This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
yes please.
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.
Okay. No_one posted their case, and it was not the one I was originally thinking of but one I am aware of.
This is one of the case which Ivan Katchanovski likes to cite as proving his Euromaidan-culpability false-flag thesis that he's spend his last decade publishing on. His inclination to refer to parts of it is directly correlated to how the contents support his thesis that the government was falsely accused for shooting protestors. For example, Katchanovski likes to gloss over section seven, and particularly the Court's scope exclusions that begin on page 13 noting-
Aka, any action not found guilty in a Ukrainian court of law is excluded from the verdict.
Which, in a steelman, is defensible in the judicial process, but not necessarily in a truth-seeking process where whether something happened as opposed to whether it was proven in a court of law. Particularly when the court of law approach might be complicated by things such as known evidence destruction or defection of key witnesses / perpetrators to a country outside of the court's jurisdiction, like Russia.
As such, Ivan Katchanovski is inclined to ignore, not comment on, or push past the court record's acknowledgement of an unproven-but-not-disproven, but highly relevant claim, of-
I.e., an alleged- but never proven and thus disregarded for this court's purposes- core thesis of the 'government false flag' theory.
Now, Person_376 is not one of the person-descriptors identified in no_one's document. But, in short, the RSP were one of the armed elements in the Maidan Protestors, who were generally in the back / the deterrence for the police to charge and clear the square by force. Their existence / presence is about as old as Euromaidan itself. One of the sniper attacks on the morning of 20 Feb came from a building they had a heavy presence in, which is what this court case is about, which is also old news.
The anti-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Euromaidan provocateurs / foreign agents (of western powers) who staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the Yanukovych government and escalate the situation, with the intent to bring about the consequence the collapse of Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The pro-Euromaidan propaganda narrative is that these RSP key actors were Ministry of Interior provacateurs / agents who were staged in waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to blame the protestors and escalate the situation, with the intent of suppressing the protests as part of the broader Ministry of Interior crackdown buildup, but which had the unintended consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
Both pro- and anti-Euromaidan narratives are largely in agreement that the RSP key actors at the center of this case were staged false flag elements waiting for orders to conduct a false flag attack against Euromaidan protestors to escalate the situation, with the consequence of collapsing the Ukrainian government as ended up happening.
The difference in whose false-flag agents they were, and the intended result of the orders.
The court case doesn't take a position on this distinction, but Ivan Katchanovski likes to insinuate it does, and he is one of the main Reputable Scholars (TM) for the Euromaidan Is To Blame propaganda narrative.
@FCfromSSC
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link