Putin appeared paralyzed and unable to act in first hours of rebellion
I think it’s hilarious people are telling me I need some nuance and research, when I’m the one arguing there are differences between these sources and we need to evaluate them individually. And the person I responded to is arguing they’re all the same because, well, Journalism Bad I guess!
For the love of god read the comments before you reply.
The BBC isn’t state-owned. I know facts and nuance are tough but I do mention this in another comment. Go read it, you might learn something!
Yet certainly this has more nuance than that idiot who sees literally no difference between VOA, WaPo, BBC, and RT?
I never ran into this so I don’t really know what you’re talking about
Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they're all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you'll be good.
Of course they are; Florida’s primary concern seems to be indoctrinating people with conservative ideology, not actually educating them. Prayer U fits this mission precisely.
Yeah it's truly awful.
The worst part is how disingenuous it is. It clearly exists because Google:
- Wants to circumvent ad-blockers since ads are its primary business model, and
- Link butts in chairs more closely to web browsers so they can sell better advertisement targeting.
If they just said they were doing it because they're an advertising company and they need better ads targeted to people, at least they would have the benefit of honesty. And in that case you might actually get some big sites on-board; like if a site can explicitly say "I need to recoup hosting fees and the only way for me to do that is targeted advertising and that makes this easier/better" there's actually a value proposition there.
But don't pretend this is for the benefit of consumers or the Internet overall, and definitely don't cloak your meaning behind vague platitudes about identity authenticity.
Was that the point of my comparison, or was it simply to illustrate that politics is weird and the hand of justice slow?
There are many explanations for why Prigozhin is still free that aren't "the entire thing was fiction." The OP contains one, in fact, which is that Putin is hedged in by his own system of cronyism.
The BBC is quasi-state funded; its relationship with the government is not entirely cut-and-dry, since it is funded through a government act (though not directly by the UK itself).
What matters is whether the state has controls that prevent it from interfering with its media sources, and whether the those sources have missions respecting journalistic integrity. For the VOA and BBC this is entirely true, both have charters specifically mandating them to do that and their respective governments have very clear "hands-off" laws and policies (or did until Trump, the story does get a little complicated for the VOA recently).
RT on the other hand just publishes Putin's marketing emails.
I apparently think about it more critically than you do. All journalism is not propaganda; some is good in fact, and we can determine which is good and which is bad. And I at least have sources, whereas you have, uh... brain damage I guess?
Also that's a laughable and total misunderstanding of Voice of America's history, mission, and goals. It has a reputation basically everywhere as being as close to objective and reliable reporting as you can get outside the BBC. I guess you're just assuming it's bad based on its name, which is not great on the critical thinking front!
It is silly to compare Voice of America (an excellent journalistic institution with a great reputation), to the Washington Post (overall pretty good), to Russia Times (literal state propaganda). These are all very different sources and painting them with the same brush is just factually incorrect.
Here's some research for you:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rt-news/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/
As for your second point, Trump is still walking free and he tried to overthrow the government. These things apparently do happen.
It really shouldn’t be hard to figure out who they are
This is the kind of magical thinking I called out earlier. What happens if a member of the military accuses someone else of being a neo-Nazi because they simply don't like them? What recourse does that person have? Why wouldn't Russian agents inside the Ukrainian military simply accuse high-ranking members of the military of being neo-Nazis? You asserting that it's easy does not actually make this problem easy, and saying "just do it" ignores huge amounts of complications.
By force if necessary, this is a military not a company.
Okay, except they're probably armed and well-trained. What happens if they resist, or, even worse, band together and resist?
The reason I think this is important is I fear is the Azov battalion being hailed as heroes
I just don't understand how these problems can't be tackled after the war. Again, the problem solves itself if Ukraine fails to win. If Ukraine does win, this can all be tackled then and it won't impact Ukraine's ability to resist Russia's aggression.
You keep saying I don't have military experience, but how is any of what I've said wrong? How do you propose to find and filter out neo-Nazis? Do you truly believe all (or even most) of them are wearing their affiliations literally on their sleeves? Even if they are, how do you then suggest removing them? How will those actions help Ukraine rather than hurt it?
If you truly want Ukraine to succeed in the long run, why not tackle this after the war is over? As I've said, if you truly believe this is a problem then it certainly isn't going anywhere. And if Ukraine loses the problem is solved since the neo-Nazis will be dead regardless, having died in the fight against Putin's army.
That Twitter video was posted by the Ukrainian National Guard.
But so what? Does that make it true? Why do you believe it? Ukraine was governed by a pro-Russia Putin stooge less than a decade ago. Do you think it's possible there are people still in Russia (and outside it) that would push this angle as hard as possible even if it might not be factual? How would you determine what's true and not? Why are you using Twitter videos to do it? You accuse me of naiveté but there is simply not very good evidence for this, and extremely good reasons to be skeptical of it.
And no offense but what you describe is insane
What I describe is the only workable method of doing this. "Oh, just remove them" is magical thinking. How are you supposed to even find them? What do you do if some of them claim they're not? Obviously they're not civilians, but you still don't want to get it wrong because you'll alienate large swathes of your own (well-armed and well-trained) armed forces... and, again, for what? Why do it now when you can just do it after the war? Since if Ukraine loses, this debate won't matter at all anyway since everyone involved will be dead.
Dipping bullets in pig's blood doesn't make entire battalions fascist. Even if the Twitter videos are true (why do you think this is?) you wouldn't fire everyone involved. You'd have to investigate all the members of those units, a process that would cripple morale across the military and play directly into Putin's propaganda that he's invading Ukraine to get rid of its neo-Nazis.
Why not wait until after the war is won and then investigate? The problem isn't going anywhere and it won't matter at all if Ukraine loses, since everyone involved will be dead at that point anyway.
No offense, but I don't think one Twitter video that appears to show something that might have happened is very good proof that there's a neo-Nazi problem in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Especially, again, when this is the very point that Putin is basing his entire invasion on. With all of Russian intelligence at his beck and call, he could manufacture very, very good evidence. (Certainly better than this is which seems pretty weak to me at least.)
but “purging neo-Nazis” shouldn’t stop the military
You'd have to:
- Interview and investigate every member of the military. The bad apples won't simply volunteer that they are neo-Nazis, after all. This will disrupt the entire military while a huge bureaucratic apparatus investigates and processes all its members. People who simply don't like each other will accuse each other of being neo-Nazis. Some will manufacture evidence to get their enemies removed.
- Get rid of all the neo-Nazis. I imagine most won't go willingly and they're members of the military so many are probably highly-trained and well-armed. Even once you succeed, the units that they left will have morale problems. (All units will have morale problems because this process will be laborious and paranoid, and will take place while they are fighting an armed conflict against an external enemy, never mind internal investigators doubting each and every person's loyalties.)
- Have an appeals process (and thus an entire separate bureaucracy from the first bureaucracy) because the investigators and interviewers will get it wrong and there needs to be a way for innocent people, wrongly accused, to appeal their discharges.
So in the end, you've spent time and money to weaken your military, both in terms of membership and morale, to execute a witch hunt that basically vindicates the opposing army's reason to invade, to get rid of some small amount of neo-Nazis... instead of actually defending your country against that existential threat. Which (even if it exists) can be handled properly after the war is over.
I don't want to seem condescending either, but the ask here is totally outrageous, especially when there's no "long term" goal here, because as I said, failure to defend Ukraine will result in literally no "long term" goals for Ukraine mattering.
Because “kicking them out”:
- Presupposes there are enough actual neo-Nazis here to justify purging the armed forces, which is simply not demonstrated even in the OP article.
- Assumes said neo-Nazis are easy to purge and that doing so will not compromise Ukraine’s ability to fight while purges are on-going. If you purge the army of 10 neo-Nazis, but remove its ability to fight for that time period… is that worth it?
- Simply ignores that this entire narrative is literally seamless to Putin’s stated war aims and Russia’s wartime propaganda of Ukraine. Why do you think Russia is pushing this narrative too? Is it because it’s true, or because it’s a wildly overstated claim that is also a useful one for them to repeat constantly?
I have no idea how you can say “ignoring Ukraine’s issues will only hurt it in the long run” when they are literally fighting for their very existence fight now. Like, doing anything except fighting for its life certainly seems like THAT would hurt it in the long run, since if it loses this war there is no long run!
This is also totally ignoring the fact that Ukraine just elected a Jewish President after an anti-Russia pro-democracy revolution in which far-right parties acquired less than 4% of the total vote. In what sense does any of that justify systemic concern about neo-Nazis?
Oh I entirely disagree; I think comments like this are already falling into the trap.
Purity testing Ukraine and its armed forces is the point. Zero neo-Nazis is not a standard we’ve asked of any other armed forces on the planet, including our own — and we are currently at peace so it seems like something that would be easy for us to achieve. Asking Ukraine to both fight for its life and also perform rigorous ideological testing of its armed forces seems… well, pretty helpful for Russia, honestly.
And for what? Certainly there must be one or two neo-Nazis in there. But there isn’t anywhere near enough to call the entire kit and kaboodle neo-Nazi, or to justify the amount of time and effort involved. Or the slew of Putin-aligned articles like this where useful idiots “just ask questions” about neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Ultimately we have to ask if we are willing to accept some amount of negative externalities in Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. Asking Ukraine to commit collective suicide because they don’t pass an arbitrary purity test is too much of an ask. If a few isolated neo-Nazis are empowered as a result of Russia’s war of aggression, that is because of Russia forcing Ukraine into this situation, not because Ukraine is secretly super duper pro-neo-Nazi.
It always bothers me how neatly these talking points fold in to Russia’s propaganda blitz that “Ukraine = neo-Nazis” that they used to justify the invasion. (Spoiler alert; they’re not.)
I’m not sure what the utility of exploring this is even if it’s true. Does the existence of problematic Ukrainians or Americans justify Putin’s war of aggression? Does it mean Ukraine should not be able to defend itself?
Ultimately Ukraine has more pressing problems at this moment. And discussions like this that seem to justify Russian aggression suck air out of the room that could be used to talk about real, larger problems.
I know it’s tough to believe, but government-funded things aren’t necessarily bad. To discover if they’re bad you have to do more research than seeing who funds them!
It’s shocking I know.