Nobody interested in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

Post Reply New Topic

@Mikah Dismissing evidence is not open-mindedness.

That's often self-evident, it seems to me. /s

Indeed.

Open-mindedness would not entertain claims of space lasers, Elvis, or giant hamsters as a cause - and promoting Russian PR as a reasonable, possible explanation for these events is as equally dismissible, given the independent narratives provided by satellite images, witnesses, the utterly incredible and wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure and, of course, the slaughtered civilian dead.

It's possible Ukraine did all of this and they really are Nazis?
Yeah, try harder...

This sounds very Chinese.

Most Chinese don't care what the government or other countries are doing unless there is hot news.
Only those who are hostile to the West or dissatisfied with the government will be interested in politics.
(But if you think of gender relations as politics, it's a widely debated topic)

In authoritarian countries, political opinions don't do much.
Not so many platforms are tolerant of political discussions. They are afraid of risk.
So politics is just a "personal interest".This is considered useless.
This may also be the experience of the Russians.

^ From what I heard, worse than that. Having opinions in Russia - either tsarist of soviet - was often not only useless but also seriously dangerous. Even the "right" opinions weren't safe - Great Purge in 1930s is an obvious example. So, the common survival strategy is to know nothing and blend in.

Some recent Russian immigrants have told me:

• Citizens must cheer Putin or risk going to prison.

• Entertainment must be approved by the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media.

• Expressing dissident thought is considered a symptom of schizophrenia.

• Scientific discoveries must be approved by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

This all seems believable, but I wonder how much of it is true.

^ Our most recent hire is of Russian descent and speaks fluent Russian along with a few other languages. (We hired him for the programming languages he knows.) He told me that Russians are divided like Americans, that older ones, even in his family, who consume only propaganda media, they're under putin's spell like he's some kind of cult leader and are very pro Russia/putin for it. Exactly the same as those under the former orange guy's cult leadership in America. So, at least we have a common understanding of how this happens..

So for people such as these Putin IS Russia and Trump IS America.

Sad.

Ya. :/ So super gross to hear trump conflating what's bad for him as being "bad for our country." Wtf? No. It's not "terrible for our country," it's bad for You if you get caught doing criminal things.

So super gross that putin likely speaks the same and people are brainwashed into believing that what's bad for Him is bad for Russia.

"The King is the Land" defines two things and links them inextricably -- one IS the other -- in one powerful nationalist slogan, because no one but the King has the fundamental right to rule that the King has.  Conversely, the King rules over a defined Land, and "They" are not about to take it away from "Us".

A more chilling example of this "logic" is the way that the Republican party in the US has declared itself to be the party of "Christian Family Values".  There's a nasty undertone that if you do not support the GOP -- and especially Trump --you are a free-thinking, sinning, liberal paedophile.  And that, of course, immediately associates free-thinkers, sinners, and liberals with paedophiless.

Twisted, eh?

There are Nazi ultranationalist militias in Ukraine, they've been wantonly killing Russia-friendly Ukrainian civilians since 2014. Such an alternative possible scenario is far from the level of space lasers or giant hamsters.

While it is good to have an open mind, it is not so good to have one's mind so open that one's brains fall out.

https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/fi ... 20EN_0.pdf

Nope.
That has been investigated and it's false.

What is false? Do you even read the things you post? People have been dying since 2014 and read the methods used: shelling and explosives dropped from drones. What is that if not wanton?

Can you understand these numbers?
25 deaths a year for all conflict-related reasons, on both sides.
Half of them mines and ERW (page 2).
7-8 people dying a year because of shelling and other active military hostilities is very little even for collateral damage. No room for wanton killings.

What happened to the 2014 data?
Crimea crisis?