We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Dear Troll Factory… All you chaps with impeccably British names like Stephen Brown, John Smith (seriously?), Jane Austin (lol), Jim Williams, Paul Strong, Sarah Evans… explaining why the Bucha atrocity is dubious/faked/black ops… pro-tip… I can see your Russian IP addresses and you ain’t getting past the moderation page 😀
Hey “Mike Jackson”, are you guys still based at 55 Savushkina Street, St. Petersburg or has your employer moved to bigger premises to accommodate all the new hires? I suppose its a safer job than getting burned alive in your BMP in Ukraine, right?
Йдіть в пизду, йобані рашисти!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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No William Shakespeare? Shocking! I’d go dump a bunch of shitposts on Russian sites under the names Alex Dugin, Ivan Toreabollockov & Xenia Onatopp except I can’t speak a word of Russian.
“Go pussy, yoban racists” according to my dodgy translation engine.
I use a pseudonym, so I suppose I’d better leave too.
At least the trolls are helping to make Samizdata’s hits go up, so thanks, you fuckers!
Remember, a bomber attracts flak when it is over the target.
Finally, from John Ashmore in the excellent CapX site yesterday:
Or the real view from Russia, or at least from one of my Moscow correspondents (bowdlerised):
‘Yes, this bald bastard spoiled everything. After all, the bastard is lying, how he breathes. He didn’t say a word of truth about anything, a guardian for Russia.’
Nothing new here. You could see the same scenes across Russia at various points across the last century. They did the same on the Road to Berlin in 1945. It was part-and-parcel of the Red Terror’s standard operating procedure and that didn’t stop with the collapse of the USSR.
The only difference is the high resolution phones in every civilians pocket to be able to take pictures and videos and broadcast them instantly to the world. Plus pictures from drones which showed the bodies in the streets weeks ago during the Russian occupation.
I can totally understand the Ukrainians fighting tooth-and-nail against these orcs.
Only if you also have a Russian IP address, Staghounds
Glad I bought that Perthshire VPN then.
Apparently professional trolls don’t bother with such niceties as a VPN
They ARE using VPN! They actually work for Channel 4 News.
Btw, the pro-Russian trolls are still posting 🤪
🤣🤣🤣
The late Clive James made up an English character by the name of “Jane Austin” in order to shock a Japanese character in one of his stories.
The joke being that his “Jane Austin” would be as UNLIKE a Jane Austin character as possible – swear like a trooper, behave in an incredibly vulgar way, and-so-on.
On a serious note, I have noticed just how bad Mr Putin’s propagandists have become – he used to have a fairly slick propaganda machine, but it has fallen apart (people overseas can resign – and they have). The resignation (very early in the conflict) of Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert seems to have been the signal for people with real communication talent (and both Max Keiser and his wife have real talent – whatever one thinks of the use they have sometimes made of their abilities) to jump off the, hopefully, sinking ship of Mr Putin’s regime.
The Russian opposition, especially overseas, seems to have settled on the colours of Saint Andrew (important for Russians) – one sees far more blue and white flags than one sees blue, white and red flags, in opposition demonstrations.
The message is obvious – the red of war, blood and death is for Mr Putin, Russia can do without it. I am reminded of the sentiments of the French poet (and politician) Lamartine – denouncing the socialists of 1848.
Their flag is red – the colour of violence, blood and death, nothing good will come out of the death and destruction that they produce….
How successful can the Russian opposition be? As always the danger of double agents is ever present – a seeming opponent of Mr Putin may really be working for his intelligence services.
But there is also the factor of triple agents – people who present themselves as opponents, report to the FSB (and so on) as agents of the regime, but then report back to opposition figures what the FSB (and so on) has told them to do.
So “things get complicated”.
There are things you know, things you suspect, and things you notice would not be in the interests of the bad guys and/or consistent with their propaganda. When the Nazis invaded Austria, they behaved a lot less brutally than when they invaded Poland: Austria was a ‘brother nation’ of Germans. By contrast, Putin’s earlier behaviour made it unlikely he would see the need to bolster his “Ukrainians are really Russians” propaganda with instructions to his troops to act as if this were true, even before the Ukrainians made their unfraternal feelings clear in a way the Austrians never did. Nevertheless, actual events on the ground, their nature and typicality, are verified by actual examination of the ground, however probable they were without that.
(That said, the mere probability would have been quite enough in itself to keep me fighting.)
Niall statistician Kilmartin has spent decades studying subjects where totals and typicalities (including about atrocities) are deduced from infrequent or hard-to-gather statistics. When mass graves turned up all over the former Soviet union in the early 1990s, I was surprised only at how uneager the western MSM were to devote any time to reporting them*, but then I knew of the mass grave the wartime Germans discovered (and ignored) at Vinnitsa, as well as the one at Katyn. For many people, seeing these pictures will indeed be the first moment that the likelihood of such things in this war occurred to them.
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* Actually, not that surprised. With singularly poor timing, the people who were shocked by Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ speech decided to reinterpret the holodomor as “only a few thousands, or tens of thousands at most”, and similarly downplay the purge. This politically-correct narrative was powerful in the late 1980s in anglosphere university departments of the kind from which MSM reporters were disproportionally recruited.
Getting some pro-Putin spam from Indians linking to saffron fascist webshites as well, folk who are all in with nice Mr. Putin.
Paul Marks
April 5, 2022 at 12:33 pm
The Russian opposition, especially overseas, seems to have settled on the colours of Saint Andrew (important for Russians) – one sees far more blue and white flags than one sees blue, white and red flags, in opposition demonstrations.
this flag is inspired by colors of Novgorod republic, one of great “roads not taken” in Russian history
Yes indeed.
It should be pointed out that every people that have been taken over by Marxists have acted in a savage way.
For example the “gentle Cambodians” slaughtered one third of the population of Cambodia (1 in 3) under Marxist rule. The mass death of the 1930s was nothing to do with Russians being inherently evil (“Stalin” was not even Russian) – it was due to MARXISM.
As for Mr Putin – he is an ex KGB Colonel who severed many years years under a Marxist (socialist) regime. As for Alexander Dugin and the others who have tried to create a new ideology to replace Marxism….
The tribal Collectivism of Alexander Dugin and others has as much in common with Pushkin and Dostoevsky (and the rest of classical Russian culture) as they have with Ming the Merciless from the Planet Mongo.
I do not know what is more depressing – the apologists for Mr Putin (of whom there are many) or the anti Russian racists, who keep implying that the problem is NOT Mr Putin, but is “Russians” in general.
Seriously Paul, that is not what criticising the current state of Russian culture means, so go fuck yourself.
Rather rude to Paul there, Perry.
Indeed it was, John, but I am not willing to indulge Paul calling everyone who dares disagree with him a racist. And when he calls Poles, Ukrainians and Russians who look askance at the current state of Russian culture “racist”, people who have actually interacted with Russians in Russia (unlike Paul), he has vanished up his own rear end.
What surprises and disappoints me is how many folk who are usually on our side of the argument are so bitterly opposed to the current western regimes, that they will believe Russian propaganda rather than admit that maybe, just this once, our usual enemies are actually on the side of the angels this time. People I have usually grown to respect are now peddling Putin’s obvious lies. I’m dismayed, frankly. What happened to the basics, such as the non aggression principle? That alone should tell you if you are backing the wrong side here.
Longrider, most people I know who are somewhat like what you describe are not actually believing Putin’s BS. It’s more a matter of also not believing Biden’s or Zelenskyy’s BS. As for, why might some – specifically, Americans – not see Ukraine on the side of angels, remember that Ukraine has played a very central role in Biden’s corruptions for quite some years. Ukraine’s corruptions were probably somewhat responsible for Biden’s election.
Ukraine is the one place that has managed to out-corrupt Biden. That’s . . . impressive. We were predisposed to disbelieve anything uttered by Ukrainian government when this started.
There’s no binary solution such as, one side is with angels, one with Satan. (Excepting, of course, as in all such situations, the innocent civilians trampled between the sides.) Obviously, Putin wins in the “most evil” contest. But many of us simply don’t trust any government official, any press report, on either side.
As to the NAP: I keep encountering accusations that Ukraine has been shelling civilian areas in the Donbas for eight years. I have no clue if this is true. If it is true, then the violation of the NAP would seem to be shaky grounds to take sides. If I rape your sister, I probably ought not be surprised when you kill me.
Again, the only people who warrant consideration now are those caught in the middle. I’ll not take on a new love for Ukraine’s rulers based on that. But to the extent that “support” has any meaning or value, most people support the Ukrainian civilians and want this to end. You can abhor a country’s government and still support its people.*
(*: As an American, I have a lot riding on this statement.)
@ Bobby B,
Yes, that’s my take also and I’m sure many others. I’m certainly not pro-Putin and his invasion is stupid and brutal, but that doesn’t mean no attempt should be made to try and understand why he did it (again, this does NOT mean approve of those reasons, just understand them).
Is there some US led attempt to destabilise and debase Russia? If so, have those behind it asked themselves what they do if they succeed? After all, nobody is talking about invading and occupying Russia (yeh, best of luck with that!) but there is talk of war crimes trials and the old favourite “regime change”. Bluster? Perhaps so, but its very stupid bluster. I’m sure Russia and the world would be better off it became Libya 2.0.
There are a lot of people playing with forces they don’t understand but somehow imagine they can control.
This is so true.
(I’m imagining Biden frantically trying to change the television channel with the stereo remote.)
Longrider:
ARE our usual enemies on the side of the angels?
The “Biden” regime still refuses to liberalize fracking, or to allow new pipelines.
The German regime is still going to shut down nuclear reactors. (Although the Germans have arguably done more that the “Biden” regime.)
At least now we know whom we can trust.
I don’t think “Ukraine is the one place”: in many countries, corrupt people have it easier than in the US.
That does not imply, of course, that there is anybody in the world with less integrity than Biden: it’s just that Biden had to exercise restraint (when he had a functional brain).
I also object to your lumping in Zelensky with the governments that preceded him.
Leaders who are in it only for the money, do not stay to fight when their lives are at stake.
Agreed. Ukraine certain has a corruption problem, to put it mildly, but notable improvements have been made. And yes, I previously had a rather poor impression of Zelenskyy but I find it impossible not to admire the man now. I suspect “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition”* will go down in history as the succinct Ukrainian “We will fight them on the beaches…”.
* (I have seen several slightly different versions of his exact words)
IIRC, Zelensky was quite involved in the Hunter & Joe Show in Ukraine. The Bidens walked out of Ukraine with millions of dollars – money that really can’t be explained away as anything but attempted bribery on Ukraine’s behalf. That occurred under Z’s watch. Trump says that Z was elected as a corruption-fighter, but the Biden clan was quite enriched even after Z’s election.
And . . . back to that (alleged) pesky shelling of and attacks on the people in the Donbas. That was occurring while Z was in charge, right? You can call Azov rogue, but Z was President. Those attacks, if they truly occurred, wouldn’t seem to meet the definition of proper warfare.
I’ll grant that he has acquitted himself well in this war. But his pre-war history that I’ve seen isn’t that inspiring.
Right now, the humans i most admire are:
V. Zelenskyy
D. Trump
E. Musk
R. DeSantis
In reverse alphabetical order 🙂
Too bad that they are all White males.
But one of them is African-American.
Bobby: Zelenskyy was elected in 2019.
Biden ceased to be VP in 2017.
That seems to contradict your narrative of Z. being involved in the Biden corruption.
As for the shelling, i am going to suspend judgment until there is an independent inquiry.
It is fairly clear that the Ukrainians shelled civilian areas in the DonBas. What is unclear are the all-important contexts.
The anti-Ukrainian fighters (many actual Russians sent in by Putin) set themselves up in civilian areas. They made those areas targets when they did so. Did they set up in those areas before the Ukrainians shelled them, or after? Were there civilians living in them at the time? That is what is at stake.
The mere act of shelling civilian areas is not sufficient to prove foul play. You need to show that the area was not a legitimate target as well.
It’s not a war crime to shell a hospital if the enemy is using the hospital to hide troops or military supplies.
Just going round shouting “they shell civilian areas” as if that is all there is to it is stupid. Especially since the Russians have been doing it all war.
I note that the shooting of civilians is also not a war crime if they attack military targets while not in uniform. I have no doubt that many of the civilians shot by the Russians fall into that category. We know that the Ukrainians have encouraged them to do so.
It does seem odd that the trolls aren’t hiding their true location behind a VPN. Perhaps the troll factories are as corrupt as everything else in Russia, so they don’t even try to deliver a remotely credible service as long as they can still get paid. But allowing low-status workers to use a VPN might enable them to do all manner of things that their masters wouldn’t approve of. Perhaps the real truth is that in paranoid security states like Russia, there are many servants of the state but there is no such thing as a trusted servant of the state.
What bobby b said: “You can abhor a country’s government and still support its people”
I’ve known people from a lot of countries with detestable regimes in charge, Communists or Islamists, and every single person I’ve met has been wonderful. Maybe they are playing me to get information? …but Occam’s Razor says no, they are just nice, funny, friendly, smart, likeable people.
Their government people and “clerics”? I’d burn every one of them slowly.
I’m irritated by what I see as smug comparisons between the war in the Ukraine and the 1939-1940 Winter War.
After a “re-organisation”, the Soviets crushed the Finns (who are still waiting for promised troops and supplies from Western powers). Petsamo is still in Russian occupation.
I hope this doesn’t happen again. But I don’t trust the former European Union or the USA to do enough. Worse, I can see someone getting a Nobel Peace Prize for “stopping the fighting” on terms that entrench Mr Putin’s gains. Kamala Harris no doubt. Imagine if they shared it with Mr Putin!
As for atrocities, IIRC the Russian troops advancing into Prussia in the 1750s were accused of digging up entire cemeteries to rape and loot corpses. So, yes, I’m willing to believe any crime is possible.
But… in 1940 retreating British troops shot dozens of “German spies” as they approached Dunkirk and other channel ports. None of them were German spies, they were French civilians who failed to understand English – even when being shouted at. The kindest explanation is that a form of mob hysteria occurs under battle stress. This is why I would not be shocked that atrocities were committed on either or both sides.
Not pesky at all and there was indeed shelling in both directions. The Russians & their local auxiliaries were constantly trying to increase the size of their holdings, Ukrainians were trying to push them back, it was a warzone in which both sides had and used artillery.
Yes, yes, I get the distaste for the Biden regime and I agree with it, just as I agree with the statements that our MSM are a bunch of self serving venal liars who are likely spinning propaganda. What I’m on about here is those who will simply nail their colours to Putin’s mast because they despise Biden so much. You can despise both. An example here would be Steve Turley. He has spent time and effort championing freedom of speech and a return to conservative values (men and women are different, for example) that I really did think he was on the side of the angels (not being on the side of the demented Dems being a start, at least), despite not agreeing with all he has to say. That said, he did go a bit Comical Ali in the wake of the 2020 election telling everyone that Giuliani would pull something out of the bag.
Now, however, he is firmly behind Putin. This is a man who is waging a war by invading a sovereign nation – this, itself is a moral wrong. There are no excuses and no justifications. Any fighting going on in the east of the country is a civil war and no one has the moral authority to go in and sort it out. In the process, civilians are being killed. Putin’s admirers here are claiming that this either isn’t happening or is exaggerated. Well, maybe it is exaggerated, but an urban war will kill civilians and the decision to invade was a moral wrong precisely because of this. And people seem to think that Putin’s actions are okay. Really?
I don’t care how corrupt or not the Ukraine regime is. That’s their business and no one else’s. Like Perry, there are things I have come to admire about Zelenskyy. I cannot say that about Putin.
Oh, yeah, and I’m sick of this reference to a ‘special military operation.’ It’s an invasion of a sovereign state. Call it what it is.
Responsive to Bobby b.’s comments about ‘people playing with forces they do not understand but think they can control’, one has only to watch the video of President Obama visiting the White House yesterday and observe the way President Biden is treated. It would be merely funny if it wasn’t so informative. This would make an Awesome Republican campaign ad for any Republican bold enough to run it, eg, Trump.
later,
llamas
About Russians committing atrocities – nothing new here. They have committed enormous atrocities, mostly on fellow Russians, in the last century (also before…). In this respect they indeed treat Ukrainians as if they were true Russians (as Putin claims they are).
Not only have Russians murdered some 60 million fellow Russians (and also fellow Ukrainians) in the last century, but – if we leave the dead aside for a moment – the treatment of many dozens of millions Gulag prisoners (before they died) was unspeakably barbarous and cruel.
We are not accustomed in the West to such phenomena, such enormous barbarity and can’t grasp them. But it happened. (The Germans came close, too).
And don’t try to blame all on Communism. It does not begin to explain the depth of barbarity. And it didn’t spring to life suddenly after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was there, latent, before.
Texan Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who does a regular set of interviews available on YouTube, has this good interview with an expert on Russia and other countries’ disinformation ops and psychological warfare. He notes how crap a lot of current Russian fake stuff is and how easy it is to spot, such as how Perry here has been able to note the use of Russian IP addresses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrk_iJh1yHo
That said, the Russians may not be as silky smooth as they’d like folk to think, and the crap performance of their military is a blow to their prestige, but they are still capable of doing a lot of evil.
Llamas: one has only to watch the video of President Obama visiting the White House yesterday and observe the way President Biden is treated
The Lightbringer went back to the White House!
Probably thought somebody said “Bathhouse”. No wonder he was keen.
The Soviets took Petsamo (easily, because it was demilitarised under an earlier agreement) in the Winter War (1939 – 40) but returned it to Finland in the peace treaty (probably because they wanted a bit of Finland to be between them and Norway, to isolate themselves from the western war. In the Continuation War (1941 – 44), they did not take Petsamo but demanded it be ceded to them in the peace treaty, Soviet priorities having changed.
(As for that comment’s later claim that retreating British soldiers shot ‘dozens’ of Frenchmen as ‘German spies’ merely because they did not speak English, I wonder what his source was. A while back, some of the usual suspects wrote ‘histories’ to ‘debunk the myth of Dunkirk’. There were inglorious incidents in that retreat – but those ‘histories’ should be treated with caution.)