Resignation Letter

“Problematic” is often cited as the way extremists are labelling people they want to cancel.

That much is actually true - I grew up not far from there, and it was a mistake for Khrushchev to give Crimea to Ukrainian SSR - it's been a part of Russia since 1783. But back then it was unimaginable that the USSR would fall, so nobody made much of it. Ukrainians were an ethnic minority in Crimea, and Russians were 67% of the population at the time it re-joined Russia. Not something you will find in US mainstream press. This is why Greenwald's input is valuable - he actually studied the issue rather than parroting the mainstream party line.

To see why he's right, consider this: Russia took Crimea _without any bloodshed_ and with fairly minimal military presence. This would not be possible if populace wasn't in agreement.

Leaving aside the formalities, Ukraine's grasp on Crimea was tenuous at best, and its fate was decided when Ukraine threatened to kick Russian military base out of Sevastopol - which lets Russia control the vital Black sea. With Russia no longer there, somebody else (e.g. NATO) could take its place, which Russia will not allow for geostrategical reasons.

But even ignoring Russia's interests in the region - one could argue Crimea was never really "Ukrainian" in the first place, and their temporary possession of that land was a historical mistake, which has now been corrected. It's not even clear if Khrushchev had the authority to give it away in the first place.

No opinion on the West Bank, I don't have first hand info on that.

I remember some years ago, a big debate in the media was whether blogging represented some new revolution in journalism. Eventually the mainstream became obsessed with Twitter and sort of forgot about blogging, but it never went away.

By far the best journalism and analysis available during COVID-19 has been from this wider group of journalists. Some of them are both independent bloggers and writers in regular newspapers simultaneously. But many are just ordinary citizens who happen to work in mathematically or statistically rigorous fields, and found themselves with time on their hands to do analysis.

I think one reason they can do a better job is they're less conflicted than journalists are. They can write some calm, level headed articles pitched to any audience they like and don't have to worry about how many clicks they get, or whether subscriptions will grow or shrink as a consequence. A huge problem professional journalists have is that they earn more money when telling people there's a crisis, because news consumption goes way up. So anything scary is blasted out at full volume, and when it's discovered to have been a false alarm there's crickets. There's no incentive at all to tell people, OK, maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed.

I think this is also why so many journalists end up attacking vague, unnamed "deniers" and "sceptics". It's common for such people to write detailed blog posts drilling in to a specific scientific issue far deeper than newspaper or CNN talking heads can, and often concluding, actually, the issue is overhyped. They can reach that conclusion because their livelihoods don't depend on finding the opposite. But any time anyone reads this alt-journalism and concludes, hey, maybe I'm being manipulated into believing things that sell a lot of news, they drop out and stop consuming as much of the "pro" output. It makes sceptical bloggers the arch enemies of mainstream news.

Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die .... We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law.

I don't think we have. I think that's another narrative newspapers like to feed people to keep them watching or reading.

No argument there.

> Would Russia have annexed Crimea if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?

It likely would not. But that's a hypothetical, so there's no way to tell one or the other. MAD is a thing, and neither country would deploy nuclear weapons this close to itself, let alone do so in a MAD-inducing way.

What is certain is that Ukraine would be a different level of a player on the international stage if it had nuclear weapons. Other countries (including Russia) would bend over backwards to keep it stable (much like everyone bent over backwards to stop proliferation in 1991), and there'd be no talk of NATO presence at Russia's border with Ukraine.

People in the US (which never had a real, total land war on its soil) don't understand: there are kinds of things that Russia simply will not allow. In contrast with the US, Russia had total wars on its soil several times, and lost tens of millions of people in those wars - a level of sacrifice unimaginable here in the US. Russia does not have natural barriers to a land invasion. So it cannot and will not afford the "buffer states" around it (such as Ukraine or Belarus) to fall under NATO or anybody else's control. It's not even a question of cost or international law. It's a question of national security and survival. Those concerns always dominate.

One of the things Russia will not allow in particular are NATO bases within easy striking distance of Krasnodar, Rostov, and much of its agricultural base. Another is Belarus affiliating itself militarily with the West. Baltic states were lost, so now there's a NATO military base within 200 miles of Saint Petersburg (in Estonia), which is significantly raising Putin's blood pressure and could result in action if escalation continues there. These things start small. Some people, a few tanks. Then there's an air base. Then there are rockets and long range radars being deployed under the pretense of "protecting Europe from Iran" (for those who don't know where Iran is on the map). And so on and so forth.

That's a strong claim without evidence.