The SS knew what they were doing. They did not leave bodies lying around. Line em up and shoot them, then fill the ditch. Still people could see what was taking place or hear the gunfire. When they got more organized they built camps out of sight of the locals where the killings could take place without gunfire or witnesses.

Russia’s got a big problem since the murders seem to have happened when these towns were under Russian occupation. Not likely Ukrainian death squads could be roaming around selecting collaborators for execution when the Russian Army owns the streets.

Well, The Maine was a false flag and Bucha is probably a false flag, so good comparison.

OT 81 students, more than half a class, caught cheating in one exam at Yale.
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/04/05/eighty-one-students-in-anthropology-class-referred-to-executive-committee-for-academic-dishonesty

I don’t think the atrocities the Ukrainians are committing are being covered in the West, or like Bucha they get mislabelled to the Russian side.

The Russians left on the 30th, confirmed by the Mayor on the 31st, these supposed killings emerged on the 3rd or 4th of April, after Ukrainian Nazi paramilitaries entered the town on the 2nd to ‘cleanse’ it of collaborators, in the words of the Deputy Mayor, which why I guess the victims have white armbands or have Russian humanitarian aid packs. Sometimes it really is straightforward.

This accusation doesn’t make any sense, there are easy alternative explanations, there are wierd lacunae in the official story like not noticing all the unhidden bodies until after Azov showed up, and the “smoking gun” is that we actually had photographs for weeks (weeks during which the bodies neither bled nor decomposed) but for some reason said nothing about it, even while the entire media Wurlitzered for examples of Russian evil.
And if it was 100% true it’s still nothing but a disgusting war manipulation like the horror stories about Belgium or the Kuwaiti incubators.

“As soon as the cyclist rounds the turn, a Russian armored vehicle fires several high-caliber rounds along the thoroughfare. ”

It’s this sentence that alerts the reader that the article is more about sensationalism than facts. Several “high caliber” rounds. As opposed to what? Low caliber? I mean, we don’t get any of these high speed sounding adjectives when describing the road, or the cyclist, or even and adverb for his dismount.

“A second armored vehicle fires two rounds”

Whoa whoa whoa whoa there. Wait a darn minute. Were they high caliber rounds? Regular caliber rounds? Unleaded rounds? These details are crucial in understanding the span of the atrocity. Luckily Steve doesn’t engage in this type of gratuitous sensationali…

“Clearly, this cyclist got annihilated by large caliber Russian arms.”

Oohhh. Nevermind.

Well, Steve, there is history here. Remember the last time the Russians let a cyclist get too close to their tank?

The Russians can recognize patterns too, you know.

Wars are bad.

Borders are good.

There is probably broad popular agreement on this.

This first problem, though, is “our” elites seems to hold the opposite view.

The second problem—not only in Ukraine but many other places—is even if everyone agrees war-bad-border-good, where exactly is the good border? Where the Kiev regime wants it? Or where the people in Donbas—who actually live within it—want it?

On such questions, apocalyptic wars are waged.

Sounds like those L.A. PD were made up of Imperial Stormtroopers or African-American gangstas.

The Russians might be tempted to re-take the area, conduct their own investigation and decide the other side was responsible. That’s what happened in Katyn. Some members of that same Soviet investigation committee later turned up at Auschwitz where they concluded the Nazis had killed 4 million, processed hair, bones and clothing on an industrial scale, were able to cremate multiple corpses in a single muffle in 30 minutes, etc.

It has been independently verified by The New York Times.

haha!

This is the Ukraine National Police – 8 minute video of how they found Bucha – published on April 2nd. A man talks about how he was arrested by the Russians but later released (in a very ineffective attempt to imply Russian brutality)
xxhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNuMJNIS64
(remove the xx which was added to avoid the links showing as pictures – they are age-restricted anyway)

This is BBC evening news on April 1st. A 12 min segment to lead the program. 2 reporters, one at Mria 10km from Bucha. The other at Irpin – which is a twin town with Bucha one each side of the river. Plenty of talk about individual incidents in the previous month, much like your cyclist.
xxhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNTPyAsMmxs

No talk of large numbers of bodies – yet the Russians left on March 30th and the local mayor declared Bucha was under Ukrainian control on March 31st.

Draw your own conclusions.

… verified by The New York Times …

The definite red flag for propaganda.

The laws and customs of war forbid killing noncombatant civilians and civilians not engaged in spying, but ‘hero’ Zelensky forbade all men under 60 from leaving the country and was telling civilians to attack Russian vehicles with Molotov cocktails.

People are suggesting giving the Ukrainians what they need to drive the Russians back to their start line for this war, which sounds innocuous. But the capability to push the Russians back to the prewar de facto border would entail a capacity for going much further; the Ukrainians would surely not stop at the prewar situation and try and drive the Russians out completely, quite possibly succeeding. Russia back within its recognized borders would mean loss of everything it acquired since 2014. No such thing as a limited liability war of course, but humiliating Russian is not in the Wests interests.

Some say Russia’s greatest asset is natural resources, I disagree . In my opinion the strategic space of Russia is of incalculable value, especially to China. A Beijing to Moscow rail line (maybe the Arctic passage from China to Europe) would transform the supply chain. |It is all very well talking about the West compared to Russia to but there are indications that China will falsify the belief that wealthy technologically advanced democracies will always beat totalitarian states. The West has an unspoken belief that Russia ought to be a Western style democracy because it is a white country.

“Somehow, the Mexican ladies survived 107 bullets.”

What does Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings have to say about this?

All’s fair in love and war.

Obviously you can have some rules of engagement when troops from developed countries with volunteer armies such as the US and Britain are occupying countries like Iraq or Northern Ireland, and you want to instruct your soldiers not to shoot unarmed civilians, but an all-out war where one nation is trying to invade and destroy its neighbor, that can be no rules.

It is a fight to the death involving every man woman and child.

Afterwards the winners then have the privilege of putting the losers on trial for war crimes and executing their leaders.

It has been that way for thousands of years.

Even preventing US cops from shooting unarmed civilians in the war on drugs is a struggle.

exactly more like Katyn Forest or 911. USS Liberty would have made the list but managed to stay afloat.

Nah, it was definitely the Ukrainian side which gunned down “collaborators”. Probably elements of the far-right in the UKR NG. But whatever.

Some real news from Ukraine:

Arutz Sheva
April 5, 2022

Zelenskyy: Post-war Ukraine to be a ‘big Israel’
Ukrainian President says country will be more like Jewish State, less ‘liberal European,’ following Russian invasion

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared his vision for what a post-war Ukraine would be like, and stated that the country would be more like the State of Israel than like western Europe, Haaretz reported.

“Ukraine will definitely not be what we wanted it to be from the beginning. It is impossible. Absolutely liberal, European – it will not be like that. It will definitely come from the strength of every house, every building, every person,” Zelenskyy said during a briefing to Ukrainian media Tuesday.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine would become a “big Israel with its own face” in its handling of security issues after the war end, including having armed soldiers in public places such as movie theaters.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/325272

I think I need to read Ron Unz’s article on how the Nazis were instrumental in the founding of Israel. I see a pattern.

From 3 years ago:

Baltimore Jewish Times

Both Ukraine PM and President Are Jews

By Cnaan Lipshiz
JTA – April 23, 20190

If official exit polls from Ukraine’s presidential elections are to be believed, that country is set to become the only one in the world, besides Israel, whose president and prime minister are both Jewish…

https://www.jewishtimes.com/ukraine-prime-minister-and-president-are-jews/

Canada’s Golgatha

A sculpture of a Canadian soldier ‘crucified’ on a barn door with bayonets was produced in 1918, after a rumor of the crime was circulated to stir up passions for war.

The sculpture has been mostly sitting in storage of the War Museum ever since, because it’s such an outlandish piece of propaganda.

The British army was not “occupying” Northern Ireland.

It has been independently verified by The New York Times.

What does this mean, exactly? That it’s a little more reliable than normal NYT reporting? Because some verification process that remains to be described happened? Maybe it’s code by a seasoned reporter that the woke twenty-somethings were not involved in the article?

This is the same Russian military that we were told ran out of supplies and ammunition, yet it can waste tank rounds on a passing civilian. And there’s something in the Ukie air that keeps his surprisingly unmutilated corpse pink and unbloated after weeks’ exposure to the elements. Kept the crows and rats away too.

Obviously you can have some rules of engagement when troops from developed countries with volunteer armies such as the US and Britain are occupying countries like Iraq or Northern Ireland, and you want to instruct your soldiers not to shoot unarmed civilians, but an all-out war where one nation is trying to invade and destroy its neighbor, that can be no rules.

These are some of the better examples of occupying forces, and there were still episodes of war crimes and extrajudicial killings.

What I find odd curious about Bucha is that it makes the news a week or so after Biden announces that “Russia is killing civilians” and that “Putin is a war criminal” as he was bidden by his advisors.

More like the SS. I just saw an interview with a woman from Bucha. The Russians dragged her husband (she says he was not military and had never fired a gun in his life) out of their home in his slippers and made him kneel and executed him. Then they threw a grenade into their house and set it on fire. This was no accident in the heat of combat.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61003878

Is this woman lying? Is she a Hollywood actress? Is her husband alive and living in Miami? Did she set her own house on fire?

People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates. There is nothing in the American experience you can liken this to.

Shame, shame on you for trying to minimize these crimes.

You should hear what the Israelis do and did.

A Beijing to Moscow rail line … would transform the supply chain.

You’re 100 years too late.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway

the Ukrainians would surely not stop at the prewar situation and try and drive the Russians out completely,

More advance chicken counting/ speculation. Let’s try to get the Russians to stop killing now. Calibrating the aid to give the Ukrainians just barely enough to stop the Russian advances is just getting more people killed, Russian soldiers as well as Ukrainians. I think the Ukrainians themselves would be overjoyed if they could just get back to the pre-February borders. If the war was going that badly, Putin would suddenly become more interested in a negotiated cease fire.

The laws and customs of war forbid killing noncombatant civilians and civilians not engaged in spying, but ‘hero’ Zelensky forbade all men under 60 from leaving the country and was telling civilians to attack Russian vehicles with Molotov cocktails.

Is there some contradiction here? Show me the evidence that the people who were murdered were enemy combatants. We have evidence that they are dead. Not even the Russians claim that they were combatants – their claim (lie) is that they didn’t kill them at all. You can’t be holier than the Pope and invent better, more convincing lies for them.

I’m sure you could find a similar bunch of stories about what the Ukrainians did to the Russians when they got the upper hand.

I’m with the Ukrainians, though. They live there.

I’m sure you could find a similar bunch of stories about what the Ukrainians did to the Russians when they got the upper hand.

Show me one. AFAIK, the Ukrainians have not killed one Russian civilian in this war. It appears that some unofficial militia type guys may kneecapped a few Russian POWs in an isolated incident which of course the Russians and their supporters are trying to make hay out of in order to change the subject. There are zero reports of regular Ukrainian Army abusing prisoners or anyone else. The Ukrainian government has promised to investigate this incident and prosecute the offenders if war crimes have occurred. I have heard no such promises from the Russian government.

What the Russians are doing and what the Ukrainians are doing is NOT similar. At the end of WWII, a handful of American soldiers, shocked at what they saw at Dachau, shot some of the camp guards. This doesn’t mean that the US Army was “similar” to the SS. As Stalin said, quantity has its own quality.

They gave their consent to slaughter Slavic Russian Civilians in Donbass for 8 years…including 400 children…

It’s all crocodile tears for the Civilians in Donbass…and these crocodile tears would dry up real fast if there was a military draft of all able body young men and women in the US to fight the Russians in Ukraine…..

There wasn’t a peep out of Steve about the slaughter of the 400 Slavic Russian Children in Donbass from 2014 to present….

Is this woman lying? Is she a Hollywood actress? Is her husband alive and living in Miami? Did she set her own house on fire?

I don’t know. But I do know that the Ukrainians have an incentive to lie about things like this.

People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates. There is nothing in the American experience you can liken this to.

What we can imagine is a foreign regime, in concert with the U.S. State Department and Intelligence agencies, confecting a narrative in order to get the U.S. involved in a foreign war. Are Russian soldiers bayoneting premature Ukrainian babies in the NICU?

Shame, shame on you for trying to minimize these crimes.

Your upset, Jack, seems to be related to the fact that many of us won’t get mad and blinded with rage right now, and are instead waiting for more facts and evidence to be revealed and asking reasonable questions instead of taking some babushka’s account at face value.

Eastern Ukraine doesn’t belong to Hillary Clinton…Barack Obama…The US Military….Hunter Biden….Joe Biden…and the diseased whore Kamala Harris…and Stacy Abrams….and the homosexual pederast Kharzar Zelensky…

Eastern Ukraine belongs to Slavic Russia like it always has for 900 years..

These are the only two options…and I know which is the only legitimate option…

Slava Russaya!!!

Fascinating how Sailer is trying to take a pro-GloboHomoNATO stance while using xenophobic rhetoric.

Wars are bad.

Borders are good.

There is probably broad popular agreement on this.

This first problem, though, is “our” elites seems to hold the opposite view. …

There has been broad popular agreement on it since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and subsequently reaffirmed and refined at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and the UN Charter in 1945.

The problem is, after a decade or two, the elites start losing sight of the wisdom they acquire the hard way, at the expense of the populace.

How to get your neighbors killed: feed occupying soldiers poison.

https://www.newsweek.com/ukrainian-civilians-kill-russian-soldiers-poisoned-cakes-report-1694559

At least two Russians soldiers were killed and dozens more were injured after Ukrainian civilians allegedly gave them poisoned cakes and alcohol near Kharkiv, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials.

Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence posted on Facebook Saturday that two soldiers died and 28 were placed in intensive care after being fed the poisoned cakes in the city of Izium. Roughly 500 additional Russian soldiers were hospitalized due to heavy alcohol poisoning of an “unknown origin,” the post added.

The troops were from the 3rd Russian Motor Rifle Division, according to Ukrainian officials. The post said the Russian government is reportedly writing off the incident as “non-combat losses.”

Americans live under a criminal regime in the US that has every incentive to lie about its enemies, foreign and domestic.

Ukrainians have lived under a criminal regime since at least 2014.

Please stop parroting Biden. It’s unbecoming at a mimimum.

Corollary to Sailer’s Law: If a black man kills more than he wounds, he’s either a vet or an e-cop.

Or, as in Waukesha, a motorist.

I do try to keep up with the Lie so I can be invited to parties. Recently the Lie was that the Russians had mobile crematoria (and, as day follows night, bone-crushing machines) to hide all the dead bodies. Then the Lie was that Russians were just shooting people and leaving them in the street. What happened to the mobile crematoria (and bone-crushing machines)? Did they get taken out by the Kiwi Ghost?

I sympathize with normal Ukrainians who don’t want to be Russian subjects, but I’m not “with” them because that clearly implies you support NATO and the US, whoch is inexcusable.

(she says he was not military and had never fired a gun in his life)

People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates. There is nothing in the American experience you can liken this to.

Shame, shame on you for trying to minimize these crimes.

I’m not sure why you’re complaining.

According to you, “monopoly of force” is the prerogative of government (in the case of Bucha: Ukraine’s government, and then Russia’s).

Jack D on civilian ownership of guns:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/globe-and-mail-calling-the-ottawa-protests-peaceful-plays-down-non-violent-dangers-critics-say/#comment-5153914 (#109)

The entire concept of government is based upon monopoly of force – the idea that there are some things that the government can do that we can’t do individually. We don’t allow individuals to lock people up because they have offended them or execute others for crimes or demand that you turn over a large % of your income as taxes or allow people to have tanks or nuclear weapons, etc. so guns are no different.

Odd that the Ukraine government didn’t allow (not to mention encourage) widespread civilian ownership of combat rifles (and ammo), what with being right next door to an unimaginable criminal regime. Did the Ukrainians not trust themselves, as a people, with basic, effective weaponry? And if so, why not?

Maxar Technologies, source of the Lie, was also the source of that 60 mile stranded convoy that was later learned to be 17 miles.

Recent Financial Times article about Finland, very very good, unintentionally very anti-Ukrainian. Finland of course scarred by experiences with Russia and adopted Swiss model of politically keeping their mouth shut and militarily emplacing a gun behind every hill. Ukraine essentially opposite to Finland.
https://www.ft.com/content/c5e376f9-7351-40d3-b058-1873b2ef1924

So you fell for the “blame it on the Russians” Bucha slaughterpropaganda. This is the problem with reading commentary by “American” Jews.

Briefly: the Russians withdrew on Feb 30th: no bodies; for two days, Bucha officials were recorded saying the Russians left and they were happy about it: Still no bodies; there are images of the Ukrainian walking into Bucha shortly thereafter: Still no bodies; then, on the third day, we see bodies; and we have recording of an Ukrainian soldier asking if it is OK to shoot people without the blue bands about their arm: “Yes” said his superior officer. The dead were those who did not support Zellensky or supported the Russians.

I recommend that the commenters here start listening to Gonzalo Lira who is Kharkov giving daily reports. Teh ukrainian assassins are hunting for him.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxpPT4b4vnDlX0sBGz3r4Q

Odd that the Ukraine government didn’t allow (not to mention encourage) widespread civilian ownership of combat rifles (and ammo), what with being right next door to an unimaginable criminal regime

.

Edward Luttwak IIRC has suggested that Poland and the Baltic states re-organize their armies along Swiss-style militia “every man be armed” lines. I’m not expecting Russia to embark on any Polish or Baltic adventures but probably not a bad idea.

Shame, shame on you for trying to minimize these crimes.

Not my country. Not my people. On the other side of the world.

I do not care what happens in Ukraine.

“collaborators with the Russians executed by Ukrainians. That’s a not unworthy goal. Clearly, this cyclist got annihilated by large caliber Russian arms.”

Huh? In theory those people will have to live together and cooperate at some future date. Or one or the other group will have to be separated by deportation or whatever, like Greeks and Turks when the Ottoman empire dissolved.

One aspect you might not get is Russian is the language of technicians in Ukraine. If the Russians go then they take all modern industry with them. Based on past performance USA NATO EU was unwilling to send any high tech work to Ukraine. For example buying weapons or aircraft from Ukraine. So the war is lose, lose more, or die for Ukraine.

BTW, who is going to rebuild what is left of Ukraine? Popular choices are EU, Russia, China, anyone else? My guess is Russia+China.

An observation, Israel is not supporting USA NATO EU sanctions. It is not clear what their calculation is, but in the past Israel has always ended up winning.

Some Russo-Ukrainian companies Americans might know of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playrix#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherp

I got a Sherp. The GREATEST off-road vehicle on the planet!

Speaking of Cuba, Spain and all. Why don’t I hear much anymore about Central American wars, drugs, commies, the CIA, the US being bogged down in the jungle, et cetera?
Did that part of world get fixed, or something? Anti-American propaganda was all the rage during the 80’s and some of the 90’s regarding those places and now it’s all gone quiet.

Curious if y’all have some ideas on why our media doesn’t care about what have to be on-going despotisms and squalid Marxist guerilla cells. Maybe it’s all peace and bananas these days.

…that adds to mounting evidence…

The New York Times again. And no doubt “experts” have something to say about all of this too.

But that evidence is “mounting” (as opposed to somehow decreasing”), so something must be up.

There could have been 26 atrocities committed by Russian forces and 1,287 committed by the Ukrainian side, but that Russian number is mounting so it’s time to send in the troops.

I obviously just made up those numbers above. My point is to consider the source. Why should we take seriously a “news” outlet which completely blacks out black on white crime, some of it really atrocious, but wouldn’t hesitate to talk about “mounting hate crimes against people of color,” strongly implying it was white racists who are responsible for it?

The propaganda war is in the mopping up stages, as the basic objectives of the Deep State have been met. I am not excusing anyone’s behavior in this war, but the propaganda produced by Ukraine’s Washington’s consultants is the crudest variety, as crude as anything in the Spanish War satirized by Mark Twain.

Milley’s pronouncement that this conflict will likely continue for years or even a decade ( bet the over) confirms that the objective has been met: Another long-term commitment to a foreign entanglement fighting another monster abroad.

They have “unified NATO” which is “stronger than ever.” The War Profiteers all have new lucrative, long-term contracts with the government to soak American taxpayers. Milley also said their was no way to deter Russia’s invasion ( indeed, why would they deter what they wanted?), and the obedient press will memory hole the Biden admin’s claim that sanctions would be a deterrence.

I grew up in DC and it had a sort of dignified shabbiness about it, with prominent Senators and officials living in modest homes in Chevy Chase or Bethesda or Northern Virginia. It was not a city awash in consultants and grifters worth 10s of millions of dollars. That has all changed. It is now a big money trough with the pigs fattening themselves shamelessly, never taking their faces out of the slop.

Not paying attention to Ukrainian war reports as we can trust none of them. But as for soldiers killing a bicyclist, I know first hand how it can happen. During a foot patrol in Iraq around midnight, a teenager on a bicycle came barreling towards us. By the ROE we could have blown him away (and others in similar incidents did just that). We were yelling at him to stop and blinding him with flashlights, but still he came to us. As the leader of the patrol, I just had a “sense” that this wasn’t a suicide bomber but just a dumbshit kid who was too shocked and scared to stop or turn away. So I stepped forward and as he approached I knocked him out with my rifle butt. Dumbest thing I ever did, but I was lucky since he was not a terrorist as we ascertained after searching him. Later my guys were pretty split on whether we should have shot him or not, since if he had been a suicide bomber I let him get close enough to blow us all up. We knew we were always being watched, so if it had happened again we would have opened fire on assumption some terrorist was trying to take advantage of a pattern we had just set.

Most European societies don’t have a tradition of civilian gun ownership, especially not handguns. America, with its Revolutionary roots and abundant hunting tradition, is somewhat unique in this regard (and even in America for a long time it was thought that the 2nd Amendment applied mainly to the national guard and that cities could regulate handgun carry to the point where it was effectively banned except for a handful of special exceptions). Maybe America (which BTW has a very high rate of hand gun homicide by white country standards) is the outlier here and Ukraine is the “normal” country in regard to its gun ownership laws.

OTOH, when the war was imminent, Ukraine did start handing out guns so that people could form self-defense militias.

You’re changing the subject here – what you are saying has nothing to do with what happened to Oleg. Would it have helped Oleg if he had a gun? Was he suppose to take on the Russian Army by himself? If he had had one, people here would say that he was a combatant out of uniform and the Russians would have been justified in shooting him.

But in fact he was unarmed and shooting him was an undeniable war crime and no, the LAPD doesn’t drag innocent civilians out of their houses and execute them.

During Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, senators John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham accused her of calling Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush war criminals. This accusation was based on a tendentious inference drawn from a brief she filed on behalf of a Guantanamo Bay detainee.

But if Putin can be labeled a war criminal, and I believe that is appropriate, shouldn’t George W. Bush also be labeled one? How is what Putin has done different than what George W. Bush did? Perhaps Lindsey Graham will explain.

Milley also said their was no way to deter Russia’s invasion

Wow, who woulda thunk it? Turns out it’s really difficult to deter something while you’re actively provoking it. Getting the war started was the hard part, now they just need to keep it going. So far so good.

Also agree with you about DC. Yeah there were always rich people living around NW and the Potomac area, but not the kind of wealth we see now. Dignified shabbiness is a good way to put it – well-off, smart academic types..the type who would drive Volvo station wagons. Now it’s unrecognizable.

For context on the 100+ bullets fired into the wrong pickup;

In Germany with 80 million population – total bullets fired by all police in all incidents in a year averages 70 rounds.

That’s a not unworthy goal.

iSteve you shouldn’t let Chico Marx a proof a reada.

Bucha: More like the Babies Thrown out of Incubators or the notorious Saunas of Death™?

Either way, it’s clear what Bill Kristol and David Frum’s “Fellow Americans” are morally obligated to do:

Onward! Defeat the evil Putler and his ebil not-see/ Bolshevik/ Great Russian chauvinist minions! Defend the Kolomoisky/ Zelensky regime from this madman! Stop him from taking over the world! If we don’t fight them on the Dnieper, we’ll be fighting them on the Missippi!

Don’t worry — Bill Kristol and David Frum will be right there beside you, throwing paint balloons at tanks. And “Jack D” will be right, uh, behind you…

I’d put Clinton, Bush/Cheney, Obama, and Trump on that list for sure. At some point it just became totally normal for American presidents to bomb any countries they want, whenever they want, with no accountability whatsoever. Because of various human error (combined with not giving a shit), civilians die in these drone strokes all the time. *Shoulder shrug. I think Obama hit record numbers with his drone strikes while he was in office, and Trump was on course to beat him had he won the election. We used to at least pretend that we needed approval to do so. Pretty soon we will just have AI doing it for us. Randomly drone striking (insert third world country) to keep their (insert rebel group that we previously armed to provoke regime change, but now they are out of control and we have to bomb them) at bay.

I tried the the court trial style timelining and positioning of people thing with her story, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Of course, that could be as innocent as simple mistranslation or Chinese telephone syndrome on the part of the BBC.

On the other hand, here in Japan we had an Anglophone “foreign correspondent” stringer selling stories and live video reports in the aftermath of the earthquake/tsunami, and I’m pretty sure a lot of his stuff was novelistically enhanced. I think he really believed everything he reported happened, and his lack of language skills helped out. Expat-Japan-Twitter had a field day with this guy.

I try not to get taken in by Gell-Mann amnesia:

In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann amnesia effect, after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts’ fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.

In my case, since I know that English language coverage of Japan, in peacetime, is crazy inaccurate, I try to keep in mind that wartime coverage in other non-Anglophone countries is probably much worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect

Breaking news:

Highly placed sources in the Zelensky-Kolomoisky security apparatus reliably inform us that ongoing consultations with the Atlantic Council will determine what the nascent semitic supremacist settler-colonialist state in the Ukraine will be called. “Big Israel” has already been rejected due to “bad optics.” Leading candidates at this point include “New Galicia” and “Eretz Khazaria.” What has been determined is that this firm will be a leading “financial consultant” to the new regime:

https://arendacapital.com/

Obviously you can have some rules of engagement when troops from developed countries with volunteer armies such as the US and Britain are occupying countries like Iraq or Northern Ireland,

Just look up the civilian death toll in the Second Gulf war

Objectively wrong. They generally do and made a conscious decision to reject it at a particular point as part of modernization. The three big examples being Czecha (surrounded by the three biggest empires, no ocean barriers, your own prowess becomes a legend but doesn’t exactly help), Swiss (the reason Wilhelm Tell shot an arrow off his son’s head was to convince the Austrian Empire to not even try), and England (see the bit in In Search Of The Second Amendment describing how the Glorious Revolution was actually about the concept which would later give birth to the Second Amendment). Question, racistly for persons of Hebraic ancestry: what us haaaaaaaaannnting? What’s that? Hunting? Shooting an aminal? Why would anyone do that? Dere’s no aminals in the Europe, right?

I deserve hell, not because of my moral failings, not because of my vices, but because I never stepped into an elevator with the used helicopter donator and homosexual Willy Milley and %@&%#@% open his neck.

in America for a long time it was thought that the 2nd Amendment applied mainly to the national guard and that cities could regulate handgun carry to the point where it was effectively banned except for a handful of special exceptions

No way.

FREEDMEN, THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,
AND THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, 1866-1876. By
Stephen P. Halbrook. 1 Westport, Ct. Praeger Publishers.
1998. Pp. xiii, 230. Hardcover. $55.00

Halbrook’s book presents a chronological account of the
background and evolution of the Fourteenth Amendment and
several important pieces of related legislation, as well as of initial
enforcement efforts during Reconstruction. Halbrook’s eye is
always focused on showing that protection of the freedmen’s
right to arms was both a central and a “cutting edge” element in
the Reconstruction effort. This is followed by a very detailed
description of the events leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Cruikshank. 4 This case arose when federal authorities used the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute a
number of whites who had allegedly participated in a massacre
of black citizens. In a decision that Halbrook treats as the death
knell for Reconstruction, the Supreme Court held that the indictment was legally insufficient.

Halbrook’s exploration of Reconstruction history is a
means to other ends. His principal goals are to show that the
Privileges or Immunities Clause prohibits infringement by the
states of the right to keep and bear arms, that the Supreme
Court has never decided otherwise, and that the Court should
now decide that the Fourteenth Amendment does protect that
right. Though it does not fully address every question relevant
to its thesis, this book is a valuable addition to the literature, and
it deserves more serious consideration than it is likely to get today. But perhaps its time will come.

https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1819&context=concomm

So if Bush is no different than Putin, this means that Saddam Hussein is no different than Zelensky. I disagree.

This is playing into the Russian’s game. They take the West’s bottom as their starting point and they plumb the depths of depravity from there.

Suppose that heaven forbid you once hit a pedestrian by mistake with your car. In Putin’s mode of thinking, this means that he has the right to drive down the road and intentionally mow people down, as many as he feels like hitting. After all, you killed someone with your car – who are you to say that killing people with your car is wrong?

When you are six years old, your parents tell you, “if your friends jump off of a building, that doesn’t mean that you should do it too.” As the avatar of White Christian morality (supposedly) Putin should aspire to be BETTER than America, not worse. Apparently no one taught Putin that lesson.

Somehow, the Mexican ladies survived 107 bullets.

Does Sailer’s Law apply to mass shootings by the police?

Like the ancient silk road, Mackinder argued the Trans-Siberian railway could provide the Russian Empire with an infrastructure capable of exploiting the resources of its Siberian territory and linking it with the markets of the far east.

Ukraine is what what Makinder called the heartland: key to world domination

Diplomacy
China-Ukraine infrastructure deal a surprise for observers of Beijing, Kyiv and Moscow geopolitics
China and Ukraine have a complicated past but they have signed a new deal to work together on roads, bridges and railway projects
Published: 12:00pm, 11 Jul, 2021

Beijing to Moscow high speed railway. It will be the biggest job for the highest stakes ever.
—
Most of the people killed in this war have been Russian soldiers killed by Ukrainians, and Ukraine has tremendous momentum, morale and an unlimited supply of the mot advanced weapons and targeting technology in the world. They are in the process of getting long range anti aircraft missiles and hundreds of tanks. Of course Ukraine will press its advantage and try to get back all its lost territory. The Russian soldiers do not want to be there and have no intention of getting killed through giving civilians wandering about in a warzone littered with dead Russians the benefit of the doubt. Almost everyone had left the area’s and those remaining were in cellars.
—

‘Make Molotov cocktails, neutralise the occupier!’: Ukrainian ministry of defence urges residents to make homemade petrol bombs in district of Kyiv
Call to action was sent via official Twitter page of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence
It urged residents to make Molotov cocktails to ‘neutralise the occupier’ in Kyiv
Twitter post also urged residents in Obolon to share location of Russia troops

It is a fact that the Ukrainian forces are operating in civilian clothes and driving civilian cars

Show me the evidence that the people who were murdered were enemy combatants

Eighty percent of an army are soldiers are in support and logistics rather that being combat troops; of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocents stroll during fighting are passing on information to set up ambushes or are look outs for a Javelin team. The civilian police in peacetime are going to shoot you about one half of a second after a warning if you are a threat to them. <Again, in Bucha one street had ten obliterated combat vehicles

Shame on you for being so stupid as to believe this garbage, garbage that has being going on perhaps since human existence. And where is this “interview you speak of? All I see is a photograph of some anonymous woman. Are you should stupid that you believe the BBC fiction

“Mississippi”

Most European societies don’t have a tradition of civilian gun ownership, especially not handguns.

Weird. One would think that after WWII, the means of lethal self-defense (civilian herd immunity) would be a big deal. Unless the Holocaust, and genocide in general, is rhetorically overblown by some in its significance. I guess some people would rather kvetch about past (and present) government massacres than actually deter them.

Maybe America (which BTW has a very high rate of hand gun homicide by white country standards) …

America has a lot of Blacks. Probably more, per capita, than “most European societies”. You should look up the murder stats by race in America. There’s a blog and Twitter account by some guy named Steve Sailer that addresses this from time to time.

… is the outlier here and Ukraine is the “normal” country in regard to its gun ownership laws.

Well, massive wars with civilian slaughter are normal for Europe, and yet here you are kvetching. Are you for European “normal” or not? Maybe restrictive gun ownership laws have something to do with civilians being helplessly slaughtered by governments? If that’s normal for Europe, and you like whatever’s normal, I don’t understand your complaints about Bucha. It’s normal.

OTOH, when the war was imminent

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. An invasion might have been deterred, and failing that, executions of unarmed adult civilians would not be possible. Unless those individuals chose to be unarmed.

You’re changing the subject here – what you are saying has nothing to do with what happened to Oleg.

It has everything to do with Oleg’s specific fate.

Would it have helped Oleg if he had a gun? Was he suppose to take on the Russian Army by himself?

Not by himself. I didn’t write that the Ukraine government should allow only Oleg to have a rifle and ammo.

If he had had one, people here would say that he was a combatant out of uniform and the Russians would have been justified in shooting him.

It’s called war. Shooting happens. I would rather civilians be armed, but you would rather them be totally at the mercy of others, so you can cry crocodile tears about the results. Curious.

the LAPD doesn’t drag innocent civilians out of their houses and execute them

Kind of hard to do, physically, if the LAPD is outnumbered by legally armed civilians. A totalitarian LAPD may be able to hit a few houses until word gets around and then bye-bye LAPD.

People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates

I think you’re not giving the American people enough credit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/politics/afghanistan-drone-strike.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47480207

Wars are bad.

Borders are good.

Everyone feels that way . . . after their tribe has won the last war and established borders that suit them.

All that is needed is a competent medical forensic examination of the bodies in Bucha. If these people were killed on or before March 30th, then this is a Russian atrocity. If, on the other hand, the bodies were found to have been murdered after that, this is a Ukrainian atrocity, probably the murder of people found to have collaborated with the Russians.

On April 3rd and 4th, Russia asked for an emergency Security Council meeting to accomplish this examination, and a full UN team capable of this activity is in Ukraine now.

Apparently, though, no examination will take place.

So all that is left is narrative vs. counter-narrative.

The L.A. City Council gave them $4.2 million ..

and out of their own pockets. How contrite.

LA taxpayers themselves could have done more. For instance, voters in the totally crappy, N KC school district just approved a $140M bond refi (79%) that extends duration and allows the district to convert 2 mills of its property tax revenues, “lockboxed” for debt service, into general operating (i.e. slush) funds (71%). Voters in nearby Park Hall approved similar measures / amounts.

Most of the people killed in this war have been Russian soldiers killed by Ukrainians,

We don’t know that. The Ukrainians (like the Russians) have not been releasing military casualty figures because they don’t want to damage morale. Furthermore, we really don’t know at this point how many civilians the Russians have killed although it appears to be many thousands. If the Russian plan to starve Ukraine out succeeds, it could be millions.

of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocents stroll are passing on information to set up ambushes or are look outs for a Javelin team.

Of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocent stroll are actually taking an innocent stroll (or actually desperately seeking food because they are starving or trying to make it back home or to a cellar, etc.). The Russian appear to shoot on sight with no attempt to distinguish between the enemy spies and innocent civilians. How would they even know if they were spies if they just shot them on sight? Maybe by luck some of the people that they shot really were enemy spies but if so it’s only by chance because the Russians were going down the street and shooting everyone that they saw. No matter how many excuses you make, this is a war crime.

People here seem to want to give the Russians “the benefit of the doubt” but the Russians have done nothing to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the women who say that they were raped by Russian soldiers (often after the Russians had just executed their husbands) really had consensual sex with them but given the history, I would start with the presumption that they are telling the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/world/europe/russian-soldiers-sexual-violence-ukraine.html

Killing the enemy males and taking their women is something that is deeply rooted in human history but this is the 21st century – we are supposed to be more civilized than that.

It appears that Putin’s bullshit about being there to eliminate Nazis is actually being believed by Russian soldiers. They are going around shooting Ukrainian civilians because they are convinced that all Ukrainians are Nazis and it’s OK to execute Nazis.

The SS may have been brutal but they were probably more disciplined and professional than most American cops.

Here’s a bodycam video of a New York State trooper fatally shooting an unarmed motorist in the back of the neck two months ago.

Of course, you didn’t hear anything about it because the dead guy was white:

Yes, George W. Bush IS a war criminal, and the Obama administration failure to prosecute the Bush torture gangs is a disgrace.

Again, what people are doing here (the Russians love when you do this) is conflating American mistakes with Russian intentional acts. There is a big difference in the treatment at law of accidental homicide vs. intentional homicide. It’s quite obvious that many of the civilian deaths that the Russians are causing are 100% intentional murder/ executions and not accident or mistaken identity (unless you consider mistaking all Ukrainians for Nazis to be a legitimate case of mistaken identity).

“How is what Putin has done different than what George W. Bush did?”

I’m not a fan of the Iraq war, but come on, get a clue. Zelensky is no Qusay or Uday. And Bush tried for months to get UN and other bodies to settle this by way of broad consensus. He assembled an international alliance from a variety of nations and perspectives to participate. He didn’t lie and pretend this was some “military operation”. In those cases where US soldiers were caught abusing Iraquis (e.g. Lynndie England) it caused widespread outrage among Americans themselves, and led to government prosecution, as opposed to some shoddy effort to pretend it was all faked by hostile media.

Moreover, even now, Iraq is STILL not the 51st star in the American flag. (I just checked — see for yourself.) Not one acre of it was swiped and declared to be American, or even Kuwaiti.

Do I expect this to sway the majority of the readers of Unz-dot-com? Of course not. But they should at least understand why even some of the more justifiable causes they advocate for will be regarded as “fringe”, and this kind of attitude will not help in that regard.

We don’t know that.

Lol! Jack D immediately takes a fog-of-war stance about possible Ukrainian misdeeds, but he’s 100% dead certain about every Russian war crime story, however implausible. Do you still believe in the Ghost of Kiev, Jack? Jack also seems to post 50 times on every war thread. How very tiresome to put up with his age-old ethnic grievance.

A short timeline:

* After the Jewish Bolshevik revolution, connected Bolshie Jews gobbled up everything of value in Russia.

* Stalin eventually clawed it back for the state.

* In the 90s, Jews once again stole everything of value in Russia with the help of their American ethnic cohorts.

* Putin has clawed some of it back and threatens to claw back more. This is mainly why Jewish media hates him, but they don’t like that he helped rebuild the Russian Orthodox church (remember, Jews burned many a church in the Revolution).

* Uki war starts, Jews froth at the mouth for war with Russia, because they smell the opportunity to steal everything AGAIN, for the third time. Third time’s the charm, as they say.

And of course in Ukraine, Jews still own everything, which they stole. Which is why Ukraine is the “poorest country in Europe.” It’s not, really. It’s just the most-looted one.

Jack really, really hates the Russians, probably from watching “Fiddler on the Roof” too many times.

Most European societies don’t have a tradition of civilian gun ownership, especially not handguns. America, with its Revolutionary roots and abundant hunting tradition, is somewhat unique in this regard

Stop making up bullshit.

Most European societies absolutely had a tradition of civilian gun ownership (and hunting). Until the last century or two, it was common in England for people (including ladies) to be armed for traveling on the roads for fear of “highwaymen” and in the cities against ruffians. Indeed, English common law recognized the right of civilian to possess arms for centuries. Where do you think our Founding Father’s explicit protection of the gun rights came from? It didn’t magically spring from the Revolution.

Indeed, it was only in the 20th Century that serious limitation on the possession of guns (and handguns in particular) began in England with the Pistols Act of 1903. Likewise, it was common, until very recently, for most English and French farmhouses to have long guns for hunting. As late as World War II, German military officers had to buy their own handguns through the civilian market. It was only with the monstrous rise of the Administrative State after World War II that gun restrictions became draconian (prior to 1934, for example, Americans could walk into a sporting goods store and order a Thompson submachine gun by mail, no background checks needed).

even in America for a long time it was thought that the 2nd Amendment applied mainly to the national guard

Love the passive tense there. Thought so by whom? Men without chests like you?

The Bill of Rights is pretty explicit in protecting gun rights and the Second Amendment was never about the National Guard which did not come into being until the early 20th Century. The legal history of the term “militia” is pretty clear and referred to a combination of an organized militia and an unorganized militia, the whole body of eligible voters (in the past free, propertied white males of adult age, now all citizens over age 18).

Steve Sailer:

“Wars are bad.Borders are good”

Borders 90% of the time are the *cause* of wars. You can’t have one without also having the other.

If a black man kills more than he wounds, he’s either a vet or an e-cop.
Or, as in Waukesha, a motorist.

Well… terrorist Darrell E. “Mathboi Fly” Brooks, who was closely affiliated with the notorious anti-White hate group “BLM,” slaughtered 6 members of the White community and maimed 62 in the Waukesha Massacre, so that example of anti-White stochastic terrorism doesn’t do much to advance your thesis.

And if we look at a terrorist attack in Europe with similar numbers of casualties, the 2016 Berlin truck attack, the perpetrator killed 12 and wounded 56 — with a higher-profile vehicle and (arguably) a more tightly-packed crowd. The 2016 Nice attack, also using a box truck, resulted in more casualties, but an even lower ratio of killed to wounded — 86 to 458.

Offhand, I can’t think of single example of a vehicular attack that had comparable numbers of wounded and dead. It makes sense if you think about it. In a vehicular attack, unlike a mass shooting, the terrorist is aiming more at a mass of people than at particular individuals — and many of his targets are actively trying to get out of his path.

More like the SS.

It’s always the Holocaust morality play with you.

I’ll give you a Holocaust morality play:

Were these guys also “more like the SS”?

Quite a few people here who used “our” when describing American elites have been exposed to be about as American as Benjamin Netanyahu albeit of the Mongloruss tribe as opposed to “the” tribe. Including quite a few that cosplayed as founding stock Americans. What is there to say tempers flare and you forget your lines and ours become yours and Jeffs and Dannys become Sergeis and Fyodors.

I completely agree. We might have been hopelessly naive about Putin and the Russians, thinking that he was somehow the Great White Hope, and we have been horribly disappointed. There’s no use trying to hide it.

Just like in business, it’s not so much that everything runs faultlessly all the time, but what you do about it when things don’t. When American soldiers were accused of war crimes, then the alleged crimes were investigated and the perpetrators punished. Allegations that are difficult to prove during wartime, I dare say, too.

He’s just afraid the peasants are going to rise up and “pogrom”/a> him if they’re allowed to possess firearms. Typical semitic supremacist paranoia.

Sad!

There are the historical proclivities of Russian soldiery.

But I see this as primarily a matter of probably poorly trained soldiers surrounded by a hostile and often armed and aggressive civilian population.

I saw all this coming when there was all this celebration of heroic Ukrainian civilians taking up arms. The cute blonde in the pink jacket being handed an AK-47…ohh ohh.

When the civilians are potentially armed and dangerous, civilians tend to get shot — and not necessarily the right civilians.

This isn’t to justify any of it. It’s just to point out that this is the way it is.

This first problem, though, is “our” elites seems to hold the opposite view.

Agree. There’s a lot of hypocrisy from the American establishment now. Ukraine’s border is sacred, but America’s border (or Hungary’s border) … well nah, not so much, that would be racist!

If Putin had managed to arrange a couple million Syrian young men to invade Ukraine, one gets the impression that all our government and “journalist” establishment would be blabbing about the “diversity is our greatest strength” and how “Ukraine needs immigrants”.

The second problem—not only in Ukraine but many other places—is even if everyone agrees war-bad-border-good, where exactly is the good border? Where the Kiev regime wants it? Or where the people in Donbas—who actually live within it—want it?

There’s little evidence that “the people of the Donbass” want any particular one thing. I don’t claim any special knowledge of Ukraine–it’s not my patch. But the Donbass is clearly *not* Crimea. The Donbass is not chock full of people who think they are Russians–much less explicitly want to be part of Russia. Just pulling up wikipedia suggests, exactly what the fighting there suggests–it’s a muddle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donetsk_Oblast#Demographics
Strong majority Russian speaking — 74%
Small majority ethnically Ukrainian — 56%

My suspicion is that rural skews Ukrainian and the cities a bit more Russian. (The Donetsk city data seem to confirm this.)

My bias in to “who owns the place” is that the farmers come first. They are the primary producers. And if you are making a living off your land, you are relatively immobile. (The curse of farmers since settlement–the barbarians ride in and take your stuff … what the “lord” hasn’t already stolen.) In contrast, if you’re a bureaucrat, an engineer, a trademan, a clerk in Donetsk and really feel you are “Russian” and do not like the Ukrainians wanting to join the EU and “be like Poland” … you can just move your ass to Russia and do the same stuff.

(I have the same thoughts about the American separation. Take say Madison (Dane County). Yeah, come the AnotherDad referendum, it will vote to be in Rainbow America. But the joint is basically parasitic. It depends on all the farmers and dairymen and manufacturing employees and owners in the American part of Wisconsin to pay in taxes or come for medical treatment or send their kids to University of Wisconsin. Take away its supporting–and especially taxing–the primary producers and Madison simply can’t support so many Rainbow hued parasites.)

In any case, there’s obviously some reason, that Crimea has been peaceful and the Donbass has not. The two plausible ones are
A) The Russian army is in Crimea, Ukrainians are sacred to mess with it.
B) The Donbass is actually quite divided in sentiment and Crimea is not.

Both are in play, but i’ll note even if you think it is basically “A” and “the people of the Donbass” actually do want to be part of Russia … Putin had accomplished that by sending in the Russian army–openly–in February. (And you’ll note, that did not start a war, nor did it kick off the big Western–sanctions–response. It may fire up these Russia haters in the American establishment, but most people in the European establishment understand Eastern Ukraine is a legit muddle.)

But Putin then trashed any opportunity for that situation to congeal. Putin didn’t say “Hey, this is done. If the Ukrainian army attacks, we’ll respond in kind. When Ukrainians are ready to be reasonable, we can sit down and talk about plebiscites and exchange of populations and getting Ukrainians and Russians into the respective nations they belong in. And then Ukrainians–if they see fit–can go join the EU and Russians who are not interested won’t have to be part of it.”

Instead, Putin invaded.

And the reason Putin didn’t talk about it is because his interest is has never been in helping people have the borders they want–witness Grozny. No Putin’s main interest is being a big swinging dick. Putin is a “what’s mine is mine; what’s yours is mine” kind of guy.

What Sitting Bull simply didn’t understand is that if Bill Sherman was willing to lay waste to the farms and cities of white people, Bill Sherman was not going to shirk from doing the same to a remote group of rebellious American Indians.

What Vladimir Putin doesn’t understand is that if the US is going to allow its major city central districts to be burnt over some drug-addled person finding every excuse to not sit in the back of a police car, the facts-on-the-ground in Bucha mean nothing to the people who want to see Mr. Putin, as it were, Chauvinized.

Was arming ethno-nationlist battalions in order to initiate a coup and provoke conflict in the Donbas an accident? The US knew what it was doing, just like they knew who they were backing in Iraq, which eventually turned into ISIS. Chaos is the goal. All these articles warning about the far-right problem were written years ago, well before the Russian invasion. To be fair, I think the situation is a total hornet’s nest. No good guys to be found anywhere. But the Nazi thing is more substantial than just Russian disinformation, and the US bears a large portion of responsibility for stoking this conflict in the first place.

(2014) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-neo-nazis

(2014) https://www.newsweek.com/evidence-war-crimes-committed-ukrainian-nationalist-volunteers-grows-269604

(2015) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-azov-idUSKBN0ML0XJ20150325

“Appeasing the aggressor will only lead to more aggression. This war will inevitably continue – either until our complete defeat or until our full victory and return to our land in all east Ukraine and Crimea. We believe in the second scenario,” said the 35-year-old from the city of Kharkiv.

Ukraine is fucked.

So if Bush is no different than Putin, this means that Saddam Hussein is no different than Zelensky. I disagree.

I don’t follow your logic. Whether Saddam Hussein is a worse leader than Zelensky has nothing to do with our right to start a war and kill tens of thousands of people.

You can say Bush was misinformed. He started a war “accidentally.” Putin may have also been misinformed.

Again, what people are doing here (the Russians love when you do this) is conflating American mistakes with Russian intentional acts. There is a big difference in the treatment at law of accidental homicide vs. intentional homicide.

As a lawyer or at least someone highly-conversant in law you certainly appreciate the fact that performing an action where the loss of innocent life is possible, even probable, and performing that action repeatedly makes you culpable- to an extent increasingly indistinguishable from murder, as reflected practically in sentencing- the more often and the more callously you perform that act. The US has been droning for almost 2 decades now. We know that innocent people will inevitably be killed the next time we do it, that when it happens no one will be held accountable, and yet we have no problem doing it all over again next week.

Look, maybe the Russians committed a war crime. Given their lower standards of organization and discipline and endemic alcoholism I concede the chances are greater than 50%. However, we have a corrupt Ukrainian government in collusion with the Deep State seeking to stoke war fever in the West through manufacture of some mediagenic atrocity (cf. Syria) and willing to go to any extent of deception and distortion to do so. They also seem amazingly blasé about the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

I am pro-Russian people, pro-Ukrainian people, pro-US people, against the corrupt elites on all sides who seek to prolong or intensify this conflict for their own special interests. I am also anti-b@llsh!t and will continue to point out the lies, deceptions, and resorts to emotional special pleading used to manipulate us. War is hell and crimes get committed all the time in the process of it. The US Army executed German POW’s in cold blood when they proved inconvenient (cf. THE IRISHMAN). In Korea there are documented incidents of same done to Chinese POW’s and the bodies of Chinese dead were used as bridge ballast during the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. Does this make the US Army the “bad guys”?

Stay calm, call out the bullsh!t, demand a path to peace.

Yup, just like Saddam’s troops tossing babies out of incubators and German soldiers using Belgian babies for bayonet practice.
Keep believing the narrative, Jack. I guess a person who believes in human soap and lampshade stories will believe in anything.

If Putin had managed to arrange a couple million Syrian young men to invade Ukraine,

If Putin had managed for SPETSNAZ to kidnap Kyle Rittenhouse and then chemically (or hell, the old-fashioned way) castrate him there’d be a red-white-and-blue flag in EVERY artisanal coffeehouse and independent bookstore across this great land of ours right now.

Putin is a totalitarian maniac who needs to be terminated. Time to quit leaving this to future generations, especially since the infection is now so deep in Americas body politic that Republicans are kissing commie butt.

The nuclear bomb got Japan’s mind right, and it’s time Russia got the shock treatment. Oh, they can fire back? Right. Look how they’ve looted their own boots on the ground military. And you think they actually spent the rubles on ICBM testing and maintenance? Russian nuclear planners would be best to consult Wile E. Coyote’s launch of his Acme Rockets.

Look, I understand that the 2nd Amendment is your thing like abolishing public education is Abolish Public Education’s thing. But honest to goodness, Ukraine’s problems with the Russian Army and its tanks and specifically the problems of the recently deceased citizens of Bucha (individually or collectively) would not be solved if handgun ownership was legal in Ukraine. You are off on a tangent.

“Wars are bad.”

All wars, large and small, are usually fought by clueless suckers organized by malignant elites. Ukraine is a classic case.

But sometimes killing is necessary. The above malignant elites, for example.

US troops shot a lot of people at roadblocks in Iraq. Mark Twain confessed to doing the same thing when he was an aspiring Confederate bushwhacker.

I wasn’t the one who brought up the SS. Steve did.

The title of his post was Bucha: More Like the SS or the LAPD?

As between the two, I pick SS. Which one do you vote for? Does the Russian Army remind you more of the LAPD?

Those Israelis with rifles are all well and good fighting against Fedayeen, but as you point out in your other post, Russia has a (fairly) modern army with tanks and such, against which rifles are suicidal. Unless you think that the Ukrainians should have been keeping Javelins in their gun cabinets, the lack of a 2nd Amendment in the Ukrainian Constitution is not really their problem.

As for who thought the 2nd Amendment applied to the National Guard, that would be the Supreme Court for most of the post Civil War period. It wasn’t until Heller (2008) that the court firmly recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms.

BTW, since a Javelin is something that you can bear in your arms, does the 2nd Amendment extend to the private ownership of Javelins? Asking for a friend.

The US Army executed German POW’s in cold blood when they proved inconvenient (cf. THE IRISHMAN).

LOL. A Hollywood movie is your source. Frank Sheeran was a bullshitter and a drunk and maybe beat up a few guys for the union in his younger days. But the idea that he was this James Bond type hitman who went around killing people by the dozen either in the war or after it was just a tall tale of the type that drunken Irishmen love to spin.

John Carlyle Berkery, who worked in the Philadelphia mob at the same time as Sheeran, said he was “full of shit.” Berkery added, “Frank Sheeran never killed a fly. The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”

Fake propaganda like the Ghost of Kiev and the Snake River 13. We don’t know what really happened or who did what.

But just on cue, we have another “war atrocity” that our lying media pushes. Reminds me of the claim that the Iraqis were throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators. Totally fake. People aren’t falling for it.

That one or even several people were killed by Russian troops doesn’t logically contradict the possibility that some of the alleged ‘hundreds’ of bodies found were Ukrainian citizens who failed object strongly enough to the Russian invasion. If you follow any pro-Russian (but non-government) channels on Twitter or Telegram you will get an idea of the thuggishness of significant numbers of Ukrainian regulars and irregulars and paramilitaries.

But honest to goodness

LOL!

Jack, if you ended up like our friend Oleg, you would be getting off easy.

the problems of the recently deceased citizens of Bucha (individually or collectively) would not be solved if handgun ownership was legal in Ukraine

I specifically mentioned “civilian ownership of combat rifles (and ammo)”. (You, a liar, brought up “handguns” as a red herring to slander White America by citing America’s “very high rate of hand gun homicide by white country standards”.)

Why are you against civilians owning combat rifles and ammo? Especially in a country neighboring a “criminal regime” as you put it?

Your “goverment monopoly on force” doesn’t jibe with your (fake) tears about Bucha.

“BTW, since a Javelin is something that you can bear in your arms, does the 2nd Amendment extend to the private ownership of Javelins? Asking for a friend.”

Yes.

The Russians tried for years to get the Kievan government to stop shelling the ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk.

I am glad Russia has now directed its efforts to the east and south. In fact I think there’s a good change the whole Kiev thing was a head fake to keep the Kievan forces tied down. I’ve said that for a while now.

War is Bad is the new Faber College motto. Borders are good–that’s why sometimes you have to go to war to defend them, alas.

“Yes, George W. Bush IS a war criminal …”

Even an Englishman can find the truth on occasion. But don’t forget Cheney, Rummy, and the PNAC Straussians who are currently activated to prolong the war in Ukraine. Putin’s gotten pretty much what he wanted but the US and UK neocons in government and media are actively sabotaging diplomatic entreaties.

Except for the packed flights of military aged males leaving the country for a certain country in the Levant, nonsensically to avoid a racial pogrom by an army fighting a ‘denazification’ campaign. No leapfrogging loyalties from Senor Zelensky…

LOL. A Hollywood movie is your source. Frank Sheeran was a bullshitter and a drunk and maybe beat up a few guys for the union in his younger days. But the idea that he was this James Bond type hitman who went around killing people by the dozen either in the war or after it was just a tall tale of the type that drunken Irishmen love to spin.

Jesus, Jack, just take the L-

Captain Barber, meanwhile, had been stewing over what to do with his own prisoners. By this point, Fox Company had captured more than thirty Chinese soldiers, including the three frightened kids Cafferata had collected on the hill. The prisoners were nearly freezing to death, they were hungry, they were lame with frostbite. Many of them had serious battle wounds. Some of them had already died of exposure. The ones who were left sat on their haunches in a pitiful cluster, shielding one another from the wind. Barber could let them go, but who knew what would become of them? The Chinese officers might not take them back. Fox Company had seen commissars shooting Red deserters, and these prisoners—the uninjured ones, at least—might be perceived as such. But if their superiors did take them back, they’d put weapons in their hands and send them up the hill to kill more Marines. Captain Barber had been avoiding the obvious, but he knew what he had to do. It was the hardest decision he would make in his entire life—harder than anything he’d been forced to do on Iwo Jima. He was a God-fearing man, a Christian, a churchgoer. But he thought he had no choice. He called for a private from Georgia and told him to get a few other Marines and take care of the problem. And so they went around back, behind the command post and the med tent, back where the prisoners squatted in the snow. Then they shot every one of them in the head.

On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir by Hampton Sides

Of course I know how a criminal regime operates; I live in the U.S.

Are you OK with private citizens owning Javelins? Because even rifles (WITH ammo) are worthless against tanks.

Again, you have set this up as heads I win, tails you lose situation. If Oleg and his neighbors are all executed by the Russians because they are bearing rifles (WITH ammo) then the Russian are justified in executing them as irregulars out of uniform – it’s not even a war crime. If they DON’T get rifles (which BTW are legal in Ukraine), then they were stupid for not resisting and got what was coming to them. Either way they are dead.

Estimates of the number of guns in private hands – including 2 million registered and an estimated 3-5 million unregistered firearms – suggest that in Ukraine there are between 9.9 and 15.8 firearms per 100 people.10 3 5 Based on data from the study which calculated the lowest estimates in this range, Ukraine ranked 14th in the world for the number of civilian firearms in its national stockpile, and 49th in the world for the number of civilian firearms per head of population.3

https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/cp/ukraine

The reason I mentioned handguns was not to denigrate (are you still allowed to use that word) fine white Americans but because ownership of rifles is legal in Ukraine so I assumed you were talking about their restrictive handgun laws.

I repeat that lack of rifles (AND ammunition) or bad gun laws in Ukraine or my musings about the monopoly of force in another context several years ago or whatever your obsession is has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is that the Russians are executing unarmed non-combatants in cold blood.

I agree that it’s weak to cite a movie as a source. However, Abe’s point is correct. Read memoirs by WW II veterans and you’ll find that when our troops were advancing rapidly, German soldiers who surrendered were sometimes executed on the spot because GIs could not be spared to escort them to the rear. It would have halted their mission.

My father was a WW II veteran and he told me about one particular GI who on two occasions shot and killed a German prisoner he was supposed to be escorting to the rear. “He tried to escape,” was the reason he gave, but my father believed he just liked shooting Germans.

Russia has a (fairly) modern army with tanks and such, against which rifles are suicidal. Unless you think that the Ukrainians should have been keeping Javelins in their gun cabinets, the lack of a 2nd Amendment in the Ukrainian Constitution is not really their problem.

Twinkie (and I) replied to your original post, which wasn’t about tank warfare, but hands-on interpersonal violence:

More like the SS. I just saw an interview with a woman from Bucha. The Russians dragged her husband (she says he was not military and had never fired a gun in his life) out of their home in his slippers and made him kneel and executed him. Then they threw a grenade into their house and set it on fire. This was no accident in the heat of combat.

The execution as described above literally could not have happened if the people were armed (with combat rifles) and resisted. Maybe the Russians could have leveled their house (with tanks) from a distance but that’s not “like the SS” specifically. So—it still stands that you would rather the execution have taken place than Ukraine citizens have combat rifles to resist such executions. You would rather people suffer so you can complain about perpetrators.

Those Israelis with rifles are all well and good fighting against Fedayeen

Those “Israelis”(Israel didn’t exist yet) were Irgun and notorious for bombing the British and killing Arab civilians in order to terrorize the rest to flee. They later lost a little civil war against the Haganah and was absorbed into the IDF. Their leaders later formed the core of the Likud Party.

As between the two, I pick SS. Which one do you vote for? Does the Russian Army remind you more of the LAPD?

I don’t do false choices, so neither. The Russian Army reminds me of… the Russian Army.

As for who thought the 2nd Amendment applied to the National Guard, that would be the Supreme Court for most of the post Civil War period. It wasn’t until Heller (2008) that the court firmly recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms.

No, yet again. There was no National Guard until the 20th Century.

BTW, since a Javelin is something that you can bear in your arms, does the 2nd Amendment extend to the private ownership of Javelins? Asking for a friend.

You know a Javelin is useless against a rifleman, right? Just as an ATGM-wielding hunter-killer team can ambush vehicles, a few infantrymen with small arms can ambush the hunter-killer team and take the ATGMs. If you need more explanations, just ask instead of posing like you know anything about weaponry.

“My suspicion is that rural [areas of the East] skews Ukrainian and the cities a bit more Russian. (The Donetsk city data seem to confirm this.)”

All that, as you generally implied, shifted significantly (away from the pro-Putin camp) even before Putin invaded — and then probably changed even more drastically afterwards, after the invasion. Even the parties that openly collaborated with the Russians denounced the invasion (at least publicly) so as not to alienate their supporters, which should tell you a lot about where their supporters are leaning. So much for the “Putin just wanted to save the children of Donbass from being shelled by neo-Nazis” narrative. The fanboys keep pretending it’s true. As for those allegedly being shelled? Evidently, they’re not buying it.

And even before the invasion, Putin did a good job of deRussifying even the areas of the country that had earlier voted in his stooge Yanukovych to be president:

How Putin managed to derussify East Ukraine in just 8 years…

What happened? How [did] Kharkiv, which used to be culturally and politically pro-Russian, so quickly turned super anti-Russian? It’s a huge cultural change and a very recent one. And the answer would be: Putin’s conflict-manufacturing strategy killed pro-Russian sentiments in Ukraine.

When Putin manufactured the Donbass War he presented it as an Ukrainian inner conflict. Many in Russia bought it. Many in the West bought it. Many idiots even now talk about “Ukraine shelling civilians of Donbass for eight years”. Bad Ukrainians being bad, that caused the war…

Nobody in Ukraine bought it. Russians and Westerners considered the Donbass catastrophe as a Ukrainian problem. In Ukraine however, it was seen as a Russian problem. Donbass was simply a part of Ukraine which fall under the Russian rule and its nightmare was purely Russian-made

Putin didn’t think about it. He as usually manufactured a Donbass war to later come out as a saviour, do everything he wants to do, collect a payout and be showered in gratitude and public love. But in Ukraine he was seen as the one who created this war in the first place

Nothing de-russified East Ukraine so quickly and irreversibly as the Donbass catastrophe. I’m not talking about the war, I’m talking about a general socio-economic conditions there. Under Russian control, Donbass fall under the rule of…criminal gangs, presented as the “levy”

They were usually guys from below the social hierarchy who saw this war as a chance to rise up. And they did. With their power unchecked, they started systematic plunder. Take people’s homes, cars, businesses, kill those who object. Arrest someone, torture and release for ransom

…With economy destroyed, and few opportunities for employment remaining, many locals, twenty-five-thousanders, joined this “levy” for 25 000 rubles a month paycheck. Russians paid them about 400 usd per month just to keep the war going on. It all turned into a vicious circle

You could sell this Donbass catastrophe as a Ukrainian problem to Russians or to the Westerners. But it was impossible to present it as such to the Ukrainians. People in Kharkiv, Sumy, Mariupol saw that nothing comparable is happening on territories under the Ukrainian control

Bush justified the Iraq War by stating that the Iraqis had WMD and they sheltered, trained and assisted terrorists that operated in the United States. The Bush Administration stated:

“Given the goals of the rogue states and terrorists, the U.S. can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker…and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

Putin justified invading Ukraine by stating that Ukraine already has what amounts to a proxy NATO army trained and armed by NATO and the US and that Neo Nazis pervade the Ukraine government and its army and security forces and have carried out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass.

“[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.”

Both Bush and Putin argued that preemptive war was a reasonable response to an imminent threat.

Of course, we now know that Iraq had no WMD, and they offered little if any assistance to Al Qaeda. Ukraine has one of the largest and best-trained standing armies in Europe, and has a serious Neo Nazi problem. Does that justify invasion? Pick your side and argue it.

It really is a tragedy that almost nobody in the West or even in Steve’s comment section understand Russia. Yes, fortunately there are some neutral or even pro-Russian commentators here, but even they are almost all to a man overwhelmingly working with a false Western framework and Western assumptions.

Russia at the start of the war never intended to capture Kiev, or any major cities outside of the Donbass. They merely wanted to put pressure on Kiev and some other major cities like Kharkiv to force the Ukrainians to commit troops there. Their only goals at the start of the war were to protect the independent nations of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and Luhansk Peoples Republic, to get Ukraine to stop attacking them and bring peace to the region, and to prevent The Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU for at least one year, the rest of 2022.

Amazingly the war has gone right in almost every way, far better than even the Russians could have expected it to go. Putin was planning to have a long grueling war lasting at least 5 months long just to secure the independence of the Donetsk Peoples Republic, the Luhansk Peoples Republic, and keep The Ukraine from joining NATO for a year.

But now it looks like the war has gone so unexpectedly well that they will take Kiev within one month, and either have a Ukrainian government that’s 100% allied with Russia, or even just annex the country to the Russian federation. The people of Ukraine have shown themselves, outside of the fascists and neonazis serving in the militia “army”, to be 55-70% in favor of Russia during this war, more than even Russian analysts have expected. While there’s been a few civilian deaths the number of non-combatant civilian deaths caused by Russians can be counted on two hands, while there have been hundreds caused by Ukrainian soldiers.

It is one of the best fought and executed wars in the last 200 years by Russia, and one of the most merciful.

There are two reasons why the SS eventually decided to switch from killing on location to centralized extermination.

First, the Jews were extremely loved by everyone else, so there was a chance that the whole Polish village, or Ukrainian village, or Romanian village, would rise up in defense of their beloved Jews.

Second, the SS were extremely concerned with erasing any evidence that would lead to them. Like the whole German people, the SS was working on the premise that, any time soon, they will be defeated and judged by international tribunals. The Germans wouldn’t even start a war unless they knew they expected to be defeated. For most of the time, they were busy making up alibies, in order to avoid the US prosecutors.

I am kind of surprised Putin is not as scared of US prosecutors as the SS was.

OT: UPDATE: Sacramento Police Say at Least 5 Gunmen Involved in Gang-Related Mass Shooting

Five gunmen?!?! That would explain the higher than average kill rates for black mass shootings.

Has there ever been in the past a gang altercation that involved that many gunmen?

Daviyonne. Another black criminal act, another black name no one’s ever heard of before.

I also wonder what poor 57-year-old Melinda Davis was doing there at 2am.

——

SACRAMENTO (CBS SF) — Police in Sacramento released additional info Wednesday on their investigation into Sunday morning’s horrific mass shooting, announcing the number of shooting suspects has risen to at least five and that the incident appears to be gang related.

In a release issued late Wednesday morning, the Sacramento Police Department said detectives were continuing to piece together details regarding the April 3 mass casualty incident that injured 18 victims, including six fatally.

“Evidence in the case indicates that at least five shooters fired guns during the shooting, and that an exchange of gunfire took place between at least two groups of men,” the release stated.

While three people have been arrested in connection with the shooting — brothers Smiley Martin and Dandrae Martin as well as Daviyonne Dawson — so far the arrests have been described by authorities as related to the Sunday morning shooting with none of the suspects in custody facing homicide charges.

Police noted that as detectives continue to identify shooters and weapons involved in the deadly Sunday morning incident, the number of identified shooters may grow to more than five.

Police also said there are more indications “that gang violence is at the center of this tragedy.”

Authorities said they were unable to elaborate on exactly what the gang affiliation of the individuals involved might be as of Wednesday, gangs and gang violence are inseparable from the events that drove these shootings.

“This tragedy downtown is a very public example of what families in many of our neighborhoods know too well,” Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester said in the release. “The suffering inflicted by gang violence does not limit itself to gang members. It spills over to claim and shatter innocent lives and harm our entire community.”

Police say they continue to receive a steady flow of information from the public on the deadly shooting. As of Wednesday, nearly 200 videos, photographs and other pieces of evidence have been submitted and are being analyzed. The information is coming through our community evidence portal utilizing a QR code embedded in department websites and social media, and shared by news media.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2022/04/06/update-sacramento-police-say-at-least-5-gunmen-involved-in-gang-related-mass-shooting/

Are you OK with private citizens owning Javelins?

No. But tanks aren’t committing the ‘SS crimes’ that have got you unconvincingly all worked up.

Again, you have set this up as heads I win, tails you lose situation.

You set up your own loss, Jack. Your anti-execution position is inconsistent with your “government monopoly on force” stance.

If Oleg and his neighbors are all executed by the Russians because they are bearing rifles (WITH ammo) then the Russian are justified in executing them as irregulars out of uniform – it’s not even a war crime.

They cannot be “executed” if they are armed and resisting. Sure, they can be killed in combat—that’s a normal part of war. My advice—kill your enemies and don’t get captured. YMMV.

If they DON’T get rifles (which BTW are legal in Ukraine)

What kind are legal? I specifically wrote “combat rifles” which in Ukraine would mostly be AK-variants. Your source mentions unspecified “rifles and shotguns”.

but because ownership of rifles is legal in Ukraine so I assumed you were talking about their restrictive handgun laws

I literally specified “combat rifles”, liar.

whatever your obsession is has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is that the Russians are executing unarmed non-combatants in cold blood

That literally could not happen if the population was armed with combat rifles.

But you would rather the civilians not own the rifles. Sick.

I did not learn much about the Spanish-American War in school, but if you are interested in a good read about the war, I will recommend “The War Lovers” by Evan Thomas. A war sought, actually lusted after, by Teddy Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Cabot Lodge. Who doesn’t love a “good war?”

Actor Penn suggests America is too circumspect about deploying its nuclear arsenal:

“Even countries that have nuclear weapons can remain intimidated to use them, and we are seeing that now with our own country. And I fear what that legacy is going to be." pic.twitter.com/jL3Zk0m9Rh

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) April 6, 2022

The political realignment Trump started is amazing to watch. Unfortunately it seems to appear less strongly in economic populism in the GOP than it does the reinvigorated migration of neocons back to the Dems.

Sean Penn in 2022 is on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News complaining the US is too hesitant to use nukes against Russia.

Imagine trying to explain this to Sean Penn circa 2003.

The implication to me is that Penn believes (If not rationally then emotionally) Russiagate and thinks nuking Russia is just what has to be done in revenge for Trump winning in 2016.

You are right. Why would that woman be an actress? Was Nayirah an actress?

When Stormy Daniels said “oh, Donnie, you are so strong”, she meant it!

Jack D is not dumb, but he is unwise. He should learn to cut his losses and not keep digging when he is in a hole. But that goes for many people who overestimate their own intelligence and/or those whose pride (“I have to win!”) exceeds their knowledge/capabilities.

What was Bucha called in the Soviet days?

Of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocent stroll are actually taking an innocent stroll (or actually desperately seeking food because they are starving or trying to make it back home or to a cellar, etc.).

Yes and there men in New York without criminal records who were being stopped and questioned, some of those individuals had it happen every single week. In Normandy they demolished every church tower because they became convinced that was where any shots were coming from. The Russians never saw the Ukrainians shooting at them. In a war zone after the invaders burnt out tin coffins litter a street a man under 60 out of his house is a target by virtue of Zelensky’s own decree, his government’s instructions, and the type of warfare Ukrainians chose to wage. That street with the bodies in the street was down to one sniper

It appears that Putin’s bullshit about being there to eliminate Nazis is actually being believed by Russian soldiers. They are going around shooting Ukrainian civilians because they are convinced that all Ukrainians are Nazis and it’s OK to execute Nazis

Since 2014 there have been are hundreds of thousands of refugees from Donbass in Russia, and they have many very unpleasant stories; it is not just propaganda. Ukraine is not genocidal, but it is an integral nationalist state in which an ethnic Russian who won the presidency twice was first prevented from taking office (2004) and then deposed in a coup (2014). Ukrainian integral nationalism is different to Hitler’s (or Meir Kahane’s) brand, but it’s not entirely unfair unfair to call it ‘Nazi’.

Again, what people are doing here (the Russians love when you do this) is conflating American mistakes with Russian intentional acts.

Haditha killings were quite deliberate killings of bystanders, people in a car and two nearby houses including elderly women and children. just because they were handy. They killed the first Iraqis they saw. though the were innocent and had obeyed instructions. Any Iraqi running could be shot dead, and how many times was that explanation false but not exposed as such?. The Russian army units in Ukraine may have a lot of such incidents but they have taken far higher casualties than any US force did in Iraq.

In the Yeltsin era America was virtually directing his election and America and Germany were paying off Russian government to compromise the national interest by means of international loan that were disappearing into personal Swiss bank accounts. Putin rose to power because he was an relatively honest and unambitious administrator. There little reason to see his analysis of America’s actions as idiosyncratic for a Russian. Ought America to have not pushed Russia so hard, AOTBE i would say America did the right think, but the trouble is it is not just the US and Russia, there is China. When Medvedev said the other day ‘The goal is for the sake of the peace of future generations of Ukrainians themselves and the opportunity to finally build an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok’ he is really talking about the export of Chinese products. The crucial criterion for following containment as a strategy was that George F. Kennan made a central pillar of hisargument, the Soviet Union had weakness that would only become more crippling as time went on. That is not true of China because their expansion will be commercial-economic so military containment of China in the way Russia was contained is going to be difficult enough without leaving Russia with a feeling of fear and loathing toward America for a total humiliation in Ukraine as things are going Russia is likely to suffer a catastrophic defeat and America what in the not tooo distant future will be seen as a pyrrhic victory.

There are evil bastards in every army along with others who act according to justice no matter what. Most Russian soldiers are like everone else dependent on the circumstances.The Russian army’s officers are like everything else in their army not very good and the bad apples may be not kept under control, but I don’t think you can make out that Russians are bad people or even that their state is misdirected. Putin in my opinion was well aware that invading Ukraine would being his leadership and even the existence of the Russian state into question. It beggars belief that he thought he could conquer a de facto member of Nato with 40 million people without getting a reaction very much like he has got. I happen to think that Putin knew it would be an extreme risk, but felt it was right for Russia in the final analysis. So he decided to do it, no matter what.

The CIA ran a torture facility in the middle of Bucharest. Care to explain how could this be an “unintentional” mistake?

the sound of the women’s newspapers slapping against driveways resembled gunshots

There is an apocryphal story that the L.A. Times once killed a woman’s dog – literally. Supposedly the delivery person threw the paper on the woman’s lawn and inadvertently hit the dog, killing him instantly.

(This was back during the days when the Sunday paper ran several hundred pages.)

But evidently someone at the Times investigated the matter and determined that the delivery person ran over the dog.

Agree, except for maybe the first clause. 🙂

If Putin had managed to arrange a couple million Syrian young men to invade Ukraine, one gets the impression that all our government and “journalist” establishment would be blabbing about the “diversity is our greatest strength” and how “Ukraine needs immigrants”.

Belarusian President Lukashenko did more or less exactly that last year to Poland: scrape up a bunch of third world migrants and launch them against the EU’s border. There was an iSteve take on it a month ago. And yes, the “journalist” establishment did manage to weave it into their standard white supremacy narrative.

There’s little evidence that “the people of the Donbass” want any particular one thing.

Well, there’s the 2014 referendum where they voted for independence. Of course, the usual suspects claimed vote fraud, but the result was broadly in line with what independent polls showed, so whatever the irregularities were, they were less than what put the current US regime in power.

“The Russians tried for years to get the Kievan government to stop shelling the ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk.”

As I noted in an upthread comment, that’s not a narrative that holds much traction in Donetsk and Lugansk, outside the paid spokesmen of the collaborationist-parties inside those breakaway-regions. Even those pro-Russian parties condemned this invasion (at least publicly) so as not to antagonize their membership.

That should tell you all you need to know that even their own voters don’t buy the “neo-Nazis are shelling the children of Donbass!” narrative the way it has been framed in the Russian media and its various re-broadcasters. They see the whole Donbass mess as much more of a Putin problem.

Removed. 404.

A friend of mine briefly considered joining the Ukrainian foreign legion. (My friend is fairly based by millennial standards, but he got caught up in the frenzy in the early days of the war.)

He has an extensive collection of firearms, but he was informed that he would not be allowed to bring any of his own weapons. This lessened his enthusiasm tremendously.

“Well, there’s the 2014 referendum where they voted for independence.”

And a sizable shift away from Russia and Putin since then. Donbass, under Putin’s henchmen, has not become the utopia the fanboys make it out to be and it has become increasingly clear that the primary problem for that is the thuggery of those INSIDE its barbed wire borders, as opposed to any alleged shelling from outside.

Come on, even the collaborations parties condemned Putin’s invasion. Even the more deluded fanboys admitted as much. That should tell you something.

Exactly! Everyone who lives comfortably inside modern America lives on conquered land.

And we could say the same thing about every nation on earth.

“It is one of the best fought and executed wars in the last 200 years by Russia, and one of the most merciful.”

That’s awesome! Praise be! In that case, if what you say is all true, then mission accomplished. That means all the Russians can just scurry back on home right now and receive their hero’s welcome. Putin can assure them that he’s gotten everything he wanted from this war and more, and it was all a smashing success. And who’s going to question that? Navalny? Zhirinovsky?

And I’m sure that from this point onward, the people of Mariupol and cities like that will fondly cherish the memory of the last time their brothers from up North ventured down for a visit. Thanks so much, all you Russian “brothers”!

Does anyone else think that “itchy trigger finger” is probably a corruption of “twitchy trigger finger”?

On the cyclist, I think that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are a pretty miserable bunch. Sure, they are “professional soldiers,” not conscripts, but how many conscripts do you think were pressured into signing contracts? I’ll bet the Russian army can put a lot of pressure on 18-year-olds away from home for their first time and in a military camp in a hostile country, don’t you think?

There’s also the matter of the low prestige and living standards of the Russian military. At least under the Soviets, kids of respectable Party members did not end up thrown in with the regular draftees. I’ll bet Russia today is corrupt enough that bribes can keep your kid from being drafted. As for the pros, I am strongly willing to bet they are a pretty scuzzy bunch. Men with brains or the ability to learn a skill get out of the army as quickly as they can.

Lots of miserable people want to make other people miserable too. So, they might have shot the cyclist just because they saw someone who was doing something normal.

People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates

…..you’re joking ,right…….2008-2016 and right now?

Name one war where the US went to war over its borders.

I could be wrong but I believe the correct answer is still zero.

The political realignment Trump started is amazing to watch. Unfortunately it seems to appear less strongly in economic populism in the GOP than it does the reinvigorated migration of neocons back to the Dems.

Totally. One almost thinks that Trump’s tacky, gold-plated, rude-dude meets racist uncle persona so perfectly calculated to trigger our ugly nerd power elite (or whatever passes for one) is so incongruous in conjunction with his principled commitment to Russian detente (and why stick through thick-n-thin with this one side-issue out of any of them?) that the only explanation for it must be that Trump is a brilliant concoction of the CIA, designed to make normally counter-cultural, peanick sh!tlib normies stop worrying and love the bomb as otherwise the bullies win and kindness is not everything.

Show me the evidence that the people who were murdered were enemy combatants.

According to President Zelensky, every Ukrainian man 18-60 is a combatant.

(According the Western media, every Ukrainian woman 14-80 is a combatant and superhero, but I doubt the Russians take that seriously, to their dismay perhaps.)

Oh good. I’m glad you cleared that up. What’s next for you? You gonna get up from behind the keyboard and go make a sandwich or something?

That’s not how it works under the Geneva convention. You’re saying that genocide is OK.

Fascinating how you’ve been bamboozled into believing that the Ukraine and its people are decidedly pro-GloboHomoNATO.

“No body, no crime” rules, there were no remains of Dorner to be found in the burnt out cabin.

Dorner’s DL was found on a sidewalk near the San Diego airport, much like Saudi passports falling from the sky on 9/11/2001.

Maybe the Russians could have leveled their house (with tanks) from a distance but that’s not “like the SS” specifically.

That’s what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto. In any case they would have been just as dead.

“People in America live a sheltered life. They literally cannot imagine how a criminal regime operates. There is nothing in the American experience you can liken this to.”

Ever heard of the imposition of slavery by the criminal regime known as slaveholders? I was told by the fine commenters here that your own brethren partook in such a dastardly activity. Then again, what do they know, right?

it deserves more serious consideration than it is likely to get today. But perhaps its time will come.

This is a polite way of someone is a crank who holds eccentric views that are out of step with mainstream scholarship.

If these people were killed on or before March 30th, then this is a Russian atrocity.

That does not follow. It seems now that some of these bodies were killed before March 30th (by Ukrainians) and then dramatically placed in the open (again, by Ukrainians) in various states of rigor mortis and decomposition in order to make a nice photo-op that made it appear that the Russians had done it.

“Bucha: More Like the SS or the LAPD?”

Bucha: More like Jussie Smollet or Duke Lacrosse (e.g. prominent examples of hoaxes the MSM foisted on US without fully doing the research or investigation to ascertain the actual facts of each case).

That Steve isn’t doing his usual and skeptical noticing on Bucha the way he has in the past regarding Smollet, or Virginia Tech U, is a bit odd, to say the least. At this point in time, we’re really expected to just blindly accept the Narrative of Russians totally evil, and Ukrainians totally good, no ulterior motives behind the scenes, etc. Just take the MSM’s word for it that this is how it actually all went down.

Seriously?

This war in the Ukraine is a people’s war and every civilian on the street is a possible spy who can call in strikes with their cell phone. If they’re not a spy they may be militia in plain clothes. The Russians are badly trained and badly lead and are facing attacks from all directions around the clock from attackers that they can’t identifiy.

Under these circumstances many innocents will get killed. It’s part of the equation. It’s one reason the charge of waging a war of aggression is prosecuted as a war crime. You create a set of circumstances that make random violence against unavoidabe.

If only we held trials for those who didn’t make a reasonable effort to contain or prevent a war. Putin would be at the head of the list but there’s a lot people in the US who should at least get community service, like everyone who urged confronting and destablizing Russia.

Look at the refugees and destruction. Unavoidable? Maybe, but in this case there truly was no such thing as a bad peace and a good war.

Ha, what people or nation would you say you’re loyal to?

Let’s also remember claims that the Iraqis destroyed Kuwaiti baby incubators in the first gulf war before we fire up Nuremberg II.

I think that Sean Penn’s point was that for the MAD doctrine to work each side must be convinced that the other side is determined not to blink. Russia is openly threatening to use nuclear weapon while all what the West is saying is that it wants to avoid WWIII. Has the West blinked already? This show of hesitancy to use nuclear weapons erodes the foundation of the MAD doctrine which actually will make WWIII more likely. Thus Biden instead of saying we do not want WWIII from the game theory position he should have said “bring it on” to preserve the appearance of commitment to the MAD doctrine and he should have reasserted that the West’s aid to Ukraine will not be compromised in any way by Russia’s opinions on that matter but it is and will be predicated only on the West’s commitment to the preservation of Ukraine sovereignty.

This is a polite way of someone is a crank who holds eccentric views that are out of step with mainstream scholarship.

And yet the Second Amendment is considered a restraint on the States NOW so Halbrook’s consistant thesis of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporating the Second Amendment as applying to the States is now accepted.

One of the little mysteries of Ukraine seems to have been solved.
There have been many reports of helicopters flying into Mariupol that have been shot down by the Russians. One explanation was that they were attempted rescue missions of high value foreigners trapped in the steelworks..
France was the usual suspect.

Turns out it may not have been a frog they were seeking to smuggle out. The Russians seemed to have captured an American Major-General.

The American and Western forces kept sending helicopters only to have them shot down before reaching the steel mill. Then the Russians changed tactics. The tactical change was to allow the helicopters to reach the steel mill and land in open areas on the steel mill grounds, and then shoot them down when they tried to leave. They allowed, over time, 8 to land and pick up people from inside the steel mill. 2 of them got away, but in one of the six they shot down they found General Cloutier.

https://rense.com/general96/us-major-general-captured-by-russians.php

I hadn’t made the connection with Fiddler yet but I’m glad you did–it really does explain a lot of what we’re going through right now. People like Nuland, Kristol and Frum are fighting their great-grandfather’s war and exacting holy revenge on the Cossacks. Zelensky is Tevye now and we should be honored for the opportunity to perish in a nuclear holocaust to avenge a self-important dairy man who wasn’t shown proper respect back in 1905. “If you please, Reb Tevye, pardon me Reb Tevye…” wow what a load of Jewish BS.

Show me one.

The Ukrainian military has killed thousands of civilians in the Donbas since 2014. Western media have not taken much interest in it, but no one denies that it has been happening.

some unofficial militia type guys

“Unofficial militia type guys” such as Azov are officially part of Ukrainian military per President Zelensky.

Video Link
I’m putting the videos of war crimes and atrocities committed by Ukrainian military below the MORE tag since some of them are very graphic.

There are many more like these, but the MSM, YouTube, and Twitter prefer to keep them under wraps, so you may not have heard about them.

This show of hesitancy to use nuclear weapons erodes the foundation of the MAD doctrine which actually will make WWIII more likely.

Hold the presses! Someone call the Fields Medal committee! Surely we live in an age of wonders and omens because you have just proven Sean Penn must be smarter than John von Neumann!! For 70+ years we’ve groaned beneath the burden of Budapest Louie’s bumbling, mathematically flawed conception of Mutually Assured Self-Destruction which Spicoli Jeff has just brought level to the earth in one single masterstroke!

While previously we had all just assumed MAD worked only in the context of a threat to national security existential or near-existential in nature, Sean Penn has just shown us that MAD can be applied to all sorts of awkward, everyday social situations. 3rd world, sh!tty country no one in America ever brings up outside of SEINFELD throw-back references but with its hand deep in the President’s pocket invaded? Get MAD! Sergey Lavrov squeeze past you down the airplane aisle and not turn around so as to slide past @ss-to-@ss, but has the effrontery to go d!ck-to@ss like some barbarian? Get MAD! Vladimir Putin take the last Olive Garden breadstick when he’s already had 3? Get MAD!

The point isn’t that you won’t use them, the point is you won’t use them in this case, there is always something you are prepared to go to the mat for, turning Ukraine into a NATOstan isn’t it. Obama was forced to admit this years ago when badgered by Jeffrey Goldberg about why he wasn’t more aggressive with Russia. He calmly explained that of course the political status of Ukraine didn’t, couldn’t and shouldn’t mean anything close to what it meant to Russia.

https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2016/03/the-obama-doctrine-the-atlantics-exclusive-report-on-presidents-hardest-foreign-policy-decisions/473151/

Therefore the US would always lose a war of escalation with Russia over this. That includes how prepared it is to use nukes or rather risk a MAD situation. The US has zero interest in this. The question is, then why did we get here? The US put itself in a position of endless escalation until it had to have it’s president state explicitly several times that he was not prepared to risk MAD for this situation. But Sean Penn is intimating that he thinks this is something the US should be prepared to go to nuclear war for and thus thinks the US looks weak rather than reassuringly somewhat sane. He is disappointed and doesn’t understand that the US seeks only to turn this into a quagmire for Russia and has zero concern for how Ukraine looks after this and is not prepared to put US soldiers in a shooting war with Russian ones because the US intervention in Ukraine since 2014 wasn’t defensive, it was offensive.

Are the neocons just total lunatics at this point who have embraced a logic of never giving an inch and always provoking to the point that if nobody stops them they get us into insane messes like this?

You’re saying that genocide is OK.

You’re straw-manning, preceded by an appeal to authority.

The Ukrainian commander-in-chief created a morally ambiguous situation for the Russian military. That doesn’t make every Ukrainian man a target, but it does make them potential combatants.

Well, sure HA you are right since after 2014 the Kievan government of the Borderlands gave carte blanche to Azov etc to purge or at least drive underground pro-Russian ‘Borderlanders’.

The Borderland has had to actively prevent military age (widely understood) males from leaving the country. The Borderland has it’s thugs shooting military aged men trying to leave conflict zones with their families. The Borderland has had it’s thugs held civilians in a city under siege, at times at gunpoint, in order to use them as human shields.

The Borderland has repeatedly lied in its propaganda campaigns, from Snake Island to today. It has tried with its lies to drag my country (yours?) into a war with a nuclear armed foe.

In contrast, the brave soldiers of Donetsk and Lugansk, ill equipped, have tied up significant forces of the Kievan government, and indeed even advanced both to link up with Russian forces in the South and on the fortified positions from which the Borderlanders have rained down indiscriminate artillery fusillades for eight years, on and off.

Well, The Maine was a false flag

The Maine presumably blew up from an accidental explosion in the magazines. So I guess it falls into a category you might call “opportunistic false flags,” in which the event wasn’t planned but was nevertheless pinned on the enemy after-the-fact. The Gulf of Tonkin is another example. Jumpy radar operators and gunners started shooting at ghosts and then reported they had repelled an attack by the North Vietnamese navy. After the dust settled it was pretty clear no attack had actually happened. But the initial reports were too good of an opportunity to let go to waste.

The Reichstag Fire was another of these. It was a real arson by a lone commie. But the event was spun up and attributed to a giant conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks that was used to justify a nation-wide political repression. But when the Germans needed a pretext to attack Poland they went full-blown premediated false flag by staging an attack on their own radio station with SS guys wearing Polish uniforms.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Gestapo executed Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried Upper Silesian[7] Catholic farmer, known for sympathising with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo and dressed to look like a saboteur, then rendered unconscious by an injection of drugs, then killed by gunshot wounds.[8] Honiok was left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was then presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.[9] Several prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were drugged, shot dead on the site and their faces disfigured to make identification impossible.[4][6][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident

In the 1950’s the Israelis got busted running a false flag operation that bombed Western targets in Egypt and blamed the terrorism on the Islamic Brotherhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair#:~:text=As%20part%20of%20the%20false,several%20hours%20after%20closing%20time.

The history of “false flags” and “false false flags” seems like a perfect topic for a Ron Unz essay.

There hasn’t been another referendum since 2014, but since you already know what’s in everyone’s heart in the Donbas, there is no need: they can just ask HA!

Not just every man..the Borderland government was issuing weapons to all comers.

There was a long article in the WSJ about a woman mayor of the Borderland state who appears to have been executed by Russian forces with her husband and adult son. Horrid. Exept that the reporters can’t stop themselves from narrating her heroic exploits in informing Borderland forces of Russian positions via cell phone and her husband’s doing the same. Which of course makes them combatants. (Don’t know about the son)

Every interview there I’ve seen has featured people speaking perfect and not even south inflected Russia, which gives the lie to the Borderland government’s linguistic censuses. I’m guessing it was Bucha in Soviet days as well.

The 2nd Amendment guys tell me that the militia consists of all able bodied men. Therefore you belong to the militia and it’s ok for the Russians to kill you.

weird lacunae in the official story

Exactly. If you have the evidence to dispel any doubt why not put it forward: e.g., forensic evidence establishing cause of death, time of death, victim’s identity, and at least a plausible motive.

It’s a big ask to expect thinking people (as opposed to the MSM) to accept that the Russians are engaging in the cosmically counter-productive practice of just killing random civilians and leaving them strewn about in the middle of the street, because that’s just “who they are.”

Do you know any slaves personally? No because we abolished slavery 150 years ago.

There have been false flags in the past so therefore everything that happens is a false flag. Nothing is ever real, especially not things that you don’t like and wish to ignore.

“The US has zero interest in this.”

They had plenty of interest when Ukraine was “encouraged” to give up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees. That led to an actual document being signed — unlike those fictitious “not one inch Eastward” NATO agreements or handshake deals that were allegedly made at some point (in the absence of any NATO official, I might add).

Russia and China have already indicated their word means nothing on a document like that and their many trolls and enablers have assured us that this is how it should be because big powers are allowed break agreements whenever they feel like, or something. (And let’s remember that the next time anyone expects Ukraine to believe any agreement Putin or his henchmen or China signs.) The remaining question, then, is what America’s word means on a document like that, and based on the flood of weapons Ukraine has received, it’s not totally worthless, even if some would say it’s not enough.

Oddly the very same fanboys who tell us trusting America to keep its word is a recipe for disaster (to the extent that any country that thinks otherwise deserves to be turned into rubble) are the very same ones who tell us that violating that security assurance is no big deal.

In any case, let’s dispense with the lie that encouraging a nuked-up country to give that up wasn’t in our interest. It was and it is. Had Russia played this the way adults do (e.g. Nuland, who managed to sway the Ukrainians without a single tank rolling towards Kiev and without swiping a single acre of Ukraine), we would never have had to do anything else.

As it is, we made a promise, and now the bill is due.

“Do you know any slaves personally? No because we abolished slavery 150 years ago.“

Don’t be naive, Jack. We’re all slaves to the machinations of the elite. You’ve made that implication clear.

There have been false flags in the past so therefore everything that happens is a false flag.

I said no such thing. But our very own Deep State warned that we should expect false flags in this war and they are the authorities, no?

I also forgot that “Assad gassing his own people” was almost certainly a false flag. https://mronline.org/2021/11/25/prestigious-weaponry-expert-censored-after-demonstrating-that-a-deadly-poison-gas-attack-blamed-on-the-syrian-government-was-really-a-false-flag-operation-by-u-s-funded-terrorists/

Also, remember the alleged assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush by Saddam Hussein. As Scott Ritter notes, we captured all the Iraqi intelligence agents and archives in 2003, and their docs showed they never had such a plan. (See 50:00~54:00 of interview). It was apparently disinformation/false flag by the Kuwaitis and U.S. Deep State elements to preempt Clinton’s lifting of sanctions.

Nazis beating the shit out of Russians in a major battle around Kharkov for the fourth consecutive time. Just rename it Mansteinberg at this point.

Commenter Jack D sounds like an unhinged leftist who has embraced National Bolshevism.

Let me quote the great prophet Lennon:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Livin’ life in peace
You
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Why in the HELL would I care about Ukraine’s borders when my own are deemed illegal, racist, and now non existent. I might bother to care at all about Ukraine, when my own nation has a border. A real one. One enforced. And I’m not on the hook for paying for the extra 100 million “migrants” that Obama is pushing down our throats.

As for who/what/where/how/why, I’m suspicious of everything. I’ve been lied to over and over: Martin Luther King, Tawana Brawley, Rodney King, Duke Lacrosse, Haven Monahan, “White Hispanic” Zimmerman, Big Guy’s son’s laptop, “Two weeks to crush the curve,” “masks don’t work,” masks work wonders, vaccine is dangerous, vaccine is perfect, you need 11 boosters, toddlers must wear masks, Covid did not come from a lab leak, Fauci is blameless with no conflict of interest, BLM is perfect and incorruptible, the oceans will dry up in ten years (this in 1988). Lies lies lies all lies. Obvious ones too. So I don’t believe the media, don’t believe Ukraine who have been caught lying constantly: Ghost of Keeeevvvvvvvv! and Snake Island and I don’t believe Russia.

And since everyone is lying to me, I just don’t care. I don’t care who did it, or why, its not my problem.

I do see how wrong Jack D is on pretty much everything. One thing not un-noticed by Deplorables and other Dirt People is how effective rifles firing intermediate cartridges are in an urban setting. How “hugging the enemy” as the Soviets did in Stalingrad, the NVA in Vietnam, Hezbollah with Israel in Lebanon, Afghanis and Iraqis did with US BIG ARMY, neutralizes artillery and air and armor. When its dudes shooting at each other with rifles over rubble, the group with the best skills, determination, and numbers wins. Since all that other stuff cannot be used without killing their own people in great quantities.

It took twenty years, but illiterate goat herders on motorbikes conquered Afghanistan from us in at the end, not even a week. As we fled in terror.

Not even Obama, manuevering now to replace Brandon as President via the Vice Presidency then Brandon’s resignation, is going to nuke a Major American City to get at the Dirt People living there. Not even him.

… if the US is going to allow its major city central districts to be burnt …

Since that has already happened, who, in their right mind, is going to respect U.S. sovereignty.

And a poisonous frog dies when it is eaten by a predator. Nevertheless, making your own destruction a costly affair for your destroyer remains an effective strategy, as shown by multiple taxa which all evolved to the same strategy under differing conditions.

You’re descending into oh-be-de-why-dang territory now.

They had plenty of interest when Ukraine was “encouraged” to give up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees.

You know the Ukraine never had those nukes. They were Soviet nukes always under Russian control. This silly argument keeps getting trotted out.

Beyond that, do US still doesn’t have an interest in this current conflict and you are avoiding that.

Do you give Steve a lot of donations so he put you on auto approval? You’re able to post hundreds of times and create the illusion of “winning“ arguments because no one can respond to you.

Why haven’t you changed your online “profile” to Bonxie, a kleptoparasite?

It is much more apropos to your commenting than aggrandizing yourself as a crow.

I thought I was doing you a favor by suggesting bonxie to you a while back.

Apparently, you do not appreciate my efforts.

Please reconsider.

Newspapers thrown from a truck and landing on driveways do make a little thump sound. But nothing like a rifle or hand gun shot. Chris Dorner was an affirmative action LAPD cop. He was so corrupt he was fired even if he was a sacred highest caste affirmative action African American

Hannity, is that you? Clamoring for war with Russia? Another neocon shill?

Oh, it’s Ha ha ha again, clamoring about this “promise” that NATO should invite Ukraine into the club.

Question: Currently, is Ukraine part of NATO?

Answer: No, it is not.

Therefore, it’s not our fight, period.

As this is the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where nuclear missiles were being proposed to be placed in Cuba, about 100 miles away from the US, the parallel is obvious to those over the age of six.

Then: the Western Hemisphere is the US’s backyard, and the USSR should stay out.

Now: Ukraine is Russia’s backyard (sphere of influence) and the US/NATO should stay out.

Ukraine’s getting what they deserved. Putin has been warning the US/NATO for nearly 20 yrs not to come close to Moscow (much as JFK warned USSR not to place nuclear missiles in Cuba).

It’s fairly simple, Ha ha ha. We stay out of Russia’s sphere of influence (their backyard) and they stay out of ours.

And with that, you’ve just admitted that you don’t know any US slaves, literally. Slavery as an institution was abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment.

The incident could also remind us of another famous event in Iraq — the infamous January 2005 Tel Afar shootings, in which the little girl Samar Hassan was photographed by Chris Hondros and it became the face of the civilian casualties of the war [1].

In this case, spooked US soldiers lit up on an Iraqi family, killing the parents and permanently paralyzing one of the children, because the driver of the vehicle did not come to a full stop when they surprised their patrol in the late evening.

These Russians suddenly saw a cyclist appear from nowhere while the two lead tanks were looking off into the distance.

Indeed, there is actually a shot from one of the tanks that appears to have been done prior to the cyclist rounding the corner, as if they were already in some kind of engagement with an off-screen Ukrainian enemy. You can see this occur at roughly 1:28 of the infamous Bellingcat video [2].

It is perhaps the case that a significant amount of the civilian casualties that will occur in the war are from relatively more benign reasons than intentionally lighting them up or executing them as collaborators. I have long been open to the idea that the bulk of police shootings of unarmed criminals are likely because of this.

The great irony, of course, to all of this, is that the only war crimes done in Bucha so far that we have definitive proof of were just released today — the New York Times confirming the validity of a video in which the Ukrainian military shoots to death a Russian prisoner and, nearby, there are three other dead Russians with blood pooled on the ground around their heads [3]. This video will not get the attention it deserves precisely because of what you have stated: it does not benefit the narrative that the media tycoons and Western oligarchs want. They want a Lusitania.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2005_Tal_Afar_shootings
[2] https://nitter.snopyta.org/bellingcat/status/1511284174921076736
[3] https://news.yahoo.com/video-appears-show-ukrainian-soldiers-192219323.html?guccounter=1

I don’t do false choices.

That’s not a false choice. If I asked you , is a mango more like a peach or a potato, you could say, well it’s neither, a mango tastes like a mango but probably you would concede that it tastes more like a peach, because that has no political implications. There is nothing false about a choice like this.

But here you are just trying to dodge our gracious host’s perfectly valid question because it leads to further implications that you don’t like. First you try to deflect it onto me even though it was Steve’s question and then you say the question is not valid (you should take that up with Steve – how dare he post false choices!) – you’ll do anything not to give a straight answer. Others are screaming false flag or the Ukrainians do that too or the Americans do that too or my dog does that too. Anything not to have to deal with the implications of another genocide in the heart of Europe.

That’s what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto. In any case they would have been just as dead.

The Russian army can’t go door-to-door committing executions with only tanks. Russian tankers, in your scenario, would have to waste hundreds or thousands of tank rounds shooting at houses which may or may not be occupied, in a contested combat zone where every tank round is needed to fight the Ukrainian army. To round up civilians and commit executions, a force needs dismounted (exposed) infantry to kick down doors. That can’t be done (without huge losses) if the civilians have combat rifles.

Ukraine civilians being unarmed allowed Bucha to happen (as reported), and yet you still hold that governments should have a “monopoly on force”. Ridiculous.

Your just playing word games . Being a slave to the machinations of the elite in America is just a metaphor and is nothing like actual slavery.

Americans have such an easy life that they are prone to this. My father once told me a story about something a woman said to him when he was working in a butcher shop in the early 1950s, after he had come to America, something that stuck with him for decades. The woman must have somehow known or figured out that he was a Holocaust survivor (some of the guys had the number tattoos on their arm but he hadn’t stayed at Auschwitz long enough to get tattooed – the Russians were approaching and they shipped him on to Germany right away). And unprompted (except by her own feelings of guilt) she said to him, “You know, in America during the war we didn’t have it so great either. We had meat rationing, you know.” As if having meat rationing and being nearly starved to death as a concentration camp prisoner are really the same thing.

I keep seeing the same thing here – our government is “oppressive”, so therefore it’s really no different than the kind of reign of terror that exists when the Russians come to town and start executing people. You really have no idea what real oppression is.

“Your just playing word games . Being a slave to the machinations of the elite in America is just a metaphor and is nothing like actual slavery.”

I’m not the one playing word games. I’m simply relaying the sentiment of the unz commentariat, and something that you have also implied. You’re not fooling anyone.

“Americans have such an easy life that they are prone to this.”

Just stop. You as a Jew do not enjoy when others make sweeping generalizations about your kin, yet that is what you are doing here.

“I keep seeing the same thing here – our government is “oppressive”, so therefore it’s really no different than the kind of reign of terror that exists when the Russians come to town and start executing people. You really have no idea what real oppression is.”

“Real” oppression, huh. OK, is not the American elite oppressing white people by favoring non-whites and trannies? Is not the American elite oppressing white men by favoring white women and women of color? Because that is the attitude by a number of posters on this fine opinion webzine. Aren’t you being dismissive of their experiences with “real oppression”? Direct questions. Please answer, with reasoning.

Anything not to have to deal with the implications of another genocide in the heart of Europe.

Is Ukraine the “heart of Europe”? News to me! And has a genocide occurred, or just “implications”?

If you’re really anti-genocide, why don’t you advocate for arming civilians, as I’ve described? Such armed societies could still be wiped out by nukes, but they would be sure tough to occupy. But I think you rather savor the maudlin drama of Shoah-business vignettes of helpless civilians getting rounded up and whacked. You are sick.

Again with the guns. Can’t we get Abolish Public Schools in to complain about the public schools in Ukraine? I gave you the link – there are already something like 5 to 7 million guns in private hands in Ukraine or enough to equip most men of fighting age. These guns were of limited use when the Russian Army rolled in with armor.

Ukraine (at least the Kyiv region) was tough to occupy ( largely due to heavy weapons and official armed forces, not hunting rifles) but the Russians nevertheless managed to slaughter a lot of innocent civilians. Amateurs equipped only with rifles are simply no match for a modern army, especially a ruthless one that is willing to slaughter civilians indiscriminately. Had there been more partisan type activity, the Russians would have massacred even more civilians in their Nazi style – you kill one of ours, we shoot ten civilians. In Chechnya and in Syria there was heavy resistance and the Russians just pounded their cities into dust the same as the Germans did with the Warsaw Ghetto. Rifles vs. howitzers is no contest.

And what about people touching the hair of Black Women. Hair touching is WORSE than genocide. The dead no longer care but the anguish a Black Woman whose hair has been touched is endless.