Goofy, you were even a key part of the conversation before that post! You and micro and others were actually, successfully, having one of those discussion-thingies that this forum is supposedly for.
I’ll be completely honest here: I am legitimately, genuinely perplexed as to how someone as smart and as aware as you continues to ignore the "only-here-to-own-my-opponent"ness of CN’s posting across thread after thread. I am not surprised that micro responded in kind–do you notice how different his posting was when responding to you, bbb, and others vs once CN entered the chat? Do you think that’s because micro is only here to own his opponents, or could it be something else?
This continues to be one of those “am I taking crazy pills” things for me, because it seems incredibly obvious and yet I constantly feel like I’m on the outside.
CN is both aggressive and wrong in this thread.
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You can ignore CN. It took me years on 22 to figure this out, but it works like a charm.
Maybe I can be provocative and say that some demonization of the enemy is a necessary evil?
Like even if I was living in Ukraine and seeing what the Russian army was doing to my people, I still might have a hard time pulling the trigger at those specific Russians in front of me, because they’re probably conscripts who didn’t do those atrocities and don’t want to be there any more than I do. But if I don’t pull that trigger at the right time and that sort of behavior is repeated across the front lines then it causes the war to be lost and much worse outcomes for everyone. At the same time if public will and political support is sapped away the war can be lost that way, so it has always been a tactic to do this in the propaganda to the public as well. Think of the “Halt the hun” posters the US government put out in WWI and similar examples.
So I think this demonization aspect has been sort of a necessary tactic to maintain the will to actually do what needs to be done to win and prevent the worse outcomes.
This whole discussion reminds me of the black mirror episode “Men Against Fire.” There is the point that Russians are also using the same tactics calling Ukrainians Nazis and such to motivate their guys to do the necessary evils, but I just don’t feel war is a place where one side can always be like “when they go low we go high.” It never has been.
It’s not that I am saying this stuff isn’t bad but that there’s all sorts of horrible shit that is going on always in every war. At this point Internet message boards are a front, (like Putin has a whole army of Internet trolls). Online discussions tend to percolate viewpoints and attitudes into the public which affects the political reality of continuing sufficient aid from western countries to Ukraine.
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I wouldn’t say it’s necessary, but it does seem like a misplaced priority to pearl-clutch over namecalling when apartments are being shelled.
I mean it’s not necessary for me to call them orcs in my posts but it is to some degree necessary for Ukrainian army and citizens to think of the Russian soldiers as orcs terms rather than as “people who probably wouldn’t agree with this war if they were not force fed propaganda and who probably don’t want to be here and whose experience and emotions in this moment are just as validly human as my own”
I don’t think it is a bad thing for those on Internet message boards to use and reinforce the language adopted by Ukrainian army for this purpose
Meh. I think people on the internet half a world away should get less leeway in this than the people actually fighting Russia.
At least no one called them orcs.
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Is one of them using a horse?
Oopsie poopsie.
Tbf I’ve walked over some pretty obvious mines in fallout
The only good orc is one who puts sunflower seeds in his pockets so his inevitable death won’t be a total waste.
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it kind of looks like he aimed for the gap he’d never fit in
Humanize. From the swahili HU MANBE IN GUISE
Some people can’t take a joke, but I think the video is still interesting and I don’t seem to be able to edit out the commentary.
Some experts argue that anything less than total Russian withdrawal would be a victory for Putin and therefore must be resisted. But Putin has already lost strategically—NATO is working to expand its membership to include Finland and Sweden and has supported Ukraine in ways unimaginable before. The Russian army has been devastated and embarrassed. The economy has shrunk as well as lost capital and technology that are unlikely to return absent major changes in Russia’s government. Russian citizens, especially the most talented youth, have become disaffected or have fled. A negotiated cease-fire would not change these facts.
Ukrainians and their admiring supporters would be legitimately frustrated by a negotiated cease-fire now. The world recognizes the injustice of any gain for Putin and Russia. But the desired heroic ending of World War II, in which the aggressors were vanquished and friendly new democratic governments were created, is not an option here. Germany and Japan didn’t have nuclear weapons; Russia does. That fact cannot be undone.
If Ukrainian forces cannot expel Russia from all these lands without a cornered Putin using nuclear weapons as a last recourse, it is better for the people of Ukraine, Europe, and the United States to act on this realization before a nuclear war begins.
I know the phrase is America will fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian but this points to the other side. People will push for peace with Russia down to the last Ukrainian territory.
In reality it’s a quagmire. The article gently hand waves away the implication of giving into nuclear threats by saying that Russia’s learned its lesson, its military is ‘embarrassed’, but doesn’t seem to realize that the take away would be to just threaten nuclear weapons earlier, because conventional warfare is for suckers? But of course you can’t just handwave away nuclear bombs dropping either