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Discussion: Inconsequential Chat

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Discussion: The NYT Spelling Bee Thread

alha said:

jimmurphy said:

Partita?

Early QB today.

yep, "partita" ... another obscure word. Nicely done on the early QB...I'm stuck at QB -2 yet again

I have failed miserably in the last week or so, but just got QB! Congrats, jim, as usual.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

mtierney said:

from RCL.

Votes for Biden: 926,633

Votes for Trump: 788,833

Democratic votes not Biden: 123,921

Republican votes not Trump: 163,748

Were you trying to tell us something?

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Discussion: What does Putin want (and whatabout it)

Diplomat: Why the Minsk Agreements Failed in Ukraine (jacobin.com)

Wolfgang Sporrer is former head of the Human Dimension Department of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.

"There were three main reasons for the failure of the Minsk agreements. First, the Minsk agreements did not address the root cause of the conflict. It was stipulated, so to speak, that there was or had been some kind of ethnic conflict between Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine, and that this was the reason for the outbreak of violence. And by settling this alleged ethnic conflict, the conflict could be pacified.

This was pure fiction. The ethnic conflicts that existed in Ukraine were no more serious than ethnic tensions in many other countries.

Moreover, the dividing lines in this conflict, if one insists on understanding them in ethnic terms, are incredibly blurred. This is not about the Russian versus the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian versus Russian national identity. Nor is it about religion, not even in the slightest. At most, one could find something like an eastern Ukrainian Donbas identity. But this regional identity of the Donbas is not much stronger than strong regional identities in other countries.

What this conflict is fundamentally about is Russia wanting to exert influence over the domestic and foreign policy orientation of the government in Kyiv. In the Minsk agreement, however, this fiction of an ethnic conflict was constructed instead, although Russia actually had no particular interest in obtaining any autonomy rights for eastern Ukraine, for Russian-speaking or ethnically Russian Ukrainian citizens.

A Ukraine that is neutral between Russia and the West is no longer a realistic option, simply because this would no longer be accepted by a large majority of the population in Ukraine.
Russia was not really interested in these issues, but Ukraine was not at all eager to grant such rights either, for fear of a supposed fifth column. However, Moscow was not only concerned with what was happening in the Donbas, but above all with what was happening in Kyiv. The Ukraine conflict is about the orientation of Ukraine, pure and simple. But the Minsk agreement addresses completely different issues. That’s why the process didn’t work.

The second reason for their failure was the low technical quality of the Minsk agreements. There were far too many provisions for their verification, and the sequencing of various measures also remained controversial to the end, as the agreement itself didn’t specify any.

The third reason for the failure — and this may sound banal now, but it is true — is that it has not been possible to meet in person since the end of 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As little as the Minsk agreements were actually implemented in practice, they did help to build trust.

The very fact that the parties were sitting around a table had a de-escalating effect. You don’t get the same sort of benefit online. For that, you need coffee breaks, shared meals, unofficial contacts and the like. If you lose the seemingly ancillary aspects of diplomatic talks, such a process is doomed to failure. With the Minsk process, therefore, an early-warning instrument pointing to a possible escalation of the conflict was also lost."

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Discussion: German Lab Leak

A German joke is no laughing matter.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

This trial has given late night hosts a bounty of material to work with. 

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Discussion: Roundup Alternative: Weed Torch?

You can get agricultural vinegar from Home Depot, Lowe’s or Walmart. It’s 20%, 4 times stronger than the stuff in the supermarket. Works like a charm. Use it in dry weather on a Sunny day. Do NOT get it in your eyes because it’s very caustic stuff. Do NOT use it on windy days.

mrmaplewood said:

Also, as a low-tech answer to your problem, try plain vinegar with a dash of dish detergent in a spray bottle.  Not as strong as Roundup, but environmentally friendly.  (Don't shake, bubbles make spraying impossible.)

P.S.  "Do I need a permit to use even though it’s fairly basic?"  That's the kind of question I have learned the hard way to avoid around here.

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Discussion: German Lab Leak

I barely made it past Bolden Elementary alive just now. The schoolyard was full of kids having lunch, and I heard one of them tell her friends: “Two peanuts were walking down the street. And one peanut was …”

The joke’s potency may have weakened over the last 80 years, but an abundance of caution requires me to end it there.

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Discussion: What does Putin want (and whatabout it)

nan said:

Right, they get 3% and yet wield great influence. I'm still waiting for you to answer my question? Why would a country celebrate Sephan Bandara with streets, statues and holidays? He's got his picture hanging in government offices. Where else in the world does that guy have so many fans?

How do you explain that?

I remembered PVW’s answer from a couple of years ago. Didn’t you?

PVW said:

As Ridski notes, nations often (always?) have problematic heroes. In the Eastern European context, specifically, I get the sense that Nan isn't very familiar with the region's history in WWII and afterward, when peoples and states were being crushed by either the Nazi or the Soviets, sometime serially, sometimes simultaneously. And in that context, heroes of national liberation were often aligning themselves with the Germans against the Russians, or the Russians against the Germans. She seems truly baffled by why post-Soviet and post-Communist states may have been so eager to join NATO and the EU, unable to conceive of any motivation beyond American machinations.

Russia itself is actually a great example of this complicated history -- look at how central Putin has sought to make the fight against Germany to Russian national identity, and how he's explicitly tied that history to his current war against Ukraine, and how that's required elevating Stalin, one of history's great moral monsters.

Nan also doesn't seem to have a good understanding of the cultural and legal landscape within Russia if she thinks the force of the state isn't being brought to bear against ethnic groups there. Ask the Chechens, the Tatars, the Dagestanis, or any of the many other ethnic groups within Russia where they fit in Putin's vision of a Russian, Orthodox civilization.

Someone on these threads frequently reminds us to avoid turning the news into Disney fairy tales. That's good advice -- an attempt to grapple with the actual history of the region would be a good start.

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Discussion: What does Putin want (and whatabout it)

For the record, nan, last night you raised two unconvincing arguments in just a couple of hours. One, that the Nuland dialogue is evidence of a U.S. attack on Ukraine. (See the unconvinced replies from nohero and PVW.) Two, that having NATO on Russia’s doorstep is an existential threat, since it first happened 20 years ago and by your own description Russia is thriving.

This is why letting the thread speak for itself was my response to your request for examples. It’s full of them, and only Sisyphus would have had the endurance to roll them out again.

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