"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Why do you imagine I so rarely multiquote?

Can we get back to the tweets and have less of the twits?

Russia has attacked a mall in Ukraine.

No, she's engaging in empty virtue signalling to make herself feel special and superior.

All these places she insists we should also be caring about if we want to care about Ukraine, how much has she been talking about them other than to shame us for not talking about them?

How many civilians does she think would die during the violent Communist takeover of America she dreams of? She never seems to answer that question.

Don't even get me started with her repeated lies about the kids in cages.

She's just here to play Big Damn Hero on the interwebs. Anything to avoid dealing with reality.

Should we stop caring about Ukraine, then?

I don't really think about it, sorry.

Pics of a Russian helicopter shot down in Ukraine. Supposedly the circled text says "To Berlin." @Paladin might be able to confirm what it says.

It does indeed say "To Berlin."

My thought is the Trump men are going to have a bumper crop of teenage ukranian/russian wives to chose from the next time they are at the new epstein island. The world right wing has got to be loving millions of poor young white girls and boys who are homeless, unaccounted for, and desperate. Someone check out Matt Gaetze's venmo account for new activity.

Regardless of if this is an official expression of Putin's thought processes, he certainly has no intention of stopping with Ukraine.

Last week, there was a widely distributed video of a Russian tank with a USSR flag. If nothing else, these things suggest that the command is encouraging such displays or is indifferent to the optics of them.

I mentioned it earlier, but I'll put it out there again: could flying the Soviet flag, be the Russian equivalent of flying the Confederate flag?

No, because the Soviets actually won.

Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group, 22nd MEU Deploy from Norfolk, N.C.

Ugh.

National Review.

And yet…

Hs are Ns.
As are As.

Lowercase Bs with a cap are Bs.
Es are ‘Eh’.
Ps are Rs.
Triangles without a bottom are Ls.
Backwards Ns are ‘Ee’.
Hs are Ns.

So: Na Berlin. Which yeah, means ’To Berlin’.

And for those wondering, as someone who is under 40, ex-Special Operations with Russian as his language, no. I totally haven’t had a tight butthole for a couple weeks now. I’m barely even paying attention.

Sidenote, but a piece of paper I found on the ground said that the word on the street was that the Visegrad -Hungary +Baltics were considering sending their own non-NATO non-EU peacekeeping force into western Ukraine in order to protect civilians, safeguard humanitarian aid distribution and enforce non-combatant refuge corridors.

This piece of paper also said that while the US was initially opposed, a compromise had been found where the US (from locations outside Ukraine) would provide ADA protection for these peacekeepers as long as they didn’t move into contested areas.

But it is just a piece of paper I found on the ground so take as you will.

A lot depends on where that ground is…

125th St.

This is all personal, it doesn't address the fact that some of her points are valid.

Fuck Orbán Viktor.

Only reason the Magyars are showing up 10 Downing Street re: Ukrainian refugees and Visa requirements is ethnic Magyars from Ukraine; I'd be more impressed if they hadn't hardlined against the Syrian refugees... which Vlad the Invader also help generate.

Also, 125th St, eh? I know you ain't talking Portland, as that's hands down the roughest part of the city, making the infamous Felony Flats of the Lents neighborhood tame in comparison.

Surely you realise that that is a false choice? There isn't really any connection between how the healthcare system is organised and aid to Ukraine. Lack of funding is decidedly not the issue for health, but where that funding comes from and where it goes.

Now, back to some of your other points, because these are important and I do not share the determination of some others here to shut down the discussion or to ensure that we all march in lockstep behind an official narrative.

There are critical differences between US & Russian wars.
Iraq is probably the most pertinent example. That was certainly also a war of aggression, the "supreme international crime" identified at Nuremberg, about which I posted earlier. Those involved in organising it, and many of those involved in waging it, should receive - although they have not - the most punitive criminal sentences available. They certainly should not be treated as doddering elder statesmen or subjected to mild criticism of their policies while they are lauded for their duty and patriotism.
Beyond the initial aggression and overall responsibility for all which followed, the US frequently and unjustificably killed civilians in Iraq (and in their other wars). This usually happened because they were often considered expendable and violence was indiscriminate. Rules of engagement specifically enumerated how many civilian casualties were acceptable to achieve military objectives. Rules governing the escalation of force led to many thousands of deaths. Where lower level troops and military contractors carried out killings, there were rarely serious consequences. And on occasion where seen as expedient, military policy led to the targetting of civilian infrastructre - including hospitals.
One need not even go into the use of torture camps or the activities of US allies such as Israel.

But - Russian crimes in Ukraine are of a different nature and a different order. They are borne of weakness and frustration in the face of their own failures and the stubborn resistance of Ukrainians. Rather than tactical in nature as American misteps have been, they are strategic. Starvation, murder and wanton destruction are increasingly being used because everything else has failed, in the hope that brutalisation will lead to surrender. And because of this they are much more ubiquitous and larger in scale. Aside from the desperate humanitarian conditions there, the latest shocking news out of Mariupol at the moment suggests that this will become even more barbarous. Having ignored an ultimatum to surrender the Russians have declared that the cities defenders will henceforth be treated as "bandits" who will be subject to military tribunal, redolent of language one should be familiar with from World War 2 and raising the prospect of mass executions and the like.

You appear to be implying that in the face of this that "the west" should do less - because it has acted badly in the past and it hasn't helped to the same degree in other warzones. The inconsistency is certainly revealing - but surely one ought not to advocate for less but to advocate that this be the standard response. You violate the peace and you are cut off. You get excluded from the world economy and all of your stuff aboroad is confiscated. Imagine this level of commitment to the BDS movement against Israeli expansionism. Or against Saudi crimes in Yemen. Yes, there are political issues with achieving that, but it's got to be the goal - rather than sulky isolationism.

Other points you've made:
The media - I agree that the US has the best propaganda system in the world. It is based on concentrated ownership of the media and driven by advertising revenue. It actively promotes debate (within certain boundaries) and allows dissenting voices a wide latitude. It very rarely resorts to coersion or censorship. But these things all exemplify why it differs from Russian media. State control, suppression of information and arrest of dissenters are crude tools. They are easier to fight against because they are easier to identify. It is again much too simplistic to argue that the same things are happening, and it isn't accurate to say that Americans are the most easily led into nationalist-furore in the world. Americans have many advantages and as can be seen, many do not become Fox News acolytes.

Refugees - yes, it's scandalous that there is now essentially a two tier refugee system (in much of Europe at least) - one for white people and one for brown people. The answer to this again, is not to argue that white people should be treated worse.

Sanctions - yes, sanctions can cause suffering, have and are being applied unjustifiably in various places. But no, that doesn't mean that all sanctions everywhere are bad. They should be assessed against their ends, in this case causing difficulty for Vladimir Putin and his immediate circle. I share your revulsion at arbitrary persecution of individual Russians.

Ukraine - Zelensky's government has in the last number of days been suspending the operations of many of Ukraine's opposition parties and taking other actions against independent media. There probably can be justification for some of this in wartime where such activity is providing succour for the enemy - but it certainly appears to go beyond that, outlawing for example parties who harshly condemned the Russian invasion and who have no links but who advocate differences in the approach to the breakaway regions. This is not good. Nor is the involvement of neo-Nazi's in the state. Ukraine is clearly not a paragon of democracy. But being frank, this stuff is small potatoes for now.

I fear that you are succumbing to something that affects a lot of Marxists - trying to over-simplify the world into the little boxes that Marx and his successors prepared for you. Once you have an entity labelled "imperialist", you make all sorts of unfortunate assumptions that cloud your judgment. But into those boxes the real world will often not go. It is too complicated.

This x 1,000,000.

If the United States and western allied nations had pursued this course of action following 9/11, we could have been living in quite a different world today.

Alas, it was not to be.

Because reasons (and money).

While there is certainly racism in refugee admissions, a lot of it is also cultural and based on personal contacts. The US has brought in more refugees from places we've fought, including Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, than other places. The Afghan airlift was nothing short of a miracle - 115,000 people brought out of a land locked country in a month, when it became apparent that the government was doomed b/c despite billions in aid and spending 20 years giving them the chance to create a liberal western democracy they refused to fight to support it if we left.

Since 1980, 55% of refugees to the US have been from Asia - in this data set that included Iraq in Asia for some reason. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/07/key-facts-about-refugees-to-the-u-s/

Refugees did decrease in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which IMO is understandable, and that was certainly far from the last fundamentalist terror attack for the next 15 years. It spiked again during Obama's presidency. In 2016, there were more refugees allowed to come to the US than the next 4 years combined under Trump, whose manufactured claims of racial 'invasion' was absolutely racist.

As to Ukraine, quite frankly it's far more important geopolitically, it's far more likely to spread into a global war, it's possible that it could be the forefront of nuclear armageddon - for these reasons alone of course we are going to see more knowledge and awareness.

They also are a wealthier country who has flooded the west with an effective propaganda campaign largely due to the ubiquity of streaming video from the cellphones they have.

We did have troops in Syria - Putin's crony Trump ordered us out. And that's another reason that this is more addressed - US citizens by and large understand that Russia impacted our elections and put in a friendly asset, in much the same way as Brexit.

Even then, geopolitical considerations trump racism. We were in Syria. The UN has th largest peacekeeping force in the world in the DRC. We stayed in Afghanistan for 2 decades and tried to give them the basis to stand for themselves. We won't go into Ukraine directly.

And there are ties that bind Ukraine more closely to the West than DRC or Syria - for one thing, there are far more Ukrainians in the west. Hell, I'm married to a 3rd generation Ukrainian. My wife's family fled the Holodomor.

Racism exists, of course, but it's just one of several signals.