There is no "data", let alone primary data about these things.
The authoritarian nature of the governing system in Russia makes it nearly impossible to gather such data.
Is she suggesting that there is no conflict in Donbas for the last 8 years?
That is very clearly is not what she's saying.
She didn't accept that academics can have opinions.
Opinions are one thing. Her concern seems to be with the fact that otherwise intelligent and articulate colleagues can be so naïve -- and to some extent, willingly self-deluded -- about the utter insanity their government is currently perpetrating on a neighboring country.
> There is no "data", let alone primary data about these things.
> The authoritarian nature of the governing system in Russia makes it nearly impossible to gather such data.
oh I'm just referring to her argument that academics in Russia are all brainwashed. Of course there can be data. That's the premise of this blog. That she's free to just email them and get responses back. But she was unwilling to accept that one of the responders was free to have their own opinions. If she decided that "Russian Academia" was brainwashed based on those responses, where is the data?
On Twitter he made it very clear that he didn't believe the US that Russia was planning on attacking Ukraine, and did a lot of chastising of the media for trying to whip things up. Up until a speech by Biden around the 18th of February, after which he wasn't as sure.
So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.
There's no need to "invent" what Putin has very clearly told us in his public speeches. Recreating "historical Russia in the form of the Soviet Union" is the stated goal of what Mearsheimer apparently considers to be Putin's bold act of non-aggression this past week.
What a mindfuck. Only an intellectual can come up with argumentation like this.
Not sure that’s borne out, though his gist is along those lines.
> It’s hard to say whether he’s going to go after the rest of Ukraine because—I don’t mean to nitpick here but—that implies that he wants to conquer all of Ukraine, and then he will turn to the Baltic states, and his aim is to create a greater Russia or the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. I don’t see evidence at this point that that is true.
Putin may be simply testing what can be done in a deliberate fashion. Armies need wars to fight in order to stay in shape. He got Crimea pretty easily, so like a cat that got a first piece off the table he might be seeing how big a piece he can manage. We don’t know how much of Putin’s imagery is literal and how much is to just set a tone and narrative for what he does do.
In 2014 it did seem a bit over-the-top to suggest that Ukraine should join NATO to me. The analogy of Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact seems apt. Ukraine has been free all along to say “we like elections, but no thank you to NATO” knowing how Russia sees things. We’ll see how this plays out. This may just be the opening gambit in a multi-round game for the next several years.
And if this takes off -- we can be sure that the inevitable reduction in human staff (especially in stores in or near working class neighborhoods) is going to play really, really well for Amazon.
The authoritarian nature of the governing system in Russia makes it nearly impossible to gather such data.
Is she suggesting that there is no conflict in Donbas for the last 8 years?
That is very clearly is not what she's saying.
She didn't accept that academics can have opinions.
Opinions are one thing. Her concern seems to be with the fact that otherwise intelligent and articulate colleagues can be so naïve -- and to some extent, willingly self-deluded -- about the utter insanity their government is currently perpetrating on a neighboring country.