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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2218 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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When any outside observer can, with minimal cynicism required, attribute their deaths to FSB agents or other goons sanctioned by the government, I consider that a distinction without a difference. You might argue that it could be at the behest of individual oligarchs, but Russia can be accurately described as an oligarchy.

Oh will no one rid me of this meddlesome journalist?

That having less concern about regime critics being murdered by "random thugs" who will never be investigated than murderers being sentenced to death is stupid doesn't mean it's impossible to draw the distinction.

Hence the:

I consider that a distinction without a difference

It is largely petty criminals and malcontents who languish indefinitely in prison, assuming they weren't liberated and then killed by Wagner. Or get raped to death. Maybe Wagner does that too.

If you are an opponent of the regime, you are lucky to get a trial at all, let alone a fair one. And if you die, the fig leaf that it wasn't court-sanctioned fell off a while back.

Did Prighozin get his warrant served for sedition? Only if you consider an AA missile a suitable means of delivery.

In other words, the fact that they do not legally claim to practise the death sentence or have put a moratorium on it means nothing at all.

Sure, progressives object to criminals, lumpenproles, and other such creatures facing negative consequences(whereas ordinary middle class people biting the dust unjustly is eh, it happens occasionally), and that's the distinction being drawn.

It's incredibly dumb and messed up that amnesty international cares less about white collar regime critics getting beaten to death by implausibly-deniable thugs than they do about murderers hanging. But they do and that's the distinction they're drawing- and it is a meaningfully different distinction.

Sure, I agree with you in the most part. But here I was pointing at the graph showing that Russia is nation that has de-facto ceased to perform judicial executions. And that is what I dismiss as a distinction without a difference.

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