That also makes sense, especially considering how it worked with politicians accusing eachother of being “soft on crime”.
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And yet if Trump was the president he woudn’t do anything to help Ukraine and all the Republicans would be totally fine with it. Biden will be demonized no matter what he will do.
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Public officials, and the media, and the voters all form a giant irrational machine that can be exploited by people who profit from war, or that can even choose war for no sensible reason at all, just out of impatience and boredom
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What more is he supposed to do?
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Send in the Air Force, send in the Marines, just say “fuck it” and blow up the world 
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It’s almost as if they don’t like the folks who parade around with two-thirds of a swastika who like to “liberate” countries
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Right, understood - but these are Russian army soldiers. Whatever their civilian background, it raises the question as to what sort of conditions their army barracks have. Have they spent their entire army careers using field toilets?
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By all accounts, really, really shit conditions.
This Human Rights Watch report from 2003 doesn’t mention the toilet facilities, but …
And Kiril’s story from 2006
Maybe it’s less that they don’t know what a toilet is, but that as far as they’re concerned they’re luxury items. That’s just a guess, though. More likely they’re literally just stripping everything they can fit on a truck or strap to a tank so they can sell them when they get back to Belorus or Russia. Because that’s just how the Russian Army works.
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When Russian forces retreated from Sloviansk last time, in July 2014, Russian media spread a notorious lie about Ukrainian atrocities there. That specific piece of propaganda can help us to understand the ideology behind the war now (and anticipate Russian propaganda to come).
By 5 July 2014 the Russians had withdrawn from Sloviansk. Six days later, on 11 July, the Russian army began to shell the Ukrainian army in the Donbas – from the territory of the Russian Federation. The next day Russian media distracted from both of these events with an outrageous lie. The most important channel on Russian television told an entirely invented story about a non-existent three-year-old Russian boy crucified by Ukrainian soldiers on Lenin Square in Sloviansk.
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This weekend I attended one of these workshops and finally learned how these intricate designs are made:
(Yeah, I’m aware that decorating eggs is somewhat performative and does nothing to directly help the Ukrainians. I had already made separate donations before doing this fundraiser. But it was still nice to see a positive aspect of Ukrainian culture being spread right now.)
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I support this viewpoint.
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That would make a lot sense. As recently as 30 years ago toilets were still luxury in homes in some villages in more rural parts of Poland. Earlier even in cities there were some low cost apartment buildings that had only one toilet per entire floor. It’s entriely possible that some poorer regions of Russia are still like this.
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Taking the railroad outside the big cities in Russia in the early 2000s, I clearly remember spotting villages that looked like they hadn’t changed since the late 1890s: dirt roads, simple wooden buildings, rustic shrines, horse wagons. The small settlements in the far east are also pretty primitive living. As in other countries, the Russian conscription machine comes for uneducated and poor young men in the hinterlands first.
I agree with you and the others here that it’s not so much a lack of knowledge on their part that indoor toilets and and washing machines and paved roads exist but shock that they’re so common and widely available to their counterparts in the rural areas of Ukraine.
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I may be wrong, but I imagine that the average Ukrainian village probably looks much like the average Russian village, except for better roads. The Russian soldiers will be thinking “this is just like home but they have X, why can’t we have it too?”
(Ukraine used to be a favourite filming location for cheapskate Russian television producers, as Canada was for American producers.)
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Just read that Steven Seagull celebrated his 70th birthday in Moscow.
Expected nothing less.
3rd rate actor.
4th rate human.
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4th rate?
Is that about equivalent to dumpster full of dirty diapers on fire?
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my scale only goes from 1 to 4, so, yeah.
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