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Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

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Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#871

Post by dralley »

coldtea wrote: post #810
dralley wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia and Russia alone is responsible for "kick-starting" this war. And providing Ukraine with aid so that they don't get steamrolled is not morally wrong. Nor is refusing to do so so that Russia can more quickly get around to torturing and repressing the population a moral right.

[flagged]

Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.

>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them

The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.

None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#872

Post by mrguyorama »

jojobas wrote: post #342
libertine wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "problem" of Western countries is that the political sphere operates under different moral compasses: like taking down a shadow fleet tanker would be a natural disaster... taking down many would mean many disasters. The real question is, should security and defense concerns be placed on hold? If our basic freedoms and rights are being attacked, how big of a deal would be a shadow fleet tanker catastrophe?

Western countries have intelligence services with sabotage departments and in general are not above blowing up things their leaders don't like. If the CIA or US Navy don't have the technical means to blow up the Crimea bridge with plausible deniability they haven't been paying attention.

The problem is we (The US) used to swing our """nation building"""/Imperialism dick all around, coup'ing and invading whoever we want, but after Vietnam and wasting trillions bombing sand for 20 years, a lot of us have softened on the idea of forcing our desires through explosions.

Add to that a natural conservative tendency in the US to jump at isolationism whenever there's an easy excuse (the guy you like is doing the "bad thing" so you don't actually want to stop him, the war is literally somewhere else and doesn't exactly involve us)

So it's hard for people like me, who used to be pretty pacifist, to decide that yeah maybe violence is the right option sometimes?

Also, the entire time we are trying to shake off bullshit "Democrats are warhawks" nonsense from the party that did the desert bombing just because Bush wanted to defend his daddy's memory. The same people who call the Dems warhawks spent the 2000s screaming that "you're either with us or against us" and calling anti-war people pussies so I guess they don't have very good memories.

So for various reasons, some good, the US is extremely gunshy right now. Even those of us wholeheartedly in support of Ukraine, wishing we gave them a thousand Bradleys and tanks, feel uncomfortable with the idea of boots on the ground. Meanwhile Europe has forgotten what intervention is, and seems utterly unwilling to do anything, lest they have to get off their holier than thou pedestal.

Appeasement definitely doesn't work, but the middle east is full of examples of "just bomb them all" also not working very well. Everyone is very nervous. It sure seems like Russia won't stop their horseshit until someone makes them stop, but that's going to require a million dead.

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#873

Post by johnisgood »

libertine wrote: post #867
johnisgood wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all began with pro-Russian Ukrainians fighting against the Ukrainian government though... Are you in support of Israel too, by any chance?

Wrong. It all began when President Yanukovych rejected an agreement he promised to sign with the EU ( which was, and is, a public document with known the terms ) in exchange for a deal with Russia, of unknown terms and vague promises, and framed with threats. This was a 180 turn that led to the Maidan Revolution and the impeachment of the president. It was the decision of the President against the will of the majorit…

> After the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution and the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, a divide between pro-European and pro-Russian factions in Ukraine became more pronounced.

> In the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, many residents harbored pro-Russian sentiments due to historical, linguistic, and cultural ties to Russia.

> Following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, separatist groups in Donetsk and Luhansk, supported by local pro-Russian factions, declared independence from Ukraine.

These statements are false?

> aligned with the Russian narrative

That is merely coincidental.

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#874

Post by amelius »

UltraSane wrote: post #865
alenrozac wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's repeaters so the general area should be known.

They can measure the location of the break to centimeters by timing how long a light pulse takes to reflect back to the emitter. It is called time-domain reflectometry.

Ok, then was it used? And if not, why not?

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#875

Post by coldtea »

dralley wrote: post #871
coldtea wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old. >prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's…

>Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.

Yeah, nothing like nato when it comes to anti-imperialism...

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#876

Post by holowoodman »

throwaway290 wrote: post #402
petre wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany was told to stop buying Russian gas financing the Russian war machine by the previous Trump administration. They were told to pledge 2% of their GDP for defense, contributing more to NATO. They didn't listen. This is what happened: Ukraine got invaded, the pipeline was blown up to ensure compliance, their defense spending reachd 2% this year, more two years too late in a worse economic climate. Next year, the…

Don't forget how Germany's exports of chips and machinery to places like Kyrgyzstan skyrocketed since the invasion. > Exports of motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts to Kyrgyzstan grew particularly strongly in the first quarter, soaring more than 4,000% from a very small base to over 84 million euros... That came after a six-fold rise in German exports to Kyrgyzstan last year following Russia's February 2022 invasi…

Half of Germany was, for roughly 4 decades, a soviet puppet state. With indoctrination programs, propaganda towards the western part, cadre schools, the whole deal. And even in West Germany the soviets always had a lot of support, especially in the burgeoise (yes, the irony...) upper layers of society. Socialism and communism weren't just invented here out of thin air and such.

This means that a good part of especially the general former East German population as well as the academic and cultural upper class are left-leaning (in USian terms: deep red communists), soviet/russia-supporting and antiamerican by default. This got even stronger the farther we got past the 1990s, because the view back on the communist times naturally lost the memories of the bad parts.

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#877

Post by burningChrome »

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #383
burningChrome wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also been widely reported that when Trump first met Putin he said if he invaded Ukraine, he would turn Moscow and several other cities into a parking lot. Trump in several interviews has said he warned Putin not to do it, that he would pay a very, very heavy cost and he would see to it that he would. This is all Trump had to do. He was able to leverage the media's reporting on him that he was reckless, dangerous…

Surely you should be able to provide a source for the claim that Trump threatened Putin over Ukraine.

Here you go:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17852964/donald-trump-threaten...

“They're all saying oh he's a nuclear power, it's like they're afraid of him,” Trump said in a recording of the phone conversation with Daly. “You know, he was a friend of mine, I got along great with him. I say, Vladimir, if you do it, we're hitting Moscow. We're going to hit Moscow. And he sort of believed me like 5 per cent, 10 per cent - that's all you need.”

He's also said the same thing in several interview. That he told Putin he would make it very difficult to take Ukraine and it cost them economically and militarily. You can infer that meant could mean several things depending on your point of view.

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#878

Post by UltraSane »

amelius wrote: post #874
UltraSane wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can measure the location of the break to centimeters by timing how long a light pulse takes to reflect back to the emitter. It is called time-domain reflectometry.

Ok, then was it used? And if not, why not?

It was almost certainly used.

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#879

Post by burningChrome »

aguaviva wrote: post #535
burningChrome wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also been widely reported that when Trump first met Putin he said if he invaded Ukraine, he would turn Moscow and several other cities into a parking lot. Trump in several interviews has said he warned Putin not to do it, that he would pay a very, very heavy cost and he would see to it that he would. This is all Trump had to do. He was able to leverage the media's reporting on him that he was reckless, dangerous…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

#880

Post by inopinatus »

coldtea wrote: post #810
dralley wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia and Russia alone is responsible for "kick-starting" this war. And providing Ukraine with aid so that they don't get steamrolled is not morally wrong. Nor is refusing to do so so that Russia can more quickly get around to torturing and repressing the population a moral right.

[flagged]

Neither cable goes to Ukraine. Is Finland fighting someone’s proxy war, too? How about Germany? Sweden? Lithuania?

How about Russia? Whose proxy are they?

Anyone parroting that phrase is simply repeating Kremlin-sourced propaganda, intended to wrench at the weak minds of “useful idiots” and supply a pretext for what they truly wish: lily-livered appeasement that rewards aggression with recognition.

Life under Russian occupation is one of rape, torture, kidnapping, looting, execution. Would you like to be raped and tortured? How about your family, in front of you, before they are executed? No? No.

That is why Ukraine fights.

“Proxy war”, my ass. Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression is existential.

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