The main fallout of the Russia/Ukraine conflict has been the rapid and escalating measures to divide east and west, putting up barriers to economics, culture, sports, the arts, etc at a breakneck speed truly unprecedented in modern history. As opposed to the more gradual escalation of reciprocal measures in the first cold war, we basically sprung the Berlin Wall right back out of the ground like that clip in the Simpsons. Pretty much all these divisions so far have been escalations by the USA and EU, or tit for tat responses by Russia, which is another change. So I thought we should have a thread to just devote to rapid onslaught of breaking news as corporations and credit card companies and international banking and operas and whatnot all rush to plunge us back into the cold war.

So to give some recent examples;

• Russian banks are being cut off from SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and are now turning to China's UnionPay and Japan's JCB. As Russian financial institutions are being isolated from the USA and EU dominated dollar markets, they are turning to the other world powers which are not joining in the sanctions are giving more power to the RMB, possibly threatening the long term status of the US Petrodollar as the reserve currency of the world. Russia on its own isn't going to end the dollar, but it could be the first domino big enough to fall.
  
• Exxon, Apple, Disney, Ford and other companies are either dialing back or completely withdrawing from Russia, selling stakes in Russian companies, stopping imports and exports. Russia in response has moved to freeze foreign-owned stock investment trading and prevent their sale.
  
• The USA and EU have moved to seize the assets owned by Russian corporations and oligarchs and private citizens they don't like, notably France and Germany both seizing mega-yachts owned by Russian businessmen, effectively acts of modern piracy.
  
• RT and Sputnik news channels have been banned in the EU, their online presence censored by Google and Youtube, RT America has shut down and in response Russia is banning Western media and several have shut down preemptively, including Facebook, Twitter, BBC, Bloomberg, CNN and ABC
  
• Formula One, the 2022 Winter Paralympics (lol), FIFA, UEFA, Ice Hockey Federation, World Rugby, Rugby Europe, International Tennis Federation, Euroleague and International Basketball Federation all banned Russian teams and officials.

That's not close to comprehensive, its so many at the same time nobody can track it all. But I'd like to draw another good particular example which is the world of Classical Music. Even back in 2014 with Crimea, there was already rumbles over outspoken musicians like Valentina Lisitsa being banned for supporting Russia. But in the past few days, various operahouses and city governments have come for a list of the top Russian talents: Famed conductor Valery Gergiev, Bolshoi director Vladimir Urin and soprano Anna Netrebko were the victims of 'cancelling' in the arts world. Gergiev refused to make any political statements and was sacked for refusing to denounce his friend Putin or the war, while Anna Netrebko put out a public statement condemning the war but refusing to be bullied into making compelled speech against her mother country. In her own words;



And thus the Iron Curtain fell on her. I think one thing notable about this culture war is that its just that: A war led by culture. The mob vengeance is coming from within the world of arts and sports. In previous world conflicts, the artists and musicians and athletes have been voices of tolerance and bridging political divides, often freethinkers devoted to cultural exchange. Whether it was ping pong diplomacy or the beach boys singing "Back in the USSR". Even when it was controversial and the paranoid nationalists accused them of being traitors, artists thawed tensions. This time around, the cancel culture was already in full swing and the stage primed for the woke generation to get out their pitchforks and demand Russians and their sympathizers be blacklisted from public society.

And importantly: The world isn't being divided as cleanly as it was in Cold War 1. We are not splitting geopolitics to our advantage. The wedge is being driven in a way that favors our only true rival, China. Russia is turning to be more codependent on China. When we demand our allies join sanctions and escalation against Russia, that call was not joined by India, Mexico, Japan, the UAE and KSA, even Israel. For all the incredible amount of time spent criticizing Donald Trump for putting up walls at our borders and isolating us on a world stage, we're doing far worse right now under Biden. The biggest threat is to the US Petrodollar and long term security of the dollar as an investment. When other countries see us flip a switch and seize assets and cut off markets overnight, the oligarchs and businessmen who actually run the world get a glimpse of their vulnerability and the ball starts rolling.

What the west is doing is just as bad.
Shutting down the banking system, do you think your coins are safe?
If i was Putin, i would press the red button just couse of this and this NATO weapon agression against Russia

And this propaganda is unreal.
West is escalating things like retards

Just watched the Dutch news,
This pisspeople at the north, Groningen, crying for decades about earthquakes as a result of wining gas.
76%of them now wana pump gass again, to piss of Putin.

This post was edited by Tommyvv on Mar 6 2022 11:21pm

Sanctioning a country for invading a sovereign nation is cancel culture is certainly a new take.

USA would be happy to spread their ideological degeneracy of "more than 2 genders" to Russia and Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are heavily Christian and USA cannot stand that.

imagine a country repeatedly invades its neighbours, literally killing thousands of innocent people, displacing millions, causing unthinkable pain and destruction, and some dishonest / stupid people are trying to mental gymnastic their way into believing the invaders are "aCkTsHuaLLy" the aggressed upon... fucking clowns...

Sees women and children getting indiscriminately bombed by an invading force.

But muh monies.

Get some perspective.

Sanctions are the alternate to war.

I don't see seizing Russian oligarch assets as thievery in this case. Those fuckups knew that they were in a mafia organization and now they're getting what they deserve.

Cancel culture is bad because the punishment is usually significantly worse than the crime. Does Russia defending itself from an aggressive neighbor really warrant harsh economic consequences? Let me guess, you're one of those idiots who thinks that America shouldn't have invaded Iraq.

Commodities index skyrocketing. Good for me because I saw it coming and got out of tech, bad for the world because of why that happened.

I've never been more genuinely concerned for the well-being of America and the West. You cannot cut off the world's largest wheat exporter and one of the largest fossil fuel exporters without a plan for producing it/buying it elsewhere, and from what I can tell, the current leaders of the west are too beholden to "green energy" interests to do anything that prudent. I have to wonder, why are they burning down the house? Do they realize they're headed for a massive political loss this year and are just going scorched earth like a scorned ex?

I figured we'd be okay and would make it to 2024 without a massive economic shock. Now, it's looking like it might even happen this year. The leaders of America have their heads so far up their own ass - they think they hold all the cards. They're even talking about sanctioning India and China for not sanctioning Russia, despite how both countries have tacitly disapproved of the Ukraine invasion. America is the evil empire and deserves everything that's coming its way, and while that means the Democrats will be absolutely obliterated, this and what's coming is far too heavy a price to pay for it.

And that assumes Russia's incredible nuclear arsenal stays idle, which adds yet another, well, wrinkle.

3edgy5me.

your usual routine aside though, you're accidentally raising an interesting point here - one that is lively discussed in the arab world for example, concerning the double standard "the west" has regarding unjustified invasions and military aggression. now obviously there are some major differences between america's war-mongering in the middle east and russia's military campaigns against its neighbours, the most convenient and obvious one being their respective motivations and goals, but the core of the criticism is still very valid imo.

the honest reply to it contains multiple different aspects of course, but chief among them, in my opinion, is simply economic dependence and ideological / political alignment with the respective aggressors - which is pretty sad, from a moral standpoint at least.

just to take the wind out of the sails of our resident putin bots: this does, of course, not mean that we should let putin get away with his war-mongering, it rather means that we should oppose american imperialism more, and stop making (buying into) excuses for it.