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CharlesPhipps wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:14 am
It's unhelpful vicious stereotyping and kind of awful history but we have more important things to talk about in the thread.
Uh, no. It is VERY relevant to this thread because it is happening right now. It is the one of the cornerstones of what Ukrainians are experiencing.
And you have made a grave error here Charles. One I am afraid born of living in a peaceful society where many of these problems are behind us. The "It's hard for me to contemplate these nasty things so it must be a stereotype" trap. "It must be propaganda, lies, exaggerations. Surely it cannot be the truth. Not in the 21st century!"
No. No. No. No. This is the reality. The world is a harsh place that does not resemble the relative paradise that we live in. You need to look into the first hand accounts of the reality of the Russian army before you make such claims again. Stick your nose into Google and look into it as I have.
Fuzzy Necromancer wrote: ↑Mon Apr 11, 2022 12:17 am
I mean specifically the radioactive souvenier malarky.
Hopefully not more than the fools who took it.
I feel terrible while thinking these things and writing them down and yet... I don't shed a tear for a single person of Dresden. They had it coming. And not just on an individual level, but as a society. Being indoctrinated by state propaganda only goes so far. I accept children not being able to know better and mourn their lost chances of having a wonderful life. They truely can't know better. But the soldiers? Their women? Their families? They can know better. They choose not to. And they conciously choose to dehumanize the victims of their utterly broken society.
I shouldn't feel this way. Don't want to feel this way. I need to remind myself, that #notallrussians, but at the same time... #toomanyrussians
Makes me think of what the scientist said to Captain America;
So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own.
If you agree with that sentiment, then what does that say about the all those German soldiers? To me it makes them more of Hitler's victims people dying for a cause that was not theirs. Does that make Ukrainians bad for resisting? Of course not, but anyone who can't recognize the tragedy of Russian men dying for the sake of Putin's agenda, might not be as far removed from Putin as they would think.
CharlesPhipps wrote: ↑Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:14 am
It's unhelpful vicious stereotyping and kind of awful history but we have more important things to talk about in the thread.
Uh, no. It is VERY relevant to this thread because it is happening right now. It is the one of the cornerstones of what Ukrainians are experiencing.
And you have made a grave error here Charles. One I am afraid born of living in a peaceful society where many of these problems are behind us. The "It's hard for me to contemplate these nasty things so it must be a stereotype" trap. "It must be propaganda, lies, exaggerations. Surely it cannot be the truth. Not in the 21st century!"
No. No. No. No. This is the reality. The world is a harsh place that does not resemble the relative paradise that we live in. You need to look into the first hand accounts of the reality of the Russian army before you make such claims again. Stick your nose into Google and look into it as I have.
I take it you haven't been paying attention to a single one of my posts so I'll just let you speak all your statements about blah blah blah.
What have I been saying about the Russian army, btw?
I mean if we're going to play the "the first country the Nazis conquered was their own" card then the soldiers should be judged as full-on collaborators the same way every other conquered people who worked for them are judged. Personally that makes me a lot less sympathetic than I would be otherwise.
...for space is wide, and good friends are too few.
Of course, you could argue that it was individuals in that case. Then I would direct your attention to the behavior of the armies in the Croatian War, in which the mass rape of women, with the intent of producing pregnancies, was the explicit policy of at least one side.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." -- George Orwell, 1984
Of course, you could argue that it was individuals in that case. Then I would direct your attention to the behavior of the armies in the Croatian War, in which the mass rape of women, with the intent of producing pregnancies, was the explicit policy of at least one side.
I'd like to point out, that the Bosnian War and the NATO-intervention is a standard go-to talking point of Russians, which they use as a great example of NATO being an agressive, meddling force. The war-crimes comitted are denied by russians and their butt-buddies the Serbs, to this day.
"If you get shot up by an A6M Reisen and your plane splits into pieces - does that mean it's divided by Zero?
- xoxSAUERKRAUTxox
The Guardian did a good article on Putin and his hatred of Western democracies due to his admiration for Gaddafi and hatred of the Bosnia interventions.
There is a certain kind of mind, I've noticed, that reliably accuses others of what it itself is doing. Sometimes it seems like a conscious strategy, other times it's so blatant and overt that it's hard to believe it's anything but involuntary.
The psychological term for this is 'projection', and it's been recognized as far back as Freud (when he was actually doing good descriptive work).
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows." -- George Orwell, 1984
I've gotta say, even for what a clown show the invasion has been getting your flagship torpedoed and sunk by an enemy with no navy is quite an achievement. To my knowledge completely unprecedented in the history of warfare.
...for space is wide, and good friends are too few.
