1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome.
2. This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. All three have led to the total destruction and failure of the invaded state. Ukraine has lost territory and there has been substantial suffering, but it has not been nearly on the same scale and the social disruption has not, at least yet, been anywhere near as significant.
I bring this up because moral consistency is important. Just as we should endorse the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves from criminal aggression, we must also endorse the same rights for other peoples. And we should be making the same calls, or not, for the aggressor states in these crimes to have their cultural influences purged from law-abiding societies.
>This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
That depends on what numbers you're going to believe about civilian fatalities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen etc.
It is often claimed that the Iraq War killed anywhere from 0.5 million to over 1.0 million Iraqis.
However these big numbers don't make much sense considering that large scale aerial bombings and artillery strikes stopped after a month into the war and large-scale ground operations stopped after the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. The Iraqis then suffered a horrific decade of weekly and monthly sectarian terror attacks. However adding all the civilian fatalities from the US invasion and the decade of sectarian violence still doesn't add up to ~100,000 and not anywhere near the "millions" range.
Don't get me wrong. The people who started the Iraq War are war criminals. However it doesn't make sense to compare the most widely exaggerated estimates from the 10+ year Iraq War with the current UN confirmed counting of civilian fatalities in the 5 month war in Ukraine. If we go by confirmed civilian fatalities Russia is currently killing Ukrainian civilians at a faster pace than anytime during the Iraq War.
The study of Iraqi deaths is ongoing and I suspect that the confirmed civilian casualties from direct violence is an undercount, but regardless we should also be counting excess deaths caused by the deterioration of the country's infrastructure. That's a direct result of the war. It does mean we have no good way of counting the dead in Ukraine yet and won't for years.
That said, the Ukrainian state has survived and is continuing to provide civilian services. Ukraine still produces plenty of electricity (it is even exporting it), and still is able to provide food, healthcare, water, and other essentials. There are tight supplies for some things, like gasoline and some medicines, which is awful.
Contrast that to the devastation after the American invasion of Iraq, the starvation in Yemen, or the chaos in Afghanistan. Iraq still has spotty electricity and deals with violent incursions, and the war has spilled into Syria. Yemeni deaths have been horrific, but equally bad has been the widespread hunger and extreme poverty the war has thrust millions into. I just don't see that kind of suffering in Ukraine. At least not yet. If the war continues at this level of intensity and Ukraine collapses entirely, which I find unlikely (indeed, the level of intensity and casualties is already down significantly from its peak in March) I'll reassess.
The displacement of Ukrainian children is awful, but also occurred in all these other conflicts. The flow of refugees is also awful, as is the imposition of the conqueror's ideology, but that happened in Iraq too.
All the other effects are speculative and caused as much by US/EU sanctions (which have historically never accomplished their goals and have not had their intended effect even in this conflict) as they are by the invasion.
I'm not saying the war in Ukraine isn't a horrendous war crime. It absolutely is. But it just hasn't reached the scale of the other conflicts I mentioned, and I suspect that the fact that white Europeans are suffering instead of Arabs or central Asians is the root of this overemphasis.
The taking of Mariupol, all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk have been successes. They've been hard fought, grinding successes, but successes nonetheless.
They don't control all of Luhansk and they don't control most of Donetsk oblast. I'd lay off from russian TV for a bit :) The goal was to take Kyiv in 3 days and install puppet government they have not accomplished that and have not taken a single major city in Ukraine despite Kharkiv being 40km from the border. So no for self proclaimed worlds 2nd army they have not accomplished a single strategic goal let alone the goal of the campaign.
Russia controls less territory today than it did in March, yet I am told that Ukraine losing territory in July is losing, Russia losing more territory and not recovering it in March is not Russia losing.
Funny goal posts seem to get used a lot in this conflict.
> There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. All three have led to the total destruction and failure of the invaded state
Your opinion is very one-sided and misses many details:
- Iraq is currently relatively peaceful democracy after decades of tirany and wars (Iran-Iraq war caused 1M deaths)
- Afghanistan under US rule demonstrated significant economic, demographic and human rights growth
- Yemen civil war started with Iran backed shiite houthis took power by force in country with majority of suni population, and Saudis reacted on this
Zelensky, the current president, was democratically elected. Yanukovich fled to Russia after mass protests, when he attempted to reverse the process of association with the EU, as requested by Putin (it is one thing to be a “pro-Russian”, and another — to be a Kremlin puppet).
I have seen very few people contesting his election. It’s the snipers shooting at crowds and sending the army to the Maidan square that people really objected to. Also, his cosying up with Putin and showing the finger to the EU. And corruption.
Look, the obvious point here is that you can't take someone's pretext for war at face value like the fuckhead who thinks it's okay to starve Yemeni children because of Iran did. There's always some kernel of truth to hang them on, but it doesn't justify criminal military aggression, either in Ukraine or Yemen.
I completely agree. But we’re talking about Yanukovich here, who was deposed by a revolution, not a war. There were many reasons why the Ukrainians were fed up with him, it was well justified.
I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of modern life regardless of location, combined with continued urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense urban spaces.
I'm waiting eagerly for the day when people in the west can grow up enough to learn from Soviet city and housing policies. Too many people just turn their minds off when they hear that godless commies did it.
I live in one of the "complete neighborhoods" in Portland and it's really nice. I can walk to the grocery store to buy fresh food for each day, and I'm less than fifteen minutes by foot from three public parks (and a tiny one that I don't really count). This is far from representative of the city itself, but I would never want to give this lifestyle up.
This really gave me pause. I know the US is car-centric, but walking to the grocery store and at most 15 minutes to a real park sounds like the bare minimum for a livable location in my mind. Is the implication that regular US cities don't even fulfill that requirement?
When I first visited the US I was pretty appalled. Silicon Valley towns are huge stretches of residential areas where you can't even get a coffee on foot, you might be ok by cycling if they're not too large. In inland non-ancient cities, even the city centre is built for cars --- you can go around and get things by foot in the centre, but the roads are still made for cars, so you're constantly crossing 4-lane roads and walking across huge parking lots.
For reference: The nearest grocery store to me is 3 km away, down a hill and across an interstate that does not have a method for pedestrians to cross it, other than playing Frogger, if you know what I mean. And that store is overpriced and doesn't have a good selection. The next-closest store is 8 km away.
What we really need is a holistic approach to a lot of these issues. Ending the violent prohibition of drugs, building and providing housing for the homeless, better and more accessible mental health programs, denser cities, better transit, etc. We don't have a politics in the US that fully articulates the dynamic interconnectivity of all the issues and aggressively pushes for a set of solutions.
I'm really tired of this "SF is the dirties city" trope. Yes, there are areas that are incredibly dirty, but those areas are something like 5% of the city, and most of those areas are concentrated in a few specific neighborhoods. Most of the city is fairly clean (but to be sure, it's no Singapore) and reasonably well-maintained.
I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".
I'm more worried about the threat of violence from mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's something that's also concentrated in a relatively small number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with the dirtiness).
> I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".
I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)
As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of our public transit), we're also a very dirty city (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).
It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our floods (and damaging the subways further).
I saw about 5 between the bart station and Berkeley campus on my way to get a curry, and I wouldn't even consider that dirty relative to driving a few blocks down towards the freeway...(I know it might not technically be "SF" but you know what I mean)
No city can adequately fund these programs, and San Francisco certainly doesn't build housing for the homeless, have an enlightened drugs policy or have adequate mental health care. San Francisco and other coastal cities mainly differentiate their policies by treating the homeless populations there with malignant neglect instead of outright hostility, which leads to the phenomenon you see where 10-12 cities bear the brunt of a national homelessness crisis. Because San Francisco is one of them, you also see a bunch of entitled tech bros whining about how they have to see a homeless person sometimes on HN.
I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.
I feel like SF is one of the most permissive places to do drugs in perhaps the entire world. Even if there are laws on the books, they are not really enforced.
I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order, just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.
It's misallocated through an enormous network of private contractors, ineffectual nonprofits and government bureaucracies. The unaffordable expenditure (public housing or at least publicly funded housing) is completely out of that budget, while the rest of the programs are so watered down and so much have been leeched out of them that they're completely ineffectual. Rebuilding capacity for direct state action, without farming out to all of these parasitic middlemen is a key component, as is reducing or eliminating wasteful and top-heavy bureaucracies.
I want to make clear that I agree completely, but I've been injured in two car crashes in my life. Once, I was a pedestrian and crossing the street in a crosswalk with a signal when an old lady drove into me and then drove off. We had made eye contact while I crossed, but for whatever reason she decided to start driving nonetheless. The other time, I was stopped at a red light and someone arguing with their partner rear ended me. Incidentally, I caused minor injuries to others in a similar crash when I was a teenager. Clearly, there was no element of control to the injured parties in any of those three stories.
It'd be really nice if we could figure out how to convey to people that they don't have any significant control over their safety when driving, so that we can finally start making rational attempts to drive down the number of motorist and pedestrian deaths.
I doubt this piece was signed off personally by Xi Jinping or anything, but all these little details lodge subconsciously in your mind. Like, you might not specifically think of Chairman Mao as a poor rural dweller famous for his love of spice after reading this article, but after reading dozens of pointless details like it you might start to think he wasn't such a bad guy after all.
Some advertisers spend on relevant keywords, others pay for generalized brand awareness. Many do both.
Anything published by a government in a foreign language has an agenda. It's propaganda. In this case, "brand awareness" propaganda.
Maybe the goal is to promote tourism, or to give a boost to exports.
Maybe it's to keep the country/government in the front of foreign readers' minds, to foster a sense of commonality or appreciation.
Whatever. There's an agenda. It's worth discussing and thinking about.
Like with advertising, it's important to know what role you are playing in the publisher's agenda. Accepting the material uncritically is not a neutral position -- it makes you a unwitting player in their game.
You are completely correct that the US does it too, both internally (presidential mythologies, to use your example) and externally (Radio Free X etc etc).
Propaganda is common though. Many companies have their own newsletter and plenty do paid advertising, some in subtle ways. Plenty of scientific research is paid for by companies for their own gain. Authors are destined to propagate their own opinion and mind. That doesn’t however means anything that’s not complete neutral is pointless. An echo chamber is very much like propaganda, few people is going to speak out against the majority. Our training should be to obtain useful information from the massively available information, not disregard everything.
I'm glad you see it that way. My response was so flippant because I do think people often see China as personally run, in its entirety, by Xi. Any news coming out of China, from as grave as genocide to as minor as Olympics festivals, is seen as part of a single plan. The actions of the Chinese gov't and press can be just as much bottom-up as top-down, even if the top takes credit.
I actually do think it’s relevant. They build credibility in your mind space via innocuous stories about peppers, so you’re more likely to accept their articles about more charged topics in the future.
Perhaps. OTOH - looking over Sixth Tone's front page, there are many "Here is a serious problem in China..." headlines. Far fewer "All is well" or "Interesting Story" headlines. And zero headlines about politics or national security issues, for Sixth Tone to be building cred on those subjects.
Sixth Tone represents a sort of progressive Shanghai-based view of China that is more palatable to people in democratic countries than the usual party line reporting. But, to be sure, the level of criticism is still always below the threshold of what the party deems acceptable. That doesn't mean the stories aren't pertinent or interesting, but it's worth keeping in mind that they will only ever go so far in reporting the facts on the ground. You may see criticism of corrupt behavior or generally "uncivilized" practices, but not of the broader party policies that led to the situation. In China, this is the best you can hope for.
And how is this relevant to story about chilli peppers? You all are just feeding troll when you approve pointing out company ownership at story about chilli peppers. Next time you see story about sausages on DW.com I hope you won't forget to analyze how it's site funded by German gov, same with France24 and French gov.
I think this is a weird take. You could analyze every human interest piece this way. Is that what the NYT does with Page Six? I read that and then don't think about the fossil fuel or tech companies' influence on their stories?
Just read a story about chili peppers and don't get all Joseph McCarthy about it.
I'd also be interested as to what parameters could possibly be tweaked such that capitalism would find it unprofitable to commodify food or at the very least more profitable to distribute it to those who can't afford it. Massive state and international intervention might be able to do it but this isn't the kind of thing we could fix with minor tax incentives and penalties.
OK but what's the upshot wrt this story? Now that someone knows about its connection to the CCP, does it change how we ought to think about it in any way?
Yes. If this wasn't state-driven, it'd be a somewhat-humorous prank. If it is state-driven, it becomes a situation straight from 1984, where the protagonist's job is quite literally to rewrite history.
If you applied the same criteria to Western media, you'd conclude that the vast majority of them is state-driven too.
(Note that this is not whataboutism, but rather a proof that this behaviour is widespread and pretty much normal, which contrasts with article's rethoric)
I do, and I have. That said, the extremely-predictable "what-about-western-media" tu quoque that occurs anytime someone leverages a criticism towards any Second World nations is as tired of a counter-propaganda strategy as the propaganda it's used to deflect attention from.
Edit: just noticed that you're a self-proclaimed 50 Cent Army member. It's all making sense now - you're an actual propagandist. For anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
Doesn't the fact that it's reported in state-owned media suggest, although not prove, that it's not state driven? Why would they invite extra scrutiny to their disinformation campaign by publishing an article about it?
Not really. It's a common strategy called "controlling the narrative" and it has been in play since the early days of public relations and propaganda, largely considered to be pioneered by Ivy Lee[1].
Regardless, I only posed it being state-driven as a hypothetical anyways. But state media reporting on the matter does little-to-nothing towards disproving that hypothesis.
1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome.
2. This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. All three have led to the total destruction and failure of the invaded state. Ukraine has lost territory and there has been substantial suffering, but it has not been nearly on the same scale and the social disruption has not, at least yet, been anywhere near as significant.
I bring this up because moral consistency is important. Just as we should endorse the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves from criminal aggression, we must also endorse the same rights for other peoples. And we should be making the same calls, or not, for the aggressor states in these crimes to have their cultural influences purged from law-abiding societies.