I’m handing one to trump on this.

Biden would never.

Sometimes you have to revel in the absurdity.

Russia plays too soft.

Ukraine is signatory to Additional Protocols 1, and this is a violation of Article 56. It is up to states to define their own legal punishments to violations of the articles, however, something that people don’t consider with the geneva conventions/protocols is that the allowed punishment for violation can be quite shocking. For example, the geneva convention allows you to simply execute mercenaries as a matter of legal resolution.

The Geneva Convention also outlines Reprisals. The sole purpose of a reprisal is to compel an opposing party to comply with international humanitarian law. For a state to declare a reprisal, you must inform the offending state of their violation (attacking a nuclear power plant) and give them a chance to cease this violation (such as, say, handing over the commander that approved the violation and all documents necessary to convict them in a Russian court within 48 hours.) or suffer an official reprisal under the geneva conventions. Some things are off limits for reprisals such as attacking civil nuclear plants or dams. A tactical nuclear attack against drone launching sites/airbases to declare the cost of future attacks on nuclear facilities would be both in-line with Russian state deterrence policy, and a valid reprisal under the geneva conventions.

In my opinion, Russia should conduct a humanitarian nuclear strike to remind Ukraine of their obligations.

I was shocked because the west was saying there were “150,000” troops built up on the border, when Russia would have needed triple that for starters before initiating a vaguely successful invasion. Morally, invading Ukraine was the right choice to rescue Donbas. Militarily, it was half cocked.

Very audacious.

I wish I’d voted for democrat so that this could be done quietly, unreported, and not ruin the vibe of my brunch.

Someone was asking a few days ago about the UK supreme court ruling and how it’s affecting trans/gnc people.

In Scotland, anti-trans legal groups have successfully harangued the government into issuing new guidance that (government) workers should use bathrooms associated with their “biological sex”. The union for civil servants is still formulating a response, but the most mild response is to insist that trans/gnc workers be given an unconditional full remote work adjustment to their contract to avoid the bathroom issue all together. This is considered the worst immediate response because it still removes trans/gnc people from public life. Other branches of the union are telling their members to simply ignore the new government guidance and use whatever bathroom they want since there are no legal repercussions, and any individual employment repercussions will be handled by collective response.

I mean to be fair our main complaint with corbyn was that he was never willing to centralize power and discipline/purge the other wings of the party.

Guess I can’t criticize him for actually doing that, even if he’s directing it at comrades rather than liberals.

Several BBC editors could be fired and lose their pensions over their genocide apologia and I’d be disappointed they weren’t put on trial and shot.

It’s interesting to contrast state owned propaganda outlets like Sputnik with other state owned propaganda outlets like the BBC, VoA, RFE/RFA, PBS. In the modern era there’s so much propaganda in the news space that you need to learn to discern between black propaganda (outright lies) and white propaganda (truth emphasis).

Interestingly with Russian outlets aimed at English speaking audiences… due to the low trust people place in them due to their own biases, Russian outlets typically lean heavily onto white propaganda (truth emphasis) and fail spectacularly at black propaganda (outright lies). The only exception is with western racists, where they’re quite happy to swallow anything if it confirms their world view.

It’s also important to look at where “journalists” (stenographers) are getting their information from. It’s not uncommon, for example, to see a western “journalism” outlet like say, CNN, that directly cites the CIA/Radio Free Asia as their source in the bottom half of the article. That laundering of propaganda through “legitimate journalism” is what causes people to be tricked and manipulated. If, however, you can wade into the propaganda and feel out the black noise from the white noise, you can partially inoculate yourself against the downstream stenographic spread of information. Yesterdays lies are tomorrows journalism. Avoiding propaganda entirely and treating it as untouchable just makes you vulnerable to it.

and yeah, we already know the Ukrainian’s repress Russian speakers and target them for conscription. It’s not really “news”. Sputnik is re-emphasizing something that the Ukrainian’s have already freely admitted themselves years ago and patted themselves on the back for.

Pretty sure that yappers who get killed by a buwullet don’t go to valhalla.

A $10,000 drone taken out by a $384,000 missile.

Actually they cleared out an entire prison by via transfer and early release just to make sure they could lock up these dangerous terrorists.

Her grandfather was a member of a nationalist paramilitary force that hunted down communists, assisted einsatzgruppen in extermination of undesirables, and so on. As one might expect.

Wouldn’t put it past the US to try and assassinate Maduro.

It’s inevitable that most regions/countries will wall themselves off in the end. It’s the only way to stop colour revolutions and information warfare. The tools get better every day. Israel has gone from having whole battalions of manpower sitting in offices shitposting to using LLM’s and getting companies to automatically flag and prune anything they don’t want anyone seeing.

Eventually total information control will be possible for even the smallest powers.

Self preservation would be one motivation. .

The 2019 RAND report gameplan for this conflict makes it clear that, if the worst case scenario happens and Russia gets stronger over the course of the conflict rather than being depleted as intended, an offramp should be found immediately to minimize Russian gains. Ukraine is losing the war, and supplies are now limited to a dripfeed. Their suzerain is stating pretty clearly that they expect compliance. – Logically, in line with US think-tanks, the next step is to assassinate Zelensky and find someone more conciliatory.

Mass killings of civilians don’t make you a terrorist, but being aligned with enemy nation sure does.

It’s just the start of the “stabbed in the back” myth though, isn’t it? Ukrainian men are all heroes that fought like lions, lead by incompetent russian generals and jewish leaders; and betrayed by the west who didn’t possess a will to win as strong as ours.

Listening to Ukrainian sources and interviews on the street is very interesting. There’s immense social and legal pressure to follow “the narrative”, but occasionally you get a weary sigh as someone on a tram 20km from the front says, yeah, our boys attack civilians but everyone around here knows the Russians don’t so I feel quite safe.

Criticizing the performance of the regular army is one of the few legal and socially acceptable avenues to express dissent.

Cut Wikipedia access for people in the UK and just have a page that says “wikipedia is unavailable in the UK due to local censorship laws”

It’s not like they have to make a profit.