“This is an amazing demonstration of projection”
Yes, very good of you to admit that.
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Do you follow Kasparov on Twitter? He has a lot to say about all this.
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I don’t - but will check him out! @Kasparov?
@kasparov63, I think.
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Hey man - look at that! I’ve gotta be a genius!
@Kasparov63
Hah, no, honestly, I’m not fond of this “chess as metaphor for whatever is happening today” the media likes me to say. But here it fits!
From the man himself. What a dude.
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If only Ukraine had a legitimate government. But they don’t.
Just because Ukraine’s government was stolen during the fire drill does not mean it was yours to take, or that you get to keep it.
If only Ukraine had a legitimate government. But they don’t.
If only Russia had won at hockey, but they didn’t. Sorry about your ego.
Pfffft.
Ad hominem. And a weak one at that. You fail as a trolley.
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I joined a fair number of anti-war protests, and helped with organizing. We could see the police on the buildings and everyone called them the snipers. I haven’t been as active lately, due to my disabilities, so only attended Occupy twice.
But they use pepper spray, bean bag rounds, beatings, and so on to punish protesters who don’t threaten police. And they sometimes use live ammunition to punish black people and disabled people who don’t threaten police, or to kill survivors who do threaten police with lawsuits, and if we look back, they have used live ammunition to kill union members and their children. Am I supposed to believe they wouldn’t use live ammunition if paramilitaries had joined the protest and had started firing on the police? or throwing Molotovs at the police?
[quote]I never said that “these” (Yanukovich style) crackdowns wouldn’t occur in places like Bahrain (which are not, to my mind, client states). And why would I say that, when it’s clear Bahrain has used lethal force and live ammunition on protestors? What I said is that the US criticised them for doing so, just as they’ve criticised Yanukovich for doing so.
[/quote]
Yeah, and I’m sure that criticism is worth its weight in gold.
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I’ve been hovering around the Internet and lurking in comment threads at some of the most popular outlets in the USA. The jingoistic haste to send other Americans to fight and die in the Ukraine by conservative chickenhawks is already ramping up.
I worry that the fervor is being exacerbated by the “macho” shots they take at Obama for being weak since he’s not enough of a chickenhawk, GW Bush “axis of evil” saber-rattler. It’s like they’re trying to one-up each other to prove who is the most bloodthirsty chickenhawk.
Reminds me of all the “macho” chatter before the disastrous Iraq invasion. Except this time the end result down the road will be vastly worse for everyone. I hope that cooler heads prevail before this spirals.
Maybe if we can put aside some of our nationalistic tendencies and reach out to the Russian public in peace, we can do what the leaders can’t and pull back from a vicious escalation. I think people from both Russia and the US need to have a healthy distrust of their own mainstream media outlets and leaders and work on communicating with each other instead of getting sucked into the propagandistic chatter. We need to look at what we each can do better instead of finding differences and focusing on fear of the “other”.
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My new favourite telling off for my passive aggressive acquaintances. Thanks!
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Hey! Iraq was great! My Halliburton stock shot through the roof!
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Do I need evidence that rocks fall when dropped?
Personal fucking experience. And you can look up dozens of similar incidents right here.
Kenneth Chamberlain. Keith Vidal.
Duanna Johnson.
Ludlow. Bloody fucking Ludlow.
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You’re using an incident from 1914 as a basis of comparison? Hey, might as well say US democracy sucks because they’ve historically not allowed women to vote before the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Sorry, should have dropped that part from the quote.
Kenneth Chamberlain was a protestor?
Keith Vidal was a protestor?
Look, both of those incidents are terrible, but they’re not political violence or the violent suppression of protestors, which was the context we were discussing. (It’s would also disagree that they were shot as punishment, or that Mr. Chamberlain’s killing had anything to do with him being black, but that’s another argument that’s not really relevant here.) I don’t know why you want to keep shoehorning other things into the discussion of how the governments treat protestors, and I don’t know why examples of very bad and/or illegal police actions say much about whether police snipers would be ordered to shoot protestors in the US.
Again, this is a horrible incident, even though it’s far from clear that she was killed by police. But this incident has little to do with protesting, and her death has had no effect on her lawsuit or the judicial process.
Basically, in none of the incidents do we see lethal force as a deliberate, intentional strategy to suppress protests. We do not see the US setting out with the intent to kill protestors, as we did with Yanukovich. The specific incidents you describe are examples of lawless actions for which there is the possibility of redress. No one was acting on orders when they killed or beat the individuals. This is not the case when we talk about lethal riot suppression in Ukraine.
Well, they probably were acting on orders when they beat me. I thought I was going to die. And given the pattern of police violence against unarmed people, and the presence of police snipers, why wouldn’t you expect police violence if armed paramilitaries joined protests?
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Violence, maybe. But I wouldn’t expect the uniformed police to be the instigators, and I wouldn’t expect lethal force, much less against general civilian protestors.
Well, they attacked us when they beat me, they attacked us pretty damned often.
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Those are your expectations, informed by your experience which, based on your expectations, likely involves some degree of privilege that you do not yet recognize. I used to have those same expectations, growing up where I did. Now that i live out in the adult world, it’s not so black and white.
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