Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cold war. Show all posts

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Would You Believe---Russia?

 

This is the most believable and also weird story happening recently. It's probably too easy to dismiss vague symptoms of some unknown origin as being anything but a kind of mass hysteria, but because of the nature of who was experiencing the "syndrome" and so on, it being a Russian op feels both too on the nose and a little like: "Who else?" 

But it is also absurd--we aren't living in Cold War times anymore, right? Except that we never stopped being in one. We (the US, apparently) thought when the Soviet Union failed, our relationship had radically changed. But that isn't exactly what happened. 

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Christmas Memories: 1991

 


Look, I was a Cold War kid and this was meaningful to me in the way the fall of the Berlin Wall was. My neighborhood had a lot of people who were immigrants from the USSR. I believed it was about generational change--the youth getting rid of the Communist gerontocracy. It felt like popular protest made things happen. But it wasn't that alone.  Not exactly. There are opportune times for things to happen. 

Putin tried to take an opportunity when the West was tired of war to make something happen that never will again.  Russia is paying a price for trying to make their neighbor, Ukraine, unfree. If US conservatives rooted against the USSR like I did as a liberal agnostic kid who passionately loves freedom, they would continue to support the valiant struggle for sovereignty and western values. Support NATO. Look down on despots.  

Otherwise, if they support tyranny and strongmen  (doing lipservice to religion as an opiate of the masses) who are really littledick men projecting terror because they can't fill potholes or collect taxes properly, or who are desperately clinging to power so they can avoid civil and legal penalties, they can go suck an exhaust pipe. 

This is my expressive Christmas wish for the CPAC/Turning Point/MAGA grifters. This love of eastern-style tyranny is fucked in the head and not what this nation was founded on. You all just gross me out for having no sense of history. Get with the western values that made America great, or admit you got nothing and just want to be arschleckers to a big daddy figure. 

Friday, February 3, 2023

Ein "Red" Luftballoon

 


Being a kid of a certain era, of course I thought of the song from Nena when I heard about the Chinese surveillance balloon traversing US airspace. (I also thought of the shooting down by the USSR of Gary Powers' spy plane--a U-2, because this is my brain, this is my Cold War 80's teenager brain, this is my brain on the music of my generation.) Things sure do happen. Sometimes things we know about and sometimes things we don't. The Chinese balloon is supposed to be a weather balloon according to the Chinese, and depending on who you ask, it is both always and never a weather balloon, whether you are talking about spy aircraft or UFOs or anything else. 

I'm a child of the 1980s, but I'm an adult of the 21st century, and I'm like, "how quaint is a fucking balloon"? I'm not talking about how zeppelins are weird since what happened in New Jersey and all, but more like, shit, there are satellites all over the night sky, and I don't know how many dumb MFs got TikTok on their phone. Information gathering has taken some leaps over the decades. What the hell are you all surveilling with a fucking big ass balloon? An obvious large as a couple tractor trailer ass balloon up over the whole continental US?

Could it be our reaction to it? Because that's a fun little test balloon, right there. 

Monday, October 3, 2022

Many Ukraine/Russia Commenters are Confused

 


After Russia has tried to bomb the hell out of maternity hospitals and schools and places clearly marked for being where children were sheltering in place, and after kidnapping tens of thousands of people, and trying to punish the Ukrainian out of the kidnapped children to make them Russian, after all these understood tactics of genocide? No, I don't think any of these things are appropriate, and "Fuck off" is the only answer. Ukraine doesn't have to negotiate shit, because they got invaded by Putin on bullshit made-up terms that even he lets on were always fake: he wants territory, the territory formerly held whenever but certainly not considered Russian territory this minute.

Putin's history is wrong, and the support of it by his apologists are wrong. When Russia was supposed to have a neat little 72 hours war or so, maybe there was reason to think Ukraine needed to negotiate. 

It's been longer and costlier than Russia anticipated, and for people who bothered to listen to what Putin has actually been saying about his hopes for westward expansion, support for Ukraine has only become more necessary as support for the borders of sovereign states who already have self-determined. If Ukraine falls, who is next?

It has become apparent that Ukraine needs to win, and I don't even know where these "negotiate people", these "sue for peace" people are even coming from.  Russia, in their fake annexation and mass mobilizations are committing themselves to a path from which there isn't an off-ramp. This isn't fixed at any negotiation table. It stops when Russia pulls back a helplessly bleeding stump and realizes shit isn't ever going to get better for them. 

The annexation votes were bullshit, and never should have been staged, so how the hell should they be re-done? When those loyal to Ukraine have been relocated as refugees for their safety? How do you manage anything approaching serious and fair? How do you re-introduce the original citizen pool safely?  You don't.  The idea of the vote itself is an affront. A lie. An imposition. 

As a humanitarian issue, of course people should have the right to water. but that is a human rights issue that the instigator of the aggression--Russia--should consider their responsibility and should be rightfully sanctioned for what they fail to achieve regarding human rights--

But that's a fucking laugh, isn't it? These Russians are rapists and torturers. They don't care about their own people. They've been thieving from Ukraine for their own material benefit. No one at the top of the Russia food chain thinks they will ever see repercussions for what they've done, even if it should wind them up in the Orange Hotel. 

And don't get me started on how Ukraine is supposed to stay neutral after all of this. Would I if this was what was done to my country? Would you? 

The apt sobriquet stays the same: if Russia stops fighting the war ends, if Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. 

There isn't any room for negotiation here. and for US quislings who want to relent on Ukraine aid, I am telling you: Putin isn't your potential benefactor so much as you are his potential bitch. If you think the US way of life is superior, you don't fucking cater or crater to his influence, because he is planning to expand it and already has made inroads to do that.  If you want America First, you don't place Russia anywhere on your priorities. We are not buddies with Putin. He isn't even a necessary evil.  He's the kind of evil we can do without. 

People missing this understanding have slipped a cog in their cogitations. 



Monday, February 28, 2022

This Would Be Appeasement

 

From a purely defensive point of view, I realize that the loss of lives could be temporarily paused by something like this--if you wanted to gamble with the freedom of actual human beings, if you wanted to count on Putin not going further. If you thought this action would not lead to Putin executing Ukraine's leadership and destroying whatever industry or organizations that made Ukraine a functioning independent state. If you thought a little bit of totalitarianism was okay. If you were without ideals about what we in the US actually are supposed to stand for. If you didn't also know our other allies would be imperiled. If you just swore an oath to the constitution and incidentally never cared what our democracy means or what our ideals mean, to the world.

I don't know what American exceptionalism means if it means catering to bullies and telling other nations to bow their heads and kneel to totalitarianism. It can't be that. Not ever that. 
 
Putin isn't being demonized but accurately described based on the words coming out of his word-hole and his long history of death and destruction.  I understand to some extent the rationale of people who want to see strongmen like Putin as a father figure--but these people need to get psychoanalysis, not an opportunity to advise countries about foreign policy. 

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

The Bad Case of Vladimir Putin

 

It might be better said that, rather than having "made the case", Putin advanced an argument based on revisionist history that fell just a bit short of crowning himself "Tsar of all the Russias". Putin has felt this sense of being robbed about the fall of the Soviet Union for a long time, and it wasn't actually a secret. 

It bothers me that people are framing recent events in contexts that are not complete because the story isn't recent, and address what Putin is doing in terms of what "the West", or particularly the current US administration, have or haven't done, which sometimes gets framed in the terms of "weakness" or "strength". It seems particularly hard for many of my fellow Americans to grasp that the world does not revolve around US politics. What we're looking at here is Russian imperialism.

This is something Putin wanted to do, and well, bucket list items do not cross themselves off. He benefits from the frame that he is reacting to the actions of other people; like all authoritarians, he uses the language of victimhood as justification for atrocity: "Look what you made me do." 

No one made him do this. He is responsible for the invasion of the separatist regions, and there is no reason to believe he will stop there if you listen to what he is and has been actually saying

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Merry Arms Race

It's Christmas already in Philadelphia, PA, from which I write my humble blog. I'm a Generation X-er. The year I was born, 1972, the season was marked by the Christmas bombing of Hanoi.  I grew up with a consciousness that the world could actually end because countries got very mad at one another. We even called it "MAD"--Mutually Assured Destruction. There was an understanding that if nation states got too far out of line, we would have a global catastrophe resulting in millions if not billions of casualties.

The millennials don't really have this experience. The people who grew up with 9/11 as their significant milestone of consciousness, or indeed, had that event occur before they were even really aware, might be more inclined to see war and violence as being a product of state and non-state actors performing acts of mass destruction at more or less close range. The threat of global thermonuclear war just wasn't as ever-present in their minds.

The idea of an "arms race" might seem like a curious 1980s artifact--as it should. We (the US) had an arms race with the USSR then. There's a curious idea that the USSR fell because the US simply outspent them into oblivion which might be conditionally true, even if the scenario is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. The SDI or Star Wars program, which was never a working thing, was scary to people who had already discovered they didn't always have the wherewithal to sustain working nuclear plants.  The weird thing is , the missile gap was always kind of like Iraq WMDs in the early Bush II years--we really had overmatched them considerably. We might have been caught off guard by a thing or two in the space race, but we really had produced a quantum fuckton more of fission-y boom-y things. But probably more importantly, the West also had blue jeans and Beatles records and a worldview that didn't suck. The wall came down alright--but it was because walls suck and people who put them up suck the worst.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Sen. Chuck Schumer Opposes the Iran Deal


Sen. Chuck Schumer has come out against the Iran deal. I think the Iran deal is the best deal we could ever get. I like Chuck Schumer a little less for not seeing things the same as I do. He might have a reason for it, but I still think he's all wrong on this one. I don't see how a plan for reduction in nuclear strength with regular inspections, results in anything like a stronger hand for Iran. I think that idea is paranoid. I think Iran might be reasonably persuaded by the obviously superior nuclear strength of the US and the not obvious but implied nuclear capability of Israel that any thought of an arms race is already failed. We literally don't have much to kick about in re: the Persian Bomb. War is a failure to communicate. Diplomacy is a form of successful communication. Why would Sen. Schumer hate success?

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

TWGB: It's Raining Shoes!

  It certainly has been a minute, hasn't it? So, what brings me out of self-imposed blogging exile, if not something very relevant to my...