cfgaussian @ cfgaussian @lemmygrad.ml

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452

Joined

3 yr. ago

It's a beautiful city but the cost of living is apparently quite high. Similar to Beijing. High by China standards i mean.

The problem with petty bourgeois activism of this kind is that it is almost always entirely ineffectual unless it receives real material and organizational support from the outside, i.e. as in the case of the archetypical color revolution playbook, with entire NGO networks and tons of cash to pay people to go and stay in the streets for days and days (most people need to work and can't afford to do this unless someone pays them), pay for professionally printed banners and signs, etc.

Even online activism needs a certain amount of material support to produce professional propaganda designed to maximize psychological impact, pay for bot networks to distribute it and so on.

Without that kind of support this is just virtue signaling that inevitably fizzles out because there are no resources or organization behind it.

I'm getting lib/petty bourgeois vibes from this. Not that Saudi Arabia doesn't need a revolutionary overthrow of its despotic monarchy, but these methods strongly remind me of astroturfed color revolution movements. Smells too much like "Arab Spring" when online activists literally got NED (aka CIA) training.

Would be cool if it's genuinely grassroots though. Cause fuck the Saudi monarchy.

Who liberated the concentration camps?

There is no such thing as a "free and neutral net". It would be nice if there were but sadly that's just a fairly tale for children. Someone is always in control.

Humility is key to learning. Admitting that you can be wrong and don't know everything. Unfortunately in capitalist society the opposite behavior is encouraged and rewarded.

Definitely. I have liked the attitude i have seen so far from this person a lot. I think the most important thing is being curious and open to learning. Ignorance is only a sin if it's willful. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, some other people choose go to great efforts to remain ignorant.

Who is currently advancing?

Poland was never part of the Soviet Union. Unless they lived in the USSR and later moved to Poland, they did not "grow up under Soviet rule".

It's probably healthy for them to take a step away from social media and go touch grass for a while.

It only seemed that way because we were not as aware of the extent of western information warfare operations. In reality the firewall has always been justified.

The Nazi regime in Kiev which came to power in a US orchestrated coup attacked Russian speaking regions of Ukraine and has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2014. Sources here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686

Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting.

They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or giving money and weapons to help Nazis kill Russians again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more racist, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more detached from reality.

but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.

Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?

You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media

Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.

when the thread was about internet control and social media

Yes, social media is being censored and controlled across Europe and the broader West. Let's not even mention how often Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter have banned anti-imperialist channels, deleted pro-Palestinian or pro-Russian content. The governments themselves are legally persecuting social media based news outlets, forcing them to shut down

Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.

In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn't know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.

They are also very racist.

it weren't western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy

Not true. What little success they had there was due to British naval drones. Those worked for a while until Russia adapted. Now you hardly ever hear of success anymore.

Ukranian drones did it.

Again, technically not the case. Most of them are Chinese, the Ukrainians just strap explosive shells on them.

the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy

Drones play a large and vital role but they have not and cannot replace the role of conventional artillery. In fact the most effective use of drones in this conflict has been as artillery spotters. The reason why Ukraine relies on kamikaze drones to such an asymmetrical extent is because they have little else left by now. It is done out of necessity, not because it is the optimal thing to do.

Further, there is a certain inherent bias in OSINT toward overestimating the impact of drones on the battlefield due to the fact that they come with their own video footage whereas an artillery shell does not film as it flies toward a target.

Ukraine started this war with their pants down

Not really. Ukraine had the largest and best equipped military of any European country except for Russia at the start of this conflict. They were involved in an active conflict since 2014, had tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed and large swathes of the eastern front heavily fortified, and they had been receiving training from NATO for years as well as weapons.

Then they were further pumped full with all remaining Warsaw pact equipment that could be scrounged up (which was actually a very large amount) when the conflict began.

and indeed if it weren't for western systems and ammunition they would've lost it long ago

This is true.

at the same time they've been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent

Quite the opposite. Ukraine began this war with far more of a military industry than it has now. It lost almost all of it to Russian strikes, and what is left are almost exclusively small scale decentralized production which can only produce small weapons (drones first and foremost) and ammunition but nothing on the scale of tanks, artillery systems, air defense systems, etc.

Ukraine is now more dependent on western supplies than it has ever been, and not just in the military sphere. Its entire government is being kept afloat by US and European money which pays the salaries of virtually everyone in the Ukrainian government. It even imports energy. Functionally Ukraine's economy is dead.

Lol. If we didn't do that then we would get accused of not including our sources. But i get your point, sometimes we can tend to be overly thorough.

I view this as being a bit like mathematics. The things we say make sense to someone who is already versed in the subject but for someone who doesn't already understand or agree with certain concepts or ideas we don't necessarily want to rehash arguments that were already laid out in works a hundred years prior so we just refer back to those in the same way that when you do modern mathematics you don't need to repeat proofs that were already done in the 19th century. You can just take those theorems as given and if you are really interested in how they were derived you can still go back to the original literature and read up on it.

Of course you can still engage with and understand the more advanced arguments even without going all the way back to the basics but then you need to accept certain things as axiomatic, because it would take too much time to go back and explain them every time.

Let's say for instance that we are talking about imperialism. To clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about imperialism we may briefly give the Leninist definition of imperialism. You can either accept that this is the definition or you can ask why. Why is it defined that way and why does it make sense? Well for that you would have to go and read Lenin's work on Imperialism. Which in turn references but does not necessarily thoroughly explain certain concepts about the nature of capitalism that were worked out earlier by Marx.

You see, you can either choose to go down this rabbit hole and invest the time it takes to really go to the basics and build up from there, or you can take it as given that this has already been worked out and you can try and understand how we apply it to the modern day, which saves time and is more practical. Neither is wrong, it just depends on your personal interest.

The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don't live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.

but you won't get censored for criticising the Government... I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel

Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges

Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down

Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the "wrong side", in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU

Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe's victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn't like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed

Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn't change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.

You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.

The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.

someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF's foreign legion

Irrelevant. All foreign fighters choosing to involve themselves in this conflict are mercenaries as far as Russia and the Russian justice system are concerned. They have repeatedly said this and have warned how they treat mercenaries. If you still go it's a case of FAFO.

Because this isn't 2022, territorial reality has changed, the deal Russia was offering back then is no longer on the table, it's gone forever and not coming back.

The new regions are part of Russia according to the Russian constitution and will not be given up, and even in 2022 Russia would not have accepted Ukraine in any European military alliance, when the whole reason for this war is that a militarized and hostile Ukraine is unacceptable to Russia's security. And Europe has chosen to be intractably hostile to Russia for the time being.

This won't change even if the US disappears out of Europe entirely, and the deal Russia is willing to offer will keep getting worse for Ukraine the longer this goes on.