The FBI is warning people against using public USB chargers for their phones. Malicious devices are high-jacking phones or stealing passwords.
The AC power outlets are OK if you bring your own charging block. Or conceivably, one could use a USB cable that has the data transfer wires disabled. I was surprised to see that a quick search on Amazon or the web in general did not bring up any such cables for sale. Or one could make such a cable.
I wonder how secure the charging ports are on airplanes.
I started looking into the situation in Ukraine a couple of months ago after running across a Ukrainian separatist movement in the Donbas beginning about the same time Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In addition, Crimea, about the same time, briefly declared its independence from Ukraine. That lasted one day, before an agreement creating a somewhat autonomous Crimea was reached and Crimea remained part of Ukraine.
When talking about these events, other commenters usually dismissed these efforts as merely Russian meddling– usually ending with some reference to Putin.
I believe there was a legitimate claim in the Donbas and Crimea to declare their independence. Right now, the only mechanism for groups to separate is a shooting war. Massive destruction seems to be the only method.
If you looked at the Russian ethnicity in Ukraine, it’s highly concentrated east of the Dniepro River and Crimea. The voting patterns show a highly divided country when it came to relations with the EU.
Most claim the Russia-Ukraine war is to defend the “rules based order” in the West. They ignore Kosovo which was recognized, after being carved out by NATO interference– demonstrating that the “rules based order” is more flexible than admitted.
Why does this matter to us? There are analogies (not ethnically but ideologically) in the US. As traditional Judeo-Christian moral/legal framework is being dismantled by a deconstructionist/anarchist/totalitarian mindset, calls for a national divorce will continue to increase.
How can a national separation occur short of a bloody war. If you look at the way the federal military is scattered across the county– a red/blue split would potentially give each side the firepower to destroy the other.
Even split, the two parts would still likely have the largest militaries in the world.
It’s easy to dismiss any talk of a “national divorce” as pointless, since the cultural rot can’t be swept away. But it would allow the new parts to reset their core structures. Currently, any attempt to reform the judicial or education systems can’t happen– since federalism.
What brought this all up? An article recently that all the counties in Eastern Oregon have already held referendums to separate from Oregon and join Idaho. There is an underlying sentiment in Eastern Washington to create a new state called Liberty. Northern California has a seperatist movement. Much of the country doesn’t like the other.
If the “rules based order” were to create a mechanism to recognize separatist movements the world would no doubt become even more chaotic. So there would have to be an intricate set of rules to govern who would be eligible to break away.
What would be the threshold support?
Could a region buy their separation?
Yes, this is just frustrated speculation. Maybe the method the ancients used– Champion warfare would work.
Probably the best way to determine the outcome of a war, given our current technology, would be virtual warfare. Neutral judges would determine the military capabilities of a country, and a virtual war would ensue.
Losing country buys the winner drinks.
I do not think a split is really practical without uprooting millions of people. What happens when the liberal city is within a deep red state? It is possible that Irish democracy will happen. Just refusal to obey.
@Keto
I’ve seen that news story.
For all of the readers who haven’t seen this news story yet-
Sophia Rebecca, the dancer, is a real news story.
I’ve looked at some news sites, + apparently, Sophia Rebecca, a trans-woman in The UK, has joined a prestigious, Ballet school, in the UK.
So I wonder- Sophia Rebecca has gotten her in the door, and is now doing top level, ballet training- but in the entertainment world, what are her dancing career plans, after her ballet school?
Sophia stands about 6 foot…three inches, + Sophia’s visual look, is kind of like- a muscular armed, professional body builder.
After Sophia graduates from her ballet school, are the ballet companies going to hire her, to put her in their shows, and pay her to be a professional, ballet dancer? How will this go?
I’ve known people who’ve tried to make a living at professional acting, in venues like- in live theatre [plays], + in small-budget films.
My actor friends found- that if you don’t have the look that the play director wants, or if you don’t have a physical…voice that the directors want for a part, then you don’t get hired. Unfortunately, that is how the entertainment industry operates.
Will it work that- with her 6′ 3″ height, + her [large + muscular ] appearance, that she will get a lot of ballet roles, where she’ll look like- a delicate, elegant, and graceful, female dancer?
I admire Sophia’s ballet training, I wonder how many ballet companies, are looking to hire a female dancer, of her size and appearance.
I also wonder how many people who pay to go to ballet shows, will pay to see a female dancer, of her size and appearance, doing the roles that traditionally go to petite-looking women, and delicate looking women?
Usually, unfortunately- a person is only hired to be [a paid, professional, actor], or [a paid, professional ballet dancer], only if that person has the look, or sound- that the directors want to have in their film, or in their ballet show.
It will be interesting to see how Sophia Rebecca’s dancing career progresses, but- I wonder if ballet fans will want to pay to see her playing very feminine-looking…ballet roles or female…ballet characters, in classical, ballet shows.
I’m hoping that Sophia Rebecca gets every health and happiness that she desires, but- it looks doubtful that she’ll get a long career as a salaried, ballet dancer, or as a [paid, ballet dancer].
Unfortunately, like any other for-profit companies, ballet companies will only put on a show, if it is a salable or profitable show, that people will go to see, many times.
It will be interesting to see how Sophia;s story progresses.
I grew up in the railroad/meat packing nexus of K.C. – Armourdale. We had one kid die but mostly it was men and the deaths were pretty horrible. The worst I recall is a man caught between boxcar couplings.
Considering how much time we kids spent roaming those yards, it’s astounding there weren’t more deaths/injuries.
To lighten my post up, two incidents:
1) A gang of us were roaming on our bikes and stopped by the tracks under an overpass to rest. Apparently a conductor saw us and as the engine passed by he blew the horn. We *all* literally ran in circles screaming, we were so scared.
2) My brother roamed at night and in those days they still had rail yard dicks and those guys didn’t play.
One saw my brother and Joe Reppart (funny how you remember problem guys) in the yards and chased them. They jumped on the surrounding fence to escape and the guy unloaded a double barrel of rock salt at them.
My brother came home dancing and danced the rest of the night. Only hit by one grain but, honest truth, it hit him right in the rectum.
****
Don’t play in railroad yards.
TR–
Another question about the UK transgender ballet dancer has to do with finding male dancers tall enough to partner “her.” If “she” stands 6’3″, any dance company that hires “her” will have to recruit cisgender male basketball players to be credible partners– and basketball players aren’t exactly known for grace and delicacy in their movements on the court. IIRC, Neo has remarked in the past that many well-known male dancers weren’t/aren’t that tall: Nureyev was about 5’8″, Baryshnikov is 5’6″; Sophia Rebecca would tower over both of them.
Speaking of railroad yards. My Dad started a business in a small town that was going to have great potential because of a large reclamation project bringing water to the arid desert like environment in Eastern Washington.
The first four years we lived in the back of the store, which was across an alley from the train depot.
The station master’s family lived in the depot with two kids my age. Occasionally, we would ride the train to the next stop and then back, either in the engine or caboose. Good times.
Our playhouse was a large wooden packing crate. We played in it during the day, and the hobos slept in it at night.
Then there’s this shipwright fellow Pete Stein’s story (pick it up just prior to the 15 min mark in) about hoboing life catching trains; an hilarious gag he pulls on the viewers; and why he has “stumped” tattooed on his knuckles: https://youtu.be/mR5jwxJcEGc
Re: ballet
I’ve said it before and I always will, Ever since I saw Singing in the Rain Cyd Charisse has been my lifelong heart throb and ideal of a dancer, ballet or otherwise.
She defines sultry and as Debbie Reynolds said “She has legs from another galaxy.”
Enamored so much so that, I subconsciously modeled one of my main characters in my story series after her looks and character in Singing In the Rain. She’s featured on the cover of Deja Voös.
Once my heart finds a flame, it never extinguishes.
I believe there was a legitimate claim in the Donbas and Crimea to declare their independence.
==
You’re working hard on this. There is no indication that pan-Russian sentiment has been of consequence in the Ukraine at any time in the last 30 years and the Crimea is the only part of the country wherein self-identified Great Russians formed a majority of the population in 2012. (They were about 38% in Donetsk and Lukhansk). The 1991 independence referendum won a majority in every region and only in the Crimea did the ‘no’ vote exceed 20% of the total.
==
They ignore Kosovo which was recognized, after being carved out by NATO interference– demonstrating that the “rules based order” is more flexible than admitted. Why does this matter to us?
==
Yugoslavia had broken up into its component parts. There was no ‘rules-based order’ in Yugoslavia. Kosovo had, about four generations earlier, had a Serb plurality, but differential fertility and migration patterns had left the Serbs with about 10% of the population by 1987. The Serb government was escalatingly abusive to the Albanian majority in Kosovo and had spent three years running ethnic cleansing operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s not difficult to understand why NATO took action to end the conflict on terms unfavorable to Serbia. What was the surprise was that it was successful.
==
Note also there was no explicit or implicit threat to any party other than Serbia from the bombing campaign, whereas you had the lout foreign minister of Russia last year demanding that every country which entered NATO after 1997 be expelled. Understanding the difference between the two situations is not that difficult.
Brain E returns with the usual apologetics for the 2014 attempted dismemberment of Ukraine and somehow the 2008 invasion of Crimea is forgotten. But no Saint Yanukovitch, so that’s refreshing.
Cui bono in the Donbas, Luhansk, and Crimea? Its turned out, so far, not Vlad. Sad that so many have died for his vanity war.
I’ve said it before and I always will, Ever since I saw Singing in the Rain Cyd Charisse has been my lifelong heart throb and ideal of a dancer, ballet or otherwise.
Oligonicella:
I’m with you! I was never a dance/theatre/musical guy, but I was stunned by that Cyd Charisse / Gene Kelly number.
@Brian E
I started looking into the situation in Ukraine a couple of months ago after running across a Ukrainian separatist movement in the Donbas beginning about the same time Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
This is true.
In addition, Crimea, about the same time, briefly declared its independence from Ukraine. That lasted one day, before an agreement creating a somewhat autonomous Crimea was reached and Crimea remained part of Ukraine.
That I haven’t seen, though Crimea did vote to restore its autonomy and there was some complex legal maneuvering in the early 1990s (which often took on an overtly pro-Russian shade under Meshkov) including the adoption of a Crimean constitution incompatible with the Ukrainian one, but ultimately this petered out around the mid 1990s, especially due to Budapest 1994 and so on.
I’d also encourage caution. It’s already hard enough finding the truth in a media environment rife with propaganda, especially on a controversial topic too, but one of the sources you used previously (the Donbas Blog) I caught lying very, very blatantly about the Ukrainian Independence referendum, claiming it was about acknowledging whether an independence declaration had been made rather than whether to affirm it or not (apparently the author was relying on people having even less knowledge of Russian and Ukrainian language sources than I have). So it might be worth double-checking.
When talking about these events, other commenters usually dismissed these efforts as merely Russian meddling– usually ending with some reference to Putin.
Well, I’ve made my convictions and biases clear, but I did not. Indeed, I did acknowledge the prevalence of pro-Russian sentiment in Crimea and the Donbas going back to at least the 1990s if not 1980s, which Periodically rose up into support for outright separatism.
I also pointed out that it was actually the lack of Russian government support that largely doomed these efforts (assuming they weren’t already doomed from the start, as I honestly think the Donbas campaigns were). While it’s risky to extrapolate too much in this, we do have a fair few documents available from the Russian leadership in this time where they discuss and argue about Ukraine and the approach they should take to groups like the Crimean Autonomists and the pro-Russian campaigns in the Donbas, if they should be supported and if so to what end and degree.
But ultimately Moscow decided that it needed a rapprochement with Ukraine, especially on matters of trade (which was already proving to be an unholy nightmare for the post-Soviet Russian Government and which bluntly has never stopped) and nuclear security. Which is why Budapest 1994 is so important because it in effect saw Moscow hanging the would-be pro-Russian separatists and autonomists out to dry in a rather unmistakable fashion, and indicating it would not sanction a partition of the country.
This is PARTICULARLY important because it ran very counter to Russian government actions in Moldova and Georgia, where it outright supported separatism (even armed separatism) in those regions.
This is important because it took the wind out of the sails of the pro-Russian separatists and autonomists, since even the slowest among them realized they had little hope of obtaining what they wanted and had to reconcile themselves to politicking in Ukraine. Which is why around the time of the Budapest Memorandum and after it you see a number of auspicious signs for the Kyiv government, such as the fall of Meshkov’s government, the revision of the Crimean Constitution, and a collapse in polling for Donbas autonomy (let alone separatism).
Also, Putin isn’t particularly relevant to this period since during it he was a regional political figure with middling national importance as a pol and administrator in “Peter”/St. Petersburg.
I also think that this is important to understand because while this outlines that the separatist republics weren’t completely created out of whole cloth in contrast to say Manchukuo, there’s probably much, MUCH Less crossover between their current existence (as basically warlord states propped up by troops from the Kremlin) to this early flowering of it. Not none (especially since these remained generally pro-Russian areas, especially Crimea), but not enough to explain the outbreaks of the fighting in contrast to the now-openly-acknowledged deployment of Spetznaz to Crimea and the barely-disputed-by-Moscow deployment of them and contractniki to the Donbas in 2014.
This also I think plays a lot into how drastically overinflated the Novorossiyan Dream was. Apparently Putin seems to have believed these areas would welcome his troops and operatives with open arms and that a tide of revolution would sweep through in an arc from Sevastopol to Mariupol as soon as the loyalist military garrisons got attacked in 2014. That didn’t happen, and indeed part of me wonders if he would’ve had better luck trying to cultivate grass roots support while avoiding direct conflict with the Ukrainian Territorials and Regulars for as long as possible. But he didn’t, and the resistance by both Ukrainian Loyalist troops and the locals largely imploded the Novorossiyan Dream outside of Crimea (and even Crimea had to be run through a campaign of torture, censorship, and disappearances).
2022 saw another attempt at this, and while militarily the Kremlin now does have most of the territory it claimed to want for Novorossiya, it has to do it by essentially maintaining military occupation. A military occupation that is dealing with both pressure from the Ukrainian loyalists from without and guerilla campaigns from within.
In short, 2022 wasn’t 2014, and neither was 1994 or 1991. Even those that actually supported autonomy or union with Russia in 1994 would’ve had to deal with the disappointment of Moscow very transparently sending them up the river for its own strategic interests and being told to adjust as best they could, and while many of them either supported Yanukovych or opposed Euromaidan (and even then this wasn’t nearly as uniform as Kremlin propaganda and the like enjoys making it out) that didn’t mean they were in favor of being invaded and forcibly united to Russia.
Especially not when it happened in just about the worst possible way for them, as it happened in the Donbass: being placed under the power of utterly unaccountable, thoroughly corrupt, and extremely brutal mercenary warlords like Girkin, who proved to be unable to Administrate. I think one reason why the Donbaschukuos have remained significantly less popular and significantly more unstable than Crimea has not just been due to the heavy fighting there but also the fact that at least Crimea was taken over by the Russian government, using the established pro-Russian elements in the local government. This created a sense of normalcy and stability, since while I have caustic opinions on most of the Crimean Bureaucracy and legislature I can’t argue they had zero experience administering the region, and while the sine non qua of Crimean “union” has been the military occupation by the Kremlin’s troops and repression against dissident they could co-operate with the parts of the established bureaucracy and political sphere willing to collaborate.
It also probably helps that while Crimea was suffering problems even before 2014 economically it was in a much, Much better position economically than the Donbas Rust Belt.
I believe there was a legitimate claim in the Donbas and Crimea to declare their independence.
I agree.
Emphasis on WAS
But as I pointed out before, the momentum in favor of autonomy and especially separatism waned and then broke down in the early-mid 1990s as the Kremlin prioritized relations with Kyiv and things like the Nuke Transfer part of Budapest over supporting breakaways. Which is why trying to draw too straight of a line between the two moments starts running into massive problems very very quickly. This is especially true in the Donbas, where the heaviest fighting has taken place, since while Crimea at least reaffirmed its autonomy within the Ukrainian political landscape with Kyiv’s acceptance (albeit after significantly rewriting its constitution), the Donbas never had legal autonomy get serious traction before it broke down.
(Especially as Donbas businesses and politicians – of whom Yanukovych is just the most well known and infamous – realized they could exert significant influence as insiders within Kyiv itself, and autonomy of the kind adopted in Crimea and “proposed” with varying degrees of lethal violence in Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia would likely hurt their interests).
As for the more recent issue, I don’t think there’s too much to be said. The more recent 2014 “separatist referendums” did use some undetermined level of irritation and disenchantment with Euromaidan and the caretaker administration in Kyiv, but they ultimately are the product of violent Russian Federation military invasion and occupation. This was true in Crimea, and it sure as hell is true in the Donbas. Which in addition to being a hideous violation of international law and those of both Ukraine and Russia (remember how it’s illegal to have mercenaries in Russia? Pepperidge Farms remembers) also underlines the governments of both as ultimately illegitimate regimes propped up on bayonets and vote rigging.
Which is why they deserve the Stimson Doctrine treatment they have gotten.
Right now, the only mechanism for groups to separate is a shooting war. Massive destruction seems to be the only method.
This is post-hoc rationalization. The reason why “right now, the only mechanism for groups to separate is a shooting war” is BECAUSE the origins of 2014-now “separatism” in Ukraine was a violent invasion by the Russian Federation’s military and other affiliated proxy groups, which forced the locals to take a side and unsurprisingly (and correctly) resulted in Kyiv realizing that any legislative push for separatism would probably be a Kremlin orchestrated catspaw.
It didn’t HAVE to be this way. And perhaps without the introduction of Russian troops it might have gone; Crimea and the Donbas were not truly separatist prior to the occupation but they were generally dissatisfied with Kyiv and Ukrainian politics, and Crimea in particular would probably have made more pushes for autonomy (especially since it didn’t really have support for Yanukovych to fall back on). That might have led to a “Donbasmaidan” or the like similar to the Cold Civil Conflicts we saw in post-independence Ukraine up until 2014.
But for whatever reason, the Russian Government decided it would rather deploy Little Green Men with Guards Spetznaz equipment it claimed could be gotten from a Military Surplus Store to seize control of as much as could be seized while evicting or capturing Ukrainian garrisons and squashing dissent.
So here we are now, and I am under absolutely zero obligation to trust the postures or proclamations out of the occupation.
If you looked at the Russian ethnicity in Ukraine, it’s highly concentrated east of the Dniepro River and Crimea.
And as we’ve discussed ad infinitum, Russiah ethnicity and language are no surefire way to indicate whether or not the locals support pro-Russian politics, let alone “autonomy”, “separatism”, or the Russian military occupation. As I pointed out before, Right Sector has taken to enthusiastically recruiting Russophone, ethnic Russian Ukrainian Nationalist Neo-Fascists. So clearly just reading an ethnographic map is going to be a monumental mistake.
The voting patterns show a highly divided country when it came to relations with the EU.
This is true, but A: It has become MUCH less divided than it was before (just look at Kharkhiv, previously one of the bastions of the Blue Camp in Ukrainian politics), and B: Voting Patterns in peacetime are no guarantee of support for the “Novorossiyan” occupation and partition project now (again, Kharkhiv is a good example).
Even if one wants to make the argument that which side of the battle line one fell on was often a matter of chance or military maneuvering than deep seated ideological or political sympathies (as I think was likely the case), that was in 2014. The war has in one way or another been dragging on for just shy of a decade. And even back in 2014 the “Separatists” and their Russian support had to spend a great deal of time stomping holdouts in “their territory” (with inner city Donetsk and Luhansk being the most famous).
Most claim the Russia-Ukraine war is to defend the “rules based order” in the West. They ignore Kosovo which was recognized, after being carved out by NATO interference– demonstrating that the “rules based order” is more flexible than admitted.
Oh, do not start with me on Kosovo, Brian E.
Because it's a bad day when a thoroughly corrupt sewer of ethnonationalist terrorists turned inner city pols like the KLA are the lesser evil, but unfortunately in Kosovo that was very true.
Let's start with the fact that if we're going to talk about the "Rules-Based Order" let's start with a very basic fact about the Rules in Yugoslavia. There were none, or at a minimum very few. While Tito was decent by the standards of totalitarian dictators he was still a totalitarian dictator who intentionally cultivated a cult of personality and weak civil society and government in order to maintain his power. Worse, he was ruling over a region where "rule of law" had been weak for at least the past several hundred years (if it was ever strong there to begin with).
Which meant that when Tito croaked without any kind of recognized political heir, the mid-and-upper rank Communist Apparatchiks started squabbling for power on regional lines at the same time as reformists (not all of whom were GOOD) came up from the bottom. Which tore the place apart. This became particularly evident after Milosevic took power following an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" and began a policy of centralizing Yugoslav "laws" and ruling around Belgrade, including stripping the SRs of most of the autonomy they had.
This included Kosovo, especially since it was one of the youngest and weakest SRs (just gaining autonomy in the 1970s) and also a part of greater Serbian national sentiment, and with a large number of ethnic Serbs. Where Milosevic (bitterly and ironically) alleged that Tito had committed genocide against the Kosovar Serbs. So Milosevic rammed the bills through a pliant (and Serbian-dominated) Kosovo and Yugoslav Assemblies, and began following the tried and true Communist policies of getting out the batons and bullets to quash the protests.
But this escalated when Milosevic ordered the dissolution of the Kosovo Assembly on intentionally vague grounds, which resulted in most of the delegates striking out on their own and declaring Kosovo independent. Which helped take the previous tensions and violence into an actual war, as the Yugoslav government (in this area utterly dominated by Serbs) started going into a war footing, assorted guerillas and activists joining the proto-KLA, and paramilitaries on both sides began forming out of the woodwork. Made all the worse because both sides had already begun accusing each other of GENOCIDE even *before* either side had actually begun doing genocide.
Ironically it was the fact that the greater humanitarian catastrophes were breaking out to the North that helped make the atmosphere of repression and "soft" ethnic cleansing by the Serb authorities somewhat more manageable, since Milosevic had to struggle to fight the Bosnian Muslim and Croat governments coming out of the woodwork and try to impose his vision of a "pure" Serbia (complete with purging those Serbs who for whatever reason – largely tolerance of their neighbors, like at Vukovar – who did not comply), while the Kosovar Albanians recognized they could not hope to defeat the Yugoslav Military without NATO help and that too concentrated a resistance would just lead to the risk of Milosevic turning more of his troops around and going to flatten them. While Milosevic was focused on securing the bigger, more at risk prizes in Croatia and Bosnia (and preventing his clients in places like Krajina from getting too powerful) so that he could then secure the borders he wanted, dictate terms, and turn around to settle Kosovo. So the early and mid 1990s were in an atmosphere of repression, sectarian tension, and tit-for-tat violence but not act high intensity War as both sides basically waited and hoped the situation would get better for them.
As it turned out, Rugova, Jashari, and co won their bet. the mid 1990s saw the Serbian militaries losing steady ground as the Serbian war effort stalled outside Sarajevo and the Croat ports. NATO – steadily annoyed by their former ally's refusal to abide by agreements, use of mass murder and rape as tools, fear of his ties to Moscow and threats to a neutral Austria – began striking Serbian targets and (at least as importantly) financing and helping to train the Croat and Bosniak militaries while organizing a Shotgun Marriage between the two (which took some doing given their own bitter histories and how Tudjman had once talked with Milosevic about partitioning Bosnia). So 1994-1995 saw a series of utterly shattering defeats hit the Serbs, such as the Croatian "Operation Storm" Offensive. These shattered the Serbian troops out West and also began uprooting thousands upon thousands of Serbian civilians, who fled en masse East while Milosevic etc. al. began to try and get out of the war by signing Dayton.
So these campaigns had crippled Serbia's conventional military power and destabilized the "Yugoslav" government, but also triggered a humanitarian catastrophe that meant Belgrade would need to re-house thousands upon thousands of families as refugees from Bosnia and Croatia. With Kosovo being an obvious choice. To the Kosovar Albanian leadership, this was the best chance they would get, so they shifted from indirect resistance to guerilla operations (and in the case of many KLA operations, terrorist attacks). Milosevic, after getting humiliated in Bosnia and Croatia and having already embraced ethnic cleansing as core to his strategy, responded in much the way you'd expect, with NATO increasingly siding with the Albanians. This started out diplomatically (including a shameful in my opinion demand that the Serbs sign a ceasefire without a stop to terrorist activities), but moved on to military after it became clear Milosevic was up to his old tricks and that he couldn't be trusted to keep a peace. Which is what led to the bombing runs and ultimately the occupation. Which after years later led to the Kosovar declaration of independence.
I personally disagree with the recognition of it, but the attempt to use this as a "Gotcha" to try and justify the invasions of Crimea and Donbas are – to put it mildly- a load of crap. The closer of the two examples to Kosovo is Crimea, which saw significant members of the pre-war Crimean government align with the occupation force and declare first secession and then union with Russia (as opposed to in the Donbas, where the occupation regimes were mostly created out of whole cloth and held together with duct tape). However, even this starts to break down when you realize that the Ukrainian government had not taken steps to suppress Crimean legal autonomy or the rights of the locals there. Milosevic HAD done so as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, including forcibly dissolving its legislative assembly and imposing martial law on the region.
And the first "disappearances" in the area were those opposed to the Kremlin and its agenda. And that's before I get into the measures to try and undermine Ukrainian culture and identity by the occupation regimes, including much more draconian measures to stamp out Ukrainian language instruction than the Ukrainian Government has been criticized for re: Russian languages. Moreover, NATO deployed to Kosovo in response to years of brutal government oppression and sectarian conflict; that was not the case in Crimea or the Donbas where Russian military forces entered either to spark said conflicts or immediately after them (depending on how we interpret it). So on almost every single level, the attempt to play the "Whatabout Kosovo?" game falls flat on closer inspection.
So if I'm feeling generous, the closer comparison to the "Crimean Republic" would be Serbian Krajina, a breakaway separatist regime and patron of a larger, authoritarian government composed of much of the pre-existing leadership but who are engaged in a brutal cultural crackdown. While the DNR and LNR are outright artificial occupation regimes roughly comparable to those the Japanese established through much of China, devoid of any legitimacy beyond extremely minimal appeals to regional autonomy and interests (which are undermined by the nature of the occupation).
The "Rules-based international order" has always recognized the right of self-determination as a core concept (even if in practice it has not always honored it), and egregious abuse by the central authority is a recognized reason for that. In contrast, even the Russian Government no longer denies it deployed Russian military forces to Crimea in order to "secure the peninsula" and its "secession" in a referendum that could be generously referred to as "unfair", while in Donbas outright coordinated assaults and seizure of power began in a manner even more egregious than the narratives about Euromaidan being a Coup (since even if Yanukovych's removal was a coup, it was one carried out by the duly elected Rada as well as whatever Maidanites – peaceful and paramilitary- were on the street, not by foreign Little Green Men and assorted paramilitaries launching first strikes on military facilities).
Why does this matter to us? There are analogies (not ethnically but ideologically) in the US. As traditional Judeo-Christian moral/legal framework is being dismantled by a deconstructionist/anarchist/totalitarian mindset, calls for a national divorce will continue to increase.
If we are going to discuss Judeo-Christian moral and legal frameworks, it is important to acknowledge a couple things.
Thou Shalt Not Murder. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Thou Shalt Not Covet (ie desire to take that what is one’s neighbors). These are foundational to even secularized and agnostic takes on Judeo-Christian society, and underline how unjustly taking what someone else has is forbidden by the will of God. It does not take a genius to recognize that the Kremlin and its vassals have been egregiously guilty of all of the above and more, and are overly reliant on mangling both the law and chronology to justify it.
How can a national separation occur short of a bloody war.
Ask the Czechs and Slovaks and their Velvet Divorce. It CAN happen, and indeed HAS Happened. The issue is that it relies upon a significant amount of goodwill, practicality, and willingness to compromise on both sides. Which is why talks about a national divorce, I find, are largely missing the forest for the sake of the trees. I am opposed to a “National Divorce” on practical as well as ideological grounds, but I am more than willing to hear out those who advocate for it and will not crucify them for being “Neo-Confederates” or the like.
But in the absence of basic respect for human liberty and practicalities, attempts at a National Divorce or even attempts to reassert local rights will not end like the Velvet Divorce in Czechoslovakia or even in the successful negotiations regarding Crimea in the 1990s. They will end up like Kosovo in the 1990s.
Which makes dealing with the totalitarian, power-grasping mindset and approaches more vital. It also calls for cultivating allies and those who will either support us or reject appeals by the would be corrupt and aoppressive to squash us.
If you look at the way the federal military is scattered across the county– a red/blue split would potentially give each side the firepower to destroy the other.
Indeed, and that’s always been the case. In part due to intent since at least the Civil War if not the War of 1812, and as was the case in the breakup of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
Even split, the two parts would still likely have the largest militaries in the world.
They’d be up there but both would almost certainly downsize both due to whatever fighting gets on and how a lot of the crucial support nodes get broken in a divorce and there’s a need to cut people who are “Surplus to Requirements/potential to support”, whether because they are suspect, or because there simply aren’t enough resources to go around.
It’s easy to dismiss any talk of a “national divorce” as pointless, since the cultural rot can’t be swept away. But it would allow the new parts to reset their core structures. Currently, any attempt to reform the judicial or education systems can’t happen– since federalism.
I disagree and am SOMEWHAT more optimistic, especially since Federalism does in fact allow attempts to reform judicial and educational systems. Many of the reasons to support DeSantis came from this. Though the issue is that only can go so far as the Left’s power and forbearance will permit. And since their latter has been shown to be near nonexistent, that leaves us the former and the question of limiting it, especially after 2020.
What brought this all up? An article recently that all the counties in Eastern Oregon have already held referendums to separate from Oregon and join Idaho. There is an underlying sentiment in Eastern Washington to create a new state called Liberty. Northern California has a seperatist movement. Much of the country doesn’t like the other.
Indeed, and I support those efforts on the whole, and believe they have great potential to help fix much that is broken with the US or at least help set the stage. I also trust they will be committed fairly freely and without the sudden deployment of Guards Spetznaz or PLA or UN Peacekeepers into the region just before crucial votes. The bigger issue I see is how many of the established US States, as long as the Union hold, have a certain incentive to play the OAN and oppose breakaways out of communal interest and appeals to stability.
But in any case, I do not see how smoothing out the bloody, jagged fangs of Milosevic or Putin help the cause of Cascadia, Liberty, Jefferson, or us as a whole. In particular since Milosevic played a part much closer to that of a hypothetical Biden Regime going full repression mode and seeking to stomp on the rights of those seeking a peaceful divorce, and Putin violently intervened to squelch dissent and then try to pry parts off. It is why in spite of having little theoretical or principle opposition to an independent or Russian Crimea and Donbas, I am so unmoving about them now. I have many issues with Stimson, but his doctrine was well considered (and could be used as a template by other nations for use on the US if we ever tried to pull another Panama Secession) and covers exactly these kinds of situations.
Moreover, Lavrov and Kadyrov’s threats not just to the very existence of Ukraine and its people but also to others such as Moldova (whom I note was and is a neutral, non-NATO country) belie the attempts to make this about the rights of Crimea and the Donbas (as if those rights were not squelched by military occupation and vote rigging).
The difference between Putin and myself on the Donbas and Crimea is that I’d be willing to respect a legitimate vote in Crimea and the Donbas that turned out the opposite of what I’d “prefer.” Which is probably why Putin has worked so hard to avoid any such vote from taking place outside of extremely choreographed shows.
@Brian E Part 2
If the “rules based order” were to create a mechanism to recognize separatist movements the world would no doubt become even more chaotic. So there would have to be an intricate set of rules to govern who would be eligible to break away.
There already is a mechanism to do so, and it isn’t substantially different from the mechanism to recognize any new country or government. Which is why to a large extent there is an element of Mad Libs, Improv, and naked Self-Interest involved in it. But East Timor and South Sudan didn’t come out of nowhere, nor did diplomatic recognition for them.
What would be the threshold support?
Could a region buy their separation?
Good question, and that depends. Indeed more than a few polities and societies have indeed bought separation (though it was more typical in the Medieval and Renaissance era). But I’d submit that one cause would be a lack of compulsion in votes to determine secession, as well as diplomatic limits on how many foreign troops and from whom can oversee.
Yes, this is just frustrated speculation. Maybe the method the ancients used– Champion warfare would work.
Probably the best way to determine the outcome of a war, given our current technology, would be virtual warfare.
Perhaps for the technologically savvy, but many others do not.
Neutral judges would determine the military capabilities of a country, and a virtual war would ensue.
Losing country buys the winner drinks.
It’d be nice, but that incentivizes lying on military capabilities (even more than they already are, which is plenty, since there’s much risk of it being tested). And we have things somewhat close to that in the form of normal diplomatic wrangling and nonlethal saber rattling.
I happened to think of Cyd Charisse / Gene Kelly this morning.
My niece had sent me a remarkable animation she had downloaded from TikTok (while noting it was usually a “garbage site”) that had been the collaboration of Disney with Salvador Dali!
It was titled “Destino” (Destiny) and it had never been released, It shows a beautiful long-limbed woman in a flowing diaphanous gown dancing in a mostly empty landscape with some Daliesque scenery. She meets her male partner who seems to be a baseball player. It’s supposed to be based on the love of Chronos (Time) for a mortal woman.
It’s a perfect synthesis of Dali and Disney. I googled for a link, not wanting to rely on Tik-Tok, and found this:
Ray E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, had found the earlier work which had been abandoned in 1949. He put together a team which finished it with traditional animation and some computer animation. The result was released in 2003.
Someone added a Pink Floyd sound track, based fittingly on their song, “Time,” which replaced Disney’s. IMO it works, but it can be muted.
Outstanding.
I didn’t have that kind of mobility until I was 12. While I could run around the neighborhood @10, i had boundaries that were not excessively far from home, and certainly would not have climbed into/onto a random train. :-/
Turtler,
Someone on another thread commented, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
Actually I’m not trying to win anything, and I obviously didn’t do a very good job making it clear I wasn’t trying to re-argue the issues in Ukraine, but point to the need to find a “rules based order” for separation, since we’re going to need it in this country. The level of propaganda and lies that have become standard fare in what passes for journalism is only growing exponentially (or at least geometrically).
Case in point, the ferocity of the attacks on Judge Thomas. They think they’ve found a narrative and they’re going to use it to justify packing the court if the left takes back the House in 2024.
You bring up the velvet divorce of Czech Republic and Slovakia, which was a mutual decision. But in the case of Ukraine, both the Donbas and Crimea held referendums– which weren’t recognized as legitimate in the “rules based order” of the West, since the Ukraine constitution requires the entire country to vote, which wasn’t going to happen (and even if it did, Western Ukraine wouldn’t have allowed those regions to secede).
I only brought up Kosovo, not to imply any connection to Ukraine or moral judgment on the participants (except our bombing campaign), but to point out that Kosovo’s declared independence was accepted by the West, even though Serbia objected and refused to recognize it. The “rules based order” the US and EU are trying to defend is in reality whatever the US and the West say it is.
As to the US having a cordial separation, that will never happen. In the case of Oregon or California– the leftist holding hostage will never agree to that or in the case of the State of Liberty seceding from Western Washington.
I saw this interview with David Sacks recently. His conclusions about Ukraine are similar to mine.
This is a snippet from my introduction to Déjà Voös describing Voös and her relationship to my lead guy and just when I realized I’d confiscated that vixen for my story. Link added to its text.
***
The clip is of her first dance with Gene Kelly in Singin’ In the Rain. Find the right clip or watch that dance in the movie and right there at 30 seconds or so into the scene, in comes Voös.
As soon as I watched the clip, I knew. I remembered being awestruck by that dance since I was around seven or eight and being enthralled by the woman just as long.
I distinctly remember one particular moment and one particular look on Cyd’s face that has been my subconscious (until now) foundation for everything that is Enveòglersécævoös.
If you watch the clip, you’ll see it, and if you understand Voös as I’ve written her, you’ll even know the moment.
***
What smoldering affection.
I just rewatched the whole movie. Sigh.
Huxley: The poster of the Time version of Destino has a link to the original version in the “see more” right under it.
I appreciate that original score, but it has a very very 40s/50s feel to it, which makes it feel very dated. The … ahhhh… “timelessness” of “Time” — seems much more fitting even without the subject contrast.
R.I.P. Al Jaffee, “Mad” Magazine. 4/10/23
*Sigh* I’ll note that I have been making the case for the last 2-3 decades now that the model for the future is not the models we’ve been used to, and using, for the last 1000 odd years.
The first economy was an Agricultural Economy. It expressed its final form in the Feudal model — with Food and Farming as the product and the engine/creator of the product, and the Feudal Enclave (e.g., “castle”) as the central organizing principle, and the primary decisionmaker the Lords and Ladies of the region. Note that this model is inherently hierarchical.
The second economy was the Industrial Economy. It expressed its final form as the Corporate model — with Goods and Factories as the product and the engine/creator, and the Corporation as the central organizing principle, with the primary decisionmaker in the CEOs and Presidents of the corporations. Note that this model, too, is inherently hierarchical.
Now we have entered what, in the 60s and 70s was referred to as the “PostIndustrial” Economy, which we now realize is an “IP and Services” Economy — with (duh) IP and Services as the product and a lot more not particularly well understood, such as the ideal “engine/creator” for the two things, and no clear “central organizing principle”, e.g. the collective body that is ideal for accomplishing/producing the product. And since we don’t know that, it’s difficult to decide who, if anyone, is the “central decisionmaker”.
I assert that IP & Services are very very very dependent on information flow. It’s a much quicker, far more nimble environment to operate in, and hence a hierarchy is a crappy basis for the engine to operate on. A single path up and then back down, for info to flow from the possessor to the one who needs it is a bad setup, prone to blockage. What is called for is a network of pathways for information to get from A to B in any organization or structure.
I assert also, from this, that the operating engine is going to be far far smaller and much more nimble/less rigid than we have been used to. An IP&S Economy is inherently a complex of much smaller entities (My own term is “kith”, for reasons I won’t go into) and rejects the strictures of a hierarchy.
This includes governments and nations — It follows from this that perhaps the future is not the world of nations we’ve been used to, but a much more highly fragmented collection of operatives — think classical “city-states” — rather than the big honkin’ nations we think of as the norm.
There are two reasons for this —
1 — it’s a lot easier to keep governments responsive to the needs and requirements of their citizens, as well as much more under control of their citizens. And a lot less opportunities for abuse of and misapplication of governmental power.
2 — with increased energy available at the citizen level, you are simple going to have more aberrant individuals acting in aberrant ways. And “nations” make big targets with lots of enemies for those aberrant individuals/groups.
Imagine if the USA could no longer be called “The Great Satan” by our enemies and they instead had to deal with 25 “lesser Satans” comprised of our subsets…? Who do they attack?
Note that this in no regard rejects the idea of alignment, treaty, and other loose organizational bodies towards specific ends. Think NATO, rather than EU. The same could happen if the USA broke down into 5, 10, 15 “state groups” which applied some variation of the US Constitution. Let the Lefties create their own hellholes, and stop trying to drag the rest of us down that oubliette. And we Libertarians and Conservatives can find common ground and create plenty of free zones with far less regulation (and yeah, I’m sure some of the religious element will try and create their own overly regimented religious version of a hellhole). As long as people are allowed to “vote with their feet” to join a different city-state-nation, humans will find solutions they approve of.
But I do strongly suspect that the future does not lie with Big Anything — Not Big Business, Big Labor, OR Big Government. No Big Nations, either. The only way those can remain is — yes, Big Brother.
Oligonicella:
I forgot that first Charisse / Kelly number! Thanks for reminding me.
Not to mention Charisse had a look, un coup d’oeil, which could pin one to the wall.
She did have legs from “another galaxy.”
OBloodyHell:
Thanks for viewing the Dali/Disney collab. I agree that Pink Floyd came through on that one.
Since AesopFan credits the blog with providing French lessons, which must mean moi, here’s a cute bit.
In the French Harry Potter I discover a zoo director has:
[il] se confondit en excuses.
Which in my literal French translates as:
[he] confused himself in excuses.
But the original Potter English was:
[he] apologized over and over again.
The French idiom (I presume) says the quiet part out loud.
Oligonicella and Huxley: try this, from “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955):
OBH: I didn’t know Al Jaffee grew up in Lithuania with his mother. Good thing he returned to the States before the war. Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and my favorite “Mad” artist, Wally Wood. Genius, especially the strips from the early and mid-1950s. Deeply subversive stuff.
Any who think there can be national divorce can please explain how they think the nukes will be divided because no one in their right mind will give them up now.
Brian E:
David Sacks, another PayPal mogul. Five months on and one word answers back, Events. Events haven’t played out as expected. Ukraine has a say despite what the moguls and billionaires may want. Poor Vlad, he chose poorly.
Time will tell,
Chases Eagles:
Well giving up their Soviet legacy nukes worked out for Ukraine? Not so much it seems? Couldn’t really afford to protect them from rouge non-state actors. And they had security guarantees. A bear guarding the flock.
Ukraine didn’t have to fear Poland, or Hungary, or Romania, or Moldova (except Transnistria maybe), but Belarussia (Belarus) and Russia proved to be another kettle of caviar. Not that being subjugated by Russia for centuries was predictive of future aggression. Not at all. Completely unexpected.
Re: Cyd Charisse
Hubert:
Thanks. Brilliant stuff I hadn’t seen.
Charisse had her day in the sun, compared to most, but I do wonder why she didn’t crack the next level.
Hubert:
Yep, not a style she couldn’t do and hypnotize doing it.
In an interview she said her favorite partners were Kelly and Astair. She said her husband always knew which she had worked with at the studio because when it was Kelly, she had bruises. Heh. You can kind of see that in that number I linked. Also a great example of that “glance”. It would be intimidating albeit great to be on the receiving end of that.
Turtler,
You said you weren’t aware the Crimea Rada voted for complete independence from Ukraine. Here is an article verifying that. It’s also on the Wikipedia article on Crimea.
Also, you’re skeptical of the Donbas Insider article– but notice this Marquette University article notes that many Russian speaking people thought there would be another vote to reunite with a non-communist Russia.
Ethnic Russian Ukrainians did support the Ukraine independence based on polling data at the time, but other than Crimea, they didn’t indicate the support in the Donbas.
“Polling data at the time also suggested that more than 55% of ethnic Russians in Ukraine supported the decision to leave the Soviet Union.”
“However, in Crimea, the percentage of “yes” votes was only 37% of total voters, and in Sevastopol, it was just 40%. Moreover, it has been argued that many of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who voted for independence believed that they were voting to abolish the Soviet Union, which would be followed by some sort of reunification with a non-Communist Russia.”
“Almost immediately after independence, the Crimean parliament sought to assert its autonomy, going so far as to declare its independence on May 5, 1992, only to retract that declaration the following day. On May 6, the newly adopted (in Crimea) Crimean Constitution was amended to identify Crimea as part of Ukraine (albeit a highly autonomous part). In June of 1992, the Ukrainian parliament recognized Crimea’s status as an “Autonomous Republic” under the Ukrainian Constitution, but the controversy of the scope of the powers of the Crimean government was not resolved until December 23, 1998, when the Verkhovna Rada accepted a new, less ambitious constitution that had been adopted in Crimea two months earlier.”
Someone on another thread commented, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
And I responded to them there. At best that is partially true. The truth is that explanations often have utility, ESPECIALLY when it comes to pinning someone down to a stance and making them justify it to see if they can (as I pointed out with Bauxite with his fixation on Trump and a particularly ill-considered analogy that I gladly leapt on and used as my own). Just about everyone has parts of their psyche that are not rational or logical, and for many if not most people that is more powerful than their logic. Which is one reason why appeals that short-circuit their rationality and thinking to hit in their heart are so powerful.
But that’s not everybody, and even many of those can be convinced. Which is one reason why it is useful to maintain a balanced set of appeals and messages. Including explanation.
My explanations are rather cumbersome and long, it is true, but they seem to be quite effective within the context of this blog. And while I would wager the people on this blog are more knowledgeable and politically aware than most (and Neo talking about manipulation and encouraging people to think through appeals helps), it still is a matter.
Actually I’m not trying to win anything, and I obviously didn’t do a very good job making it clear I wasn’t trying to re-argue the issues in Ukraine, but point to the need to find a “rules based order” for separation, since we’re going to need it in this country.
Fair, but honestly that isn’t too hard. It has happened many times in the past, as East Timor and South Sudan attest. In general the “Rules Based International Order” (for all of its myriad hypocrisies and failures) is generally not opposed to secession where it is done by the consent of both parties (preferably peacefully, but sometimes not as in the massively bloody freakshow that was the Partition of India in 1947). It also generally recognizes oppression, brutality, and unjust treatment as a valid reason for separatism (even if armed), as we saw with East Timor and to a lesser extent Kosovo.
The big issue I see is that this is rarely popular, and the Woke or other anti-Western authoritarians are in control of many of the Great Powers, which means that if the likes of Jefferson have to start getting out guns to defeat oppression from Biden’s puppetmasters, the vaunted “International Community” will not do much to help us and might actively support the state against us.
But that’s a matter of practicality. As a matter of law or “rules” secession is totally kosher in theory and has even had several successful practices in recent history. Which is why at least for the most part I am more concerned with leftist backlash and retaliation against it at home than abroad. Especially given how the Left loves to shift the blame and accuse us of being Confederates and how secession at least superficially resembles that. Which is another reason why I would oppose initiating separation even if it is inevitable, since the last people to hold the symbolic and legal ties to “The Old Country” will have an advantage.
It was probably a minor reason why CHAZ and its kin imploded so catastrophically.
The level of propaganda and lies that have become standard fare in what passes for journalism is only growing exponentially (or at least geometrically). Case in point, the ferocity of the attacks on Judge Thomas. They think they’ve found a narrative and they’re going to use it to justify packing the court if the left takes back the House in 2024.
Absolutely agreed. And it is telling that there’s less pushback on it in comparison to how even FDR got flak for it. But I also feel that is a consequence of not pushing back more strongly. In many ways I do think the right has largely been playing to hold ground for nearly a century and playing the “Gentleman’s Game”, such as with Nixon re: JFK and Chicago. And that’s ultimately helped lead there.
You bring up the velvet divorce of Czech Republic and Slovakia, which was a mutual decision.
Indeed, but I think it is worth noting in terms of concern about how secession plays under the current “rules based international order”, and it is one of the most clearcut and textbook examples of it. To the point I’d argue it is almost a fairytale example far on one side of the scale and few situations are that amicable. But it’s also textbook because textbook, clearcut cases are often the best to establish general principles and see how events interact with the law (hence why textbooks usually start us out with fairly simple situations and then gradually scale them up in complexity).
But in the case of Ukraine, both the Donbas and Crimea held referendums– which weren’t recognized as legitimate in the “rules based order” of the West, since the Ukraine constitution requires the entire country to vote, which wasn’t going to happen (and even if it did, Western Ukraine wouldn’t have allowed those regions to secede).
This is flipping the situation on its head. Various Ukrainian governments have generally allowed the Donbas Oblasts and Crimea (or entities within them) to hold referendums on various scales and levels and have usually worked through their results (though in a few cases like Crimea they overrode them by citing the Constitution). This was the great success of the various Ukrainian governments in the crises of the early and mid 1990s (and probably a salutary lesson to what pan-Russian sentiment remained and the Kremlin about the likely outcomes).
The reason the “rules-based international order”, even among nations otherwise friendly to or sympathetic for the Kremlin, did not recognize these referenda is simple.
A: Self-Interest. Many countries (including the West) bluntly opposed Russian dominance in many aspects, especially Putin after 2008, and opposed them on that. Many other nations did not care particularly one way or the other but did not want to jump on the boat in the face of such strong and powerful opposition.
B: Legitimacy. The reason why the referendums are not taken seriously on a legal matter (including by myself) is because they were fundamentally illegitimate. They were conducted in the face of a thoroughly illegal foreign occupation, under conditions that make mockery of the kinds of conditions legitimate plebiscites are supposed to occur under, with occupation regimes that were horribly authoritarian from the start and apparently had begun lethally disappearing or executing people very early on even before the referendums.
As such, they are violations of not just the Ukrainian Constitution and a host of international agreements and international law, but also basic human dignity and common sense on a scale at least as grand as anything either side did in Euromaidan and almost certainly worse (especially in terms of a strategic simulation).
As such, I believe invoking the Stimson Doctrine and rejecting recognition of these entities is both the proper ethical course of action and also fully pragmatic for American interests. And indeed it is the conclusion made by many powers, even other neutral ones or those positioned as strategic partners of Russia (such as India and even Moscow’s main ally the PRC). I see no more reason to acknowledge their supposed legitimacy because of rigged referendums than I see to claim Manchukuo or the Nazi puppet “First Slovak Republic” were such. And that latter part is noteworthy because while Manchukuo was always rather thinly based on a general desire for autonomy and feeling of regional identity (which the Japanese occupation systematically violated anyway) and was mostly constructed wholesale, Slovakia had been legitimately frustrated with the union and saw Slovak separatist sentiment emerge as a minority but very real force in politics, even disconnected from the manipulations of the Third Reich and its Hungarian allies. But that didn’t mean that the regime itself wasn’t a farcical Nazi dictatorship where Hitler foisted a dictator on the country and demanded it comply with German terms. Likewise why the Ukrainian government has no reason to recognize regimes that are inherently hostile to it (and which wasted no time attacking its loyalists and military troops even in their barracks) and which were constituted illegally and illegitimately. And honestly from the Ukrainian Loyalist POV the illegitimacy and illegality is frankly the cherry on top; there’s much less dispute that the Confederate movement in 1860-1 represented a fairly authentic and popular movement by not just the Planter Lords that controlled it but also the people of those states, but that didn’t stop Lincoln from dropping the hammer militarily when they attacked Federal troops at Fort Sumter (and even rejected a last ditch attempt by the habitually pro-Southern, Native-to-the-South CO of that fort to have a diplomatic outcome).
If anything, the proto-Confederate legislatures had much more confidence in their legitimacy and popularity because they were willing to have more or less fair votes according to their state laws and to let the diplomatic crisis simmer for months before growing frustrated or overconfident enough.
It also contrasts sharply with Kosovo, where for better or worse (and I’d increasingly argue worse) the KLA and Kosovo Government could credibly claim descent from the legally recognized (to the extent “laws” matter in a totalitarian communist dictatorship) Kosovo Assembly that Milosevic had first neutered and then disbanded on the thinnest of pretexts, and both were active well before NATO intervened openly. And in many ways Kosovo is a more peaceful mirror image of the Donbaschukuos, being a formerly single party state run by corrupt former warlords, albeit ones that have been forced to recognize that pushing for annexation into a Greater Albania is not practical and neither is expelling all Serbs.
I could write quite a lot about the dismal state of Kosovo for the past century or so, and I do *not* have a good opinion of the KLA or much of the Kosovo government and indeed I could criticize NATO and other Western actors heartily on much that they did, and maybe I will later. But in pretty much every index one can choose Kosovo compares favorably to the Russian occupation gov’ts in Crimea and the Donbas.
I only brought up Kosovo, not to imply any connection to Ukraine or moral judgment on the participants (except our bombing campaign),
Fair, though honestly I support the bombing campaign with conditions. I do believe it fair to question the nature of our interests in Yugoslavia (even if I must personally, grudgingly agree with Bubba Clinton and his shysters that having a murderously genocidal dictatorship in power in Serbia was both a humanitarian fiasco and unwelcome to our interests, even if it was allied with us as Milosevic was at the start of the 1990s), but retaliatory bombing for ethnic cleansing fits. It also is worth noting that as controversial as the NATO bombing campaign is, the previous “Yugoslav” bombing campaigns have largely dropped down the memory hole in spite of their prominence at the time and how the Serb-dominated air force if anything acted more brutally and indiscriminately than we did (such as attempting to assassinate Tudjman and a great deal of the civilian Croat leadership with a failed bombing campaign at Banski Dvori, something with no analogue in the NATO ROE). I do think stomping on Serbian aviation assets and hitting its military and strategic infrastructure was a welcome corrective, not unlike the No Fly Zones over Saddam’s Iraq, though I do think a lot of the execution was botched (though not as bad as Clark nearly starting WWIII over an avoidable conflict with Russian peacekeepers on an airfield).
(I should also note that this does not mean I favor a No Fly Zone being imposed over Ukraine; while morally and legally I can support it on a practical level it is thoroughly unworkable and more likely to cause catastrophe, such as a new world war.)
but to point out that Kosovo’s declared independence was accepted by the West, even though Serbia objected and refused to recognize it.
I actually am leery at best about “the West” and others choosing to jump on the bandwagon of that so quickly and can even argue it was a practical mistake and legally dubious. However, as much as I oppose it I oppose the attempts to conflate it with the armed takeover and thin referendums even more.
The fact is that the Kosovo Declaration was conducted years after the end of large scale military and sectarian combat, though Kosovo remains unstable and suffers from plenty of communal violence (now with the Kosovar Albanians largely the abuses, like we saw in the March Pogrom). It was also done by the at-least-officially legally constituted government after years of negotiation with Serbia, Russia, and others fell through, and while it did lead to (often justifiable) anger from the local Serbs and abuses by Albanians the peacekepers stepped in to mostly clean house even-handedly, and years more negotiations followed where the anti-separatist assembly were recognized and re-integrated into the government and both Belgrade and Pristina had to make concessions (and a good portion of the traditional Serb heritage of Kosovo has been placed under guard).
There’s a lot wrong with this, and even more wrong earlier, but it is a far cry from a Fly-by-Night military takeover and referendum held at gunpoint during an active combat, while inner city Donetsk and Luhansk were still under fighting. And while we can criticize “The West” for a lot and recognizing this in my opinion prematurely, it did not force the issue with a military occupation (indeed, the occupation had been going on for years by the time it happened, and if we wished to draw a parallel it would be closer to Transnistria or the inner Georgian separatist states).
The “rules based order” the US and EU are trying to defend is in reality whatever the US and the West say it is.
There are two issues with this.
Firstly: It simply isn’t true. The US and others in the West have had to eat crow a good portion of the time, ESPECIALLY about things like East Timor, and while it’d be a lie for me to say the US and other powerful countries do not manipulate the situations to minimize damage to themselves (Such as the US refusing to put its people under the Hague’s jurisdiction), we are more consistent.
Moreover, these rules are appealing not just to “The West” but also to a host of others, such as India (which one might argue is a Western country), OAN, and others. And indeed even to Russia, at least when it isn’t explicitly in contradiction to its interests.
Secondly: Even if this were true I, as an American Patriot, would still find it to be MUCH more welcome and preferable to a situation or order based on whatever the likes of Xi, Putin, or the Ayatollah say it is. Especially since they are at least as given to hypocrisy and self-interest as the West is but are also enemies of my country and truly vile dictators on their merits.
In short, there is still a quantifiable difference between a widely-boycotted-but-well-observed referendum done by a dodgy and corrupt but nominally democratic government during a time of uneasy peace in response to failed negotiations, and a fly-by-night referendum enforced by bayonets and made a sham of while in many cases fighting and protests ravaged the place.
We can and should criticize the “quality” of governance in Kosovo and the West’s indulgence of it, but that doesn’t actually help or justify the Kremlin’s actions in Crimea and the Donbas. If anything, it makes them WORSE precisely because the Kremlin has absolutely no consistency between its stance on Kosovo and its stances on Crimea and Donbas besides “they’re our guys, so what we say go.” Even the West’s stance on Kosovo- for all of its MANY problems – is not that thin or threadbare.
As to the US having a cordial separation, that will never happen. In the case of Oregon or California– the leftist holding hostage will never agree to that or in the case of the State of Liberty seceding from Western Washington.
Unfortunately agreed, as things go now, though I imagine there might be a chance with enough painful but peaceful standoffs. Though I certainly have been wrong and overly optimistic before.
I saw this interview with David Sacks recently. His conclusions about Ukraine are similar to mine.
David Sacks: Ukraine is turning into Woke War III
Thanks for the link. I’m watching it and will give my thoughts more later, after I reply to the other post.
You said you weren’t aware the Crimea Rada voted for complete independence from Ukraine. Here is an article verifying that. It’s also on the Wikipedia article on Crimea.
Thanks for the evidence, and that’s what I thought it might be. That it did happen but it was quickly retracted as a result of negotiations. And that does fit with my basic stance that Crimea has been and remains the most pro-Russian of the regions internationally recognized as Ukrainian (excepting maybe some parts on the very Eastern borders).
Also, you’re skeptical of the Donbas Insider article–
I’m more than skeptical of it, the Donbas Insider article was blatantly lying about the wording and nature of the independence referendum, trying to argue that the voters in the Donbas were “tricked” about the vote acknowledging an independence declaration was made rather than whether they supported it or not. Not only does the wording (*stated by the article itself*) not support that, it also would require believing the public was ignorant about the results elsewhere in Ukraine and in similar votes through former Soviet space.
Which makes the rest of it immediately suspect at best. That doesn’t mean everything they wrote is wrong (I’m not going to believe that saltwater is healthy to drink just because Putin says it isn’t) but it does mean I’m under no obligation to believe they are being honest or even acting from a position of goodwill.
but notice this Marquette University article notes that many Russian speaking people thought there would be another vote to reunite with a non-communist Russia.
Indeed, and that makes a lot of sense. Especially given the trajectory of Crimean politics during that period and after it, when it had a mostly openly pro-Russian government and legislature that openly sought autonomy if not outright union with Russia, and largely faltered both due to negotiations and Russia prioritizing the Budapest Settlement over territorial claims.
It’s also why on a moral level I actually don’t have any real objection to Crimea or the Donbas uniting with Russia in principle, and I believe that there could be a just and workable situation on that basis with enough trust, goodwill, and work. I just object to it now because of the criminal nature by which the “separations” took place and how lacking the grounds to believe in trust or goodwill would be, as Moldova and Georgia can attest.
I’m largely indifferent to what the final settlement is so much as
A: It adheres to certain principles (including American interest) for me.
and
B: It is actually Stuck To. Which is the big issue, and while the Ukrainians aren’t entirely trustworthy I do think the commonalities show Putin’s camp is more to blame.
Ethnic Russian Ukrainians did support the Ukraine independence based on polling data at the time, but other than Crimea, they didn’t indicate the support in the Donbas.
Agreed, and many saw Ukrainian independence as a vehicle to reunite with a non-Communist Russia as you pointed out. And why had the Russian government prioritized integrating these regions it probably could have gotten much of them in the Budapest negotiations, albeit after making concessions (and it’s possible in that alternate history we might’ve seen an inverse of the historical Sevastopol lease agreement, with the Ukrainian Navy and Black Sea Fleet maintaining basing rights in a Russian Crimea).
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For the ballet fans:
https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter/status/1645790976932454407?s=20
“Thanks for lookin’ for me. Thanks for worryin’ about me. And I’m never gon’na climb on a box car again. In a million years.”
Caroline Glick Show: “The Perfect Storm Hitting Israel”
https://youtu.be/5nqiHiN1s8Q
The FBI is warning people against using public USB chargers for their phones. Malicious devices are high-jacking phones or stealing passwords.
The AC power outlets are OK if you bring your own charging block. Or conceivably, one could use a USB cable that has the data transfer wires disabled. I was surprised to see that a quick search on Amazon or the web in general did not bring up any such cables for sale. Or one could make such a cable.
Here is a really old how-to article:
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-make-a-USB-no-data-charger-cable/
This issue has been around for a while.
I wonder how secure the charging ports are on airplanes.
I started looking into the situation in Ukraine a couple of months ago after running across a Ukrainian separatist movement in the Donbas beginning about the same time Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union. In addition, Crimea, about the same time, briefly declared its independence from Ukraine. That lasted one day, before an agreement creating a somewhat autonomous Crimea was reached and Crimea remained part of Ukraine.
When talking about these events, other commenters usually dismissed these efforts as merely Russian meddling– usually ending with some reference to Putin.
I believe there was a legitimate claim in the Donbas and Crimea to declare their independence. Right now, the only mechanism for groups to separate is a shooting war. Massive destruction seems to be the only method.
If you looked at the Russian ethnicity in Ukraine, it’s highly concentrated east of the Dniepro River and Crimea. The voting patterns show a highly divided country when it came to relations with the EU.
Most claim the Russia-Ukraine war is to defend the “rules based order” in the West. They ignore Kosovo which was recognized, after being carved out by NATO interference– demonstrating that the “rules based order” is more flexible than admitted.
Why does this matter to us? There are analogies (not ethnically but ideologically) in the US. As traditional Judeo-Christian moral/legal framework is being dismantled by a deconstructionist/anarchist/totalitarian mindset, calls for a national divorce will continue to increase.
How can a national separation occur short of a bloody war. If you look at the way the federal military is scattered across the county– a red/blue split would potentially give each side the firepower to destroy the other.
Even split, the two parts would still likely have the largest militaries in the world.
It’s easy to dismiss any talk of a “national divorce” as pointless, since the cultural rot can’t be swept away. But it would allow the new parts to reset their core structures. Currently, any attempt to reform the judicial or education systems can’t happen– since federalism.
What brought this all up? An article recently that all the counties in Eastern Oregon have already held referendums to separate from Oregon and join Idaho. There is an underlying sentiment in Eastern Washington to create a new state called Liberty. Northern California has a seperatist movement. Much of the country doesn’t like the other.
If the “rules based order” were to create a mechanism to recognize separatist movements the world would no doubt become even more chaotic. So there would have to be an intricate set of rules to govern who would be eligible to break away.
What would be the threshold support?
Could a region buy their separation?
Yes, this is just frustrated speculation. Maybe the method the ancients used– Champion warfare would work.
Probably the best way to determine the outcome of a war, given our current technology, would be virtual warfare. Neutral judges would determine the military capabilities of a country, and a virtual war would ensue.
Losing country buys the winner drinks.
I do not think a split is really practical without uprooting millions of people. What happens when the liberal city is within a deep red state? It is possible that Irish democracy will happen. Just refusal to obey.
@Keto
I’ve seen that news story.
For all of the readers who haven’t seen this news story yet-
Sophia Rebecca, the dancer, is a real news story.
I’ve looked at some news sites, + apparently, Sophia Rebecca, a trans-woman in The UK, has joined a prestigious, Ballet school, in the UK.
So I wonder- Sophia Rebecca has gotten her in the door, and is now doing top level, ballet training- but in the entertainment world, what are her dancing career plans, after her ballet school?
Sophia stands about 6 foot…three inches, + Sophia’s visual look, is kind of like- a muscular armed, professional body builder.
After Sophia graduates from her ballet school, are the ballet companies going to hire her, to put her in their shows, and pay her to be a professional, ballet dancer? How will this go?
I’ve known people who’ve tried to make a living at professional acting, in venues like- in live theatre [plays], + in small-budget films.
My actor friends found- that if you don’t have the look that the play director wants, or if you don’t have a physical…voice that the directors want for a part, then you don’t get hired. Unfortunately, that is how the entertainment industry operates.
Will it work that- with her 6′ 3″ height, + her [large + muscular ] appearance, that she will get a lot of ballet roles, where she’ll look like- a delicate, elegant, and graceful, female dancer?
I admire Sophia’s ballet training, I wonder how many ballet companies, are looking to hire a female dancer, of her size and appearance.
I also wonder how many people who pay to go to ballet shows, will pay to see a female dancer, of her size and appearance, doing the roles that traditionally go to petite-looking women, and delicate looking women?
Usually, unfortunately- a person is only hired to be [a paid, professional, actor], or [a paid, professional ballet dancer], only if that person has the look, or sound- that the directors want to have in their film, or in their ballet show.
It will be interesting to see how Sophia Rebecca’s dancing career progresses, but- I wonder if ballet fans will want to pay to see her playing very feminine-looking…ballet roles or female…ballet characters, in classical, ballet shows.
I’m hoping that Sophia Rebecca gets every health and happiness that she desires, but- it looks doubtful that she’ll get a long career as a salaried, ballet dancer, or as a [paid, ballet dancer].
Unfortunately, like any other for-profit companies, ballet companies will only put on a show, if it is a salable or profitable show, that people will go to see, many times.
It will be interesting to see how Sophia;s story progresses.
I grew up in the railroad/meat packing nexus of K.C. – Armourdale. We had one kid die but mostly it was men and the deaths were pretty horrible. The worst I recall is a man caught between boxcar couplings.
Considering how much time we kids spent roaming those yards, it’s astounding there weren’t more deaths/injuries.
To lighten my post up, two incidents:
1) A gang of us were roaming on our bikes and stopped by the tracks under an overpass to rest. Apparently a conductor saw us and as the engine passed by he blew the horn. We *all* literally ran in circles screaming, we were so scared.
2) My brother roamed at night and in those days they still had rail yard dicks and those guys didn’t play.
One saw my brother and Joe Reppart (funny how you remember problem guys) in the yards and chased them. They jumped on the surrounding fence to escape and the guy unloaded a double barrel of rock salt at them.
My brother came home dancing and danced the rest of the night. Only hit by one grain but, honest truth, it hit him right in the rectum.
****
Don’t play in railroad yards.
TR–
Another question about the UK transgender ballet dancer has to do with finding male dancers tall enough to partner “her.” If “she” stands 6’3″, any dance company that hires “her” will have to recruit cisgender male basketball players to be credible partners– and basketball players aren’t exactly known for grace and delicacy in their movements on the court. IIRC, Neo has remarked in the past that many well-known male dancers weren’t/aren’t that tall: Nureyev was about 5’8″, Baryshnikov is 5’6″; Sophia Rebecca would tower over both of them.
Speaking of railroad yards. My Dad started a business in a small town that was going to have great potential because of a large reclamation project bringing water to the arid desert like environment in Eastern Washington.
The first four years we lived in the back of the store, which was across an alley from the train depot.
The station master’s family lived in the depot with two kids my age. Occasionally, we would ride the train to the next stop and then back, either in the engine or caboose. Good times.
Our playhouse was a large wooden packing crate. We played in it during the day, and the hobos slept in it at night.
Then there’s this shipwright fellow Pete Stein’s story (pick it up just prior to the 15 min mark in) about hoboing life catching trains; an hilarious gag he pulls on the viewers; and why he has “stumped” tattooed on his knuckles: https://youtu.be/mR5jwxJcEGc
Re: ballet
I’ve said it before and I always will, Ever since I saw Singing in the Rain Cyd Charisse has been my lifelong heart throb and ideal of a dancer, ballet or otherwise.
She defines sultry and as Debbie Reynolds said “She has legs from another galaxy.”
Enamored so much so that, I subconsciously modeled one of my main characters in my story series after her looks and character in Singing In the Rain. She’s featured on the cover of Deja Voös.
Once my heart finds a flame, it never extinguishes.
I believe there was a legitimate claim in the Donbas and Crimea to declare their independence.
==
You’re working hard on this. There is no indication that pan-Russian sentiment has been of consequence in the Ukraine at any time in the last 30 years and the Crimea is the only part of the country wherein self-identified Great Russians formed a majority of the population in 2012. (They were about 38% in Donetsk and Lukhansk). The 1991 independence referendum won a majority in every region and only in the Crimea did the ‘no’ vote exceed 20% of the total.
==
They ignore Kosovo which was recognized, after being carved out by NATO interference– demonstrating that the “rules based order” is more flexible than admitted. Why does this matter to us?
==
Yugoslavia had broken up into its component parts. There was no ‘rules-based order’ in Yugoslavia. Kosovo had, about four generations earlier, had a Serb plurality, but differential fertility and migration patterns had left the Serbs with about 10% of the population by 1987. The Serb government was escalatingly abusive to the Albanian majority in Kosovo and had spent three years running ethnic cleansing operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s not difficult to understand why NATO took action to end the conflict on terms unfavorable to Serbia. What was the surprise was that it was successful.
==
Note also there was no explicit or implicit threat to any party other than Serbia from the bombing campaign, whereas you had the lout foreign minister of Russia last year demanding that every country which entered NATO after 1997 be expelled. Understanding the difference between the two situations is not that difficult.
Brain E returns with the usual apologetics for the 2014 attempted dismemberment of Ukraine and somehow the 2008 invasion of Crimea is forgotten. But no Saint Yanukovitch, so that’s refreshing.
Cui bono in the Donbas, Luhansk, and Crimea? Its turned out, so far, not Vlad. Sad that so many have died for his vanity war.
I’ve said it before and I always will, Ever since I saw Singing in the Rain Cyd Charisse has been my lifelong heart throb and ideal of a dancer, ballet or otherwise.
Oligonicella:
I’m with you! I was never a dance/theatre/musical guy, but I was stunned by that Cyd Charisse / Gene Kelly number.
@Brian E
This is true.
That I haven’t seen, though Crimea did vote to restore its autonomy and there was some complex legal maneuvering in the early 1990s (which often took on an overtly pro-Russian shade under Meshkov) including the adoption of a Crimean constitution incompatible with the Ukrainian one, but ultimately this petered out around the mid 1990s, especially due to Budapest 1994 and so on.
I’d also encourage caution. It’s already hard enough finding the truth in a media environment rife with propaganda, especially on a controversial topic too, but one of the sources you used previously (the Donbas Blog) I caught lying very, very blatantly about the Ukrainian Independence referendum, claiming it was about acknowledging whether an independence declaration had been made rather than whether to affirm it or not (apparently the author was relying on people having even less knowledge of Russian and Ukrainian language sources than I have). So it might be worth double-checking.
Well, I’ve made my convictions and biases clear, but I did not. Indeed, I did acknowledge the prevalence of pro-Russian sentiment in Crimea and the Donbas going back to at least the 1990s if not 1980s, which Periodically rose up into support for outright separatism.
I also pointed out that it was actually the lack of Russian government support that largely doomed these efforts (assuming they weren’t already doomed from the start, as I honestly think the Donbas campaigns were). While it’s risky to extrapolate too much in this, we do have a fair few documents available from the Russian leadership in this time where they discuss and argue about Ukraine and the approach they should take to groups like the Crimean Autonomists and the pro-Russian campaigns in the Donbas, if they should be supported and if so to what end and degree.
But ultimately Moscow decided that it needed a rapprochement with Ukraine, especially on matters of trade (which was already proving to be an unholy nightmare for the post-Soviet Russian Government and which bluntly has never stopped) and nuclear security. Which is why Budapest 1994 is so important because it in effect saw Moscow hanging the would-be pro-Russian separatists and autonomists out to dry in a rather unmistakable fashion, and indicating it would not sanction a partition of the country.
This is PARTICULARLY important because it ran very counter to Russian government actions in Moldova and Georgia, where it outright supported separatism (even armed separatism) in those regions.
This is important because it took the wind out of the sails of the pro-Russian separatists and autonomists, since even the slowest among them realized they had little hope of obtaining what they wanted and had to reconcile themselves to politicking in Ukraine. Which is why around the time of the Budapest Memorandum and after it you see a number of auspicious signs for the Kyiv government, such as the fall of Meshkov’s government, the revision of the Crimean Constitution, and a collapse in polling for Donbas autonomy (let alone separatism).
Also, Putin isn’t particularly relevant to this period since during it he was a regional political figure with middling national importance as a pol and administrator in “Peter”/St. Petersburg.
I also think that this is important to understand because while this outlines that the separatist republics weren’t completely created out of whole cloth in contrast to say Manchukuo, there’s probably much, MUCH Less crossover between their current existence (as basically warlord states propped up by troops from the Kremlin) to this early flowering of it. Not none (especially since these remained generally pro-Russian areas, especially Crimea), but not enough to explain the outbreaks of the fighting in contrast to the now-openly-acknowledged deployment of Spetznaz to Crimea and the barely-disputed-by-Moscow deployment of them and contractniki to the Donbas in 2014.
This also I think plays a lot into how drastically overinflated the Novorossiyan Dream was. Apparently Putin seems to have believed these areas would welcome his troops and operatives with open arms and that a tide of revolution would sweep through in an arc from Sevastopol to Mariupol as soon as the loyalist military garrisons got attacked in 2014. That didn’t happen, and indeed part of me wonders if he would’ve had better luck trying to cultivate grass roots support while avoiding direct conflict with the Ukrainian Territorials and Regulars for as long as possible. But he didn’t, and the resistance by both Ukrainian Loyalist troops and the locals largely imploded the Novorossiyan Dream outside of Crimea (and even Crimea had to be run through a campaign of torture, censorship, and disappearances).
2022 saw another attempt at this, and while militarily the Kremlin now does have most of the territory it claimed to want for Novorossiya, it has to do it by essentially maintaining military occupation. A military occupation that is dealing with both pressure from the Ukrainian loyalists from without and guerilla campaigns from within.
In short, 2022 wasn’t 2014, and neither was 1994 or 1991. Even those that actually supported autonomy or union with Russia in 1994 would’ve had to deal with the disappointment of Moscow very transparently sending them up the river for its own strategic interests and being told to adjust as best they could, and while many of them either supported Yanukovych or opposed Euromaidan (and even then this wasn’t nearly as uniform as Kremlin propaganda and the like enjoys making it out) that didn’t mean they were in favor of being invaded and forcibly united to Russia.
Especially not when it happened in just about the worst possible way for them, as it happened in the Donbass: being placed under the power of utterly unaccountable, thoroughly corrupt, and extremely brutal mercenary warlords like Girkin, who proved to be unable to Administrate. I think one reason why the Donbaschukuos have remained significantly less popular and significantly more unstable than Crimea has not just been due to the heavy fighting there but also the fact that at least Crimea was taken over by the Russian government, using the established pro-Russian elements in the local government. This created a sense of normalcy and stability, since while I have caustic opinions on most of the Crimean Bureaucracy and legislature I can’t argue they had zero experience administering the region, and while the sine non qua of Crimean “union” has been the military occupation by the Kremlin’s troops and repression against dissident they could co-operate with the parts of the established bureaucracy and political sphere willing to collaborate.
It also probably helps that while Crimea was suffering problems even before 2014 economically it was in a much, Much better position economically than the Donbas Rust Belt.
I agree.
Emphasis on WAS
But as I pointed out before, the momentum in favor of autonomy and especially separatism waned and then broke down in the early-mid 1990s as the Kremlin prioritized relations with Kyiv and things like the Nuke Transfer part of Budapest over supporting breakaways. Which is why trying to draw too straight of a line between the two moments starts running into massive problems very very quickly. This is especially true in the Donbas, where the heaviest fighting has taken place, since while Crimea at least reaffirmed its autonomy within the Ukrainian political landscape with Kyiv’s acceptance (albeit after significantly rewriting its constitution), the Donbas never had legal autonomy get serious traction before it broke down.
(Especially as Donbas businesses and politicians – of whom Yanukovych is just the most well known and infamous – realized they could exert significant influence as insiders within Kyiv itself, and autonomy of the kind adopted in Crimea and “proposed” with varying degrees of lethal violence in Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia would likely hurt their interests).
As for the more recent issue, I don’t think there’s too much to be said. The more recent 2014 “separatist referendums” did use some undetermined level of irritation and disenchantment with Euromaidan and the caretaker administration in Kyiv, but they ultimately are the product of violent Russian Federation military invasion and occupation. This was true in Crimea, and it sure as hell is true in the Donbas. Which in addition to being a hideous violation of international law and those of both Ukraine and Russia (remember how it’s illegal to have mercenaries in Russia? Pepperidge Farms remembers) also underlines the governments of both as ultimately illegitimate regimes propped up on bayonets and vote rigging.
Which is why they deserve the Stimson Doctrine treatment they have gotten.
This is post-hoc rationalization. The reason why “right now, the only mechanism for groups to separate is a shooting war” is BECAUSE the origins of 2014-now “separatism” in Ukraine was a violent invasion by the Russian Federation’s military and other affiliated proxy groups, which forced the locals to take a side and unsurprisingly (and correctly) resulted in Kyiv realizing that any legislative push for separatism would probably be a Kremlin orchestrated catspaw.
It didn’t HAVE to be this way. And perhaps without the introduction of Russian troops it might have gone; Crimea and the Donbas were not truly separatist prior to the occupation but they were generally dissatisfied with Kyiv and Ukrainian politics, and Crimea in particular would probably have made more pushes for autonomy (especially since it didn’t really have support for Yanukovych to fall back on). That might have led to a “Donbasmaidan” or the like similar to the Cold Civil Conflicts we saw in post-independence Ukraine up until 2014.
But for whatever reason, the Russian Government decided it would rather deploy Little Green Men with Guards Spetznaz equipment it claimed could be gotten from a Military Surplus Store to seize control of as much as could be seized while evicting or capturing Ukrainian garrisons and squashing dissent.
So here we are now, and I am under absolutely zero obligation to trust the postures or proclamations out of the occupation.
And as we’ve discussed ad infinitum, Russiah ethnicity and language are no surefire way to indicate whether or not the locals support pro-Russian politics, let alone “autonomy”, “separatism”, or the Russian military occupation. As I pointed out before, Right Sector has taken to enthusiastically recruiting Russophone, ethnic Russian Ukrainian Nationalist Neo-Fascists. So clearly just reading an ethnographic map is going to be a monumental mistake.
This is true, but A: It has become MUCH less divided than it was before (just look at Kharkhiv, previously one of the bastions of the Blue Camp in Ukrainian politics), and B: Voting Patterns in peacetime are no guarantee of support for the “Novorossiyan” occupation and partition project now (again, Kharkhiv is a good example).
Even if one wants to make the argument that which side of the battle line one fell on was often a matter of chance or military maneuvering than deep seated ideological or political sympathies (as I think was likely the case), that was in 2014. The war has in one way or another been dragging on for just shy of a decade. And even back in 2014 the “Separatists” and their Russian support had to spend a great deal of time stomping holdouts in “their territory” (with inner city Donetsk and Luhansk being the most famous).
Oh, do not start with me on Kosovo, Brian E.
Because it's a bad day when a thoroughly corrupt sewer of ethnonationalist terrorists turned inner city pols like the KLA are the lesser evil, but unfortunately in Kosovo that was very true.
Let's start with the fact that if we're going to talk about the "Rules-Based Order" let's start with a very basic fact about the Rules in Yugoslavia. There were none, or at a minimum very few. While Tito was decent by the standards of totalitarian dictators he was still a totalitarian dictator who intentionally cultivated a cult of personality and weak civil society and government in order to maintain his power. Worse, he was ruling over a region where "rule of law" had been weak for at least the past several hundred years (if it was ever strong there to begin with).
Which meant that when Tito croaked without any kind of recognized political heir, the mid-and-upper rank Communist Apparatchiks started squabbling for power on regional lines at the same time as reformists (not all of whom were GOOD) came up from the bottom. Which tore the place apart. This became particularly evident after Milosevic took power following an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" and began a policy of centralizing Yugoslav "laws" and ruling around Belgrade, including stripping the SRs of most of the autonomy they had.
This included Kosovo, especially since it was one of the youngest and weakest SRs (just gaining autonomy in the 1970s) and also a part of greater Serbian national sentiment, and with a large number of ethnic Serbs. Where Milosevic (bitterly and ironically) alleged that Tito had committed genocide against the Kosovar Serbs. So Milosevic rammed the bills through a pliant (and Serbian-dominated) Kosovo and Yugoslav Assemblies, and began following the tried and true Communist policies of getting out the batons and bullets to quash the protests.
But this escalated when Milosevic ordered the dissolution of the Kosovo Assembly on intentionally vague grounds, which resulted in most of the delegates striking out on their own and declaring Kosovo independent. Which helped take the previous tensions and violence into an actual war, as the Yugoslav government (in this area utterly dominated by Serbs) started going into a war footing, assorted guerillas and activists joining the proto-KLA, and paramilitaries on both sides began forming out of the woodwork. Made all the worse because both sides had already begun accusing each other of GENOCIDE even *before* either side had actually begun doing genocide.
Ironically it was the fact that the greater humanitarian catastrophes were breaking out to the North that helped make the atmosphere of repression and "soft" ethnic cleansing by the Serb authorities somewhat more manageable, since Milosevic had to struggle to fight the Bosnian Muslim and Croat governments coming out of the woodwork and try to impose his vision of a "pure" Serbia (complete with purging those Serbs who for whatever reason – largely tolerance of their neighbors, like at Vukovar – who did not comply), while the Kosovar Albanians recognized they could not hope to defeat the Yugoslav Military without NATO help and that too concentrated a resistance would just lead to the risk of Milosevic turning more of his troops around and going to flatten them. While Milosevic was focused on securing the bigger, more at risk prizes in Croatia and Bosnia (and preventing his clients in places like Krajina from getting too powerful) so that he could then secure the borders he wanted, dictate terms, and turn around to settle Kosovo. So the early and mid 1990s were in an atmosphere of repression, sectarian tension, and tit-for-tat violence but not act high intensity War as both sides basically waited and hoped the situation would get better for them.
As it turned out, Rugova, Jashari, and co won their bet. the mid 1990s saw the Serbian militaries losing steady ground as the Serbian war effort stalled outside Sarajevo and the Croat ports. NATO – steadily annoyed by their former ally's refusal to abide by agreements, use of mass murder and rape as tools, fear of his ties to Moscow and threats to a neutral Austria – began striking Serbian targets and (at least as importantly) financing and helping to train the Croat and Bosniak militaries while organizing a Shotgun Marriage between the two (which took some doing given their own bitter histories and how Tudjman had once talked with Milosevic about partitioning Bosnia). So 1994-1995 saw a series of utterly shattering defeats hit the Serbs, such as the Croatian "Operation Storm" Offensive. These shattered the Serbian troops out West and also began uprooting thousands upon thousands of Serbian civilians, who fled en masse East while Milosevic etc. al. began to try and get out of the war by signing Dayton.
So these campaigns had crippled Serbia's conventional military power and destabilized the "Yugoslav" government, but also triggered a humanitarian catastrophe that meant Belgrade would need to re-house thousands upon thousands of families as refugees from Bosnia and Croatia. With Kosovo being an obvious choice. To the Kosovar Albanian leadership, this was the best chance they would get, so they shifted from indirect resistance to guerilla operations (and in the case of many KLA operations, terrorist attacks). Milosevic, after getting humiliated in Bosnia and Croatia and having already embraced ethnic cleansing as core to his strategy, responded in much the way you'd expect, with NATO increasingly siding with the Albanians. This started out diplomatically (including a shameful in my opinion demand that the Serbs sign a ceasefire without a stop to terrorist activities), but moved on to military after it became clear Milosevic was up to his old tricks and that he couldn't be trusted to keep a peace. Which is what led to the bombing runs and ultimately the occupation. Which after years later led to the Kosovar declaration of independence.
I personally disagree with the recognition of it, but the attempt to use this as a "Gotcha" to try and justify the invasions of Crimea and Donbas are – to put it mildly- a load of crap. The closer of the two examples to Kosovo is Crimea, which saw significant members of the pre-war Crimean government align with the occupation force and declare first secession and then union with Russia (as opposed to in the Donbas, where the occupation regimes were mostly created out of whole cloth and held together with duct tape). However, even this starts to break down when you realize that the Ukrainian government had not taken steps to suppress Crimean legal autonomy or the rights of the locals there. Milosevic HAD done so as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, including forcibly dissolving its legislative assembly and imposing martial law on the region.
And the first "disappearances" in the area were those opposed to the Kremlin and its agenda. And that's before I get into the measures to try and undermine Ukrainian culture and identity by the occupation regimes, including much more draconian measures to stamp out Ukrainian language instruction than the Ukrainian Government has been criticized for re: Russian languages. Moreover, NATO deployed to Kosovo in response to years of brutal government oppression and sectarian conflict; that was not the case in Crimea or the Donbas where Russian military forces entered either to spark said conflicts or immediately after them (depending on how we interpret it). So on almost every single level, the attempt to play the "Whatabout Kosovo?" game falls flat on closer inspection.
So if I'm feeling generous, the closer comparison to the "Crimean Republic" would be Serbian Krajina, a breakaway separatist regime and patron of a larger, authoritarian government composed of much of the pre-existing leadership but who are engaged in a brutal cultural crackdown. While the DNR and LNR are outright artificial occupation regimes roughly comparable to those the Japanese established through much of China, devoid of any legitimacy beyond extremely minimal appeals to regional autonomy and interests (which are undermined by the nature of the occupation).
The "Rules-based international order" has always recognized the right of self-determination as a core concept (even if in practice it has not always honored it), and egregious abuse by the central authority is a recognized reason for that. In contrast, even the Russian Government no longer denies it deployed Russian military forces to Crimea in order to "secure the peninsula" and its "secession" in a referendum that could be generously referred to as "unfair", while in Donbas outright coordinated assaults and seizure of power began in a manner even more egregious than the narratives about Euromaidan being a Coup (since even if Yanukovych's removal was a coup, it was one carried out by the duly elected Rada as well as whatever Maidanites – peaceful and paramilitary- were on the street, not by foreign Little Green Men and assorted paramilitaries launching first strikes on military facilities).
If we are going to discuss Judeo-Christian moral and legal frameworks, it is important to acknowledge a couple things.
Thou Shalt Not Murder. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Thou Shalt Not Covet (ie desire to take that what is one’s neighbors). These are foundational to even secularized and agnostic takes on Judeo-Christian society, and underline how unjustly taking what someone else has is forbidden by the will of God. It does not take a genius to recognize that the Kremlin and its vassals have been egregiously guilty of all of the above and more, and are overly reliant on mangling both the law and chronology to justify it.
Ask the Czechs and Slovaks and their Velvet Divorce. It CAN happen, and indeed HAS Happened. The issue is that it relies upon a significant amount of goodwill, practicality, and willingness to compromise on both sides. Which is why talks about a national divorce, I find, are largely missing the forest for the sake of the trees. I am opposed to a “National Divorce” on practical as well as ideological grounds, but I am more than willing to hear out those who advocate for it and will not crucify them for being “Neo-Confederates” or the like.
But in the absence of basic respect for human liberty and practicalities, attempts at a National Divorce or even attempts to reassert local rights will not end like the Velvet Divorce in Czechoslovakia or even in the successful negotiations regarding Crimea in the 1990s. They will end up like Kosovo in the 1990s.
Which makes dealing with the totalitarian, power-grasping mindset and approaches more vital. It also calls for cultivating allies and those who will either support us or reject appeals by the would be corrupt and aoppressive to squash us.
Indeed, and that’s always been the case. In part due to intent since at least the Civil War if not the War of 1812, and as was the case in the breakup of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
They’d be up there but both would almost certainly downsize both due to whatever fighting gets on and how a lot of the crucial support nodes get broken in a divorce and there’s a need to cut people who are “Surplus to Requirements/potential to support”, whether because they are suspect, or because there simply aren’t enough resources to go around.
I disagree and am SOMEWHAT more optimistic, especially since Federalism does in fact allow attempts to reform judicial and educational systems. Many of the reasons to support DeSantis came from this. Though the issue is that only can go so far as the Left’s power and forbearance will permit. And since their latter has been shown to be near nonexistent, that leaves us the former and the question of limiting it, especially after 2020.
Indeed, and I support those efforts on the whole, and believe they have great potential to help fix much that is broken with the US or at least help set the stage. I also trust they will be committed fairly freely and without the sudden deployment of Guards Spetznaz or PLA or UN Peacekeepers into the region just before crucial votes. The bigger issue I see is how many of the established US States, as long as the Union hold, have a certain incentive to play the OAN and oppose breakaways out of communal interest and appeals to stability.
But in any case, I do not see how smoothing out the bloody, jagged fangs of Milosevic or Putin help the cause of Cascadia, Liberty, Jefferson, or us as a whole. In particular since Milosevic played a part much closer to that of a hypothetical Biden Regime going full repression mode and seeking to stomp on the rights of those seeking a peaceful divorce, and Putin violently intervened to squelch dissent and then try to pry parts off. It is why in spite of having little theoretical or principle opposition to an independent or Russian Crimea and Donbas, I am so unmoving about them now. I have many issues with Stimson, but his doctrine was well considered (and could be used as a template by other nations for use on the US if we ever tried to pull another Panama Secession) and covers exactly these kinds of situations.
Moreover, Lavrov and Kadyrov’s threats not just to the very existence of Ukraine and its people but also to others such as Moldova (whom I note was and is a neutral, non-NATO country) belie the attempts to make this about the rights of Crimea and the Donbas (as if those rights were not squelched by military occupation and vote rigging).
The difference between Putin and myself on the Donbas and Crimea is that I’d be willing to respect a legitimate vote in Crimea and the Donbas that turned out the opposite of what I’d “prefer.” Which is probably why Putin has worked so hard to avoid any such vote from taking place outside of extremely choreographed shows.
@Brian E Part 2
There already is a mechanism to do so, and it isn’t substantially different from the mechanism to recognize any new country or government. Which is why to a large extent there is an element of Mad Libs, Improv, and naked Self-Interest involved in it. But East Timor and South Sudan didn’t come out of nowhere, nor did diplomatic recognition for them.
Good question, and that depends. Indeed more than a few polities and societies have indeed bought separation (though it was more typical in the Medieval and Renaissance era). But I’d submit that one cause would be a lack of compulsion in votes to determine secession, as well as diplomatic limits on how many foreign troops and from whom can oversee.
Perhaps for the technologically savvy, but many others do not.
It’d be nice, but that incentivizes lying on military capabilities (even more than they already are, which is plenty, since there’s much risk of it being tested). And we have things somewhat close to that in the form of normal diplomatic wrangling and nonlethal saber rattling.
I happened to think of Cyd Charisse / Gene Kelly this morning.
My niece had sent me a remarkable animation she had downloaded from TikTok (while noting it was usually a “garbage site”) that had been the collaboration of Disney with Salvador Dali!
It was titled “Destino” (Destiny) and it had never been released, It shows a beautiful long-limbed woman in a flowing diaphanous gown dancing in a mostly empty landscape with some Daliesque scenery. She meets her male partner who seems to be a baseball player. It’s supposed to be based on the love of Chronos (Time) for a mortal woman.
It’s a perfect synthesis of Dali and Disney. I googled for a link, not wanting to rely on Tik-Tok, and found this:
–“Destino & Time – Salvador Dali, Walt Disney and Pink Floyd”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc_f9VDVsNk
Ray E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, had found the earlier work which had been abandoned in 1949. He put together a team which finished it with traditional animation and some computer animation. The result was released in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destino
Someone added a Pink Floyd sound track, based fittingly on their song, “Time,” which replaced Disney’s. IMO it works, but it can be muted.
Outstanding.
I didn’t have that kind of mobility until I was 12. While I could run around the neighborhood @10, i had boundaries that were not excessively far from home, and certainly would not have climbed into/onto a random train. :-/
Turtler,
Someone on another thread commented, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
Actually I’m not trying to win anything, and I obviously didn’t do a very good job making it clear I wasn’t trying to re-argue the issues in Ukraine, but point to the need to find a “rules based order” for separation, since we’re going to need it in this country. The level of propaganda and lies that have become standard fare in what passes for journalism is only growing exponentially (or at least geometrically).
Case in point, the ferocity of the attacks on Judge Thomas. They think they’ve found a narrative and they’re going to use it to justify packing the court if the left takes back the House in 2024.
You bring up the velvet divorce of Czech Republic and Slovakia, which was a mutual decision. But in the case of Ukraine, both the Donbas and Crimea held referendums– which weren’t recognized as legitimate in the “rules based order” of the West, since the Ukraine constitution requires the entire country to vote, which wasn’t going to happen (and even if it did, Western Ukraine wouldn’t have allowed those regions to secede).
I only brought up Kosovo, not to imply any connection to Ukraine or moral judgment on the participants (except our bombing campaign), but to point out that Kosovo’s declared independence was accepted by the West, even though Serbia objected and refused to recognize it. The “rules based order” the US and EU are trying to defend is in reality whatever the US and the West say it is.
As to the US having a cordial separation, that will never happen. In the case of Oregon or California– the leftist holding hostage will never agree to that or in the case of the State of Liberty seceding from Western Washington.
I saw this interview with David Sacks recently. His conclusions about Ukraine are similar to mine.
David Sacks: Ukraine is turning into Woke War III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5AdnEwywu4
@huxley :
This is a snippet from my introduction to Déjà Voös describing Voös and her relationship to my lead guy and just when I realized I’d confiscated that vixen for my story. Link added to its text.
***
The clip is of her first dance with Gene Kelly in Singin’ In the Rain. Find the right clip or watch that dance in the movie and right there at 30 seconds or so into the scene, in comes Voös.
As soon as I watched the clip, I knew. I remembered being awestruck by that dance since I was around seven or eight and being enthralled by the woman just as long.
I distinctly remember one particular moment and one particular look on Cyd’s face that has been my subconscious (until now) foundation for everything that is Enveòglersécævoös.
If you watch the clip, you’ll see it, and if you understand Voös as I’ve written her, you’ll even know the moment.
***
What smoldering affection.
I just rewatched the whole movie. Sigh.
Huxley: The poster of the Time version of Destino has a link to the original version in the “see more” right under it.
I appreciate that original score, but it has a very very 40s/50s feel to it, which makes it feel very dated. The … ahhhh… “timelessness” of “Time” — seems much more fitting even without the subject contrast.
R.I.P. Al Jaffee, “Mad” Magazine. 4/10/23
*Sigh* I’ll note that I have been making the case for the last 2-3 decades now that the model for the future is not the models we’ve been used to, and using, for the last 1000 odd years.
The first economy was an Agricultural Economy. It expressed its final form in the Feudal model — with Food and Farming as the product and the engine/creator of the product, and the Feudal Enclave (e.g., “castle”) as the central organizing principle, and the primary decisionmaker the Lords and Ladies of the region. Note that this model is inherently hierarchical.
The second economy was the Industrial Economy. It expressed its final form as the Corporate model — with Goods and Factories as the product and the engine/creator, and the Corporation as the central organizing principle, with the primary decisionmaker in the CEOs and Presidents of the corporations. Note that this model, too, is inherently hierarchical.
Now we have entered what, in the 60s and 70s was referred to as the “PostIndustrial” Economy, which we now realize is an “IP and Services” Economy — with (duh) IP and Services as the product and a lot more not particularly well understood, such as the ideal “engine/creator” for the two things, and no clear “central organizing principle”, e.g. the collective body that is ideal for accomplishing/producing the product. And since we don’t know that, it’s difficult to decide who, if anyone, is the “central decisionmaker”.
I assert that IP & Services are very very very dependent on information flow. It’s a much quicker, far more nimble environment to operate in, and hence a hierarchy is a crappy basis for the engine to operate on. A single path up and then back down, for info to flow from the possessor to the one who needs it is a bad setup, prone to blockage. What is called for is a network of pathways for information to get from A to B in any organization or structure.
I assert also, from this, that the operating engine is going to be far far smaller and much more nimble/less rigid than we have been used to. An IP&S Economy is inherently a complex of much smaller entities (My own term is “kith”, for reasons I won’t go into) and rejects the strictures of a hierarchy.
This includes governments and nations — It follows from this that perhaps the future is not the world of nations we’ve been used to, but a much more highly fragmented collection of operatives — think classical “city-states” — rather than the big honkin’ nations we think of as the norm.
There are two reasons for this —
1 — it’s a lot easier to keep governments responsive to the needs and requirements of their citizens, as well as much more under control of their citizens. And a lot less opportunities for abuse of and misapplication of governmental power.
2 — with increased energy available at the citizen level, you are simple going to have more aberrant individuals acting in aberrant ways. And “nations” make big targets with lots of enemies for those aberrant individuals/groups.
Imagine if the USA could no longer be called “The Great Satan” by our enemies and they instead had to deal with 25 “lesser Satans” comprised of our subsets…? Who do they attack?
Note that this in no regard rejects the idea of alignment, treaty, and other loose organizational bodies towards specific ends. Think NATO, rather than EU. The same could happen if the USA broke down into 5, 10, 15 “state groups” which applied some variation of the US Constitution. Let the Lefties create their own hellholes, and stop trying to drag the rest of us down that oubliette. And we Libertarians and Conservatives can find common ground and create plenty of free zones with far less regulation (and yeah, I’m sure some of the religious element will try and create their own overly regimented religious version of a hellhole). As long as people are allowed to “vote with their feet” to join a different city-state-nation, humans will find solutions they approve of.
But I do strongly suspect that the future does not lie with Big Anything — Not Big Business, Big Labor, OR Big Government. No Big Nations, either. The only way those can remain is — yes, Big Brother.
Oligonicella:
I forgot that first Charisse / Kelly number! Thanks for reminding me.
Not to mention Charisse had a look, un coup d’oeil, which could pin one to the wall.
She did have legs from “another galaxy.”
OBloodyHell:
Thanks for viewing the Dali/Disney collab. I agree that Pink Floyd came through on that one.
Since AesopFan credits the blog with providing French lessons, which must mean moi, here’s a cute bit.
In the French Harry Potter I discover a zoo director has:
[il] se confondit en excuses.
Which in my literal French translates as:
[he] confused himself in excuses.
But the original Potter English was:
[he] apologized over and over again.
The French idiom (I presume) says the quiet part out loud.
Oligonicella and Huxley: try this, from “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6SqoqS9Xrs
“…And Rocky Marci-ANO!” Green was definitely her color.
Here she is before all that, in a scene with Richard Basehart in “Tension”, a film noir from 1949:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rDnLIXxctM
OBH: I didn’t know Al Jaffee grew up in Lithuania with his mother. Good thing he returned to the States before the war. Jaffee, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and my favorite “Mad” artist, Wally Wood. Genius, especially the strips from the early and mid-1950s. Deeply subversive stuff.
Any who think there can be national divorce can please explain how they think the nukes will be divided because no one in their right mind will give them up now.
Brian E:
David Sacks, another PayPal mogul. Five months on and one word answers back, Events. Events haven’t played out as expected. Ukraine has a say despite what the moguls and billionaires may want. Poor Vlad, he chose poorly.
Time will tell,
Chases Eagles:
Well giving up their Soviet legacy nukes worked out for Ukraine? Not so much it seems? Couldn’t really afford to protect them from rouge non-state actors. And they had security guarantees. A bear guarding the flock.
Ukraine didn’t have to fear Poland, or Hungary, or Romania, or Moldova (except Transnistria maybe), but Belarussia (Belarus) and Russia proved to be another kettle of caviar. Not that being subjugated by Russia for centuries was predictive of future aggression. Not at all. Completely unexpected.
Re: Cyd Charisse
Hubert:
Thanks. Brilliant stuff I hadn’t seen.
Charisse had her day in the sun, compared to most, but I do wonder why she didn’t crack the next level.
Hubert:
Yep, not a style she couldn’t do and hypnotize doing it.
In an interview she said her favorite partners were Kelly and Astair. She said her husband always knew which she had worked with at the studio because when it was Kelly, she had bruises. Heh. You can kind of see that in that number I linked. Also a great example of that “glance”. It would be intimidating albeit great to be on the receiving end of that.
Turtler,
You said you weren’t aware the Crimea Rada voted for complete independence from Ukraine. Here is an article verifying that. It’s also on the Wikipedia article on Crimea.
Also, you’re skeptical of the Donbas Insider article– but notice this Marquette University article notes that many Russian speaking people thought there would be another vote to reunite with a non-communist Russia.
Ethnic Russian Ukrainians did support the Ukraine independence based on polling data at the time, but other than Crimea, they didn’t indicate the support in the Donbas.
“Polling data at the time also suggested that more than 55% of ethnic Russians in Ukraine supported the decision to leave the Soviet Union.”
“However, in Crimea, the percentage of “yes” votes was only 37% of total voters, and in Sevastopol, it was just 40%. Moreover, it has been argued that many of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who voted for independence believed that they were voting to abolish the Soviet Union, which would be followed by some sort of reunification with a non-Communist Russia.”
“Almost immediately after independence, the Crimean parliament sought to assert its autonomy, going so far as to declare its independence on May 5, 1992, only to retract that declaration the following day. On May 6, the newly adopted (in Crimea) Crimean Constitution was amended to identify Crimea as part of Ukraine (albeit a highly autonomous part). In June of 1992, the Ukrainian parliament recognized Crimea’s status as an “Autonomous Republic” under the Ukrainian Constitution, but the controversy of the scope of the powers of the Crimean government was not resolved until December 23, 1998, when the Verkhovna Rada accepted a new, less ambitious constitution that had been adopted in Crimea two months earlier.”
my boldface
https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2014/03/understanding-the-constitutional-situation-in-crimea/
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the discussion on ballet, and about Cyd Charisse.
This was a fun discussion. 🙂
There’s a 1953, Cyd Charisse film, that I like, named Bandwagon [tm].
In it, she co-stars with Fred Astaire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band_Wagon
Cheers.
@Brian E
And I responded to them there. At best that is partially true. The truth is that explanations often have utility, ESPECIALLY when it comes to pinning someone down to a stance and making them justify it to see if they can (as I pointed out with Bauxite with his fixation on Trump and a particularly ill-considered analogy that I gladly leapt on and used as my own). Just about everyone has parts of their psyche that are not rational or logical, and for many if not most people that is more powerful than their logic. Which is one reason why appeals that short-circuit their rationality and thinking to hit in their heart are so powerful.
But that’s not everybody, and even many of those can be convinced. Which is one reason why it is useful to maintain a balanced set of appeals and messages. Including explanation.
My explanations are rather cumbersome and long, it is true, but they seem to be quite effective within the context of this blog. And while I would wager the people on this blog are more knowledgeable and politically aware than most (and Neo talking about manipulation and encouraging people to think through appeals helps), it still is a matter.
Fair, but honestly that isn’t too hard. It has happened many times in the past, as East Timor and South Sudan attest. In general the “Rules Based International Order” (for all of its myriad hypocrisies and failures) is generally not opposed to secession where it is done by the consent of both parties (preferably peacefully, but sometimes not as in the massively bloody freakshow that was the Partition of India in 1947). It also generally recognizes oppression, brutality, and unjust treatment as a valid reason for separatism (even if armed), as we saw with East Timor and to a lesser extent Kosovo.
The big issue I see is that this is rarely popular, and the Woke or other anti-Western authoritarians are in control of many of the Great Powers, which means that if the likes of Jefferson have to start getting out guns to defeat oppression from Biden’s puppetmasters, the vaunted “International Community” will not do much to help us and might actively support the state against us.
But that’s a matter of practicality. As a matter of law or “rules” secession is totally kosher in theory and has even had several successful practices in recent history. Which is why at least for the most part I am more concerned with leftist backlash and retaliation against it at home than abroad. Especially given how the Left loves to shift the blame and accuse us of being Confederates and how secession at least superficially resembles that. Which is another reason why I would oppose initiating separation even if it is inevitable, since the last people to hold the symbolic and legal ties to “The Old Country” will have an advantage.
It was probably a minor reason why CHAZ and its kin imploded so catastrophically.
Absolutely agreed. And it is telling that there’s less pushback on it in comparison to how even FDR got flak for it. But I also feel that is a consequence of not pushing back more strongly. In many ways I do think the right has largely been playing to hold ground for nearly a century and playing the “Gentleman’s Game”, such as with Nixon re: JFK and Chicago. And that’s ultimately helped lead there.
Indeed, but I think it is worth noting in terms of concern about how secession plays under the current “rules based international order”, and it is one of the most clearcut and textbook examples of it. To the point I’d argue it is almost a fairytale example far on one side of the scale and few situations are that amicable. But it’s also textbook because textbook, clearcut cases are often the best to establish general principles and see how events interact with the law (hence why textbooks usually start us out with fairly simple situations and then gradually scale them up in complexity).
This is flipping the situation on its head. Various Ukrainian governments have generally allowed the Donbas Oblasts and Crimea (or entities within them) to hold referendums on various scales and levels and have usually worked through their results (though in a few cases like Crimea they overrode them by citing the Constitution). This was the great success of the various Ukrainian governments in the crises of the early and mid 1990s (and probably a salutary lesson to what pan-Russian sentiment remained and the Kremlin about the likely outcomes).
The reason the “rules-based international order”, even among nations otherwise friendly to or sympathetic for the Kremlin, did not recognize these referenda is simple.
A: Self-Interest. Many countries (including the West) bluntly opposed Russian dominance in many aspects, especially Putin after 2008, and opposed them on that. Many other nations did not care particularly one way or the other but did not want to jump on the boat in the face of such strong and powerful opposition.
B: Legitimacy. The reason why the referendums are not taken seriously on a legal matter (including by myself) is because they were fundamentally illegitimate. They were conducted in the face of a thoroughly illegal foreign occupation, under conditions that make mockery of the kinds of conditions legitimate plebiscites are supposed to occur under, with occupation regimes that were horribly authoritarian from the start and apparently had begun lethally disappearing or executing people very early on even before the referendums.
As such, they are violations of not just the Ukrainian Constitution and a host of international agreements and international law, but also basic human dignity and common sense on a scale at least as grand as anything either side did in Euromaidan and almost certainly worse (especially in terms of a strategic simulation).
As such, I believe invoking the Stimson Doctrine and rejecting recognition of these entities is both the proper ethical course of action and also fully pragmatic for American interests. And indeed it is the conclusion made by many powers, even other neutral ones or those positioned as strategic partners of Russia (such as India and even Moscow’s main ally the PRC). I see no more reason to acknowledge their supposed legitimacy because of rigged referendums than I see to claim Manchukuo or the Nazi puppet “First Slovak Republic” were such. And that latter part is noteworthy because while Manchukuo was always rather thinly based on a general desire for autonomy and feeling of regional identity (which the Japanese occupation systematically violated anyway) and was mostly constructed wholesale, Slovakia had been legitimately frustrated with the union and saw Slovak separatist sentiment emerge as a minority but very real force in politics, even disconnected from the manipulations of the Third Reich and its Hungarian allies. But that didn’t mean that the regime itself wasn’t a farcical Nazi dictatorship where Hitler foisted a dictator on the country and demanded it comply with German terms. Likewise why the Ukrainian government has no reason to recognize regimes that are inherently hostile to it (and which wasted no time attacking its loyalists and military troops even in their barracks) and which were constituted illegally and illegitimately. And honestly from the Ukrainian Loyalist POV the illegitimacy and illegality is frankly the cherry on top; there’s much less dispute that the Confederate movement in 1860-1 represented a fairly authentic and popular movement by not just the Planter Lords that controlled it but also the people of those states, but that didn’t stop Lincoln from dropping the hammer militarily when they attacked Federal troops at Fort Sumter (and even rejected a last ditch attempt by the habitually pro-Southern, Native-to-the-South CO of that fort to have a diplomatic outcome).
If anything, the proto-Confederate legislatures had much more confidence in their legitimacy and popularity because they were willing to have more or less fair votes according to their state laws and to let the diplomatic crisis simmer for months before growing frustrated or overconfident enough.
It also contrasts sharply with Kosovo, where for better or worse (and I’d increasingly argue worse) the KLA and Kosovo Government could credibly claim descent from the legally recognized (to the extent “laws” matter in a totalitarian communist dictatorship) Kosovo Assembly that Milosevic had first neutered and then disbanded on the thinnest of pretexts, and both were active well before NATO intervened openly. And in many ways Kosovo is a more peaceful mirror image of the Donbaschukuos, being a formerly single party state run by corrupt former warlords, albeit ones that have been forced to recognize that pushing for annexation into a Greater Albania is not practical and neither is expelling all Serbs.
I could write quite a lot about the dismal state of Kosovo for the past century or so, and I do *not* have a good opinion of the KLA or much of the Kosovo government and indeed I could criticize NATO and other Western actors heartily on much that they did, and maybe I will later. But in pretty much every index one can choose Kosovo compares favorably to the Russian occupation gov’ts in Crimea and the Donbas.
Fair, though honestly I support the bombing campaign with conditions. I do believe it fair to question the nature of our interests in Yugoslavia (even if I must personally, grudgingly agree with Bubba Clinton and his shysters that having a murderously genocidal dictatorship in power in Serbia was both a humanitarian fiasco and unwelcome to our interests, even if it was allied with us as Milosevic was at the start of the 1990s), but retaliatory bombing for ethnic cleansing fits. It also is worth noting that as controversial as the NATO bombing campaign is, the previous “Yugoslav” bombing campaigns have largely dropped down the memory hole in spite of their prominence at the time and how the Serb-dominated air force if anything acted more brutally and indiscriminately than we did (such as attempting to assassinate Tudjman and a great deal of the civilian Croat leadership with a failed bombing campaign at Banski Dvori, something with no analogue in the NATO ROE). I do think stomping on Serbian aviation assets and hitting its military and strategic infrastructure was a welcome corrective, not unlike the No Fly Zones over Saddam’s Iraq, though I do think a lot of the execution was botched (though not as bad as Clark nearly starting WWIII over an avoidable conflict with Russian peacekeepers on an airfield).
(I should also note that this does not mean I favor a No Fly Zone being imposed over Ukraine; while morally and legally I can support it on a practical level it is thoroughly unworkable and more likely to cause catastrophe, such as a new world war.)
I actually am leery at best about “the West” and others choosing to jump on the bandwagon of that so quickly and can even argue it was a practical mistake and legally dubious. However, as much as I oppose it I oppose the attempts to conflate it with the armed takeover and thin referendums even more.
The fact is that the Kosovo Declaration was conducted years after the end of large scale military and sectarian combat, though Kosovo remains unstable and suffers from plenty of communal violence (now with the Kosovar Albanians largely the abuses, like we saw in the March Pogrom). It was also done by the at-least-officially legally constituted government after years of negotiation with Serbia, Russia, and others fell through, and while it did lead to (often justifiable) anger from the local Serbs and abuses by Albanians the peacekepers stepped in to mostly clean house even-handedly, and years more negotiations followed where the anti-separatist assembly were recognized and re-integrated into the government and both Belgrade and Pristina had to make concessions (and a good portion of the traditional Serb heritage of Kosovo has been placed under guard).
There’s a lot wrong with this, and even more wrong earlier, but it is a far cry from a Fly-by-Night military takeover and referendum held at gunpoint during an active combat, while inner city Donetsk and Luhansk were still under fighting. And while we can criticize “The West” for a lot and recognizing this in my opinion prematurely, it did not force the issue with a military occupation (indeed, the occupation had been going on for years by the time it happened, and if we wished to draw a parallel it would be closer to Transnistria or the inner Georgian separatist states).
There are two issues with this.
Firstly: It simply isn’t true. The US and others in the West have had to eat crow a good portion of the time, ESPECIALLY about things like East Timor, and while it’d be a lie for me to say the US and other powerful countries do not manipulate the situations to minimize damage to themselves (Such as the US refusing to put its people under the Hague’s jurisdiction), we are more consistent.
Moreover, these rules are appealing not just to “The West” but also to a host of others, such as India (which one might argue is a Western country), OAN, and others. And indeed even to Russia, at least when it isn’t explicitly in contradiction to its interests.
Secondly: Even if this were true I, as an American Patriot, would still find it to be MUCH more welcome and preferable to a situation or order based on whatever the likes of Xi, Putin, or the Ayatollah say it is. Especially since they are at least as given to hypocrisy and self-interest as the West is but are also enemies of my country and truly vile dictators on their merits.
In short, there is still a quantifiable difference between a widely-boycotted-but-well-observed referendum done by a dodgy and corrupt but nominally democratic government during a time of uneasy peace in response to failed negotiations, and a fly-by-night referendum enforced by bayonets and made a sham of while in many cases fighting and protests ravaged the place.
We can and should criticize the “quality” of governance in Kosovo and the West’s indulgence of it, but that doesn’t actually help or justify the Kremlin’s actions in Crimea and the Donbas. If anything, it makes them WORSE precisely because the Kremlin has absolutely no consistency between its stance on Kosovo and its stances on Crimea and Donbas besides “they’re our guys, so what we say go.” Even the West’s stance on Kosovo- for all of its MANY problems – is not that thin or threadbare.
Unfortunately agreed, as things go now, though I imagine there might be a chance with enough painful but peaceful standoffs. Though I certainly have been wrong and overly optimistic before.
Thanks for the link. I’m watching it and will give my thoughts more later, after I reply to the other post.
Thanks for the evidence, and that’s what I thought it might be. That it did happen but it was quickly retracted as a result of negotiations. And that does fit with my basic stance that Crimea has been and remains the most pro-Russian of the regions internationally recognized as Ukrainian (excepting maybe some parts on the very Eastern borders).