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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   33232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Just because tyranny is legal (constitutional even) or convenient doesn't make it legitimate.

The Press is totally lawful, I still think the men running after youths to throw them into the meat grinder of a war that's already lost are the dregs of humanity.

But ultimately, it's not like we're talking about France in WW1 where every party is fully committed to national union and postponing elections is a formality. It's closer to a Lundendorff type situation.

Zelensky has ostensibly used war powers to ban his political opposition, kill journalists and pretty much done all that you expect of a corrupt Slavic dictatorship.

Maybe you need to be a dictatorship to survive an existential war, that doesn't mean that it's automatically right to fight a lost war to the last man.

Source on killing journalists?

I assume he is referring to the Gonzalo Lira case. Most outright killings (that we have documentation of) seem to have happened before Zelensky (though not all). There is more evidence of non-killing crackdowns on the press since well before the 2022 invasion.

I think one reason the justification for suspending elections is particularly unsympathetic to Americans is that we held an election even during a raging civil war.

It’s not exactly the same scenario as Ukraine, but it some ways it was worse. And it was 150+ years ago, and we still managed to do it.

That election excluded the confederate states by design, though. Russia apologists would certainly consider such a move for a new Ukrainian election to be illegitimate.

As someone frequently accused of being a Russia apologist, I have to disagree - people living in Crimea should be voting in Russian elections, not Ukrainian ones. If Ukraine doesn't want to let the people in the contested regions vote, they're simply making the implicit case that those regions are not part of Ukraine.

Do you really think that? I’m sure some might make those mouth noises but the argument would be ignored. Whilst the argument for an election is at least not crazy

This is a fair point, and that’s why I said it’s not a precise comparison.

Do we have examples of elections being held in circumstances exactly like Ukraine’s? I genuinely don’t know, although I know elections have been held in war torn countries before.

The Confederate States of America also held congressional elections in 1863-1864 while Grant's and Sherman's armies were busy trashing the place. I think that counts. The CSA didn't hold presidential elections because IIRC the CSA presidency was a 6-year term and the CSA didn't, um, last long enough for Jefferson Davis to have to worry about elections....

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