The Ukraine crisis: John Kerry and Nato must calm down and back off
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sending troops in unmarked uniforms with unmarked vehicles to annex the Crimean Peninsula under the pretense of protection from ethnic cleansing, which anyone with access to Facebook and Twitter can easily see is completely manufactured by the Russian propaganda machine, without buy-in from the international community, is an obvious act of aggression. Putin keeps upping the ante because nobody ever bothered to call him on his bluff. The international community consistently let Putin cross boundaries with impunity, and he's been getting more and more insolent with each incident. There comes a time when enough is enough.
Am I mistaken in assuming that the G8 is not under American control? At worst, Kerry could recommend that the US not take part in the Sochi-hosted G8, but that's it, correct?
I'm also confused by the writer's characterization of the situation in the Ukraine as "a crisis that can easily be contained if cool heads prevail."
If you drill down to the basics, any crisis could "easily be contained" if all parties involved are calm and willing to sit and talk indefinitely.
In this particular situation, it doesn't look like that would happen given that Ukraine is essentially in the middle of a civil revolt (war?) and there are a large number of parties who would have to be comfortable having some kind of draw-down talk.
I suspect all it takes is for G7 countries not to invite Russia to the meetings.
They have been uninvited to the G20 meetings in Australia.
Nobody's going to be able to uninvite Russia from their own summit, so if the US and Australia "remove" Russia and don't attend the summit, doesn't it just become a G6 (G8 minus the US and Australia)?
In order to "remove" Russia, all seven countries would have to agree to not go to Sochi and also to have the summit somewhere outside of Russia.
However I think news like this probably should be posted on reddit than here.
I think it's obvious to everyone that NATO would love to have influence on the Russian border, and that Russia would prefer if that didn't happen, but that doesn't make a military invasion okay. The "Western hysteria," at least what I've seen from over here in the good old US of A, is about the possibility of a significant (which it would be even if nobody else gets involved) war in Europe.
It's kind of like with bitcoin pools, if any pool gets 51% of hashrate, it can do nasty things to everybody. Same with influence, if US gets, say 51% influence in the world, it can be bad for everybody. It's all very simplified here, and my only politics knowledge comes from playing EU and Civilization video games, so that's only how I see it.
I support 'invasion', which is not really an invasion yet, because it consists only of selfies of native population on the background with unmarked Russian(irony, ha-ha) military. Nobody is dead, and I hope, hope, hope it will stay that way.
I see this as a very calculated move to show Crimea they have our support, which they asked for, and nothing more. All hysterical WWIII comments is an overkill.
However if Putin would enter east provinces of Ukraine, like Kharkiv, and it might be tempting to do so, cause they are somewhat pro-Russian too, but much less than the Crimea, it would be insane, and I'll never fight for him, and I'll go to protests and try to overthrow him, because I don't want a war. So that's my biggest concern.
There is one more thing to keep in mind: even if Russia would do nothing, Ukraine may go downward into civil war because they have some nasty social problems now. If it would happen I really don't know what would be the best move for Russia to take. But I think there was enough violence already, and I want only peace.
1. Browser plugin(or at least web service)showing "yelowness" of an article and whole site as well. There are some semi-formal attributes of yellow article: exaggerating(e.g. "peaceful protesters" vs "provocateurs"), controversial sources, non-representative opinions(e.g. a crying woman with children speaks for the whole country) etc.
2. Some kind of facts graph. While the most yellow media has no links to sources at all, slightly better option is just quoting source w/out any links(and you have to spend a lot of time to check). Good media have links, but reader have to check them(and source could qoute some controversial and non-representative opinion). We should give users some kind of software able to find root sources for all facts in an article immediately and build linking/quoting graph.