Ukraine-Russia Crisis Thread

A bit more detail on the Ukrainian biolabs

Norhing concrete but feel it’s safe to assume if it’s being funded by the Pentagon in a poor country it’s the worst shit imaginable.

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Yes, we’ve seen that this is absolutely trashing some users’ mental health so let’s kick off at someone suggesting we maybe don’t go straight for all the worst case scenarios without some awareness of how that is affecting other people :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

don’t think Xylo was being unreasonable and it looks like others agree too. process all you want, just consider using caveats / summary option if it’s getting particularly bleak and/or speculative?

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Mr Zhao told reporters that “wielding the stick of sanctions at every turn will never bring peace and security but cause serious difficulties to the economies and livelihoods of the countries concerned”.

Can’t agree more with what China have been saying this morning. Not having a good grasp on West’s relationship with China, would this be something that the US would take onboard. Would we see a reduction in sanctions over the coming weeks?

Think people using spoilers or summaries when a user feels like what they’re writing may tip over the line from analysing to speculation is a good idea personally.

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Did I ‘kick off’? Are you kicking off at me now? Will my reply be seen as me kicking off at you?

This is silly. If there’s a real time exchange of views and ideas that several posters are engaged in it’s a bit off to come along 10 hours later, having not been there at the time, read 80 odd posts all at once and decree that last night’s posts should have been sensitive to this morning’s readers

It’s a chaotic and unpredictable situation, people are going to speculate, follow leads & information that other people are unaware of or disinterested in and discuss them here - that’s process …and in that process one can dismiss or discount the fringe stuff after taking a look and deciding it’s bollocks

As far as I can see, no one is posting bad faith takes to try and intentionally hurt & demoralise people and what’s here is a fraction of what you see on BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera etc

If we’re going to all have to second guess everyone else’s sensitivities & daily fluctuations of anxiety then what’s the end result? We don’t mention war in the war thread? I’d say that if people are in an unhealthy place that this might not be the best thread to compress read 100 replies in. Sometimes even spoilering stuff seems like titillation or performative

Bottom line though is that someone coming in from an angle after the fact and judging other posters as going over the line, being insensitive or proposterous is not a good thing. ‘I don’t like the way you’re processing these events and you need to calm down in order to make me feel more comfortable’ is neither useful nor sympathetic, no matter how many likes it gets

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Nah I don’t think they’ll do this

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Where does “US funded bioweapons labs” fall on the inverted conspiracy theory pyramid?

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I don’t think so either but on the BBC News last night Lyse Doucet chaired a ‘Global Questions’ panel (like a Question Time’ format) from Vilnius. On it the Ukrainian ambassador to Lithuania started talking about how Russia could stage a sabotage event at a Ukrainian nuclear plant and blame it on Ukrainian forces

I dismissed it as he was saying it as he was leveraging the fear as part of his argument for a NATO lead No-Fly zone. It was about half an hour after that that I was on here, the chat turned to Nazi Ukrainian regiments & Russian Z propaganda and the idea popped back into my head as the ‘Reichstag fire’ moment

But you aren’t pouring out your worst fears into a vacuum here. People reading you saying Putin is installing the fourth Reich and is preparing to flatten the rest of Europe is going to have a negative effect on their mental health. You might feel you’re being entirely rational but it seems more like you’ve jumped to the worst possible outcome and extrapolated from there. Reichstag fires at Chernobyl? People have rightly told keyzeey he needs to find a better way to unload these anxieties than describe the blackest shit they can possibly imagine over and over on here, they seem to have taken that on board a bit, and I think you need to too.

Value much of your perspective on here btw, it’s refreshing to hear how other parts of Euorpe are reacting to this.

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the Ukraine’s Pentagon-run bio-labs

If we’re going down non-concrete rabbit holes, I’m going to raise my eyebrows at the use of the definite article there

Reread the sentence pls

the one I’ve quoted from the tweet?

What have I missed?

Oh right, I thought you were taking issue with my wording.

I continue to make that mistake all the time so I’m usually lenient towards people who make it too.

Apols, I wasn’t taking issue with your wording, and I did edit my text to add in the extra words from the tweet after first posting and without them it’s less clear I was quoting the tweet.

I do it too, but I’m less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are publishing information such as the above. I think it exposes biases as much as being a linguistic habit.

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As is posting maps of speculatively Pentagon-funded Ukrainian bio-weapons facilities no?

That might shit some people up too no?

But on the other hand we’ve already seen the Russians carry out a bio-weapons attack on UK soil so are the ‘sensible moderates’ actually downplaying real threats?

So which part of the ‘everything is fine’<—->’armageddon is here’ axis do we calibrate to? And who decides? And who even knows where they are on this axis from one hour to the next?

I thought DiS was a plurality that was against enforcing ‘norms’ ? So if I - as the son and grandson of holocaust survivors - have a little late night OMG moment about a possible Reichstag fire why is that unacceptable? Why can’t anyone understand it as part of my processing and extend sympathies in my direction?

The only way we can possibly proceed with plurality of thought is to stop judging others and stop being the guardians of other people’s perceived sensibilities

I’m sorry but I’m just not going to accept that my talking or posting about possible economic collapse or famine or whatever terrible consequences may come of this war is responsible for people’s anxieties about the actual war or its consequences when they’ve come into a thread about the crises at hand. And that is not a comment on not caring about people’s mental health, it’s a comment about safeguarding people’s mental health by creating an open space where opinions are inclusive and anxieties can be processed without being policed

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I dunno man I think if someone (in this case multiple people) are pointing out they’ve got an issue with this style of posting then just take a second to appreciate that and mull it over.

This won’t happen but if it did, it is more likely to be the extremist elements in Ukraine ding it to trigger intervention. Nazis do not behave rationally when on the brink of defeat. That is why I found Rubio’s comments so alarming about the biolabs - he is signaling that any action that drastically “crosses a line” will be automatically blamed on Russia without needing evidence or investigation. That is very dangerous. How would your average Azov paramilitary receive that statement.

So, the norm rule of the sensible, rational moderates applies does it?

Even when one person’s ‘moderate’ can be another person’s ‘extreme’ & vice versa?

All I’m advocating is a non-judgmental acceptance that people post here in good faith (bad faith posting is obvious) and that different people process things differently and that it’s unnecessary (and also unhealthy) to ‘white knight’ the processing space down to a perceived norm

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Hopefully more good reporting like this will expose how the global economics of the situation make a mockery of claims to be “standing by” Ukraine or “on the side of democracy”, and it is in everyone’s interest to end this war A S A P before we tank the entire show.

No. ‘The west’ won’t take on board anything China are saying in relation to this conflict.

Just out of interest, would your solution be to stop all sanctions and any other action and effectively let Putin have whatever he wants re Ukraine because you are worried about the consequences otherwise?