Re: Russian Invasion of Ukraine [MERGED]
You know... one thing that I'm always cognizant of is when I'm fighting for a particular issue, I stop and I look around at who is fighting for the same issue, too. For example, if I'm looking at an issue and I find myself on the same side as Rand Paul or Tucker Carlson, I stop and I ask, "Do I really have the correct information?" because generally, Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson are on the wrong side of, well, just about everything.
I wasn't familiar with Scott Ritter's stance on the Ukraine war. So, I did some reading on his positions. Then I did a Google search and the first thing that showed up on the search was a YouTube video (never a good sign) with Scott Ritter and Andrew Napolitano. Both of these guys have some pretty serious sexual predator accusations against them.
Scott Ritter is a convicted sex offender. One of the reasons that he dropped off the face of the earth during the Bush Administration was that he had multiple accusations of trying to set up sexual liaisons with underage girls. He pulled out his dick on cam with someone who had told him she was underage (who was actually an undercover police officer). And before you think, "Oh, well... the Bush Administration framed him!", it happened more than once. He wasn't prosecuted the first time he was arrested. Then it happened again and again which led to his conviction. Ritter didn't deny he tried to hook up with 15-16 year olds, he instead blamed in on depression.
He ended up serving a prison sentence for "unlawful contact with a minor".
Andrew Napolitano used to be a fixture on Fox and was a frequent commentator on other shows. Fox finally gave him the boot because
there were so many young men coming forward with credible accusations of sexual harassment. The accusations included former employees- young men in their twenties. There was one accusation from a defendant in Napolitano's court who said that Napolitano solicited oral sex from him. When there's more than one person coming forward with the same story, a pattern emerges.
It might be that Scott Ritter has valid opinions on Ukraine but there's no evidence that he had any expertise in Russia or Eastern Europe. And there's a whole lotta baggage that comes with Scott Ritter.
On a related note...
Everyone in the LGBT community has good reasons to be suspicious of Russia's motives
in anything. If you have any doubts about the motives of these guys, ask yourself, "Do I want to be on the side of the country that has so much anti-gay rhetoric? Or on the side of the country whose values are more in line with Europe?".
They're saying it out loud.
Russian Orthodox Church Leader Blames Invasion on Ukraine's 'Gay Pride' [Newsweek]
Regardless of the motive- recreating Russian's past glories as an imperial power, land grabs to get access to the Black Sea or Ukraine's progressive values... one does have to ask, "Am I on the right side?".
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You nor anyone else who's been aggressively controlling the narrative here has refuted a single thing I mentioned about Ukraine, not a single thing any of the sources I provided say about Ukraine.
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Those three sources just happened to be the ones I'd seen in the previous couple days and took 30 seconds to post, just to show that the debate is not settled. I could post a thousand sources from the West that expose the government propaganda, yet it would have no effect here,
[Text: Removed] The response here is both comical and predictable. The Western propaganda machine says they're all deplorables, so it's a fact they're 'wrong' about everything.
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So the fact that the dozens of top leaders worshiped by 'liberals' and 'progressives' are all in Epstein's pedo-island flight logbook means they're all 100% wrong about everything too, right? But no, they support gay parades, so they're the best people ever, at the pinnacle of 'Western values'. Got it.
And the Russian religious leader in the clown suit says the war is divine justice against the gay parade depravity, and that means it's awesome that the Ukraine Army, controlled by Nazis, have been shelling the civilian populations in the Donbass for eight years, killing thousands. And the 2014 CIA coup,
[Text: Removed] which included rounding up and murdering all of the political opposition, is a 'progressive' step forward because it brought gay parades, and all the ethnic Russians who are the majority in the Donbass should just accept their US puppet dictator or die. Got it.
Yes, Rand Paul must be evil, because he's not only against this war, but he's against every war, as he knows they're for no other reason than for empire and 'full-spectrum dominance', and he argues, like his father, that the US should earn respect in the world with diplomacy rather than demanding it via threats, coups and bombs. And he thinks the federal government has no business governing anything regarding our sex lives. Such evil. Yes, he's obviously wrong about everything.
Ah yes, Scott Ritter likes teenage girls. I didn't know that, because I don't pay any attention to tabloid matters.
[Text: Removed] Do you know how many Americans are in prison because they were bullied into a guilty plea knowing that they had no chance fighting the government? Maybe Ritter deserved to be convicted, and maybe not. I don't know, and neither do you. What I know is that he was a decorated Marine officer who was a stand-out in military intelligence circles, so much so that he was chosen for an elite team of weapons inspectors for Iraq, and when he saw that the Western establishment was intent on launching a war based on blatant lies, he threw away his standing with the Washington crowd and tried to stop a war from happening. Can you tell me how many others in the righteous and honorable US military who also knew that war was based on lies gave up their careers and told the truth to back up Ritter? Take a guess.
So regardless of whether or not Ritter showed his dick to a teenage girl, when it comes to military matters I'll still listen to what he has to say, and weigh it along with a lot of other sources.
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Regarding the comments about Engdahl (and mintpressnews), passed down from the oracle of Wikipedia, all I can do is laugh. And I say that sincerely.
[Text: Removed] I read the first Engdahl book as a teen, and it changed my life, realizing that the reason I was so bored with history in school was because it was all BS. The book was given to me by my father's best friend. When he'd visit I'd always try to be home, because he and my father were the two smartest people I've ever met, both brilliant engineers leading the development of aircraft design when it was all done on paper and by mathematicians like them. We'd talk for hours about politics, history, philosophy, engineering, and then started giving me books because I had so many questions. The Engdahl book wasn't available in any bookstore, effectively banned, because the history it told was dangerous to the political establishment, exposing their narrative as largely propaganda. One of the other books he gave me was G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island", on the history of the US Federal Reserve, once again showing me that the school/government history was trying to keep me ignorant. I've found innumerable books since, having learned that whatever government asserts is true is half-truth at best, and often outright lies, in order to keep the population ignorant, submissive, and entertained. Surely you're familiar with the work of Bernays, and the early relationship between the CIA and corporate media?
There isn't a war in the past century for which the Western political establishment has told the truth about how and why it started, up to and including Ukraine. Anyone who's a sincere student of history by default is highly skeptical of anything government says about a new war, and looks diligently for sources that the government is trying to censor or discredit.
Mintpressnews, what's their thought-crime? Oh, they have the guts to be one of the very few Western publications to cover in-depth the ongoing genocide in Palestine. That makes them laughable; trash any article they publish. Got it.
Believe it or not, sincere historians, or anyone looking for truth, doesn't google an author to see if they're establishment-approved in order to discern credibility. They look at the information itself, as something completely separate from the one who wrote it down in the present document, and they see how the information fits with all of their other learning, and they continue reassessing it that way for the rest of their life. It has nothing to do with beliefs, politics, tribes, or personalities. And yes, sincere truth-seekers can absolutely disagree with both sides during a war, and virtually always do. It's always only the cowards who don't go near the battlefield, led by their coward politicians, who cheer for war.
After writing all of that, I just realized it's all irrelevant, because it's simply about anti-gay rhetoric or the country more in line with Europe's values. But which values are you referring to? The new love of Nazis and their 8-year ethnic cleansing campaign and mass murder of political opposition? The robber-baron Israeli oligarchs who fund the Nazis? The NATO military who train and arm the Nazis? The CIA puppet government installed in a violent coup, and called a celebration of democracy? The global capital of corruption, bribery, & looting of public wealth? The European capital of human trafficking for sex slavery? Am I missing any of your alleged 'values'?
But I'm learning; that all gets dumped into the 'we see nothing' bin, because they have gay parades, while the nasty Russians, even the gay ones, hate gays, and therefore deserve to die. So judged by the champions of tolerance, the 'liberals', the spokespeople for all gays. Got it.