No update today, but your regularly scheduled programming will continue tomorrow.
Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Convincing Liberals that de-nazification is real and our friend is probably the road of most resistance and the one they are least likely to accept, besides maybe biolabs talking points.
The most convincing argument to Liberals is to educate them on the attacks on Donbas, the civil war, the Maidan Coup with US funding, the expansion of NATO, the reckless escalation to war being dangerous and all parties needing to negotiate.
You are never going to convince an western Liberal that Russia’s intervention is based. But you can convince them that Ukraine is even worse and that the west caused this with their greedy expansionist meddling and lack of care for Russia’s pragmatic concerns
Western media before this war always portrayed Nazis as bad. The entire WW2 entertainment industry revolves around Nazis vs the US. The eastern front despite being far more important to the war is quite severely less popular than the stuff the US actively participated in.
They must be able to see the bizarre world we are living in right now where 3 months ago Nazis were villains both on news reporting(which is why I suggest western sources) and entertainment sources compared to now where supposedly a little bit of Nazism is ok. As I said ask them about ISIS in the US army and if that would be ok. You don't need them to agree that war is justified, but only start questioning why this fact is taken for granted.
If they do believe nazism is ok no matter what then these are not libs you are talking with but 15yo chuds living and breathing FPS games still thinking playing on the Nazi side is cool.
I actually saw polling on what Westerners thought about various Russian pro-war narratives. The ones with the highest agreement from western normies was “Ukraine should not join NATO” and “Ukraine is in an ongoing civil war” and “not our business, we should not interfere or sanction Russia and hurt ourselves”.
The ones with the worst polling were de-Nazification and irredentist territorial claims
What percentage of those people actualy believe the Nazis exist in the first place?
Remember the No fly zone polls and how they change when people are told what it actualy means and the result would be WW3.
Americans just spent the last 6 years calling each other fascists and Nazis. They pretty much all tune out to the insult as hyperbolic when it’s coming from “the other side”.
Liberals also think that we should solve everything with words (or at least others should, we get to use democracy bombs). Even if you get them to agree Ukraine has a major Nazi problem, they still will turn around and say “that doesn’t give Russia the right to invade and kill the Nazis”. Remember these are the people that could not agree whether or not it was ok to punch Richard Spencer.
I saw some of that in the wild today, albeit from a few years ago on twitter. "We can't just denounce Nazis we have to sit down with them and have a frank discussion and then they will change their minds!" Liberalism projects a delusional view of the world.
But then you'd have to explain that the "moderate rebels" the US was backing against Syria were literally just ISIS.
:same-picture:
Both are a terrorist organization but only one pretends it isn't.
I'm going to disagree. Anything about Donbas civil war is met with "Russian Backed separatists. No civilians were killed they were all Russian separatist fighters"
Nazis on the other hand are monolithic "evil" if you can convince someone that a person or group are Nazis or even Nazi accepting its basically instant dehumanizing. When Zelenskyy is literally deleting his victory day tweets because there are Nazi symbols that slip past him and there are dozens of pre-special operation reports/articles/videos on the Nazi's role in the Euromaidan Coup and tons of videos of Ukrainian Nazis since the Russian intervention it isn't hard to prove.