Oh locked for editing huh? How interesting this is normal

  • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    66
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Literally nothing there is true. It’s not a loaded question, it’s not disinformation, and Ukraine has absolutely been doing things to the Donbass despite the scare quotes.

    Edit: later in the article

    Before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the intensity of the hostilities in the Donbas had been steadily declining since the signing of the Minsk agreements in February 2015.[9] For example, according to Ukrainian authorities, 50 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in clashes with Donbas separatists in 2020.[10]

    Absolutely no concerns for deaths on the Donbass side. Less Ukrainian soldiers died so clearly that means everything is getting better.

      • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        And also if more Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, it would be because Russia’s deliberately escalating the conflict and therefore still Russia’s fault.

  • moonlake [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    ·
    1 year ago

    Fun fact for you tankies: Ukraine didn’t exist before the Russian invasion. It started existing in February 2022, when I first learned about its existence. Before that it was just a procedurally generated wasteland.

  • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Reminder that whataboutism was literally coined (originally as “whataboutery”) by some absolute cull Irish journalist who supported the British during the Troubles. He needed to invent a way to not get constantly owned by everybody around him when he’d bitch about the IRA, and people would just point out what the British forces had done that either directly spurred the retaliation he was whining about, or things the Brits did that were just blatantly worse.

    I know Ben Burgis kind of sucks, but he had a good article about “whataboutism” and the abuse of crying whataboutism to get out of basic calls for moral consistency:

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/is-whataboutism-always-a-bad-thing

    From the article:

    "

    The original phrase was whataboutery. It was coined in Ireland in the 1970s. When supporters of continued British rule in Ireland’s northern six counties would condemn the violence of the IRA, Irish Republicans would respond by bringing up atrocities perpetrated in those six counties by the British state and allied loyalist paramilitaries, and this in turn would be dismissed as evasive “whataboutery.”

    It’s true enough that the same dynamic played out in the global propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Americans would accuse the Soviets of human rights abuses, the Soviets would respond by bringing up the numerous respects in which this charge was hypocritical, and the American response would characterize this as an unprincipled evasion.

    There even was a special phrase used during the Cold War to describe the Soviets’ response to criticism. That phrase wasn’t “whataboutism.” It was “And You Are Lynching Negroes”—since that was the Soviets’ go-to example.

    The difference matters. “Whataboutism” is an inoffensive word that doesn’t suggest any particular example of western hypocrisy on human rights. If we were still talking about an “And You Are Lynching Negroes” “fallacy,” every use of the phrase would remind listeners that the Soviets had a point. [emphasis mine]

    It’s also hard to reconcile the assumption that “whataboutism” is always a bad thing with the inconvenient historical fact that a widespread desire to deprive the Communists of exactly this kind of talking point seems to have played a meaningful role in weakening white resistance to the civil rights movement and ultimately hastening the end of Jim Crow. If anything, it would have been better if the embarrassment had run deeper. If one is annoyed by the Soviets using American lynchings to deflect criticism, the best way to end the tactic would be to stop American lynchings. Still, anti-lynching legislation consistently failed in Congress, and it was not until this year that an anti-lynching bill passed both houses.

    "

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 year ago

    Jesus Christ, liberals really think of Russians as like tricky goblins who speak in riddles. They think everything that adds nuance to Russia is disinformation. They think any contrary stance to liberal mythology is a brain virus invented by leprechauns.

  • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Calling this phrase ‘disinformation’ is a surprisingly blatant move to convince people NOT to look at what Ukraine has been “doing” to the Donbas for the last 8 years. Anyone who thinks this is a one-sided war of aggression need only look.