Man, the look in her face - she clearly wan’t expecting that! Priceless!
Sure, that’s the real-world difference, but when it comes to politics and military and the blame game, that doesn’t count. Which is why we’re fighting a slight proxy war rather than fighting directly.
It’s closer so, other European countries are thinking maybe Historical Russia is greater than we ever knew from the history books and Russia is going to try and be really Great.
It’s happening in a area that we still haven’t categorized as “that’s just how stuff is there”.
Also, and I’m sure this is a larger part than most here are comfortable with, it’s white people.
There are alternatives — e.g. Amadeus comes to mind.
But they’re all western companies — US or EU companies — and they won’t be available to Russia either.
Those are the reasons that, if Ukraine managed to come out of this whole, it will very rapidly be taken into the EU and NATO. But right now to JP’s question, that they weren’t members means we can’t suddenly treat them like members when a conflict is already afoot.
I’m sure there’s a degree of racism there for some. But there’s also a human reaction of empathy towards people who look like you, your parents, your children, your grandparents. It’s easier to feel a pang of emotion for a terrified old woman who looks just like your grandmother. I’m not sure that’s racism per se.
Interesting article on the VDV, Russian paratrooper forces:
Lurb
5653
For me, there’s also something about the extreme diplomatic thuggery, that attitude of “I’m lying to your face and you know it and I know you know it, and still you have to act like I’m not”…
I’m glad it’s not “me” with the finger on the nukes.
Financial Times Moscow bureau chief
After reading the whole thread, I’m wondering exactly what the takeaway message is from the analysis. What did you learn from this?
As a side note, we do very very similar analysis for single cell RNA-Seq data sets (leiden clustering to generate neighborhoods, uMAP projections). I’m working on figures for an upcoming manuscript and making relatively similar plots.
This is important, especially the first part. Putin is part off a strong anti-modern movement in international affairs that is centered on places like Moscow and Beijing. By anti-modern, I mean adhering to pre-Age of Revolution, if not pre-Westphalian norms. This viewpoint rejects the idea of nation states being mutable political constructs, self-limited through mutual agreement on rules and standards of conduct. Instead, it sees the world as rulers of old did, as divided into natural or organic communities linked by blood, culture, and religion. “Russia” in this context has little to do with lines on a map, and everything to do with a historical and cultural understanding of identity. Likewise, for the Chinese, “China” can’t be sub-divided simply because of an accident of recent history allowed a splinter group to carve off some land and call it something else. Taiwan was, is, and ever shall be an integral part of China, just as Putin feels Ukraine, Belorussia, and perhaps other regions are part of Russia.
At least, that’s my take on it more or less.
I’ve often suspected that “anti” accounts that stupidly use the hashtags that they’re trying to refute inadvertently do more to amplify the thing they wish to refute (and/or are likely angered/outraged by). This puts data in to demonstrate how easily a handful of bots can create engagement and push a hashtag onto the trends list.
This was interesting, thanks, and I’ve added a thread roll up link here for those who don’t Twitter.
Sentiment analysis isn’t always very good when it comes to NLP. Most of the real experts I’ve listened to on datascience podcasts acknowledge how hard it is to differentiate
“Putin is a good leader”
and
“Putin is not a good leader”
They tend to lock onto the noun Putin and the modifier good and often miss the negation. So I always look at those sorts of analysis with a bit of skepticism. Doing the analysis and getting an answer is easy, but doing the analysis and getting the right answer is actually really hard.
I tend to down-weigh results from these analysis unless I know there’s been a lot of careful thought put in. It is certainly sort of interesting in the abstract, though.
If you can forgive his crime of working on Epic Games Store, check Sergiy Galyonkin’s tweets. Donating money to Ukrainian charities is probably the best way to help people in the war zone.
This is apparently for violation of the Crimea-related sanctions, but the timing is interesting.
Seems like the charges have been in the works for at least a month.
