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Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Add to the above list if you can, thank you.


Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins


Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.

Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)

Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.

Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.

On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.


Yesterday's discussion post.


  • zeal0telite [he/him,they/them]
    hexbear
    49
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Mariupol Azov fighters perform tactical retreat into Russian territory where they have numerical superiority in POW camps.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
      hexagon
      M
      hexbear
      35
      2 years ago

      y'all Putinists about to look real fucking stupid when you realize that the operation to go behind enemy lines has succeeded

      • SoyViking [he/him]
        hexbear
        16
        2 years ago

        Azov will penetrate deep into the remotest parts of Siberia

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    hexbear
    39
    2 years ago

    The European Union has resolved to step up its defence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region in light of fears about China’s growing presence

    I wonder what would happen if Chinese war ships started hanging out in the Mediterranean with the stated goal of defending China against the growing western presence in the European region.

    • NPa [he/him]
      hexbear
      6
      2 years ago

      my duplicitous neighbors Sweden and Finland have joined the imperialist pigdogs in NATO, please Mr. Xi, send PLAN aircraft carrier Liaoning armed with hypersonic cruise missiles to the Baltic Sea and liberate us

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
    hexbear
    37
    2 years ago

    If Azov form such a "tiny part" of the Ukrainian Army, then why do they dominate western press coverage of Ukraine, hmmmm

  • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]
    hexbear
    35
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    A total of nearly 1000 soldiers have surrendered from Azovstal over the last few days. They are going to be tried and won’t be exchanged for Russian POWs.

           :yes-hahaha-yes-r: 
    

    :pit: :yes-sicko:

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
    hexagon
    M
    hexbear
    32
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Prof. Wen Tiejun Foreword to Michael Hudson’s The Destiny of Civilization

    TLDR: US hegemony is in decline and has been totally taken over by a landlord class that does not really create value itself, and GDP and such is just those at the top transferring wealth to one another. As domestic industry has shrivelled, all it can do is exploit foreign countries to gain resources. China, with a mixed economy and government control, can meaningfully counter the US, but a critical part of that is that Chinese economists must move away from more traditional Western economic understanding and towards their own, and better, understanding of how to run a county.

    The most important factor affecting the global economy is the increasing strain caused by U.S. hegemony. Its diplomacy has shaped the economic and trading rules enforced by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions in America’s favor after World War II. U.S. leadership reached its peak with its Cold War victory over the Soviet Union in 1991, consolidated by increasingly aggressive military diplomacy over the next twenty years. But since 2008 this U.S. diplomacy has become so aggressive that it is now self-destructive, driving other nations out of the U.S. orbit, leading America’s international influence to fall increasingly short of its ambition to siphon off the world’s income and wealth for itself despite its own weakening economic power.

    The principal conflict in today’s world is between the United States and China. This book by Professor Hudson explains this conflict as a process of international transformation, above all in the sphere of economic systems and policy. He explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political-economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentiereconomy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels.

    Professor Hudson endeavours to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution. The essence of 19th-century political economy was its conceptual framework of value, price and rent theory. Its idea of a free market was one free from economic rent – defined as the excess of market price over intrinsic cost-value, and hence unearned income. The classical aim was to free markets from landlords, monopolies and creditors. Yet the reverse has occurred in the West, particularly since the globalization of neoliberal policies in the 1980s.

    Historically, the way for industrial nations to gain wealth and power was to make their government strong enough to prevent a landlord class from dominating, and indeed to suppress the rentiersector as a whole. To promote industrial prosperity, governments provided public services to reduce the costs of living and doing business. Basic services were provided at subsidized prices that would have been replaced by exploitative monopoly prices if key public infrastructure were turned over to private owners.

    Economically, the most important service that all economies need to function smoothly is the provision of money and bank credit. When privatized, it becomes a rent-extracting choke point. That is why 19th-century economists developing the logic of industrial capitalism concluded that money and banking needed to be a public utility, so as to minimize financial overhead unnecessary for industrial production.

    Today’s anti-classical economics regards financial charges as income earned productively by providing a “service,” which is categorized as output and hence part of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That statistical methodology treats financial profits, along with other forms of economic rent, as additions to GDP, not as an overhead burden. This produces an illusion that the real economy is growing. But what actually is growing is the rentiersector, which does not create real economic value, but merely transfers income from debtors, renters and consumers to creditors, landlords and monopolists. This rentiertakeover is achieved by privatizing the public sector to create rent-extracting means for monopoly capital, organized mainly by the financial sector.

    This book by Professor Hudson is based on the lecture series on finance capitalism that he presented for the Global University for Sustainability. The series is directed towards the Chinese audience because he believes that China’s mixed economy with its classical industrial policy has best succeeded in avoiding the neoliberal American disease. These lectures explain why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentierclass has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.

    The policy question for China is how it can best maintain its advantage and indeed, avoid falling prey to American ideological and diplomatic pressure. Professor Hudson summarizes his prescription as follows: First, national statistics should distinguish the productive sectors that create real value from the financialrentiersectors that merely transfer income from the rest of the economy to themselves. A transfer payment is not production. Second, all successful economies have been mixed economies. Money and credit, land, public services and natural resources should be controlled by the government so that they can be provided at cost or on a subsidized basis, thereby lowering the cost of living and doing business in the private sector. Third, the way to prevent unproductive debt overhead is to tax away economic rent so that it will not be financialized and paid out to banks as interest by speculators and buyers of rent-extracting opportunities.

    A central point of Professor Hudson’s analysis is that U.S. diplomacy is an extension of the neoliberal ideology sponsored by its rentieroligarchy. “U.S. exceptionalism” means that the United States can ignore international laws, dictate the policies of other countries, and demand that they relinquish control of potential rent-yielding assets (banking, mineral-resource extraction rights, and high-technology monopolies) to U.S. multinational corporations and those of U.S. economic satellites.

    For nearly the entire 75 years since World War II, pro-creditor laws have been imposed on all nations within the U.S. diplomatic orbit. This U.S. drive has imposed austerity on Global South countries when they have not been able to pay their dollarized debts, sacrificing their domestic economy and the well-being of their people to pay foreign bondholders.

    What is ironic is that the United States itself is by far the world’s largest international debtor. It has turned the dollarized system of international payments into a way to make other countries finance its global military spending by making the foreign reserves of the world’s central banks take the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury – holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and other dollar-denominated assets. That is the buttress of today’s debt-based Dollar Hegemony. To break out of this dollar trap, China should stand with other independent nations to develop a new system of international payments and formulate new principles of international law for trade and investment relations. These principles require an overall economic and political doctrine along the lines described in this book.

    What I find strange is that despite the West’s economic, political, social and cultural problems stemming from its neoliberal anti-classical ideology being obvious for many years, many people in China still look to Western schools and leaders for guidance, as if their own native institutions, civilization and even their own race are inferior. The defeat of a country starts with the defeat of the people’s self-confidence in its institutions. Yet as an American scholar, Professor Hudson, who has studied U.S. finance his entire life and worked on Wall Street for decades, recognizes China’s institutional advantages. As long as we have the scientific spirit to continue self-reflection, self-correction and self-enhancement, there is no reason not to believe that China’s social organization and its ideology of Common Prosperity can lead its society toward a higher form of civilization. The key is to pursue our institutional advantage and abandon the shortcomings of the post-industrial Western rentiereconomies, not follow the Western neoliberal path and fall into dependency on the U.S. hegemony and ideology that has ground prosperity to a halt in most Western economies, subjected as they are to debt-ridden austerity.

    Behind today’s finance-capitalist crisis is thus a profound civilizational crisis. The world is at a crossroad in which all humanity now shares a common prospect: Barbarism or Ecological Civilization.

    • summerbl1nd [none/use name]
      hexbear
      24
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      man, it's like all the people i've been reading the in the past 3 years have chosen the past six months or so to pop off online :turtle-pogger:

      edit:

      despite the West’s economic, political, social and cultural problems stemming from its neoliberal anti-classical ideology being obvious for many years, many people in China still look to Western schools and leaders for guidance, as if their own native institutions, civilization and even their own race are inferior

      this + that china watcher essay from the other thread, too fucking real. liberal ideology, not even once :sadness-abysmal:

      • Teekeeus [comrade/them]
        hexbear
        14
        2 years ago

        Consequences of western hegemony

        IIRC there might be increasing anti-american/western sentiment in china though (does anyone have stats/polls/numbers on this?)

        • EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
          hexbear
          11
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Yes. I know I've seen more (and better, and more recent) polls showing this, but I'm having difficulty finding them at the moment (Google doesn't want us knowing the truth 👁️).

          But anyway, favorability of the US in China dropped by a net 13% just in the first 100 days of Biden's admin: https://morningconsult.com/2021/04/27/biden-100-days-global-views-america/

          Here's one showing a decline as of 2013: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/07/18/chapter-1-attitudes-toward-the-united-states/

          Here's another poll showing a pretty detailed breakdown of attitudes toward the US as of late last year, although it doesn't show change over time: https://uscnpm.org/the-pulse/

          Oh, and here's something adjacent: https://web.archive.org/web/20210710035810/https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/07/10/asia-pacific/china-mao-zedong-youth/

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexbear
        3
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        What do we do? How do you write "Our culture is a fucking nightmare of self-destructive self-annihilation that brings misery and death wherever it goes! Turn back! Accept no gifts! Burn every ship that departs from these shores and erase this cursed land from your maps!" in mandarin. Maybe we could put up a bill board on the California coast.

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    hexbear
    31
    2 years ago

    🇷🇺🇫🇮❗Zakharova said that Russia's response to Finland's decision to join NATO will be a surprise, and the measures will be military

    Surprise military measures :doomer:

  • eduardog3000 [he/him]
    hexbear
    31
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin says that Russia will sell energy from the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant to Ukraine in the future, if they're ready to pay for it.

    https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1526949948838883329

    lmao :gigachad:

    • chlooooooooooooo [she/her]
      hexbear
      16
      2 years ago

      does that indicate they're planning to occupy that region for a long time? maybe annexation?

      • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
        hexbear
        30
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Kherson is absolutely getting annexed. This was clear as soon as Russia started converting it to rubles and retraining their teachers.

        Kherson controls the water supply into Crimea, which was one of the less well known reasons for the Russian intervention - to unblock water to Crimea. Kherson is too strategically important to give up now

        • voice_of_hermes [he/him,any]
          hexbear
          2
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Was this the dam they destroyed? Because the canal sure looks full on the upstream end and dry as a bone Crimea-ward from it....

      • eduardog3000 [he/him]
        hexbear
        20
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        There have been a few indications over the past month or so that they might annex Novorossiya (Southern Ukraine). It's looking pretty likely at this point.

        • chlooooooooooooo [she/her]
          hexbear
          8
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          that's really wild. i'd have been in the "nobody is crazy enough to start a war of outright annexation in the modern age" camp a few months ago.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            hexbear
            11
            2 years ago

            I was too until I started looking in to the actual history of Ukraine and realized it's an administrative sub-unit of the USSR rather than a well defined nation state, and that ethnic tensions between Russia Ukrainians and Ukrainian Ukrainian nationalists have been boiling since Ukraine declared independence 30 years ago. Crimea, for instance, has always has since the deportation of the Crimean Tartars in the 40s had a huge Russian Ethnic majority, and they voted overwhelmingly to split from Ukraine and join the RF, and they continue to support that decision with 80% in favor eight years later. Ukraine's dreams of re-taking Crimea are delusional; They'd be invading a foreign ethnic group that would absolutely take up arms to oppose them.

            It basically falls down to - Western Ukrainian is full of Ukrainian Nationalists, Eastern Ukraine has a large Russian speaking Minority that kind of just went along with the Ukraine thing because that's where they happened to live when the USSR fell apart, and the Ukrainian Nationalists have been trying to start shit for decades, and finally did start shit when Euromaiden coup'd the legitimate if unpopular government and replaced them with an illegitimate and unpopular coup government.

  • Neckbeard_Prime [they/them,he/him]
    hexbear
    31
    2 years ago

    Success in battle is also a function of strategy, operational employment, doctrine, training, leadership, culture and the will to fight. Russia held and continues to hold an overwhelming numerical advantage in manpower and weapon systems, but Ukraine holds the advantage in every other factor.

    This is some John Madden-level word salad bullshit.

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
      hexbear
      20
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Strategy: make trenches and hold civilians hostage while waiting for the enemy to come to them. Get bombed to shit by superior artillery and air superiority in the meantime because why not. When that inevitably fails claim victory and heroism anyway!

      Operational deployment: Literaly just reduced to using civilian vehicles at this point. 1 2. This is what winning looks like.

      Training: THEY LITERALY CAN'T USE THE GARBAGE SHIT WESTERN WEAPONS/TANKS YOU ARE SENDING THEM YOU IDIOT!

      Leadership: Half the time it is training by some US millennial who got a medal for killing civilians in Iraq, the other half is the strategic masterminds that think holding territory at all costs is how you win wars.

      Culture and will to fight: I'll give this one, only fanatical nazis would emulate German WW2 strategies with enthusiasm, lose territory and manpower and continue to do the same dumb shit anyway. Can't argue here.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      hexbear
      4
      2 years ago

      Ukraine's army functionally didn't exist in 2014 and is being run like a puppet by NATO spooks.

  • JamesGoblin [he/him]
    hexbear
    30
    2 years ago

    Accordng to the western "media", Putin has all kinds of manias,dementia,parkinson and is in terminal stage of cancer since 2005.

      • jackmarxist [any]
        hexbear
        14
        2 years ago

        "Ukrainian ministry of Intelligence reveals that Putin might be undergoing 'aging' at a rapid pace of one year per year, experts believe that putin might have already lived a major part of his life by now"

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      hexbear
      15
      2 years ago

      He's such an inspiring role model, showing persons who are mentally and physically differently abled that they can achieve anything they want, without having to let the disability stop them.

      • zeal0telite [he/him,they/them]
        hexbear
        15
        2 years ago

        Calling people ableist for suggesting that people with terminal illnesses are dangerous because they lack consequences for their actions.

  • Yanqui_UXO [any]
    hexbear
    29
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Joker report:

    :joker-troll: ENTER ERDOGAN:

    Erdoğan blocks Nato accession talks with Sweden and Finland

    Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has attacked western allies for failing to respect Ankara’s “sensitivity” on terrorism and accused the latest Nato applicants of refusing to extradite 30 people accused of terrorism-related charges in his country.

    “We asked for 30 terrorists. They said: ‘We are not giving them’,” he said in a speech to parliament. “You won’t hand over terrorists but you want to join Nato. We cannot say yes to a security organisation that is devoid of security.”

    :jokerfication: ENTER ZORAN MILANOVIC (CROATIA):

    President Zoran Milanovic said on Wednesday that he would instruct Croatia's Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Mario Nobilo, to vote against the admission of Finland and Sweden to the alliance until the election law in Bosnia and Herzegovina is amended.

    EXEUNT

    still means shit ofc, but NATO isn't "as united as ever" and Erdogan signaled to others that they can start compiling wishlists, especially when it comes to such a reckless endeavor as having Sweden and Finland join NATO, which very few European members actually want to happen (apart from the Baltics and Poland)

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      hexbear
      31
      2 years ago

      I love this. Westoid media pretended that NATO expansion into Sweden and Finland was just a question of them deciding it. They think NATO is essentially a local little league team that you can just join.

      We were also told that NATO was sticking it to Putin by being as united as ever.

      And then it happens, those nice friendly Nordics decides to join. And then they are told no. And to add insult to injury, the countries saying no are countries who are far down the whiteness scale compared to Sweden and Finland.

      NATO is not rising to the challenge in a united defense of liberal democracy. They're squabbling over petty bullshit and making demands that stands in stark contrast to the lofty ideals the west claims to stand for.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexbear
        11
        2 years ago

        I was telling some Finns that they shouldn't expect the West to save them.

        • voice_of_hermes [he/him,any]
          hexbear
          3
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          How'd you like a little forced austerity with that nuclear-laden military base that's also swarming with heavily armed and propagandically stupid yanks, bro? So much for Nordic social democracy. Ha ha ha.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
      hexagon
      M
      hexbear
      29
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      would be pretty funny if NATO swapped Turkey and Croatia for Sweden and Finland. also, equally funny and deranged if like, half the NATO states take this opportunity to be like "Okay, I'll approve Finland and Sweden but only if I get one of my weird national and deeply racist issues addressed"

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
      hexbear
      27
      2 years ago

      I could be wrong but my impression so far is that Turkey is not actually all that pleased about supplying all those drones and then seeing them all get destroyed while Ukraine still loses the war. I wonder if they felt they've done their part and this is compensation for it.

      The "Turkish drones are so effective wow" narrative is very much an attempt to make Turkey happy by praising their shit drones. The reality is everyone involved knows they barely do anything but its one of those things you can't just go out and admit it.

      So Turkey may already be pissed overall and this isn't just opportunism.

      • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
        hexbear
        23
        2 years ago

        Drones are pretty damn good against technologically inferior enemies like Armenia. They are not particularly effective against Russian anti-air and electronic warfare

      • Yanqui_UXO [any]
        hexbear
        18
        2 years ago

        Yes Bayraktars don't seem to be as effective as advertised, or at all. Even though there is a lot of media silence imposed on the Russian side, they seem to make a point to publish every photo and every video of every Bayraktar that's been shot down, there's been so many.

        • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
          hexagon
          M
          hexbear
          14
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Is there any genuinely good military equipment being made anymore or is it just national MICs grifting the governments they're parasitically attached to or outright in charge of with high cost equipment that just doesn't actually work?

          Russia's hypersonic missiles seem to function as they should, though it's obviously hard to get a good look at them when they're travelling so quickly. Are their tanks okay? What about in China?

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            hexbear
            9
            2 years ago

            Hard to say. A lot of America's stuff is very high tech and works in some situations, but hasn't show itself to be effective against a popular insurgency. Russia is coasting on late cold war soviet tech, much of which was very good, and they've been able to modernize a lot of their stuff to keep up with the new high tech toys.

            I think the real issue is that without an industrial base America's whiz-bang science fiction toys can't be replaced faster than they would be destroyed in a real conflict, so the US would rapidly run through it's cool toys and have nothing to replace them with. Also, the US population is such a fucking mess that recruiting a meaningful army would be... uh... very difficult. Can you imagine trying to conscript a million zoomers and keeping them from fragging their officers immediately?

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                hexbear
                7
                2 years ago

                They could always try to recruit from the Christian Fascists, but if they try to recruit from the general population they'll be training and arming hundreds of thousands or millions of kids who have no loyalty to the government and no faith in authority to do anything but punish them and ruin the world.

            • euro_chapo [comrade/them]
              hexbear
              2
              2 years ago

              Hard to say. A lot of America’s stuff is very high tech and works in some situations, but hasn’t show itself to be effective against a popular insurgency. Russia is coasting on late cold war soviet tech, much of which was very good, and they’ve been able to modernize a lot of their stuff to keep up with the new high tech toys.

              Yeah right now feels like maybe 50% of the Russian success is attributable to all those great late-Soviet missile designs, Kalibrs, Kinzhals, Iskanders...they all seem to work great, Russians have a good supply stock, and the West can do jack and shit about those daily missile strikes.

              Just a reminder for folks because I only realized it after the Seth Harp interview on RWN - Russian dumped 30 (that's right, THIRTY) Kalibrs on the redditor base in Yavoriv on March 13. Ukronazis saying "30 Ukrainians got killed", some Austrian redditor interviewed said at least 60 Westerners got murked. Why can I not hold all this Ukraine winning.

          • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]
            hexbear
            6
            2 years ago

            I am not very smart when it comes to these things, have never really been a war need, but I think this depends on what you consider to be military equipment, yeah?

            Like, it seems that modern military conflict is mostly reliant upon information. If militaries are prioritizing information gathering systems, pairing munitions with targeting computers (or whatever the correct jargon is), establishing satellite measures and counter measures, etc. You wouldn't necessarily see this reflected in what we traditionally think of as military hardware so much.

            Also (and this is a bit shaky) I don't really see munitions being built for anything specific If that makes sense. Designing around potentialities leaves designs ungrounded. I'm not sure how to further clarify this point, I hope this much makes sense.

    • sysgen [none/use name,they/them]
      hexbear
      21
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Well, in a way this is because NATO is not really useful for Turkey anymkre, but tries to limit it and has significant costs. So, Turkey is seizing the opportunity to redress what it sees as a skewed relationship (which, if you go by ghoulish NATOite logic, yeah fair enough). They're likely to get significant concessions.

      Turkey also doesn't really feel threatened by Russia and has no incentive to see them join NATO while relations with the US and the EU are in the shitter, so it's a perfect opportunity

  • Kanna [she/her]
    hexbear
    27
    2 years ago

    Thank you as always seventytwotrillion :D

  • chlooooooooooooo [she/her]
    hexbear
    26
    2 years ago

    when do you guys reckon things are gonna get really real in the global north, as in middle class people facing physical shortages of goods? given everything we're hearing about crop failures and crops not even being planted due to market conditions, i'm thinking autumn this year will be when the shit truly hits the fan. idk what exactly will happen but widespread hunger and fuel shortages combined with constant political strife (roe v wade in the US for example, or the neverending tirade of tory scandals in the UK) are a hell of a combo

    • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
      hexbear
      21
      2 years ago

      Climate change is definitely going to cause an increase in crime for parts of the global north that have been traditionally colder.

    • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
      hexbear
      18
      2 years ago

      I would imagine there will be killer heatwaves and fires in Europe this summer and with record energy prices and inflation things might pop off by August.

      • chlooooooooooooo [she/her]
        hexbear
        15
        2 years ago

        it's already been waay warmer than usual for the time of year where I am. it's like, as hot as you'd expect the hottest days of May to be, but every day. feels like it'll be baking by july

  • D61 [any]
    hexbear
    25
    2 years ago

    :rat-salute: to all your work during these "interesting times."

  • Redcuban1959 [any]
    hexbear
    25
    2 years ago

    Ukrainian presidential adviser Podolyak confirms that there are no negotiations taking place between Ukraine and Russia, as President Zelensky currently considers them "impossible".

    • LeninWeave [none/use name]
      hexbear
      22
      2 years ago

      How do liberals rationalize this with their idea that the Nazis are a minor force? Either he's the biggest fucking idiot on earth, or there's a gang of fascists with a gun to his head.

      • lascaux [he/him]
        hexbear
        14
        2 years ago

        they consider the true nazis to be the russians who supposedly want to wipe ukraine entirely off the map and want to commit genocide against the ukrainian people. if that were true then negotiations truly would be impossible

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]
        hexbear
        9
        2 years ago

        and especially if Ukraine was winning as hard as they claim to be. If you are winning hard you keep negotiations open even if you are just going to be belligerent and keep repeating your original demands. (like what Russia was doing when negotiations were happening)

      • voice_of_hermes [he/him,any]
        hexbear
        4
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        IMX—based mostly on :reddit-logo: brigading—they choose one of two flavors:

        1. "Everyone wants to negotiate except Putin. U.S. and Ukraine have been trying over and over again, but Russia just won't come to the table."
        2. "Bucha and other atrocities and the fact that Russia wants to keep territory are non-starters, so Zelenskyy isn't wasting his time. And you can't and shouldn't negotiate with Putler anyway, because he will stop at nothing until he has genocided every Ukrainian and turned every square inch into Russia."

        This shit is really bringing home for me the fact that ALL liberals are pretty much just like the climate-deniers and anti-vaxxers and Q conspiracy dweebs. They just need the right flavor of reactionary drivel to scream irrationally about and stick to the narrative they've been handed despite all evidence to the contrary.