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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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that + looting and rape and torture is exactly what is being described as Bucha massacre.

No, publicly, people are saying Russians 'murdered' hundreds of people. It's all over twitter, for example. If you search for it, tweets pop up, every one saying Russians 'slaughtered' those people, as i if they, in a contested town on the front line had nothign better to do than kill thirty civilans each day.

If you look a little closer, the official claims are 'hundreds of people with signs of violent trauma' which is what you'd expect to happen in a town that wasn't evacuated and where the invading army is getting shot at for weeks.

It's not clear to me why the people haven't fled, did the Russians think having them around would help ? Probably, Russians were never very nice people, and even though they probably know it'd not stop Ukraine from firing at them, they thought 'why not', it costs us nothing and maybe it'd help.

It's not clear to me why the people haven't fled

People outside were very likely to be murdered/raped/tortured by Russian occupiers so most tried to wait.

Also, many has fled and remaining were less able/willing to escape.

as i if they, in a contested town on the front line had nothign better to do than kill thirty civilans each day.

I never claimed that Russian soldiers have good priorities. If anything, I claimed exact opposite. Which is self-proving by fact that they are Russian soldiers.

And I have no idea why you are surprised by that: we have long history of armies murdering civilians for no good reason, often with harm to themself. Russian army has even more clear history of being absurdly evil.

We also have quite good evidence of Russian army murdering some specific people in this specific case.