Supporters of US interventionist policy in Ukraine for the past year sanctimoniously act like they have the obvious moral high ground, as if hundreds of bodies aren't piling up every day, whole cities wrecked, and it's only getting worse. "Isolationists" didn't do that. You did Of course they'll just keep pumping out the sanctimony: angrily denying that they're responsible for the war effort they're funding, arming, planning, and executing. Like small children, they accept no responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and just shout "Russia"

Head of "security studies" at the Marshall Center -- a quasi-academic offshoot of the Pentagon -- declares Russian culture inherently violent, and defined primarily by "rape and torture." Useful insight into the vengeful psychodrama that's really animating these "NatSec" creeps Maybe @andrewmichta can clarify if his description of Russian culture as inherently violent, barbaric, sexually predatory, thieving, and torturous -- along with his call for its unspecified "expulsion" -- meets the criteria for what would be commonly understood as "genocide""

Dave Rubin just published a 50 minute infomercial with Mike Pompeo that appears to be billed as some sort of interview. To give a sense of the journalistic acumen on display, here's a representative sample of Dave's questions, transcribed for your convenience "But little old Dave never claimed to be a journalist!"

Whatever, I don't really care what he claims to be, I just know he did a chummy "interview" with the former CIA Director/Secretary of State and possible presidential candidate, and didn't ask a single challenging question

RAND Corporation identifies chief "impediment" to ending the Ukraine war: "The centrality of Western assistance"

Causing misperceptions similar to what prolonged World War I, they say

An amazing acknowledgment from the Pentagon's in-house Think Tank, but will be largely ignored It's suggested that the US could address the problem by conditioning further "aid" on Ukraine engaging in negotiations. Odd that most of the media/Congress/etc. wouldn't get caught dead saying this, like RAND Corp. must be some radical outlier organization
rand.org/pubs/perspecti…

So many fallacies packed into one tweet. "Deterrence" was the supposed rationale for US "defense" policy in Ukraine pre-2022. Given that Russia invaded Ukraine, there's no evidence this policy "deterred" anything, and strong evidence (i.e. the invasion) it had the opposite effect

https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1619343503477334016

As far as Russia's military capacity being "wrecked," what's the actual evidence for this, because it's the kind of thing that constantly gets asserted without any real evidence. We're told Russia's capacity is "wrecked"... but they're also gearing up for a giant Spring Offensive

Victoria Nuland said yesterday that the US is working on setting up a "judicial mechanism" to prosecute Putin, whom she preemptively declared guilty. Thus confirming that the US is pursuing regime change. If you're throwing Putin in prison, you're changing the regime by force Also seems like the US dealing a death blow to any potential negotiations. If the US is publicly declaring its intent to remove, prosecute, and imprison Putin, that's effectively a declaration that the war can now only be resolved with the demise of the current Russian government

Looks and sounds like Paul Pelosi was just trying to defuse the situation and keep the wack-job intruder calm. It was always justified to request more information before drawing conclusions about the attack. Not justified to start running wild with salacious sex theories, however Such a dumb thing to have a partisan flamewar about, there's no larger principle at stake in the competing theories of the incident -- just nasty two-way grudges and resentments

In practice, the word "genocide" has come to just mean "really bad." It has no stable definitional criteria beyond that

https://twitter.com/AndriyYermak/status/1618896105005260801

Russia and Ukraine both accuse one another of committing genocide right now. For most conflicts anywhere in the world, there will usually be cross-cutting allegations of genocide, and in practice the meaning of the word is just interchangeable with "really bad"

Not adequately emphasized is that this latest upsurge of arms to Ukraine -- PATRIOT missiles, tanks -- coincides with the establishment of a new "long-term" joint US command led by a three-star general. US is rapidly bureaucratizing and "permanentizing" its involvement in the war "Security Assistance Group-Ukraine" or "SAG-U," the new joint US command -- slated to be up and running by "early 2023" -- recalls an earlier example of a joint US command: "Military Assistance Command-Vietnam" or "MACV," established in 1961 and led by a three-star general

German Green Party manifesto in the 2021 election called for banning "export of arms and military equipment" into war zones. They won 118 seats on this pledge, entered the ruling coalition, and are now the government's most hardcore proponents of exporting arms into war zones "Germany should be a driving force in the political de-escalation of conflicts," the manifesto reads -- raising the question of whether the Green Party now views Leopard Tanks as new, cutting-edge "political de-escalation" devices

Latvian journalist Kristaps Andrejsons, aka @Eastern_Border -- really seems to be on top of his game 👇 Seems like a cry for help

Nothing in this thread specifies what Nate Silver actually did to wrong this person, other than "create an environment of hierarchy and fear," which is a hilarious thing to allege that Nate Silver ruled over with an iron fist

https://twitter.com/farai/status/1617840720756486145

I also don't believe Nate Silver ever "dismissed all relevance of race and gender" in the 2016 election, partly because I guarantee you could find approximately ten billion references to race/gender in FiveThirtyEight's 2016 election coverage, including from the author herself

The insidious influence of the for-profit "defense" sector on US foreign policy (not to mention the warped supporting role of the financial sector) used to be a ubiquitous target of left-wing critique. But today the critique's been completely neutralized so they can play-act WWII twitter.com/i/web/status/1… It's highly offensive to observe that the US defense and energy sectors in particular have had a $$$ bonanza since the war started, and to wonder whether this imparts a perverse incentive as to why US policy has been 100% geared toward expanding the war, rather than curtailing it

Aside from the irony of McGonigal once working on the FBI Trump/Russia investigation, now he's charged for violating 2018 sanctions *Trump imposed* on the ground that Russia was an "extraordinary threat to US national security." I thought Trump & Putin were colluding at the time? I get the schadenfreude, but a more productive question might be: What does this say about the utility of the sanctions in the first place? Because the nature of both sanctions-imposition and sanctions-enforcement could not be more openly political

It's now become a truism that in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, elected officials will rush to declare a "hate crime" in the absence of any evidence. (After this press conference, the suspect was reported as Huu Can Tran, 72). Clearly the incentives are warped here Here's a local person describing the suspect. Maybe if @HildaSolis watched this before swooping into Monterey Park and delivering her standard "AAPI hate" sermon, she might've waited for some actual evidence first

The photo of her she's claiming was "non-consensually" posted on Twitter is from a 2016 music video published by World Star and directed by "Video God," aka Austin Hart, who has also directed music videos for major hip hop artists like Migos, Juicy J, Lil Wayne, and Wiz Khalifa Since she apparently has a direct line to Twitter management and is getting people banned for posting the images, I won't post them. But feel free to do a quick Google for "WSHH iCandy: Eliza Knows" to see what this prominent Human Trafficking Survivor was up to six years ago

So the stakes of the war are indeed "existential" for the Russian state -- i.e., defeat would cause the state's destruction -- which is one of the few scenarios where it's widely contemplated that Russia could actually use nuclear weapons?

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1616491043049848832

Kasparov demands that upon the overthrow of Putin, a "transitional state council with legislative powers" must be imposed by the US "to oversee a temporary technocratic government" -- presumably including Kasparov himself. What could possibly go wrong?

Do some reading beyond "tactical wisdom" self-help brochures and you might learn the definition of "tank" versus "Armored Fighting Vehicle" has been extremely ambiguous and fluid for more than 100 years, despite the weird dogmatic certainty from you and other internet Tank Guys

https://twitter.com/DolioJ/status/1615838844011839490

As is often the case, it's a severe disadvantage to actually read and know stuff

From "A Dictionary of Modern War" by Edward Luttwak (1971)

In case anyone tries to argue that the Bradley Fighting Vehicles being sent by the US to Ukraine aren't technically "tanks," so no big deal, UK Defense Secretary says their own tank deployment is specifically meant to "complement" the BFVs, to form one "interoperable" tank fleet Pay no mind, this is *not* a tank, it's merely a "fighting vehicle"

This attempted hit-piece would've been slightly less embarrassing if the author and/or editors had managed to maintain basic logical continuity across consecutive paragraphs. But even if they met that simple threshold, it still would've been embarrassing

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1615258939008114688

https://twitter.com/MilesKlee/status/1614708027051114496

Journalist @MilesKlee finds himself forced to begrudgingly concede that an NY state law being challenged by Rumble is "admittedly dubious" -- but then immediately pivots to a Misinformation Expert dismissing the lawsuit as "based on false concerns." OK then, makes perfect sense

It’s extremely bizarre that the Scottish Parliament has chosen to make Gender Self-ID for 16 year olds such a massive governing priority, and is now even gearing up for an epic constitutional showdown over the issue, which is only supported by about 20% of the Scottish populace twitter.com/i/web/status/1… One theory is that the SNP used the issue as a vehicle to deliberately provoke a constitutional crisis. But if the SNP really wanted to intertwine the cause of Scottish Independence with the cause of Gender Self-ID for 16 year olds, that makes the whole thing even more bizarre