If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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Flex
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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Howard Beale wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 3:53pm
Flex wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 3:36pm
*Edit* ignore please. Posted while hangry and made an uncharitable comment.
I saw the comment and it's totally cool and no issue, I get where you're coming from. I just meant that I've heard it leaves out a lot of the details we've discussed on here and has a general "Russia bad" message in the way it sounds like the Stone doc may have too uncritical of a "Russia good" message.
Oh yeah, for sure, I get it. That's why I tried to immediately retract. I think I'm just having an argument in my head with a type of person that doesn't actually post here.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Howard Beale »

It's all good, and hey, if I veer off into asshole territory, by all means, call me out. I want this all to be civil and in good faith, even if and when there are vehement disagreements.

EDIT: Also just realized i probably should've DM'ed you instead, sorry, just getting back into the hang of posting again.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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I'll only reply to the material that was a reply to me (not stepping on anyone else's toes) …
Howard Beale wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 3:07pm
Since Taibbi used 1984 as his reference point, I'd say the overall phenomenon he's exploring in the piece is the symbiosis of government (and media) propaganda and the opinions of the general public (Americans most specifically). While your point about shifting societal attitudes toward free speech in the purely cultural (i.e. not related to the First Amendment) context is an interesting conversation in and of itself, I don't think we can have a fair critique of the article if we take out the interwoven strand of the role of the state (and mainstream media, its de facto propaganda apparatus) in shaping and directing the flow of those attitudes.
It can be approached from different angles, for different reasons, arriving in common places. I don't think we can tie the demands of people to clamp down on casual racist and sexist and gendered slurs in social discourse. It's a bottom-up thing, especially as the target of such demands are the privileged and powerful, used to being able to casually use slurs as entertainment or dumb validation of position. I'm not certain that there's anything quite so sinister about how Big Tech and other Big Business has responded to this beyond an evaluation of the market and seeing there's more value in being on the progressive side of these language issues. Capitalist logic is so baked into our way of being that I'm hesitant to being persuaded by theories that supersede what we've all learned is "common sense."
Dr. Medulla wrote:
18 Mar 2022, 3:45pm
Related to the above, if we regard the invasion of Ukraine as a crisis (in the same way the pandemic is a crisis), then it's not hypocritical or irrational to accept some norms and tolerances are suspended in the interim. One of the failures of libertarians and libertarianism during the pandemic is the unwillingness to be flexible to crisis circumstances. Principles shouldn't be a suicide pact.
The problem with this, I think, is that in practice it tends to only cut one way. The people in power are never asked to make such sacrifices or even to reduce the active harm they often cause in the face of a crisis, that's only for the plebes. You mentioned the pandemic. While, for example, some guy in a MAGA hat screaming in the middle of a Wal Mart about how tyrannical it is that he's being asked to wear a mask during the early days of the pandemic is certainly obnoxious, delusional, contemptible, etc., it's not as if he and his ilk have any actual power. In fact, that's what those people's support for Trump actually was in the first place—an inarticulate howl of impotent rage.

Following on from that example, I could just post a bunch of pictures of maskless politicians and celebrities out mingling in public from the same time frame in which they were chiding all of us in order to drive home the point, but Taibbi offers up a much more infuriating, and frankly, dangerous example of how those in power do not play by the same rules as the rest of us.
Well, sure, the rich are different from you and me, as Fitzgerald stated. But I see no reason to follow the bad behaviour of elites simply to be on the same level as them or to call out their hypocrisy. It certainly makes them less persuasive to me, but I'll be socially responsible as best I can regardless and whatever my norm-times ethics might dictate. Model the behaviour of the society you want and all that. There's no value to being worse to prove some kind of point.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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In the interest of boosting what I consider to be compelling voices on the ground, here's a libertarian socialist in Moscow's view against the war: https://strangematters.coop/russian-ana ... raine-war/
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by FarawayTowns »

[/quote]

Thanks for the link. I watched the documentary over the weekend. I was quite surprised how slanted it was to a Russian viewpoint. For that reason I would think carefully about recommending it to anyone whose mind I was trying to open to the background of what is happening now. I think that there is a strong possibility that it would be viewed as pro Kremlin propaganda. Also rightly or wrongly it's open to criticisms of bordering on conspiracy theories.

For anyone interested who doesn't want to spend 90 minutes watching it. This article sums up the points pretty succinctly.

https://traveltomorrow.com/oliver-stone ... raine-war/

Maybe it's necessary to also watch 'Winter on Fire' for a more rounded view.

[/quote]

Thanks for the review! Does sound like it may be a bit lopsided, but I'm still gonna check it out. I actually didn't realize that Oliver Stone didn't direct it, just served as executive producer and as the in-film interviewer. It's apparently part of a trilogy of films on Ukraine by the director Igor Lopatonok: UoF is the first one, then Revealing Ukraine (2019) and The Everlasting Present—Ukraine: 30 Years of InDependence (2021). Per the credit listings on IMDB, it doesn't appear that Stone had any involvement in the third one.

I'm curious about Winter on Fire, although I've heard it's heavily slanted in the other direction and I've seen it recommended in a couple mainstream news articles. If you do watch it, please let us know if it's worth seeing.
[/quote]

Ukraine on Fire is definitely worth watching. Just maybe some of it hasn't aged that well with recent events

I just watched the following which is produced by a UK based left wing media group. I found it educational and informative without being overly biased. Or maybe the way it's presented just suits me. Interesting points made in the discussion at the end as well.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Sparky »

Flex wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 4:57pm
In the interest of boosting what I consider to be compelling voices on the ground, here's a libertarian socialist in Moscow's view against the war: https://strangematters.coop/russian-ana ... raine-war/
That was an interesting read, makes me feel a bit better that not all Russian citizens support Putin's war, but sad at the same time because under a dictatorship there's little the common man can do about it.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-u ... fd8136152c

A NATO estimate suggests Russia's battlefield deaths could be as high as 15K in the first month. That's astounding if true. By comparison, the US had around 58K deaths in Vietnam in over a decade.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
23 Mar 2022, 12:38pm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-u ... fd8136152c

A NATO estimate suggests Russia's battlefield deaths could be as high as 15K in the first month. That's astounding if true. By comparison, the US had around 58K deaths in Vietnam in over a decade.
I saw that some pro-Russian sources were admitting casualties in the region of 10k so the 15k figure looks eminently plausible. That's about how many were killed in a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and that was deemed a national humiliation.

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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Low Down Low wrote:
23 Mar 2022, 1:19pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
23 Mar 2022, 12:38pm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-u ... fd8136152c

A NATO estimate suggests Russia's battlefield deaths could be as high as 15K in the first month. That's astounding if true. By comparison, the US had around 58K deaths in Vietnam in over a decade.
I saw that some pro-Russian sources were admitting casualties in the region of 10k so the 15k figure looks eminently plausible. That's about how many were killed in a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and that was deemed a national humiliation.
Even if Russia "wins" this conflict, it's gonna be a sad, tragic result for an entire generation. Just horrible.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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I also read something a day or two from an American military guy that claimed five Russian generals had been killed so far, an astonishing number. What's happening is that tactics are so bad that the generals feel obliged to go to the front to better understand and lead, and have gotten picked off by snipers. But it shouldn't come to that—generals aren't supposed to be exposed to harm on the battlefield—and is suggestive that Russia's military is fundamentally unsound and is being exposed now faced with genuine opposition. I can't tell whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for what Putin eventually does, but, holy hell, that seems like conditions for a coup.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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Wow, a lot of discussion. I've been very busy. Just popping in to say that while Taibbi's thesis is more about free speech and propaganda, that wasn't really why I posted it. I should've said more when I posted it but didn't have the time. Rather, I was more interested in how the accelerating oscillation of "correct" opinions produces vertigo in anybody who has a good memory for the political issues of the past 20 years. This section in particular:
Moral panics erase memories. It’s their primary function. 9/11 wiped the national hard drive of everything from the third degree to My Lai to Operations Phoenix and Condor to the Church Committee to the School of the Americas to countless other shameful episodes, and the lessons learned from them. The Trump-Russia scandal blotted out Snowden, made the spooks the good guys again. 2016 rehabilitated neoconservatives, now reinvented as never-Trumpers, cleaning away the shame of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, etc.

The “misinformation” panic wiped out the WMD fiasco, restoring honor to credentialed press. The DNC leak erased “Collateral Murder.” After George Floyd we hated cops, after January 6th we loved them. Ukraine now is openly being sold as a blue-pill cure for everything that went wrong during the War on Terror, including the recent defeat in Afghanistan. “Realism” is in disgrace, and “leadership,” “regime change,” and the “universal appeal of freedom” are back, only this time their primary backers are the upper-class cosmopolitan Democrats who marched against the simplistic “freedom against evil” plot neoconservatives tried to sell them twenty years ago.

We’re at the end of a twenty-year cycle that has taken what was once the oppositional-skeptic portion of the American population and seen them rallied behind the people they once hated the most. This has been accomplished by keeping us in a rage that always escalates and is never watered down by contradictions, thanks to mastery of “reality control” via “an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

The relentless parade of panics listed above (just a small sample; we’ve had dozens just in the last few years) makes those victories easy, and every time we switch targets, from Russians to neo-Nazis to cops to transphobes to insurrectionists to the unvaccinated to truckers and back to Russians again, the Church of Forgetting picks up new converts.
I would say 1. this sort of thing of course has existed for a long time (Orwell was inspired by Comintern line changes after all!), but 2. the process has accelerated in my lifetime; it seems like the turnover is every few days sometimes, which seems very tied to how our social lives are mediated through technology, 3. I think it's more distributed than directed; Taibbi ascribes more agency in this process than I would (language like "primary function"). I'd say instead of a conspiratorial model it's rather a product of changes in the media and its technologies (from newspapers to radio to TV to 24 hour TV news to social media etc) and concomitant social changes (neoliberalism). Certain actors can use this to their advantage, but I think it's more distributed than directed. You don't have to tell the tech companies to censor something; the internal logic can take care of it. Of course there are examples of explicit direction and collusion, but you don't need to chalk every instance up to that.

All of this tying into more distributed social processes—Sometimes the ability of those in power to control/direct these processes to their advantage is limited. I think the Russophobia is beyond the Biden admin's control at this point, and Trumpism is a good example of something a bit disruptive and wild from the institutional Republican perspective.

Sorry if this is a bit sloppy. In the middle of something and can't write with as much clarity as I'd like.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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I can't recall who made this argument, but some time ago I read that with the end of the Cold War, with its ideologically driven frame, nations have returned to more of a nineteenth-century perspective in terms of foreign policy. If so, the disorientating oscillation that eumaas describes is due to still thinking that nations operate from firmer ideological principles (the Cold War), rather than just floating from crisis to crisis and employing whatever narrative is suitable to justify actions (pre-20th c). The difference is all-pervasive media, but also, perhaps, that we're also still partially grounded in 20th c beliefs. Cynics might say that's always been the case—that the Cold War wasn't that distinct from previous imperial attitudes—but I think that's a bit too easy. Not sure if I really buy that—in no small part because I'm not a foreign policy person—because I agree enough with postmodernist critics that truth is in flux as norm, not exception. There's great possibility in that, but also great danger.
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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Howard Beale »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 4:27pm
It can be approached from different angles, for different reasons, arriving in common places. I don't think we can tie the demands of people to clamp down on casual racist and sexist and gendered slurs in social discourse. It's a bottom-up thing, especially as the target of such demands are the privileged and powerful, used to being able to casually use slurs as entertainment or dumb validation of position. I'm not certain that there's anything quite so sinister about how Big Tech and other Big Business has responded to this beyond an evaluation of the market and seeing there's more value in being on the progressive side of these language issues. Capitalist logic is so baked into our way of being that I'm hesitant to being persuaded by theories that supersede what we've all learned is "common sense."
I guess I'm starting to become more sympathetic to the idea that social media should be a public utility. I'm still kind of on the fence, but even putting that issue aside, the government and Big Tech have become so intertwined with each other at this point that it's hard for me to still buy the "private companies can do whatever they want" argument.

Also, apologies if it seems like I'm making the parameters of the discussion a little too American-centric here. That's not intentional on my part, I just don't have as much of a handle on the specific free speech laws in Canada (or the UK, France, Germany, etc.), so I'm naturally going to view this all through a First Amendment filter. Not intentionally trying to be tunnel-visioned here, though.
Dr. Medulla wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 4:27pm
Well, sure, the rich are different from you and me, as Fitzgerald stated. But I see no reason to follow the bad behaviour of elites simply to be on the same level as them or to call out their hypocrisy. It certainly makes them less persuasive to me, but I'll be socially responsible as best I can regardless and whatever my norm-times ethics might dictate. Model the behaviour of the society you want and all that. There's no value to being worse to prove some kind of point.
Oh, I definitely agree with you on all of that. To be clear, I wasn't advocating for bad behavior in times of crisis as some kind of misguided attempt to own the powerful, but I see now why it came across that way. I was just trying to point out that one end of the social strata breaking the social contract at every turn heavily disincentivizes those on the opposite end to continue playing by the rules. For example, how the political and corporate class are allowed to loot with impunity and then act shocked and appalled when looting occurs by the underclass in the midst of social upheaval, like what we saw in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder.


FarawayTowns wrote:
22 Mar 2022, 6:12pm
I just watched the following which is produced by a UK based left wing media group. I found it educational and informative without being overly biased. Or maybe the way it's presented just suits me. Interesting points made in the discussion at the end as well.
Thanks for that—excellent video! I'd never heard of these guys and was skeptical, but I'm impressed. If I was trying to give someone with no knowledge of the far-right problem in Ukraine a quick primer, I think I'd show them this. Also—in relation to the Maidan Massacre (mentioned at 2:36), there's a lot of evidence that suggests pretty strongly that it was not carried out by the Yanukovych government. More info here: http://www.russialist.org/the-snipers-m ... in-ukraine


Dr. Medulla wrote:
23 Mar 2022, 12:38pm
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-u ... fd8136152c

A NATO estimate suggests Russia's battlefield deaths could be as high as 15K in the first month. That's astounding if true. By comparison, the US had around 58K deaths in Vietnam in over a decade.
We should be very skeptical of reports coming from NATO or the Ukrainian government. We've heard many outlandish claims from Ukraine over the past month that we've been presented zero evidence for. Even The New York Times has pointed out that whole-cloth making up and spreading total bullshit is a key part of Ukraine's war strategy.



For those interested in analysis of the war from a military-strategy perspective from an expert in the field, former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter is one of the voices I've been following throughout the war. Here's an interview he gave a couple days ago, I'm about halfway through it.



Some kind soul in the comments section made a detailed time-stamp guide for quick reference. Enjoy.
0:00 What Russia's aim is (it's not occupation)

4:05 Russia's battle strategy (and Scott's case for why it will succeed)

9:00 The short-term and long-term consequences of sending weapons to Ukraine

12:05 How Articles 4 and 5 of NATO have been used (Libya, Iraq, etc)

16:15 How the West was using Ukraine to destabilize Russia (and Zelensky's alliance with neo-Nazis)

19:34 Russia wants to redefine the European security framework (the 1997 lines)

21:58 Context for Putin's rise and what the West gets wrong (sanctions, American interference, Putin doesn't want a new Soviet Union, decoupling from the West)

30:06 The beginning of the end of dollar hegemony and its consequences (continuation from the question about sanctions)

35:02 Americans don't understand Putin, or how short-sighted it is to demonizing Russia, or why getting rid of nuclear weapons is good for humanity, or the world they live in, or their world history...or anything

43:00 What is a "war crime", and where is the evidence of them? (and Scott's involvement in bombings in Iraq)

51:35 Information warfare from Ukraine, the CIA, MI6

54:29 What the media doesn't understand about Kyiv or Zelensky (and how he's creating the conditions of his surrender)

1:02:44 Scott questions the legitimacy of the "weekend warriors" from other countries (and how it will end disastrously for them)

1:11:22 Russia went in soft, the West did not (and how much longer the war will last)

1:19:43 What "victory" looks like for Russia, and what it looks like for Zelensky

1:22:41 Biden has no cards to play (and Russia is not using energy as a weapon)

1:26:19 Scott's perspective on biolabs (and hypocrisy of rules-based order)

1:35:59 Americans can't engage in fact-based discussions or listen

1:42:20 The labs are scary, we're dangerously close to nuclear conflict (and context from Cold War history)

1:52:30 Our "experts" don't have expertise on Russia anymore (and Putin does not define Russia)

1:58:21 The "best possible outcome" (and Russia is not playing all its cards)

2:07:54 Is Taiwan the next Ukraine? (and this mess started before Biden)

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

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"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: If you really wanna go - alive or dead my friend

Post by Howard Beale »

Well, the last couple weeks have been pretty remarkable in the saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud department...



Turns out Flex and I were correct—Ukraine never had any chance of being admitted into NATO, Zelensky has now confirmed this. The even more stunning part, though, is his admission that not only was he given an unequivocal NO, but was also told that "publicly the doors will remain open."





Leon Panetta admitted on live TV that this actually a proxy war between the US and Russia...





...and the president himself seemed to give the game away that, yes, this is in fact about regime change.





This was also unnerving—Biden seemed to imply during his visit to Poland that the US will be sending ground troops to Ukraine.





The drumbeat for all-out war between the US and Russia by mainstream media has been getting louder by the day, and it doesn't exactly inspire confidence knowing that people like this sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee...


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