Scrolling through u/twitter they seemed like any other poster, until one little thing sticks in their craw and suddenly they're posting mysogynist and hobophobic slurs and fucking death threats??
Ah, there it fucking is
I know she said that the Minsk agreements were just to buy time to arm Ukraine, but I think she was lying. Germany obviously wanted to deal with Russia, it wanted the cheap energy and resources Russia offered and its manufacturing base was built upon this clearly beneficial arrangement. There's a reason the US had to blow up Nordstream themselves, because otherwise the Germans would have eventually caved to their own economic interests and started rebuilding relations with Russia.
So I believe the Germans really did go into the Minsk agreements in good faith, but the US and UK were always planning to backstab both Russia and their continental European 'allies'. As for why Merkel then claimed Minsk was a lie - the political climate in Europe at that point had reached a full crescendo of Russophobia, and even the slightest sympathy for the Russian devil was being rooted out inquisition-style, so I think part of it was her trying to avoid having her political legacy tarnished by fanatics accusing her of being "soft" or "naive" about Russia just as she was about to retire.
Putin's almost theatrical response to her claims, putting out a speech where he seemed personally affronted, also makes me think that he didn't really believe it either, but that he knew it was absolute gold in terms of pointing out the perfidiousness and hypocrisy of the west to an audience of the rest of the world.
I also think - and this is going into the realms of psychoanalyzing that we rightfully dismiss, but whatever - that to some extent, having worked with each other for almost twenty years that Merkel and Putin had a kind of grudging respect for each other, and Merkel made these statements both as a way to spite the Atlanticists who ruined her project of 'German economic development using Russian materials' and also as some kind of a parting gift for Putin, because she's far too politically savvy to not know how these things would sound to the rest of the world. But then again, it may have just been her self-servingly falling in line with the prevailing narrative.
But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
A slight side-track, but this always pisses me off when people say things like "well, war might be terrible, but it does drive scientific progress..."
No it doesn't! It just centralizes research! It forces a bunch of disparate capitalist scientific institutions to be directed by a central body, with the goal of actually making breakthroughs instead of just finding new ways to make profit.
As they should have known from their history, one fascist's life is worth at least 50 French lives.
So they've saved their Azov buddies the equivalent of an entire casualty.
@CascadeOfLight
@hexbear.net