Imagine being a troll on here and going so far that even d2_e4 was like “Dude… Chill.”
I never thought I’d see the day either.
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The war crimes stuff is super gross, but there’s a funnier bit later on where Mearscheimer quibbles with the notion that Russia wants to conquer Ukrainian territory. We can tell that’s not so, he says, because he recognized LPR/DPR as independent states, rather than annexing them into Russia. Killer argument.
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Ah, the “known lying liar said something I want to believe, hence it must be true” premise. Solid footing.
Actually, sounds like every Trump supporter ever.
JFC that’s just insane levels of obtuseness.
It’s clearly my fault for posting Mearsheimer. I should have known it would get keeed riled up. I poked the bear and threatened keeed’s legitimate security concerns.
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But suzzer! You can’t just focus on the dumbass shit Mearsh says without acknowledging that he also said something true and obvious and thus must be taken seriously!
True and obvious and in a context where it was clearly meant to minimize/deflect from something terrible.
Mearsheimer lost his marbles.
He spent decades believing in something and it all went to ruble feb 24.
A man of his massively inflated ego can’t accept that he was wrong so he just doubles down on stupidity.
He is utterly an average human being.
Most of them are.
This is for the ~15 people about to call me out on the difference between the median and the arithmetic mean.
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It means level the whole village with artillery fire. A very common tactic among armies including the US army. If you’re the massive combined arms army invading a country, like Russia in Ukraine or the US in Iraq, if you take fire from some buildings you’re going to hit them with artillery or air strikes.
Is that a war crime? I don’t know, maybe, depends on the proportionality of the strike. And if the goal of the commander on the ground is to kill everyone in the village, then yes, of course it’s a war crime.
Interesting. Where are the people who live in these buildings located while you are “levelling” them?
Do you go door to door and invite them to leave first?
Russia levels a residential area, killing a bunch of civilians, while blaming it on Ukraine.
Keeed:
Is Keeed a troll? I don’t know, maybe!
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In addition, it seems we have subtly but materially changed the parameters.
What if we meet the armed forces of the enemy on the outskirts of the village? Do we level the village then, too?
Hell, why don’t we just drop a nuke on it? Easier, no?
I heard one woman was even armed with a bicycle.
That generally isn’t the practice of modern invading armies but I think it’s happened occasionally. Like I think the US might have dropped leaflets warning people to leave a German city before massively firebombing it but that sort of thing was the exception rather than the rule. I think something like that might have happened during one of the battles for Fallujah as well.
So, in the absence of that, we just shell and napalm the shit out of anything that breathes, amirite? Not a war crime, tho.
So you might take John’s comments as defending or denying Russian war crimes. I’m sure that he acknowledges that there are many violent crimes taking place during the invasion, which once the invasion starts is inevitable. That’s certainly what I think, there are obviously many innocents being killed. He’s being cautious in saying that the war crimes and killings of civilians are systematic or a matter of policy, which I think is appropriate. You guys are closely following the war through Ukrainian and Western propaganda, which is going to be hugely biased against Russia on that question. His second, related point is that civilians are being armed and encouraged to fight. This is obviously massively dangerous for those civilians, who are likely to end up dead very quickly facing trained Russian soldiers. But I took his point to be that the more that civilians take up arms against Russian soldiers, the more violent and hostile the Russian soldiers are going to be against all Ukrainian civilians. This is plainly true and would be true for any invading army. And it’s directly related to the question of is killing civilians a deliberate policy or not, which is why I think John mentions it.
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