Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
The most important figure of the American right spent a large portion of his winning 2016 presidential campaign demanding that his center-left opponent be locked up.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Sure, but this whole thread basically consists off examples of white celebrities who have got away with shit and black celebrities who haven't, followed by "Yes, sure, but that's an exception... and that... and that... and that..."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
It should also be remembered that the guys that Nuland and Pyatt were talking about - Yatsenyuk - was one of the main leaders of the main opposition party and had already been offered the PMs post by Yanuk as a compromise, making him the most natural leader to take this post after Yanuk and PoR had vacated power.
It's not like they just picked some guy out of nowhere to make him their puppet, the main thrust of the Nuland call was that they wanted to keep Klitchko and Tyahnubok marginalized since the first was too close to the Europeans and the latter was far-right (something that the pro-Russians never seem to mention - the US explicitly wanted to make sure the far right does not get too much power, something that doesn't fit in the idea of US gunning for Banderites to turn Ukraine into Banderastan).
The Nuland call is not inconsequential since it's evidence that EU should operate on its own and not just rely on the US, surely an important message to this day, but it's not by itself evidence that the entire Euromaidan sequence was just due to string-pulling by Americans with Ukrainians having no agency.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The opinion of NAFOids and Redditors can be discounted on sight, but at least here, where the one thing the media or the public opinion beyond the most extreme loser circles is solidly pro-Ukrainian , the media has been bouncing the question of what the actual goals are or should be for quite a bit longer than that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
Perhaps cramped was the wrong word, I absolutely do understand how different having one's own room is to not having one's own room. I was strictly talking about the square meters/feet as a metric here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10d ago
Yeah. I mean, it would seem to be an obvious from even a cursory reading of Russian history that the one tendency that has stayed from Muscovy times to imperial times to Soviet times to current times has been the continuous tendency for expansion, either through direct annexation or the acquisition of extremely closely held client states. The only expections have been leaders who have been willing to permit territorial contraction for revolutionary purposes or to acquire personal power, and these leaders have then later been greatly denigrated due to this. The finishing of one annexation has generally just tended to be the beginning of the planning of the next acquisition. Much of the "aw, why be so scared of Russia? They clearly have very good reasons for whatever heist they're pulling now" discourse just comes off as an attempt to obfuscate this very obvious pattern.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The amount of EU troubles and dysfunction that can simply be blamed on Germany being moronic again is not insubstantial.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
The idea that Putin represents a moderate faction and that Putin is indeed single-handedly resposible for the current phase of war (ie. events after 2022) in no way contradict each other. When the drumbeat for war started in 2021, there were no indications that the situation in Ukraine was about to change in an essential way (ie. Ukraine was about to make a major assault to take back the territories lost after 2014 - if anything the Ukrainians had gone to great lengths to seem nonaggressive up until a few weeks before the invasion) and also no indications that Putin's strict grip on power in Russia was about to be challenged, by the more radical nationalist forces or anyone else. Putin simply saw that the idea that he'd get what he wants peacefully would not happen - the least anti-Russian politician that could get elected in Ukraine at this point, ie. Zelensky, would not budge or be able to do so - and took a gamble.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
What carrot would he have had? Weapons shipment? Little need for those if Ukrainians were hell-bent for peace. NATO membership? Explicit Russian demand was for Ukraine to not be in NATO, at this point. EU membership? There was a certain event some years ago that means Boris Johnson did not exactly have leverage on this point.
I'm not sure what other stick there would have been apart from UK actually invading Ukraine itself, which, uh, would have certainly caused a lot of questions, home and abroad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20d ago
My understanding is that adoption of Catholicism and Spanish went pretty much hand in hand during the Latin American colonization, and the Jesuit missions spread both.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Two contributions after months of none at all? I knew that March had been a sluggish month for work for me, but you don't have to rub it in like that!
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
Well, a welfare state kind of necessitates being a developed country, unless you have some sort of a different definition from the one I have.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
The point isn't the specific flags or the number of protestors, the point is that, unless someone proves otherwise, the resist libs and the pro-Palestine protestors would most naturally seem to be two specific constituencies, with one of them being prone to thinking that Biden is the only chance against fascism in the USA and the other thinking that Biden is a fascist, for example.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of Russians and pro-Russians on social media talking continously about how Russia will any day now take Odes(s)a (I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city), which would put them within a striking distance of the Moldovan border.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11d ago
"The Ukrainians only fight because they are conscripted and forced" is also something that I've seen for the entire war. The whole idea seems to have originated as cope by Russians and pro-Russians who claimed that since Ukrainians are just Russians who speak funny they'd run directly into the arms of Mother Russia once given an opportunity and who have then flailed to find explanations for why that didn't happen. You don't fight for two years with this intensity with forced and conscripted troops. It's possible that this might change at some point, but even then I'd need far more evidence to actually believe it to be true this time.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
I've never used a Mac, and this thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard of the Marathon game. It's amazing that such a piece of gaming history has completely passed me by, despite having been a gamer for all of my life.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
If there's not enough food coming to your country due to external factors then you basically have to ration food or you start getting starvation and mass deaths.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Ugh, I thought that there was something wrong with that spelling but didn't bother to check. To be honest I haven't followed or thought about Greenwald for some time.
Trump himself probably doesn't care one way or another.
Even that would be quite a different stance from those who somehow think that Trump and Assange are on the same side (against the globalists or whatever).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
27d ago
It's basically a product of the system. When you have governments consisting of coalitions between parties and when elected representatives are reliant on the party for support (particularly in PR systems where the MPs are not really dependent on having the support of some precise geographical one-MP constituency but larger and more inchoate electoral districts), the only way you can get the business of government done is those parties agreeing on a governmental program and then making sure no-one defects, since if defection is allowed, there's too much of a risk that parties start trying to maneuver to get things on the program they don't like busted (ie. even if they don't formally vote against some law they "allow" a sufficient number of MPs required to get it scuppered to vote against it or so on).
Whether such a system is better than, for instance, the American system, is of course a question on opinion. There are probably more important things to consider than the precise methods of representative democracy whichever country chooses.
The bare minimum requirement to even begin considering the statement "vegetarianism/veganism has already been extremely popular on the left" truthful would be a majority of leftists being vegetarian or vegan, which isn't even true here, where these things probably have a stronger hold on left consciousness than most other countries, and hasn't been remotely true in any of the other countries I've visited and where I've encountered leftists.
More options
Context Copy link