ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

As anticipated, Putin rejects recognition of "republics", insists on Minsk II.
Russian troops are "sort of" moving away from the border.
So, Moscow is anticipating a Paris/Berlin/DC move "to help" Kyiv with implementation of Minsk. Otherwise we're back where we've started https://t.co/x6N4h2oSWA

— Anton Barbashin (@ABarbashin) February 15, 2022

The Duma voted in favour of a bill put forward by the Communist Party for Putin to unilaterally recognise the LNR and DNR as independent and he’s said no.

Ukraine could be under a cyberattack. So far, the website of the Ministry of Defense https://t.co/nrqxvlj1P2 and Armed Forces https://t.co/rT5ozqhXVE; are down;
problems reported with state banks Oschadbank & Privat

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) February 15, 2022

⚠️ Confirmed: Real-time network data show a loss of connectivity to #Ukraine's State Savings Bank, impacting ATM and banking services; disruptions also reported on Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces networks; incident comes amid heightened tensions with Russia 📉 pic.twitter.com/QMbPPpCzaV

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) February 15, 2022

Modern war - terrifying in strange new ways.

could just be shitty comcast service again

honestly i do better when i don't think about the real world. i am too pessimistic. for example, i believe with 99.5% confidence that in the next 10 years there will be a massive cyberattack on the u.s. (from within or without, doesn't even matter) knocking out telecommunications for much of the country. mind you, i have no idea what the fuck i'm talking about, but i believe it all the same

this is why countries should always keep their malwarebytes installation up to date

If the average person (or hell, any of us) was threatened with shutting off their internet cold turkey, 99.9% would roll over and let the Russians invade. And the other 0.1% are already living off the grid in the woods and won't even know it's happened.

It's been a great time to prove you're hard.

Labour leader @Keir_Starmer tells me on @Channel4News “we should go now and hard with the sanctions” against Russia.

— Cathy Newman (@cathynewman) February 15, 2022

xp I'd finally crack open that dusty old door stop Scuffy the Tugboat and begin my education

how would this affect my saved game

So, am I piecing this together correctly? The Russian army just happened to thwart a "terrorist attack" in Donbas today and just, via sheer coincidence, happened to have multiple camera operators there to capture the thwarting from multiple angles?

Is Djokovic is about to invade a sovereign state? Because if not, his prominence in the news bulletins is insane.

— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) February 15, 2022

So, am I piecing this together correctly? The Russian army just happened to thwart a "terrorist attack" in Donbas today and just, via sheer coincidence, happened to have multiple camera operators there to capture the thwarting from multiple angles?

The FBI trained them well in the '90s.

Sounds like shit might be getting real over there? Or maybe just Putin flexing further after Biden's presser.

The Russians have been avid students of secret police and espionage methods since the Czars. They'd be insulted to hear you say the FBI could teach them any new tricks.

it's always good to learn new stuff, thanx aimless

tell milo

Russia bad. America good.

Half right.

Yikes. Head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in parliament claims Western media “hysteria is now costing the country $2-3 billion every month,” calls CNN, Bloomberg, WSJ coverage “worse than Skabeeva and Solovyov, top Russian state propagandists. https://t.co/VjXrQLf55U pic.twitter.com/zH5bdrWM3e

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 16, 2022

I don't know how reliable Arakhamia is but hard agree that so called respectable western media outlets who are uncritically reporting highly questionable Whitehouse briefings every day are presently no better or are even worse than the top Russian state propagandists.

At the same time, there is no way to know if the ott messaging/reporting from the west played any role in *preventing* a (further) Russian incursion (so far). Like, all that Russian military, blood banks, etc. weren't arrayed there for no reason at all.

All I know is it must be fun to be Putin.

At the same time, there is no way to know if the ott messaging/reporting from the west played any role in *preventing* a (further) Russian incursion (so far).

after being bombarded 24/7 with 🚨 BREAKING, PUTIN TO INVADE ANY MINUTE NOW 🚨 only for the situation to be gradually de-escalated is probably the clearest sign you'll get that the press are just stenographers for imperialist interests. add it to the chart next to WMDs

— pez 🇬🇭 (@periuspb) February 16, 2022

gyac otm

de-escalated?

The press are drama/conflict junkies.

Add it to the chart next to "Clinton will resign within the week" and "Trump is going to be dropped from the ticket."

As much as I’d love to blame the press, this seems to have been a deliberate strategy from the US government. Either they had credible information they didn’t share with the Ukrainian government for some reason or they’re flooding the airwaves with rubbish as some kind of unconventional deterrent.

How the media feels about being used in that way remains to be seen.

I don't trust the gov or the news to necessarily give me the truth, but ... there *were* close to a 100K Russian troops, tanks and whatnot that had amassed at the border, right? Why? Or was that all made up?

Sabre rattling

How the media feels about being used in that way remains to be seen.

― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Wednesday, February 16, 2022 4:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol after centuries of this i don't think it actually remains to be seen.

xpost Which I believe! But isn't saber rattling only effective if the audience believes there's a chance there's more than saber rattling?

the truth is so much more complicated than all of this

it's so simple to be look at something so huge and incomprehensible and complicated and stand 100% on one side of it and talk about it

only effective if the audience believes there's a chance there's more than saber rattling?

if Putin's saber rattling was a bluff, his bluff had instant credibility in light of the Crimea in 2014. But it needn't have been a bluff. Putin had the advantage of the initiative, and could safely afford to wait and assess the situation before deciding to pull the trigger or stand down.

Just saying, the idea that there was not a real and credible threat of invasion is kind of huh, not least in light of Crimea, whether or not it was imminent to the day. So to say that the US or the west or Europe or the media or whoever blew it out of proportion is kinda equally weird, especially because Putin could do it all again tomorrow, next week, next months, or whenever he feels. The childish North Korean "any attention is good attention" model.

I think KM is otm, I don't think anyone can say for 100% whether or not anything will actually come of this or not. Apparently there have been some seemingly credible reports of field hospitals popping up on the Russian side of the border.

Yeah, I heard some Russian reporter talking about how the west was getting it all wrong, and my first thought was "well, they might be wrong, but like I'd ever trust *you.*"

Crimea is different for the current situation for all the reasons discussed earlier itt. The relationship between Ukraine and Russia is difficult and involved and war would disrupt trade between the two significantly, even before you look at relations between Russia and other countries.

100%, 0%

all the way to the left, all the way to the right, 10,000 foot view, blue checks, internet sleuths, bold predictions, running away and saying nothing when you're wrong, screaming into the loudhorn when you're right

delete the parts where you're wrong, promote the squares where you're right

logging off when you know you should log off when you know they should log off when they tell you to log off when they know you're wrong and you know they're right

this shit goes around eternally, i want to barf 100% into a trash can and fill the entire thing up

u ok karl?

we're all drinking from a contaminated well

i'm ok! i listen, i do log off, sometimes.

i think i'm just getting sick of negative voices everywhere, inside my head i try to silence them, but then everywhere else, my friends, here, the news, my family, even my dog whining - the world is full of negative voices, always being right, always predicting with 100% confidence and backing it up when they turn out to right, always conspicuously absent when they're completely wrong. it has nothing to do with the other, all these things, but so much of it just boils down to never backing down and always being right and having the correct opinion and predicting the big thing that on else saw coming, or telling the story of the thing that happened in a way that made it inevitable and easily predictable, such a long time coming, doing that with the news but also doing that with life and relationships and minor things and huge things, divorces and death but also the most petty fucking shit you have ever heard of, doing all the time, in our own heads, leaking out in excrement in the form of words. that's what i mean by wanting to barf and fill up a trash can, it's just this gross build-up in our bodies and minds

this is usually the part where someone who knows it all tells me to stop drinking, and then i think "but the problem is that i'm sober right now"

anyway, back to the normal and uncomplicated question of ruso-ukraine politics, a subject in which all of us as well as tens of millions of people on the internet possess expertise and which everything is clear

Just saying, the idea that there was not a real and credible threat of invasion is kind of huh

Again, perhaps there was but, if so, there is a difference between a general ‘credible threat’ and the kind of specifics being set out. The US strategy of providing information about coup plots, invasion dates and false flag attacks to the domestic press and not the Ukrainian government is, at least, very odd.

lol after centuries of this i don't think it actually remains to be seen.

Probably true! I guess the difference with Iraq is that the press reports didn’t need months to be shown to be wrong. idk, when the press is facing historic levels of distrust, people are trying to argue a distinction between ‘the free press’ and state-sponsored media, etc, it will be interesting to see if there is any mild backlash.

fwiw, Karl, I am on team "by all means, keep drinking," because a bit of shock absorption may be precisely what is needed sometimes.

also I have no fucking clue what to do about Eastern Europe, or Eurasia as a whole - seems like a bigger mess than I can be expected to fix so I am not sure it reflects badly on me that I don't have a solution figured out yet

I'll still take US "free press", warts and all, over the Russian news media. In this case, I don't really know what else they could have done. Should they not have reported on the leaked intelligence reports? I think they were pretty upfront about the fact they had no way of independently verifying it.

That's why the news is always written as according to sources or The White House says or whatever.

when it comes to foreign policy the US media happily allows itself to be the conduit of government positions. because dissent has no harsh repercussions they are 'free' to dissent, which is a nice feature, but they rarely do.