The countries that voted in favor of continued bombing of Syria are:
- Russia and its client state Belarus
- Cuba
- Bolivia
- Venezuela
- Nicaragua
- North Korea
- China
- Zimbabwe
- Russia’s new best friend Burundi (the Russian media have been going nuts over the wonderfulness of Burundi and the importance of a strategic partnership with this crucial country)
- South Sudan
- Iran
- And Assad himself, obviously
China is desperate for oil. And the rest are dumb Russian pawns in the new Cold War.
Clarissa's Blog 
Interesting. US bombs oil tanker trucks as Islamic State battles Syrian regime near Palmyra.
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Good news.
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Burundi does not get the attention it deserves in most of the English speaking world.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2012/12/burundi-rwandas-mirror-twin.html
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Here is a post on more recent events in Burundi.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2015/12/violence-in-burundi.html
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Very interesting! I have to confess that I wouldn’t know anything at all about Burundi had it not become such a central issue on Russian news.
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China? Seriously?
I’ve been there and have good friends who live there. Shanghai, Beijing, Ningbo (in zhejing province south of Shanghai), and Shenzhen.
Aside from the internet “great firewall” its actually not a bad place to live and do business. Shenzhen is my favorite because it is the most dynamic.
The interent “great firewall” is a pain in the ass though.
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I’m sure there are tons of amazing people in China but they have powerful oil interests in the Middle East and it’s all about that right now.
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the whole reason the world cares about middle east has been oil. the modern world needs it (both obvious statements, just stating them). At this point there is enough second order effects (powerful govts, terrorist / jihadi groups and breeding grounds) that the west and eastern powers need to be there. Again, this is why as I have stated before and I think you have agreed, is the best case for renewable energy / efficient battery storage. Forget the green climate change, its very contentious, but cheaper and most importantly stable energy prices with no wars or proxy wars on energy will happen only when alternatives AT SCALE replace oil. Sadly almost no politician uses this argument… sigh 😦
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Very true.
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UN General Assemby resolutions like this one are useless symbolism, anyway — always have been.
Only the Security Council has the authority to actually enforce resolutions, and both Russia and China have a permanent veto there.
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That’s true but these resolutions are a good gauge of who are the bastards and why.
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\ these resolutions are a good gauge of who are the bastards and why.
Bastards from whose view?
Israelis think most of EU are bastards, judging by quantity of anti-Israeli resolutions.
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@el:
Your Israeli compatriots are correct:
The UN long ago degenerated into a third-world backwater, filled with anti-Semitic countries who hate Israel, hate the West in general, support “revolution” as long as it claims to be “anti-imperalist,” create “Human Rights” panels with countries like Syria and Saudia Arabia on them, and then expect the U.S. to pay the majority of the organization’s annual dues (which America stupidly does).
Last week the U.N.’s top Human Rights body, led by Cuban puppet Venezuela, had the U.N. hold a minute of silence for the dead Cuban butcher Castro.
Winston Churchill once famously said, “To jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” That may be true for preventing major wars between big powers, but the sentiment does nothing to stop the slaughter in places like Aleppo and the Sudan.
In short, the UN is a sham and a frace, only marginally better than its precedessor, the League of Nations, which totally failed to keep World War I from progressing within a mere twenty years to the biggest war in the history of mankind.
The lack of a WWIII during the last 71 years since the U.N. was founded has been purely the result of the Balance of Terror between the nuclear forces of the United States and the Soviet Union/still-nuclear Russia — not due to anything that the impotent UN has accomplished.
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I think that any reasonable person will agree that only bastards would want to keep up the bombing of the tortured people of Aleppo.
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I won’t pretend to understand all the different factions fighting in Syria.
For someone who can keep track of the different sides…
What would the best (or least terrible) result be?
Will Syria not run by Assad ever have a place for religious minorities again or are the Christian and Alawite populations gone for good?
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After so much brutality, the chances that the traumatized survivors will go back to a peaceful existence are pretty much nil. I don’t see any good prospects there, unfortunately. Let’s remember that Syrians were already a traumatized population. I remember back in Montréal, among all the immigrant groups from the region, Syrians were very clearly the most traumatized and with the greatest difficulty to adapt.
People think it would be Palestinians, but that’s not true at all.
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\ Syrians were very clearly the most traumatized and with the greatest difficulty to adapt.
People think it would be Palestinians, but that’s not true at all.
Those people buy into Arab anti-Israeli propaganda too much. Israel sees itself as a Western, first-world country (I hope) with the accompanying certain respect for human rights and self-restrictions during warfare.
Assad … well, he does not care for those things. And, based on what I heard, neither do most anti-Assad fighters. The Arab world is totally in a different cultural place.
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I’m not equipped to analyze the phenomenon, to be honest, but if I were to choose whether to have as neighbors in Montréal Syrians or Palestinians, I’d choose Palestinians hands down simply based on my experience.
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My impression is that the “New Cold War” is over and has been won by Russia. It happened when we elected DJT as President, likely with the assistance of Russian hackers.
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“My impression is that the “New Cold War” is over and has been won by Russia. It happened when we elected DJT as President, likely with the assistance of Russian hackers.”
Absolutely. Sad but 100% true.
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\ At this point there is enough second order effects (powerful govts, terrorist / jihadi groups and breeding grounds) that the west and eastern powers need to be there. … no wars or proxy wars on energy will happen only when alternatives AT SCALE replace oil.
Am I mistaken to think that when the world severs its dependence on oil, Middle East will descend into even worse violence, probably a local version of WW3?
For instance, imagine what will happen in Russia. I suspect huge economic crisis will lead to more inner and outer aggression, as it has been in Weimar Germany. In the ME, the effects will be greater by several orders of magnitude, compared to Russia. Saudi Arabia’s economy is (in)famously oil-based, and it’s true for many other ME countries too. Suddenly those people would lose all their wealth and/or turn from “poor” to “destitute” overnight. It would sow fear and rise levels of aggression in socially backward, not democratic societies with bloody ethnic conflicts predating the reliance on oil.
Of course, the world won’t interfere then, like it hadn’t in the Rwandan genocide (if I am not mistaken here). May be, the world’s interference and the attention coming with the former actually sometimes serve to limit violence. Compared to what would’ve happened had everybody ignored the wars.
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In Russia, the oil only feeds a small oligarchy. Most people don’t get anything from the oil profits so I can’t imagine they’d notice.
Places like Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc, however, those will suffer badly because they keep everybody very well provided for from oil revenues. What will happen to them if the world no longer needs oil can be seen right now in Venezuela.
However, this is hundreds of years from now because even if alternative energy is invented, it has to come to the developing countries, too. And that will take forever. So I wouldn’t fret about it now. This is very distant future.
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\ What will happen to them if the world no longer needs oil can be seen right now in Venezuela.
What is going on there?
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A total social collapse. The whole economy was propped up by oil revenues, all the social programs were nourished by oil, and now that the oil prices dropped, there’s nothing left. Venezuela is a typical banana Republic with oil instead of bananas. People are so desperate that they storm the national borders just to be able to go buy some rice and potatoes in the neighboring Colombia. Because there’s no food in the country.
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