aguaviva

That's not what happened. In fact its local government reached out to the US and agreed to come under its wing as a de-facto protectorate, which it saw as a preferable alternative to Canadanian/British (and in any case German) intervention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_in_World_War_II

'56, '67 and '82 were all unambiguously started by Israel.

It is also currently engaged in an effort, which it initiated on December 9th, to expand its illegally annexed territorial holdings in Syria as we speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Israeli_invasion_of_Syria...

I have three questions for you:

(1) Can you name one of the regions Putin is attempting to annex, aside from Crimea, that was "heavily ethnic Russian?"

(2) Can you explain the circumstances which caused that particular region to have a majority Russian-identified population? (In just a sentence or two, please).

(3) Something else happened in 2014, in between the two events that you claim happened. Why is this missing from your chronology?

And that's your cardinal error.

To come to an understanding of what's been happening to Ukraine -- you need to focus on Ukraine, and its history, along with the history of the region. Especially in regard to what all of these countries have had to put up with for the past 400 years.

Not the US, and its never-ending internal scandals and naval-gazing shenanigans. The idea that stuff like the Russiagate can begin to matter in comparison to what's actually happening in Ukraine ironically reflects a profound Western-centric bias.

Your secondary error is to adopt as an axiom that "anti-Putin" and "pro-West" are on a common axis, and part of a zero-sum game.

And hence to be anti-Putin is to be "pro-West", and a sucker for its propaganda.

I also found out that it wasn't Russian operatives shooting at the Maidan protestors from the top of a building. It was neo Nazi Ukrainians.

Except you didn't "find this out". Your read it on a blog somewhere, and it never occurred to you to dig behind this assertion and fact-check it.

The West does Propaganda too.

Then just ignore it, and use your brain instead.

It's not that hard, really.

You can imagine all you want, but that's not what happened in regard to Ukraine.

What did happen is that Ukraine formally renounced its NATO aspirations in 2010, but Putin invaded anyway in 2014.

Nowhere near a half a million have been killed.

The country identified as 17 percent Russian in the last census.

No one one from the Ukrainian side was going to, or is ever going to expel or exterminate anyone.

No one from Ukraine I talk to (including people very close to events at the time) gives any credence to the "coup" theory.

You obviously have no understanding of the Language Law, or what it actually does. And anyway it was passed in 2019 and so had nothing to do with events of 2014.

People in the West talk about the Ukraine situation all the time, from every angle, include quite obviously very pro-Russian angles. Not just online, but right there on major channels like Fox and CNN. There are no "allowed" or "disallowed" viewpoints, or any other repercussions or constraints.

Everything you're saying above is sheer lunacy, basically.

Which is completely ludicrous, of course.

For Ukraine, "surrender" means accepting permanent occupation and subjugation.

For Russia, it means they get egg on their face, basically. It will just go back to its corner and sulk for a while. Definitely very doable, as it's something they've done many times in the past.

There's simply no comparison.

And there's no symmetry at all between the two sides in this conflict.

First, Zelenskyy was just reacting to what the DPSU (State Border Guard Service) told him. And mostly likely what they reported was (at worst) a somewhat premature, but not unreasonable inference based on the information they had at the time.

This information being, at the time, the following facts: (1) The aggressor opened fire shortly after the guard patrol refused to surrender, and rightly told the warship what, precisely, it needed to do with itself; and (2) all contact with the patrol was lost shortly after that; and (3) before the close of the same day it was observed that all infrastructure on the island had been destroyed after an intense air and naval bombardment.

Further, there was a significant delay (about 48 hours -- in any case on the 26th, 2 days later) between the assault on the island, and the first indication by the DPSU that some of the personnel on the island might still be alive. In any case confirmation was not provided by the aggressor until the 28th.

Meanwhile Zelenskyy's statement was issued on the 25th, so entirely within this window in which the details were not fully known, but during which it was perfectly reasonable to assume the soldiers had most likely been killed, based on the information available. Plus the war had literally just started, and it wasn't like he didn't have a lot of other distractions at the time.

In sum: no story here, just the usual fog of war. Definitely not in the category of an intential deception ("one big lie") as you're making it out to be. And unlike the DPSU, you've had close to a full 3 years to catch up with the full story by now, so if anything it is your own less than forthright representation of the matter which should be raising eyebrows, in view of this context.

In this evil, awful, insanely stupid war, based entirely on lies from the very start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Island_campaign#/media/F...

This is a muddled hyperbolization. These features barely existed (in terms of widespread use) even 10 years ago, but everyone got along just fine, even founded FAANG-scale companies without them, and so on. Yet you're making it sound like if you aren't using them, then you're basically still writing COBOL.

Not using productivity tools is just hurting you.

The commenter very clearly isn't saying you shouldn't use them. And their point had nothing to do with any "sensation of superiority".

They simply meant that -- yes, it is possible to not only be productive, but highly productive without these tools -- and that if you just tried to get along with them for a while, you just might learn a thing or two. For example, if one is even the slightest bit hesitant as to how one would go about resolving one of the issues that the OP asked about, without the help of modern tooling features:

   What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?

Both of those languages are strongly typed.

It seems you're confusing the fact that the type checking happens at runtime (that is to say, that they are dynamically typed) to mean that they're "untyped", but that's just not the case.

If one is confused about the languages one is using at this level, then modern tooling features aren't likely to help much.

   WASHINGTON - Stanislav Nazarov, 46, a dual citizen of Israel and Russia, has been extradited from Israel to face charges in an indictment accusing him of taking part in an international money laundering scheme.

But hey, it's a free planet, and you can believe whatever you want to belive. I certainly wouldn't want to get between you and one of your pet narratives.

All apologies.

Not quite. Its criminal code inherits directly from that of the 1871 Reich (including quite notoriously Paragraphs 175 and 218).

But it is correct to say that its constitution inherits only back to 1919, and it never maintained any pretense of connection to the Holy Roman Empire.

You damn sure were.

Again, I don't know much about you other than you were very vocal about the definition of genocide as it pertains to the Israeli response

You're hallucinating. In this particular thread, I haven't touched on the genocide definition in the Oct 7th context at all. Someone switched the focus to Dresden, and I started chiming in on that.

and your abject silence and avoidance of answering a simple question.

Because it was a leading question, as already explained.

And the fact that you immediately whipped out the antisemitism accusation after I refused to take the bait proves that this was the stick you were carrying all along.

You're just a bully. Go away.

Which (as used by the commenter) was very clearly meant to apply to those who support Israel's military operation.

Not to Jews in general.

I agree, [waving the antisemitism flag] just makes it clear to everyone who reads this who is one and who isn't.

Except when it's unsubstantiated.

In which case it's just a cheap, ugly smear.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483975

But don't let that slow down your witch hunt.

Don’t forget this is a tech forum

It isn't actually, and you can check the guidelines on this if you wish.

Snyder isn't right-wing at all. Where did that come from?

That's insane. Of course it's an "option". No one in these countries (outside of a very tiny portion of wackos) cares about the current borders, or dreams of starting a war to move them.

They aren't actually. And none of that history relates to the current war.

Which is all about Russia's internal politics and ideology. And not about the after-effects of post-WW2 territorial transfers at all.

Those transfers in turn were in turn the work of the Allied powers, not Ukraine.

I was paraphrasing you, but not unfairly in that sense.

The burden of proof is on those claiming genocide, not on me.

The burden of proof is on the occupying forces, to show that they are not causing undue harm to the population affected.

We could adjudicate this further, but as said - you've simply worn me out, via your patently spurious opening.

Meanwhile, yours wasn't merely a keyboard slip. The point, simply, is that your encapsulation of the last 5 decades was very myopic. Don't mean to condescend, but it does seem that in terms of basic global history you're still playing catch-up, as it were.

The concern (as I attempted to articulate) wasn't so much that you were "lying", but that (going by your statements) you do seem to have a rather blasé attitude about the truth, and/or to have simply missed out on a lot of the major event chronology of the last 50 years. Which suggests that you're much more interested in your moral narratives than in what actually happened, or why.

The irony here is that we probably agree about 70 percent in terms of which side is "bad" and who is to "blame". It's just that that other 30 percent is, unfortunately, complex and intermixed.

If it helps, I hereby mention "legalized torture, secret laws, and secret courts".

In turn, if you like, you can "mention" the ethnic cleansings in Srebrenica, Prijedor, Foča, Zvornik, Doboj Bosanski Šamac and Bijeljina -- and what, precisely, you think the morally compromised Western powers should have done about this general state of affairs at the time.

That is, if these events ping your awareness at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_the_Bosnia...

Bitte. Please.

The KPD paramilitaries (with their various assassinations) and the the SPD (through their alliance with various reactionist forces at the time and the far greater violence they supported) did their part as well. And that's just Germany, not to mention events in Spain, etc.

It was a mutual effort.

There's a difference between "lying" about things, and being simply deluded or deeply misunderstanding them.

Of course they lied about WMD. But they didn't "lie" about those other two situations. Whether you like it or not, there's a major distinction at play here.

lost the last 5 decades of wars

It's true that they lost the 3 major wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). But they didn't lose all of their pet wars in this time period. The Gulf War (I betcha forgot that one!) was a very, very major conflict that they won unambiguously.

So already, you're completely out to lunch, right there. But there were numerous second-order conflicts that they won also during this time period. This most significant was the proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan (effectively the "First Afghan War" from the US perspective) which was unambiguously won, also. Which BTW had some pretty huge consequences (though it seems you've forgotten about those, as well).

And several second-order conflicts in addition (Panama, Yugoslavia, Kosovo) that were effectively won also, even if others (Syria, Libya) were not.

I know, I know - like Reagan said, "facts are boring things". What's my point, you ask? Let's get right to it.

What if they’re just full of shit?

Of course they're full of shit.

But what's vastly more important point is -- if you can't be even ballpark correct about the stuff above -- or (as seems to be more likely the case) you plainly don't care -- then what does that make you full of?

If it's all just word salad to you -- if the basic factual accuracy of stuff like this just doesn't really matter to you; as long as you can smoosh the various bullet points together somehow, and sculpt them in your into whatever broad, sweeping, hypermoralistic narrative that your worldview seems to hinge on -- then not only are you no different, really, from "them" and all of their big, fat stinking lies.

Effectively, you're on the same team.

Who are there (and are emotionally traumatized) in no small part because your government chose to cozy up to Putin in the first place, and to look the other way while he started his rampage in 2014. Which doesn't excuse the behavior of those particular kids. But the situation needs to be understood in this context.

As a German I'm tired of going shopping and only hearing languages of the middle east.

For 5 minutes out the week. In that one particular aisle of the store.

Some of your complaints have validity, but I have to say this one sounds extremely petty. Not to mention naive. In large cities in Germany one has been hearing Middle Eastern voices for decades. Absolutely no one grumbled about it (or if they did, it's because they were, well, basically kind of an asshole).

If you're being suspected of intolerance, it's probably because (with respect to this particular complaint) you're making, auf deutsch gesagt -- aus einer Mücke einen Elefanten.

However, I'm afraid you drained my batteries with the unwise decision to employ the plainly untenable "It's either gas chambers or it's no big deal, really" technique. Which by itself (through the use of such trivializing language) carries an air of callous disregard for the plight of those suffering from the situation we were attempting to talk about.