Category Archives: morality

The Barbarian on His Redeployment

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is redeploying some of his forces away from the vicinity of Kyiv. He’s also ordering his hordes to lay booby traps that would do Daesh proud.  Per Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (as cited by The Wall Street Journal):

[R]etreating Russian forces had placed mines in houses, laid trip wires and booby-trapped corpses.

And this:

The [Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv] city council said a confectionery factory in Bucha had been mined by the Russian military before it departed.

Never mind the lack of military importance of this sort of installation. Certainly, sugar can be used to make a variety of bombs, but to the extent that’s the case, the militarily appropriate act would have been simply to destroy the factory. This was done solely to inflict more civilian casualties.

And at a private residence in Velyka Dymerka, a village just northeast of Kyiv, a returning resident filmed the damage done by Russians:

In a kennel outside, his dog lay dead, apparently shot. “Why would you kill it?”

Because barbarism.

The Progressive-Democratic Party Fails Again

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editors are concerned about the Left’s and the Progressive-Democrats in Congress’ efforts to cancel in one form or another Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over some text messages his wife sent.

Democrats and their media allies quickly sped past Ginni to demand that Justice Thomas resign (Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY)), or be impeached (Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN)), or at least recuse himself from hearing cases related to elections (Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN), et al.).

The Editors are entirely justified in that concern.

However, I think the problem goes well beyond that.  This whole sorry affair is typical of the Left’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s intrinsic sexist bigotry, and their efforts to turn back the clock on the feminist movement (the real one of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, et al., not today’s movement of professional victimhood and identity politics).

Demanding Justice Thomas recuse/resign/be impeached over his wife’s remarks does nothing but reduce Mrs Thomas to that erstwhile status of a wife being merely an appendage of her husband and not a free agent in her own right.

Asset Seizures and Doing Business in Russia

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And the disingenuosity of corporate heads who are continuing to do business inside Russia.

Nestlé is still doing business there.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal tweeted that he had talked with Nestlé Chief Executive Mark Schneider, who he said showed no understanding of the side effect of continuing to sell in Russia.

Shmyhal is being generous. Schneider, having risen to the top of a large international corporation, knows full well the fungibility of money; he knows full well that money his company spends in Russia, even if it’s solely to support his employees there and the employees of Russian suppliers of his businesses there, allows other moneys to be reallocated to Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. Schneider knows full well that the taxes his Russian-domiciled companies pay go to supporting the Russian war machine.

Other businesses have said they are staying because their hands are tied by joint-venture or franchise agreements.

This is…mistaken. The disruptions caused by war are a perfectly legitimate business—and legal—reason to walk away from “joint ventures,” especially when one of the partners is domiciled in the war-starting nation and thereby (however unavoidably) supporting that war of aggression. These business’ managers know this full well; they’re simply hiding behind a transparent fig leaf in order to put their incomes ahead of what’s right.

Russian prosecutors have warned some companies of asset seizures if they withdraw from the country and threatened to arrest employees.

This is simply idiotic. By surrendering their companies to such threats, the business managers who so succumb already have surrendered their company assets to Russian authorities. Koch Industries COO, Dave Robertson, for instance:

We will not walk away from our employees there or hand over these manufacturing facilities to the Russian government so it can operate and benefit from them[.]

He already has, and they already are—whatever Koch’s facilities produce in Russia, those facilities now are producing only that which the Russian government permits.

PepsiCo, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Reckitt Benckiser, these are another small part of the extensive list of Western companies finding excuses to continue doing business inside Russia and thereby, however indirectly, supporting that nation’s barbaric war.

Maybe Western consumers should begin looking to other companies from which to buy things.

Update: Since I wrote this, Nestlé has agreed to limit its production in Russia to truly necessary items: baby food and other infant nutrition products, specialist veterinary meals and medical-nutrition products. Nestlé also has committed to donating such profits as it gets in Russia would be donated to humanitarian relief organizations.

Cheering

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Russia has invaded Ukraine and is deliberately butchering women and children, bombing hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, even shooting at nuclear reactors in civilian power plants, and a Progressive-Democrat pollster for President Joe Biden (D) is cheering them on. Lake Research Partners’ Celinda Lake:

The good news is we now have a very specific reason for rising gas prices and a specific villain[.]

This Progressive-Democrat is happy to sit in the coliseum cheering for the mayhem below—because that’s good for the Progressive-Democratic Party. She’s not the least bit interested in the butchery beyond the fact of its existence and its perceived Party benefits.

The Value of Talks

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army [sic] and air force [also sic] are repeatedly and routinely bombarding civilian urban areas, hospitals, and schools, and the barbarians he employs as “soldiers” routinely rape and murder captured women and children and torture and murder captured men.

Putin does this especially hard right before his teams engage in “talks” with Ukrainian peace negotiators. Putin also flatly denies his barbarians do this at all.

Mr. Putin spoke Monday with the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, asserting—contrary to evidence of deadly Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine—that the Russian military was taking steps to save civilian lives, and accusing Kyiv of obstructing those efforts, according to the Kremlin’s account of the phone call.
As Russia continued to erase the line between military and civilian targets, Russian forces shot and killed Yuri Prylypko, the head of the village council in Hostomel, outside Kyiv, and two people who were helping him distribute food and medicine, according to the council’s Facebook page. Hostomel was the site of fierce fighting in the war’s early days.
In Kharkiv, near the Russian border, Russia intensified attacks on civilian targets, pressing to subdue a city, Ukraine’s second largest, that remains in Ukrainian control after days of fierce bombardment.

And so on.

Which raises the question: what is the value of engaging in talks of any sort with anyone in the Russian government, much less peace talks for Ukraine?

One is as critical as it might seem to be trivial: to get Putin’s lies, and those of his teams he sends out to pretend to negotiate, about his crimes on the record alongside his crimes.