Free Republic

Timothy Leary was a follower of Aleister Crowley and said he was continuing Crowley’s work.

I don’t see the point in setting things on fire, but the anger is over mass immigration. The knife attack was by an Algerian national outside a children’s school. Three kids were stabbed and two adults.

There is a lot of pro-Palestinian sympathy in Ireland especially on the left and among Irish “nationalists” like Sinn Féin, who are now for open borders as well. Not to mention all the new arrivals from the Middle East and North Africa.

Irish people see their struggle under the British paralleled in the struggle of Palestinians. Many do not believe that Israel should exist. Pro Palestine rallies draw large crowds and you always hears chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

As an Evangelical I am both very pro Israel and proud to be Irish. We are living in prophetic times.

“Your 17% number is nonsense.”

It’s the official number.

The US is different. In the US, if someone says they are Irish or Italian, it means they had a very distant relative from hundreds of years ago who migrated and didn’t even keep their own culture but became an American. In Ukraine, ethnic Russians do not share the same culture as their fellow citizens. There was a balance that was maintained to prevent discord and that balance has been disrupted.

Your views on citizenship and loyalty to the state are not universal. People have differing views elsewhere. Once people become US citizens, they have a high incentive to remain citizens due to the high standard of living and personal freedoms afforded to them. They won’t risk that. That situation does not exist in many other countries. Therefore people don’t always feel the state is their friend and worthy of blind loyalty.

As I’ve tried to point out, there is a long history of conflicts breaking out in post empire countries with mixed cultures and nationalities. This is nothing new. The conflict we have is predictable. Ethnic Russians were targeted and attacked both militarily and in terms of state approved discrimination after 2014. Both sides knew a conflict was inevitable. Ukraine and their European allies admitted they had no intention of honouring the Minsk agreement. Instead they prepared for war.

What’s clear is that you can’t even put yourself in the shoes of other people and your outlook is too limited to realise that others don’t think like you.

“I have never heard a Hungarian complain that they should now, in 2023, have the right to rule over the people who were freed from their rule in 1919.”

Yet another over simplification on your part. You need to talk to people from other cultures more and learn more about history than what you claim to know.

“Right, because, more often than not, that’s exactly what’s happening, for example, when Serbs attempted to conquer land inhabited mainly by Albanians.”

Albanians never existed as a state before the 20th century. They expanded into Serbia, increased their population and borders and demanded a potion of Serbia be gifted to them.
Your views on the right of self determination of Albanians and ethnic Russians are contradictory and hypocritical by the way.

If you can’t get the distinction between capability to speak a language and being of a certain ethnicity, I don’t know what to say.
Probably 90% of Ukrainians would have a good grasp of Russian. That is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Around 17% of them are ethnic Russians, (ie of Russian ancestry) and having a slightly different culture.
17% is a high percentage of the population and as in former Yugoslavian nations you have to look after the needs of both sides or else conflict is inevitable. You don’t seem capable or willing to grasp this.

There were numerous and frequent reports of Ukraine and ethic Russians clashing on many new stations since 2014 but before the latest conflict.
Saying that no ethic Russians were attacked by the Ukrainian forces is a lie.
There were separatist groups certainly, and if you want to simply label them all as traitors, I would say that reflects a naive and ignorant attitude about living in a post empire region made up of divided nationalities.
There may be different reports on how many casualties there were but there were attacks and the Russians were outgunned and were suffering casualties. Again, this is a fact.

When the Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed at the end of WW1 the treaty of Versailles saw Hungary lose up to two thirds of their territory and probably around six million of their citizens. Many Hungarians are still bitter about this even now and they probably have a right to be, even if there were on the wrong side of the war.

Do you think the wars between Serbia and Croatia, or Serbia and Albania had any history prior to the 1990’s?
There was a long history of warfare and massacres prior to and leading up to those conflicts. Croatia had one of the most brutal death camps of WW2 in Jasenovac where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma were killed.
Do you think in every case there is a simple version of one side being wrong and the other side being right?
Often the media reports assume that the bigger power is bullying the others and trying to aggressively expand.

I’m not sure you understand how pensions work outside the US so I’m going to simplify it for you.
People who did not work a high paid job often get a state pension as opposed to a private pension. If they don’t have substantial savings this pension is all they have.
In Ukraine this is around $100 per month so not much at all, even in spite of the lower cost of living.
Therefore for a Ukrainian politician to threaten to withhold this from ethnic Russians is to threaten them with starvation and a death sentence.

Saying that this can be addressed by opposition parties is a complete joke since Zelenskyy outlawed opposition parties just like he doesn’t permit a free press there anymore or even freedom of religion. They are one of the most corrupt countries in the world and have been for some time.
There is no democracy in Ukraine, just a western appointed stooge who is sending other people’s children to die in a war they cannot win so that the US and NATO can test out their latest weapons without shedding soldiers blood.
That is exactly what one of Ukraine’s generals just plainly stated.
“We are testing weapons systems for NATO and the US and they don’t even have to sacrifice their own soldiers.”

It takes two to tango.
NATO wanted this conflict and has taken numerous actions to escalate it such as blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines and pouring weapons for Ukraine to fight a conflict they could not dream of with their own resources.

At some point there will need to be a negotiated settlement.
I don’t know who is winning in terms of gaining ground and economic resources.
The US has gained in energy sales to Europe and you are charging us through the nose for it, so thanks for that.
The arms companies are enjoying record profits as are the US politicians on both sides who no doubt bought lots of shares in those companies.
Russian has lost a large share of their customers for gas and oil but gained some new customers in Asia.
Their GDP is only down 2%.
Ukraine is taking heavy losses in their infantry.
Russian has taken significant losses but they are bringing out their heavier artillery now.
The sooner both sides are willing to negotiate, the better.

You’ve done nothing to refute the analogy. You just misquoted me and then brought up a whole lot of straw man claims that I never made.

There is no precedent for a US population being a majority in a certain region of another country and being attacked by a foreign entity. If there was a similar situation with 10,000 to 14,000 Americans being killed in 8 years I am sure America would act militarily to stop the killings.

I never claimed anything about Russian speakers being a majority in the Ukraine. You are the one lying here. I said ethnic Russians are a majority in one particular region (the Donbass), I never said they are a majority in the whole country.

Russian speakers versus ethnic Russians is a complete red herring. It is a completely different thing.

Ukrainians are at least as corrupt as their Russian counterparts and you seem to be suggesting the Russians deserved to be killed in their thousands and be threatened to have their only source of income (pension) denied to them in their old age.

Again with the conflation of Russian speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. It’s not the same thing. We don’t know how many of them want to be part of Russia. I’d wager quite a few changed their mind about joining Russia after thousands of their compatriots were killed.

The overthrow of Yanukovych which was preceded by the Maidan protests and the killing by snipers of protestors and police alike was not done by Yanukovych and his forces but by forces hostile to him. The snipers took out people from behind in a hotel where a number of foreigners were staying. Yanukovych’s forces were to the front of the protestors. It was a coup and even the subsequent vote to remove Yanukovych didn’t garner enough votes to pass.

Your figures for the Iraq war casualties do not line up with a official numbers. The claims that Saddam was threatening neighbours with weapons he didn’t even have is laughable. And even if true, none of this adds up to proof of him ever possessing these WMD.

I support the ideals of the US and its constitution but not its actions in most of its military campaigns in the last 60 years. The US has a lot of blood on its hands in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Libya and Afghanistan and Russia will not come close to matching this bloodshed in this conflict. Conservatives in the US need to reign in the arms manufacturing companies and the military industrial complex. The also need to dismantle the CIA and reform the FBI.

“Except that your analogy is pure lies.”

Explain how the analogy is a lie. Just stating that does not make it so.

Are you saying that Ukraine didn’t ignore the Minsk accords?
Are you saying there wasn’t Ukrainian politicians promising that ethnic Russians would be discriminated against on Ukrainian national TV by being denied their pensions etc?
Even Merkel recently commented that the plan all along was to ignore the Minsk accords and prepare for war with Russia.

I have never said I supported the invasion or felt it was justified, but Ukraine chose this route of confrontation.
They had multiple opportunities to negotiate in the months prior to the conflict and showed zero interest and they were rebuked for their stance.
Russia has been complaining bitterly for 20 plus years about NATO broken promises regarding expansion.
They have been warning Ukraine repeatedly over attacks on ethic Russians in the Donbass.

Regarding US military action in Iraq. The casualties of the war itself were over 400,000 and the sanctions probably killed over 1 million. That’s already much more than will die in this current conflict.
All the intelligence claiming Saddam had WMD was bogus and the intelligence community who supplied this so called evidence knew that. Saying “no one knew for sure he didn’t have WMD” is not a convincing argument. It’s an argument from silence effectively.

Borders change sometimes due to changing demographics and sometimes due to conflict.
Crimea was gifted to Ukraine by Russia at a time when both nations were part of the USSR. Nobody at that time expected the breakup of the USSR so at the time it seemed like a meaningless gesture. In any case they voted to join Russia by around 86% so if you believe in self determination then it’s clear they prefer to be part of Russia than part of Ukraine. Forcing them to re-join Ukraine against their will doesn’t seem right.

Election rigging happens everywhere and the US knows all about it. Having cordial relations with your neighbour especially when your neighbour is a nuclear superpower is just common sense, and the Ukrainians understood that well. Not to mention that they were heavily dependent on Russian gas and deeply indebted and behind in their payments. Obama stirred up that conflict just like he sparked the Arab Spring.

So what if the missiles in Europe are not nuclear tipped now? We don’t know if the long term intention for those missile sites is intended to be purely defensive. I think it’s naive to think that.

ISIS were riding around in fleets of US army jeeps. They had loads of them. There was at least a couple of occasions where they were going out to engage the Syrian army and the US “accidentally” bombed the Syrian army and helped ISIS. This behaviour changed after Trump got elected admittedly.

The current war is not the West’s war.
Ukraine would never have soured it’s relations with Russia had it not been made all sorts of promises by NATO and the EU.
The conflict is not affecting the US but in Europe our energy costs have more than doubled, and an already bad immigration and housing crisis has been made lots worse.
Stop sending arms to Ukraine now. Tell them they can’t be in NATO ever. Force them to make a deal with Russia or the conflict will escalate further.
They can’t win anyway. All they can do is force more men, most of whom don’t want to fight, to go to their deaths.

There isn’t an example of a large US population living in one place so that they were a majority being attacked by a foreign entity. So you can’t say the US would respond differently from Russia because this has never happened to the US. I’d wager there would be a major military response if there was a similar situation.

When Ukraine had governments that were more closely aligned with Russia as opposed to the West/NATO there was no conflict between their citizenry. Both sides have a culture and history that is similar and much closer to Russia than the west. The non Russians saw an opportunity for greater economic growth for making overtures to the EU and the US NATO. They would have known in advance that Russia could never accept a NATO member that close to their border. They chose to take this risky provocative action and thought Russia would not do anything.

You can’t defend the US actions over the Cuban Missile crisis and simultaneously defend NATO installing missile batteries in countries in Eastern Europe in close proximity to Russia.

What happened in Serbia was not precision bombing. It was an attack on a sovereign nation who posed no threat to the US. The casualties were mostly civilian also and cluster bombs were used.

Plenty of people were saying there was no evidence of Saddam having nukes or even significant stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons. In the absence of any real proof, the pretext for declaring war was extremely weak or non-existent.

I recognise the Democrat culpability for the most recent US military actions sowing chaos, such as the overthrow of Gadaffi leading to the Arab Spring and elevation of the Muslim Brotherhood and associated terror groups.

I believe the CIA has funded and armed groups like Al Queda and ISIS and almost certainly continues to do so. Many of ISIS fighters were clearly paid mercenaries and Putin has correctly pointed this out. Both groups are now fighting in Ukraine for the Ukrainian/NATO side as has been confirmed by multiple sources from the Islamic world. So you have Nazis, ISIS and Al Queda fighting for Ukraine and you wonder why some of us don’t want to put Ukrainian flags in our Twitter profiles.

Russia is not at all innocent, but they were clearly and repeatedly provoked and their response was totally predictable. The breakup of an empire where you have mixed ethnic populations is always messy, and you only have to look at the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the breakup of the former Yugoslavia to see this. There was a fine balance which had been tread for decades which was abandoned and the West was deeply involved in sowing the seeds of chaos and discord from the start and is now sacrificing Ukrainians to test out new weapons systems.

If the US had previously shared a state with parts of Canada so that in some areas the US population outweighed the Canadian, and then the Canadian government started attacking and killing the US citizens in their thousands there would be an outcry and undoubtedly military action.

The US carpet bombed Serbia in 1999.

The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretences, having blamed them for 9/11.

US did install a puppet government in Ukraine in 2014 after they helped topple Yanukovych. See Victoria Nuland “F*ck the EU” video where they decided who would make up the new government.

Here is the interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE8TcBjhgk4

The source was a Polish guy interviewed on the Redacted YouTube channel. I can’t confirm what his connections are but it’s clear that mainstream media is deliberately trying to portray a story that Ukraine is winning.

Ursula Von Der Leyen let slip about a month ago that 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died. The clip was quickly removed and re-released with that part removed. Why?

It’s because governments are trying to sell us on the idea of keeping the conflict going. If we only send a few more tanks or another $40 billion dollars then the Urainians will surely kick the Russians ass. It’s bullshit.

Russia has made various gains also.
The Ukrainian army has lost around 120,000 men, much more than the Russians.
There are reports of large numbers of Polish military fighting in Ukraine.
It is a full on proxy war.

Russia would have had no excuse to invade if the west/Ukraine had not helped overthrow Yanukovych and spent the last 8 years attacking ethnic Russians in the Donbass region instead of keeping to the Minsk accords.

I think his comments about Jews were racist and untrue. They were stupid, insulting and unfounded. He can say what he wants but if he says stuff like this not many will defend him.

As for the actions of the bank, it may not be their place to punish him and I don’t like it when banking institutions start acting like moral guardians, but I don’t think their actions are illegal.

I understand why Jones questioning of whether the shooting occurred and whether or not the kids really died can be framed as him libelling the parents although he never accused them of lying personally, you can infer that it was implied.

The fact that he has a well known platform and was known for making controversial statements meant the establishment were always going to go after him.

As for the event. I watched an interesting documentary called “We need to talk about Sandy Hook” that posed a lot of questions that I don’t think have ever been answered. A lot of the parents exhibited little or no grief when giving interviews to the press on the very next day after the event. I expect I would be incapable of holding an interview and would be a blubbering mess in their position.

There was drone footage of the fire station/assembly hall that showed people entering one entrance going out another exit, and then circling around again. It was strange.

There were eyewitnesses who gave conflicting facts when recounting their stories to different news groups.

There was one parent who seemed to have donned an FBI uniform and patrolled around with a couple of agents. He was tall and overweight and had a distinctive wart on his face. He clearly didn’t know how to hold a rifle safely, and once ducked for cover behing a car when approaching the press. He was nicknamed “sloppy sniper” and a guy by the alias Barry Soetoro did a series of clips showing his strange behaviour.

If you look at the massive spike in mass shootings under the Obama administration, it does not seem that far fetched to think that some of the events could have been staged to drum up support for gun control legislation.

By calling Sandy Hook a hoax, he has implied that all the parents were liars and actors. He hasn’t libelled them by naming them, but it looks like that’s how it is being interpreted legally.

I would guess that Russian oil is cheap to buy in bulk at the moment since they have plenty of supply but not as much demand as usual due to sanctions. Also the Russians need to raise cash fast to fund the war effort.

Saudi has been charging a high price for their own oil since the demand is high.

The correlation between deaths and Covid 19 vaccines is even stronger in New Zealand which has much less Covid cases due to closing their border early.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxmAIKjYM4

I’m holding out against being vaccinated here in Ireland. Not too much pressure yet as I’m working from home anyway. I have been predicting for the last year that it will be made mandatory and establishment politicians from the two main parties have started suggesting it.

The European Union put out a timetable for rolling out vaccine passports in the third quarter of 2019, just before Covid 19 was released by the Chinese. Coincidence? I doubt it.

https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/default/files/vaccination/docs/2019-2022_roadmap_en.pdf

You can still see at the top of the document, last update Q3 2019.

By most accounts, it is the mildest variant yet, but those who are determined to harness fear to consolidate power that they have no right to exercise will continue to politicise this to suppress truth and freedom.

They don’t even have many cases or deaths there. It’s just an experiment to see how much tyranny they can inflict on a previously free society once you scare people with stories about a killer virus.