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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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"without a good reason" is doing heavy weightlifting here :)

Obviously Russians are sure they also have a good reason, like every invader ever.

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What is absurd in the statement that Ukraine successfully pushed away Russian attack to most of their country?

As I said Ukraine might or might not recover Donbas and/or the Crimea but they successfully defended their capital from falling into Russia's hands. Now with the western help their army has only gotten stronger and I expect that they will liberate at least some of the territories currently occupied by Russians.

As George Soros said back in 2004:

If we re-elect Bush, we are endorsing the Bush doctrine. And then we are off to a vicious circle of escalating violence in the world. And I think, you know, terrorism, counter-terrorism, it's a very scary spectacle to me. If we reject him, then we are effectively rejecting the Bush doctrine. Because he was elected on a platform of a more humble foreign policy. Then we can go back to a more humble foreign policy. And treat this episode as an aberration. We have to pay a heavy price. You know, 100 billion dollars a year in Iraq. We can't get out of that. We mustn't get out of it. But still, we can then regain the confidence of the world, and our rightful place as leaders of the world, working to make the world a better place.

I think it deserves a top-level post in itself: one of the reasons American right started to hate Soros was that he opposed interventionist policies of Bush. Now Tucker and co, who supported invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, declare people like him to be warmongers.

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But OK, I'll push back on a more object-level, without sneering. On forefront of which revolutions was he? Velvet revolution? Singing Revolution in Baltic countries? Orange Revolution? Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan? Euromaidan? Rose Revolution in Georgia? Because it's a nice narrative concocted by Russian propaganda, Orban and pro-Ru types, about CIA or Soros, but it just doesn't hold and betrays both ignorance and conspiratorial thinking.

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Soros, whose institutes have been at the forefront of funding revolutions since..

Good for him for developing democracy in those countries by funding libraries, scientists and free media. Unfortunately, despite all efforts Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria slide back into corruption and their elites keep pocketing EU money, of course Soros is a good scapegoat for their failures. Gullible people there love this Soros shit, makes them feel smart.

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