Putin offers truce if Ukraine exits Russian-claimed areas and drops NATO bid. Kyiv rejects it

Russian President Vladimir Putin promised Friday to “immediately” order a cease-fire in Ukraine and start negotiations if Kyiv began withdrawing troops from the four regions annexed by Moscow in 2022 and renounced plans to join NATO. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejected what he called an ultimatum by Putin to surrender more territory… [the offer] didn’t include any new demands. The Kremlin has said before that Kyiv should recognize its territorial gains and drop its bid to join NATO.

Russia occupies most, but not all, of the territory in question. They are winning the war, and this is the type of offer you make when you’re winning. As the article notes, this is not some new request; this has been on the table for a while.

Ukraine is losing, but slowly. They could take this deal now, saving their own people’s lives, or they could continue sending men into the meat grinder and wind up with this or worse in maybe another year.

Besides seeking to join NATO, Ukraine wants Russian forces out of its territory, including the Crimean Peninsula that was illegally annexed in 2014; the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity; and that Russia be held accountable for war crimes and for Moscow to pay reparations to Kyiv.

Compare Russia’s terms to this – a totally delusional offer for the losing side to suggest.

He will now be held in a grim adult detention centre [article later notes he was sentenced to a juvenile facility]

a top performing student at school

no scrap of evidence for this was produced

a hellhole adult detention centre [in the same sentence where the article notes he’s going to juvee]

If this was a story about, say, a January 6 defendant, these types of editorial decisions would jump out at people as an obvious sign of significant bias. Pull the exact same rhetorical tricks against a Bad Country, though, and most simply accept it at face value.

Arseny Turbin, who committed his alleged crimes when he was just 14, has been branded as Russia’s ‘youngest terrorist’ following his conviction…

Judge Oleg Shishov in Oryol found him guilty of ‘participation in the activities of an organisation that is recognised as terrorist’…

[His mother] said ‘We will appeal the verdict….we did not expect this outcome at all.’

There was a trial – “no scrap of evidence” is a bald-faced lie.

If your theory (which really would have no scrap of evidence behind it) is that this was a kangaroo court, why would his mom be talking about appeals, and why would there be an appeal available in the first place?

Real reporting would have been, at minimum, getting a trial transcript and evaluating the evidence yourself. Or finding a Russian lawyer who was familiar with the proceedings and interviewing them. But of course MSN didn’t do any of this, because this isn’t reporting, this is propaganda.

“Oh you think killing literally Hitler would be OK? Think again”

For all the criticisms of the DSA, it’s the only remotely leftist org that remotely approaches the scale of a mass movement. There’s at least some utility in a large, nationwide org that is explicitly left of the Democratic Party and has “socialist” in the title. There really hasn’t been anything comparable since, what, before McCarthyism?

You are arguing against killing Hitler. You’re right that this sounds stupid, because it is.

But your whole post is really beside the point: there are absolutely, positively, beyond any doubt politicians who could justifiably be assassinated. Set aside guesswork about how such an act would have played out – the act itself would obviously be justified. It would in no way make you worse than Hitler, or even anywhere near as reprehensible.

At this point your faced with 2 options. Assassination or choosing the lesser evil.

The most absurd false dichotomy I’ve seen in a while, nice.

“Honestly the first choice just makes you the greater evil.”

“Killing Hitler just makes you worse than Hitler” – outstanding logic. Literally everyone outside of hardcore pacifists would agree there are certain politicians that it is OK to assassinate.

I wonder how much of this is election related. Would the response be different next February?

The article mentions that additional missiles were shot down, but it sounds like at least one hit where it was aimed.

Russia has summoned the US ambassador over a “barbaric” missile attack that hit a beach in Crimea, killing at least four, including children, and injuring 151.

I have yet to see even a story from the U.S. about what military target was supposed to be on a crowded beach.

I think “generally” is doing a lot of work there. Tons of people dig in if you challenge their opinions, but a lot of people don’t, too. Say 30-40% of people dig in on their positions no matter what evidence they see. That’s enough that it’s a huge factor you’d see all the time, but you could still say that generally (most of the time) people respond to facts.

Another sticky issue is what people consider to be reliable, factual information. If my grandpa sends me a chain email with “facts” from OANN, I’m going to be pretty skeptical. Maybe the information is actually factual, but I would have to choose to take the time to verify it through other sources before it would change my mind.

I think you have a little of that, and a little of this showing that the giga-rich didn’t get that way because they are these perfect human multi-specialty geniuses like they all claim.

Sure, maybe they’re pretty bright in one or two areas. Many successful people are. But they also do real stupid, shortsighted shit like this all the time. They got as rich as they did not on merit, but on family wealth, luck, and exploiting the labor of others.

What makes them a racist liberal?

In the article, they go over some examples of it being used in the mainstream by George Will. There’s also at least one youtuber they cite as using it, for what that’s worth. I haven’t seen it on Hexbear or Lemmygrad, which is good.

From this article alone (never heard of this person before), they’re definitely anti-Kautsky and pro-Lenin.

This whole section is interesting, too:

This quote is fake. More importantly, even if Lenin had said it, a sassy riposte to Kautsky cannot not “prove wrong” the idea that leftists should “convert people who think differently”.

In reality, evidence overwhelmingly shows that persuasion works. For example, these three large-sample experimental studies strongly suggest that factual corrections change minds:

Wood et al 2018: there is no evidence for a consistent “backfire effect”; telling people facts generally changes their minds; among 10100 adults, the effect of factual correction was ~1/3 as large as the effect of ideology on stated belief

Schmid and Betsch 2019: experimental study: among 1661 adults, topic rebuttal (oppose misinformation with facts) and technique rebuttal (refute the methods that science deniers use to mislead their audience) substantially and significantly reduced the influence of science deniers (by about 1/3 of a standard deviation), especially among individuals who vulnerable to antiscience beliefs

Tappin 2021: against “partisan motivated reasoning”: among 5071 adults, evidence changed minds in a sample of 24 policy issues; no significant difference between “evidence + contrary party leader cue” (purple) vs “evidence alone” (black)

This case’s existence is one indicator that the U.S. is much closer to a decaying empire than a fascist state. In a fascist state your union leaders wouldn’t argue a case before the Supreme Court – your union leaders would be shot. The U.S. will still do all the horrors of fascism abroad, but that’s “just” imperialism. At home, there are still many of the elements of bourgeois democracy.

If they make it illegal to strike and make you punishable in courts for it… Then at what point do people just start killing their boss instead?

Probably after they start with work-to-rule, slowdowns, sabotage, etc.

Today, Biden could:

• End all U.S. military support for Israel
• Veto any bill that contains one cent of funding for Israel
• Publically call a genocide a genocide
• Direct U.S. agencies to cancel contracts with companies that work with Israel, citing existing U.S. human rights laws
• Join the ICJ case against Israel
• Arrest Netanyahu’s son Yair, who’s just chilling in Miami
• Direct the National Guard to protect anti-genocide protesters
• Clean house at the State Department and other NatSec agencies to fire the people who have supported this genocide most vociferously
• Use the vast overseas surveillance power of the U.S. to document Israeli atrocities

How quickly would this stop?

And that’s not even considering options like a decapitation strike on the Israeli government, which should absolutely be on the table to stop a genocide.

Huey Newton was not what you would call a good speaker. In fact, he had a kind of high pitched monotonous voice and his rambling for three hours about the negation of the negation was sheer disaster. People walked out in droves. Instead of criticizing what was happening, most of the Party members defended it. When I said that Huey needed speaking lessons they jumped down my throat. When Huey changed his title from defense minister to the ridiculous “Supreme Commander” and then to the even more ridiculous “Supreme Servant,” damn near nobody said a word. That was one of the big problem in the Party. Criticism and self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given often was not taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, and not learn from them.

One thing I see fairly often on here is the idea that trying to refine the presentation of leftist ideas = ceding ground to liberals, or watering leftist ideas down. The importance of good presentation is somewhere between “extremely helpful” and “absolutely crucial.”

The BPP seems to have left a lot of potential untapped because they didn’t care enough about how people received their ideas. We should learn from that.

“In Ukraine we have a saying that not everyone can become a lawyer, but a lawyer can become anyone,” he says.

Least pompous lawyer

Pick one: Russia is running on fumes, or Russia should have won a year ago.

The coherent opinion here is that it’s a slow, grinding war and the side that has lost more and more territory as it continued will continue to do so.