this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Posting about Trump or Putin being bad would be akin to making posts about ISIS being bad: it goes without saying.
Like 99% of people on this platform already agrees with you, it's really not a contentious issue. There's no significant MAGA or Russian nationalist instance federated. None of their supporters would see it, it would be a completely moot point.
Oh how I wish that was true. Unfortunately I've seen far too many people support Russia in this war, both offline and online, including here.
Maybe I'm wrong about hexbear, I certainly hope that I am, but on lemmygrad I saw long posts with many upvotes explaining how this war is a good thing and Putin is a hero that is fighting against the capitalists etc.
Edit: and now lemmygrad had Hunter's laptop on the front page. Could they be any more obvious?
Edit2: lol, you almost had me believing that I was wrong and just too paranoid. Then in this very thread I got two people from hexbear telling me how NATO and Ukraine are evil, heavily upvoted. Still nothing bad about either Trump or Putin. Thanks.
Right, but if you made a post about how Putin is a great leader or Republicans have better policies and child labour, homophobia and lower taxes on the rich are good on Hexbear you're going to get shat on in the comments if not outright banned.
Criticizing NATO is more pressing because online discourse is extremely pro-NATO. Reddit, for example, loves NATO expansion and loved when Finland joined. None of the disdain for NATO is praise for Putin being a corrupt nationalist.
Also anything involving Hunter Biden is funny. He's just an obscenely offbeat person. While the Trump children (except Tiffany and for now Barron) are just slimy sycophants trying to gain daddy's approval while swindling money out of MAGA morons, Hunter is doing cocaine and sleeping with prostitutes. Its never really in our discourse for anti-Biden posts to criticize Hunter, he's become a micro celebrity in his own right. If anything we literally like Hunter better than Joe
Its because we don't have to convince y'all that Trump and Putin are bad because you already think that. We'd just be spitting into an echo chamber, preaching to the choir. There's no point. To be clear we dunk on Trump all the time. We do not like him.
Why do you think that leftists have to say "but also btw Trump is also bad" every time we criticize Biden? That would make no sense.
We had a user who would uncritically support Russia and Operation Z. A "Z poster", if you will. They were banned on several accounts and no one really missed them.
Some of us tepidly support the CPRF, which is largely controlled opposition. We recognize that counting since 2014, there's a lot of propaganda, civilian strikes, and land mines coming from both sides. Most of us favor an immediate armistice along the present LOC that follows pretty closely a "dividing line" for the plurality ethnicity as evidenced by the past 30 years of linguistic, electoral, and poling data. And we favor quick peace as opposed to continued hostility that likely will go nowhere.
It sucks that Ukraine's self-determination is being jeopardized by Russia. It sucks that Luhansk's self-determination is being jeopardized by Ukraine. It sucks that there's a geopolitical standoff between the two strongest military powers that overlays this. It sucks that the only imaginable ruling party in Russia is a reactionary capitalist one that was ushered in by Clinton's intervention. And it sucks that they're all probably just going to die in a field to resolve it, and make the situation in Bosnia look like a vacation resort in comparison.
There is a silver lining in that we are seeing a great power struggle to subjugate its neighbor, and also in that the wearing down of NATO and Russia allows the less belligerent, more progressive, emerging superpower to have more sway in the world. Some might say that makes it "worth it" but I certainly don't.
This is uncritically supporting the Z operation. It rewards the attacker and gives them absolutely no reason to not try again in 10 years (either in the same country or in another one). It's also what happened in 2014 and you see the results of that now.
Would you favor an immediate armistice with the Nazis in 1943? I surely hope not, but that would be a quick peace, very much like what the advocate for now.
I'm not sure you know the meaning of the word uncritical but go off.
Also, just so we're on the same page, what do you believe happened in 2014 and what has happened since then until Feb 2022? What political and demographic conditions do you believe set the stage for the conflict that has been going on since then?
Your comparison to WW2 in 1943 is also wildly off. For one, you've got it mixed up which side is wearing the Nazi insignia and celebrating Nazi collaborators and enthusiastic participants in the Holocaust. For another, the USSR turned the war around in 1943. It would make no sense to call for armistice when you're winning. Ukraine is currently stalled and bleeding manpower and materiel. The counteroffensive is all but done, were it not for Western insistence that fighting continues to the last Ukrainian.
I don't know, which side are Wagner and Rogozin on?
USSR was just as stalled in early 1943, bleeding manpower and materiel, getting massive war supplies from the USA, and the West was insisting that fighting continues to the last Russian. Sounds familiar?
Okay but can you actually name institutional promotion of nazism? For example publishing celebrations of Bandera, putting the OUN trident on old soviet monuments, funding neonazi run youth camps, etc?
I'm guessing you can't because while there are certainly Nazi Russians they've also tried to suppress any sort of Nazi organizing within Russia. The state is hostile to organized Nazism unlike Ukraine.
To be clear, theyre still a right wing neoliberal hellscape, but it is a low bar to clear and one clears it.
Nazis fighting Nazis
Hunter Biden's laptop is big news though. Why would it not be on the front page?
It's not though? We got tired of riffing on that literally years ago.
While it should go as without saying I think it's pretty hard to take it that way when the following statements get made a) The legitimate Ukraine government was overthrown in a NATO croup, b) Ukraine government is a neo-nazi government, c) DPR and LPR are legitimate countries and d) NATO started the war in Ukraine. Every single one of those is a Russian state propagated talking point, all of them made around nuggets of facts (like the leaked chat where some US officials were discussing who should or shouldn't be in the new government) but ultimately warped into something that can't definitely be proven true or false. Thus whoever spreads those talking points wants to believe those statements as true, which begs the question of why to believe they're true.
So, theyre all Russian talking points but theyre also all supported by evidence?
This is a thing that annoys me about liberal conceptions of bias. Everything is biased, the question is how factual things are.
Yes, this is what we call discussing who should be in the puppet government. You'll note that they kept the moderate "we should be nuetral between the US and Russia" organizers out and brought the nazis in.
As if to prove my point... I said they're statements made around certain known fact, facts that don't really prove the statement. Like the "coup". Fact is that there was a discussion between Nuland and Pyatt, which proves US was in talks with the opposition. But the fact doesn't shine a light on the extent of their talks, including if they were plotting a coup or how much Ukrainians listened to them. To claim it was a coup you have to believe it was one topic of the discussions and the Ukrainians listened.
I don't have problem understanding that things are biased. It's just odd how western narrative get criticism but Russian narrative is seemingly taken without question.
You just said the question is how factual things are, so factual proof that nazis were brought in? Because from the leak they were actually talking to keep ultranationalists like Tyahnybok out.
Talking about who should be in government and those people "coincidentally" being installed is plotting to install a puppet government.
Or were forced to. The point is we know they were successful at installing their people and keeping others out, and "it was just a coincidence" seems improbable given how popular Klitsch was.
The western narrative deserves criticism. And hexbear is very critical of the Russian narrative, just not the things that they say that are supported by evidence.
The thing is Tyahnybok was a nobody politically, they went with the more well known Yats as prime Minister. You'll note that Yats is the leader of the "Fatherland" party
They also say about the defacto leader of the movement Klitsch and the other moderate democrats:
I want to ask the reader something, what is being said here? Does this come off as innocent?
Because to me this reads as plotting to install certain leaders within Ukraines new government.
You're literally proving my point. You've added nothing to factually prove the coup, you're adding assumptions to make the fact fit the narrative. Also Yats is not the leader of the Fatherland party, he used to be there but moved to People's front in 2014.
I dont need to add more stuff. What they said makes it obvious they're talking about a soft or hard coup. You're being shown a red balloon and asking for more proof it's a red balloon.
What would you accept as proof, if not the senior US officials there talking about who should be in government and about moving to make it happen?
Oh, cool, the people's front! Let's learn more about them:
Russian politicians were also talking how Russia should nuke Nevada test site, so I guess Russia has nuked America because the only thing required to make it true is someone talking about it.
For fuck sake, at the very least search for the right thing. not this, but this.
Did a nuke go off at the Nevada test site in a way that wasn't connected to US nuclear testing? If so, it would be reasonable to assume the Russians who talked about doing it did it if it furthered their geopolitical objectives.
Oh, sorry. But still, theyre described as a conservative nationalist party and split from the "Fatherland" party. Also the leader of Azov Battalion was on their military council. Hrmm.
Now you're word for word proving what I originally claimed. If something happened and another factual event happened, that may or may not be related, and you believe they're related then it's okay to make the assumption that asserts your belief.
Conservative doesn't mean neonazi and maybe they split to be less radical?
I'm tired of constantly correcting you so I'm just going say wrong
Yes, it is extremely reasonable.
If John Smith talked about killing Jake Jones and was recorded, and then Jake Jones showed up killed as John Smith described he would be, then it would be reasonable to assume that John Smith killed Jake Jones. Jake Jones' head could have just done that spontaneously, but it is unlikely.
Do you have an alternate explanation for them saying "we're going to install the people we want and keep out the people we dont" and then that happening?
Okay but there are neonazis in the Wikipedia article you linked about them
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It's how 4chan and Reddit decided Sunil Tripathi was the Boston marathon bomber. A bombing happened, someone knew Sunil had gone missing, images kinda looked similar, people wanted to find a connection so they made whatever connection they could find. He wasn't the bomber but people still started a witchhunt based on assumptions they thought were reasonable. So no, I don't think blindly taking assumptions as factuals is extremely reasonable.
Without any further information I'd say they're just discussing ideas (in this case who should be in the government) to present to Yatseniuk with the goal of making sure Russia doesn't sabotage the movement. Nothing about it implies planning a coup.
I'm going to need more specifics than an information dump. Outside of the Azov being in the military council (which I admit was my mistake for not noticing, and I'll get to why that's not proof) and Andriy Parubiy (who I wouldn't consider a Nazi because he been a target of that kind of disinformation campaign by pro-russian media) nobody else catches my eye.
As for the addition of Azov in that list. The council is not made up of territorial defense battalions, it's made up of leaders of volunteer battalions. Azov was at that moment a volunteer battalion which is why they were included, along with the other leaders of the volunteer battalions. He wasn't picked because he was neo-nazi, he was picked because he was leading one of the biggest volunteer battalions. The idea that the government is a neo-nazi government because the biggest political party in that government created a special body and that special body has one known neo-nazi is just bewildering. Look at how many hoops you have to jump through just to have some connection between neo-nazis and the 2014 Ukrainian parliament, and then tell me that is reasonable.
Okay, are you saying that this is a case of mistaken identity? I dont get what you're trying to claim.
I treat the assumption as fact within my internal worldview because it is the only explanation I can think of for what happened and it has strong supporting evidence. We have records of them plotting, so they probably carried out their plot as it seems that what happened mirrored what their plot wanted.
Again, I would love an alternative explanation for what they said they wanted and were doing lining up with what happened.
Wait, did you not go over the list and look at the political history of everyone involved? It's much more than one nazi.
Do your research and then take a second attempt at replying.
I don't think I could ever make you believe that we came to these conclusions based on an analysis of world history, economics, and the current geopolitical reality and didn't need any help from Yuri at the FSB.
You literally don't understand how we analyze geopolitics.
Of course you can't, because there's nothing you can provide except your belief that it is the way you want to believe.
That's nice.
Feel free to provide proof.