spoiler“He’s doomed to not be loved!” Never was there a more clear-cut case of “commentator’s curse” than when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated on a sunny Kyiv day exactly five years ago. The TV narrator’s inference was that, after a landslide election victory with 73% of the vote, it could...
At the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US and its allies immediately froze $300 billion worth of Russian overseas assets, most of which is in the EU nations, with about $5 billion in the US. As the war continues, these funds have not been used.
Interesting that the vast majority of frozen assets are in the EU, not the U.S. Could be a factor in any sort of split between the two.
The physical intrusion, conducted with “counterparts from the national competition authorities of the Member States,” however, is just “a preliminary investigative step,” Brussels says, and “that the Commission carries out such inspections does not mean that the company in question has indeed received distortive foreign subsidies, nor does it prejudge the outcome of the investigation.”
Even if you think there’s something real here, a raid is pretty heavy handed for an investigation in its early stages. You usually wait until you have basically everything you need, then do the raid, because if you don’t find what you’re looking for you’ve let the target know what you’re doing. In the U.S. you’d need a warrant for this sort of thing, which again means you’re beyond the “preliminary” stages.
One way of getting into postwar Canada “was by showing the SS tattoo,” Canadian historian Irving Abella told “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace. “This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”
This is relevant context to the recent incident of the Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation to one of these Nazis. The “narrative” here is that that it’s abhorrent and no one in the room has an excuse to plead ignorance as the presence of Nazis in Canada was well-known at least 25 years ago.
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If you’re going to rules lawyer, do it well.
This is very obviously relevant to a recent news story that has had several posts here already.
Do you have even the slightest problem with Canadian parliament applauding a Nazi? You and a bunch of other people here seem to think litigating how to post is more important than the actual issue.
Here’s the news story if you missed the dozen other threads on it and the discussion elsewhere in this thread. Let me know if you need anything else spoonfed to you.
You care more about posting etiquette than you do about Canadian parliament applauding a Nazi.
This story has circulated widely enough (I see multiple articles on BBC and CBS, among other outlets) that they had to issue an apology. I don’t believe you haven’t heard of it, but if you really haven’t, what does that say about where you’re getting your news/what draws your attention?
I’m referring to people who never actually lived in a communist state but claim to have witnessed first-hand all the anti-communist propaganda they’ve swallowed
All I’m doing is predicting we’ll have someone drop in with the “oh but you never lived it like I did” bit, only to be revealed as too young to have had any meaningful life experience under the government they’re criticizing. It happens so often in threads like this it’s basically a trope.
First, for the sake of argument, let’s assume every word in that excerpt is uninpeachable historical fact. Taking it as fact, it is no worse than what the U.S. has done at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, that blacksite the Chicago PD used to disappear and torture people, etc., to say nothing of the horrors of the many dictatorships the U.S. installed and propped up throughout the Cold War. If you see this conduct as some moral event horizon you should want to burn the U.S. to the ground. This is not whataboutism, this is asking if you really give a shit about this stuff, or if it only offends your sensibilities when the Bad Countries do it.
Dispensing with the assumption that the except is proven fact, let’s examine the reliability of the sources (I’ll spoiler this section to not clog up the thread, but suffice to say it doesn’t look great):
spoiler* Lidia Golovkova: A search for “Lidia Golovkova historian cv” doesn’t turn up anything. Nor does the alternate spelling “Lydia.” Searching her on Google Scholar returns no articles she authored. She appears to be a real person – looks like she attended a conference organized by “The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia” in 2002 – but I’ve found nothing that would speak directly to her credibility as a historian, or lack thereof. She appears to be cited fairly regularly (sometimes in academia, more often in articles like the one you quote from), but it also looks like she’s cited in the same breath as noted hack Robert Conquest (example). Generously, she might be associated with positions only a minority of historians hold. Less generously, it looks like she’s doing motivated reasoning and pop history, like Conquest. * Sukhanovskaya Prison: Special Facility 110: Found a few mentions of this book, but no English translations. Two mentions in particular (here and here) both cite Russian-language editions. It’s odd how many of the same English excerpts can be found with a “cursory” search, despite the book at minimum not being widely available in English. Looks more like quote mining/citation hunting than all of these authors actually assessing what they’re referencing. It would be difficult for English speakers to evaluate, for instance, whether this work is consistent with information from USSR archives that were released after the country fell (a major turning point in Sovietology which separated serious historians from propagandists; see Conquest). * Open Democracy: Funders include the Ford Foundation, which has a long tradition of funding anti-communist activity and a corresponding political motivation, to say nothing of its well-documented ties to covert U.S. anti-communist programs. Hell, one of the architects of the CIA served as chairman of the Foundation! Open Democracy is not some neutral organization; there’s a clear political bent.
Yeah, the crimes of the U.S. are always spoken of as history, despite no one ever being held accountable and the existence of a clear throughline from the people and institutions of decades ago to those of today (shit, sometimes it’s the exact same people!).
So you were just doing reddit contrarianism, got it.
If you want to actually assess Soviet vs. American policing the way to do it isn’t to find a (poorly sourced) example of Soviet police misconduct, because you can find endless examples of the same from American police. Instead, you’d have to look at how the police typically act(ed) in each country. You might start by looking for something to show Soviet police were armed with more military equipment than American police, for example, but you’d be looking for a while.
There are countless examples of U.S. police misconduct that was ordered by superiors, and plenty more that was done with their full knowledge and tacit approval.
Ukraine's Zelensky stays in power despite term expiring (www.bbc.com)
spoiler“He’s doomed to not be loved!” Never was there a more clear-cut case of “commentator’s curse” than when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was inaugurated on a sunny Kyiv day exactly five years ago. The TV narrator’s inference was that, after a landslide election victory with 73% of the vote, it could...
Confiscating Russian assets a violation of the principle of sovereign immunity (www.globaltimes.cn)
EU storms Chinese company offices, seizes phones & IT gears without prior notice (www.pekingnology.com)
Europe must be ready for US to quit Nato, diplomats warn. Sweden and Finland must be feeling real smart right about now. 😂 (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Canada admits letting in 2,000 Ukrainian SS troopers (jweekly.com)
One way of getting into postwar Canada “was by showing the SS tattoo,” Canadian historian Irving Abella told “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace. “This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”
Anti-communist fighter pursuing a suspected member of the 'Securitate' secret police, Bucharest, Romania, 1989 (lemmy.world)
OMG (lemmy.world)