Genocide is definitely politics, but should definitely be talked about.
Restrictions on “politics” always and forever mean restrictions on heterodox political positions, while allowing orthodox views.
1000% this. I live in the bible belt and am a big burly bearded bastard so people “quiet part out loud” at me with supersonic speed (1). I’d almost make a mortgage payment if I had a buck for every time someone said some ridiculous shit then I got in trouble for “getting political” aka politely and calmly engaging with the statement just made directly to me.
I didn’t make it political. The person saying trans folk should “wear the right clothing” made it political. I believe the word you’re looking for is “uncomfortable,” and if you don’t want it to get uncomfortable maybe tell HIM not to get political. If he says it, I have a right to respond - and silencing my speech but not his is an explicit endorsement of his speech.
(1) It has literally happened in like 5 sentences or less between even me and a stranger multiple times. “Hey what’s up” “nothing much started a new job” “cool, I haven’t worked in a bit but I worked at target for a bit” “why? Target funds ANTIFA TERRORISTS”
That’s true to an extent. It’s more about avoiding arguments, though, and less about whether the view is orthodox.
For example, some views are so out there and unaligned that people will just think it’s a joke and not fault you unless you start seriously arguing for it, like if you say murder should be legal.
On the other hand, some orthodox views would still get restricted because they’re contentious. Like if you start talking about how you believe in equal rights, that’s something most people agree with (at least in principle,) and it shouldn’t be political. But it’s going to ruffle some feathers anyways (especially if you get any more specific than that,) so it’d be restricted.
So basically, it either has to be so out there that people won’t think you’re serious, or so commonplace that people won’t even consider that it could result in arguments.
Everything is political. And yes, genocide should be talked about, especially ongoing genocides.
Technically, yes, everything is political if you make it political. But you have to make it political first. Petting your cat isn’t inherently political unless you bring up the government policies and economical structures that allow you to own the cat in the first place, or compare your attitude towards the cat to a political stance, or something else of that ilk.
In the same way, everything is scientific if you study it scientifically, and everything is theological if you consider it from a theological perspective. It’s technically true, but that doesn’t make it useful. It says more about the way you think than the nature of reality, especially as politics are a social construct.
Everything is political.
Sigh
That’s only true in an academic sense. When a layman uses the term “political”, they refer to discussion pertaining to things like how a formal government is run, comparisons between types of governance, government policy, etc.
While deciding what cookie to eat or what color your cat’s litterbox is might technically be political in an academic sense, you’re just going to annoy people if you try to tell them that those are political decisions. I have found that trying to force academic definitions into common use is confusing at best, annoying on average, and infuriating at worst.
An example of where a word’s academic definition has no place in common speech can be found in “information”. The informal definition of “information” typically is seen as referring to knowledge and the transfer of said knowledge. This definition allows you to gain information from a lack of something.
However, it is my understanding that the scientific definition of “information” does not allow for the aforementioned action, as “information” refers to the properties of physical matter. The result is that you cannot gain “information” from a lack of something. You might be able to come to conclusions based on a lack of “information”, but you cannot actually gain “information” from a lack of something because “information” is inherently linked to matter.
Now. All of that said, this meme is related to something said at an engineering school, so on the one hand, it isn’t entirely out-of-place to expect the academic definition to be used because it is an academic setting. Yet, on the other hand, it is an engineering school, not a political science school. As such, while OP should be aware that the academic definition of “politics” may come into play, it’s also reasonable to expect that their professors and peers would mainly be using the common definition of the term.
However again, in my experience, trying to force academic definitions into casual discussion is confusing at best, annoying on average, and infuriating at worst. Please stop trying to do it. Thanks.
(Also, imo, genocide is like Schrodinger’s Cat; it is both political and not political at the same time. Personally, I think it mainly depends on the depth of the discussion; but its “political” nature varies from person-to-person. Imo, saying that genocide is happening shouldn’t be considered “political”, but talking about why it is occuring is political.)
Edit: whoops, somehow my comment doubled, within the comment. The fuck happened there?
Edit 2: I swear I need to find a new phone keyboard, and I need to read over my comments before submitting. I’m finding a lot of stupid auto-correct errors, and it seems like they’re becoming more common.
Edit 3: the reason I got hung-up on it, and I should have mentioned this, is because I often see “everything is political” used to justify bringing heavier topics into places where it’s inappropriate (like chatrooms where people are trying to just hang out and have light hearted discussions).
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This statement is political
How is a fact political?
This was for the joke, I’m sorry you got downvoted
Yeah, it all is.
Well it depends on the definition. What I mean is that it’s not about opinions, it’s about facts
Both of those statements are categorically false.
In Sweden they seem to be trying to make the first one true. A university made it forbidden to have ‘any conversation that may be interpreted as political to a passer-by’ anywhere on campus. It was celebrated by the minister for higher education (liberal party member) as a brilliant step against “wokeness”. It was retracted, because it is not possible to enforce. But the government is doing an investigation against universities to root out “wokeness”.
But the government is doing an investigation against universities to root out “wokeness”.
Which is a course of action rooted in politics.
Specifically, fascism.
In Germany it’s normal to discuss politics in school, is even part of the curriculum. It’s just highly prohibited to discuss parties.
Discuss politics for 40 hours without mentioning a party
The American mind cannot comprehend this
You are allowed to mention them and explain what they officially stand for, we even made roleplays, to simulate how the parliament works (the class was distributed into parties according to the distribution of Parliament at that time and everybody tried to pass a law), it’s too tricky for me to explain the fineprint in english , sorry ;)
It is in America too. I had to debate shit like gay marriage in high school. We even have mandatory civics classes that teach you how the government works and my teacher told us how jury nullification works and why you should never talk to cops
We sure do NOT have universally mandatory civics, not anymore. I graduated in 09 and my school district didn’t teach anyone anything beyond the basics of the voting system.
It’s not prohibited to discuss political parties. Teachers are just not allowed to endorse or recommend voting for specific parties.
My English is simply not proficient enough to translate/explain it probably ;)
Also university is exactly where politics is best discussed.
How many of those engineers are gonna end up at Lockheed or Raytheon?
Wait… y’all have restrictions about that? In my school, only the teachers aren’t allowed to be biased (they are, still tho)
Not official restrictions. I heard this from other students actually
The closest thing to genocide in Ukraine is the conscription carried out by the banderite government for the meat grinder of an unwinnable war.
The Newlines Institute is nakedly a propaganda outlet for US interests. If you had done even a modicum of media criticism you’d realize that posting that article is actually embarrassing for you rather than a Le Redditor slam dunk.
By all accounts civilians deaths in Ukraine top out at about 10,000 over the last 2 and a half years.
In Gaza, on the other hand, Israel has killed ~40,000 in the last 8 months. In Iraq allied forces killed an estimated 100,000 civilians in the first 2 years of the 2003 invasion.
What the fuck is wrong with people like you who try to trivialise things like genocide by accusing everyone you don’t like of it?
Tell me you haven’t read the source provided without telling me you haven’t read the source provided.
You seem to have no idea about what a genocide is. It is not simply killing a massive amount if civilians. It s the eradication of a people, completely or partially. That includes but is not limited to the massive killing of civilians but also cultural eradication for example by abducting and reeducating children (which Russia did on a grand scale), the suppression of cultural items like language (which Russia has done like forever, but especially since the beginning of the occupation in 2014) or the dehumanization of members of the people.
Some other comprehensive sources:
https://theconversation.com/unmarked-graves-violent-repression-and-cultural-erasure-the-devastating-human-toll-of-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-223337
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/ukraine-mass-murder-hate-speech-soviet/629629/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukrainians_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_WarPlease tell me, what is more trivializing genocide, factoring in more than civilian deaths or reducing genocide to a single factor?
p.s.: your number of 10.000 civilian deaths in Ukraine is a very conservative estimate and is probably much higher (as mentioned in the first link I put under comprehensive sources).
p.p.s.: inb4: I’m not saying what’s happening in Gaza is not a genocide.
Do you have any idea the size and populations of Russian occupied Ukraine? 20,000 kids being moved away from the frontline, that are getting returned as parents are identified, is not cultural genocide, and if you want to talk about dehumanisation look no further than the term “orcs”. You’re talking about cultural suppression like the Ukrainian government hasn’t been actively attacking it’s own people in Donetsk and Luhansk for not being Ukrainian enough. I know you deeply trust those publications, but if you can’t Intuit it I really don’t know how to tell you that you shouldn’t be placing your faith in any regime’s estimations about their opponents. Try going with actually factual data.
P.s. all of the numbers are the most conservative estimates, I’m using verifiable figures rather than US and Ukrainian Nazis saying the russians are definitely doing all the worst things ever
P.p.s we are on the internet, not using a typewriter or writing by hand - you don’t need to postscript anything, you can just move the cursor back up the page to insert additional information.
Do you have any idea the size and populations of Russian occupied Ukraine? 20,000 kids being moved away from the frontline, that are getting returned as parents are identified, is not cultural genocide
Oh, I forgot, abducting children is OK, because there are enough more. Sure. Also, you forgot about the part where these children are reeducated to become russian citizens and despise or forget their ukrainian background. That is the cultural eradication. And those kids would still be with their parents if Putin’s Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine, in many cases killed their parents and destroyed their home. Russia is the aggressor, don’t forget about that.
and if you want to talk about dehumanisation look no further than the term “orcs”.
And that means dehumanization and genocide ukrainian civilians is fine? Btw, I never condoned the term “orcs” and I don’t like it. So stop your strawman right there please.
You’re talking about cultural suppression like the Ukrainian government hasn’t been actively attacking it’s own people in Donetsk and Luhansk for not being Ukrainian enough.
There has been no evidence for that, only russian allegations.
I know you deeply trust those publications, but if you can’t Intuit it I really don’t know how to tell you that you shouldn’t be placing your faith in any regime’s estimations about their opponents. Try going with actually factual data.
Intuition and faith are no measurements we should use. Factual data is evidential, not faith and intuition. You have yet to provide fact-based sources.
p.s.: Again, you have yet to provide verifiable sources. And sure, call everyone Nazis except those who act like Nazis.
p.p.s.: I like using post scriptum.
u c, i am very smart, so i wud leave the childs alone to die in the street after taking over their cities
Yes, I’m sure you’re so kind for avoiding the appearance of impropriety
that means dehumanization […] ukrainian civilians is fine?
No, it simply means you have nowhere to go with your “russia is being dehumanising” rhetoric - you’re trying to use the idea to build the case that there’s a unique injustice being committed against Ukranians, but they’re not even getting dehumanised as much as they’re dehumanising russians by referring to them as a fantasy species of mutated elves bred for war.
There has been no evidence for that, only the 2014-2022 war in Donbass
Like really, are you 12? I could understand this if you were distracted for the last decade, but you’d have to be pretty young still to not know about it.
Factual data is evidential, not faith and intuition.
Intuition is the ability to gather or understand factual data while skipping the conscious level of reasoning - it’s why we try to create intuitive designs that people can engage with without specialist training. You are the one placing blind faith in people’s reports about how their enemies are actually the worst people ever, while I don’t need to start thinking to understand that’s a fucking stupid idea. Evidently you do though, so you should start thinking about reasons people might not be completely truthful while talking about their enemies, instead of claiming you’re using factual data.
Nazi is when war
come the fuck on
like really, just grow the fuck up. The russians are at war. War shit is happening. The Ukranians can’t stop wearing actual icons and symbology of the literal 1939-45 NSDAP.pee.pee. In english it’s called a postscript. They’re used to include additional information that you forgot to the first time around - your insistance on them is the equivalent of double posting all your replies then saying you like the style when people piont out what the edit button is for.
these children are reeducated to become russian citizens
These are war orphans. And Eastern Ukraine has been culturally Russian for centuries. Even Zelensky is a native Russian speaker.
Do you think a 10-year old native Russian speaker war orphan from the Avdeyevka war zone is getting culturally eradicated because at the orphanage they teach them more about Pushkin than Shevchenko? Do you not see how obscene to use the very same word (“genocide”) for this and for what Israel does in Gaza?
Or do you think Putin wants to abduct children to brainwash them en masse like some comic book villain? Surely you can’t be this gullible, right?
There has been no evidence for that, only russian allegations.
The right wing Ukrainian regime has been terrible for all non-ukrainians, not just Russians. They also have been racist against Hungarians and other minorities in Western Ukraine.
War is bad that’s why there should be a ceasefire and actual peace talks in Ukraine as soon as possible. The West has no moral standing.
Here’s Ukrainian Adolf from the SS brigade:
but also cultural eradication for example by abducting and reeducating children
Moving children away from a warzone and putting them in school.
the suppression of cultural items like language (which Russia has done like forever, but especially since the beginning of the occupation in 2014)
You have it reversed. Ukraine has been guilty of this, doing an ethnic cleansing in its Eastern regions since at least 2014 that includes a Ukrainization of ethnic Russians and the Russian language, with violent suppression and an indiscriminate shelling campaign from Ukronazis.
If you walk through the sources in your Wikipedia post that you cited without even deigning to say what about it you found supportive, it gets even dumber.
The first is from Euromaidan Press, a liberal Soros-funded rag that draws the same kinds of editorialized conclusions, such as that children using Russian language textbooks in an area, again, shelled out by UA Nazis is a bad thing. UA is their enemy, killing them, and the RF took this opportunity to have soft power via direct aid, i.e. providing teaching materials free of charge and, being the only source of supplies, creating a Russian market in the area. You’d have to have no understanding whatsoever of Euromaidan itself to think this is surprising let alone evidence of RF committing fucking genocide. These publications even wrote a number of articles on the anti-Russian ethnic cleansing going on, but since the RF invasion they’ve completely reversed course to try and pretend nothing they said actually happened lest you be less supportive of the Nazi shock troops. The link to the banning of Ukrainian language in Crimea does not work. The claim is simply false, Ukrainian is an official language of Crimea. There were sporadic and local attempts to ban it, with limited success.
Anyways I was going to go through all of these but now I’m bored. I recommend that you acquire the habit of reading before sharing your opinions.
a liberal Soros-funded rag
And we arrived at antisemitic rhetoric. No, thanks, bye.
That wasn’t antisemitic lol. Not all mentions of Soros as a negative influence are antisemitic, he’s a billionaire liberal that funds propaganda NGOs.
It’s like saying a think tank is funded by the Kochs.
It’s good to recognize antisemitism but unfortunately you have a very simplistic understanding.
Anyways looking for the first excuse to run away seems to be your style.
No, the closest thing to genocide in Ukraine is the genocide being carried out by russia and defended by crypto-fascists
No need to resort to incoherent name-calling.
Russia invaded Ukraine, but war is not genocide, as much as the banderite government likes to turn everything into genocide to minimize their history of the original Banderites and other collaborators perpetrating the actual Holocaust.
If Russia wanted to carry out the war in a way that involved genocide, just carpet-bombing cities or things like that, it absolutely could, it has maybe the second or third strongest air force in the world. Luckily for everyone involved (other than perhaps frontline Russians), Russia knows that it shouldn’t do that, and so it isn’t.
I don’t see why you feel the need to so readily call people who disagree with you fascists. I don’t think you’re a fascist, I just think you’re a well-meaning individual who was tricked by the PR of a liberal-fascist alliance. What would make me a fascist? I certainly don’t like Russia, I don’t have some fantasy of the Eurasian peninsula united under the Russian Federation. I’m not here to tell you that Putin is a good guy, he’s a mafioso like you see at the head of most liberal states. I’ve got no problem with people speaking Ukrainian, though I sure wish they’d find a better national hero than, it must be repeated, a literal perpetrator of the Holocaust, but I also think those weirdos in Russia who worship the pogromist Tsar Nicholas II should get a better idol as well. Please, tell me what kind of fascist I am.
Which crypto-fascists are these?
- History of Fascism in Ukraine Part I: The Origins of the OUN 1917-1941
- History of Fascism in Ukraine Part II: The OUN during World War 2, 1941-1945
- History of Fascism in Ukraine Part III: 1944-1963 UPA War, Ratlines, and the Assassination of Stepan Bandera
- History of Fascism in Ukraine Part IV: The Global OUN Network in Exile, 1962-1992
- The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
- BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
- AP, 2014: Airstrike in eastern Ukraine kills 11 civilians
- Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
- Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
- Truthout, 2015: The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made
- The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
- The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
- WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
- Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
- The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
- openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
- Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
- Consortium News, 2022: Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev
How’s the anti-terrorist operation in Donbas going, champ? Oh, half the Ukrainian army left to fight for the RuZZian terrorists?! Yikes, better call Lindsay Graham, Amy Klobuchar, John McCain, and Victoria Nuland, the real architects of the plan. I’m sure the West’s limitless arsenal and money will be able to support Ukraine against those dirty bydlo vatniks, heh heh. After all, haven’t you seen all those videos on reddit of their crazy shit falling apart? This is gonna be a piece of cake.
Everything is politics, and should be talked about.
Also this would’ve been much more fitting with the Luhansk
or Donetsk 
flags instead of the Kiev regime’s, since the post-2014 coup government did commit a genocide in Eastern Ukraine.Or use the Ukraine flag since Russia is currently committing genocide with forced relocations including children. Russification is not great.
You’d have to be completely out of your mind to call the Donbas war a genocide. And that’s coming from Russian national who frequently calls out Ukraine government for being the same sort of garbage as Russian, if not much worse.
So unless this is some form of high level meta-sarcasm and/or trolling, I’d advise you and everyone who upvoted this to seek therapy.
Yes. It’s a screenshot of our template for the r/place. I included Ukraine because some people disliked it too
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong!
