h a l f b a k e r yClearly this is a metaphor for something.
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Seeing as the humans in the Crimea are greatly out-numbered by the animal kingdom in the Crimea, the referendum seems a little discriminatory.
Ants choosing which sugar cube to make off with, the one with the little Russian flag, or the Ukrainian one, that kind of thing.
Bacteria moving to one
side of a red/white/blue or blue/yellow dyed petri dish.
End this tyranny of minority votes...
Please grow a beard...
http://www.amnh.org...pain_mainstory1.jpg
[not_morrison_rm, Mar 23 2014]
On the Russian "Culture" Minister
http://www.rferl.mo...insky/24602133.html
I wish you could read what this guy says in Russian [theircompetitor, Mar 23 2014, last modified Mar 24 2014]
Realpolitik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
Seems applicable. [Zeuxis, Mar 24 2014]
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This is a load of ballots. |
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Crimea river of tears for democracy. Russia is using the
power of will of authoritarianism over the power of the
willingly undermind will for the collective in democracy.
Russia uses individual will of the collective socialist
leviathan vs. the collective undermined will of the
individual democracy leviathan of the west. In
democracy the individual will is undermined by
majoritarianism, popular culture, so the democratic
leviathan is weakened at the will of its atomic elements
by mass democratic power but the authoritarian
leviathan is weakened at its individual will by individual
power. In conflict mass collective democracy and mass
collective authoritarianism pits two wills, the will for
individually authored mass function and the will for
collectively authored mass function. In a war of wills,
being lead by a leader in authoritarianism, and being
lead by a mass of undermined wills in democracy, I think
the leader led mass will outlast the democratically
composed mass because the individual wills of
democratic leviathan will be compelled by the power of
their antileviathans collective will. Russia maintains the
global dialectical conflict and takes a space back on the
gameboard. Losing the conflict is not creating one for
Russia. Had Crimea joined Russia democratically Crimea
would not have been joining Russia but attacking it on
the side of the west. That's really what the point is, a
democratic Crimea joining Russia would have been a loss
to Russia vs the west, but on the level of leviathan will.
Obviously if crimea organized democratically to join
Russia that formation of a democratic leviathan would
come into conflict with russia. |
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The amoeba are holding out on medical insurance reform. The gnats want single transferable votes. |
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Mayflies have been ruled ineligible to vote as they won't be around to live under the administration they have elected. |
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Should apply that to people with terminal diseases as well? |
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Seems fair, the whole thing was started by Ukrainian protists. |
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// Russia uses individual will of the collective socialist leviathan vs. the collective undermined will of the individual democracy leviathan of the west.// |
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Speaking from my side of the Atlantic, I don't know that I'd say the something called the West is substantively distinguishable in this regard from something called Russia. An examination of the principals in each would probably reveal some overlap. |
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//West....substantively distinguishable in this regard from something called Russia |
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Don't be silly, Russia has more natural gas and oil, and pelmini. And more Russians. And bears, not to mention balalaikas, which I don't laika myself. |
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Meanwhile the Russians release a phage that only eats blue or yellow bacteria... |
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violation of all sanity [+] |
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Ukrainians strike back by polling the fish in Crimean waters, waterproof paper and all that, overseen by the UN inspector Belle Luger, and her team. Putin carps on about it for seven minutes and 34 seconds on Russian state TV. |
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Because, of course, the other living things totally care about this sort of thing. |
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No representation without taxation! The global economy could be doing much better of all the squirrels were paying CGT on their nut hoard each winter. |
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// the other living things totally care about this sort of thing |
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Have you ever asked them? Who knows, that Bush/Gore Florida thingy could have turned out a lot different. |
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Cunning politicians would do things like passing mandatory tag-and-release carp fishing laws to garner support. |
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It would probably be more effective to start a Crimean fox hunting association, and put a bounty on them, than to declare them to be endangered game. Although Aesop would argue that the foxes could talk the rabbits into voting for anything, I think even rabbits wouldn't fall for fox feeders and free "nest" (ie earth) blankets being somehow in their best interests. |
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Every farm would have its own Napoleon and Snowball, just to complicate things. |
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I think the point is that, even if every life form in
Crimea voted to be part of Russia, that doesn't
mean that the Russian militia has the right to roll
in there. |
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Russia has thuggishly broken international law,
and there has been no significant response by
anyone, because of course we can't contemplate
any kind of "significant response". |
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This is all going to get a lot worse. |
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On a lighter note, 94% of the people on the
Buchanan estate have voted in favour of becoming
part of the Turks and Caicos islands, mainly for the
weather and tax breaks. |
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I don't see how a coup legalises an invasion. Can you
explain? |
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//be like a US president slipping below majority opinion and being under siege by a pitchfork mob. |
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Somebody put that up as an idea, just so I can bun it please? |
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Looking at the history, it wasn't Russian until 1774, when they nicked it from the Tatar. The Crimea has very low mileage, but no careful owner* |
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I give the Mongol/Tatar claim the most credence as they went on horses, and horses are fickle buggers at best, so the horses must have agreed to it, so doubling the number of votes. |
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*In between year zero and that it was nicked by the Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Khazars , Kievan Rus', the Byzantine Empire, the Kipchaks, the Mongols, the Venetians and thence by Genovese. |
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This shows up in the maintenance log, with large gaps between major servicing. Just don't ask about the volcano, that's all I'm saying. |
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//For a start it wasn't an invasion. Where did you get
that spin from ? There were peace-keeping forces
allowed under international treaty that only took
possession of installations after the referendum.// |
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Whatever you want to call it, it was opportunism and
broke international law. It may well be (I have no
idea) that there is good reason for Crimea to belong to
Russia, but there are lots of countries that think other
territories should belong to them. |
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That's why international law exists - "jaw, jaw is better
than war, war." |
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Howabout the Hapsburg jaw? How does compare with, for example, Switzerland's invasion of Lichtenstein about a month ago? |
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What's done is done. Redundant to say, but often we need to remind ourselves of this. |
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Attribution of right and wrong is only truly useful with regard to what's going to happen next (and in certain controlled situations like legal proceedings). Yes we need to try and evaluate what governments have done according to some better standard than mere self-interest, but that gets tricky. In a tight spot like this, it can be a distraction. |
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So maybe Putin's wrong. He's playing a game that probably has more to do with winning votes than with looking after fellow Russians. Worse, he's playing the military probing game. Thing is that right now, that game has placed Russian forces in the Crimea. Done. The time for preventing this is over. |
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How to reverse it? WWIII? The risk thereof? |
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Sanctions?? Plea---se. This is a nice symbolic way to express disapproval, and for politicians to be able to "do something about it". |
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The situation is a fait accompli. That player moved quickly enough to gain an advantage, and it worked. So the situation we're in now is the one to start the talking in, not the situation as it should be, or even as it was. |
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The talk necessary involves lots of rationalisation, and even Right and Wrong, so do we end up back at square one? |
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Not necessarily. Now national states have an interest in holding captive those people corralled in by the border who don't want to be part of that state. If we acknowledge that natural justice lies with the unwilling citizen's desire to break ties, and that international law is largely made up of pragmatic *injustice* that overrides the legitimate desire of people to form their own preferred kind of tribe (eg one that does not set out actively to destroy their language) simply on the basis that non-lethal forms of oppression are a lesser evil than war; if we nevertheless retain the basic principle that what ought to matter most is what the people want, then when a situation like this becomes fait accompli (partly by tardiness in preventing it when this was possible), then the post-crisis solution becomes simple. The principles may be Byzantine, but the consistent correct end result is quite easy to determine. |
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In this case, the cure would seem to be for all players to quietly go backstage for a while, agree to a new referendum, heavily monitored, and with all proper democratic prerequisites clearly specified, and then see what the people say. |
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If they want to form an independent Crimean nation (wise choice?) so be it. If they actually now find they miss being part of Ukraine, or if they want to be incorporated into Russia, let that be. |
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There's no principle that says they "belong" to Ukraine (or to the Russian nation, for that matter); all there is, is a pragmatic limit on the enforceability of "tribal-level justice", that's all. |
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This is a bit of a tangle, but with a bit of combing out, it might provide a better framework than eg "mine vs thine" for evaluating the (i) right thing to do and (ii) when the wrong thing to do is the right thing (international law exceptions). |
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Do the Crimeans want out? Then who cares who owns what? Let them have what they want ... |
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Here I trip over my own feet. |
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Someone said 40% of the population there is ethnic Ukrainian? What about them? Isn't majority rule also more pragmatism than fundamental justice, in many cases? |
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...and the earwigs, can't you hear in a tiny voice "I have a dream"... |
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//Could it be the 58% ethnic Russians that make
up
the population ?// |
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I don't care if 99.9% of Crimea's population is
Russian,
or Swiss, or Cantonese. I don't care if Crimea ends
up belonging to Russia. |
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However, there are legal and illegal ways to do
things. For Russia to destabilize things in an
already destabilized region is thuggish,
opportunistic and irresponsible. |
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Subtract 14 from 39, add to 90. As dangerous as
this is, russia must be confronted now.
Bigsleep, read up on the annexation of Austria. For
shame |
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Surely at least the gad-flies will get their say. |
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Yes, paranoid as it may sound, it's probably safest to get ready for WW3, just in case. Start by making ready to ride the first blow, and then try to get in a position to be the one who starts it. (Reacting is a lousy alternative to taking the initiative, given the situation where the nobody cares enough about the Earth to cool down and use the gray stuff inside the brain cavity. If there's going to be a WW3, I suspect that it's preferable to be the one who starts it - marginally, of course.) |
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//Again. Setting fire to buildings in the country's
capital is also not a legal way of going about
things.// |
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And again: adding one illegal act to another is not
helpful. I have no idea of the respective rights and
wrongs of Crimea's nationality. But Russia is acting
in the irresponsible way expected of smaller, newer
and less civilized countries. If the weather were
warmer it would be a banana republic. |
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[bigs] sweetie, all your blaterations seem to boil
down to "other people have done worse things". |
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I don't disagree with you, but that doesn't excuse
Russia's destabilizing actions. |
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However, let's just agree now that we won't get any
further in this discussion, and move on to more
profitable discussions. |
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The time to deal with the invasion was before it happened. Now it's happened, it's done. Next move, please. |
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And sovereignty schmovreignty. The issue there is keeping the peace (or if that's not possible, keeping the non-war). What's bad about the Russian troops moving in is that they're messing with what was, till now, more like Peace than just non-war. Not sovereignty. |
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There needs to be some expression of disapproval. There probably also needs to be a sincere demonstration of military readiness to not simply Neville Chamberlain this situation if it continues to go the wrong way. That's for the sake of peace, not sovereignty (not as anything near a first principle). |
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As for the "fubaring" of various invaded countries, I ask myself why Germany today is anything but a pile of rubble. Answer? After being reduced to rubble, the Germans just got on with the job of rebuilding. They didn't go obsessing about how invaded they'd been. To the contrary, there are fireworks on VE day. Iraq, on the other hand, has set about trying the best it can not to recover from a war that had some benefits to go with the drawbacks. It's obvious that most of the current destruction in Iraq (and presumably Afghanistan) is self-destruction. |
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More to the point; a huge portion of the harm that can be attributed to others in Iraq is due to sanctions. Sanctions are just destructive measures that destroy places without changing them. This is a different issue, I know, but it has cropped up, so it's necessary for us to shout at each other about it, too. |
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No, Putin should not have invaded. And yes, with 20:20 hindsight Iraq should've been left to rot. But no. None of these can be undone, so it's better to sharpen the focus on what next. (Including mobilisation, even.) |
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// I don't disagree with you, but that doesn't excuse
Russia's destabilizing actions.// |
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//Patronizing git. Compared with what has happened
in very recent times in other countries this is
nothing.// |
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Yes, bigsleep, no shots were needed for Austria
either, nor, as I recall for most of Europe. When I
come across people that appear to be this dense, I
remind myself that after all when we invade, there's
always some opposition internally. Amazing how
miraculously everyone in Russia is supportive |
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I haven't been following this on the official news channels, because I generally avoid the news. I work on the assumption that if something I really need to know about happens I'll hear about it. Looks like I heard a bit imperfectly this time. I was under the impression that more than just the Russian navy moved in, and that militias had the backing of regular units. Actually I was under the impression that this was more like what happened in Georgia/Abkhazia. |
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So if there was just a secessionist referendum, what's the big hoo hah about? Let the (rather slighter than I thought) majority have their Crimea, and give the Ukrainians there lenient refugee procedures if things turn out bad for them. |
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I'll grant that this is not a very good way of undoing whatever it is that was done (and that's absolutely Nothing, anyway?), but it seems a pragmatic fix for things as they now stand. At most, they could apologise for not anticipating the problem and getting involved in time, and then this can depart from the screens so we can get back to the cricket. |
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From the Ukraine's legitimate-national-interest point of view I suppose it's not so great having the distance to a potentially hostile neighbour move closer to your capital, but the way to fix that is to put conflicts behind, and look at things like trade instead. The loss of that part of the tax base is less of a legitimate national interest. (Just like it's a bit unfair for Castille to tax Catalonia). |
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Maybe they should share the economy 60:40? |
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Clinton mostly got lucky, entendre intended. There
was a really old joke about the ussr, where a citizen
of the west says to a Russian, "but I can stand next
to the Whitehouse and say the President is a
moron, and the Russian says, what's the big deal, I
can also stand in Red Square and say your
President is a moron. Your problem, bigsleep, is
you're all too willing to substitute their propaganda
for ours. When people in Russia burn flags, when
half their country disagrees with the other, then you
can draw comparisons. Until then, what you are
doing is simply throwing out a party line, and in the
end, you'll discover its not the party you wanted to
go to |
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Ha. Well, I have a very particular set of biases here.
My grandmother is from.eastern Ukraine, and my
grandfather from tiraspol Moldova, where I was
born and which is on the verge of being liberated by
Putin, being largely a Russian enclave |
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And I absolutely get the as anti fascist propaganda,
few as anti semitic as the Ukrainians. |
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I even believe if this referendum happened properly,
it would end the same way. |
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But the nationalist fervor putin himself is whipping
up.is chilling. And the.regime is rurhless and
answerable to no one. |
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My god, the russians have their eyes on the Ruhr region as well... |
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bigs, didn't you know that Russia
has always
been "invited in to defend the
Russian-
speakers?" That's the standard
propaganda
line, as fomented by the official
state party media. Until you've
lived there, don't shell out this
crap. Russia is a failed state ran by
oligarchs. We're not there, yet. |
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I'm getting that "Oppenheimer after the Trinity test" feeling..... |
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There is no global resources deficit. Wait until the
makers get going, and then there REALLY won't be
a global resources deficit. Or maybe of sand. |
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I'm so sick of people worrying about running out of
climate, running out of oil, running out of food,
running out of water, constantly running out of
something, especially if they can get a grant to
study it. How do people not run out of patience
listening to this nonsense. |
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It does look my facts are not that inaccurate as far as the question of whether or not there was an invasion goes. It depends on who one chooses to believe, as regards some masked militiamen goes. Were there Russian soldiers in disguise helping local militias? |
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Fortunately none of the likes of us is ever going to know. That means we can just choose to believe what suits us. I think it might turn out to be more peaceful to believe that there was an understandable but mistaken belief that there was an invasion element. Of course any player in the game for whom too much peace is an irritation is going to choose to believe something else. |
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So now you reckon Kazakhstan's next? Ethnic Russians there are basically shut out of the economy these days, so there's a grand old grievance to get to work on. But of course Kazakhstan is next to China, and Kazakhstan is probably not going to give up its nukes. Personally, I don't have any anxieties about anyone playing WW3 there any time soon. |
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Also there are Bactrian camels there, who still remember how the Kropotnin Expedition of 1647 killed and ate most of the neighbours of their ancestors. |
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//There is no global resources deficit// |
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Beg to differ, there. There's a reason they call it the
'dismal science.' |
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