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What is really happening in Ukraine

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Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#191

Post by rayiner »

mercurial wrote: post #169
rayiner wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walking down the road, boom, a lot of me is missing, shock, I'm gonna die, ouch, ouch, dead. More like, hide out in Yemen for 10 years organizing violent jihad against the United States and protecting Al Qaeda members from the Yemeni government, then walking down the road... It's tremendously demeaning to political protestors in Ukraine to compare their situation to people like Al Awlaki.

I'm annoyed at myself for feeding this thread which has really nothing to do with the Ukrainian situation, but you make it sound like drone strikes only hit terrorists. I'm sorry, but you've been fed the wrong narrative. Take, for instance, this extract from [1]: An estimated 286 to 890 civilians have been killed, including 168 to 197 children. I'm not saying that it's done on purpose, and intent does matter when con…

D9u's post was not about drone strikes in general, but Anwar Al Awlaki specifically ("U.S. citizen and his teenage son.")

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#192

Post by jhuckestein »

tptacek wrote: post #165
D9u wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about drone strikes which target and kill a US citizen and his teenage son?

I shouldn't indulge these unproductive subthreads, but I have mild nerd autism and am easily trolled. It's my experience that people who bring up Anwar al-Awlaki and his son --- particularly when using the term "US citizen" in the same breath --- rarely know anything specific about what actually happened. To start with, al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman weren't killed together, but at separate times. Abdulrahman was…

I agree with you that citizenship should not protect you from the consequences of your actions. Even so, I don't understand how a targeted drone strike in Yemen is an acceptable choice for the USG, regardless of who is killed.

Would it be okay for another country to conduct such drone strikes on US soil? If not, which countries are allowed do do such things, and where, and why?

How can you prove that lives were saved by the drone strike?

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#193

Post by tptacek »

barrkel wrote: post #183
tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't indulge these unproductive subthreads, but I have mild nerd autism and am easily trolled. It's my experience that people who bring up Anwar al-Awlaki and his son --- particularly when using the term "US citizen" in the same breath --- rarely know anything specific about what actually happened. To start with, al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman weren't killed together, but at separate times. Abdulrahman was…

The USG chose the option that killed the fewest innocent civilians. That is an enormously presumptive statement that you're not qualified to assert. It's so big I'm fairly sure it's wrong; the probability is very much against it. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in "preemptive" wars the US started post 9/11. Even taking US air strikes alone, the kind of operations that the US has been engaged…

Look at the options more carefully:

(1) Leave al-Awlaki alone, situated in the middle of AQAP home territory, and hope that he doesn't succeed in his evident ambitions to coordinate attacks against Europe, America, India, Russia, and Indonesia. This is the strategy Clinton employed against Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. You and I might debate it, but a realistic analysis of the circumstances of al-Awlaki has to acknowledge that the strategy was discredited. Consider carefully what the real differences between al-Awlaki and al-Zawahiri actually were.

(2) Kill al-Awlaki with an air strike. Here, we have the benefit of seeing the result of this strategy, since it's the option the US actually took. Result: 14 people dead: al-Zawahiri, his son, the editor of al Qaeda's English-language magazine, the day-to-day operational leader of AQAP, and 10 other people. Assume only al-Zawahiri, the editor, and al-Banna were actually meaningfully hostile to the US: that's a death toll of 11 innocent people.

(3) Invade Yemen. Hundreds or thousands of truly innocent people, people with no connection to AQAP or al-Zawahiri at all, would have been killed. Nothing the USG does is more damaging than sending ground troops.

Options (1) and (3) had potential death tolls in the thousands. Option (2) had a death toll in the low teens.

I think reasonable people can obviously disagree about which of these options was the most prudent. But I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that there wasn't a difficult decision here; that the President, whose foremost duty is to protect the people of the US, could casually have chosen to leave al-Awlaki to his own devices. I look at the situation and thank God I'm not the President, and can instead retain my humanity.

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#195

Post by lhgaghl »

slig wrote: post #136
lhgaghl wrote: post #121

Can't watch any of the videos linked because youtube asks me to sign in to prove my age. And to sign up, it asks for cell phone number to send an SMS to verify. Perhaps because I use tor. Anyone have a usable source? If you have the viewtube greasemonkey plugin, you can download the video from youtube and upload it somewhere else (e.g mediafire, zippyshare). Would be good if someone does that.

Replace the "/watch?=$id" with "/v/$id" in the URL and it should work.

I tried and it just asks me to download a .SWF file:

www.youtube.com/v/z0zD3pOG-Tk

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#196

Post by tptacek »

jhuckestein wrote: post #192
tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't indulge these unproductive subthreads, but I have mild nerd autism and am easily trolled. It's my experience that people who bring up Anwar al-Awlaki and his son --- particularly when using the term "US citizen" in the same breath --- rarely know anything specific about what actually happened. To start with, al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman weren't killed together, but at separate times. Abdulrahman was…

I agree with you that citizenship should not protect you from the consequences of your actions. Even so, I don't understand how a targeted drone strike in Yemen is an acceptable choice for the USG, regardless of who is killed. Would it be okay for another country to conduct such drone strikes on US soil? If not, which countries are allowed do do such things, and where, and why? How can you prove that lives were saved…

What does "OK" mean? Nations interact in the state of nature.

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#197

Post by api »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #67

What is really happening in Ukraine is that both sides of this conflict (pro-Euro and against) are absolutely corrupt and the people know it. The tragedy of this is that no one from the government or opposition represents the will of the people. The population of Ukraine really just wants an end to corruption and a better national identity, euro-integration was just the last straw, but not fundamental to this crisis…

That seems to be a common thing globally. All sides of most political conflicts are corrupt.

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#198

Post by ynniv »

wavefunction wrote: post #174
ynniv wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure which part of tracking the physical location of dollar bills you think has a European bias, but if means that much to you the project was completed at Northwestern University. The professor only later moved to a university in Europe. Please use your gray matter a little more before dispatching the fingers.

>>gray matter a little more before dispatching the fingers Yet you linked not to the original work but to a German site. I would also point out that assigning physical-proximity as a cultural marker due to the movement of currency is a terrible stand-in for actual cultural similarities. And cultural similarities are what we are concerned with here, if we're discussing the devolution of America based on cultural lines…

Yet you linked not to the original work but to a German site.

Don't be ridiculous, one links to the currently maintained version of a project.

While these states are proximate physically, the culture between these states is completely different

Citation needed. I lived in Colorado for a couple of years, and in my experience there is more similarity than difference between those places.

How's that for some gray matter? Is it enough, or do I need more?

It's better than commenting on a domain name, but there is no upper bound on insight.

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#199

Post by gkoz »

shitgoose wrote: post #186
vdaniuk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian speaking Ukrainian, participating in protests, living in Kiev that considers this quote by Albert Einstein to be very true "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind", you are so full of shit.

Would you dare to go to Lvov these days and speak Russian there, your native language?

Done that and (not surprisingly) nobody cared and nothing happened.

Re: What is really happening in Ukraine

#200

Post by avasylev »

pipy wrote: post #171
avasylev wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous... Except of few crazy people no one wants ethnically pure Ukraine. I grew up in western Ukraine and I have never seen single person discriminated for being Russian. I don't know why would you post that wiki link, WW2 situation was complex, but 100 years passed and it has nothing to do with current situation.

That's what Ukrainian lefties write: "One of the major forces at Euromaidan is the far-right xenophobic party ‘Svoboda’ (‘Freedom’). They are dominant among the volunteering guards of the protest camp and are the vanguard of the most radical street actions such as the occupation of the administrative buildings in the center of Kiev. Before 2004 ‘Svoboda’ was called Social-National Party of Ukraine and used Nazi ‘Wolf…

You should have also cited some Russian news... But there's some truth in this - 'Svoboda' is indeed far-right party, but it definitely doesn't have trained militants and I don't recall any "hate crimes against migrants and political opponents". 'Svoboda' is only one of the forces, having or not having Svoboda there doesn't change anything.
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