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.

I love this graph, it is an excellent graph

Furthermore, by the time the US intervened the "war" was basically over, Iraq had effortlessly bullied the ~~oil franchise~~ "sovereign nation" of Kuwait into conceding its demands - Iraq claimed they had been slant drilling across the border to steal Iraqi oil and wanted them to stop - and a peace deal mediated by the other Gulf states was about to be signed when Bush abruptly decided he was polling too low and needed to become a wartime president, had the Iraqi army bombed mercilessly as it retreated basically without fighting, blew up a huge swathe of Iraq's power stations and sewage treatment plants (which is what you do when you're the good guy defending justice) and then sanctioned it to hell.

That one friend who interrupts other people's anecdotes to talk about something similar that happened to him

Sorry naysayers, but facts don't care about your feelings!

Established during the campaign against Islamic State, no one can quite explain why al-Tanf still exists

Mysteries of the universe: Was there anything before the Big Bang? What is inside a black hole? What is the purpose of al-Tanf?

However, the g-force from being lifted kills him instantly

I always say it, he literally worked for British propaganda during WW2, the whole of is both pure projection and an extremely accurate description of the actual imperial thought control machine

I was thinking about this in regards to the death penalty in revolutionary societies, I feel like there's a distinction to be made between 'circumstantial' crimes like theft or murder, where someone has to be in a particular place and time etc., they could be motivated by economic hardship, they could even just be innocent - versus 'structural' crimes where their guilt is a result of their position in an organization that cannot be deflected.

Like... name all of the US foreign military bases??

My retirement plan is for a NATO-backed fascist paramilitary death squad to gun me down for harboring trans people