420blazeit69 [he/him] @ 420blazeit69 @hexbear.net

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1

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505

Joined

4 yr. ago

Ukraine has lost. They are not getting their separatist regions back.

Their choices are to keep fighting, which will not change this outcome, or negotiate an end to the war so they can stop dying and start rebuilding. Their negotiating position will only weaken as the war continues absent some one-in-a-million stroke of luck.

This isn't "I kick you and you don't defend yourself." It's "I kick you, you defend yourself, lose, and choose to either walk away or keep getting beaten up." And that's not even digging into the actual causes of the war, which are nowhere near as clear cut as Russia one day waking up and deciding to attack out of the blue.

What part of that comment can be construed as pro-Russia?

They have age-old traditions

You're describing every empire that has ever existed. This is not a special thing "they" and they alone do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)

Stalin didn't kill enough of you people

For folks wondering, this is referring to Nazis and Nazi collaborators. It's abundantly clear that much more should have been done to destroy Nazism after WWII, just as much more should have been done to destroy the Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War.

"You can't call our neo-Nazis trash and our state that celebrates Nazi collaborators a shithole! That's, uh, uh, that's racist!"

America is a shithole, too, if you were wondering.

Just like Vietnam, right!

Did they take Kiev within 3 days?

This was never a goal, as even American military analysts will tell you.

Did they hold Kherson?

This is outside the separatist regions.

Are they able to stop the Ukrainians?

The front has not moved appreciably in almost a year.

That's outside the separatist regions.

is somehow losing to the minor Western allies

How are you defining "losing" here? They're occupying the separatist parts of Ukraine and can do so indefinitely.

The quote from the article was:

The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities.

You characterized this as:

china admits soldiers gunned down over 300 people

As @robinn2@hexbear.net pointed out, a significant number of Chinese soldiers were also killed (and not killed by gunfire). "Fatalities" includes deaths on both sides, but you (and this is an easy mistake) read this as only referring to civilian deaths.

This sort of precision is important. First, it highlights that this was not simply a one-sided affair; these were not wholly peaceful protesters. Second, the kind of factual slippage you (mistakenly) engaged in is how, over 30 years, an event where 30+ soldiers and 200+ civilians died in a messy confrontation becomes a clear-cut massacre of tens of thousands, where tanks crushed peaceful protesters and [inset whatever other salacious, invented details you've heard with the mythological version of the story].

Note that this last point is not mine, but is from the Columbia Journalism Review article.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of folks really grasp how large and active Hexbear is.

BTW thank you for the civil conversation.

The "it is fair to say that the USSR stance was no different than the stance of the United States during the same time" stance would get a lot of agreement on Hexbear. We'll go to bat for the many good things the USSR did, but we're more than happy to criticize it (or China, or Cuba, etc.) where appropriate. One of the most-cited books on Hexbear -- Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (big recommend, by the way) -- has at least a whole chapter (maybe even a whole section, can't remember) on criticisms of the USSR.

Super jealous you've been to Cuba -- hope I can go one day!

You're right, it wasn't relevant to you in particular. You got that comment because of the context surrounding this thread. Say you run a book club or game group and lots of people are chronically late, annoying you. One day a new member shows up a little late with a legit excuse but you fire off a snide comment to them in your frustration at the overall situation. They didn't deserve that, you were a little quick on the trigger, but can you see how the larger context affects what was said?

I also agree that you aren't brigading. The Hexbear users here came to this thread the same way you did, and they aren't brigading, either.

I would not enjoy it if a large group of alt-righters suddenly federated with us and became a very vocal presence, even if a large number of their users were often polite, because I am so strongly opposed to those politics.

There is a difference between occasionally annoying people who generally want good things and occasionally annoying people who generally want bad things. One example:

• Alt-right opinions on immigrants in the U.S. range from "let's immediately deport millions of people and create an even more deadly southern border" to "we should exterminate those [slurs]."
• Hexbear opinions on the same subject range from "we should have an open border, a guaranteed minimum for all U.S. residents, and we should end the imperial meddling that causes so much immigration in the first place" to "yes and the imperial core owes untold sums in reparations to the Global South."

Maybe you disagree with both, maybe you get annoyed by people talking about both, but one is fundamentally genocidal and the other is fundamentally humanistic.

Your stance on the Russia-Ukraine war is more or less the consensus on Hexbear.

It takes considerable time and effort to re-think beliefs you haven't interrogated for a while, regardless of how you eventually come out on the. Good on you for taking some steps in that direction.

What is the purpose of forums if not to talk to each other? Activity is a good thing, especially in the infancy of the fediverse.

From many Hexbear threads on the topic of LGBT rights in the Soviet Union (and Warsaw Pact countries), here's my understanding:

• The pre-Soviet Russian Empire criminalized homosexuality.
• The first Soviet constitution "decriminalized" it in the sense that it wiped away the laws of the old Empire and instituted new ones that did not include criminalizing homosexuality. I don't personally think (and I think this is the Hexbear consensus) that was an intentional choice; it probably just got left out because it wasn't a priority in the midst of a revolution, civil war/invasion by a half dozen capitalist powers, and the monumental task of building a modern state (and the first socialist state) out of the ashes of WWI and late-feudal Russia. Note that plenty of legal scholars would disagree on the theory that legislative bodies write laws (or don't) very deliberately.
• Stalin re-criminalized homosexuality. Zero people on Hexbear support that, and I'm not aware of any existing socialist state that does, either (the CPC line on Stalin, for instance, is "70% good, 30% bad").
• In the 80s, some Warsaw Pact countries (possibly just East Germany) were on par with or ahead of the West on LGBT rights, policies that came to an end with the dissolution of the USSR.
• Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state likely more corrupt and undemocratic than even the U.S., and I've seen no Hexbear user defend it, much less its reprehensible stances on LGBT rights. What you will see, however, is discussion of Russia's actual intentions (not propaganda like "Putin is a mustache-twirling villain who does bad things for no reason") and its role as a counterweight to NATO hegemony.

It's also important to consider the USSR's stance on LGBT rights in context of the rest of the world -- they were still wrong to oppress LGBT people, but no one else was doing much better, which indicates those bad policies were not some unique aspect of socialism. Cuba, for instance, just passed a Family Code that has LGBT protections far ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale, and the public support programs of socialist countries (housing, education, labor protections, etc.) are significant benefits for any marginalized community even if not expressly intended as such.

You're coming into a thread after it has 1000+ comments, which itself is subsequent to a lot of informal discussion. There's context here.

Part of that context is repeated accusations of Hexbear users brigading. The concept of brigading has its own issues, but to whatever degree it's a real problem, users from other instances dropping in because a thread pops up in their feed (as you presumably did) is not brigading. Users from many instances have said they aren't always sure where they are in every thread post-federation, and Hexbear users have said that, too.

It's how we got MAGA, ISIS, etc. Their ideology accepts summary executions in the street.

What exactly did you mean by this?