Lulu, I don't know how to get through to you, but I'll try again.

I live in Europe - every time the Croatian soccer team team comes to town, there are literally hundreds of arrests - the police have literally at least 20 vans at the train station identifying and taking away the disorderly and obviously brain-damaged drunk. There's chanting and obnoxious stomping through the streets all through downtown for 3 days straight. It's only slightly better when the 2 main in-country rivals get together. When Britain plays France, there's violence and debris from Calais to Paris. Welcome to the world of football idiots.

Your article refers to preparation for an event 3 years ago where the armed violence AFAIK didn't happen aside from the usual beatings. Yeah, lots of skinhead big talk about blacks, some larger rallies (they claim 3500 members, but how many actually show up?), and some messing around with knives. The racist skinheads like their Nazi imagery - I dealt with enough of these idiots in the US, espciaily around the music scene - shave your head, buy your Doc Martins, do lots of pushups, quote some Mein Kampf and supremacist ideology, a bit of hardcore music, and you belong. And typically that's where it stops - a couple years of stomping around shouting Oy and slam dancing at concerts, pushing strangers and acting obnoxious and then they move on.

And it's one of the easiest "being bad" stunts in the world - especially in Europe where Nazi literature is often illegal. Where I lived, we had the resident "bad" neoNazi guy who had some kind of reputation, but no one took him too serious and his influence aside from underground lit and the feeling that "ooh, we're scary"  was basically 0.

Ukraine has 45 million people. It's a relatively primitive place, as is Russia, Poland, Croatia, etc. You can find a few thousand people in any of these places to fret over. I read an article about Chechnyans & other "blacks" as they're called trying to fit in in Moscow - typically abused, discriminated against, etc. even though they feel inside more Russian than Chechnyan.

The original brownshirts - SA & SS - weren't training for a once-in-a-generation visit of the Euro cup to their country - they were the street militia to push a political agenda and intimidate the street every day. They were quite able to hospitalize and kill people - which these wannabees seem to stop well short of - and by 1933, the brownshirts numbered 3 million. So like the flit of a butterfly in the South Pacific turning into an Atlantic storm, perhaps these small groups of neo Nazi yobs could turn into something dangerous, just like the drunks in the park I pass every day could possibly do something harmful - but I'm not going to waste my life worrying about it until the odds look more convincing than now.

As for your article on Bullshit, it's clearly bullshit, even the section you quote - me as an individual of course am interested in mistreatment in Saudi Arabia and other backwards cutlures, and it's not obfuscation for me as an individual to be concerned about Putin even as I don't equate him with Stalin, just as I'm happy to have new governance in Kiev supported by the majority, even though I don't equate them with the Enlightenment and hope they don't turn into typical East Europe/ex-Soviet kleptomaniacs. Obfuscate? Of course our government will make any opponent up to be Hitler, and be concerned say for Afghani women for 2 weeks (as Laura Bush did) - it's how we go to war. But I'm not a government - I watch as an individual, and many others around do to. Russia's behavior towards Ukraine along with natural gas blackmail didn't start in 2012, and it's been a point of concern for Europe for a long time. Since European borders are no longer tight, the interaction with Ukrainians and concern about Russian influence is natural, especially as it spills into countries further west - not just military action, but corruption up to the highest levels of other governments. The author gives a "sure, Russia does what they say, but..." passing, and then this line gets me: "But only a fool would claim that Putin started his Ukrainian campaign simply to camouflage his domestic record." - huge red herring. Yes, only a fool would claim that, and I never heard anyone claim it.

What I did hear them say is that Putin planned his line of propaganda for interfering in Ukraine before Maidan started, and they seem to have the documents to prove it, along with a much heavier blatant propaganda campaign than the author credits the west with. I also heard Ukrainians concerned about Yanukovych's anti-EU stance before Maidan, which I still believe was the primary cause of the uprising (not some bit about NATO membership). I also believe the Benghazi uprising was genuinely popular even as I question whether we should have used it as the reason to overthrow the Libyan government rather than 1 of 13 other optional courses of reaction - I'm able to handle ambiguity and contradictory issues without problem. The author uses all his talk about bullshit to lead to his bullshit conclusion, that concern about democracy in Ukraine is just bullshit. Sorry, he's simply wrong, and no dazzling amount of bullshit can cover that up.

It's strange that for someone who's supposed to be educated on this matter, he doesn't dig into the most pertinent point for the Russian side - not Putin's personality, but the Russian inability to move on from its colonialist imperialist past. Not that they're sending huge armies out still, but they're not able to give up nostalgia for Empire, to come up with a policy that resolves its moral failings of the Soviet era and retreats into a sustainable skin of Russia, much like Germany did post-war. Instead its relations with its ex-colonies on its border remain ambivalent - heavy-handed influence, a puppet here and there, but little outright annexation. It's a lukewarm posture that leaves no one too comfortable, at least for those with even a tiny knowledge of history. Russia wants the option of taking it all back, even if it doesn't use that option. That gets into its pride and what-not, but no one else is really excited about filling Russia's lost sense of importance at this point. Sure, if Putin wantts to  score 15 goals in a rigged game of hockey we'll have a good larf. But the stuff that involves foreign lands, not so much.

PS - an article on how to wage just enough war in different ways to keep it below the threshold of war - "hybrid war"