One 89-year-old chud in the back row:

At least the Donbass was experiencing genuine turmoil. The Obama regime had to invent a pretext for invasion whole cloth. And fifteen years later NATO hasn’t rebuilt even a single building in Libya. Mariupol looks a lot better than it did a year and a half ago.

Our humanitarian intervention vs. their FULL-SCALE invasion

Buoyancy can’t take you out of the atmosphere by principle. The stratosphere is fake space! It’s under the Karman line.

I know. I’ve put 2000 hours in Kerbal Space Program. 🙂

I don’t consider the stratosphere, where weather balloons travel, to be space.

If a hot air balloon can reach low Earth orbit then why are we wasting money on rockets? Just tie those satellites and space station components to a balloon!

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Why did the dino run away from the fight?

Because it was a big chicken.

“Russian Propaganda” Means Disputing US Propaganda

WWII comparisons are apt, because this war is largely a resumption of grievances from that war, but not in the way you’ve implied. Here’s a hint as to which side is the Axis analog: It’s the one that glorifies Nazi collaborators and made it illegal to commemorate the Allies’ victory.

Me when I change my VPN exit node

What’s with the spacing around the punctuation?

It happens because it makes rich people richer

No, it’s not inherently liberal. It’s just that I hear it most often from liberals when discussing how Democrats and Republicans both stand for capitalist imperialism. To be fair, that’s probably primarily due to the types of discussions that anti-imperialists find themselves in.

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek characterization of the propaganda of the nations we’re discussing here, but I’ll elaborate further.

There are qualitative and quantitative reasons the equivalence is false.

Qualitative: As the undisputed global hegemon, the modus operandi of the US empire is to maintain full-spectrum dominance over the globe. It does this by exploiting weaker countries and looting their resources for use by American corporations. When a country refuses to submit, US propaganda has to invert reality and depict its victim country as the bad actor in order to justify its actions. Therefore, it inherently relies on distortions. On the other hand, the propaganda of the oppressed nation simply needs to reveal the true intentions of the US empire in order to make its case.

The best example of this is the DPRK. US propaganda frequently invents, out of whole cloth, Looney Tunes-style stories, such as Kim Jong-un executing a government official with an anti-aircraft cannon—an official who later turned up alive, by the way. In contrast, DPRK propaganda is usually centered around telling stories from the brutal war of extermination that the US carried out against it in the 1950s, like its popular museum memorializing the Sinchon Massacre.

Quantitative: US propaganda is voluminous and far reaching due to the empire’s cultural hegemony that’s concurrent with its military hegemony. Just as the US has military bases around the world that number more than those of any other nation by orders of magnitude, so is its propaganda more numerous than that of its enemies. In fact, US propaganda is even more powerful and effective than its military is. Hollywood movies are popular worldwide. In contrast, the propaganda of its enemies is weak and typically limited in reach to within its own borders, and the language barriers limit the scope of the little bit that manages to extend further than that.

Americans eat, breathe, and bathe in US propaganda. They rarely, if ever, are allowed to see propaganda from enemy nations. YouTube regularly bans channels that speak for China, Russia, or the DPRK. One of the greatest accomplishments of US propaganda is the creation of the perception that this dominance is inverted. They’ve convinced Americans that they do not consume any propaganda at all, and that the enemy’s propaganda is all around them. They’ve trained them to dutifully ignore or attack any narrative which portrays their enemies in a positive light because it must be originating from its conniving enemies.

Yeah, same. A lot of lives would have been saved if he had not given them almost a decade to entrench. I think Putin was trying hard to buck the strong man characterization of him, but US propaganda does not bend to material reality.

The hesitancy is something the US never would have done, but the situation was also not a position the US would ever find itself in, because its enemies aren’t as belligerent.

One major difference between the two conflicts is that if the US had been in Russia’s position it would have invaded in 2014 and never attempted eight years of diplomatic solutions

As liberals are fond of saying, “false equivalence”.