Where Do Things End With Vlad? (h/t romad1)

[romad1]

 

[romad1]

The biggest story of the day so far

 

[romad1]

nice

 

[romad1]

Welp

[romad1]

well, we should expect this

 

[romad1]

good!

[romad1]

So, assuming the war does not end...a NATO member would be at war with Russia.   I think this would be a strong incentive for Ukraine to reclaim as much territory as possible as soon as possible and get Vladdie to the peace table.   Vladdie knows this though.  He needs the war to continue or he faces a real problem. 

[romad1]

Some reports of an amphibious landing near the dam that was destroyed.  Lots of twitter reports of sounds of gunfire and shelling. 

[romad1]

fwiw.

[romad1]

Considering the Russian and Chinese full-court press in Africa....this very generic description of "African leaders" visiting Bucha is very interesting and requires further digging.   My hope would be that some of the non-aligned World see what is happening as a major problem in international law/relations.   Not that there isn't terrible stuff going on at wholesale in Africa.

 

[romad1]

A bit more detail

https://eaworldview.com/2023/06/ukraine-war-african-leaders-kyiv-russia-attacks/

Quote

Explosions were heard as the four African leaders — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa; Senegal’s Macky Sall; Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema; and the President of the Union of Comoros, Azali Assoumani, the current chair of the African Union — arrived for a meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The African leaders, pursuing their initiative to end Russia’s 16 1/2-month invasion, are scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday.

Before their meeting with President Zelenskiy in Kyiv, the delegation visited the site of mass graves in nearby Bucha, where occupying Russian troops killed more than 400 civilians in March 2022.

South Africa - being a member of the Commonwealth has a foot in a couple worlds.  They warned Putin not to go to South Africa because of the ICC indictment.  They are cold to the West's various obsessions with terrorism as the ANC were called terrorists back in their own revolutionary phase. 

None of these countries appears to have heavy Wagner presence unless I'm missing something. 

[romad1]

different report about the President of Egypt being there.  Also, seeing that the Ugandan foreign ministry is there.

Edited June 16, 2023 by romad1

[romad1]

This might be wishful thinking -- but students of political psychology can clearly see that a spider if forming a web -- so the end result might not be that Vladdie is removed but it might be that a lot of blood is shed before he leaves the stage. 

.  

[chasfh]

On 6/12/2023 at 7:45 PM, gehringer_2 said:

you know, when I was a young anti-Vietnam and thus also anti-military-industrial complex guy, I though it was sort of quaint that organizations like the USMC spent so much time in their recruiting talking about honor, loyalty, and other virtues when the core reality of their purpose was to break things and kill people. What was the point?  

The point is to break down the human being and remake them as a willing and remorseless killer of people, and the way to do that is to reprogram them to see breaking things and killing people as an honorable defense of their country, even though the United States military has been going on offense exclusively for the last 150 years.

[romad1]

3 minutes ago, chasfh said:

The point is to break down the human being and remake them as a willing and remorseless killer of people, and the way to do that is to reprogram them to see breaking things and killing people as an honorable defense of their country, even though the United States military has been going on offense exclusively for the last 150 years.

The deceased defenders of Wake Island would like a word. 

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, romad1 said:

The deceased defenders of Wake Island would like a word. 

Although we claimed Wake Island, it was only to serve as an outpost for our burgeoning empire and no person has ever lived there as a native of it, so it was not an attack on the homeland, which is how people commonly perceive what it is that has to be “defended”, and in any event, we repaid the actual Japanese homeland and its civilians tens of thousands of times over for that.

[romad1]

2 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Although we claimed Wake Island, it was only to serve as an outpost for our burgeoning empire and no person has ever lived there as a native of it, so it was not an attack on the homeland, which is how people commonly perceive what it is that has to be “defended”, and in any event, we repaid the actual Japanese homeland and its civilians tens of thousands of times over for that.

Yes, we did.  It took the spirit of the bayonet to defeat Hirohito's armed forces.  

[romad1]

also, I spent 2 years NOT on offense in Germany defending the democracies during the 80s.  Say it wasn't worth it all you like.  Its not like Vladdie wouldn't have taken whatever inch was given him if we were not there in collective security. 

[romad1]

 

[chasfh]

6 minutes ago, romad1 said:

also, I spent 2 years NOT on offense in Germany defending the democracies during the 80s.  Say it wasn't worth it all you like.  Its not like Vladdie wouldn't have taken whatever inch was given him if we were not there in collective security. 

That’s a different version of defense, that of a country we went on offense to help conquer, and hearts and minds of which citizens we eventually won over (to some degree). Given the circumstances of the world at the time—even though that country did not attack our homeland directly, it seemed an inevitability they would were they not stopped—I myself would have made the decision to do that one 100 times out of 100.

I will spare you the long, long list of foreign lands our military invaded simply for territorial and capitalist gain.

[romad1]

3 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That’s a different version of defense, that of a country we went on offense to help conquer, and hearts and minds of which citizens we eventually won over (to some degree). Given the circumstances of the world at the time—even though that country did not attack our homeland directly, it seemed an inevitability they would were they not stopped—I myself would have made the decision to do that one 100 times out of 100.

I will spare you the long, long list of foreign lands our military invaded simply for territorial and capitalist gain.

You and I are probably not too far distant in outlook on these things.  I grant you that the oligarchy does want us to control the oil stocks of the middle east or the sugar production of Cuba.  And the military does have to very roughly grind civilians into potential killers.  Still, so long as a person like Donald Trump isn't pardoning war criminals we do try to manage our affairs with a semblance of order and rules.  

[chasfh]

5 minutes ago, romad1 said:

You and I are probably not too far distant in outlook on these things.  I grant you that the oligarchy does want us to control the oil stocks of the middle east or the sugar production of Cuba.  And the military does have to very roughly grind civilians into potential killers.  Still, so long as a person like Donald Trump isn't pardoning war criminals we do try to manage our affairs with a semblance of order and rules.  

No doubt. Utopian visions of a peaceful hand-holding society are beautiful, but they are also just visions. I may be anti-war in all but the most extreme circumstances—I was 100% against the Gulf War and the Iraq War from the word "go"—but I am also less utopian than I am pragmatist. There may be elements of utopianism we can work very, very, very hard to try to assimilate into our culture, and I'm all for that when- and wherever we can achieve it, but for the most part it's proven to be historically unworkable, and that goes double for a culture that celebrates the concepts of individualism over collectivism, self-determinism over interdependence, and competition over cooperation.

A by-product of that kind of society is the requirement to field a standing military filled with people conditioned to kill without remorse, devoid of self-reflection and conflicting morals in the moment (that usually comes later, when the soldier-turned-civilian is left to their own devices). That part is never going to change, so the goal, from my point of view, should be for cool-headed civilian leaders to exercise control over the worst impulses of their more zealous counterparts in order to minimize the atrocities that a constant militaristic footing inevitably leads to. We could get into a discussion over how our society conditions entire classes of people of modest means and modest prospects to fulfill that role, but that would take us really far afield from the topic at hand.

 

[romad1]

11 minutes ago, chasfh said:

No doubt. Utopian visions of a peaceful hand-holding society are beautiful, but they are also just visions. I may be anti-war in all but the most extreme circumstances—I was 100% against the Gulf War and the Iraq War from the word "go"—but I am also less utopian than I am pragmatist. There may be elements of utopianism we can work very, very, very hard to try to assimilate into our culture, and I'm all for that when- and wherever we can achieve it, but for the most part it's proven to be historically unworkable, and that goes double for a culture that celebrates the concepts of individualism over collectivism, self-determinism over interdependence, and competition over cooperation.

A by-product of that kind of society is the requirement to field a standing military filled with people conditioned to kill without remorse, devoid of self-reflection and conflicting morals in the moment (that usually comes later, when the soldier-turned-civilian is left to their own devices). That part is never going to change, so the goal, from my point of view, should be for cool-headed civilian leaders to exercise control over the worst impulses of their more zealous counterparts in order to minimize the atrocities that a constant militaristic footing inevitably leads to. We could get into a discussion over how our society conditions entire classes of people of modest means and modest prospects to fulfill that role, but that would take us really far afield from the topic at hand.

 

I'm seeing a lot of the last case of conditioning entire classes of people of modest means playing out.  They all have big trucks and Virginia's Gadsen flag "don't tread on me" license plates. 

[gehringer_2]

47 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That part is never going to change, so the goal, from my point of view, should be for cool-headed civilian leaders to exercise control over the worst impulses of their more zealous counterparts in order to minimize the atrocities that a constant militaristic footing inevitably leads to

It was civilian neo-con intellectuals, as opposed to military leadership, that lead the charge into places like Iraq. It's been civilian leadership  (if you can call it that) that is driving Russia's militarism. 

It is interesting how military vs civilian political leadersip dynamics vary across national 'cultures'. The  histories of some parts of world have been quite different from other parts in that regard - say Egypt, SE Asia and S and C Americas (lots of direct military rule) on one hand vs W.  Europe, N. America, South Africa, China on the other.

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

It was civilian neo-con intellectuals, as opposed to military leadership, that lead the charge into places like Iraq. It's been civilian leadership  (if you can call it that) that is driving Russia's militarism.

Which is why I did not make a distinction between civilian and military leadership. There are good guys and bad guys on both sides of that particular divide.