massive amounts of material support and turn a blind eye to break the same rule within limits.
If the world started operating on pre-20th century assumptions of ethnic conflict again, Israel would have a free hand to exile or kill the Arab population of course. But then it could also not expect much sympathy or support from the West when the hundred fold more populous enemy surrounding it did the same to Israel. So be careful what you wish for.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
Perhaps because they were alive before last Saturday? It is not for nothing that people who actually spend serious attention on this conflict (and don't have certain affinity for one side) usually end up lament the evil done by both sides and shake their heads in despair.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
I agree wholeheartedly. Except that I don't believe it was meant to be a war of expansion but simply an instigation to a coup to install a pre-2014 style government to Ukraine and stop Ukrainian attacks on Donbas from being a headache on the Russian government who couldn't care less about the Donbas population but cannot let them get crushed either. Since then they are improvising rather poorly and had to annex the occupied territories as a sign of commitment.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
If there aren’t enough people who can’t discuss an event 80 years ago without flaming out, it doesn’t say good things about the degree of mythological significance that event has gained. Makes it a more interesting topic to argue about.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
That still definitely sounds to me like something the EU would never tolerate against any other ethnic group. You would likely get jail time in Germany for even championing stripping new comers of their citizenship.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
10mo ago
I will free-form list my thoughts:
The current Ukrainian retreats do look more like a rout than an orderly retreat, and there is talk of quite a lot of operational chaos in Ukrainian command at the moment. Pro-Russian opinion sources are definitely very gleeful in a way I haven't seen since the well advertised Ukrainian offensive imploded with massive casualties. In a couple days we will get a better view into how much of this is true.
Ultimately it is very difficult to predict anything about the future of this war (without clowning yourself) without a good insight into the casualty rates of both sides and Russia's military production/import ramp-ups.
I suspect that Ukraine is actually facing a low ceiling in its overall conscription capacity. I base my suspicion on increasingly brutal videos coming out for months where conscription officers are beating up men unconscious to drag them to the barracks or having to fight a large community resistance. We simply don't know how many eligible Ukrainian men are even left in the country at this point.
I suspect that Russia is having some problems ramping up and adapting its military production. I base my suspicion on its constant reliance on North Korean/Iranian weapons imports and inability to scale up precision bombing campaigns to truly devastating sizes and the fact that they appointed basically a logistics czar as the Minister of Defense after spending years failing to adapt their hardware to the battlefield conditions.
I still expect that a Ukrainian front collapse is very much possible although I am impressed by how long they held out. They have relied heavily on "ideologically motivated" brigades (other words might apply), a general manpower advantage over the lean professional pre-war Russian army, and Russia's slow adaptation to the drone/precision-guided dominated war. Those troops are dead, Russian military recruitment seems to have equalized things, and Russians more or less adapted to these technologies and even gained an upper hand. All these observations support the theory that Kursk offensive has been a failed Hail Mary attempt to trigger some black swan event through forcing a massive error from the Russian command.
I think anyone who still word-cells "this is how Ukraine is actually winning" theories are basically delusional or worse. The war perhaps developed as a win for the NATO command (debatable imo), but Ukraine is a dead country busy with auto-cannibalization in the hands of a desperate leadership.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1yr ago
I fail to see how this goes against anything I have said.
It’s trivial to observe that due to cultural factors eastern Slavic women have a tendency to easily become gold diggers or prostitutes under certain adverse conditions, while for example Muslim women don’t have this tendency under even more extreme adverse conditions. Your male relatives being prepared to use violence to keep your sexual purity is one of these cultural factors.
This doesn’t distract from my point at all.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
when its northern border with Russia is reinforced on both sides and makes raids impossible
Were those raids ever anything other than PR for Western media and Ukrainian domestic jingoism? They generate lots of media attention and allows headlines in Europe to the tune of "partisans advancing into Moscow" which are always useful as average normie has lost all interest in the war other than seeing the occasional headline.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Probably you are right. But it doesn’t change the fact that the seemingly extraneous bits of trivia that the octopus alludes to, have a coherent target.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
The nationalist Ukrainian state, if it ever stops being such a poor corrupt shithole and enters the EU, will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants
Are you taking my sentence out of context on purpose?
This is entirely a choice of national governments, not the EU.
No it’s the migrants’ choice. Entire Eastern Europe gives massive youth emigration to the west because wages are low and living standards are low. That’s also why foreigners don’t go there. It’s naive to think this won’t change fast if they manage to catch up economically.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Also attacking an EU and NATO country isn't exactly going to be positive for the support of the rest of them or probably even the US.
I suggest you take a look at this page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
A country that has enough pull or support in American foreign policy and intelligence establishment can get away with virtually anything. Some evidence surfaces against Ukraine? It will be dismissed or classified. The media will basically ignore it and allude to Putin propaganda. Anyone who still remembers any of this will be seen as conspiracy cranks after 1-2 years.
The other problem for Ukraine attacking is that it would be rather hard for them to pull off.
I find this line of argumentation very irrelevant. Ukraine doesn't have to send some warship from Odessa to circumvent Gibraltar and drop depth charges. It is a very lean operation and this sort of underwater infrastructure is notoriously quite fragile. Pretty much the entire area is full of CIA black sites and countries that hate Russia and the Nordstreams at least as much as Ukraine. If there is a will there is definitely a way.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2yr ago
Yes unfortunately I didn’t expect this basic label to be the object of discussion. Their ties with literal original fascism is plain and obvious. It’s a party that suddenly went from irrelevance to prime ministership so people need an introduction. When Lega had a similar sudden success, media coverage similarly mentioned their Northern separatist roots.
Unfortunately half the thread devolved into people scoring cheap dunks about the fascist/right wing label and not contributing anything to the conversation
I think there is an active media psyop when it comes to German-US relations that aims to hide or obscure that there is substantial mistrust between the two. How quickly did the people forget about this https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/
Post-war Germany is allowed to prosper economically and have a semblance of independent foreign relations, but always within limits that the Americans set. When they exceed these limits (as in the case of Nordstream 2 or trying to negotiate a peace in Ukraine through the now forgotten Minsk processes), the US has many open or covert ways to correct the course.
Who knows if the Americans did this pipeline leak? But it certainly benefits them and wouldn’t be that unprecedented.
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