Russia's planted 1000s of mines all over eastern Ukraine's fields, roads and destroyed villages. Will any of those be around after the war, or only the US-supplied cluster munitions?

This war is a meat grinder. In for a penny, in for a pound.

@1 Not to mention that Russia has been using cluster munitions in Ukraine for more than a year. It's a little rich that they're now saying they might use cluster munitions /because/ of Ukraine using them. Oh, and Ukraine has committed to using cluster munitions only on their own territory and only in areas of active front-line fighting. Russia was using cluster munitions on another nation and often in residential areas that weren't on the front lines.

Jayapal, as usual, is not wrong. Well, walking back her true statement was wrong and cowardly, but that is an unfortunate testament to how ridiculous people get when any criticism of Israel is offered.

That country is turning into the nightmare it was trying to escape with its founding.

I hope Brian Cox is wrong.
I’d like to see the strike last well into next year and beyond.
Let’s see how both sides react when they realize we’ll all be doing just fine without all of the remakes, reboots and comic book movies

Israel's open-air
Concentration Camp
known as Palistine is a
Disgrace to Human Values

that bibi nutnyahoo's
a massive Threat to
Peace. like Putin
Erdogan all of
'em oh & the
trumpfster
too.

re Representative Jayapal

Progressives occupy
the Center Left here
and are Reviled for
it. welcome to our
new Fascist State

where the Klown Kar's
got three wheels in
the Ditch and're
Dying to pull
a Thelma &
Louise on
America.

I wouldn't
Bother
buck-
ling
Up

@7: Cluster Munitions is where you draw the line? The morality lines of Western support have been drawn and erased multiple times already. Slopes are slippery.

@7 The biggest knock on cluster munitions is that duds that don't explode right away are a hazard to civilian populations after the war is over. That means that the overall morality of using cluster munitions is very different depending on whether they're being used on your own territory versus being used on someone else's territory. If Ukraine has made the decision that the added risk of demining and already heavily-mined area later is worth it to liberate territory and head off the Russian war crimes machine (rape, plunder, kidnapping children, torture, etc.), then I respect that decision.

instead of a Peace Dividend when
the USSR Imploded we got WMD-makers
lobbying Europe to buy their WMDs. is it any
Surprise they're doing so fucking Well these days?

when you have millions of Hammers
you're likely gonna Use 'em
cuz War Profiteering's
a wonderful Scam
on Humanity

perhaps we'll send
Ukraine a Boat-
load of Pros-
Thetics in
assorted
sizes

Regarding the Actors and Writers strike in Hollyweird: An out-of-touch studio executive said some strikers are going to lose a house.
Ron Perlman Threatens Hollywood Studio Executives After Writers Strike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORrhKNYioO4

Ron says we know where they live.
I'm with Ron, are you?

@7 You correctly understand the morality of war. Ukrainians are killing Russians in order to not be killed themselves. Surrendering even more Ukrainian women and children to be raped and murdered by Russians would be a greater immorality than using every available weapon to protect those women and children.

in Quest for Fire's DVD
Pearlman said they had
to tone Down his Features

& he was onehellova
Bad guy in Drive

I'd keep a Night Watchman out.
maybe Ahnald's available?

Cluster away! Also, more sweeps.

@13 The US lefty tankies are all the same. Easy smug black-and-white morality games by people who are at no risk of harm whatsoever. But when it comes to things like the BLM protests and the CJHOP/CHAZ/Whatever then you need to shrug off any violence as trivial compared to the horror of the cops. Same old hypocritical bullshit, different day.

(Full disclosure: I also accepted the excesses in the protests as understandable in context, but that's also true of the Ukraine conflict. Marquis of Queensbury rules don't work against a thug with a knife.)

@6 oh please. Why does everyone pretend the Palestineans are completely blameless in this mess. Every time Israel gives them an iota of space they respond by lobbing mortars into Israel or ramping up rhetoric to incite violence. That is of course when they aren't brutally repressing their own people. Israel definitely deserves scrutiny for some of their action but its not like they are living next door to Mr Rogers.

@3 - Not even close. Comments like yours trivialize the singular horror of the Holocaust. When Israel starts building factories that murder people by the millions or using brutal slave labor until the slaves die of disease and starvation, maybe then comments comparing them to what they left behind may be close to accurate.

As to Ukraine, the NYT had a piece just yesterday about how deadly effective Russian minefields have been and how they are the primary reason for Ukraine's slow advance. Yet, I seem to recall advocates of banning land mines stating at various times in the recent past that one of the reasons they should be banned is they are ineffective anyway. It seems Ukraine would beg to differ.

I have no doubt cluster munitions will prove to be the same...despite known military expert Rich's doubts. This is a war for national survival, and if you have effective conventional weapons, use them. If Russia were occupying 20% of the US, say New England, and brutalizing the population there and kidnapping our children, methinks the cluster munitions pearl-clutchers would suddenly not object to their use. But it's not the US, so virtue-signal away!

How sweet and how encouraging it was to be able to point to the State of Israel and say hopefully that it was indeed the only democracy in the Middle East. Under threat for much of its history, some of its measures have been necessary for survival – or to make the “never again” statement clear to its neighbors and the world-at-large. But the ultra-conservative faction in Israel, the group responsible for a lot of the anti-Palestinian and anti-secular fervor, has been throwing large amounts of unsavory ingredients into Israel's democratic recipe.

Let’s hope the Israeli people – all of them – can resist this wave out to destroy their freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qq8FYjjRe8

speaking of leaving
colorful little Bombletts
lying around for farmers &
chirrens those Abrahms tanks
we sent over -- were they Really
equipped with Spent Uranium? the

Gift that keeps on Giving:

U.S. Depleted Uranium to
Make Ukraine War Dirtier

--by John LaForgejune 6/30/23

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/30/u-s-depleted-uranium-to-make-ukraine-war-dirtier/

good thing it's not
OUR Mess to clean up!

it's a dirty fucking business
maybe one year instead of
funding our War Dept. we
handed out Microloans
to four billion people
& see if stimulating
their Economies
makes War less
Inevitable

It's weird for a cougar to be that far south. Most are drinking palomas in Seaside.

Kitteh forgot to read the tide tables.

@16 One could also say that the biggest whiners about BLM protests are also in no risk of harm whatsoever, right? If Kyle Rittenhouse had just stayed home in Illinois and played video games, two people would not have been murdered in Wisconsin that night.

Russia deployed cluster bombs in vast numbers in the opening salvo of their invasion. The bomb they used were not particularly accurate, had a very large number of bomblets, and a very high bomblet failure rate with the bomblets distributed over a large area. The munitions being given to Ukraine are accurate artillery shells with multiple bomblets designed to take out a cluster of vehicles, a section of trench, or crater a runway. They are not going to be used against targets that would not already be needing de-mining after the war. Keep in mind, those old Soviet artillery shells both sides have been using have a pretty high dud rate too. War is ugly, but that's not a reason to tell the Ukrainian people to lay down and die, rather than resist Putin's Fascist aggression. As we learned with Hitler, tyrants rarely stop for long after invading another nation.

@29 - Cluster munitions are far from the ideal weapon to crater runways; they aren't powerful enough. Now, obliterating a line of parked aircraft alongside those runways, sure. They're primarily for use against "soft" targets, troop concentrations, truck convoys, the aforementioned parked aircraft and the like. Runway craterers are huge bombs, like earth penetrating 2,000 pounders.

@20 that’s one point of view. Another is a neighbor who openly calls for your annihilation while indiscriminately lobbing bombs into civilian targets hoping to kill without distinction. There is also the knowledge that were borders to be opened another enemy (Iran) would immediately supply more sophisticated weapons with the power to kill even more people. But yeah I guess precision air strikes on military targets is the real problem.

@10: “instead of a Peace Dividend when
the USSR Imploded…”

We got the largest possible peace dividend, when the Cold War ended in some way other than thermonuclear holocaust. We also got the second-largest peace dividend, when we were not escorted to Gulag Amerikanski by our tankie ‘friends’.

If life and freedom were just not enough for you, there was prosperity. Remember Bill Clinton, the first person we elected President after the Cold War ended? Name a longer period of prosperity in American history than his two terms. (And please recall, his Presidency was so peaceful, not one single American soldier died in combat under Commander-in-Chief Clinton.)

So, we received several excellent peace dividends from the end of the Cold War. It’s not anyone else’s fault you keep squandering yours.

@32
& yet look what
you've squandered
tho you may or may
not live high on the hog

we Couldda kicked the
Military Industrial Complex
the FUCK outta our Treasury

but we did the Opposite.
we OUT-Spend the next
TEN Countries' fucking
spending - Combined!

to protect
Wealth.

and Not
the fucking
Citizenry who
number 40 Million
Without Health Care
and how Many DESPERATE
for Homes or're one Dead battery
away from friend's couches or on our Streets?

our maternal deaths
are Third World numbers

why?

but I'm Glad
you got Yours
Good for You!

fuck off.

great fucking Comments
Garbby. so Glad
you're Here

@35 all great points but doesn’t change the fact that were Israel cease launching defensive attacks today (and they are defensive even if some innocents are unfortunately killed as well) the Palestinian gov would not stop and would only escalate the conflict. My original point was that Palestine is not innocent is this bloodshed and if they want sympathy they need to shut down the own extremists in their government.

oh yeah
it's All
equal:

they call it
Shooting
fish in a
Bbrrel.

@37: I asked you to cite a time of greater peace and prosperity than the first two post-Cold War Presidential administrations. Along with your usual ignominious failure concerning facts, you whined that your entire extremist wish list hadn’t been fully implemented. Sob! (Oh, and speaking of your chronic trouble with facts, it was the Republicans who stopped the Clintons’ healthcare reforms. Go complain to them about it. You can start by recognizing that Nader subsequently lied to you about the two parties’ supposed similarities.)

There’s really little point in trying to get a person to value life and freedom — the two best peace dividends of the Cold War — when that person squanders both by constantly drooling ignorant incontinent idiocies here.

@35: Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the British also simultaneously created the Kingdom of Jordan as the Palestinian homeland. This was promptly rejected by the Arab world, who foolishly decided to bet on wiping Israel off the map instead. They lost this wager every time they made it, but never compensated the Palestinians for it. The Palestinians have been helpless pawns of the Arab world as much as they have been victims of Israel.

@40: The United States bankrolls one side in this conflict, but not the other. That makes us complicit in that one side’s atrocities. Hence resistance to double-entry moral bookkeeping. (Apartheid South Africa long complained it was being held to a higher standard than other places in the world, but we used our leverage to push change there anyway.)

"I asked you
to cite a time of
greater peace and prosperity
than the first two post-Cold War Presidential administrations."

well yeah tentsores
you assigning me your fun
little tasks may be Your little 'job'

but fulfilling your
Demands ain't
one of Mine.

but don't let
that stop your
strawmans making nor
your Clintons Worshipping

I sure you'll get
their Narrative
well-tidied up:

it Needs it.

good Luck.
now Fuck Off.

@46: Yes, finding facts to support your claims just isn’t your forte, now is it?

I’ve been having some fun, playing with the difference between the real peace dividend we all enjoyed from the end of the Cold War, and the tantrum you threw because your fantasy version wasn’t completely realized the instant the first brick fell from the Berlin Wall. (Because resetting decades-old policies rapidly is a legitimate expectation in a large pluralistic democracy — at least as far as you understand how such things work.)

But you’ll never stop fantasizing about an infinite gusher of money you can spend as you like, without any compromises or accountability. This endless stream of free money never actually exists, whether it would come from confiscating Bezos’ paper billions, regurgitating vacuous rhetoric about making the rich pay their fair share, or simply abrogating any governmental policies you happen not to like. But you keep on hoping and hoping and hoping, because if you ever had to deal with making endless compromises over allocating limited resources, you’d quit in a hot second. That hard work is for politicians named Clinton to succeed at doing.

(For a hint as to why you’d never, ever be trusted to spend any public money, especially from the limited sources which actually do exist, please take a look at the results obtained by Seattle having spent the better part of a billion dollars on the Homelessness Crisis. Now consider how much housing assistance that could have bought for Seattle’s working poor. See?)