Ukraine

[neoplacebo]

Sometimes I wonder if the world has gone mad.

Other times I know it has.

Saudi Arabia executed 81 people today. Next week they will execute Dow Jones.

[billy.pilgrim]

Sometimes I wonder if the world has gone mad.

Other times I know it has.

Saudi Arabia executed 81 people today. Next week they will execute Dow Jones.

I thought Mondays were pu lic execution days

[Ulysses]

Sometimes I wonder if the world has gone mad.

Other times I know it has.

Saudi Arabia executed 81 people today. Next week they will execute Dow Jones.

AFAIK, "Dow Jones" is not actually a person, but rather a financial term.

I will have to check on that, though.

[Ulysses]

OK...

Who or What Is Dow Jones?

Dow Jones was not a single person, but two of the three people who founded Dow Jones & Company in 1882. Charles Dow was the Dow in Dow Jones, Edward Jones was the Jones, and Charles Bergstresser was the company's third founder. In 1889, they went on to found The Wall Street Journal, which remains one of the world's most influential financial publications.

Dow was known for his ability to explain complicated financial news to the public. He believed that investors needed a simple benchmark to indicate whether the stock market was rising or declining. Dow chose several industrial-based stocks for the first index, and the first reported average was 40.94.

Charles Dow also believed it was possible to predict stock market movements based on the price movements of different types of stocks. According to Dow Theory, an upward trend in industrial stocks should be confirmed by a similar move up in transportation stocks. Charles Dow created various market averages to more accurately define which way " industrial stocks" or " transportation stocks" were headed.

Dow Jones & Company is the firm founded by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser in 1882, not the people themselves. Charles Dow and Edward Jones ran the company themselves in the early years and built a reputation for integrity. When Dow died in 1902, Clarence Barron and Jessie Waldron bought the company, and control eventually passed to the Bancroft family. In 2007, News Corp. purchased Dow Jones & Company from the Bancrofts.

Any questions? Don't ask me!

[neoplacebo]

Just that same one; why are you still here?

[Ulysses]

Just that same one; why are you still here?

Why do you keep asking that?

[neoplacebo]

I give up. Why?

[Vrede too]

Just that same one; why are you still here?

Why do you keep asking that?

Childish. Why do you keep cowering from answering?

(signature: obsessed butthurt )

Awww. , Useless. So much for "Ignored". You fail again. Plus, Useless, you've been busted too many times for anyone to believe you're not reading my posts, anyhow. It's just your excuse for cowering. Awww.

[Vrede too]

Interesting article. I'm not entirely comfortable with our once again being and supporting the merchants of death.

Why some American leftists are critical of U.S. assistance to Ukraine

... Putin, an authoritarian nationalist who has enacted laws targeting LGBTQ people and jailed liberal dissidents, has never been lionized on the left. Still, a cadre of far-left activists and pundits argue that the U.S. risked provoking confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO to its borders, and some are opposed to giving military aid to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

“Everyone I know is united in condemning this war, and none of us like Putin,” Branko Marcetic, a staff writer at the Marxist journal Jacobin, told Yahoo News. But, he said, that doesn’t mean the U.S. should arm Ukraine.

“The idea of sending weapons to Ukraine — I think there’s a defensible argument for it,” Marcetic said. “The problem is, there was a similarly defensible argument for arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s when they were fighting a Soviet invasion.”

Good point.

The mujahideen were militias that fell into civil war with one another after the Soviets withdrew. The Taliban grew out of that war, later giving safe harbor to al-Qaida. Similarly, Marcetic warns, U.S. weapons could wind up in the hands of Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias such as the Azov Battalion, a part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Putin, who said at the onset of the war that Russia’s aim was “the de-Nazification of Ukraine,” has used the existence of groups like the Azov Battalion to justify his invasion.

“Because Putin has used that pretext, and because it’s such a big element of Kremlin propaganda at the moment, that in the West there’s a whole idea of ‘there’s no Nazi problem in Ukraine’ ... which is just not true,” Marcetic said.

Azov Battalion

Back to the article:

... “Putin’s invasion was unjust, illegal and immoral,” she added. “But that doesn’t make arming Ukraine to fight a protracted miserable proxy war, with no winners but the war industry, the right thing to do.” ...

In a recent editorial, the Nation magazine, a left-liberal tribune, while decrying the invasion, called for diplomacy instead of “a rush to arms” or sanctions that it warned “will hurt not only Russia — oligarchs and ordinary citizens alike — but also Europe, the US, and the global economy’s bystanders.”

Some fear a global recession.

... Concerns that NATO’s post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe could lead to a confrontation with Moscow are by no means limited to the left. As Ukraine fights for survival, there are some democratic socialists who come to some similar conclusions as their unlikely allies on the right about how the U.S. should, or should not, respond to the war in Ukraine.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, for example, worries that replacing Russian oil with oil from Saudi Arabia will empower the Middle Eastern kingdom, which has a deplorable record on human rights and is prosecuting a brutal war in Yemen. Omar, along with fellow left-leaning Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, was one of two House Democrats who voted Wednesday against banning Russian oil imports; they were joined in their opposition by 15 right-wing Republicans.

“If our issue is that we don’t want to buy oil from a powerful country that is conducting a devastating war on its weaker neighbor, I just don’t see Saudi Arabia hardly being a principled solution,” Omar said in a radio interview on “Democracy Now” on Tuesday.

Good point. Fuck Saudi Arabia, too.

Omar has been clear that she opposes Russia’s invasion and supports U.S. aid to Ukraine....

In fact, all of the members of Congress who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, including Bush and Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have broadly backed the Biden administration’s alliance with Ukraine.

But the organization to which they belong has other ideas. In its Feb. 26 statement on the war, the DSA criticized Russia’s invasion but also came out against any effort to arm Ukraine or sanction Russia. It also called for the end of U.S. involvement in NATO.

“This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict,” the group’s National Political Committee wrote. “DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”

It's true. Arms for Ukraine could get even more Ukrainians killed while Russia still wins in the end.

... Just as Trumpist conservatives hearken back to their movement’s isolationist, pre-World War II history, leftists and socialists urging the U.S. to withdraw from NATO are expressing their ideology’s anti-imperialist instincts.

“People on the left who call themselves anti-imperialist ... believe that no big power, especially their own country, should be an imperial power, should have the right to have a large military, should have the ability to intervene around the world,” Kazin said....

“One dark reality that many in the West will soon have to reckon with is that the future of a democratic Ukraine is not worth a larger land war or a nuclear threat,” wrote Ross Barkan, a left-wing pundit and former New York state Senate candidate, in a recent column.

“In diplomacy, human life must be prized first, and if a so-called appeasement strategy is what saves us from further civilian slaughter, it will have to be the strategy pursued.”

Where are y'all at?
For overt military intervention like with a no-fly zone?
For arming Ukraine?
Against arming Ukraine?
Fence straddler like me?

Fence

My wishy-washy hominy!

[Ulysses]

Just that same one; why are you still here?

Why do you keep asking that?

I asked you why you keep on asking "why are you still here?".

I can only conclude you're just trying to start a fight.

Homey don't play that.

And clearly explaining anything to you is a colossal waste of time.

[Vrede too]

Just that same one; why are you still here?

Why do you keep asking that?

Childish. Why do you keep cowering from answering?

Cower, Useless, cower.

... And clearly explaining anything to you is a colossal waste of time.

You've never tried, .

[neoplacebo]

Interesting article. I'm not entirely comfortable with our once again being and supporting the merchants of death.

Why some American leftists are critical of U.S. assistance to Ukraine

... Putin, an authoritarian nationalist who has enacted laws targeting LGBTQ people and jailed liberal dissidents, has never been lionized on the left. Still, a cadre of far-left activists and pundits argue that the U.S. risked provoking confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO to its borders, and some are opposed to giving military aid to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

“Everyone I know is united in condemning this war, and none of us like Putin,” Branko Marcetic, a staff writer at the Marxist journal Jacobin, told Yahoo News. But, he said, that doesn’t mean the U.S. should arm Ukraine.

“The idea of sending weapons to Ukraine — I think there’s a defensible argument for it,” Marcetic said. “The problem is, there was a similarly defensible argument for arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s when they were fighting a Soviet invasion.”

Good point.

The mujahideen were militias that fell into civil war with one another after the Soviets withdrew. The Taliban grew out of that war, later giving safe harbor to al-Qaida. Similarly, Marcetic warns, U.S. weapons could wind up in the hands of Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias such as the Azov Battalion, a part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Putin, who said at the onset of the war that Russia’s aim was “the de-Nazification of Ukraine,” has used the existence of groups like the Azov Battalion to justify his invasion.

“Because Putin has used that pretext, and because it’s such a big element of Kremlin propaganda at the moment, that in the West there’s a whole idea of ‘there’s no Nazi problem in Ukraine’ ... which is just not true,” Marcetic said.

Azov Battalion

Back to the article:

... “Putin’s invasion was unjust, illegal and immoral,” she added. “But that doesn’t make arming Ukraine to fight a protracted miserable proxy war, with no winners but the war industry, the right thing to do.” ...

In a recent editorial, the Nation magazine, a left-liberal tribune, while decrying the invasion, called for diplomacy instead of “a rush to arms” or sanctions that it warned “will hurt not only Russia — oligarchs and ordinary citizens alike — but also Europe, the US, and the global economy’s bystanders.”

Some fear a global recession.

... Concerns that NATO’s post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe could lead to a confrontation with Moscow are by no means limited to the left. As Ukraine fights for survival, there are some democratic socialists who come to some similar conclusions as their unlikely allies on the right about how the U.S. should, or should not, respond to the war in Ukraine.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, for example, worries that replacing Russian oil with oil from Saudi Arabia will empower the Middle Eastern kingdom, which has a deplorable record on human rights and is prosecuting a brutal war in Yemen. Omar, along with fellow left-leaning Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, was one of two House Democrats who voted Wednesday against banning Russian oil imports; they were joined in their opposition by 15 right-wing Republicans.

“If our issue is that we don’t want to buy oil from a powerful country that is conducting a devastating war on its weaker neighbor, I just don’t see Saudi Arabia hardly being a principled solution,” Omar said in a radio interview on “Democracy Now” on Tuesday.

Good point. Fuck Saudi Arabia, too.

Omar has been clear that she opposes Russia’s invasion and supports U.S. aid to Ukraine....

In fact, all of the members of Congress who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, including Bush and Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have broadly backed the Biden administration’s alliance with Ukraine.

But the organization to which they belong has other ideas. In its Feb. 26 statement on the war, the DSA criticized Russia’s invasion but also came out against any effort to arm Ukraine or sanction Russia. It also called for the end of U.S. involvement in NATO.

“This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict,” the group’s National Political Committee wrote. “DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”

It's true. Arms for Ukraine could get even more Ukrainians killed while Russia still wins in the end.

... Just as Trumpist conservatives hearken back to their movement’s isolationist, pre-World War II history, leftists and socialists urging the U.S. to withdraw from NATO are expressing their ideology’s anti-imperialist instincts.

“People on the left who call themselves anti-imperialist ... believe that no big power, especially their own country, should be an imperial power, should have the right to have a large military, should have the ability to intervene around the world,” Kazin said....

“One dark reality that many in the West will soon have to reckon with is that the future of a democratic Ukraine is not worth a larger land war or a nuclear threat,” wrote Ross Barkan, a left-wing pundit and former New York state Senate candidate, in a recent column.

“In diplomacy, human life must be prized first, and if a so-called appeasement strategy is what saves us from further civilian slaughter, it will have to be the strategy pursued.”

Where are y'all at?
For overt military intervention like with a no-fly zone?
For arming Ukraine?
Against arming Ukraine?
Fence straddler like me?

Fence

My wishy-washy hominy!

I will go with "arming Ukraine" since we've already been doing it for years. And it's been a seven decade policy of the US (as well as the USSR and Russian Federation) to provide, sell, or donate military assistance to the respective "allies" of either us or them.

[GoCubsGo]

I will go with "arming Ukraine" since we've already been doing it for years. And it's been a seven decade policy of the US (as well as the USSR and Russian Federation) to provide, sell, or donate military assistance to the respective "allies" of either us or them.

Concur.

Also a no fly zone, i.e. a shooting war is a non starter with no happy ending.

From the scary department, I saw a video of Russian TV where RWNJ'S were talking of invading Poland. Don't know if it was their version of Newsmax or what.

[neoplacebo]

I will go with "arming Ukraine" since we've already been doing it for years. And it's been a seven decade policy of the US (as well as the USSR and Russian Federation) to provide, sell, or donate military assistance to the respective "allies" of either us or them.

Concur.

Also a no fly zone, i.e. a shooting war is a non starter with no happy ending.

From the scary department, I saw a video of Russian TV where RWNJ'S were talking of invading Poland. Don't know if it was their version of Newsmax or what.

Yeah, a no fly zone is a workable option when dealing with an inferior adversary like Iraq. The US no fly zone there was doing its job for about a dozen years. We should have kept that and worked to support opposition to Saddam from within the country. But we instead went with the RWNJ's. Not to mention that after the 91 Gulf war, the US urged the Shiites to rise up against Saddam but when they made an effort we left them hanging. As for Russian RWNJ's cheering for invading Poland, I guess the nutjobs are pretty much the same everywhere.

[GoCubsGo]

Yeah, a no fly zone is a workable option when dealing with an inferior adversary like Iraq. The US no fly zone there was doing its job for about a dozen years. We should have kept that and worked to support opposition to Saddam from within the country. But we instead went with the RWNJ's. Not to mention that after the 91 Gulf war, the US urged the Shiites to rise up against Saddam but when they made an effort we left them hanging. As for Russian RWNJ's cheering for invading Poland, I guess the nutjobs are pretty much the same everywhere.

Putin knowingly or not has changed the despot calculus of opposition with conventional arms with the threat and capability of using nukes and that's very scary. Their doctrine is different than the west's, they view a limited nuclear attacks winnable and not a crime against humanity.

Hopefully he's not so far gone that he attacks a NATO country and threatens nukes if NATO responds but it's now in play.

Same may go for Taiwan now if China gets cheeky. China doesn't have the capability to invade and hold Taiwan but they could bomb and strafe all day long. The Taiwanese could defend themselves pretty well but not indefinitely without our help.

The world has changed more than we realized.

[Vrede too]

GOP senator says a war between NATO and Russia 'would end pretty quickly'

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) dismissed concerns about the conflict in Ukraine escalating into a full-scale war between Russia and NATO during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

"How do you stop [Russian President] Vladimir Putin without starting World War III" host Bret Baier asked Risch, who is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"There's no doubt that you always have to keep in mind that you don't want to escalate to direct confrontation with Russia, [but] I wouldn't call it 'World War III,'" Risch said.

"I think it'd end pretty quickly, because with the conventional forces that he's had there, we haven't seen this kind of ineptness in a long, long time," he continued.

He might be correct though I have doubts. Napoleon and Hitler thought the same thing. Anyhow, I'm not sure that it's helpful for a Senator to openly say so. Same thing with Lindsay:

... "Putin knows that no one wins a nuclear exchange. If he ordered a strike on the United States, a general would shoot him in the head," Sen. Lindsay Graham said during an appearance on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures. Graham has previously called for a Russian assassin to kill Putin.

Maybe leave the war pronouncements to the CiC, boys. Everyone knows that the Ukraine crisis ends with a negotiated solution, if at all, and our statements need to be crafted towards facilitating that.

[Ulysses]

Yeah, a no fly zone is a workable option when dealing with an inferior adversary like Iraq. The US no fly zone there was doing its job for about a dozen years. We should have kept that and worked to support opposition to Saddam from within the country. But we instead went with the RWNJ's. Not to mention that after the 91 Gulf war, the US urged the Shiites to rise up against Saddam but when they made an effort we left them hanging. As for Russian RWNJ's cheering for invading Poland, I guess the nutjobs are pretty much the same everywhere.

Putin knowingly or not has changed the despot calculus of opposition with conventional arms with the threat and capability of using nukes and that's very scary. Their doctrine is different than the west's, they view a limited nuclear attacks winnable and not a crime against humanity.

Hopefully he's not so far gone that he attacks a NATO country and threatens nukes if NATO responds but it's now in play.

Same may go for Taiwan now if China gets cheeky. China doesn't have the capability to invade and hold Taiwan but they could bomb and strafe all day long. The Taiwanese could defend themselves pretty well but not indefinitely without our help.

The world has changed more than we realized.

Well, don't forget that we have (I think) tactical nukes as well as ICBM nukes. And I'm sure Russia does, as well. However any nuke is a bad nuke. So there is that.

[Vrede too]

McDonald's closed 850 restaurants in Russia.

America wins. . . . or maybe Russia wins.

Russians try to sell Big Macs for around $36 each and a McDonald's paper bag for more than $300, following the closure of branches

[GoCubsGo]

McDonald's closed 850 restaurants in Russia.

America wins. . . . or maybe Russia wins.

Russians try to sell Big Macs for around $36 each and a McDonald's paper bag for more than $300, following the closure of branches

This guy's not having it although it looks like Vlad may be doing him a big favor.

https://hg.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/ ... trance_of/

[Vrede too]

This guy's not having it although it looks like Vlad may be doing him a big favor.

https://hg.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/ ... trance_of/

Steven Seagal has really let himself go.

In mother Russia, Big Mac eats you.

He’s not fat. He’s supersized.

He’s not fat. He’s Americanized.