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It's got upvoted on HN therefore it's relevant to HN J
Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
231–240 of 264 posts
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suppose you're black and sit in the white section of a bus in 1950s. - Hey *, colored section is that way! You'll go to jail. - I could sit here if you white people weren't the one making the law. (That's the thing I love about analogies, they can be turned both ways and prove nothing)
No you didn't get my analogy. The parent comment was stating the point that Putin was making it illegal himself by vetoing and retracting the veto would have made it legal. The same thing happens in sex, if you consent to it, it's ok; if you don't, it's rape. That's the mechanism of consent and of veto. In your analogy there is no way the white bus passenger could instantly change the law by consenting to the black m…
Your analogy is just as flawed since Assad has no say as to consent or veto. All is being decided by the five nations in power (the white people of diplomacy). Per your analogy, Russia is not an agent on either side.
The whole analogy business in arguments is one witty exercise in strawman.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#233"The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not." The irony of Putin saying this cannot be understated. This entire editorial is dripping with it. For those of you buying into his rhetoric, remember that Putin is the head of a "virtual mafia state" [1] and a government of thugs who are too busy stealing the wealth generated by Russia's natural resources to pursue the eternal dream of Russia…
This is reminiscent of one Soviet era joke:
- We in America are free to criticize our government without any penalties!
- Duh, us Soviets are free to criticize your government too!
This very publication is a great example of the difference between the USA and Russia. A publication in major Russian media criticizing the government policy is soo not happening anytime soon.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#234Great closing paragraph: My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to s…
Yeah, the statement is all well and good, but I'm no fan of being lectured about the spread of dangerous ideas by a man who thinks homosexuality is contagious and whose power was mostly gained by family ties and rank in the Kremlin pre-collapse.
Putin is not agains homosexuality, he has concerns that the persons behind the gay rights protests are in fact trying to facilitate a colour revolution style coup.
link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
Another move that makes it plausible that this is in fact his reasoning for the "gay propaganda" law is the "foreign agent" law.
The foreign agent law makes it mandatory for NGO's to be transparent about who they are associated with, and from which foreign country they receive money.
To me, this paranoia is going overboard, but on the other hand there are precedents where coups happened after NGO's, that received money and other resources from foreign governments, incited protests.
And inciting protests from within is probably one of the few options left, if you want to facilitate a regime change in Russia, since conventional war is not going to go well with that many nukes on both sides of the table.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putin is badass enough not to need speechwriters.
Oh yeah? So you're saying Putin is like Kim Jong Il: he doesn't give speeches very often, but when he does, it's always to a standing ovation.
Why would you doubt that Putin is intelligent and articulate? He is Russian so me must be a some crude vodka drinking bear hunter?
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#236That's an extremely well written piece. Clearly Putin has good speechwriters, and the Russian literary tradition is famous! Do you think a US speechwriter could produce such a thing in a foreign language ? I doubt it.
Well, yes. It obviously wouldn't be a foreign language to the speechwriters, of which I assume there were many people involved in writing, editing and reviewing. Unless someone expects an English language document addressed to US citizens to have been written by a Russian-born writer who didn't speak English.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think his claims that the rebels are the source of the gas attack are 'perfectly reasonable,' and if you don't sign on to his breezy certitude on this point the rest of his argument falls apart.
Why not?
* There is overwhelming evidence that the Syrian military has stockpiles of nerve agents and ballistic delivery systems for them. BTW: thanks, Russia.
* The FSA on the other hand is conducting raids to get rifle ammunition.
* There's the obvious issue that the (apparent) sarin attack targeted a neighborhood that was effectively allied with the FSA and that just happened to be a current critical objective for the Syrian military.
* The attack was relatively ambitious, far more than the minimum required to establish chemical weapons signatures or gin up outrage.
* For that matter, sarin is (unlike VX) non-persistent, making an attack at this scale (a) more technically challenging and (b) more deliberately intended to kill; for instance.
* There's the matter of US intelligence that (a) monitored known Syrian sarin stockpiles, which had noted no loss of custody to the FSA, and (b) Syrian military officials planning the actual attack we're discussing.
The argument that this is a false-flag operation by the FSA is not very credible.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire point of the UN and "the law" is that Russia gets to veto the same as the US gets to veto.
That may be, but Putin is making a case against intervention while omitting his huge conflict of interest. He is making self-serving arguments under the guise of caring about lofty ideals that his own actions demonstrate he has no regard for.
If Putin is publicly opposing our war effort, it goes without saying that he will veto a UN resolution to that effect.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#239Great closing paragraph: My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to s…
Unfortunately you have to know a bit of Russian to pick up on this, but if you watch/read Russian media for a while it becomes obvious how this paragraph is a comical bit of hypocrisy. The Russians in general and Putin in particular talk all the time about how the Russian soul is exceptional, how Russia is somehow different from western democracies and has its own unique (and largely mystical) economic and political…
Thanks for that insightful comment. I like probably 99% of members of the anglosphere had no idea of a Russian mythology/identity although in retrospect it should be obvious that there is one, the same as every country.
when i read those lines i was just enjoying the chiding he gives the american national psyche. i delighted in the kong of putin with one hand drawing obama closer and with the other preparing to slap him for being so proud.
Re: Putin: A Plea for Caution From Russia
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some grammatical and capitalization errors, and numerous comma splices (stringing similar sentence fragments together in an effort to form a coherent statement). There was also usage of very short sentences in repeated succession. Those are mostly stylistic issues but they're indicative of non-native grasp of the English language. Furthermore it's clearly written by someone with enough capability to express…
That's very interesting. Any resources/research that you know about on how to identify non-native writing?
Not the same person, but I've found that learning other languages (and making mistakes in other languages) makes you attuned to what kinds of mistakes happen when speakers of that language learn English.
Just off the top of my head, Russian doesn't have articles. A Russian learning English is more likely to confuse definite and indefinite articles than a speaker of a Romance language.
I've been learning Thai and teaching English in Thailand. Thai has no articles, no tenses (in the way we think about them) and a simpler syntax with many prepositions and other "small words" omitted. When they start learning English, they often omit too many words and don't conjugate anything, so a sentence like "I don't have any pencils." becomes "No have pencil".