Skua

Power word: impotence

Depends on what’s on offer in the steam sale! Although I did pick up the Myst remaster, so I might just be having a crack at that

For only 7.99 you can get enough store points to open three Crates of Eden, each of which has a chance to give you four seconds of total invisibility or two silent takedowns!

Deadnaming is okay when you’re doing it to mercenary companies

It’s actually in England, although funnily enough the part of England it’s in is called Cumbria, which has the same origin as the Welsh for Wales “Cymru”. So it’s sort of in Wales, just not the Wales that we call Wales in English.

Anyway it’s Old English torr, Middle Welsh penn, and Danish hoh. And like many British place names the pronunciation is not what you would expect at all at first glance. It’s “tra-pen-uh”

The map has south at the top. Look in the bottom right quarter and you can see the Mediterranean, and the islands at the bottom right edge are Britain and Ireland

Why is the continent described as “west of the Old World” when it’s drawn exactly where the southern half of Africa actually is? I can’t work out why he would think it’s separated from the rest of Africa, but that definitely looks like Tanzania and Mozambique to me

That is a very strange article. The headline is “How Boris Johnson Sabotaged Ukraine Russia Peace Deal In April” and the bulk of it is about how a former US National Security Council officer didn’t say that.

Frankly the NYT one seems a lot more convincing to me. That addition to the security guarantee clause is obviously completely unworkable.

Apologies, I was using “NATO troops” as a shorthand for the large number of countries involved rather than the specific command structure. You are right to bring that up

Maybe find an article that says that then. The one you linked says that yes, they were close to an agreement, but at the last minute Russia inserted a clause that was a dealbreaker

What that link actually says:

To the Ukrainians’ dismay, there was a crucial departure from what Ukrainian negotiators said was discussed in Istanbul. Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker. Russia tried to secure a veto on Ukraine’s security guarantees by inserting a clause requiring unanimous consent.

With that change, a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team said, “we had no interest in continuing the talks.”

No, but obviously all you know how to do is to make ridiculous straw man arguments.

If ethnic cleansing didn’t happen before the war started, ethnic cleansing did not cause the war.

Nobody made the argument that simply using cluster munitions equals ethnic cleansing on its own.

Saying “they’re doing ethnic cleansing” and backing it up with a link that’s just “they’re using cluster munitions” is literally exactly this

It is predominantly ethnically Russian, and those are the people who are being targeted.

The point I was making was that the only person who described themselves in terms of identity in that link called himself Ukrainian. This makes it very poor evidence for Ukraine targeting ethnic Russians.

Bad faith is arguing about something you have no understanding of and wasting everyone’s time. See this is what a bad faith argument looks like.

What exactly do you think I’m trying to convince you of that I haven’t been open and honest about? I said exactly why I do not think that that source is worth my time based on the five other sources you put it with and how you used them.

Clearly you didn’t watch the lecture if you need to ask that question as it clearly explains the demographics in Ukraine

I know what the demographics are. I have watched Mearsheimer’s lecture, but it really is not necessary to get an overview of something as basic as where different ethnicities are concentrated in Ukraine. The fact that there are a bunch of ethnic Russians living in that part is not evidence of ethnic cleansing by Ukraine. Neither is Russia feeling threatened by eastern European countries joining the EU or NATO.

the ethnic cleansing that western backed fascists started doing after the coup in 2014.

So your position is that the ethnic cleansing happened in the ~two months between Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine in February and the declarations of the DPR and LPR in April?

Under this interpretation, the headline could then read “New Polling Shows Significant Ukrainian Support for War to End the War”

You said Russia was being diplomatic. Nobody is arguing that powerful countries are often cruel. So again, if this is Russia’s diplomacy towards Ukraine, do you agree that America was diplomatic towards Afghanistan?

“Using cluster munitions” still does not equal “ethnic cleansing”

Maybe read up on how Ukraine was put together by USSR and what ethnicities live there.

Eastern Ukraine is not 100% ethnically Russian

If you think that spending an hour to educate yourself on a subject you’re debating is too much time

“Educate yourself on a subject” does not equal “reply to a social media comment”. I said the latter was not worth one hour, not the former. This is an extremely bad faith response to what I said.

That hour long video you refuse to watch documents ethnic cleansing in great detail.

See the thing is you put it alongside five other sources which you also said showed ethnic cleansing, but they did nothing of the sort. As such I see no reason to believe you on this.

Here’s a whole lecture you can watch on the problems that led to separatism

Yes, I know the Mearsheimer lecture. It is not about ethnic cleansing. So why are you bringing it up to back up your claim about ethnic cleansing?

Oh right, so do you consider America’s behaviour towards Afghanistan diplomatic then?

It’s not at all unreasonable to hope for it, but you need to see sufficiently low support for the party in question. That does not look even slightly plausible in the upcoming US election. It might happen in the upcoming UK one, and you can see clearly the difference in polling and reporting

It’s not meaningful diplomacy to say “give us everything we want or we will take everything we want”

That’s a hard shift from “Russia is being diplomatic” to “Russia can just take what it wants”