Althouse: At the Monday Night Café...

March 6, 2023

At the Monday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

40 comments:

gadfly said...: Charlie Sykes: “You said Trump had the attention span of a gnat.”

John Bolton: “That may have even been too complimentary…”; 3/6/23, 7:30 PM
Big Mike said...: I am busy watching videotapes of the January 6th peaceful protest on Tucker Carlson. Interesting.; 3/6/23, 7:32 PM
Humperdink said...: For a guy with no attention span, Trump's economic policies were pretty favorable to the country. His demand that NATO pay their fair was right on the button. He stood up to China when no one else did. Inflation was low, as in very low. Gas prices also cheap, baby formula available, eggs available. Not bad for guy with ADHD.

OTOH, One could say that Biden has the attention span of John Fetterman, now residing in a psych ward. Speaking of attention spans, it would be advisable for Biden to pay attention to the steps leading up to Air Force One. They can be tricky.; 3/6/23, 8:03 PM
Iman said...: Charlie “3 Wives” Sykes yay!

Pull the other one, gadmaggot.; 3/6/23, 8:06 PM
Iman said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 3/6/23, 8:07 PM
BUMBLE BEE said...: Capitol Hill cops' suicides...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/third-d-c-officer-who-responded-capitol-riot-dies-suicide-n1275740
Seppuku?; 3/6/23, 8:20 PM
Jaq said...: John Bolton is a war monger who thinks that anyone not on board with the neocon agenda of world domination through the US military is an not fit to lead America. I am sure that Trump rightly rolled his eyes and moved on to the next topic whenever Bolton started making rationalizations for sending American kids to die for Hunter Biden’s clients.; 3/6/23, 8:44 PM
Tank said...: Watched the Will Smith special tonight.

He's been funnier.

He did get in a few licks at Will Smith. More than a few.; 3/6/23, 9:17 PM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: I have a theory about vocal fry (creaky voice)

Vocal Fry is a biological accommodation to an apparent vexing problem of the female of the specie.

On the one hand, women are told by feminists that they, women, (the answer to the question- who are they?) are kept down by men, that they need to stand up, speak up for themselves. And on the other hand, they are said to be more attractive to the opposite sex, if they are meek and femenine.

Nature steps in and gives them something to work with.

Something similar goes on with the male bun and the long beard in fashion.

The man bun softens talk of male toxicity and the beard offers a response to male peers mocking the man bun.

I know, you might say this is pseudo-science, Lem.

BTW, what do you call a sumo wrestler that won't get vaxxed? - A sumo pseudo.

My thesis is based... borrows from the movie Sphere (1998) and the banned Ted Talk by pseudo scientist Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion.

Nature (God) gives us everything we need, and it even throws in the stuff we ask for.; 3/6/23, 9:28 PM
Jaq said...: “Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.” - Xi

This sounds like a man that we have pushed from being an economic rival into being a military one. I guess Joe Biden didn't think our military's dance card was full enough. What Xi is saying is very similar to the kinds of things the future combatants were saying prior to WWI. If you want to understand the current war, you can start by reading the first few chapters of The Guns of August, the parts about how the way started.; 3/6/23, 9:32 PM
wildswan said...: The way I see the dispute in the US over Ukraine is what I call "Old Maps vs. New Eagles." Every country in Europe has an old map rolled up in a corner showing how once long ago in a golden age it had a lot more territory than it now has. Maybe several old maps. And in Europe it's the custom to go to battle to get back all that lost territory. That's why Henry Vth invaded France; that's why Germany attacked Czarist Russia; that's why Serbia attacked Kosovo; that's why Putin is attacking the Ukraine. George Washington warned the US against being drawn into battles to restore countries to the borders shown on old maps.

The US was founded to restore a lost republic, the Roman republic, the last republic to rule a state for 2000 years. That's why our symbol is the eagle. And ever since our founding the democratic ideal has been spreading, new eagles have been flying over new territory. Republics were founded in 1789 and in 1848 throughout Western Europe. When in World War I the issue was framed as protecting or restoring republics rather than old maps the US was drawn in and countries in Eastern Europe which had failed to get a republic in 1848 due to a League of Emperors gained their republics at Versailles. The issue was "new eagles", new republics restored following the American example.

Helping countries throw off empire and become republics is not like helping empires or colonial-minded monarchies fill in old maps and reacquire territory. But it has its own set of perils. We just extracted ourself from a country, Afghanistan, that did not really want to be a republic. It was still more satisfied with being tribal and fighting inside itself over old maps. Have we now involved ourselves with another country that doesn't want to be a republic run by citizens - though in this case what it really likes is not being a tribal society but being a kleptocratic oligarchy that might just as well be part of Russia, a well-established kleptocratic oligarchy?

I believe that Ukraine wants to be a free republic and that after a year of war it has established the basis of civil society through shared sacrifice on the part of almost all its citizens - soldiers, civilians enduring cold and bombing, government officials on Russian hit lists. And I believe Ukraine can win. Right now it is attritting Russian soldiers at Bakhmut and has defeated the Russian Vhuledar counter-offensive. It has driven the Russians out of Kiev, Kharkhiv and Kherson. Right at this moment the war has taken on trench war aspects and wherever that is true there can be no advance without tanks as was shown in World War I. So now tanks are needed.; 3/6/23, 10:20 PM
DINKY DAU 45 said...: FOX(just captured the George Santos veracity award) now showing home movies but probably won't see the latest Movie DOMINION COMING FOR YA! Rupert staying home rolling coin in penny wrappers.Keep the dupe coming. ⁸; 3/6/23, 11:03 PM
gadfly said...: A Florida woman who was scheduled to stand trial on federal charges related to the Jan. 6 riots did not show up to court in Washington DC, on Monday. . . . The FBI is searching for both Olivia Pollock and Joseph Hutchinson III after a federal judge issued bench warrants for their arrests last week.

Joe Boland, a supervisory special agent with the FBI’s Lakeland, Florida office, told . . . that the court issued the warrants after it was alerted that the defendants had tampered with or removed their ankle monitors. Court officials have not been able to locate Pollock since late February . . . , and the government’s search was largely unknown until she failed to show up to her hearing.

Pollock and Hutchinson were arrested in 2021 . . . and charged with assaulting law enforcement. Pollock wore a ballistic plate-carrier vest during [Tucker's so-called "peaceful"] riot and is accused of elbowing an officer in the chest and attempting to take the officer’s baton. Hutchinson is being accused of punching an officer and throwing another officer out of his way; authorities also say that he pulled back a fence that allowed other rioters to swarm Capitol police. Hutchinson was scheduled to stand trial in August.

Olivia Pollock’s brother Jonathan Pollock, who is also accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol insurrection, has also gone missing for several months. The FBI offered a reward of up to $30,000 in exchange for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

The defendants are among the 1000 people charged in relation to the [violent] Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.; 3/7/23, 3:21 AM
gadfly said...: Iman said...
Charlie “3 Wives” Sykes yay!
Pull the other one, gadmaggot.

I don't know what you are trying to say, Illman. But here are some important things that you gnats need to know:

MAGAts are blind Trump supporters who wouldn't know what honesty is and that ain't me.

Charlie Sykes has always been an honest-to-God conservative from Wisconsin.

He was married to his wife Diane for 19 years and they have two children.

Diane Sykes held judgeships on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and currently serves on the US 7th Court of Appeals.

She appeared on Leonard Leo's SCOTUS candidate list.

Charlie used to do the drive-time talk show on WTMJ radio before taking on "The Bulwark," a conservative online site.; 3/7/23, 4:12 AM
Jaq said...: "Helping countries throw off empire and become republics is not like helping empires or colonial-minded monarchies fill in old maps and reacquire territory. "

So you were angry when Crimea voted for independence at the fall of the Soviet Union and after five years of independence, was forcefully annexed by Ukraine in 1995 then, right?

I don't understand why you think that a Ukrainian Republic has to be composed of regions that don't want to be a part of it, and are only included in "Ukraine" by diktat of Soviet dictators and, oh by the way, an agreement between Stalin and Hitler that chopped off a piece of Poland. Putin has never said that he wanted to destroy the Ukrainian state, and he still doesn't say it. His latest threat to the Ukrainian state is that if we keep giving Kiev long range weapons, Russia will create a buffer zone to protect its territory.

"The US was founded to restore a lost republic," Many Russians also believe that they are the inheritors of Rome, they even called their kings Ceasars -- Tsars.

Face it, Kiev is a regime run by, shall we call them hyper-nationalists, who have a dream of creating an ethnically pure state from the borders drawn by a handshake between Hitler and Stalin to the borders drawn by Kruschev and Lenin, the feelings of the people who live there notwithstanding. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have managed to part ways peacefully, but this was not an option for Kiev for some reason, Quebec lives inside of Canada with a degree of autonomy that would have more than satisfied the Russians who live in Donbas and Crimea, but this was not acceptable to Kiev. England and France had been at war for nearly a thousand years.

The US is an empire. Why is it a military question if a nation pays for its oil in dollars? Even if the US is no part of the transaction, the buyer of oil must first buy dollars, and then the seller must accept US dollars. What happens to all of those dollars? They go into US treasuries, financing our fantastically high debt and funding our military, which is funded by debt. It's a global system of tribute to the United States.

Donbas is thousands of miles from the US, it consists of Russian speakers in a land that has been part of Russia for as long as New York has been part of the United States. Putin offered autonomy within Ukraine, he simply demanded that NATO not move in and arm the second largest army in Europe right on his borders, he even said he had no objections to Ukraine joining the EU.

I know you have rationalized the US fighting on the side of nazis, but I can't, sorry, these are not just people who fetishize Nazi symbolism, though they do. They celebrate Nazi collaborators who participated in the extermination of Jews and Poles in Ukraine by the hundreds of thousands, and now they talk of doing the same to the "orcs" living in Donbas and Crimea. This is actual naziism. It's hard to accept that your country's foreign policy is run by a tiny gang of neocons who are willing to kill millions and risk nuclear war to establish global domination of the US, but it's true. I see that you not only accept it, but celebrate it.; 3/7/23, 5:05 AM
Jaq said...: The movie Ukraine on Fire has video of Ukrainians teaching their children to hate Russians. "Whose not jumping is a Ruskie!"; 3/7/23, 5:07 AM
wendybar said...: Jimmy Kimmel is protecting his friend who was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
Jimmy Kimmel is a piece of shit.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/does-jimmy-kimmels-friend-who-had-close-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein-have-anything-to-do-with-reason-he-mocked-aaron-rodgers-for-bringing-up-epsteins-client-list/; 3/7/23, 6:52 AM
driverdonald said...: Leonard Leo is first and foremost a Knight of Malta. Clarence Thomas called him the 3rd most powerful man in the world.; 3/7/23, 7:03 AM
wendybar said...: OBAMA divided America. HE was the biggest error in American History.

"Indeed, the emergence of Barack Obama and his ascension to the Presidency in 2008 suggested that that moment had arrived. The event should have been an inflection point in America’s racial history. Many thought it was. How else to explain a White majority nation electing a Black President, other than that America had turned the corner? Alas, Obama was not one to placate the nation. Rather than use the opportunity of his rise to the White House as the crowning achievement of a long treacherous journey to racial reconciliation, he chose instead to agitate and polarize the nation further. His presidency should have represented the fulfillment of the great dream of Lincoln, King, and of our Declaration of Independence, but became instead the basis of an ever-widening racial gap that may never be bridged."

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/obama_trayvon_and_race_in_america.html; 3/7/23, 7:35 AM
Robert Cook said...: "For a guy with no attention span, Trump's economic policies were pretty favorable to the country. His demand that NATO pay their fair was right on the button. He stood up to China when no one else did. Inflation was low, as in very low. Gas prices also cheap, baby formula available, eggs available. Not bad for guy with ADHD."

How much of any of that had to do specifically with policies or other actions enacted or initiated by Trump? What, exactly, did he do? How much just happened to be a coincidence of national and global conditions and Trump's occupancy in the White House during the same period? How did Trump "stand up" to China? If he did, what did they do in response? Is it even true NATO wasn't paying "their fair share?" If they were not, did they pay up on Trump's (claim to) telling them to pay what was owed? How did he make them pay up? How we do know they did? We all know Trump speaks in a ceaseless flow of used-car-salesman bullshit, alternating bursts of insulting those with whom he is peeved, self-serving boasts of his extraordinary capabilities, and claims to accomplishments that are either wildly exaggerated or non-existent.

(This is a question pertinent to every president. Much of what happens in our nation and globally, good and bad, has to do with long-developing (or sudden) trends and/or expected or unexpected events outside the president's control or influence. When policies are enacted, by Congress or at the President's behest, how quickly (or slowly) will results, good and bad, become manifest? How much of what happens in the world is just coincidental with any given person in the White House during the period of time when events unfold?); 3/7/23, 8:11 AM
Lurker21 said...: Anne Applebaum met Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy. She believes he could really destroy democracy as we know it.; 3/7/23, 9:59 AM
Humperdink said...: Hump said: "For a guy with no attention span, Trump's economic policies were pretty favorable to the country. His demand that NATO pay their fair was right on the button. He stood up to China when no one else did. Inflation was low, as in very low. Gas prices also cheap, baby formula available, eggs available. Not bad for guy with ADHD."

Cookie responded: How much of any of that had to do specifically with policies or other actions enacted or initiated by Trump?

Why it's purely a coincidence Mr. Cook. Just lucky for him. Purely an accident we became energy independent. Just like Biden and his Commie-Pinko friends have presided over economic ruin - just bad luck for them!; 3/7/23, 10:16 AM
wildswan said...: Tim in Vermont
"The US was founded to restore a lost republic," Many Russians also believe that they are the inheritors of Rome, they even called their kings Ceasars -- Tsars."

This was my point. There was a Roman republic which was followed by a Roman Empire. The founders of the US explicitly intended to restore republican government in the face of the then existing Russian and Austrian empires both of which used eagles to symbolize their connection with the Roman Empire. The American example was understood and followed and, I argue, has been moving eastward across Europe since 1789. In the Twentieth and Twenty-first century opposition to the eagle of the republic, the American eagle, has come from empires which claimed descent from the Roman Empire and used its eagle as their symbol - the Austro-Hungarian empire descended from the Holy Roman Empire; the German empire, also claiming the connection, Hitler' Third Reich referred to the first Reich, Rome; the Russian empire which claimed inheritance through Byzantium and was succeeded by the Soviet empire which was succeeded by the present Russian regime which wants to restore the Russian/Soviet empire borders.
Ukraine wants to escape from the Russian empire and is straining toward the European republics. It is a great prize - size, population, position and Russia wants this prize for its empire. There are reasons to be careful about involving our own country is other people's issues. We've had some sharp lessons. But the Ukraine is not Afghanistan whereas Putin's Russia is an attempt at restoring empire on the border of Europe.
As for the rest of your points, East European history is a kind of archaeological tell, a hill with strata from many times, and by plucking forth shards without regard for their position in time anything can be proved about its past or its present as inferred from its past. Anything. But what can we infer from Ukraine's heroic stand against the neo-Russian empire? I say, it's a young eagle, the latest restoration of a republic as way to rule societies.; 3/7/23, 10:17 AM
Candide said...: wilswan,

you are molesting History to fit your illusions. You may be entitled to your illusions, but I must protect History.

Henry V invasion of France was a late episode in 100 years war, which was extremely complicated and obscure to modern minds, so we better leave that alone.

Kaiser Germany didn't attack Czarist Russia to gain any territory. Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia joined with Serbia, Germany joined with Austria, France joined with Russia, England joined with France.

Serbia was preparing to use it's military to maintain control over it's province of Kosovo, that was part of Serbia/Yugoslavia since 1918 with autonomous status and self-government like Crimea was in Ukraine. Serbia was threatening to do in Kosovo what Kievan rulers actually did in Donbas. US intervened on behalf of Kosovo, just like Russia intervened on behalf of Donbas.

George Washington "warned the US against being drawn into" ANY battles in the Old World, period. Subsequent Monroe doctrine is based on 4 basic statements: "1) The United States would not get involved in European affairs. 2) The United States would not interfere with existing European colonies in the Western Hemisphere. 3) No other nation could form a new colony in the Western Hemisphere. 4) If a European nation tried to control or interfere with a nation in the Western Hemisphere, the United States would view it as a hostile act against this nation."

US was not "formed to restore the Roman republic", it was mostly the product of Enlightenment era, although Classical Greco-Roman symbols were widely used in the process, mostly to add pizzazz.

French 1st Republic of 1792 lasted 14 years, was followed by Empire, old Monarchy restoration, 2nd Republic that lasted 1 year, another Empire, finally 3rd Republic in 1870, so it is complicated to say the least.

No Republics were founded in Europe in 1848 except French 2nd, there were just multiple failed attempts at revolutions.

New countries formed after WW1 were mostly Monarchies (except Czechoslovakia and Poland), although by that time parliamentary Monarchies were the norm, based on political developments in Britain and France but not the US.

Your fantasies about Ukraine would take too long to unravel.

I understand that the main point of your historical hooliganism is to pronounce that "now tanks are needed" in Ukraine. I suggest to learn basic facts of World History first; perhaps it will help you to make a more convincing arguments for "tanks needed".; 3/7/23, 10:42 AM
rhhardin said...: It says that IRS direct pay won't work for payments over ten million dollars.; 3/7/23, 11:01 AM
Temp Blog said...: Candide pretends to come to the rescue of "History" (since when was history a proper noun in need of rescuing?) and then proceeds to yield all of the points made by wildswan.

Henry V? Oh, that's too hard. (Pro tip: He was trying to recapture parts of what we know as France that he knew as England.)

All the contretemps in Eastern Europe? Obfuscation by throwing crap out pell mell doesn't prove your point, it proves wildswan's summary: Russia wants its Empire back. Germany (twice!) wanted its Empire back. Certainly the assassination and the treaties were the final step in the beginning of WWI and WWI was the precursor to WWII - but all of that was preceded by explicit decisions by the powers of their times to justify wars by age-old losses of territory and peoples.

You should be embarrassed for such a shoddy "defense" of "History". If I were "History" I wouldn't even dare be seen in public with one such as you.; 3/7/23, 3:01 PM
Jaq said...: So after indirectly admitting that all of your arguments are BS. you throw in this: " But what can we infer from Ukraine's heroic stand against the neo-Russian empire?"

As soon as I see the word "heroic" I know that somebody is trying to manipulate the argument emotionally rather than win it with logic. We are taking huge risks on behalf of a band of hyper nationalists who have a plan to ethnically cleanse Ukraine straight to the borders as drawn by Soviet dictators and Hitler. That is the most recent reality, the one we live in, with millions of ethnic Russians staring down the barrel of weapons the US gave to Kiev, with the choice of "be killed or leave, and oh, BtW, leave us your children to indoctrinate to hate you."

Former PM Yulia Tymoshenko, released from prison as a result of US regime change coup in Feb 2014, said that 8 million ethnic Russians (in Donbass and elsewhere in Ukraine) "must be killed with nuclear weapons".

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1501057860003930114

I would have a lot more sympathy for your arguments if you could somehow prove that the Ukrainians have not done what they have done over the past eight years, or said what they have said about ethnic cleansing of the Russians. The US is pushing your little Straussian agenda of non stop expansion of US domination, and using the Ukrainian nazis here, who knows what in Taiwan, and you have apparently bought into their agenda.

You can't explain to me why the two nations can't part peacefully, as did the Czech Republican and Slovakia, or why Kiev could not stomach an arrangement of the kind that Quebec enjoys in Canada. You just think that the Russians must be crushed, not lived with, however many Ukrainian lives it costs. That's where the rubber hits the road in your lofty theories of some kind of worldwide satrapies controlled out of DC as a utopia.

Our own republic is rotting to the core, we have openly corrupt leadership, and they have outlawed dissent, keeping peaceful protesters in solitary confinement until they plead guilty, and then parading their guilty plea around as evidence that they are in the right. Why don't we deal with our own problems at home?; 3/7/23, 3:48 PM
Jim at said...: "The Bulwark," a conservative online site.

Just when I think you can't get more dishonest.; 3/7/23, 4:27 PM
Candide said...: Temp Blog said,
“…it proves wildswan's summary: Russia wants its Empire back.”

Can you provide any factual evidence to support that statement?; 3/7/23, 6:03 PM
Dr Weevil said...: 'tim in vermont' proves he can lie faster than any three people can correct him. Here are just a few corrections:

1. The Kyiv (only assholes Russianize the name) democracy ("regime" is a weasel word) are "hyper-nationalists, who have a dream of creating an ethnically pure state"? The Romanian-, Hungarian-, Slovakian-, and Polish-speaking Ukrainians along the western borders don't seem to think so. Many of them are fighting the Russians: one of the top Ukrainian commanders in Bakhmut goes by 'Magyar' on-line. The Crimean Tatars (who have a better claim to Crimea than anyone else) all support Ukraine, and two-thirds of the 180 political prisoners Russians are holding in Crimea are Tatars. And millions of ethnically-Russian Ukrainians support Ukraine against the small minority the Russians have suborned into supporting their invasion. (Reminder: the Donbas provinces voted to join Ukraine in 1991 by margins of nearly 84%: that's 5-1. It's the other 1/6th that are trying to rule them all by violence.) The ones who want ethnic purity are the Russians. Remember that the first thing the Russians did after seizing Sloviansk (the actual start of the Donbas war) was to go around and beat up all the Gypsies in town and rob them.

2. If the U.S. were an "empire", we wouldn't have had to beg our NATO allies to fulfill their promises of 2% defense spending. Or have had to pull our troops out of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines because the P.I. government demanded way too much in the way of rent. We'd just force them to do it.

3. "You can't explain to me why the two nations can't part peacefully"? They did exactly that, in 1991, but that wasn't good enough for Putin. He's been trying to take it back ever since he came to power in 1999, aided by the folly of Ukraine (and Bill Clinton) in giving up their nukes in 1994. The Donbas War in 2014 was in fact started by Russian KGB men, who were soon joined by tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. The only difference from 2022 is that then they pretended they weren't pulling the strings and were only after the Donbas and Crimea, now they have made it obvious that they will seize all of Ukraine they can get hold of.

4. Because a small percentage of Ukrainians are idiot Nazis, all of them are? What the fuck? We have a few hundred out-and-out Nazis in the U.S., but I've only once been anywhere near them. (Forty years ago, two guys in black SS colonel uniforms were handing out their 'literature' in front of the Arlington Public Library. I averted my eyes and passed by in silent contempt.) Their existence is utterly irrelevant. I have demonstrated with ample evidence before that there are far more Nazis in Russia, in far higher places. Prigozhin, head of Wagner, the only Russian who's actually managed to capture a Ukrainian town in many months, has swastika tattoos right on his neck.

I could go on, but I'll just say: everything 'tim in vermont' ever writes about Ukraine is bullshit.; 3/7/23, 9:02 PM
Candide said...: Dr Weevil said...

"The Kyiv (only assholes Russianize the name)..."

Dr. Weevil, you ignorant slut, do you know anything about Ukraine at all? Can you read Ukrainian or Russian? Can you speak Ukrainian or Russian?

Russian and Ukrainian both use Cyrillic alphabet. Russian spelling is 'Киeв' (pronounced 'kee-yev') and Ukrainian spelling is 'Київ' (pronounced 'kee-yiv'). That's the whole difference, one single sound that you can't even hear most of the time.

'Kiev' has nothing to do with Russian spelling, because it is ENGLISH spelling. It was used in English language for hundreds of years. So when you call 'assholes' those who ever wrote 'Kiev', you actually insult millions of English speaking people of all walks of life.

English speaking people also spell 'Moscow' instead of native Russian 'Maskvah', 'Warsaw' instead of native Polish 'Warszawa', 'Prague' instead of native Czech 'Praha', and so on... For some reason Russians, Poles, Czech and many other peoples do not get excited about English speakers using garbled names for their capital cities.

Kievan regime started the poisonous propaganda campaign "Kyiv not Kiev" only in 2018. Like all other stupid meaningless propaganda campaigns it accomplished nothing except putting people against each other for no reason at all and contributed only to ratcheting divisions and animosities. That was Kievan regime specialty since 2014.

"The Romanian-, Hungarian-, Slovakian-, and Polish-speaking Ukrainians along the western borders don't seem to think so."

Assertion without any evidence.

"Many of them are fighting the Russians"

Assertion without any evidence.

"one of the top Ukrainian commanders in Bakhmut goes by 'Magyar' on-line"

Finally, we have specific example of ONE single person, although using on-line nickname 'Magyar' doesn't necessarily make one ethnic Hungarian, but I'll be generous and grant you this single ONE example.; 3/8/23, 12:45 AM
Candide said...: Dr Weevil said,

"Reminder: the Donbas provinces voted to join Ukraine in 1991 by margins of nearly 84%: that's 5-1."

That is exactly right and if you knew anything about Ukrainian history you could understand what it all means. Because it means exactly the opposite of what you imagine in your ignorance.

In 1991, when USSR was falling apart and Ukrainian SSR was about to become an independent country, Leonid Kravchuk, head of Ukrainian Soviet government and future first president of Ukraine, spent a lot of time and hard efforts travelling to Crimea, Donbas and all other troubled regions of Ukraine that wanted separation, working tirelessly trying to convince people to remain in Ukraine, promising them very bright future. There were real reasons to believe him; Ukraine was one of the most prosperous of all Soviet republics and Kravchuk promised that independent Ukraine will become like "second France". That is why people in Donbas voted 5 to 1 to remain in Ukraine. Like all people, they voted for their material interests at the time.

That promise never came true, but the peaceful union that Kravchuk worked out was holding for 23 years, from 1991 till 2014. Civil society in Ukraine existed for 23 years, with general peace and fair elections. I was there in 2012 and had great time. Life was relatively sweet. The highway Odessa-Kiev-Moscow was full of cars day and night. People were travelling between Russia and Ukraine all the time. Maidan uprising in 2014 destroyed that union and broke Ukraine as a country. Crimean people immediately voted for independence, which they were entitled to do as autonomous region with its own government. Donbas didn't have autonomy, so they demanded it. There was still a chance to preserve Ukraine by giving limited self-determination to Donbas and making Ukraine a federated political system. In response, new Kievan regime sent in the troops and the fighting started...; 3/8/23, 1:13 AM
Dr Weevil said...: Candide is a lying asshole like 'tim in vermont' - so much so that some might suspect he's a TIV sock puppet, filling in for him while he ostentatiously takes two weeks off:

1. Of course, I never "call[ed] 'assholes' those who ever wrote 'Kiev'" (emphasis added) and thereby "insult[ed] millions of English speaking people of all walks of life". I wrote in the present tense "only assholes Russianize the name". Similarly, anyone who insists on calling Izmir 'Smyrna' or Istanbul 'Constantinople' or 'Byzantium' today (not while writing a history book) is an asshole and an anti-Turkish bigot. The same goes (mutatis mutandis) for those who insist on calling Tallinn 'Reval' or Volgograd 'Stalingrad', though the latter are probably not so much anti-Russian as neo-Stalinist Putinite tankies. Is Candide a liar, or barely literate and incapable of understanding a present-tense verb?

2. Can 'Candide' read Ukrainian or Russian? If not, he's an "ignorant slut" by his own admission, and therefore a contemptible hypocrite to call me one.

3. It's interesting that Candide and 'tim in vermont' think Ukrainian provinces can change their minds any time they want about whether they are parts of Ukraine and start killing people, but the Ukrainian people are not allowed to change their mind about the president they elected and demonstrate against him. Their beloved Yanukovych cheated in the 2010 election (got the election rules changed two days before the runoff), had the woman he narrowly defeated (49-45.5% is not a majority) jailed on very flimsy pretexts for the rest of the time he was in office, and betrayed all his promises by suddenly rejecting the closer relations with western Europe that he'd campaigned on and knuckling under to Putin. The people of Ukraine rose up peacefully in anger because he betrayed them. Was he already working for Putin when he was 'elected'? Likely enough. He's still living in Russia under Putin's protection. After he fled to Russia, his party ran a friend of his in the next election and got 3% of the vote. And 'tim in vermont' is shocked that this 'freely elected' president did not serve out his term, when he'd worked hard to make everyone hate him. When anyone mentions that Nixon didn't serve out his second term, he has no answer.; 3/8/23, 10:59 AM
Candide said...: Sometimes I wonder what is the worst part of the Kievan regime; is it they are a bunch of thieves and murderers, or is it they are a bunch of pesky, annoying, meddlesome pricks.

They always presume to demand something of the world. They presume to tell the world how to spell (Kyiv not Kiev), they presume to tell the world what to read (cancel Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), lately they presumed to tell the world which computer games to play (cancel Atomic Heart). They certainly took that cancel culture trend to their hearts.

Again and again Kievan regime comes out as a bunch of mendacious shifty kill-joys, kind of like Dr. Weevil (maybe that is why Dr. Weevil likes them so much).; 3/8/23, 2:43 PM
Dr Weevil said...: If 'Candide' gets all the joy in his life from telling lie after lie, changing the subject when his lies are proven, and trying to convince his fellow Americans to stop supporting Ukraine, I will indeed do my best to kill his sick, perverted joys: it's the right thing to do. Better a killjoy than a joyous lying asshole and supporter of genocide.

If the U.S. stops supporting Ukraine, one of two things will happen. Either an independent and democratic nation of 40,000,000 will fall (partially or entirely) into the hands of a neo-Nazi regime that murders, rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and robs every Ukrainian they can, committing every war crime on the books, including ethnic cleansing and genocide; or (more likely) Ukraine will win eventually, but the war will last many more months than it should, take the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and Russians in the process, and make the gruesome breakup of an impoverished and disgraced Russia far more likely.; 3/8/23, 8:35 PM
Dr Weevil said...: Since 'Candide' likes to say "Assertion without any evidence", here's some of the evidence he's too damned lazy to look for. Do ethnic Hungarians who are Ukrainian citizens support the war against Russia? Here (link) are two professors from Uzhhorod University, which is 15 miles from the Hungarian border and right on the Slovakian border. There is of course a huge pile of evidence for what I wrote, available to anyone who cares to look for it, but 'Candide' is one of those assholes who always demands that others prove what he could easily find out for himself. If they do, he will no doubt conveniently 'forget' the evidence and demand to be spoon-fed again as soon as possible.; 3/8/23, 11:43 PM
Candide said...: Dr, Weevil,

Obviously you misunderstand. I have no intension to make you stop supporting Ukraine, I just want you to see clearly what exactly are you supporting.; 3/9/23, 12:20 PM
Dr Weevil said...: You think reading your bald-faced lies will help me see anything except how desperately dishonest Ukraine-haters are? I've been following the news from Ukraine all the way through, and your assertions are all lies.

Here's another example: No one in Ukraine has asked anyone in the world not to read Tolstoi and Dostoievski: they're just finding it difficult to stomach reading them themselves. Israeli orchestras didn't play Wagner for decades after the Holocaust: do you have an inkling why? Irish and Indians and Nigerians under British rule got pretty tired of having Shakespeare shoved down their throats - not that they thought he was not a great author, but he represented colonial oppression. It's worse for Ukrainians: they not only had Russian literature shoved down their throats for decades by oppressors who pretended Ukrainian nationality, language, and literature were somehow fakes: the Russians also jailed or murdered many of the best Ukrainian authors, most recently Volodymyr Vakylenko, who wrote children's books and diary of life under Russian occupation. They murdered him and left his body unburied to rot for a month.

By the way, an honest disputant would have admitted that there is in fact evidence that ethnic minorities in Ukraine support the war and fight in it. Did you follow my link to the two Hungarian-Ukrainian professor-soldiers and scroll down for the picture of a bunch of Roma (Gypsy) soldiers in Ukrainian uniforms? The first thing the Russians did after starting the Donbas war in 2014 in Sloviansk was to find all the Gypsies in town, beat them up, and rob them. The Roma and the Crimean Tatars support Ukraine.

An honest disputant would also have told me by now whether he reads or speaks Ukrainian or Russian and admitted that he is himself an "ignorant slut" and a hypocrite if he answers no.

An asshole would do neither. Asshole.; 3/9/23, 1:04 PM
Candide said...: Dr. Weevil,

Since you asked, I can speak and read Russian and Ukrainian.

In addition, I have close family both in Russia and Ukraine, I always supported independent, peaceful and prosperous Ukraine, but I do not support corrupt and belligerent Ukraine.; 3/9/23, 5:07 PM
Dr Weevil said...: So you're not a hypocrite, just a lying asshole. Even assuming you're not lying about your knowledge of the languages. Right now your claim is an "Assertion without any evidence".; 3/9/23, 8:27 PM