Starker on 10/3/2023 at 11:54
Even US soldiers haven't been able to just kill people with impunity, though. There have been several cases where people ended up facing disciplinary actions, reduced pay, and even prison for the more egregious war crimes that became public, such as killing and raping unarmed civilians.
lowenz on 10/3/2023 at 11:56
Well, US soldiers just didn't take a medal here in Italy for the Cermis case? :p
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Cavalese_cable_car_crash)
Still, we don't think bad about american culture for this kind of things in the same way ex-USSR nations
mortally fear Russia. Why? Because we can live with the american empire (and its bases in Italy being nuked first by Sarmat.....) but russian empire is another kind of beast that just far-rights nut cases and stupid veterocommunists (they can't even realize Russia is no more communist but a capitalistic power with state-directed corporation like Gazprom) love.
The real problem are US republicans thinking they can "use" Russia for their own interest.
Starker on 10/3/2023 at 12:58
We don't feel the same way because the US hasn't tried to destroy us in the same way and has largely tried to move away from such ideas, the occasional unjustified invasion of a country notwithstanding. Russia has not changed a bit, as we have been able to see from Chechnya to this very day.
Even the killing of prisoners remains largely the same -- only during WW2, it would be Polish POWs saying, "Niech żyje Polska," instead of, "Слава Україні". The seeds planted in Ukraine today will likewise reverberate through history and, on that note, similarly will US actions in the Americas, Asia, Middle-East, and elsewhere. People have long memories and these kinds of massive injustices will leave their mark through generations.
heywood on 10/3/2023 at 14:12
Vietnam and Latin America saw the bad side of US Cold War imperialism, Europe not so much.
Vietnam was surprisingly willing to move on from the past and enjoys friendly relations and great trading relationships with the US and even France. Even military relations now. Because we no longer threaten their interests, while China does.
Latin America is different. There have been very few territorial conflicts since the early 20th century, all minor, and no wars between states. And the ending of the Cold War eventually brought an end to proxy fighting between the US and Russia. South America is the only continent that doesn't host a US military installation, nor a Russian or Chinese one. So their threats are internal. The people are friendly to the US, and we mix cultures, but the old revolutionaries who rule in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba will carry their hatred of the US to the grave.
demagogue on 10/3/2023 at 15:30
Interesting link to two articles I just read.
The first was about Vietnam possibly buying F15s from the US. (They've bought some cheap trainer fighters from the US already.) The article said it may still be unlikely because they don't have the budget for them or to maintain them. I follow sim dog fighting videos, so I thought seeing one with an F15 in a Vietnamese livery would be interesting.
The second was Ian Bremmer's update about how heavily China is investing in Mexico, and what should be the groundwork for an economic boon, except Obrador is becoming increasingly demagogic in a bad way (no relation) and already making intimations to undermine the the next election. But of course the big issue to follow up on is China's intentions in Latin America vis. the US.
... ...
All that said, I think US impunity in Iraq and Afghanistan is going to reverberate in that region for a while. I'm working on doing a class on the Afghanistan wars. You can't discount just how cynical they've turned by how insane the US volte-face was as soon as the occupation began and they started saddling up with warlords and taking up their practices, night raids & inadvertently taking sides in tribe squabbles.
Mass violations happen when militaries try to act like police and police try to act like militaries. Neither is trained for the other's job. Just picture some infantry lieutenant thinking he's actually tracking down a real terrorist just because his village rival wrote his name down on a list, multiplied by lists with 100s to 1000s of names on them. The inevitable fuck ups are at the level of rampant war crimes or worse.
I think the difference with Russia is that the US public has no long-term stomach for it, and also of course the administration changes so that at least less delusional people should become in charge within a decade. I think the main problem in Russia's case is that Putin has been pushing the boundary since the Georgia invasion, and now it's almost 15 years later and he's still calling the shots and even more delusional than he was then. Also US institutions were pretty good at just ignoring T***p whenever he floated some crime against humanity or another he wanted to commit that week.
Starker on 14/4/2023 at 05:38
Looks like they caught the guy behind the massive leaks of highly secret documents, including a lot of sensitive information about the war in Ukraine:
Quote:
(
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/13/who-is-jack-teixeira-the-man-arrested-over-pentagon-files-leak)
In photographs, Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman who has been identified as the prime suspect in the leak of classified intelligence documents, is slim in his dark blue air force uniform. He is youthful looking, barely older than the teenage friends seen in the online group in which the classified documents were leaked.
On Thursday evening, the FBI arrested Teixeira and were searching his home. Video footage from a local TV station showed him being led away in handcuffs.
Teixeira was identified by the New York Times as the leading figure in an online gaming chat group, Thug Shaker Central, on the social network Discord. The details that have emerged about Teixeira have put him in the frame as a person of interest in the leak investigation.
Deployed in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard, Teixeira was also a key member of a group of about 30 people who shared an interest in guns, video games and racist memes.
Teixeira, the newspaper suggested, was the individual known to members of the group as OG, who had been identified a day earlier by the Washington Post as the leaker.
Assembled at the height of the pandemic in 2020, Thug Shaker Central was an invitation-only chatroom.
It appears that from the beginning, the leaker sought to impress its young members, writing messages heavy with acronyms and jargon, posting classified documents, at first typing up verbatim transcripts and then leaking actual documents - which appeared to have been physically removed from a secure place and photographed.
According to the Washington Post, OG told other members these were documents he had brought home from a “military base” where he sometimes worked in a secure facility that prohibited mobile phones and other electronic devices.
[...]
Nicker on 14/4/2023 at 12:42
Lessons from the Edward Snowden affair were clearly forgotten or simply never learned.
How some junior lackey in a state militia was able to access secrets of international importance. is question one. How he was able to do this for three years, undetected, is question two.
demagogue on 14/4/2023 at 13:12
Oh shit, haha, this guy sounds like our own CCCToad. People always (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138793&page=2&p=2119784&viewfull=1#post2119784) gave him shit for not being a real soldier with access to classified material. Whether this OG guy was challenged or not, I think the ego part may be similar, where the type wants to dredge up the goods to boost his elite bona fides. You can see CCCToad literally running that idea through his mind in that post above & finding it not worth it, but you could imagine a type and a context where a person would. He's the OG that produces the goods under the kek flag, or whatever is going for a kek flag these days.
We're a hell of a long way from Chelsea Manning and the rest of Kansas now. I saw some news program (and my mom) trying to understand the motivation here, and I'm not even a young pup anymore, but I could see the yawning generation gap here and couldn't really explain it. They could at least understand Snowden & Manning thinking they were helping, but this is something else. This is beyond 4chan & anon, past the FB, Reddit & Twitch groups, now into these countless Discord channels for this manufactured world of pure chaotic rhetoric, a metastasized perpetual Trololo, and this weird combination of ego, anonymity, and more than anything else, a lack of any real appreciation of what "privacy" or "security" means. Information wants to be free, not even for the good anymore, but for the memes.
lowenz on 14/4/2023 at 13:59
It's just love for chaos, nothing new :D
Meanwhile in russian 1984 conscription letter arrives by NOTIFIED email, just the notification is enough.....
[video=youtube;kVN1HsKPJSI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVN1HsKPJSI[/video]
WingedKagouti on 14/4/2023 at 22:25
Quote Posted by demagogue
and this weird combination of ego, anonymity, and more than anything else, a lack of any real appreciation of what "privacy" or "security" means.
21 year old male: Old enough to have learned some things, young enough to think they understand everything, that their actions are always just and that everyone should adore/praise them. While it's possible to think they should have grown out of it by that point, many males below the age of 25 tend to have at least some remnants of the immature mindset of "If something makes me feel good, then everyone wants to do it."
