Zelensky didn’t want the job either but he packed up his actor clothes and has so far been putting on a damn fine leadership show. I can imagine plenty of wealthier families are trying to dodge. who wouldn’t…10k seems low for bargaining ones potential life. not that any of this or that in ukraine is good right now. I just hope zelensky’s soul isn’t so blackened that he turns this into a teaching moment rather than punishment.
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Or a discreet state agency paying to undermine the defense of a nation. All signs point to Russia paying for these bribes since they’ve shown they can’t compete on the battlefield.
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Zelenskyy didn’t want the job, which is why he created and starred in a show that was basically a glorified political campaign.
Well, in my limited knowledge and general thoughts about it being treason, I agree with what he’s saying as it doesn’t come off as these recruiters are trying to be compassionate and save citizens to become soldiers.
Sounds like profiteering favoritism to keep rich and prominent men and women from serving.
This doesn’t strike me as 16 year old Billy is getting handed a bayonet and told to die for oil.
Bottom line, against or for the war, people getting rich by saving the rich is a pretty shitty way to do your profiteering.
Is $10,000 the minimum bribe, the typical/average bribe, or the most sensational bribe? Given the news outlet (BI), I’m guessing the latter.
Don’t know about you, but I think bribery should be an act of treasen whether at war or at peace.
Treason is a really powerful crime that carries heavy consequences. Bribery at peace should still carry consequences but in some cases (countries) treason alone carries a death penalty. Bribery during peace maybe shouldn’t carry such a steep penalty
Agreed, equating them is just penalty inflation.
A more productive focus would be:
- that those who have been shown to accept bribes are actually removed from their position prosecuted successfully.
- Transparent governance with independent watchdogs so that corruption is harder to hide.
Treason carries the death penalty in a lot of countries. But in most countries treason is poorly defined in law so it’s difficult to say whether somebody actually did commit treason from a legal point of view because it’s difficult to define what treason is.
Oftentimes it’s just easier to fire them on bribery charges and prosecute them using the standard peace time legal standards.
But it’s useful to call it treason on national television for PR reasons even if they never actually face treason charges.
*This is generally the case for most countries I have no idea how Ukraine defines treason.
No one should be forced to go to war, trying everything they can to escape it is understandable, the only bad thing is that this is something that only the rich can do, but in their place i would do the same.
You just highlighted the entire reason leaving isn’t a fair and equitable decision - only those with the opportunity can afford to leave and others will have to shoulder the burden more because of those absences.
When everyone is facing an existential threat, leaving is the same as agreeing with the threat.
But, Black Dynamite, I take bribes in the community!
Bruh what’s wrong with this comment section
You should see the threads where the huxbear and lemmygrad users get going!
Lemmy.ml tankies gunna tankie
Tankies are what happens when kids start snorting totalitarianism at a young age. Heartbreaking!
Can’t help but think they’d be singing a different tune had they grown up in any of the Warsaw pact countries in the 80s.
I mean, I get it. Capitalism has some pretty dark corners and it ain’t great for the average person, but holy fuck, the stock market didn’t invent greed and selfishness. That motherfucker been with us since we were cavemen. There’ll always be some fucker taking your shit.
Yeah, like, I’m down for hating or even wanting to overthrow capitalism. It’s when you start bootlicking fascist countries with a coat of red paint that you become insufferable.
It’s easy to say “you need to fight for your country no matter what you want” when you are at your home in a phone talking in Lemmy
Alt-righters calling Zelenskyy corrupt and so on all day long. Look how stressed his face looks. He’s aged like 30 years since the war started.
accepting bribes is bad actually
being sent to war against your will is bad actually
Being invaded by shitbirds is bad actually.
Not fighting them is bad actually.
Diluting that message is bad actually.
I’m sorry but invasions are a justifiable reason to impose a draft.
No, you’re wrong. Conscription is always wrong. If fighting is justified you won’t need to do it.
Cool so I can come in to your house and steal all your shit, beat up your children, and shoot your dog, and you aren’t allowed to fight back because if it was justified, you wouldn’t need to?
EDIT: I seem to have misinterpreted the comment, as you appear to be referring to conscription being unnecessary rather than the fighting. Taking the whole context of the comment supports that, but taking only the context of the final sentence makes it appear that you are saying “if fighting is justified you dont need to fight” rather than “if fighting is justified, conscription is unnecessary”
they mean ‘it’ as in conscription, thwyre saying if the fight was worth it you wouldnt need to conscript
Hm, I see how their comment can be interpreted that way, and it definitely makes more sense like that. They worded it extremely poorly tho, and thus is left pretty ambiguous. I think it would have been much more clear if they just spelled out “conscription” again instead of resorting to the pronoun.
That said, since I do agree with your interpretation I will edit my comment to reflect that
Correct, thanks. I guess I could’ve phrased it better but it was worth it for that dudes completely unhinged reply.
If only reality worked that way
fires? That officer should be arrested.
or sent to the front lines to replace the men they took bribes from
On one hand, I absolutely agree with this. It’s human nature to want to avoid such a fate if one can reasonably avoid it. If I had the money and could buy my way out of participation in a fucking war…I’d hate to think that I wouldn’t.
I know it’s their home and things like that…but not everyone cares about those sorts of ties, and they become even less meaningful in death. I’m not saying I condone their actions, just that I understand.
Trust me, you’ll find an official to bribe in such a situation in Eastern Europe. This is a PR move, to arrest some from time to time and show that in the news. Happens regularly.
Doesnt have to be Eastern Europe. Plenty of examples of rich people finding ways for their kids to avaoid the draft during Vietnam and WWII in the US.
My dad got out of Vietnam (unwittingly) when my grandparents paid the doctor to give him a bad medical evaluation. He was all hyped to go, only to discover he had… I want to say it was flat feet or something? Basically “you’re no good at marching so you won’t war good”.
Stayed in college, got his masters and then his PhD, then went on to work for a major energy company and move out to the suburbs and live the good life into his golden years. A couple of his high school buddies went and got killed - one in a helicopter crash and another after stepping on a landmine.
When 9/11 happened and I was ready to enlist, he grabbed me by the shoulder and explained the best thing his parents ever did for him was keeping him out of the war.
I only wish every parent had this conversation with their kids. The world would be a better place.
If it’s a crime, do not fire them, lock them up in pris-
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the actions “treason” and has initiated criminal proceedings.
Oh. Oh well.
Also, one of the main reasons the Russian army has been underperforming is corruption. Loads of money siphoned, incompetent people getting positions, you name it. Zelenskyy is also making sure the same doesn’t happen in his country and stays on top performance/efficiency wise.
the Russian army has been underperforming is corruption
Check under the hood of any army and you’re going to find all sorts of corruption, graft, and kickbacks. War Is A Racket.
A real crime here is the draft. And before the tankies start circling this post, it applies to russia as well.
Regular draft is unacceptable. But this is not a regular draft.
the draft is the real crime
What’s the alternative?
100%
But the chickenhawks here in the US have always been content watching other people march off to war.
Cheering for other people’s kids to march off and kill one another.
Booing when they come home, covered in blood and sweet and tears, because they didn’t achieve some kind of unequivocal victory.
Then claiming the (((Secret Traitors))) cost you the war by undermining moral with information about what was actually going on.
It infuriates me that more people aren’t talking about how sexist it is that Ukraine only drafted its men. I can understand instituting a draft when your country is literally being invaded, but it should apply to all able-bodied citizens, not just men.
There is a point in the fact that men are biologically more suited to fight than women. Also no one is preventing a woman to join the military.
In the end it just sucks, no one should ever have to be drafted.
To what end? Just to get woman suffer as much as men in the name of equality? Winning the war is what matters. There are plenty of strategic reasons why you might not want to include woman in a draft. You still need civilians in regular jobs, you will need to population to grow after the war, and overall most military in the world are designed by men, for men, and are extremely missadapted for woman.
Draft is slavery
What do you suggest doing when your home is invaded by people who want to erase your culture?
Lives are not property of the State.
Ukrainian should defend itself by violence. But human beings are not tools or weapons.
Indeed
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Of course, it would be best if they did it willingly. But if they don’t, you just accept being invaded and erased?
I would rather do that instead of indirectly killing a bunch of unwilling people, yeah.
Even if you think that the invader will kill and destroy more than you would by preventing its invasion?
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The only reason they can invade another country to begin with is because they are drafting people to do it.
Russian drafts happened after the invasion, especially when they encountered unexpected resistance from the Ukrainian.
It’s also the home of people being drafted (even more so than for political elite of the country). If some of them want to get the fuck out (yes, from their home) then those thay have elected shouldn’t have the right to force them to stay and die.
I think that when you grow up and live in a society, you owe many parts of your life to it, to the people who educated you, taught you, protected you or served you, but also the people who came before and made it possible for all those previous people to be there for you.
Therefore, you have a moral responsibility to defend that.Yeah, we have the moral responsibility to defend our corrupted politicians and billionares who brought humanity to the brink of extinction. This system must be saved at all cost
Do you think what Putin wants to bring to Ukrain is any better? It’s what you describe multiplied by a thousand. So yes, we have the moral responsability to resist against the worse even if the current is not great.
I mean, to be fair, slavery is slavery whether there’s a “good reason” or not
You generally don’t get paid for being a slave, nor recover your freedom after the crisis has passed.
Recover your freedom? So you’re not free and are forced to work? Sounds like textbook slavery, to me. Indentured servitude is still slavery
You are forced to go to school, you are forced to work to earn your life. Are those slavery too?
There a huge difference between parents making a child do something, with basically no legal repercussions if they don’t, and the government forcing an adult to do something against their will at the threat of prison.
They are all restricting your freedom because there’s a consensus that it helps the group in general.
Nor will you if you’re dead.
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If you only care about your own life, there’s indeed no reason to.
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It’s not just land, land is intimately related to culture. Also millions moving to a neighbor country will generally create a political and humanitarian crisis, it’s not a magical solution with no negative consequences.
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One of the foundation of culture is transforming the land, starting from agriculture. The way the natural land was shaped by the people living on is a first marker of culture. Then comes the art and the buildings, in Europe we have a very dense network of historical remains spanning thousands of years, from cave paintings to modern art museums. If you have ever seen with your own eyes or touched with your own hands a famous remain of your place, you know the emotion is not quite the same as seeing it on the internet. It creates a feeling of belonging to a line of people who have created things bigger than them, and you reach a better understanding of how everything that allows your life today was progressively developed. It makes you want to protect this inheritance for others to access the same knowledge and emotions, and it may motivate you to produce something that could reach a similar value.
Land inspire artists and creators in general. The most evident example is how Mount Fuji inspired the creation of an insane quantity of art in Japan, such as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai. The famous Great Wave off Kanagawa from this series, which is actually about the Mount Fuji, had a massive impact on the world culture.
Similarly, post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne painted multiple views of mount Sainte-Victoire https://drawpaintacademy.com/mont-sainte-victoire/
The end of 19th century classical guitar piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra written by Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega is an interesting example. It was inspired by the Alhambra palace in Spain, which was built during the 13th century by the Emirates who conquered Spain during the previous centuries. Nonetheless, it became part of the Spanish culture and inspired new art pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjX-m4LkYkTo get back to the mountains, but with a historical scientific experiment this time (science is part of culture). Blaise Pascal did a historical experiment in 1648 at the Puy-de-Dôme (volcanic mountain in the middle of France) in order to test the “weight of air” that later led to the understanding of atmospheric pressure (immortalized by the Pascal unit of measurement). This would not have been possible in Holland. https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/blaise-pascal-florin-p-and-puy-de-d.html
There are countless examples of how ancient Greece and Rome inspired arts and architecture at different centuries: 16th century St. Peter’s basilica, 17th century Versailles palace or Neoclassicism art in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are many other examples about rivers, lakes, seas, cities etc…
That is to say, the land and how it is transformed and built are major sources of culture. If you take the same people but magically modify their history, so they lived on a different land, you will have a different culture. Probably not worse nor better, but different, because the land inspires the culture.
If your people are not living on its history soaked land anymore, you lose those major culture nutriments. I’m not saying people cannot carry part of their culture with them, nor that culture cannot reinvent itself and be inspired by different origins, but you have more chances to dilute or lose culturally important works of the past if they are not set in stone. Stones that you can access.
It may even get physically destroyed and erased, like what ISIL terrorists did of the ancient temples in Iraq and Syria. To be fair, it also happens from “democratic” movements, such as how the French Revolution destroyed many pieces of arts because it represented the Nobility and the Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/04/archives/notre-dame-statuary-lost-in-1793-unearthed-in-paris.html
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/12/video-islamic-state-nimrud/25667399/Given that Putin negates Ukrainian’s history and culture as a justification to invade it, we can expect that he would continue on his pathway of destruction to erase any reminder of it.
https://theconversation.com/we-should-all-be-concerned-that-putin-is-trying-to-destroy-ukrainian-culture-179351So that’s a couple of elements about why defending your land is important for your culture.
The really first thing you want to do is to try to be better than them
Better than the invaders? I agree with the general statement, but when you’re in the line of sight of an automatic rifle, they’re not going to be impressed by your ethics.
It reminds me of Gandhi, who recommended his Jewish friends who were facing Nazism to just peacefully protest and wrote a nice letter to Hitler in 1939 to politely ask him to reconsider going to war. 6 million Jews were assassinated nonetheless.
https://apnews.com/general-news-f40d8c2c7d8d4ffeadd576ded89acc0c
https://time.com/5685122/gandhi-hitler-letter/I’m all for giving the good example and building peaceful relations, but when you’re faced with extremists who immediately endanger your life, you have to defend yourself first. It’s like a violent aggression in the street, you have to defend yourself against the immediate aggression first, to protect your body, your life and maybe your relatives’, before you can find a more civilized alternative like deescalating or getting help from the police.
You are mixing up bullshit. In order to defend themself one of the best thing ukrainian people can do is to ditch their own government who is drafting them to a meat slaughter over invisible lines on the map. Does this mean they have to stop fighting another authoritarian government trying to impose their laws and drafting on them? Nope, people exists with or without a flag on top of their head and a bunch of politicians ruling on them.
Ah yes, I’m sure the new laissez faire Ukrainian army will be able to stand up to a united Russian military machine!
No military can stand up to angry people
There’s quite a history of military rolling over angry civilians.
In a situation where losing means you lose everything… It’s a small price to pay.
losing means you lose everything
Conscripting a guy to go to war on your behalf, watching them die in your defense, and then breathing a sigh of relief because at least you didn’t lose anything.
Apple is truck.
See? I can also spew nonsense.
Words do mean things. Conscription is involuntary labor. Slavery is… involuntary labor. A=A.
War is death.
