Doesn't mean there aren't risks, but proving someone, much less an entire institution, is "irrational" is a large hurdle — boethius

I'm not trying to prove anything. You are. You are peddling the message that they know what they are doing. I just think they don't.

"How about becoming a neutral henhouse?"

I think it's the opposite: you took his advice.

Nothing looks reasonable here, on the Russian side. It's all about war crimes, power trips, incompetence, and keeping a zombified political system alive. You are looking way too hard for rationality where it may not exist.

The reason they can't articulate a war goal may simply be that they don't know what they are trying to do. Not clearly. Not as a team. For all we know they just tried to do what the US did in Iraq, and failed miserably.

Policy makers in the West have gone off script a tad bit here and there, more or less just followed my advice — boethius

More importantly, Mr Putin himself followed your advice. Ain't you proud?

Or maybe it's the other way round: he advised you first.

We don't know what they think. — boethius

They are in damage control mode right now, saying they didn't really care for Kiev now that they have been repelled from there, and after having sacrificed thousands of lives to try and get there... :smirk:

My point was that soldiers in a high intensity war need motivation, and not everybody can be suitably motivated just by killing innocent people randomly. Only few peoples are psychopathic murderers. The others, the regular average soldier would want to know what he is asked to fight and die for. Otherwise he's just going to try and save his own skin. So not articulating clear war goals is part of this big failure we are seeing.

we'd actually need to know what Russian leadership is trying to achieve exactly (which we don't). — boethius

That was already a failure to start with: no clear goals, so you have soldiers asked to sacrifice their lives for... well... everything and nothing.

We call it la Nouvelle Orléans.

LOL. Been there too (before the hurricane) and liked it even better than Budapest. :grin: I hope they are back on their feet.

No, never in Ukraine. I was in Kosovo, which had some similarities I think. For instance, every single village and town in Kosovo had two different names: one in Serb, and one in Albanian. And whether one used this or that name had (or could be seen as having) a nationalist undertone.

We used to write down the name of the Ukrainian capital as 'Kiev', but now the writing 'Kyiv' has come to be used instead in Western media. I suspect that Kyiv is a transcription of the Ukrainian writing while Kiev is the Russian one.

DISCLAIMER: Those men are not naked. They all wear a proper speedo, of a dark navy blue with a gold blazon if they are members. I thought this needed to be said before someone gets too excited... :-)

Does Budapest have a proper red-light district? — Bitter Crank

There are some of these horrible places called "striptease joints." :halo:


With a number of interesting options inside. :naughty:

Yep, that's kinda cool. It's like a huge spa from before WW1, I think, all with naturally hot spring water that doesn't stink sulphur too much.

There's also a (smaller) classic Turkish bath in Budapest, dating back to when Soliman the Magnificent was battling Vienna. Budapest was Turkish at the time.



There are also castles and churches and museums and parks and a funicular. A whole lot of statues, generally nationalistic. Some neighborhood still look as or more run down than during communist times, but the city center is rutilant and open for business.

What?

Yes, i've been to Budapest since, and you can have good fun there. I recommend the art deco baths, where you can play chess in the water.

Indeed it can. So you've supplied a mechanism by which the state can dominate the narrative, well done. — Isaac

It's not rocket science. But you have managed to understand the point. Well done.

Now explain why you providing such a mechanism in any way has any relevance whatsoever to the argument that threre is a similar dominance exerted over the narrative in the west by other mechanisms.

It seems to me that you are trying to say something here. So instead of me explaining to you what you are trying to say, why don't you explain it yourself? Don't be shy.

Yes, of course.

In the worse countries, you couldn't even trust the taxi drivers. Those queuing at the airport in particular could be bugged or the driver part of the local Stasi. But in Hungary in the 80's taxi drivers were all 'liberalised'. They were often profs and doctors having to work an extra job to make do. So they would speak relatively freely during their ride.

I remember that racism against non-magyars (Roms in particular) was already an issue, even under this communist paradise. Now of course they are lead by rather extreme nationalists.

The food was good, and plentiful. People were reasonably content but no one was happy. Nobody was ever smiling for instance, or joking or laughing their ass off, even when drunk. No public expression of joy.

It must be pretty schizophrenic. I travelled through Hungary in the 80's. It was rather sad how nobody would ever speak their mind in public but would unload in private.

I met an Albanian once, who had this story about the death of Enver Hoxha. She was at school when the news broke, a pupil in an average primary school in Albania. The teacher said that this was a terrible news and that they should all cry now. She found it hard to do, in fact she started to laugh irrepressibly. She quickly put her head down in her arms, crouched on her desk, and pretended to sob, all the while she was laughing and laughing. That's how she got through that.

No. I was disagreeing because measures of press freedom are not measures of press dominance. — Isaac

But we were talking of propaganda dominance, not 'press dominance', whatever that means. Try to focus. If the state can forbid all independent media, it can totally dominate the narrative. Think about it. It's not that hard to understand.

You were talking of dominance, remember? You were saying that there was no way to assert or measure that the propaganda in Russia was more dominant than in the West. I said there was: the Reporters Sans Frontières index for press freedom, which is based on the degree to which journalists are free to do their job without being physically intimidated, beaten up, incarcerated or killed.

Then you started to argue against that as well. Were you disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing or what?

Per chance, do you now agree that one system of propaganda in Russia is immensely more dominant and forceful than the other in, say, America?

Did you not?

Your problem is that you don't want to understand. The difference between living under Putin and under Biden in terms of freedom of access to accurate information is immense.

What power does Bezos have over you and me? None. But in Russia, the power of the government to enforce a certain narrative is very strong, in a real, physical sense.

You cut a piece out of my sentence, a classic disinformation trick.

your claim was that power was only the ability to wield brute force. — Isaac

That's not what I said.

the capitalist system commits violence against workers every day — Benkei

That is true but it's another topic.

So Jeff Bezos? No power at all (bit of a wimp by all accounts). Rupert Murdoch? Completely powerless (I mean, I could definitely have him). Larry Fink? Couldn't influence a child, after all, he's a bit skinny isn't he? Koch brothers? Too old to use brute force, so completely powerless...

What kind of bullshit argument is that? — Isaac

The argument is that they developed their influence not by killing people, but by creating new media. And people can do what they did, develop new media, and nobody will kill them or jail them for it.

Kyiv, Ukraine -- Municipal workers cover the statue of the Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri with sandbags to protect it from shelling in Kyiv. The statue, by Luciano Massari, was inaugurated in 2015 to mark 750 years since Dante’s birth
Photograph: Vadim Ghirdă/AP

Amazing how people can get dirty on a message board, make it all personal, lie through their teeth to score a point, and still expect to be taken seriously when they complain about 'Western propaganda' and 'flag waving'.

Please do so. I will spare you my presence as well.

This is a lie, one of many that your side spread, all the while crying us a river about western propaganda. Stop your propaganda first.

This thread is not about me, remember? No need to make it personal.

My point exactly. But of course, my other point of course is that I don't think people like you give a shit about the latter question. — StreetlightX

What makes you think something so outlandish? And also, why does this debate has to be about what I care for? I don't care what you care for or not, Street. It's none of my business and I don't let it bother me.

If Russia remains in Ukraine for the next 10 years, murdering its citizens, destroying its infrastructure, and (further) killing it's economy, I wonder if Western observers will still proclaim that "Russia isn't winning" - because their metric of success is simply 'how good or bad is Russia doing' and not 'how much are the Ukrainians getting fucked' — StreetlightX

The question of how successful or not the invasion is from a Russian standpoint is not equivalent to the question of how many Ukrainian lives are lost. These are two different questions. Even if the Russians killed millions of people in Ukraine (god forbid), it will not translate into a 'win' for the executioners. In fact in 'special operations', a classic factor of success is how FEW casualties are incurred by both the attackers and the defenders.

As different from a war, a good 'special op' destroys as little as possible beyond its specific target. So paradoxically, killing so many civilians is a sign of significant strategic problem in this 'special operation'.

There is such a thing as a Pyrrhic victory after all.

The fact that journalists who speak out against the dominant narrative in Russia are likely to be killed or imprisoned is a moral outrage. It doesn't, of itself, make their propaganda more dominant or pervasive than ours. That would be a separate question. — Isaac

"Dominance" is a matter of force. In the end, power is about the capacity to wield brute force. The narrative of a dictatorship is enforced, that is to say that you must agree with it publicly, or suffer the physical consequences in your body. This makes a very big difference with anything else that does not involve physical violence, including of course in terms of effectiveness: the murderers do this for a reason, because it DOES intimidate other journalists very effectively.

How is this even a question? — StreetlightX

How is that question even a question?

To those who still insist the war is going 'disastrously' for Russia because they read that on CNN, ask yourself how Ukraine having the upper hand can be squared with a public admission they cannot take back their own territory and will likely have to give some of it away. — Baden

Just because no one is winning doesn't mean "it is going well for Russia." It's not a zero sum game.

I mistook you for someone to be taken seriously, my mistake. — Isaac

Personally, I always knew you were a wimp.

What number? — Isaac

For instance the RSF Press Freedom Index.

Does economic suppression count? What about private buy outs of independent competitors? Do you have some good reason to relate 'dominance' to the use of violence as a tool?

Yes, I do. Violence eliminates dissenting voices. Economics don't.

Does it 'dominate'? What would be a measure of that, and how would you carry out such a measurement? — Isaac

Number of journalists in jail, assassinated, beaten up, could be a good indicator. More generally, indicators of state violence against the independent press such as the one developed by Reporters Without Borders.

https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-paris-russian-state-tv-journalist-denounces-kremlin-propaganda

Is it 'pervasive'? Again what would be a measure of that, and how would you carry out such a measurement? — Isaac

Number of positive media pieces and public posters devoted to the Big Boss?

Vladimir Putin has placed the head of the FSB's foreign service and his deputy under house arrest after blaming them for intelligence failings that saw his army handed a series of embarrassing defeats in Ukraine, it has been claimed.

Andrey Soldatov, a respected author on the Russian secret services, said sources inside the FSB told him that Sergey Beseda, 68, head of the agency's foreign service, has been placed under arrest on Putin's orders.

Also arrested is Anatoly Bolyukh, Beseda's deputy, according to Soldatov, who said Putin is 'truly unhappy' with the agency - which he ran before becoming president.

I think Vlad is right to be nervous. It may be more serious than the FSB having just erred in their assessment.

The US had access to tiptop intel prior to the war about what was planned (even though few believed their predictions of an all out aggression, even in Ukraine). Possibly they were tipped from the FSB (or another source). And two weeks ago the Ukrainian side said they fought back a Wagner force aiming to kill Zelensky, thank to tips coming directly from the FSB.

It's not just a case of passing info to the enemy for the money, I think. It looks more likely that someone in the FSB didn't like the idea of invading Ukraine at all, and decided that for the best interest of the nation, Mr Putin's war in Ukraine had to fail.

Perhaps so that Mr Putin would be replaced by somebody nicer.

The actions and inactions of Belarus could also be interpreted this way: does Lukachenko want Putin to succeed in Ukraine, or does he want him to fail? If he wants him to succeed, why hasn't Belarus entered the war yet?