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The going joke is always the "strange newfound respect" for someone that they had maligned as hitleresque before.
I am just barely old enough to remember how vicious the attacks on Bush II were (and hell, I think some was justifiable!), but hey, the guy paints now, how endearing!
Even fuckin' CHENEY gets a pass now. Probably helps that his daughter is quite Anti-Trump (which could be a bit of a tell, no?)
And I do truly believe that even Trump will be seen with some level of nostalgia once he's gone.
Seems pretty natural to think that 'man in office' is bad and 'man out of office' is decent. I mean, it was never about a judgement of innate evilness. Once you're president the judgements on you are also about the machine you stand atop of and how your personal sensibility interacts with the forces flowing through the country and world.
I actually think it's a good lesson to learn that psycho and even genocidal world leaders could be generally okay to hang out with absent their official role, and therefore not very surprising that opinions on them alter later. Just like one can be charismatic not as a result of your innate characteristics but because of your position in a society (see Randall Collins for details).
It's being in power that magnifies flaws, eccentricities or even charming character traits into problems for others.
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If it is any consolation, I was perhaps 16 in 2001 and now that I am 40 I can say that my anger at W has solidified rather than evaporated. For me he will always be the president who made torture official US policy and managed to start not one but two large scale wars which the US ultimately lost. His stupid stunt on that aircraft carrier. Mission accomplished my ass. From US-internal perspective, he was mostly fine, but his foreign policy was quite the disaster, and Trump will be hard-pressed to cause a similar loss of utility even if he decides to invade Greenland.
He was and is an idiot and the people who caused these wars went on to become the only faction that matters in foreign policy circles,with the Ukraine war being their crowning achievement.
Their crowning achievement is something Russia did?
Russia didn't use false flag attacks to stage a coup in Ukraine, disenfranchise their substantial Russian minority and started a civil war.
Ukrainian nationalists weren't getting support & cover from Russians.
Russia started the war with the invasion of Crimea (an action which, all claims to contrary, involved clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces and thus clearly constitutes an offensive invasion of a sovereign state's territory), and the war was then escalated with the filibuster action in Eastern Ukraine by Strelkov and co, without which the protests in Eastern Ukraine would in all likelihood not have escalated to the status of military action.
Toppling a duly elected and acceptable government by force to replace it with a hostile one, to get a strategic edge is an act of war. The issue is that Russians aren't Hajnali liberals with their cuck fetish of getting shafted due to the fear of being seen as improper.
Should I post the recently closed Ukrainian court case about the Maidan snipers? Looks like a lot of people who were shot in the back by right sector guys adding heat to the confrontation did not appreciate their promotion to martyrs yo revolution, and talked.
wat
I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say there, and I hope there's a rule against this kind of formulation.
Okay, to explain what that means, Western Europeans from the Hajnal area have this weird obsession of not being seen as improper and doing things 'by the book' etc and thus refraining from actually doing mildly hard things such as brutalizing Albanian economic immigrants by arresting them, holding them in prison camps and summarily deporting them back to Albania. That'd be of course bad for TV and so on. Instead, nothing is done but they're given a place to live and debt goes up.
Instead, the Hajnali liberals in western Europe issue half a million orders to leave and then do not actually collect the people that should leave and just mill around impotently while said people who were supposed to leave generally get up to no good and are a massive drain on finances and public order.
So you get spectacles like the small boat issue in the UK where government is paying thru the nose to warehouse illegals in hotels. Or the Chagos deal, where an island from which UK just took & deported its native population is given to a wholly unrelated island state and said unrelated (there was basically no connection between the ethnics) state is also going to get paid for the deal.
I let K2 try to explain it, actually did it better. (except for the Hajl hallucination)
Although, on a second look maybe I'm wrong because there's clearly a substantial and powerful minority which acts as if it desires the importation of more criminal & economically unproductive people - in judicial bodies & so on. But it's not clear to what degree it's something like a 'civility trap' and to what degree capture by people who actually desire large scale demographic change for ideological or economic reasons.
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However one slices the events at Maidan, they represented mostly an internal event (the impetus for change came from forces in Ukraine moreso than the West) until the invasion of Crimea made it fundamentally a war between nations.
If we were to assume it was the West that toppled the Yanuk government, this sentence becomes faintly ironic - what, the West should have accepted getting shafted (ie not have the association agreement signed, Ukraine moving closer to the Russian camp etc.) due to the fear of being seen as improper?
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yes please.
I'm probably getting banned for the Hajnali comment but I guess after I'm banned I can compose the post and let you post it or something like that. There's an entire book by a Ukrainian scholar in Canada about the topic. Can be downloaded
this is the official case file
https://www.kas.gov.ua/CourtPortal.WebSite/Home/Sprava/51176528731
and here's an upload of translated excerpts from the case file that's here
https://gofile.io/d/o1stcN
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If this is the case I am thinking of, it doesn't actually attribute the maidan sniper who was behind the protestor lines to the right sector, but rather places the sniper in a building they (and a lot of other people, iirc) were in (and out of) regularly. Which is not new-news, and has been a part of both* false-flag-sniper theories for some time.
*As both police and protestors were reported shot by snipers during the 20 February violence the tipped Euromaidan crisis into its resolution, both the pro-Euromaidan and anti-Euromaidan narratives have their own variation of 'the other side used a false flag sniper to shoot their own side and the other in order to make them feel the victim and escalate the crisis to its tipping point.' This has included the long-known point that one of the sniper firing points was from a building on the protestor side, which Ukrainian forensics verfied shot into the protestors facing the security forces from the rear.
The pro-Euromaidan theory is that the shooter was part of a covert government sniper to shoot both protestors and some police to force and legitimize the government crackdown the SBU had been advocating and setting groundwork for. The anti-Euromaidan theory is that it was a protestor-aligned provacateur, and while they agree that it was to escalate the crisis, this line of argument over time has increasingly downplayed / ignored the shooting of the police as well, which was the initially the line of argument 'proving' it was protestor snipers and that police were just protecting themselves.
(As I said- both attributions more or less agree that a false-flag sniper attack to shoot both sides was planned and conducted to escalate the crisis. Few argue that both sides coincidentally carried out their sniper plans on the same day.)
The building's primary relevance to either argument is as an argument to incredulity of if a government covert effort could get into a protestor building, and then escape in the chaos of the escalating violence outside. Pro-Euromaidan narratives don't find that unreasonable, and anti-Euromaidan narratives view it as so unreasonable that protestor-provacateur is the only remaining option. It tends to be the same sort of incredulity argument that maintains to this day that the Americans bombed the Nord Stream pipeline.
I had a larger post discussing some of the context of the 20 Feb snipers and post-Maidan propaganda dynamics, but then I realized there was a chance he was speaking of another court case I wasn't thinking of.
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That's about the sum of it.
Domestically he did introduce a lot of programs for spying and policing that I CONTINUE to disagree with, but foreign policy was, as you say, disastrous, and while I think Obama had a horrible foreign policy record as well, its hard to quantify just how much damage the warmongering did in sheer human lives cost on top of the economics of it. I look back and I cannot think of a SINGULAR positive thing that came out of it.
Okay, we unseated Hussein, but that led to the rise of ISIS (man, haven't thought about them in a while) and a general upswell of sectarian violence in the region. And they can barely hold their official government together. I genuinely appreciate that Trump made his campaign to squash ISIS as limited in scope as he did. EVERY instinct in me assumed he's put boots on the ground and pull us into another boondoggle because that seemed to be SOP by that point.
The Taliban instantly taking back Afghanistan was quite the cherry on top.
If it wasn't for the destruction of libya and the spurning of Erdogan I wouldn't think the current "migrant crisis" would have happened in the EU quite the way it did, with that no rise of nationalistic parties either. They really fucked up the internationalist global consensus they had going on.
Not in the way it did, but easily in a recognizably similar way.
The Arab Spring revealed systemic issues that were underway well before 9-11, and which would have remained primed for violent escalation even without the American invasion of Iraq. People like to focus on how ISIS had an Iraq power base, but are less inclined to note the series of uprisings against the Assad dynasty or Saddam regime, or how the fruitseller in Tunisia who figuratively and literally lit the match was responding to bog-standard petty tyrants common across the region. Names and places would have changed, but the Middle East would still be a tinder box primed to start major- or even larger- humanitarian crisis. Iraq-Iran alone could light Syria in a different way, if an fruit-seller riot spreading to Iraq led to crackdown on the Shia majority when the Iranian paramilitary capability is already present across the region.
In turn, nothing about the Arab Spring divergences would have really changed the African inflows, or the Russian incentive to use humanitarian border rushes via Belarus, or so on. Deviations might change election cycles, but not fundamental drivers.
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