@ Circe 297
if Russia attacked the U.S. by proxy, and were trying to cripple it economically as the U.S. is doing with Russia today, half of Russia would already be obliterated
And furthermore, China is criticized for not following the Bush Doctrine: If you’re not for us you’re against us. This, by the CIA chief who warned Biden prior to the Russian invasion that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and Biden did nothing positive, which he excels at.
China’s Xi Jinping is ‘a silent partner’ in Putin’s ‘aggression’ in Ukraine, CIA Director Burns warns

Posted by: Don Bacon | Apr 15 2022 15:20 utc | 303

@Boo 292
“read Russian fluently, 90-95% comonnality with my language” … You should know far better than I do, then.
IMO what these combinations of amateur-reporting and “alt-media” have, which is of value, are two things: (1) is the motivation and collective time spent, to scour social media, obscure news outlets, or in some cases unofficial leaks taking the form of the previous categories. Equally important (2) is the refusal to abide by mental filters that the national media and the authoritative primary sources impose on themselves. The exact selection of just when one “refuses to abide by mental filters” is of course is profoundly colored by political bias.
But assuming you have a way to resolve that last challenge, then the tradeoff is lack of a professional standard of “quality control”. In the world we are now in, there is also a widespread professional effort to degrade the information quality available to the public and even more so to journalists and to the social networks of the professional-managerial-class. Ironically, this makes even somewhat unreliable rumor mongers more competitive in information quality than they would have been before.

Posted by: ptb | Apr 15 2022 15:31 utc | 305

@ Paul Greenwood | Apr 15 2022 9:56 utc | 247
Dear Paul, you misunderstand me. The only parallel I was drawing was to the fact that the Belgrano and the Moskva were both obsolete ships 40 or more years old, so that the loss of the Moskva is less important than many persons seem to think. I said that the situations were utterly dissimilar otherwise. And I do not support the Ukrainian state or Ukrainian nationalism. Nor do I think there is any parallel between the situation of the British in 1982 and Russia now; to assert that would be the height of absurdity.

Posted by: Cabe | Apr 15 2022 16:25 utc | 307

@Aleph_Null #306
Will the peoples of Europe wake up when the lights go out? Last hope.

Posted by: Marjorie | Apr 15 2022 18:08 utc | 309

Dr Roberts has again repeated his assertion that Putin has left it too late and that his policy of carefully advancing in Ukraine has encouraged the USA and its allies to believe that Russia is weak and that this perceived weakness may lead to nuclear war ..
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/04/14/the-kremlin-has-missed-the-opportunity-to-end-the-provocations-of-russia-that-are-bringing-the-world-to-nuclear-war/
Perhaps we could look at this the other way around?
Why didn’t the USA push ahead for regime change when it realized that Putin was standing up for Russia and wouldn’t accept western exploitation?
Why wait until Russia has demonstrated its military superiority before provoking war?
Any thoughts?

Posted by: Stevelancs | Apr 16 2022 3:22 utc | 311