Point of view. A look from the other side.

A few days ago I would ask you to give evidence of this. But yesterday something has changed in me. I thought to the last that Russians and Americans, nevertheless, can have mutual understanding. But I do not think so. I came to American forums to better understand the Americans and explain in Russia that people in the US are the same as us and that we can have a dialogue. But I was wrong. The average American is not capable of dialogue. He blindly believes what he is told by the media. And with the faithful, the dispute is impossible. And while America is fanning the anti-Russian tantrum, such deeply religious Americans are Russia's direct enemies. So it happened that three years ago I came in search of understanding, but became an anti-American

So you can consider anything that Russia is being killed by the opposition, that Russia is eating children, that corruption is rampant in Russia and that everyone in Russia is drinking vodka instead of tea. I do not care any more The more hatred and anger in the words of the enemy, the more correct our actions.

...

I know perfectly well that among Americans there are thinking people. Even the direct open enemies of Russia. And I respect such people. But such - very little and they do not affect the atmosphere as a whole.

 

Well, here's the problem.

Russia is like America. A big country, a powerful country (compared to most countries).

Both countries have done things that most people would consider pretty bad.

Both have a lot of enemies, and these enemies can find plenty of true and terrible things to say about their targets.

But people like 'dramatic unity'. If they don't like a person, or a country, it's more comfortable to believe that the object of their dislike is completely, totally, irredeemably, unchangeably, by nature, evil.

There is an evolutionary explanation for this, no doubt: perhaps those of our ancestors who hesitated to wipe out ALL the members of an enemy tribe didn't have as many descendants, for whatever reason.

Anyway, we like our heroes to be 100% perfect and our bad guys to be 100% evil. The US is 'the Great Satan' in Iran, and any Iranian can tell you at length about how the US directed the overthrow of a democratically-elected Prime Minister who was trying to make Iran's oil benefit Iran instead of British Petroleum corporation. Several million Indonesians can name members of their family executed by the Indonesian military dictatorship, their names supplied to the executioners by the CIA. And on and on.

Many Latin Americans don't love the US, and they have good reason not to. Many Eastern Europeans don't love the Russian Republic, and they have good reason not to.

The only important issue is: do the Americans and the Russians have any deep, objective, conflicts of interest? I don't think so. So antagonism between the two countries is not necessary. Attempts by either to interfere in the other's internal affairs will backfire.

I dearly hope the Americans sort out their internal problems, but I don't think the Russians have much to contribute in the way of help. I dearly hope that Russia evolves into a modern liberal democracy, with little corruption and an honest independent judiciary. But that's necessarily something for the Russians to do -- Americans shouldn't interfere, because it just causes resentment.

However, I'm not optimistic. Mr Putin gets support for his corrupt gangster-ridden regime by offering the Russian people security, and a chance to get their own back on the stupid regimes of the West who were not intelligent enough to try to bring Russia into the network of Western nations in the 1990s, instead of expanding NATO to the Russian border, and whose bankers helped the gangsters steal the Russian economy. So of course they will support him.

And the leaders in the West will say to their voters, "See.... we told you the Russians couldn't be trusted ... they want to take over the world. Give us more money for the military." And they'll get it.

So we'll have lots of amazing new military airplanes and missiles and such, when we should be working together on putting a scientific base on the Moon, on curing cancer, on making fusion power work, on developing a five-thousand-mile-an-hour vacuum train network ....

 

This guy is a hard-core Lefty, and therefore not someone whose work I would normally recommend, but I think he's right on this issue: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/0...pons-tells-us-to-come-down-to-earth.html#more

 

Heck. The biggest loss of Russia in Syria. At the airbase Khemeymim, at the approach to landing, An-26 transport aircraft crashed. 32 people died.

 

Some information for reflection. About how Russia is closed, censored and how it suppresses freedom of the media. In Syria, the transport An-26 crashed. 39 people died. Since the disaster took one day. The Russian Internet is packed with complaints and accusations that the Ministry of Defense does not share with each information about the disaster. I am not kidding. Some people have not read even preliminary announcements in the media, have not seen them - and accuse the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in the absence of comments. That is, obviously, they want the Defense Ministry to report in detail about everything to them personally And, of course, they blame Putin for everything.

 

I wrote above how this year to my wife, random guys on the street gave two huge bouquets of flowers.

http://www.politicalforum.com/index...thout-politics.412256/page-12#post-1068797290

In my opinion, these are the consequences of the ever-expanding actions on the congratulation of women. Especially distinguished this year with gifts Russian special forces

 

So congratulated women from March 8 firefighters in Karelia

 

Gifts for women in the subway.

 

Flowers are given by the mounted police.

 

The traffic police, too, did not stay aloof.

 

It was already traditionally many congratulations from ordinary Russians. Here is a congratulation from men in the Volgograd region.

 

That more describes the left, not so much the Right. The ones who blame Russia for Hillary's defeat are the ones who will be most vocal with you. Many others consider Russia to be more an adversary than an enemy. I appreciate your posts and especially the pictures which shows the human aspect of average Russians.

 

Sh*t incomprehensible is going on. Looking at all this recent Western aggression, the impression is that, that the US and Britain need a war with Russia. I do not understand what they want with this game of fire.

 

Yes, I see and understand it. More than once I have already written that in Russia in general they approve more of the right, even if they oppose Russia. They are usually more honest. And an honest opponent is better than someone who comes up with a different lie.

But, I'm afraid, the problem "Wag the dog" is even more important here. Now in the United States, it is advantageous to blame Russia, and to say at least a few words in its defense is simply dangerous for a career. Therefore, all this anti-Russian hysteria is developing on its own. Positive feedback.

 

The Left would rather blame Russia than admit their corrupt, criminal, candidate lost to the likes of Donald J Trump. The MSM keeps the fires burning.

 

On the eve of the assassination attempt on the traitor, a brooding FSB officer stood in front of a table of boards on a secret appearance in Salisbury. On the table were laid out:

- potassium cyanide
- strychnine
- British spy poison from the number of seized earlier
- hatchet from the nearest wood-burning barn
- a black market gun in the East End, missing from the radar ten years ago
- homemade bomb
- bayonet knife
- Banana

- and, finally, a unique nerve agent, developed in the USSR in the 1980s.

"Well, of course!" — slapped an officer on his forehead. "Only with the help of a unique Soviet toxic agent can I cover up the tracks leading to Russia!" Then he grabbed a tube of poison, straightened his hat with a star on his head and went out into the morning Salisbury, mixing with the crowd.

 

That is only true of forum like this.

This would not be the first time the Russian government attacked a defector. They killed a number in the past. Putin made his bones in the KGB.

 

Today there was an amusing incident. At the airport of Yakutsk, when the An-12 transport airplane took off, a badly fixed cargo was broken. He punched the rear ramp and partially crumbled. No harm done.





But the funny is different The plane carried silver and gold in ingots. 9.3 tons worth 21.6 billion rubles (~ $ 380 million). More than 3.5 tons scattered on the runway and 12 kilometers around the neighborhood on the take-off trajectory Truly - golden rain. Well, at least no one was killed, 172 ingots fell on 20 kilograms each

 

Yesterday there was a great shame with our attempts of the state to block some Internet sites. Among others at the level of state control, a network of websites through which drugs were sold was blocked.

A little detail about such bans.

The forbidden domain is added to the "black list". Providers must block access to such addresses. Since people often use external DNS, for example, from Google, you have to block by IP-addresses. A special robot periodically checks the availability of such sites through different providers. And if there is an open access to blocked sites, the provider is issued a fine of 60,000 rubles (about $ 1000). Since blocked sites can change IP-addresses, providers also periodically check the current IP and put them on the black list.

Now practice. Yesterday, one of these drug-related sites, began to register thousands of extraneous IP addresses for all of its domains in the DNS. Some providers automatically blocked them. By the time the problem was noticed, several million addresses of many popular sites were blocked You can imagine what hell happened in the technical support of these sites.

It's even more interesting to watch how they will get out of this situation.

 

It will be interesting to see how the attempted assassination of the defecting Russian agent plays out.

Assassinating someone who has betrayed your intelligence organization is no doubt considered moral by governments. There is good evidence that the American government -- or people in it -- murdered a CIA employee because they feared he was going to talk about US germ warfare use in Korea, in the early 50s. (When I first read about this, I could not believe it. But I have since read things by people whom I trust, that make it believable. Terrible.)

The one argument against the guilt of the Russian government in trying to kill this man is this: the Russians have been moving heaven and earth trying to convince Western governments to treat them as a normal Great Power. This will be a HUGE setback to that effort. If the Russian government did it, it was a monumentally stupid thing to do. But I want more evidence.

The Russians I have seen interviewed on television don't seem bothered by it. If Edward Snowden was assassinated by the CIA, I suspect the American people would have the same reaction. But doing something like assassinating an American defector on Russian soil would be an enormous blow to the prestige of the Russian government, who would HAVE to retaliate. Who benefits from this?

Also: we can't rule out the possibility of people in the Russian intelligence services acting on their own initiative. Putin doesn't control everything. I have heard, second-hand, of a journalist (I think he was a journalist, perhaps an academic) who was planning to expose corruption somewhere in Russia [a very risky thing to do, it goes without saying], and who had the ear of Putin, who told him, "If you do this, I can't protect you."

What is maddening about this is that it's whipping up the nationalists on all sides, who are taking our attention away from Islamist terrorists, and China. Not that the latter is an enemy, but Russia, America, India, Europe need to be thinking very hard about how they will accommodate the growth of Chinese power.

 

I'm not the only one who doesn't want to 'rush to judgement' on the novichuk attack: Anyone who is seriously interested in this subject ought to read this.

 

Well, I'm pretty active on this topic arguing in the relevant topics of the forum But this is not a frequent case when I have almost nothing to say. Most of what I can say, Western forum participants say. This time the anti-Russian propaganda outplayed itself and issued such a monstrous fake that it angered even many Americans and Europeans who did not feed warm feelings to Russia.

 

A bit of Russian drum-n-bass to you

 

And a little classics in the subject. I hope that the analogy with the events of recent days is obvious

'There's more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,' said the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry; 'this paper has just been picked up.'

'What's in it?' said the Queen.

'I haven't opened it yet, said the White Rabbit, 'but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to — to somebody.'

'It must have been that,' said the King, 'unless it was written to nobody, which isn't usual, you know.'

'Who is it directed to?' said one of the jurymen.

'It isn't directed at all,' said the White Rabbit; 'in fact, there's nothing written on the OUTSIDE.' He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added 'It isn't a letter, after all: it's a set of verses.'

Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of they jurymen.

'No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, 'and that's the queerest thing about it.' (The jury all looked puzzled.)

'He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.)

'Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, 'I didn't write it, and they can't prove I did: there's no name signed at the end.'

'If you didn't sign it,' said the King, 'that only makes the matter worse. You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.'

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.

'That PROVES his guilt,' said the Queen.

It's a pun!' the King added in an offended tone, and everybody laughed, 'Let the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first — verdict afterwards.'

 

No proof is required.

There is no court of law we can take anyone to.

Some Russian spy got assassinated. What's new?
That's normal behaviour. How the Russians deal with things.

"Prove it. Prove it. Prove it."

This is not the playground.




Bottom line is, who gives a ****?
Russia says they are innocent until proven guilty.
Nuh uh.

They are guilty. Case dismissed.

What's to be done about it? Nothing much.