I also hold Putin responsible for a significant part of the human suffering in Donbas. That insurgence seems very much fueled by Putin to destabilize Ukraine further while he took the Crimean.
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Windscribe VPN gives some free data using promocode ŠŠŠŠŠŠ¦. They also have PEACE code for bleeding-heart liberals or whatever.
Iām also annoyed at duckduckgo with their BS
But I had a feeling they merely pretend to be good for a while. Any search engine you can recommend for more unfiltered results?
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So I would like to start by posing a question, what does it mean to support the government?
Sure - It just means believing the government is right to act as he does. In this case, it means believe the invasion of Ukraine is the right thing to do. A person doesnāt need to buy war bonds or whatnot to personally support the war.
Itās not because youāre not actively supporting or opposing something that you have no opinion on the matter.
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There are many Russians who donāt know there is a war and / or deny any evidence about it.
I see reports of Ukranians who discover that their relatives (even their parents) living in Russia donāt believe there is an actual war going on. Even when they send pictures of the destruction around them to their relatives in Russia, their relatives will quote Russian state media who claim itās the Ukranian military thatās shelling Ukranian cities.
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Some good news for a change (at least it looks like it): Turkey is taking steps to normalize its relations with Israel, Greece and Armenia.
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I will like this post on principle, but.
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So what is the difference between a person who supports the government by this definition and the one who doesnāt? Does it all need to converge into some situation where this support/opposition will affect the government in some way?
If not then what is the point of having an opinion? This is pretty much the premise over here. Why would you care about something you have no effect on, and will most likely never do? You can start linking all of this to some philosophical ideals and the human ideals, but ultimately, in the real world, in your entire lifetime, there will be no output from you on the matter. This is why I started it by posing that question, because without this effect or the effect of the consequences of doing so, I donāt see 2 camps here, I just see the same type of people, the ones who canāt affect anything.
You need to know about the situation. Or rather, whenever you feel like you need to know more about it, you need to have all the factual and most objective information on the subject. But whatever āsideā you pick as a response ultimately has no effect, unless youāre in the position of enough power for it to have an effect.
In this thread Iām trying to provide information that is simply overlooked or outright missing for both of the sides. Some people unwisely misunderstood this as me supporting putin, which is quite funny. I think that access to information is the most important thing. Doesnāt help both sides faking and hiding everything in their power, though I guess thatās ā21st century warā for you.
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Some more potentially good news: Both Russian and Ukranian negociators say that significant progress has been made today towards ending the conflict.
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What if these risks were weighed
What if these risks were weighed incorrectly?
I wonder why it is that such sentences are passive sentences ā¦ thus evading the need to state WHO weighs these ārisksā, which, in consequence, are lives.
IMNVHO we should train ourselves to put such sentences differently, like:
What if [WHO exactly?] weighed these risks?
What if [WHO exactly?] weighed these risks incorrectly?
Note: This is not to meant to attack or criticise those who wrote what I quoted above. it just is my interest in language and psychology that makes me wonder why we have learned to put sentences like these in passive.
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From context itās implied that itās the russian government.
Even without context, the person who took the risk may have weighted the risks incorrectly.
Being in language learning and linguistics-adjacent communities for years Iāve noticed and was told by some that the most eye opening thing for an english speaker when learning another language is how much implied context there is in other languages. Not all languages are like this, and the degree of āomitting and implying contextā varies between languages, but it seems that itās always much higher than it is in english. Many researchers also believe that all the euphemism loops that the english natives are creating are due to that they fail to understand or purposefully ignore the context, even though itās so much more explicit in this language. I wonder why this backwards effect happens.
In fact I didnāt talk about someone or even about current events. I just copied original sentences with modification to illustrate logic problems of these sentences.
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On the one hand you deny responsibility of ordinary Russian people (to which I mostly agree, and I hope Ukranians will also), but on the other hand you seem to shift responsibility to the West (to which I mostly donāt agree).
So I didnāt understand that you support Putinās actions in Ukraine, but you do seem quite defensive about it.
Iām not. Iām just providing information. And Iām not shifting responsibility or anything like that. People seemed to view the invasion in a black and white way so I provided the publicly available reasoning for it as well as the reference material. In fact I have been careful throughout so as to not express my opinion on the situation or make it look like itās what Iām doing.
Some other people also took it as me trying to justify or disparage the casualties. Which I also found quite amusing.
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I think it is very helpful - almost imperative - to provide and discuss other opinions and other reporting than the mainstream western view of the causes for the war.
One thing āwe in the westā should be terrified of is that our view of what is happening is as twisted as the view that the Russian people are being fed.
So thanks for that.
I will say that I think the diversion into āPeople think that the Russians should prevent Putin from doing thisā is a pointless diversion from more important factors in the discussion. I donāt know who thinks that, but it must be a minority: Iāve thought it miraculous bravery that there have been any protests at all, and itās clear that many Russians may not even see anything to protest about.
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I guess thatās me 
I wonāt dissect every word thatās been said in either side, because I find it patently unproductive as a course of discussion.
Iāll just reiterate that, even if minority Russians in Ukraine suffered actions that called for intervention:
A. That shouldnāt justify a war. War is usually the thing Powers throw at a problem and it leaves behind destruction and the problem intact. This is about us, the people (I mean as opposed to Powers), to discuss and internalize, if possible, because we should do better.
B. Putin doesnāt care. Leaders donāt usually care. Whatever else, heās using it as a excuse. Maybe heās indeed lost it, maybe itās cold calculating political move for more power, in any case he couldnāt care less if people suffer, heās been causing suffering all his lucrative career. Even our own clown PM is probably indirectly responsible for quite a few deaths because of the pandemic, and heās a useless nobody compared to Putin.
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This is still an oversimplified view of the situation.
āUsuallyā is a generalisation. If you really want to judge the situation in any way you need to know the exact reasoning from both sides. Discarding this doesnāt make it go away. Starting a war is a very complex and complicated action however you paint it. At worst itās a decision that involves communicating it with dozens or even hundreds of other specialized personnel and counsellors. Then it involves months, years, decades of preparation while constantly reevaluating risks and leveraging all the possibilities.
Making it sound like a crazy king getting drunk one night and ordering people to go conquer stuff on a whim doesnāt make it so. Those times are gone when it was that simple.
Once again there needs to be a lot of background to judge the dynamics of the āsufferingā. Yes heās causing suffering, but is it less suffering than if he did otherwise or wasnāt in power in the first place? Or is it more? Is he picking between two evils or is he purposefully pursuing evil and turning away from good?
Once again picking the option thatās more convenient to explain doesnāt really reduce the complexity of the situation.
And in the end even if you know all this information you probably still canāt make an easy call as to whether this or that is good or bad. Not even the experts on the matter can.
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If on the other end of ādiscarding/ oversimplifing/ generalizingā is endless excuses to justify nothing, Iām fine with my take.
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