I am the news dude. I do the news megathreads.
I subscribe to the geopolitical inversion of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.”
the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they’re egging on and go “doesn’t look like anything to me!” while advocating for the double genocide theory
Apologies, the Hexbear motto is usually to be Polite, Precise, and Brief (our writeup of our PPB motto can be found here, only a hundred words or so) so I went a little overboard!
I think a way to do this without supporting oppressive regimes is to specifically support the people, and not the government.
On Hexbear we have seen this line of reasoning a hundred thousand times and so we just laugh now whenever we see it; I thought you were making a joke until I saw your instance.
The cause of so much of the suffering of “repressive regimes” like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the DPRK, etc is specifically because of the sanctions that the West puts on it that are designed to impoverish the people and try and make them overthrow their government, because they refuse to engage in the global economy according to the United States’s rules, and not really because of those “regimes” themselves. Of course, it’s taken for granted that what the United States wants is what everybody should want, but considering the billions being exploited abroad for tiny wages in hostile working environments for the West’s benefit, perhaps America’s “international rules-based order” isn’t the best for anybody except for the West themselves! Of course, America has all the military bases, and those countries do not, and bullets and bombs tend to be quite persuasive.
For liberals, which I assume you are, these sanctions exist in a weird doublethink space. Working through it, liberals basically end up saying something contradictory like “The suffering that the people here are experiencing is because those countries are Bad. We need to put sanctions on Bad Countries. The sanctions aren’t what’s causing the suffering, it’s the Bad Countries’ fault (which thus implies sanctions don’t work and have little to no effect), but we still need to put sanctions on them to punish them (thus implying that sanctions do have some negative, disciplinary function).”
Sanctions both do and do not function depending on the rhetorical frame you’re taking at any particular time. When you’re talking about the repression that Iranian women feel and why that sparked the protests, the sanctions will never be mentioned - this is purely Iran. When you’re talking about the fact that Cubans struggle with food insecurity and don’t have enough fuel and sometimes some of them protest or complain, then what caused those shortages is, again, never mentioned - it’s purely the Cuban regime. If, on the other hand, you’re talking about how repressive regimes must be punished in general, then westerners online clamour and shout for sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.
This is why we laugh about such “support the people, not the government” rhetoric a lot of the time. Of course, in the case of Iran and similar countries, they aren’t left-wing and so we only really have critical support (in the sense of “they are better than those they are opposing, but they are not good in a vacuum”) and there is genuinely nuance about how the Iranian bourgeoisie are worsening conditions by exploiting the people, and repressive religious institutions, etc, but by and large American sanctions are the larger factor. In the case of Cuba, or the DPRK, such a line about supporting the people, not the government is quite ridiculous. Liberals (usually of the chud variety) who just come right out and say what they really mean - that, yes, the sanctions are explicitly designed to make the population overthrow the government so that Western compradors and corporations can loot it of its resources and exploit its people - are horrific monsters, but at least slightly refreshing compared to the mental knots that most liberals tie themselves in to not say that line explicitly, invoking “restoring democracy” and “fighting authoritarianism” and other such meaningless cliches instead.
the one killing citizens who speak out against it
Truly, the most dastardly invention of the Iranian government was killing people who oppose it. No government before or since, especially not in the West, has steeped to such lows.
all it cost them was shutting down their industries to use less gas to keep gas prices low
Just because a country does not conform to a Western definition of “democratic”, doesn’t mean that that country is not a democracy.
I would personally say that the United States is not a democracy by a typical definition, because voters don’t actually have the choice to vote for anything they like, and not just crank things but even things that are very popular and very important - medicare for all is a popular policy that neither party represents for example, and third parties are so disempowered by the voting system that it is essentially impossible (but not technically! as if that matters!) for any other party to gain power in their place. The generally low approval ratings for various parts of the government (the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court) are an indication of this. Is the mere ability to choose between two options, especially bad options, really a good definition of democracy? Might, perhaps, there be better ones?
Compare this to China. Sure, it’s a one-party state, but it’s a communist one-party state, as opposed to the United States’ capitalist one party state that is merely separated into two separate parties to meet their own, bad, definition of democracy. That being said, it’s actually quite a highly decentralized country, with regional and local officials elected by the people. More importantly, it has very high approval ratings and the people’s needs are generally met. I think this is a much better definition of democracy because where the people’s needs are made the priority. It’s harder to game that kind of system - the former definition has the “cheat code” of just splitting one party in two and then having the rich “lobby” both of them (AKA, legalized corruption) to have the same policies where it counts, whereas the latter can’t do that, it actually has to deliver the goods. Of course, it’s not as if you can’t have both - a system where you can choose everything about your country, and one where most people’s needs are generally met and most people approve. But if we have to have one or the other, the latter is the more important feature, IMO.
they’re turning their coal power plants back on after shutting down their nuclear power plants. oh, and planning on converting existing natural gas pipelines to carry hydrogen instead… likely generated by natural gas.
@SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net
I know this is up your alleyway, not sure if you have any detail to add
While modern liberal capitalist Russia with its oligarchs and chud politicians can eat my shit and hair, a) Putin isn’t personally responsible for the craft crashing, this is just “Bad thing happened, how do we blame it on Very Bad Man” which is just pathetic journalism, and b) lots of things go wrong with these kinds of missions all the time. Even the successful ones are like “Oh, awesome, our craft landed upside down, there’s dust over the solar panels, and one of the legs is broken, but we otherwise have a connection? That’s a big W in my book!”
I put a solid 80% of the blame on Gorbachev and Yeltsin (and the absolute blood-sucking monstrous ghouls who conducted the shock doctrine) for everything in the Russian state decaying after the disastrous fall of the USSR. Putin’s far from innocent in terms of liberalization of the economy and ideally he will be put up against the wall in a people’s tribunal, but he inherited it from those two dipshits and it would be silly to pin the blame for the decay of Roscosmos solely on him.
Unrelated, but also worth noting that Russian missile and rocket engines are still second-to-none, so they still have a big role to play in a spacefaring near-to-mid future.
this has been a very funny saga, beginning on May 30th I believe. apparently businesses were just too afraid of Iran to take the oil and congressmen had to get involved
average leftist meme
but 
, this is basically the backbone of a potential essay on why we are against NATO in this conflict and why Putin isn’t Hitler reincarnated
the ratio of artillery is essentially a proxy for the casualty rate because this is an artillery battle. I remember an interview with a foreign volunteer in Ukraine who claimed that most Ukrainians never even get to see a Russian soldier, and when they do, it’s the slightest glimpse before they retreat and start blasting them with artillery again.
there’s a counterclaim that astshually it doesn’t matter that Ukraine is firing 10 times less artillery because they’re 10 times more accurate, but this is just a very strange claim; Russian artillery is superior to the West’s and any issues earlier on in the war with lots of misses have been largely solved by now
at the end of the day, who is constantly doing counteroffensives? Ukraine, not Russia. who is constantly needing to do mobilizations? Ukraine, not Russia. who is needing to kidnap people off the streets to funnel them into the military? Ukraine, not Russia. whose country is overflowing with graveyards? Ukraine, not Russia. most of Russia’s September mobilization - the only one they’ve done - hasn’t been devoted to the battlefield yet because they’re being properly trained and nurtured for some future role, which would be impossible if Russians were dying in large numbers as Ukraine claims.
one can be like “oh but Russia is just hiding all this stuff” but I think it’s a lot harder to hide that level of mass death than people think. if Ukraine could, I reckon they would, and they have the entire Western propaganda network at their backs.
truthfully I don’t know exactly how many Russians and Ukrainians have died, but claims that more Russians have died than Ukrainians is genuinely comical, like “Oh, I know this person is a complete dipshit and I know to never listen to them on any take if they can be so completely moronic here,” it’s like the “100 million people died under communism” of Ukraine War talking points at this point. and I would genuinely be extremely surprised if the ratio was less than 1:2 in favor of Russia. Lukashenko thinks it’s 1:8, which is probably too high but like, he also probably has a better idea than me.
Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.
In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.
In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.
people like the hexbear news threads I guess
this is what is meant by “permanent revolution” I believe
“the last time I looked at China’s economy was in 2005, but I reckon nothing much has changed there since then. hasn’t changed much since then in the West, so…”
This is just a silly argument. We’re already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We’re already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We’re already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We’re already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.
Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn’t set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.
the unspoken (hell, sometimes spoken) assumption is that China would be doing a lot better with a Western-style neoliberal economy, which is an extremely funny assertion when all these economies are doing even worse than China is
there’s a manufacturing and possibly soon-to-be services recession everywhere. hyperfocussing on China while everybody else metaphorically (and literally) burns around them is just silly.
and, as others have said, the US is literally declaring economic war against China! again, it’s Schrodinger’s Sanctions! They both exist and are good, but also aren’t doing anything and it’s all that country’s fault! “Ooo, Russia is experiencing a fall in GDP in 2022, this proves that Putin’s war machine isn’t sustaina–” no, it proves that you’ve put sanctions on them! “Aha, Cuba and Venezuela’s economies are collapsing and they can’t afford enough basic necessities, this just shows how socialism is–” No, it proves that the sanctions that you actively boast about putting on them are working! “See, China’s economy is now not doing so hot (defined as “only” growing by like 5-6% or whatever), this is really a lesson in how Marxist econo–” Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you’re putting sanctions on their industries instead, the thing you, again, boast about doing?
“See, this patient is blacking out when we put pressure on his carotid artery, this shows how their vascular system is simply inferior to our own (which isn’t being actively strangled)!”
Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool
you don’t really have to support Putin per se, many of us including myself would feel glee watching him be put up against a wall by communist revolutionaries, but supporting NATO is a pretty big dealbreaker given NATO’s imperialist and fascist history. e.g. Several Nazi German officials being put into NATO’s government. Gladio and funding of fascist stay-behind groups in the event of Soviet invasion. Yugoslavia. Libya. I certainly want NATO to be destroyed, hopefully from within rather than without to prevent nuclear war, and unfortunately for us, the reactionary state of Russia seems to be the best bet to maybe have that eventually occur.
also, stop calling things “wars of aggression” unless you’re going to call everything a war of aggression, my god. what an annoying thought-terminating cliche.