Let’s have a war!

[ousdahl]

No one is gaslighting you. You have just chosen your version of what's going on and seem to selectively ignore the things that refute it.

This is like… textbook gaslighting.

Just deny my concerns then feed me some shit to make me question my own reality!

While yer at it why not throw in a “you’re just being too sensitive” too!

Sorry that world relations between global superpowers are more complicated than can be summed up in 100 characters.

They’re also more complicated than can be defined by good guy bad guy narratives and clear cut bilateral victim/aggressor rhetoric.

[TDub]

Burning Dog Poo and the Human Response

[jfish26]

what fucking responsibility do they have to offer peace negotiations to a country that invaded another? Get the fuck out and we stop shooting at you seems pretty damn reasonable. Are you seriously so fucking confused in this deal that you forget that Russia invaded Ukraine? Or are you just stupid?

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

[TDub]

what fucking responsibility do they have to offer peace negotiations to a country that invaded another? Get the fuck out and we stop shooting at you seems pretty damn reasonable. Are you seriously so fucking confused in this deal that you forget that Russia invaded Ukraine? Or are you just stupid?

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

look, they only want the living room and front bedroom with permission to use the fridge ok? why are you being so difficult?

[jfish26]

what fucking responsibility do they have to offer peace negotiations to a country that invaded another? Get the fuck out and we stop shooting at you seems pretty damn reasonable. Are you seriously so fucking confused in this deal that you forget that Russia invaded Ukraine? Or are you just stupid?

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

look, they only want the living room and front bedroom with permission to use the fridge ok? why are you being so difficult?

If my cousin is really strong and helps me get the invaders to leave the house, will the invaders accuse me of forcing them into submission?

Before you answer, consider that my cousin has got into bar fights before, even did a bit upstate.

[japhy]

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

look, they only want the living room and front bedroom with permission to use the fridge ok? why are you being so difficult?

If my cousin is really strong and helps me get the invaders to leave the house, will the invaders accuse me of forcing them into submission?

Before you answer, consider that my cousin has got into bar fights before, even did a bit upstate.

And why go on about "the pets"? They killed them all and hung them on the fence in your front yard next to the corpse of your mother already.

For fucks sake be reasonable!

[jhawks99]

what fucking responsibility do they have to offer peace negotiations to a country that invaded another? Get the fuck out and we stop shooting at you seems pretty damn reasonable. Are you seriously so fucking confused in this deal that you forget that Russia invaded Ukraine? Or are you just stupid?

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

look, they only want the living room and front bedroom with permission to use the fridge ok? why are you being so difficult?

Plus you had the neighbors over for barbecue which is provocation.

[KUTradition]

If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep?

Or is that only if I provoked them by leaving my Christmas lights on a week too long or something?

look, they only want the living room and front bedroom with permission to use the fridge ok? why are you being so difficult?

Plus you had the neighbors over for barbecue which is provocation.

aren’t those the neighbors that helped with the fence?

[Shirley]

Shirley, every time you try to paint me as a Putin supporter, I’m going to ask you this question, once again:

What makes you think the exact same dipshits who sold us on WMDs in Iraq are suddenly playing us straight on Ukraine?

And, once again, I'm going to point out that your overly broad and loose conflations make it a challenge to interact with you.

For instance, a reasonable person might appreciate a difference between a country we invaded by choice, and a fledgling democracy invaded by our adversary, we come to the aid of.

That you don't, while quaint, doesn't make you a bad guy, but it renders your points based on that strained premise lacking, and unworthy of the time or effort.

[ousdahl]

You guys are cute.

See, it’s a matter of how the U.S. war machine sells us the rhetoric. That’s the similarity between Iraq and Ukraine.

With Iraq we were soo convinced we had to get involved there cuz there were WMDs. Now with Ukraine, we’ve been soo convinced we have to get involved there because “fledgling democracy.” Howsabout THAT for some rhetoric! Wow-iee! Cue Dick Cheney to proudly declare Ukraine too has greeted us as liberators!

I’m off work, but since no one even bothered to help me understand the details of what we’ve offered toward diplomatic negotiations, I dunno if I’ll bother reading all of twocoach’s links after all…I kinda feel like there IS no detail to offer. (But if there is, somebody call me out, I’ll eat more crauw). It’s prob just more “do as we say not as we do” sort of geopolitical hypocrisy.

Cuz here’s the thing: unless we’re (the U.S./nato/Ukraine/the west) are willing to dial back our own militarism, I dunno if anything else is a good enough negotiation to offer in return for Russia dialing back their militarism.

And that’s not pro-Russia! Far from it! It’s anti-militarism. Fuck Russia’s aggression, but fuck our own aggression too.

I also think it’s time to rethink NATO. For one thing, maybe NATO (among others) should have to actually account for what they did to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Holy crimes against humanity Batman! Besides, those countries are in the Middle East, nowhere near the North Atlantic.

For another thing, it’s an imperial alliance against another imperial alliance that hasn’t even existed for over 3 decades!

Despite perhaps being totally obsolete, we still seem hellbent on getting every country surrounding Russia to join NATO anyway. If that’s case, oh man does China have the chance to do the funniest thing ever.


And oh man I like SO want to comment on Japhy’s “If someone invades my house with armed goons, am I obligated to negotiate which bedroom and pet(s) they get to keep,” but I already swore off the Israel/Palestine thread.

[KUTradition]

i can smell the self righteousness from here

[Shirley]

"...since no one even bothered to help me understand the details of what we’ve offered toward diplomatic negotiations, I dunno if I’ll bother reading all of twocoach’s links after all…I kinda feel like there IS no detail to offer..."

Maybe some people say educating you so they can argue with you isn't a good use of some people's time?

[TDub]

"...since no one even bothered to help me understand the details of what we’ve offered toward diplomatic negotiations, I dunno if I’ll bother reading all of twocoach’s links after all…I kinda feel like there IS no detail to offer..."

Maybe some people say educating you so they can argue with you isn't a good use of some people's time?

hes just asking the questions here bruh....the tough ones that only he is capable of distilling down into real information.


Real eyes Realize Real lies bro....


(full disclosure I stole that last line from a badass Tupac t-shirt I've had for 25+ years....)

[Shirley]

"...since no one even bothered to help me understand the details of what we’ve offered toward diplomatic negotiations, I dunno if I’ll bother reading all of twocoach’s links after all…I kinda feel like there IS no detail to offer..."

Maybe some people say educating you so they can argue with you isn't a good use of some people's time?

hes just asking the questions here bruh....the tough ones that only he is capable of distilling down into real information.


Real eyes Realize Real lies bro....


(full disclosure I stole that last line from a badass Tupac t-shirt I've had for 25+ years....)

Whither Biggie?

[TDub]

it's the NO TO RI O,
US,
you just
lay down,
slow,
recognize a real Don, when ya see one. sipping on booze in the house of blues

[ousdahl]

"...since no one even bothered to help me understand the details of what we’ve offered toward diplomatic negotiations, I dunno if I’ll bother reading all of twocoach’s links after all…I kinda feel like there IS no detail to offer..."

Maybe some people say educating you so they can argue with you isn't a good use of some people's time?

hes just asking the questions here bruh....the tough ones that only he is capable of distilling down into real information.


Real eyes Realize Real lies bro....


(full disclosure I stole that last line from a badass Tupac t-shirt I've had for 25+ years....)

“They got money for war but can’t feed the poor”

[KUTradition]

won’t…not can’t

[Sparko]

Detaining mourners.

[jfish26]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ry-17-2024

Although few Americans paid much attention at the time, the events of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine would turn out to be a linchpin in how the United States ended up where it is a decade later.

On that day ten years ago, after months of what started as peaceful protests, Ukrainians occupied government buildings and marched on parliament to remove Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office. After the escalating violence resulted in many civilian casualties, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, returned power to Ukraine’s constitution.

The ouster of Yanukovych meant that American political consultant Paul Manafort was out of a job.

Manafort had worked with Yanukovych since 2004. In that year, the Russian-backed politician appeared to have won the presidency of Ukraine. But Yanukovych was rumored to have ties to organized crime, and the election was full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, while Russia’s president Vladimir Putin congratulated Yanukovych even before the results were officially announced.

The government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his reputation, Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who was already working for a young Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska worried that Ukraine would break free of Russian influence and was eager to prove useful to Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was trying to consolidate power in Russia, where oligarchs were monopolizing formerly publicly held industries and replacing the region’s communist leaders. In 2004, American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered as he tried to call attention to what the oligarchs were doing.

With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych finally won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In November 2013, Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union, refusing to sign a trade agreement and instead taking a $3 billion loan from Russia. Ukrainian students protested the decision, and the anger spread quickly. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.

Manafort, who had borrowed money from Deripaska and still owed him about $17 million, had lost his main source of income.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. These sanctions were intended to weaken Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.

By 2016, Manafort’s longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone—they had both worked on Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign—was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort was happy to step in to help remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Manafort began as an advisor to the Trump campaign in March 2016 and became the chairman in late June.

Thanks to journalist Jim Rutenberg, who pulled together testimony given both to the Mueller investigation and the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, transcripts from the impeachment hearings, and recent memoirs, we now know that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded, and -directed ‘separatists’ were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead.”

In exchange for weakening NATO, undermining the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its attempt to throw off the Russians who had invaded in 2014, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Now, ten years later, Putin has invaded Ukraine in an effort that when it began looked much like the one his operatives suggested to Manafort in 2016, Trump has said he would “encourage Russia to do whatever they hell they want” to NATO allies that don’t commit 2% of their gross domestic product to their militaries, and Trump MAGA Republicans are refusing to pass a measure to support Ukraine in its effort to throw off Russia’s invasion.

The day after the violence of February 18, 2014, in Ukraine, then–vice president Joe Biden called Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” and to urge him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint.”

Ten years later, Russia has been at open war with Ukraine for nearly two years and has just regained control of the key town of Avdiivka because Ukrainian troops lack ammunition. President Joe Biden is warning MAGA Republicans that “[t]he failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”

“History is watching,” he said.

[KUTradition]

those who don’t learn from history…