• chungusamonugs [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Liberals wholeheartedly believe that if Russia gains an inch of territory that their next move will be to overthrow the world. If you mention that this is unreasonable and illogical, they insinuate that you’re a Putin sympathizer and you want that to happen.

    These are the people who claim to want peace.

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Putin has been in power for ~25 years. In that time, Russia has fought wars in… I think Chechnya, Georgia, and Dagestan. Small territories that were formerly part of the USSR, and for all I know it’s possible the USSR was justified in intervening or at the very least Russia’s action could not be called “imperial”. I guess there’s Syria too but the US is there too so that’s a wash.

      Ukraine is the first real, full scale war Putin has launched. Still within the former borders of the USSR. And that was a war Putin tried to avoid and could have been avoided had Ukraine gone along with Minsk II and stopped shelling the Donbas.

      Should we discuss all the imperialist invasions and wars the US has been in in the last 25 years?

      Putin has had 25+ years to show he is imperialist and hasn’t done it yet. But libs think he’s gonna lead the Russian army to Paris if NATO dares shows any weakness.

      • casskaydee [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        Ukraine is also a former USSR member and the last time they “invaded” it, they were actively collaborating with the Third Reich

        • jackmarxist [any]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          The Soviets didn’t invade Ukraine. The Ukrainian SSR was fighting alongside the Soviets against the Nazis. As much as I hate the UPA and modern Ukraine, I’ll never undermine or discredit the sacrifice made by Ukrainians in saving the world from Fascism.

          • casskaydee [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            11 months ago

            Very good point. I edited my original comment to put scare quotes around “invaded”

            It pisses me off to no end when, for example, westerners will refer to heros like Lyudmila Pavlichenko as “Russian” when like… she was born and raised in fucking Kyiv. She was a Soviet Ukranian, and many of the Nazis she killed were also Ukranians.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        Putin has had 25+ years to show he is imperialist and hasn’t done it yet.

        But have you considered that imperialism is when a country does anything in another country? Kinda like the imperialist CCP building infastructure in Africa to lead them away from FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY™. Bet you didn’t think about that. Chechmate tankie smuglord

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      it’s always important to remember where the imperial core is, and who is dividing the world into camps (NATO) and who is responding to that division (non-NATO countries).

      The Russian war in Ukraine is ultimately a side effect of the civil war in Ukraine, which is a side effect of neoliberalization of Ukraine, which is a side effect of the end of the USSR. All problems in that region stem ultimately from that event, but libs are incapable of seeing the end of the USSR as a bad thing, so they have to invent a world where former soviet nations are guilty of imperialism against NATO proxies and postcolonial countries are anti-democratic dictatorships who have to be brought in line by the “rules-based world order” (NATO).

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Remember that scene in the new star wars where the guy says he sells weapons to both the empire and the rebels and then they never circle back to that plot point again? It just feels similar

      irrelevant star wars

      Rei and Kylo should have joined forces when he first offered and then become grey Jedi who tear down the Empire and the Jedi and then Darth Vader’s force ghost shrugs and applauds

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    The next Dark age

    Reminder that the “dark ages” is bullshit Western chauvinist mythologising of history. Which actually fits perfectly given the context of this tweet.

    • jackmarxist [any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Quite ironic considering that the dark ages were caused by the ancestors of people living in Europe right now and rest of the world was prospering during the dark ages.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        So it’s basically saying that the western civilization is the main character of history and whatever else was going on in The Americas, Asia (including West Asia/the Middle East), and Africa was inconsequential.

        For one big example of how much it centres western civilization, the dark ages were also roughly when the Islamic Golden Age took place.

        But to go even further than that, the Carolingian Renaissance occurred during the dark ages, so it’s not even the west or Europe that we’re talking about when we call it the dark ages but a fictionalised notion of “western civilization” that goes from Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome to a big gap where “nothing important happens” to the High and Late Middle Ages in Europe where things like the Renaissance take place.

        It’s also mythologising because it implies that Western Europe are the heirs to the achievements of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome because they sorta inherited their scientific and technological legacy.

        The inconvenient fact that is that the Islamic Golden Age preserved a whole lot of writing and technology from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome by translating important works, not to mention building on these scientific and technological advances and developing their own, so they would have an equal claim over being heirs to western civilization by that same logic. Also the Islamic Golden Age is essentially how most of the science and technology from Ancient Greece and Rome gets to Western Europe.

        But that’s uncomfortable for some people to admit, so they just ignore it and tell eachother fairytales about history.

        • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          and you can still see the evidence in English: algebra, algorithm, alchemy, elixir, alkali, zero, alcohol, almanac … all from Arabic

        • IBurnedMyFingers
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          11 months ago

          The dark ages is a term for a place and time in European civilization, complaining that it doesn’t apply to other parts of the world is irrelevant. By following your argument, the Islamic Golden Age not adequately describing the conditions in Australia or the Americas means it should not be used either, when this clearly misses the point that the Islamic Golden Age focuses only on a specific part of the world during a specific time frame.

  • iByteABit [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    the year the world descended into the next dark age

    I’m waiting until the world realises that we’re already in the dark age and that year was 1991 not 2023

  • 420stalin69@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    Born to late to join the revolution.

    Born too early to colonize the stars.

    Born just in time to watch the empire fall.

    comfy-cool

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Fortunately we don’t have to worry about libs like this because their only solutions are writing their reps, going to “protests” at the designated time and place and then immediatly going home, and voting.

      So it’s not like their going to have literally any impact on anything.

      • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        I wish it were that simple. But unfortunately it takes a different set of actions and much less to preserve and defend the status quo than it does for us to change and overcome it. These people will gladly help the state spy on us and repress our movements, for example, which is relatively passive shit that we don’t really have the equivalent of. They get to exercise power almost simply by just being, whereas we have to put up active resistance and throw our bodies, our freedom, and our societal status on the line in order to accomplish anything. I think the notion that we just don’t have to worry about them because they’ll just casually contribute to the repressive tide we have to struggle against is actually kind of dangerous.

        Not that the sense in which we should worry about them is in trying to “change their minds online”. That’s obviously a pointless and futile strategy. But we should be working, when we can, to humiliate, shame, disempower, and make them uncomfortable everywhere they turn. We should be working to dismantle their casual systems of power (reactionaly neighborhood watches, homeowners’ associations, better business bureaus, NextDoor, etc.—and whatever the equivalents are in other regions, as I’m mostly familiar with the American ones) because those things are essentially an informal extension of the state and of capitalist power. They are basically brownshirts, except that the state and its tendrils have become so ubiquitous that they often don’t need to actively take the violent actions themselves when they’ve almost always got a cop on hand to do it for them, and all they have to do is be that cop’s eyes and ears. (And, of course, we shouldn’t neglect the fact that the state will still be very forgiving of them if and when they do decide to be directly violent.)

    • 420stalin69@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      I hear the angle, slightly more persuasively put but still the same as “bullies”, that “it’s all about the humans, I am against human suffering” which is false because it assumes the west are not actors with agency.

      Too many soft leftists who believe that our society is simply responding to events rather than driving them, which is why “I am against humans suffering” is the more nuanced form of “BULLIES” that appeals to soft leftists.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      Just spitballing: the validation of imagining that someone, someday, will point to their picture in a classroom and say “and these people were actually right and smart all along, but all the brainwashed people on both sides just wouldn’t listen to what they had to say.”

    • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      It’s always a matter of the civilised world vs the barbaric hordes to them.

      They don’t actually care about history. Tell them about the political philosopher Ibn Tufayl and how his works preceded the Enlightenment thinkers and was a direct influence on some of them. (I can’t remember the specific details but there was an early copy of his Hayy Ibn Yaqzan the library of… maybe a mentor of Rousseau? who had definitely read the book and was a direct influence on Rousseau and then suddenly Rousseau produces Emile, which has astonishing parallels to Hayy Ibn Yaqzan although no conclusive, direct link has been established between Rousseau and Tufayl.)

      Do you think they’re going to be fascinated or excited to learn about this fact?

      Nah, no thanks! Only Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and maybe whatever European history they’re connected to via their heritage or their last name.

      They’re just interested in historical justification for telling themselves that they are heirs to civilization.

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        11 months ago

        there was an early copy of his Hayy Ibn Yaqzan the library of… maybe a mentor of Rousseau? who had definitely read the book and was a direct influence on Rousseau and then suddenly Rousseau produces Emile, which has astonishing parallels to Hayy Ibn Yaqzan although no conclusive, direct link has been established between Rousseau and Tufayl

        hmmmm that sounds suspiciously like how Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the exact same time after Jesuits had made contact with the Kerala school of mathematics

        Many such cases!

        • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          11 months ago

          My favourite example of this in more recent times is this one:

          Erich Fromm articulates the idea of negative liberties vs positive liberties (e.g. “the freedom from being slandered” vs “the freedom to say whatever you like”) in his Escape From Freedom/The Fear of Freedom (depending on which part of the world you’re in the title was different).

          The only problem is that Fromm is a German and a Marxist (ick!)

          A couple of decades later Isaiah Berlin, who is a Russian refugee that fled the USSR in childhood (he saw the October Revolution) and who is a liberal and a strident anti-Marxist and anti-communist political theorist, delivers a speech titled “Two Concepts of Liberty”. You can guess what those two concepts happened to be. Berlin also happened to be fluent in German and he read a lot.

          Is there direct evidence establishing the link between Erich Fromm’s writing and Isaiah Berlin’s speech? No.

          But it’s not like Berlin one day wrote “Dear diary, today I am giving a speech and I thought I might as well plagiarise Erich Fromm…