Oh man… Elon Musk is creepy as hell. Reminds me of some of the men here in these comments sections.
“Following Tuesday's debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the pop star posted on Instagram that she would be voting for Harris.
She posted her endorsement alongside a photo of her holding a cat and signed the message with "Childless Cat Lady"—seemingly a gibe at Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump's running mate, who previously called Harris and other members of the Democratic Party "childless cat ladies."
Musk responded to Swift's endorsement on X, formerly Twitter, writing: "Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life."
Althouse has been pretty mum re the debate. Trump's performance must have left a mark. Haven't heard from Mead either- maybe he's still making his way back from Mosinee.
Over at Instapundit every night someone comments "Legalinsurrection shadow bans commenters!" Meanwhile here at Althouse, my comments that are germane to a previous comment keep disappearing... Doesn't happen anywhere else I comment.
Trump has a problem repeating things that people tell him when it’s just stuff in the internet. I thought that problem had been solved by now. Wtf is going on?
I'm beginning to appreciate the sunrise pictures more. Not so much for exactly what they show, yes they are often lovely, but more for the habit of observing them every morning. Habits create a grander canvas from somewhat repetitive details.
What do Taylor Swift, Ilhan Omar, Dick Cheney, and Vladimir Putin have in common? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if they agree on something, I want to be on the other side.
W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939“—with its obvious reference to the beginning of World War II—had this penultimate stanza:
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
The poet turned against his final line and refused to reprint it in 1945 until the line became:
“We must love one another and die.”
Love can neither save us from war nor conquer death. For that matter, we need to understand that power-seeking outside the rule of law cannot make life better when the goal is fascist authoritarianism. The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.
Jamie - Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014 when he took over Crimea and then he supported Russian militants in Donbas fighting for years. Before he made a full-scale invasion of Ukraine borders in 2021, he blocked Ukraine access to the the Black Sea.
Brianna Wu of the Boston Globe is suddenly, after decades of hating America, hating Israel, hating Republicans and so on ... Suddenly she's scared because she's watching her fellow leftists vigorously celebrate the rape and slaughter of families on October 7 -- celebrate ordinary Islamic rape, actually, which she previously dumbly supported when used against the right type of victims (11-year old white British slags). This dozy bint is suddenly scared because it reminds her of how she voluntarily got into fights with people online during Gamergate.
This dozy bint is comparing widespread rape, slaughter, and mass celebration of the same with someone making a mean comment to her.
These leftists deserve what they get. Good and hard. Repeatedly. Apparently nothing else pulls them away from their nauseating, dehumanizing narcissism for a moment.
She is denying their torture. She is no better than a Holocaust denialist. Yes, leftists have lost their principles and their minds, if they had either to lose in the first place. And, sorry, I include all of you here, despite my efforts to humanize you.
I guess this time you're really leaving I heard your suitcase say goodbye Well, as my broken heart lies bleeding You say true love, it's suicide You say you've cried a thousand rivers And now you're swimming for the shore You left me drowning in my tears And you won't save me anymore I'm praying to God you'll give me one more chance, girl I'll be there for you These five words I swear to you
Harris and Putin are both communists. Putin would adore anyone who wants to shut down unregulated, aka free, speech, as Harris has said. They also both think price controls are sweet. So maybe, just maybe, Putin was being honest, hiding behind that little jab about her cackle.
“ Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014”. Yes, when Biden was Vice President. But there was actually a period in which he stopped. That was when Trump was President.
The Russian Wagner Group forces were active in Ukraine during the Trump administration. Wagner were reported to be operating in the eastern regions, where the conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists was ongoing. Their presence in Ukraine dates back to at least 2014, which is before and during the Trump administration.
Harris won the pundits; Trump won the public. Pundits were grading Harris on form; the public was grading her on content. This is why the Reuters panel said Harris won the debate but they said they would vote for Trump 6-3-1
The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio has announced a potluck dinner this weekend at the Springfield community center. Posters are popping up across town inviting the townspeople. “The Haitians are supplying the meat, please bring a side” the poster reads.
The Commie-Pinkos are ramping up. First it was apartment complexes in Colorado taken over by gangs (read: dreamers), then entire towns taken over by cat lovers, that would be the Haitians. There is no mystery as to what’s coming down the pike.
How you know the Kamala Harris fix is in and that our elections are fake:
Department of Homeland Security designates Jan. 6, 2025, a ‘National Special Security Event’
They're already prepping for the next fake Insurrection and getting ready to surround our nation's capital with Razor wire again so they can install their next fake President.
gadfly said.. Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014..
so, JUST TO BE CLEAR.. according to gadfly; it was O'Bama's and Biden's fault. Thanxs for clarifying that for us gadfly! without YOUR Knowledge, we'd All be in the dark!!
The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.
This is my fear as well, gadfly. Clearly I disagree with you about who's on which side - but I think my side has the better argument for being anti-authoritarian. My side is the one in favor of free speech even if it's unpopular or distasteful, breaking up the Washington/coastal "elite"/academic/Big Tech establishment because it has been revealed over and over again to be obfuscating and sometimes outright denying reality (and the right of ordinary people to discuss it!), keeping more of what you earn, maintaining a sense of cultural solidarity based on shared American values - values anyone may adopt, most notably that natural rights are not conferred by government but are frequently impinged on BY governmentSSS and that we must constantly be vigilant about that (I'd almost say inevitable) authoritarian ratchet present in the hearts and minds of those who gravitate to government.
Your side at least acts as if it's cool with curtailment and punishment of unapproved speech, confiscatory taxation (visualized as more punishment - "the rich have to pay their fair share" as if they don't already carry the great majority of the tax burden), grievance and resentment as a motivating ethos, entitlement as a motivator for policy, rejection of the cultural values that even Democrats considered foundational and indispensable to society until forty or fifty years ago, valorization rather than simple tolerance of minority-to-fringe attitudes (the more aggressively anti-American the better, it appears) - a suite of beliefs that tend toward dividing us as a society and simultaneously sending nonconformity with those beliefs underground.
I was proudly nonconformist as a kid. Eventually I was able to bring to consciousness the fact that it was the foundational tenets of American society and governance that enabled me to be what I was without fear. Over the course of my life, I've seen less and less room for young people to have unconforming beliefs and behaviors - except with regard to their appearance and sexual (yeah, ok, I'll use a loaded word here) antics. They can pierce anything, tattoo anything, show any part of their bodies in public, and get it on with whomever they want at whatever age and in whatever situation - but to believe that, for instance, racial discrimination is no longer a strong factor in a person's success in this country, or that men cannot get pregnant, or that colonization carried benefits to the colonized lands and no Western nation still behaves like the colonizers of the bad old days - these are beyond the pale.
Maybe it's up to the voters in a democracy to decide whether we want to fight WW3 with Russia. Maybe this is not a think that is decided for us by types like Lt Vindman, or the clients of Hunter Biden, who stand to get extremely rich if we can somehow overthrow Putin and divvy up the estimated $72 trillion in natural resources in Russia, which raised the question as well, invasions, as almost an iron rule in history, flow towards resource rich countries, not out of them. Which is why Germany and France and Sweden have all invaded Russia, and the one Russian invasion was a counterattack following a German invasion of Russia. There is nothing but trouble for Russia in occupying any non ethnic Russian territory anywhere. The Russians learned this by mistakes the Soviets made.
So sure, Russia would prefer that people who don't want to fight WW3 win elections, but Putin also has stated many times, that the US President is not really in charge of anything, and that at summits, when the US president says something interesting, within hours the men in the dark suits and blue ties bring him back on the reservation. China too, which says that the US constantly lies in summits, when really it's possible that Joe Biden means what he says, and that he was never any more in control of foreign policy than Trump was, there was just an illusion that he was because he aligned more closely with the people who hold the real power.
One of your better comments, gadfly, but incomprehensibly, you don't seem to see that the side that is progressively ratcheting up "fascist authoritarianism" is the side you're on. Mask mandates. Cancellations. Restricted speech. Compelled speech. Are you really that blind and self-unaware?
And here's 'tim in vermont' doing his best 'Timofei in Voronezh' impersonation by repeating obvious propaganda that only children and morons believe, even in Russia.
He writes that there was only "one Russian invasion" of another country! Just off the top of my head, I can think of five times Russia invaded Poland in the last ~250 years, not counting the one 'tim' admits to. Has he never heard of the three partitions of Poland? Of the 1920 Polish Soviet War, in which the newly-independent Poland defeated a huge Russian army at the gates of Warsaw? Of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which was basically the Fourth Partition? Does it somehow not count if other countries join in, as Germany did in all but the 1920 war, and Austria-Hungary did in the first and third partitions? Of course, it's still an invasion, and all five were violent. And Poland had as much right to declare its independence in 1919 as the US had in 1776.
Ukraine also declared independence in 1919, but was less successful in defending itself against the Soviet invasion. That makes six invasions. By the way, even if you think Russia had a legitimate claim to Poland and Ukraine, the Russian who had that claim was the Tsar, and the Bolshevik usurpers who murdered him did not inherit it.
Then there's non-Slavic Chechnya, whose independence Russia solemnly promised to respect in 1995 after losing the First Chechen War. Of course, they immediately rearmed, reinvaded in 1997, killed hundreds of thousands of Chechens, mostly civilians, and crushed the place. More than one Ukrainian has pointed out that every Chechen who signed the 1995 peace treaty is dead. That's why negotiating with Putin is stupid: he needs to be defeated.
I could go on giving examples, but the obvious fact is that Russia is the largest country in the world, rules over dozens of supposedly-independent non-Slavic 'republics', Tatars, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Tuvans, Ossetians, and so on, and didn't get that big by peaceful means. Look up the Cherkassians (aka Circassians) and what Russia did to them in the 19th century: exactly what the Turks did to the Armenians in the 20th. The details will turn your stomach.
'tim in vermont' is a liar who retails Russian propaganda. Whether he just likes lies or is paid to do so is not obvious.
My comment replying to 'tim in vermont' and his astonishing claim that Russia has only invaded one other country once seems to have disappeared. While we wait and see if it comes back (they sometimes do), I'll just summarize and quote a bit of it, then add a footnote:
Russia invaded Poland five times in less than two centuries (1772-1939): the three Partitions of Poland, the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. And that's just Poland.
Russia is the largest country in the world, rules over dozens of supposedly-independent non-Slavic 'republics', Tatars, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Tuvans, Ossetians, and so on, and didn't get that big by peaceful means. Look up the Cherkassians (aka Circassians) and what Russia did to them in the 19th century: exactly what the Turks did to the Armenians in the 20th. The details will turn your stomach.
The footnote: Alexander Vindman is a lieutenant colonel (O-5), not a lieutenant (O1 or O2). 'tim' can't even get the most basic facts right.
One of the interesting aspects of all the Poor Widdle Wussia rhetoric is how it ignores the realities on the ground. What Charles XII and Peter the Great were contesting were lands where few or no Russians actually lived.
Same same centuries later, and in 1914 the Russian army invaded German territory (full of Germans) from the Baltic territories (full of Balts) and Poland (full of Poles). They got creamed, and within a few years vast swathes of Europe that had been mismanaged and oppressed by the Muscovites had slipped the leash.
“ Meanwhile here at Althouse, my comments that are germane to a previous comment keep disappearing....”
As I keep saying, this is the spam filter and I don’t control it. It catches many comments that, in the end, I release. I regret that people put any energy into trying to ascribe substantive meaning to this process.
Russian Wagner Group forces were also active in Syria during the Trump administration. One Wagner regiment there (~500 men) kept firing on US bases. The US called the Russian commander and told him to make them stop, he insisted Wagner were mercenaries, not under his command, and he couldn't make them stop. Trump then ordered a combination of air strikes and artillery that completely wiped out the regiment, killing half and wounding the rest, and destroyed all but one of their vehicles, leaving them the one so a wounded survivor could drive to the nearest town to tell what had happened and arrange the evacuation of the wounded. In short, Trump did far more to stop Wagner than Obama or Biden ever did.
And the "Russian-backed separatists" in the Donbas were mostly Russian regulars pretending to be locals, plus a few local collaborators and traitors to Ukraine.
“Another new commenter with a blank profile. Hmmmm.”
A lot of people say, “new bitch?” It’s Rich! A lot of people ask, “Who’s he? Or she?” A ma’am or a sir, accept him or her or whatever it might be It’s time for Lies and Levity Here comes Rich!
I guess the only effective way for a commenter to deal with this is to make a copy of each comment, save it for use if/when the comment disappears. Repost until it sticks.
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৫৩টি মন্তব্য:
Oh man… Elon Musk is creepy as hell. Reminds me of some of the men here in these comments sections.
“Following Tuesday's debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the pop star posted on Instagram that she would be voting for Harris.
She posted her endorsement alongside a photo of her holding a cat and signed the message with "Childless Cat Lady"—seemingly a gibe at Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump's running mate, who previously called Harris and other members of the Democratic Party "childless cat ladies."
Musk responded to Swift's endorsement on X, formerly Twitter, writing: "Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life."
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-response-taylor-swift-endorse-kamala-harris-creepy-1951985
It is like the clouds are racing away.
The Census Bureau is texting me to take a survey; anyone else? A text yesterday and a reminder today. A bore and a chore.
Also, I'm getting texts encouraging me to become an Uber driver in Mississippi. Some Department of Health initiative, or so they say.
Althouse has been pretty mum re the debate. Trump's performance must have left a mark. Haven't heard from Mead either- maybe he's still making his way back from Mosinee.
Over at Instapundit every night someone comments "Legalinsurrection shadow bans commenters!" Meanwhile here at Althouse, my comments that are germane to a previous comment keep disappearing... Doesn't happen anywhere else I comment.
That’s hilarious from Elon. Thank you for sharing Inga.
in chinese drama I watch that is called a love confession
Trump has a problem repeating things that people tell him when it’s just stuff in the internet. I thought that problem had been solved by now. Wtf is going on?
I'm beginning to appreciate the sunrise pictures more. Not so much for exactly what they show, yes they are often lovely, but more for the habit of observing them every morning. Habits create a grander canvas from somewhat repetitive details.
What do Taylor Swift, Ilhan Omar, Dick Cheney, and Vladimir Putin have in common? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if they agree on something, I want to be on the other side.
Vladimir Putin is on Trump’s side. Of course most people realize he hasn’t endorsed Harris and that he was just trolling.
Funny how he didn't pursue his imperial aims while Trump was president, then, isn't it?
The second one is sublime. Glorious.
Don't Haitians selfie with what'sfordinnertonite?
Same thing is happening to mine. I must’ve had 7 or 8 that disappeared from the debate thread last night.
I can’t believe the news that Biden donned a MAGA hat isn’t blowing up. I think he’s sticking it to her, Jerry!
Hopefully Tulsi will help Vance prep for his debate as well.
It’s humorous to watch Inganorant, Muttman, et al celebrate in the end zone as Trump scores bigly with Independents and undecideds.
He definitely scared all of the dogs and cats into voting for him.
W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939“—with its obvious reference to the beginning of World War II—had this penultimate stanza:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
The poet turned against his final line and refused to reprint it in 1945 until the line became:
“We must love one another and die.”
Love can neither save us from war nor conquer death. For that matter, we need to understand that power-seeking outside the rule of law cannot make life better when the goal is fascist authoritarianism. The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.
Jamie - Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014 when he took over Crimea and then he supported Russian militants in Donbas fighting for years. Before he made a full-scale invasion of Ukraine borders in 2021, he blocked Ukraine access to the the Black Sea.
Brianna Wu of the Boston Globe is suddenly, after decades of hating America, hating Israel, hating Republicans and so on ... Suddenly she's scared because she's watching her fellow leftists vigorously celebrate the rape and slaughter of families on October 7 -- celebrate ordinary Islamic rape, actually, which she previously dumbly supported when used against the right type of victims (11-year old white British slags). This dozy bint is suddenly scared because it reminds her of how she voluntarily got into fights with people online during Gamergate.
This dozy bint is comparing widespread rape, slaughter, and mass celebration of the same with someone making a mean comment to her.
These leftists deserve what they get. Good and hard. Repeatedly. Apparently nothing else pulls them away from their nauseating, dehumanizing narcissism for a moment.
She is denying their torture. She is no better than a Holocaust denialist. Yes, leftists have lost their principles and their minds, if they had either to lose in the first place. And, sorry, I include all of you here, despite my efforts to humanize you.
You have lost my sympathy.
I’ll Be There for You
Song by Bon Jovi
I guess this time you're really leaving
I heard your suitcase say goodbye
Well, as my broken heart lies bleeding
You say true love, it's suicide
You say you've cried a thousand rivers
And now you're swimming for the shore
You left me drowning in my tears
And you won't save me anymore
I'm praying to God you'll give me one more chance, girl
I'll be there for you
These five words I swear to you
Harris and Putin are both communists. Putin would adore anyone who wants to shut down unregulated, aka free, speech, as Harris has said. They also both think price controls are sweet. So maybe, just maybe, Putin was being honest, hiding behind that little jab about her cackle.
gadfly said...
Jamie - Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014
Not content to assert Trump's been serving a shadow second term, you now want him to have served a secret term from 2012 to 2016?
Concept of a plan? Talk about eating pets until Trump blurts it out on national television with everyone watching.....🤔
“ Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014”. Yes, when Biden was Vice President. But there was actually a period in which he stopped. That was when Trump was President.
The Russian Wagner Group forces were active in Ukraine during the Trump administration. Wagner were reported to be operating in the eastern regions, where the conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists was ongoing. Their presence in Ukraine dates back to at least 2014, which is before and during the Trump administration.
Harris won the pundits; Trump won the public. Pundits were grading Harris on form; the public was grading her on content. This is why the Reuters panel said Harris won the debate but they said they would vote for Trump 6-3-1
The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio has announced a potluck dinner this weekend at the Springfield community center. Posters are popping up across town inviting the townspeople. “The Haitians are supplying the meat, please bring a side” the poster reads.
Just FYI… so Rich understands his posts are a tainted brand… he’s now mincing as “Concept of a Plan”.
The Commie-Pinkos are ramping up. First it was apartment complexes in Colorado taken over by gangs (read: dreamers), then entire towns taken over by cat lovers, that would be the Haitians. There is no mystery as to what’s coming down the pike.
Newsweek, by the way, was sold for $1 to its current Democrat Party owners.
How you know the Kamala Harris fix is in and that our elections are fake:
Department of Homeland Security designates Jan. 6, 2025, a ‘National Special Security Event’
They're already prepping for the next fake Insurrection and getting ready to surround our nation's capital with Razor wire again so they can install their next fake President.
https://nypost.com/2024/09/11/us-news/dhs-designates-jan-6-2025-a-national-special-security-event/
gadfly said..
Putin has been fighting nonstop in Ukraine since 2014..
so, JUST TO BE CLEAR.. according to gadfly; it was O'Bama's and Biden's fault.
Thanxs for clarifying that for us gadfly! without YOUR Knowledge, we'd All be in the dark!!
The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.
This is my fear as well, gadfly. Clearly I disagree with you about who's on which side - but I think my side has the better argument for being anti-authoritarian. My side is the one in favor of free speech even if it's unpopular or distasteful, breaking up the Washington/coastal "elite"/academic/Big Tech establishment because it has been revealed over and over again to be obfuscating and sometimes outright denying reality (and the right of ordinary people to discuss it!), keeping more of what you earn, maintaining a sense of cultural solidarity based on shared American values - values anyone may adopt, most notably that natural rights are not conferred by government but are frequently impinged on BY governmentSSS and that we must constantly be vigilant about that (I'd almost say inevitable) authoritarian ratchet present in the hearts and minds of those who gravitate to government.
Your side at least acts as if it's cool with curtailment and punishment of unapproved speech, confiscatory taxation (visualized as more punishment - "the rich have to pay their fair share" as if they don't already carry the great majority of the tax burden), grievance and resentment as a motivating ethos, entitlement as a motivator for policy, rejection of the cultural values that even Democrats considered foundational and indispensable to society until forty or fifty years ago, valorization rather than simple tolerance of minority-to-fringe attitudes (the more aggressively anti-American the better, it appears) - a suite of beliefs that tend toward dividing us as a society and simultaneously sending nonconformity with those beliefs underground.
I was proudly nonconformist as a kid. Eventually I was able to bring to consciousness the fact that it was the foundational tenets of American society and governance that enabled me to be what I was without fear. Over the course of my life, I've seen less and less room for young people to have unconforming beliefs and behaviors - except with regard to their appearance and sexual (yeah, ok, I'll use a loaded word here) antics. They can pierce anything, tattoo anything, show any part of their bodies in public, and get it on with whomever they want at whatever age and in whatever situation - but to believe that, for instance, racial discrimination is no longer a strong factor in a person's success in this country, or that men cannot get pregnant, or that colonization carried benefits to the colonized lands and no Western nation still behaves like the colonizers of the bad old days - these are beyond the pale.
Maybe it's up to the voters in a democracy to decide whether we want to fight WW3 with Russia. Maybe this is not a think that is decided for us by types like Lt Vindman, or the clients of Hunter Biden, who stand to get extremely rich if we can somehow overthrow Putin and divvy up the estimated $72 trillion in natural resources in Russia, which raised the question as well, invasions, as almost an iron rule in history, flow towards resource rich countries, not out of them. Which is why Germany and France and Sweden have all invaded Russia, and the one Russian invasion was a counterattack following a German invasion of Russia. There is nothing but trouble for Russia in occupying any non ethnic Russian territory anywhere. The Russians learned this by mistakes the Soviets made.
So sure, Russia would prefer that people who don't want to fight WW3 win elections, but Putin also has stated many times, that the US President is not really in charge of anything, and that at summits, when the US president says something interesting, within hours the men in the dark suits and blue ties bring him back on the reservation. China too, which says that the US constantly lies in summits, when really it's possible that Joe Biden means what he says, and that he was never any more in control of foreign policy than Trump was, there was just an illusion that he was because he aligned more closely with the people who hold the real power.
Vlad Putin has explictly endorsed Harris over Trump. How did you miss that, Inga?
Big Mike.
It's only real real if YOU belive it.
One of your better comments, gadfly, but incomprehensibly, you don't seem to see that the side that is progressively ratcheting up "fascist authoritarianism" is the side you're on. Mask mandates. Cancellations. Restricted speech. Compelled speech. Are you really that blind and self-unaware?
The US Army is running war games in Bavaria, Germany simulating fighting Russians in Ukraine.
Conscription coming soon.
Dick heads.
And here's 'tim in vermont' doing his best 'Timofei in Voronezh' impersonation by repeating obvious propaganda that only children and morons believe, even in Russia.
He writes that there was only "one Russian invasion" of another country! Just off the top of my head, I can think of five times Russia invaded Poland in the last ~250 years, not counting the one 'tim' admits to. Has he never heard of the three partitions of Poland? Of the 1920 Polish Soviet War, in which the newly-independent Poland defeated a huge Russian army at the gates of Warsaw? Of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which was basically the Fourth Partition? Does it somehow not count if other countries join in, as Germany did in all but the 1920 war, and Austria-Hungary did in the first and third partitions? Of course, it's still an invasion, and all five were violent. And Poland had as much right to declare its independence in 1919 as the US had in 1776.
Ukraine also declared independence in 1919, but was less successful in defending itself against the Soviet invasion. That makes six invasions. By the way, even if you think Russia had a legitimate claim to Poland and Ukraine, the Russian who had that claim was the Tsar, and the Bolshevik usurpers who murdered him did not inherit it.
Then there's non-Slavic Chechnya, whose independence Russia solemnly promised to respect in 1995 after losing the First Chechen War. Of course, they immediately rearmed, reinvaded in 1997, killed hundreds of thousands of Chechens, mostly civilians, and crushed the place. More than one Ukrainian has pointed out that every Chechen who signed the 1995 peace treaty is dead. That's why negotiating with Putin is stupid: he needs to be defeated.
I could go on giving examples, but the obvious fact is that Russia is the largest country in the world, rules over dozens of supposedly-independent non-Slavic 'republics', Tatars, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Tuvans, Ossetians, and so on, and didn't get that big by peaceful means. Look up the Cherkassians (aka Circassians) and what Russia did to them in the 19th century: exactly what the Turks did to the Armenians in the 20th. The details will turn your stomach.
'tim in vermont' is a liar who retails Russian propaganda. Whether he just likes lies or is paid to do so is not obvious.
My comment replying to 'tim in vermont' and his astonishing claim that Russia has only invaded one other country once seems to have disappeared. While we wait and see if it comes back (they sometimes do), I'll just summarize and quote a bit of it, then add a footnote:
Russia invaded Poland five times in less than two centuries (1772-1939): the three Partitions of Poland, the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, and the Hitler-Stalin pact. And that's just Poland.
Russia is the largest country in the world, rules over dozens of supposedly-independent non-Slavic 'republics', Tatars, Udmurts, Bashkirs, Tuvans, Ossetians, and so on, and didn't get that big by peaceful means. Look up the Cherkassians (aka Circassians) and what Russia did to them in the 19th century: exactly what the Turks did to the Armenians in the 20th. The details will turn your stomach.
The footnote: Alexander Vindman is a lieutenant colonel (O-5), not a lieutenant (O1 or O2). 'tim' can't even get the most basic facts right.
"
The replies are disappear ing
Give it a rest, Harris boy
Another new commenter with a blank profile. Hmmmm.
One of the interesting aspects of all the Poor Widdle Wussia rhetoric is how it ignores the realities on the ground. What Charles XII and Peter the Great were contesting were lands where few or no Russians actually lived.
Same same centuries later, and in 1914 the Russian army invaded German territory (full of Germans) from the Baltic territories (full of Balts) and Poland (full of Poles). They got creamed, and within a few years vast swathes of Europe that had been mismanaged and oppressed by the Muscovites had slipped the leash.
But yeah, Poor Widdle Wussia.
“ Meanwhile here at Althouse, my comments that are germane to a previous comment keep disappearing....”
As I keep saying, this is the spam filter and I don’t control it. It catches many comments that, in the end, I release. I regret that people put any energy into trying to ascribe substantive meaning to this process.
Russian Wagner Group forces were also active in Syria during the Trump administration. One Wagner regiment there (~500 men) kept firing on US bases. The US called the Russian commander and told him to make them stop, he insisted Wagner were mercenaries, not under his command, and he couldn't make them stop. Trump then ordered a combination of air strikes and artillery that completely wiped out the regiment, killing half and wounding the rest, and destroyed all but one of their vehicles, leaving them the one so a wounded survivor could drive to the nearest town to tell what had happened and arrange the evacuation of the wounded. In short, Trump did far more to stop Wagner than Obama or Biden ever did.
And the "Russian-backed separatists" in the Donbas were mostly Russian regulars pretending to be locals, plus a few local collaborators and traitors to Ukraine.
“Another new commenter with a blank profile. Hmmmm.”
A lot of people say, “new bitch?” It’s Rich!
A lot of people ask, “Who’s he? Or she?”
A ma’am or a sir, accept him or her
or whatever it might be
It’s time for Lies and Levity
Here comes Rich!
Mutt will steer clear of Springfield, OH from now on.
For obvious reasons…
I guess the only effective way for a commenter to deal with this is to make a copy of each comment, save it for use if/when the comment disappears. Repost until it sticks.
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