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jevgeni

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My last comment before this one was 56 days ago. You are not exactly making a case for your argument.

As to the ban - I asked you to delete my account years ago and you refused. So it's not something you can credibly threaten with, if I don't care. What I do care is you retaining my personal data against my will. But if I need a ban for you to purge it - please go ahead.

Maybe some helpful feedback for you: I would be more inclined to pay attention to the guidelines if those were not used to reinforce the site's obvious political biases. Yeah, you *say* HN is neutral, but for some reason only a certain kind of opinion gets promoted. I've read this site for 12 years in one account or another and the groupthink has only gotten worse. How are you going to solve this?

You know, as a Ukrainian, what I appreciate the most is someone claiming to both be "in a comfy chair" and lecturing me on what is going on in my country of origin.

You have three potential explanations:

(1) The agressor, who:

- Has a history of using the very same tactics in Ukraine and sacrificing thousands of its citizens in burnt Earth approach,

- Has shot down a commercial airline "by mistake" several years ago

- Has a history and culture of endemic lying, which they also foster in Western countries through soft power and social network campaigns

- Who have started shelling the very citizens in Kherson they claimed to have liberated once they lost the city

- Benefits from the flooding massively, because it blocks off the looming counteroffensive by Ukraine

(2) The victim, who:

- Gains nothing on the battlefield by doing this and actually makes it more difficult for them.

- Has to sacrifice the lives of its own civilian population to achieve this.

- Has no history of such misinformation tactics.

(3) Force majeur.

But wait, here come the enlightened HN commenters to assign equal probability to all three explanations, disregarding all of the above, because:

- They haven't bothered to actually inform themselves (thinking that *oligarchs*, even with a Ukrainian citizenship, have nothing to do with russian secret service is another level of naive)

- They feel entitled to have an uninformed opinion

- Imply that the lives of Ukrainians are worth so little that their government would willingly sacrifice them.

Thanks, but I'll keep the outrage.

I am one of those people whose user experience will drastically improve if modal windows are accepted for what they are - an anti-pattern at best and a dark pattern most of the time. I as a user make the decisions if I want a separate window or not, not the application developer.

As a principle, I don't read any website that has a modal window, especially a modal "subscribe to our newsletter".

Bucha is ethnic eradication. Irpen is ethnic eradication. Prigozhin saying that they have "eradicated most of the active male population of Ukraine and therefore achieved the goals of the war" is a straight up confession.

Just because russia's strategy is ethnic eradication through assimilation does not make it less ethnic eradication.

Pretending that it's not is lying.

It's only a jump if you deliberately ignore what russians themselves are saying.

As I've mentioned somewhere else in this thread, russian government and russian mass media outright call for ethnic cleansing. Putin in his speech at the start of the war said "that he has taken steps to finally solve the Ukrainian question". Solovyev and Skabeyeva - very prominent, prime-time media personalities - are actively promoting ideas of ethnic cleansing, like Skabeeva saying that the gruesome beheading of a Ukrainian POW by Wagner is righteous and should happen to all Ukrainians who oppose russia. Prigozhin publicly claimed that they have "killed most of the active Ukrainian male population" (which is BS) and therefore "achieved the goals of Putin's Special Military Operation." (which is an super significant statement about their intent!)

In light of this, your whataboutism is both tiresome and irrelevant, because you are outright ignoring explicit statements by one side. This is per definition unbalanced.

The problem is not that people in the West are not listening to both sides. A lot of people still have a very selective attention to what russia says. Specifically, people choose to ignore Putin's outright hitlerian speech at the start of the war, people choose to ignore prominent russian media personalities calling for ethnic cleansing in Ukraine. Just recently a horrible video of Wagner troops beheading a Ukrainian POW surfaced and Skabeeva in prime time said something to the effect "this is what should happen to all Ukrainians".

Instead, in some Chomskian myopia there is a considerable number of people in Europe and USA spreading FUD and reducing their opinion to "war is bad (sad emoji face) Ukraine shouldn't do war".

Honestly, this playing the victim is at best getting tiring. You've ignored my comment to hear it as moving the goal posts.

Again: only ca. 2% of the population are siloviki, who rely on the rest for support, for food, for logistics, for communication, IT support, etc., etc. If the protests fail, is because most of the 98% don't care, or snitch, or actively oppose the protest. That makes them culpable. A few complaining doesn't absolve the society.