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Ukraine and the Russian invasion, 2022-24

mojo pixy said:
Here's an Israeli I know comparing Russia with Hamas and Israel with Ukraine (published december 2023):



I seriously disagree with this comparison (I've already outlined the comparison I'd draw)

edited to add quote.
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i think most of that is nonsense but that bit near the end. i would change "liberal democracies" to "us empire/the west" but apart from that i reckon he might have something there.

"A victory for Putin and/or Hamas, or even the perception of victory, would have a devastating effect on world peace and stability. Such outcomes could shake the defensive lines of liberal democracies around the world and the status quo of the rule-based world order formulated post-World War II and strengthened at the end of the Cold War in the early 90’s."
 
TopCat said:
Supporting arming Ukraine and supporting arming Isreal is the default position of most European governments and of course the US.
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TopCat said:
Many other govt including China, Brazil, South Africa, India don’t support arming either country. A position that attracts derision and attacks from some people on the thread.
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discokermit said:
the devastating effect to world peace and stability would be that it might break out, i presume.
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I appreciate the responses, but when I posted a different comparison, all discokermit replied was

discokermit said:
no.
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and from TopCat there was no response at all.

I'd be interested in reading the same kind of responses to

mojo pixy said:
... a smaller, weaker nation being attacked by a larger, more powerful neighbour that does not recognize its autonomy and considers its independence a threat...
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If it is a bad comparison, why? The mad israeli comparison got dignified with comments, but not this other one?
 
mojo pixy said:
I appreciate the responses, but when I posted a different comparison, all discokermit replied was



and from TopCat there was no response at all.

I'd be interested in reading the same kind of responses to



If it is a bad comparison, why? The mad israeli comparison got dignified with comments, but not this other one?
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This country didn't get where it is today without attacking smaller weaker countries
 
mojo pixy said:
I appreciate the responses, but when I posted a different comparison, all discokermit replied was



and from TopCat there was no response at all.

I'd be interested in reading the same kind of responses to



If it is a bad comparison, why? The mad israeli comparison got dignified with comments, but not this other one?
Click to expand...
because it is america funding both ukraine and israel. so on one level you are right, but pull out a bit and its a different picture.
 
Ax^ said:
thread descended into a love fest between Pickman's and discokermit

this is a weird one
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One weird aspect has been the decline in the quality of your posts. You used to be a really good poster but now you can barely string a coherent sentence together, much less an argument - take for example that utter nonsense about the exchange rate when you were talking about the kerch bridge's cost, that had fuck all to do with anything
 
Pickman's model said:
This country. The United kingdom. Any country? The only fucking country the uk's never been at war with is Portugal. That's quite some record
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Oh the UK, this actual country.

England alone making up the majority of the atrocities for sure, England's been increasingly a bit of a nightmare for peoples native, local and all over the world ever since its inception.

Still, Russia in Ukraine eh.
 
Pickman's model said:
One weird aspect has been the decline in the quality of your posts. You used to be a really good poster but now you can barely string a coherent sentence together, much less an argument - take for example that utter nonsense about the exchange rate when you were talking about the kerch bridge's cost, that had fuck all to do with anything
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of course you said nothing about the other poster reckoning you could build the Kersh bridge for 4 million..

and before you got involved with you nit picking posts id already said and pointed out the post where I said it was 229 billion roubles

odd that gets forgotten..

thank you
 
of course the group of beligrant asshats who like to provoke an reaction so they can hit the report button is always a classy move :p
 
tbf i'm also kinda fascinated on what part of the ugly history of the english / british empire

give Russia the right in invade ukraine :hmm:
 
Pickman's model said:
1/2 i've numbered your paragraphs to make it clear which bits i'm responding to through this post.

1) while governmental systems may be based on things inspired by the enlightenment, that does not mean that those countries subscribe to the enlightenment ideas behind them. as you no doubt recall, the united states intended to spread democracy to iraq and afghanistan and it's a really big ask to suggest that either country has imbibed the enlightenment ideals behind democracy. the democracies in europe, to say nothing of ostensible democracies outside europe, vary in their democratic quality. while the enlightenment may have inspired democracies it didn't inspire them particularly hard in europe (see the length of time it took for universal male suffrage to be granted, let alone women to receive the vote, in countries like the united kingdom - the franchise extended after prolonged struggle in 1867, 1884 and 1918 while the famous great reform act of 1832 actually reduced the electorate). as time has gone by democracy has receded and diminished from actual political participation to the occasional trip to the polling station to register an opinion. the form of 'democracy' does not therefore guarantee adherence to the enlightenment ideals which so stirred people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

2) i don't know about the term 'modernist', which to me does not refer to the contemporary world but the world of virginia woolf and james joyce - being kind, it relates to the world of about a century ago. and i'm not sure whether the famous book on modernism, 'all that is solid melts into air', would even trace modernism that far forwards. i'd reject modernism as it is no longer modern. i've addressed the term 'neo-medieval' in my previous post on the subject and don't see anything here to make me alter my opinion, not to mention that it is being used for too much to be useful even as a shorthand - barring a shorthand for 'people we don't like'.

3) this paragraph is historically illiterate. the military dictatorships of latin america, for example, were predominantly after the second world war - so there wasn't this move away from them to democracy 'throughout the twentieth century'. I'm sure, too, we all know of the great civil rights campaigns in Ireland and the United States in the second half of the C20, where in the six counties one person one vote wasn't conceded until the 1970s and the gains made in the United States under Johnson have been rolled back ever since. The USSR and its satellites might have proclaimed themselves democratic but no country calling itself eg the German democratic Republic was ever a democracy. Are we to admire the democratic people's republic of North Korea? So many dictatorships were facilitated by countries like the UK and USA in countries like Iran, Chile, Spain and so on that any commitment to democracy the UK and USA might have proclaimed should have been accompanied by a health warning. Indeed, the struggle to safeguard democracy in South Vietnam saw the Americans stick so strongly to the democratic ideal that they gave the green light to the coup which toppled Ngo Dinh Diem and his replacement by a military junta - not to mention the coup in Iran which saw the Shah come to power.

4) You talk of Afghanistan as tho the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had never happened. The United States played such a role in creating, funding and arming Islamist organisations there to oppose the Soviet Union that that great democracy and the United Kingdom must accept a great part of the blame in how things turned out. Political Islam did not grow in a vacuum, it was in many places fostered by democracies which authors like Mark Curtis have covered in some detail (MC at least as regards the British contribution). China's democratisation was only ever a pipe-dream. And after 4.6.1989 democracy is the thing the CCP have most desired to avoid.

5) The lack of faith in elected governments in the West is probably due to those governments refusing to act democratically. Our government, for example, refuses to act for the great majority of the population. The Labour government which preceded it was really happy to engage in wars of choice which did nothing to secure the national interest. The unilateral tearing up of the post-war social contract by people like Margaret Thatcher broke the link between people and government. Western governments preside over the crisis of global warming without doing anything much about it - how the fuck can anyone have confidence in such governments? The growth of Christian lunacy in the United States hasn't happened in a vacuum - it's the filthy rich who have driven much of that. Democracy in the United States, like democracy here, has been bought, the agendas driven by a few very wealthy people. Social media plays an important part whereby, as we all know, the algorithms of sites like Facebook actively promote the most reactionary politics. And moving on to your 6) Russia too has been involved with Russian gold going not to socialist or communist parties in western Europe but to far-right parties. Not just Putin, of course, but also people like Jim Dowson, who funded then broke the BNP and Britain First and not bankrolls the peculiar Knights Templar. The people who bankroll Labour and the Tories are in many cases no better, like that man who said Diane Abbott should be shot.
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I don't want to get dragged into a long paragraph by paragraph debate but to respond to your main points:

1 - Largely agree with most of what you're saying here and don't see it as incompatible with my overarching point that globalisation has created a dynamic moving against democracy. The modern state with institutions of representative democracy provided a framework in which social progress could be made, but now there are new pressures moving against this. I agree democratic life has receded and I think decline of trade unions and collective life in general is part of that.

2 - By modernist I mean a belief in progress and in reason. Marxism is a classically modernist ideology for instance. This is in contrast to our post-modernist era where everything is supposedly a matter of personal choice and perspective. Modernism is indeed no longer modern, but it is progressive and what is actually contemporary is regressive. So yes modernism in the arts is indeed associated with the time of James Joyce et al.

3 - The military dictatorships of Latin America also democratised within the 20th Century. The 1980s and 1990s are still the 20th Century.

Also I'm not saying we should admire the DPRK but both it and the Republic of Korea were based on some form of democratic idea even if this wasn't the case in practise. It's a change from 19th Century and earlier. Marxist-Leninism was a failed experiment at a non-capitalist form of industrialised modernity but this is different to now where there is no real vision of building a better society.

4 - Nothing I disagree with here and don't think it contradicts my central thesis. The political vacuum that radical Islam has filled was once filled by Arab Socialism. That Arab Socialism has declined while the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have thrived is a good example of how neoliberal globalisation has created pressure which favours a certain kind of authoritarian state (while Arab Socialism also produced authoritarian states they were perhaps less business friendly than UAE and Saudi).

5/6 - Also agree with most of this, but I do think that the post-war Labour government was peak democracy for this country. This was possible because a) democratic institutions provided a framework for it and b) strong trade unions provided negotiating power. That Thatcher dismantled the social contract in the 80s by shutting down national industries in favour of outsourcing was really one of the starting points of the anti-democratic pressures created by globalisation which I'm talking about. It's a long process which has undermined social democracy and is also going beyond that to undermining liberal democracy as well. This is the context in which authoritarian states are ascendant and in which liberal states are increasingly sliding into authoritarianism.
 
  • Russia claimed that Ukraine attacked the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant for a third day with a drone but Ukrainian officials denied that Kyiv had anything to do with the attacks. Ukraine has denied it is behind a series of drone attacks on the plant over the past three days, including three on Sunday, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said had endangered nuclear safety. The recent drone fell on the roof of the training centre, it said. No one was injured.
 
Ax^ said:
of course you said nothing about the other poster reckoning you could build the Kersh bridge for 4 million..

and before you got involved with you nit picking posts id already said and pointed out the post where I said it was 229 billion roubles

odd that gets forgotten..

thank you
Click to expand...
This would be the 229bn roubles you produced no evidence to support, indeed the evidence you proffered mentioned a different amount
 
Pickman's model said:
The only fucking country the uk's never been at war with is Portugal. That's quite some record
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This isn't really true and relies on quite a bit of jiggery-pokery, and an extremely tolerant definition of "at war with". For example, you need to count all of Spain's former colonial assets as "Spain", so that's the whole of South America; and also wars between colonised states. If you do that, you might as well include Portugal, which was under Spanish rule for 60 years in the 16th century.
 
Dave didn’t persuade
  • David Cameron’s attempt to persuade Donald Trump to permit the US Congress to push through $60bn in military aid for Ukraine appears to have failed, after the British foreign secretary was not even granted a meeting with congressional speaker Mike Johnson, who could in theory put the package to a vote. Johnson instead found himself assailed by the hard-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who renewed her threats of a snap vote to remove him from office for even countenancing a vote.
 
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