Gosh! Freedom to feed your own kids is sooooo much just like slavery. What is this 1800s? Land of the free, home of the lame? She is 4. Obviously, the state needs to make sure that she is fed to become an active, productive member of society. There was a time when listening to songs about being just another "brick in the wall" made you a liberal. Apparently, "we haz ur kids" is soooo much more liberal than telling The Man to bud out.
But the school is not denying it. Instead she was given a "meal" of which she ate only the chicken nuggets. Get off your "conservatives are idiots" high horse. "Liberals are nazis" is what "cool kids" are saying nowadays.
You are confusing a wife with a gf or mistress. As I have told my little brother, who wasn't sure if his live-in gf was a marriage material, "if she is already doing your laundry, she is not just a hot blond you are screwing, anymore."
What are you talking about? So according to you the father should think of the kid as "his"? And yes, plenty of mothers give up careers to nurture their children in their early years. This is perfectly human. The hostility with which you address is quite bizarre. And yes, he does put the roof over their heads. But he also gets to develop in his career. While a mother staying at home does not. Her skills begin to dull and she doesn't progress as far as she would if she were to stay in the work force (hint: more experience = more pay). That's a specialization of roles. Are you really so dense as to suggest that there is no advantage to specialization of roles in any human association? Well, specialization gives greater combined benefit, but when the association is broken, those who took on the role which wouldn't pay end up at a disadvantage. It doesn't have to be the mother, but it usually is. While no one may be forcing her to give up the career, it is generally a mutual decision. Marriage is not to strangers hanging out. It's two people building a household.
I think the JPEG joke is a bit overused, but the rest of the comment is on key. The article writer tried, failed, and is just asking the best advice about how to move on. Doesn't mean that trying isn't worth the effort.
Guy starts out with house, guy should end up with house. But watch the number of times she gets it.
Even if she gives up a career to raise the guy's children? If there is a specialization of roles in a contractual relationship, then one side may have an advantage if the contract is severed. This is why people sue for breach of contract. Well, marriage is also a contract.
This implies that your spouse is OK with the idea of making these backups in the case of potential divorce.
Much like car crashes and earthquakes, I don't think most married couples want to plan for a divorce. Otherwise, everyone would have a pre-nap (which is a kind of divorce insurance).
but why would want to own a shared facebook account after a divorce? Wouldn't it be more prudent for each of you to have your own account afterwards? "Digital assets" per se are information. Why would either of you want a constant reminder of a failed marriage while you go through routine tasks of checking email, updating facebook status (I am told that's a thing -- don't know myself), and so on and so forth?
Umm? During a sexual harassment trial? Of a President whose party championed the cause of suing for sexual harassment? Since fidelity is a possible defense in a sexual harassment trial, infidelity is a valid question during such a trial. Oh, and the little lie you told about Newt is still lie. Newt resigned precisely because he would look like a hypocrite in charging Clinton. He wouldn't actually be a hypocrite because Newt's infidelity wasn't illegal. While Clinton's LIE about his infidelity was a violation of the law as is evidenced by the fact that he was disbarred for it and was ordered to pay defendant's legal fees steaming from his LIE.
Slashdot should not be following the lead of the popular media. When you report on a "journalist getting arrested", you start out with his name. When you report on a scientist's discovery, you start out with his nationality. This is how media relegates science to the level of unimportant. If the article or headline starts out the description of the person (starting with their name), it immediately registers as a personal accomplishment and makes the person important. If it starts with their, field of specialty, their nationality or any other qualifiers of who they are and only mentions their name some time down the line, it makes their work sound utilitarian and irrelevant. Would you ever expect to see a head line in the news that "a Congressmen made a statement about such and such?" No, the headline would read "Mr. X, a Congressman from...." This ends up creating a de facto pecking order in which scientists and engineers are at the bottom.
I have seen interviews with them conducted before 2000.
Conducted by whom? Georgian government TV channel?
US-based Russian-speaking journalists.
Estonia hands out its passports to Russian citizens living in western Pskov oblast, in territories that were at some point a part of Estonia. Is that a problem?
Not in itself. You want to argue each event in isolation and hope that it will make the entire picture stink less. It won't. The fact that Estonia gives out passports (if it's true) to those who can trace their heritage to relatives living in Estonia a few generations ago is Estonian business. Poland does the same thing, from what I know and so does Ireland. It's just that when Ireland guarantees Irish citizenship to anyone who can prove that they are "Irish", they are not doing it in order to make a claim on parts of Long Island. Whereas Russia started giving those passports to Georgian citizens, who were not even Russian and then used their citizenship to make a territorial claim on Georgia.
Cry me a river. If you build your property on the territory of a country which initiates a war, and it gets ruined in a counterattack, you have only yourself to blame. Especially when your foreign policy and military aid was what made that country think it could actually pull such a thing off.
First of all, it wasn't a counter attack. Russia was the aggressor. And second of all, trust me. I wasn't crying. If anything I was decrying the Bush's level of engagement in Iraq. Since it made us unable to assist even our own allies. I am not complaining about Russia attacking US and Turkey -- I expect it from Russia. Certainly what Russia did to Georgia was far worse than what it did to Turkey. I am complaining about the ineptness of the US administration in its inability to put a proper check on the Russian aggression against US and its allies.
Must have been because they were hoping to walk their army into Moscow.
Strawman much?
No, that was sarcasm. I was mocking your suggestion that Georgia attacked Russia.
US was in no position to assist, because it only took the whole world - including, at last, the US as well - a couple of days to realize who started the conflict.
Oh? And not because Russia moved thousands of tanks within 48 hours into Georgia through the tunnel which started the whole thing? Not because we couldn't spare troops to simply block the roads used by those tanks? Just as US would not fire on Russia, I expect that Russians would not have dared to fire on Americans.
Yes, they did hit precisely the peace keeping force.
The fact that they eventually targeted does not prove that they initially targeted it. I am sure if they took fire from that base, they would target it at some point during the operation. Even if the base itself was directly targeted, it wouldn't prove that it was the initial target. You'd have to prove that it was the very first target which they hit before you can make the claim that Georgia started the aggression. No one has shown anything even remotely close to that. In the absence of exact evidence, only the most logical explanation of the existing evidence must be assumed to be the best explanation. And the most logical explanation was that Russia saw this as their last chance to cut the pipeline which was allowing the oil to flow from Azerbaijan to Turkey without going through Russia first.
However, even within the USSR there were constant tensions regarding e.g. administrative and school language
In every Republic of the USSR the "native" languages were the languages which were namesakes of the republics. In Georgia that would have to be Georgian. Since the native languages were considered quaint, many smaller regions simply wanted t
So you're basically repeating Georgian propaganda word for word.
Calling facts "propaganda" does not make them any less facts. I have no idea what Geogia's position is. But these ARE the facts.
Have you actually ever talked to any Ossetian to see if they consider themselves "Georgians"
I have seen interviews with them conducted before 2000. And the passions were nowhere near as flamed as they are now. It took years of Russia flaming those passions in order for them to burn into people's memory as a legend.
Do you even realize that those guys even speak a completely different, non-mutually-intelligible language?
Do you understand that there is 70000 ossetians living in Georgia? That's not an ethnic group. That's a condominium. There is over 2000 languages in India. Many of them are spoken by a small isolated group living in a very small region. Does that mean that they are not Indians? What's worse is that Georgians and Ossetians have no beef. They don't compete for any territory (because Ossetians are isolated). The only point of disagreement was that Ossetians wanted independence. Somehow that also meant that they wanted Russian citizenship. Well, that's not an ethnic dispute. That's a separatist territorial dispute. And yes, I have seen interviews with people essentially saying that Russia was handing out passports to Ossetians after the break up of Soviet Union in order to increase Ossetian's affinity for Russia.
That may be the current ratio, after the war (the figure still strikes me as BS, as that would require a deployment of 360k troops
No, there is only 70,000 Ossetians living in Georgia. How convenient it is that you added the population of ossetians in Russia to that of Georgia to make them sound larger in number. I wonder if that was a mistake or a deliberate slight of hand. Actually, no, I do not wonder.
Georgia still hasn't given up its ambitions to re-annex Ossetia
Georgia doesn't have to re-annex Ossetia. It is legally Georgian. Every international body recognizes it as such.
I dare say that it's a reasonable precaution.
To what? Georgia handling its affairs? Should UN station peace keeping force in Grozniy in order to protect the local population from Russia attempting to re-annex that region? This is legally equivalent.
However, before Georgian army went gung-ho there, there were 250 peacekeepers stationed on Ossetian territory.
Once again, they didn't go "gung-ho". The peace keepers weren't able to keep the peace. There was machine gun fire coming out of Ossetia and hitting targets in the rest of Georgia. Every nation would respond with overwhelming force to that. Georgia did the only responsible thing possible. If the peace keepers can't pacify the population they are protecting, it is the peace keepers responsibility to evacuate when the counter-attack begins.
But that's moot. If Russia didn't provoke the whole situation in order to keep access to the Black Sea, Georgia would continue to develop its modernized democracy. And they were doing a better job of it than Russia itself was. You know people accuse Arabs of being overly hostile, but Russia is worse. There isn't a despotic regime they don't like. And don't take my word for it. Listen to the voices of its own comedians -- RUSSIAN comedians. This is what they mock Russia for when they want to make a joke.
There used to be more, but in 2007 Georgia raised a fuss about this thing, so most of them were withdrawn.
So you got so convoluted in your own lies that you contradicted your own claims in the same post? 250 peace keepers and most of them were withdrawn? And then Georgia attacked the peacekeepers? The ones who left? Or are you gonna tell me that 20 of them stayed and that when Georg
Chekhov, a Russian character on a US-made science fiction TV show "Star Trek", was prone to mis-attribute all of Earths' accomplishments to Russia. This was the joke to which my comment alluded. And not getting this very popular Star Trek reference is just the kind of shibboleth that would betray a foreign-hired troll.
Yes, I did mean that. Unfortunately, I only noticed my mistake after submitting.
As for the rest of your comment, I explained why that not only was the aggressor Russia, but also that Israel was not supplying Georgia for the purposes of that war (it was supplying Georgia's operations as US ally in Iraq BEFORE the war with Russia). The explanation is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2663515&cid=38994835 (or you could just scroll below).
To call the Russian occupation force a "UN keeping force" is a height of cynicism, by the way. Russia manufactured the strife between Georgians and the other Georgians. Then it manufactured the legend that Ossetians had a historical strife against Georgia. And all of it was done, again, to satisfy Russia's geo-political ambitions. It was simply keeping in-hand the ethnic group which lived on both sides of the tunnel. Russia clearly wanted to control the tunnel as a way to control access to the Georgian region post-USSR break up (because without it Russia would have no land access to the Black Sea). The ratio of Russian soldiers to native Ossetians is approximately 1 to 5. That's not a peace-keeping force. That's a military invasion force using ossetians as a token excuse for its occupation.
Oh, not only did Russia invade Georgia under a thinly veiled pretense in that operation, but legally speaking Russia committed acts of war against the US. They destroyed a US-built oil pipeline, going through Georgia to Turkey, which was not supplying Georgia itself (so it wasn't a military target). The fact that the pipeline was supplying Turkey meant that destroying it was a direct attack on NATO. I am not sure why this was not mentioned in the news quite as much.
UN peace keeping force wasn't keeping the peace. Georgia had the right to escalate by using overwhelming force against those who were attacking its population. The fact that Russians didn't get out of the way and decided to occupy Georgia was a Russian-made decision and it was outside of the UN mandate. To sum up, Georgia did not attack Russia. Georgian troops never on Russian territory. They never crossed the border with Russia. All the violence, provocation and escalation came from the Russian direction. Israel supplied Georgia while Georgia was the 3rd largest ally of the US in Iraq. In other words, Israel was supplying America's Iraq-war allies for the purposes of operations in Iraq. None of this comes even close to supplying Syria with thousands of Russian tanks which attempted to cross the border between Syria and Israel. Georgians never attempted to cross the Russian border. Everything Georgia did legally amounted to a defensive action (even if they did escalate it was in self-defense).
Umm. You are posting as an AC. I have over 900 posts over more than 10 years on this site. You can't possibly be arguing that I am astroturfing. Well, you can possibly be arguing that. Just not credibly.
Someone compared Israel to Russia's propaganda. I pointed out that comparison was laughable. But let me see. So first you tried a deflection. When that didn't work, you went for the ad hominem. When I reminded you that you were off the topic, you decided to go with projection. Do you have a list that you follow? Or do these float around in your ahead and you reach for whichever one make your more giddy?
No matter. My point stands. Russia is using the old Soviet tactics. Blaming Israel is one of many old Soviet tactics (because Israel gets people emotional and unable to evaluate the situation rationally). The main way of staying in power during a crisis of confidence is to manufacture a new crises. Just as blaming the Jews was an old Russian tactic, blaming Israel works beautifully. It's just statistically convenient -- smaller population means pissing off the least people while the crises unfolds.
Oh, and just so we are clear, the difference between astroturf and grass roots is that it's not astroturfing if no one pays you for it. If my own opinion happens to agree with that of what you'd call "Israeli propaganda", it's still not astroturfing. It just means that I buy their story. Ie, it's still grass roots. Whereas, the opinions that Russia bought to have trolled around are astroturf.
I am awaiting with anticipation to see what's on the list after the projection.
Are familiar with the old Russian word "sabotage"? I would mention something about Chekhov impersonation here, but you might misunderstand and think that I am talking about one of your great authors.
I would respond to this rhetorical nonsense, but I suspect that it's just another tool used to deflect attention away from the issue of Russian propaganda.
Bush administration did NOT adapt the policy "if the President does it, it's not illegal." Your point about the columnist is very, very keen, but that administration did clear everything with lawyers. And employing a journalist to promote a life-style that HHS considers healthy (even if you disagree with that assessment) is a far, far cry from employing journalists to spread subversive information about other countries in order to influence elections in the home country. Having said that, I would agree that the Bush administration came a little too close to the line of breaking the law on this one. And yes, it is veeery troubling. I am surprised, however, that you chose the Bush administration as your example. The current administration completely ignores the law on just about everything. It does so brazenly, openly and unapologeticlly.
And yes, the fact that the Obama administration is breaking laws as brazenly as it does is scandalous. The fact that Russia is actively working to promote and defend its nationalist policies through propaganda is also scandalous. Both are symptoms of the same disease: no one likes giving up power voluntarily.
Btw, the only reason that Russia's actions are even surprising while China's aren't is that everyone assumes that China is a military dictatorship. Yes, military rather than Communist dictatorship. It hasn't been Communist for so long that a different denomination has to be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh! Freedom to feed your own kids is sooooo much just like slavery. What is this 1800s? Land of the free, home of the lame? She is 4. Obviously, the state needs to make sure that she is fed to become an active, productive member of society. There was a time when listening to songs about being just another "brick in the wall" made you a liberal. Apparently, "we haz ur kids" is soooo much more liberal than telling The Man to bud out.
The lunch had milk, vegetables and nuggets. She only ate the nuggets.
But the school is not denying it. Instead she was given a "meal" of which she ate only the chicken nuggets. Get off your "conservatives are idiots" high horse. "Liberals are nazis" is what "cool kids" are saying nowadays.
You are confusing a wife with a gf or mistress. As I have told my little brother, who wasn't sure if his live-in gf was a marriage material, "if she is already doing your laundry, she is not just a hot blond you are screwing, anymore."
They are his and hers.
What are you talking about? So according to you the father should think of the kid as "his"? And yes, plenty of mothers give up careers to nurture their children in their early years. This is perfectly human. The hostility with which you address is quite bizarre. And yes, he does put the roof over their heads. But he also gets to develop in his career. While a mother staying at home does not. Her skills begin to dull and she doesn't progress as far as she would if she were to stay in the work force (hint: more experience = more pay). That's a specialization of roles. Are you really so dense as to suggest that there is no advantage to specialization of roles in any human association? Well, specialization gives greater combined benefit, but when the association is broken, those who took on the role which wouldn't pay end up at a disadvantage. It doesn't have to be the mother, but it usually is. While no one may be forcing her to give up the career, it is generally a mutual decision. Marriage is not to strangers hanging out. It's two people building a household.
I think the JPEG joke is a bit overused, but the rest of the comment is on key. The article writer tried, failed, and is just asking the best advice about how to move on. Doesn't mean that trying isn't worth the effort.
Seems like you are the one trolling. YOUR account identifies you. A joint account identifies those who joined.
Guy starts out with house, guy should end up with house. But watch the number of times she gets it.
Even if she gives up a career to raise the guy's children? If there is a specialization of roles in a contractual relationship, then one side may have an advantage if the contract is severed. This is why people sue for breach of contract. Well, marriage is also a contract.
"theirs" doesn't quite exist so clear cut in a marriage. All property is up for grabs in a divorce proceeding.
This implies that your spouse is OK with the idea of making these backups in the case of potential divorce.
Much like car crashes and earthquakes, I don't think most married couples want to plan for a divorce. Otherwise, everyone would have a pre-nap (which is a kind of divorce insurance).
but why would want to own a shared facebook account after a divorce? Wouldn't it be more prudent for each of you to have your own account afterwards? "Digital assets" per se are information. Why would either of you want a constant reminder of a failed marriage while you go through routine tasks of checking email, updating facebook status (I am told that's a thing -- don't know myself), and so on and so forth?
Umm? During a sexual harassment trial? Of a President whose party championed the cause of suing for sexual harassment? Since fidelity is a possible defense in a sexual harassment trial, infidelity is a valid question during such a trial. Oh, and the little lie you told about Newt is still lie. Newt resigned precisely because he would look like a hypocrite in charging Clinton. He wouldn't actually be a hypocrite because Newt's infidelity wasn't illegal. While Clinton's LIE about his infidelity was a violation of the law as is evidenced by the fact that he was disbarred for it and was ordered to pay defendant's legal fees steaming from his LIE.
Slashdot should not be following the lead of the popular media. When you report on a "journalist getting arrested", you start out with his name. When you report on a scientist's discovery, you start out with his nationality. This is how media relegates science to the level of unimportant. If the article or headline starts out the description of the person (starting with their name), it immediately registers as a personal accomplishment and makes the person important. If it starts with their, field of specialty, their nationality or any other qualifiers of who they are and only mentions their name some time down the line, it makes their work sound utilitarian and irrelevant. Would you ever expect to see a head line in the news that "a Congressmen made a statement about such and such?" No, the headline would read "Mr. X, a Congressman from...." This ends up creating a de facto pecking order in which scientists and engineers are at the bottom.
I have seen interviews with them conducted before 2000.
Conducted by whom? Georgian government TV channel?
US-based Russian-speaking journalists.
Estonia hands out its passports to Russian citizens living in western Pskov oblast, in territories that were at some point a part of Estonia. Is that a problem?
Not in itself. You want to argue each event in isolation and hope that it will make the entire picture stink less. It won't. The fact that Estonia gives out passports (if it's true) to those who can trace their heritage to relatives living in Estonia a few generations ago is Estonian business. Poland does the same thing, from what I know and so does Ireland. It's just that when Ireland guarantees Irish citizenship to anyone who can prove that they are "Irish", they are not doing it in order to make a claim on parts of Long Island. Whereas Russia started giving those passports to Georgian citizens, who were not even Russian and then used their citizenship to make a territorial claim on Georgia.
Cry me a river. If you build your property on the territory of a country which initiates a war, and it gets ruined in a counterattack, you have only yourself to blame. Especially when your foreign policy and military aid was what made that country think it could actually pull such a thing off.
First of all, it wasn't a counter attack. Russia was the aggressor. And second of all, trust me. I wasn't crying. If anything I was decrying the Bush's level of engagement in Iraq. Since it made us unable to assist even our own allies. I am not complaining about Russia attacking US and Turkey -- I expect it from Russia. Certainly what Russia did to Georgia was far worse than what it did to Turkey. I am complaining about the ineptness of the US administration in its inability to put a proper check on the Russian aggression against US and its allies.
Must have been because they were hoping to walk their army into Moscow.
Strawman much?
No, that was sarcasm. I was mocking your suggestion that Georgia attacked Russia.
US was in no position to assist, because it only took the whole world - including, at last, the US as well - a couple of days to realize who started the conflict.
Oh? And not because Russia moved thousands of tanks within 48 hours into Georgia through the tunnel which started the whole thing? Not because we couldn't spare troops to simply block the roads used by those tanks? Just as US would not fire on Russia, I expect that Russians would not have dared to fire on Americans.
Yes, they did hit precisely the peace keeping force.
The fact that they eventually targeted does not prove that they initially targeted it. I am sure if they took fire from that base, they would target it at some point during the operation. Even if the base itself was directly targeted, it wouldn't prove that it was the initial target. You'd have to prove that it was the very first target which they hit before you can make the claim that Georgia started the aggression. No one has shown anything even remotely close to that. In the absence of exact evidence, only the most logical explanation of the existing evidence must be assumed to be the best explanation. And the most logical explanation was that Russia saw this as their last chance to cut the pipeline which was allowing the oil to flow from Azerbaijan to Turkey without going through Russia first.
However, even within the USSR there were constant tensions regarding e.g. administrative and school language
In every Republic of the USSR the "native" languages were the languages which were namesakes of the republics. In Georgia that would have to be Georgian. Since the native languages were considered quaint, many smaller regions simply wanted t
So you're basically repeating Georgian propaganda word for word.
Calling facts "propaganda" does not make them any less facts. I have no idea what Geogia's position is. But these ARE the facts.
Have you actually ever talked to any Ossetian to see if they consider themselves "Georgians"
I have seen interviews with them conducted before 2000. And the passions were nowhere near as flamed as they are now. It took years of Russia flaming those passions in order for them to burn into people's memory as a legend.
Do you even realize that those guys even speak a completely different, non-mutually-intelligible language?
Do you understand that there is 70000 ossetians living in Georgia? That's not an ethnic group. That's a condominium. There is over 2000 languages in India. Many of them are spoken by a small isolated group living in a very small region. Does that mean that they are not Indians? What's worse is that Georgians and Ossetians have no beef. They don't compete for any territory (because Ossetians are isolated). The only point of disagreement was that Ossetians wanted independence. Somehow that also meant that they wanted Russian citizenship. Well, that's not an ethnic dispute. That's a separatist territorial dispute. And yes, I have seen interviews with people essentially saying that Russia was handing out passports to Ossetians after the break up of Soviet Union in order to increase Ossetian's affinity for Russia.
That may be the current ratio, after the war (the figure still strikes me as BS, as that would require a deployment of 360k troops
No, there is only 70,000 Ossetians living in Georgia. How convenient it is that you added the population of ossetians in Russia to that of Georgia to make them sound larger in number. I wonder if that was a mistake or a deliberate slight of hand. Actually, no, I do not wonder.
Georgia still hasn't given up its ambitions to re-annex Ossetia
Georgia doesn't have to re-annex Ossetia. It is legally Georgian. Every international body recognizes it as such.
I dare say that it's a reasonable precaution.
To what? Georgia handling its affairs? Should UN station peace keeping force in Grozniy in order to protect the local population from Russia attempting to re-annex that region? This is legally equivalent.
However, before Georgian army went gung-ho there, there were 250 peacekeepers stationed on Ossetian territory.
Once again, they didn't go "gung-ho". The peace keepers weren't able to keep the peace. There was machine gun fire coming out of Ossetia and hitting targets in the rest of Georgia. Every nation would respond with overwhelming force to that. Georgia did the only responsible thing possible. If the peace keepers can't pacify the population they are protecting, it is the peace keepers responsibility to evacuate when the counter-attack begins.
But that's moot. If Russia didn't provoke the whole situation in order to keep access to the Black Sea, Georgia would continue to develop its modernized democracy. And they were doing a better job of it than Russia itself was. You know people accuse Arabs of being overly hostile, but Russia is worse. There isn't a despotic regime they don't like. And don't take my word for it. Listen to the voices of its own comedians -- RUSSIAN comedians. This is what they mock Russia for when they want to make a joke.
There used to be more, but in 2007 Georgia raised a fuss about this thing, so most of them were withdrawn.
So you got so convoluted in your own lies that you contradicted your own claims in the same post? 250 peace keepers and most of them were withdrawn? And then Georgia attacked the peacekeepers? The ones who left? Or are you gonna tell me that 20 of them stayed and that when Georg
Chekhov, a Russian character on a US-made science fiction TV show "Star Trek", was prone to mis-attribute all of Earths' accomplishments to Russia. This was the joke to which my comment alluded. And not getting this very popular Star Trek reference is just the kind of shibboleth that would betray a foreign-hired troll.
Did you mean to write "weapons to attack Russia"?
Yes, I did mean that. Unfortunately, I only noticed my mistake after submitting.
As for the rest of your comment, I explained why that not only was the aggressor Russia, but also that Israel was not supplying Georgia for the purposes of that war (it was supplying Georgia's operations as US ally in Iraq BEFORE the war with Russia). The explanation is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2663515&cid=38994835 (or you could just scroll below).
To call the Russian occupation force a "UN keeping force" is a height of cynicism, by the way. Russia manufactured the strife between Georgians and the other Georgians. Then it manufactured the legend that Ossetians had a historical strife against Georgia. And all of it was done, again, to satisfy Russia's geo-political ambitions. It was simply keeping in-hand the ethnic group which lived on both sides of the tunnel. Russia clearly wanted to control the tunnel as a way to control access to the Georgian region post-USSR break up (because without it Russia would have no land access to the Black Sea). The ratio of Russian soldiers to native Ossetians is approximately 1 to 5. That's not a peace-keeping force. That's a military invasion force using ossetians as a token excuse for its occupation.
Oh, not only did Russia invade Georgia under a thinly veiled pretense in that operation, but legally speaking Russia committed acts of war against the US. They destroyed a US-built oil pipeline, going through Georgia to Turkey, which was not supplying Georgia itself (so it wasn't a military target). The fact that the pipeline was supplying Turkey meant that destroying it was a direct attack on NATO. I am not sure why this was not mentioned in the news quite as much.
UN peace keeping force wasn't keeping the peace. Georgia had the right to escalate by using overwhelming force against those who were attacking its population. The fact that Russians didn't get out of the way and decided to occupy Georgia was a Russian-made decision and it was outside of the UN mandate. To sum up, Georgia did not attack Russia. Georgian troops never on Russian territory. They never crossed the border with Russia. All the violence, provocation and escalation came from the Russian direction. Israel supplied Georgia while Georgia was the 3rd largest ally of the US in Iraq. In other words, Israel was supplying America's Iraq-war allies for the purposes of operations in Iraq. None of this comes even close to supplying Syria with thousands of Russian tanks which attempted to cross the border between Syria and Israel. Georgians never attempted to cross the Russian border. Everything Georgia did legally amounted to a defensive action (even if they did escalate it was in self-defense).
Umm. You are posting as an AC. I have over 900 posts over more than 10 years on this site. You can't possibly be arguing that I am astroturfing. Well, you can possibly be arguing that. Just not credibly.
Someone compared Israel to Russia's propaganda. I pointed out that comparison was laughable. But let me see. So first you tried a deflection. When that didn't work, you went for the ad hominem. When I reminded you that you were off the topic, you decided to go with projection. Do you have a list that you follow? Or do these float around in your ahead and you reach for whichever one make your more giddy?
No matter. My point stands. Russia is using the old Soviet tactics. Blaming Israel is one of many old Soviet tactics (because Israel gets people emotional and unable to evaluate the situation rationally). The main way of staying in power during a crisis of confidence is to manufacture a new crises. Just as blaming the Jews was an old Russian tactic, blaming Israel works beautifully. It's just statistically convenient -- smaller population means pissing off the least people while the crises unfolds.
Oh, and just so we are clear, the difference between astroturf and grass roots is that it's not astroturfing if no one pays you for it. If my own opinion happens to agree with that of what you'd call "Israeli propaganda", it's still not astroturfing. It just means that I buy their story. Ie, it's still grass roots. Whereas, the opinions that Russia bought to have trolled around are astroturf.
I am awaiting with anticipation to see what's on the list after the projection.
Israel is not the subject of the article. Russia and China are the topic under discussion.
Are familiar with the old Russian word "sabotage"? I would mention something about Chekhov impersonation here, but you might misunderstand and think that I am talking about one of your great authors.
I would respond to this rhetorical nonsense, but I suspect that it's just another tool used to deflect attention away from the issue of Russian propaganda.
Bush administration did NOT adapt the policy "if the President does it, it's not illegal." Your point about the columnist is very, very keen, but that administration did clear everything with lawyers. And employing a journalist to promote a life-style that HHS considers healthy (even if you disagree with that assessment) is a far, far cry from employing journalists to spread subversive information about other countries in order to influence elections in the home country. Having said that, I would agree that the Bush administration came a little too close to the line of breaking the law on this one. And yes, it is veeery troubling. I am surprised, however, that you chose the Bush administration as your example. The current administration completely ignores the law on just about everything. It does so brazenly, openly and unapologeticlly.
And yes, the fact that the Obama administration is breaking laws as brazenly as it does is scandalous. The fact that Russia is actively working to promote and defend its nationalist policies through propaganda is also scandalous. Both are symptoms of the same disease: no one likes giving up power voluntarily.
Btw, the only reason that Russia's actions are even surprising while China's aren't is that everyone assumes that China is a military dictatorship. Yes, military rather than Communist dictatorship. It hasn't been Communist for so long that a different denomination has to be used.