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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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never doubted her intelligence or general political savvy

Victoria Nuland and her type are also 'intelligent' on the same level and look where their brilliant group think has gotten America. Into the enviable position of supporting a meatgrinder that has, so far, killed something like half a million people.

Ask yourself how you'd feel about the intelligence of Chinese politicians if they staged a coup in Canada, replaced the Canadian government with a pro-Chinese ones and then were surprised by US invading the place.

But not surprised by the "US" annexing the oilfields and key military locations, right?

I don't think they'd bother tbh.

Canada has always been a 'fake' country of sorts, and after 1945 it has existed purely on US sufferance, as a place where Americans can do shady shit like illegal experiments on people and US courts have no jurisdiction.

They'd simply fix the Chinese influence problem and return things to how they were before.

Wow, that's an awkward interjection of a tired conspiracy theory for a pet topic. Really couldn't hold it in, could you?

For your parallel to hold, you'd have to change some things- like that instead of a Chinese politicians staging a coup in Canada to get a pro-Chinese government, it was the American president bribing, sanctioning, and then successfully pressuring the Canadian Prime Minister to start shooting supporters of his own government in the street, only to find that the Toronto Mayor wasn't willing to go along with a lethal party purge and then the Canadian PM fleeing the country for the United States before he could be impeached.

And then the United States conducting an invasion of one province, and then astroturfing an insurgency in another in an effort to start a civil war, and then having to intervene to sustain the insurgents when they start to fail, and then maintaining a frozen conflict for half a decade while attempting to coerce the Canadians into changing their constitution in a way to give the American proxies veto-authority over Canadian foreign policy but empowered them to have their own foreign policy with the US.

And then giving up, calling them all Nazis and not a real country anyway but actually American and outright invading with pre-made plans for all the pro-Canadian and anti-US advocates to go to the torture sites and mass graves.

'Tired conspiracy theory'

Are you seriously suggesting you'd not be blaming Russia for January 6th had one of their foreign policy officials gone there and was photographed being nice and chummy with the insurgents ?

Sure. Not least because January 6th didn't have insurgents.

If you have to invent alternate history comparisons- twice- to validate your conspiracy theory parallel, that in and of itself is indicative of the quality of the original metaphor.

High ranking foreign policy officials greeting and handing out cookies to actual insurgents - people in armed militias engaged in violence against the state, not just 'pretend' insurgents who are there to create a spectacle..

Yes, perfectly normal, in no way was it a message to the militias that they had official support of the White House because no diplomat or foreign policy official would ever meet publicly, on camera, with armed resistance without an official blessing. Unless he wanted to get shitcanned spectacularly and probably charged with something the next day.

You know, you're not a weird person. You seem more like an NPC.

High ranking foreign policy officials greeting and handing out cookies to actual insurgents - people in armed militias engaged in violence against the state, not just 'pretend' insurgents who are there to create a spectacle.

And here we are appealing to more alternate history caricatures, for a third time. That bored with this timeline, huh?

Feel free to keep on. I promise to go 'Uh-huh' for any more efforts.

You know, you're not a weird person. You seem more like an NPC.

Uh-huh.

And here we are appealing to more alternate history caricatures, for a third time. That bored with this timeline, huh?

Alternate history caricatures? Was Nuland not a highly ranked state department official ?

Were the people she was seen with handing out cookies not armed militias ?

Characterizing the Euromaidan protest groups as an insurgency would be the caricature you're painting, yes.

A useful pejorative for an alternate history, but still an alternate history given it's reliance on twisting the conventional usage of active revolt or uprising. Particularly in the context of 2013, when the Syrian Civil War, Afghan War, and even the Iraq Wars were the contemporary standards of what an insurgency entailed. Truly, the battlefield of Independence Square could be fairly compared with any of these.

While seeking the categorical equivalence would be useful to those who want to exaggerate the Euromaidan protests, just as calling January 6 an insurgency (or a coup, or an uprising) is useful to those who want those categorical insinuations, such claims remain false and their usage appeals to historical fanfiction.

Armed clashes between protesters and government culminating in the militias invading parliament and forcing government MPs to dissolve the cabinet do not count as 'insurgency'?

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