Akula wrote:Dude, arguing with Frank over this is pointless. He hates the Ukrainian government because they had ties to right wing extremists. He honestly finds Putin and Russian state controlled media as trustworthy as the United States government and the AP. It doesn't matter that the US confirms that the Ukrainians didn't have AA assets in the area to carry out the attack; it doesn't matter that multiple rebel sources admit to firing on a plane when the attack took place, including the overall military commander of the rebels in the area. The Ukrainian government are BAD GUYS, so an implausible conspiracy to frame the rebels is something he wants to believe in.
This actually is an ad hominem, by the way. It's important to point these things out, because so often people claim that things are
ad hominems when they are really
insults.
Akula is of course a worthless shitbird who wouldn't know an honest argument if it was a flying candiru wedging its way up his or her urethra. I of course can't
read Russian domestic news, so it absolutely doesn't matter how credible or not I would find it if I could read it. Nor am I subscribing to any elaborate conspiracies about zombie aircraft or fake missile launches.
All I'm doing is pointing out that what we know now is precisely what we knew forty five minutes after the plane went down:
- A passenger plane went down in a contested region of Eastern Ukraine.
- The plane probably got hit with a missile.
- The missile it got hit with is old Soviet technology and possessed by every state in the area, but is well outside the capabilities of small time criminals to have.
- Some people in the area originally thought that the rebels had shot down a military transport, but quite obviously they were wrong about at least one of those things.
That's it. That's what we know. That's what we knew on Thursday, and that's what we know now. And people who are pointing the finger at Putin and claiming it is obviously his fault are fucking wrong. Even if the missile was fired by the rebels (and not the Ukrainian army) and originally supplied by the Russian army (and not a missile launcher that the rebels claimed to have stolen from the Ukrainian army last month), that
still wouldn't be Putin's responsibility. It would be less Putin's responsibility even than most "government arms terrorists" type situations, because the general assumption when you hand a group of separatists some anti-aircraft weapons is that they will point them at targets other than passenger jets full of AIDS researchers from an uninvolved country flying to a different uninvolved country.
It's not that Putin is a good person or that he isn't doing bad things or even that he isn't doing bad things in the Ukraine. It's just that the rush to blame him for
this attack is based on wishful thinking and immature splitting. There isn't enough evidence that has yet been made public to even know which side in the civil war accidentally shot down that plane. So far, all the evidence provided by both sides ranges from "dubious" to "laughable." Maybe one side or the other is sitting on some much better evidence and hasn't released it yet. But considering that the last time the Ukrainian government accidentally shot down a passenger jet they denied it for
eight days even when there was no one else to blame, I'm guessing this particular blame game is going to go on for a long ass time.
Interestingly: when the Soviet Union shot down a passenger plane in 1983 (which had gone off course and flown through restricted airspace, but which was still totally a dick move), they took five days to acknowledge the incident had happened at all. And when the United States accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, it took
eight years to get the US to apologize. Anyone expecting any kind of quick resolution to this situation is living in a fucking fantasy world.
-Username17