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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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I am pleased our discussion as always has retreated so far from the bailey from which it started, where we were discussing a fanfic of an American-involved insurgency installing an illegitimate government by force, to one where we can trust the truth-finding capacity of the Ukrainian court and investigation systems nearly a decade after it's takeover of the system...

...which did not find that said right-wing sniper protestors were a coherent part of Maidan strategy or American-aligned, but which has (repeatedly) also found the involvement of the government in the crackdown to rise to criminal levels. And which did not find extremist agitators to be a controlled factor of the Euromaidan key leaders or even to be American led, at a time when the Americans were publicly advising the Euromaidan protestors to not escalate. But which has repeatedly found substantial indications of resistance and obfuscation by the Yanukovich-era FSB and internal security forcesduring attempts of investigation the use and activities against protestors, including not just destruction of evidence but also the significant number of defections to Russia by possibly involved parties, including and up to Russian-requests for individuals of interest in the context of prisoner swaps.

I was worried you wouldn't want to believe anything that came out of the post-Maidan government and would dismiss anything they said as a pack of lies, or that the post-Maidan investigations couldn't be raised as reliable due to the amount of evidence tampering potentially done by interested parties including many which have since died or defected, but as I am sure you aren't just selectively cherry-picking any possible item in blatant confirmation bias, I am glad we can now both reference and agree with the results of Ukrainian reporting, investigations, and other government positions of the post-Euromaidan Ukraine...

...including that Yanukovich was credited as giving the order to open fire 20 Feb, and Internal Affairs Minister Zakharchenko announcing his (not legislature-derived or approved) authorization to security forces the same day to use live ammunition against protestors going forward, on a day when a lot of live ammunition was used against protestors, and no one claims primarily by Maidan elements sanctioned or otherwise.

Instead the discussion has simply moved on to the motte of verisimilitude, and what you do or do not find too odd to believe about a government giving itself the right to shoot protestors...

...after increasing pressure from both its primary briber and the pro-Russian elements within the government publicly and privately pressuring Yanukovich to escalate suppression tactics, after the protest movement did not disband and was not thrown into turmoil after the failure of Yanukovich's unity government gambit to divide the opposition but instead empowered them as part of his own government, after the protestor demands had evolved to not only the still-maintained issue of EU-to-Eurasian Union switch but also demands for credible investigations that were likely going to be costly to Yanukovich personally (such as investigations into his possible links to pre-20FEB attacks and kidnappings of protestors).

And why this sense of verisimilitude finds those factors less credulous than characterizing the Euromaidan as an insurgency fighting its way into the halls of power at American direction.

But we are talking about a sense of verisimilitude who believes the primary goal of protest leaders is always to get security forces to kill people, and even less odd senses of verisimilitude often struggle to accept the nature of history. History, after all, doesn't have to be plausible- it just has to happen.

..which did not find that said right-wing sniper protestors were a coherent part of Maidan strategy or American-aligned,

Yeah. The Maidan snipers who were shooting at their own people and also at the government, were doing so purely because they were out of control psychopaths. That'đ what you're implying.