The Red Nation Podcast has a long episode that goes in depth about the boarding “schools” from their own Marxist indigenous perspective. Always good to listen straight from the affected people’s mouth.

Pre-order ❎

Pirate before launch ✅

On a serious note, you usually gain nothing of value when you pre-order (and if you do, that’s a big red flag). It’s usually best to just wait until the review embargo, and the inevitable leaked cracks if the game is popular, to see the public verdict if the game is worth it. With modern broadband it’s rare for a game download to last a week like it used to back in the day, so you won’t be missing out on much if you just buy the game on launch day, or more likely, on the following weekend when you can actually play it.

Pre-ordering is usually just a corporate ploy to hike stock prices and hype, and that money often won’t even be used in the actual development of the game. Specially considering the lay-offs (and burned out developers leaving) that happen right after launch.

Even the byzantines hated their “fellow westerners” who came over, took their capital and declared themselves the “actual Roman empire” in Latin while the actual Romans resisted their occupation. On side note even studying the story of Math you get this fun phenomenon where a bunch of Mediterranean mathematicians develop a lot of cool stuff, then a 1000 years of silence (because Europe did nothing of value) and then suddenly after the Crusades they mysteriously “discover” a whole lot more math that sounds awfully similar to Arabic and Indian concepts. It usually goes Pytagoras -> Zeno -> Archymedes -> ??? -> Euler

First of all, thanks for the great work!

How’s the onboarding of the new contributors going? I assume suddenly getting a huge influx of eager contributors might create a lot of fun “problems” that software developers don’t usually get in their day jobs.

Related to that, besides the contributor docs on join-lemmy, is there any recommended reading before getting down to work on starting to contribute (already made or in the works)? I’ve been looking into helping out and getting better at Rust in the process.

Straight from the state department briefing last week.

QUESTION: Thanks, Matt. Liam Cosgrove with The Grayzone. So back in May I asked you about Gonzalo Lira. He was the U.S. citizen arrested in Ukraine for posting dissident content online, and you told me the State Department was aware of his arrest in May. And we learned last night through a series of tweets by him that he had been tortured in the Ukrainian prison and he was now on a motorcycle with a broken rib trying to flee to the Hungarian border. And so I’m wondering, if this is true, given the State Department knew of his arrest and his detention, how has this been allowed to occur? We have a U.S. citizen being – being detained and perhaps tortured in the prison of one of our strongest allies.

MR MILLER: Well, you lost me with the “perhaps” and the “if this is true.” I think I’d want to verify those reports before I commented on it.

I guess Yankee citizen lives are only important if they can be used to advance bourgeois geopolitical goals. Don’t worry though, they might invade Ukraine later after the war to make them pay for that transgression and their loss.

https://privatization.gov.ua/en/

Literally one search away.

That’s a fantastic write up and I have nothing else to say except for: valeu camarada! I had never thought about how specific our political landscape is compared to what people are used to on the internet.

This picture will scare Yankees (Red is the government).

We also have some 33 federal ministries but only 6 of those are held by PT party members, if that serves to illustrate it some more. Even the current vice-president was “neutral” on the 2018 election that got us Bolsonaro.

I’m not in the mood for stuff, so I’ll be brief.

Those « historical and material reasons » you speak of aren’t justification enough in light of their recent actions. It wasn’t even their seat, but the ussr’s. Which they are not the continuation of in any real way.

One of the country with the most nukes. It’s not about deserving or justifying anything, it’s because either Russia is talking in there, or they’re on the outside looking in. I don’t think any nuclear superpower should be on the outside looking in. The USA comment was made in jest because they have by far done worse crimes than Russia worldwide.

I’m a pacifist, but, and I cannot believe I am saying this, you can’t use a ceasefire against someone unilaterally invading another sovereign nation. Does this actually need to be stated?

I also can’t believe you’re saying this as it is so obviously wrong. By that measure every single American settler state should be militarily opposed by their original nations. Of course they don’t do it though, because at this point this level of moral stubbornness and lack of pragmatism would be self-genocidal.

Democracy should not depend on blind trust of public officials, not matter how well-intentioned.

This whole thing is completely irrelevant since you probably think the exact same thing of every other security council member. I can’t find a single polling on the Ukraine situation in Brasil, probably because we generally don’t care that much if Europeans are killing Europeans in Europe. That’s their problem not our problem and his inaction there at least represents our lack of interest. I would rather have a communist proletarian government (as you probably can tell), but to make this about Lula in a discussion about the security council reeks of European.

I am personally quite worried that lula would express some opinions that show a clear lack of solidarity for the ukrainian people

That’s where you’re mistaken, there’s solidarity, we send a lot of aid and the main foreign policy on that area is for an immediate unconditional ceasefire. This is probably the point where you’re going to reply with “but a ceasefire is unrealistic!” and that’s the part where Lula and NATO disagree on what will save the most Ukrainian/Russian lives.

It’s no coincidence that there has been increased activity around taiwan. It’s also no coincidence that far-right populists have been having their way in the ballot box in many countries. And it’s no coincidence that there have been putches in central africa, which, mind you, are supported by wagner mercenaries, and we have seen russian flags fly there.

Yes, Lula wanting a ceasefire and not wanting in on this war is what caused all of this. Not even going to explore the differences of all those events because if you come here to try and peg this on a completely unrelated Brazilian president just because he doesn’t support your pet war, you probably don’t care that much about those events either.

True solidarity is solidarity everywhere, because true authoritarianism is increased vulnerability to further authoritarianism everywhere.

Which is why we should dismantle the USA and EU since they’re the most authoritarian authorities to ever author authoritarianisms. True solidarity is solidarity everywhere, where was that solidarity during the 2015 coup in Brazil from Ukraine or your other favourite countries?

Yeah, PCR has some weird talk:action ratio and I even started a conspiracy theory in my head that they’re a CIA thing because their youth branch has a weird name that looks like somebody badly translated an English name and I couldn’t find information about a single person that is part of it.

I’m probably jumping at shadows, but if it walks like a fed and quacks like a fed…

And I usually do, yeah. The critical support only goes for when fascists and (more rightwing) liberals go outright slanderous against them. Dilma-Temer-Bolsonaro sequence was quite horrible and I think a big part of it (besides intelligence agencies and capitalist interference) was that we allowed right-wingers into our movements against them and suddenly they co-opted everything and suddenly it was all about “liberty” and “fighting communism” with way more financial support than communists could counter. The criticism/support balance is usually incredibly hard to find with social-democrats, and most often it’s by design to make themselves seem like the “One True Effective Left Party.”

But voting is hardly enough, which is why I’m patiently waiting for the restructuring from the PCB (that has been long overdue in my opinion) and for things to calm down there to try and get organised through them too.

Edit: for instance, the Unidade Popular party and PCB have this nasty habit of allying (more like submit) themselves with PSOL which is hardly much better than PT themselves. PSOL is not even that big of a party, there’s no reason communists should play the junior role to the junior left-liberals.

The last one was taken straight from a Guardian headline, only changing Truss to Sunak where the government campaigned to get people to “reduce their heating to save money”. It took a lot of public effort such as the don’t pay campaign to block attempts from the government and corporations from raising energy prices too much. Those prices are still going up right now sources and the overall cost of living has gone up ever since the beginning of the war source.

Although inflation has dropped, it’s still at an alarming 7.9% and so all the cost increases from last year will only compound in the coming winter, even if the Trans-Sahara pipeline is not affected. Thankfully all the Windsor palaces have pretty good heating and probably can help those who need a hot place to stay.

I’m on the same vibe but I’m also a compulsive hoarder, which is why I keep every old tech thing that is still barely functional and try to make them be something useful for what still works. So I have an old phone that serves as a music downloader/player, a notebook I’m turning into a very large e-reader, a couple of busted headphones I use only for sound isolation or testing and the list goes on. I’m still fairly reliant on my phone for browsing, but I’m really not fond of how unified and fragile modern hardware has become.

For the most part “low tech” solutions are not just more efficient in resources, but they’re also much better developed with the dedicated user in mind. Which is why stuff like vim, bash, tmux, arch are usually leagues ahead of their corporate competitors, specially now with the AI craze where not even the developers have control of their product.

Another difference is that he also commands the leadership of the party and gets elected, while Bernie is just happy to kneel to the Democrats and do the occasional speech to his fans. They’re not that similar in practice and I do have a bit of critical support for the PT, but that doesn’t mean I endorse them, or electoralism for that matter. They’re a bourgeois social-democratic party with all the liberalisms you can expect, but at least they aren’t actively telling their followers to kill communists, and voting costs nothing. (you actually pay a fine equivalent to 1 dollar if you don’t vote lmao)

Does that mean my demand should be taken seriously?

Yes, it means that I’m aware of your demand and that I choose not to comply because you haven’t provided enough justifications. On the other hand I’m de-escalating the situation by showing how the flaws in your reasoning. NATO could’ve done the same thing, but instead they chose to pretend the coup was a revolution, and all is right in the world. And you are now choosing to not read all the information which I provided, then throwing your arms to the sky and proclaiming that “there’s no such information.”

Except their critical view is being twisted by state propaganda.

So is ours. Welcome to the internet where bourgeois newspapers do their darnedest to control the narratives. However you don’t need to “fully reject” the outlets much as I haven’t “fully rejected” mnsbc or other USA news there, just read them critically. They still have the internet and a lot of them speak English, so if they want they can check multiple sources, which is how you actually develop critical views, not by just discarding the ones you don’t trust 100% percent. You may notice I didn’t outright discard any of your (rare) sources.

What grievances? The ones you mentioned or the ones Putin mentioned? Because you brought up slightly difference grievances than Putin.

You might want to elaborate on that. Since I’m not the President of Russia, I think you should go with the Putin ones of blocking Ukraine from NATO, ending the Donbass war and removing the Nazis from government. It’s all in the speech, if you read it.

And the second question is how is NATO supposed to address them?

Read above, but I’m also not the French ambassador so they could think of clever compromises too, so long as they actually acknowledged the Russian moral concerns. They didn’t even go that far. (though I could be wrong there, fetch me a source disproving this, will ya).

The one about nukes isn’t actually related to NATO either, it’s related to the countries that signed the Budapest memorandum.

Those weapons would’t be developed locally, they’d come from the USA as has been happening in other EU countries. A simple official statement “no, we won’t give them nukes” would’ve been cool I think. Obviously they didn’t do it because, again, this war has been a long time coming and NATO wanted it. Ukraine is the one paying the price.

Where precisely did NATO itself escalate the issue.

Read the sources, you’ll see that the Maidan coup was backed by NATO, that they have been supplying weapons for the war on Donbass, and that right now they are providing material support for Ukraine, which is not (and probably will never be) a NATO country. There are leaked calls in which US diplomats basically choose who should become prime minister, the previous spitballing of nukes and now even the destruction of Nordstream and the providing of cluster munitions. Since you’re not bothering to check the sources I’ll only provide the ones you ask for.

It’s entirely unrealistic to demand NATO stop it’s open door policy in regards to Ukraine, demand NATO forces out of NATO countries and demand that NATO countries themselves refuse to support Ukraine.

Not really, Ukraine is not in NATO so they could stop all of those things there. In fact it’s possible they stop doing it in a while after this failed counter-offensive of their own volition. It is at least less unrealistic than the Ukrainian government demand that the Russian forces need to pack it up and go home, abandoning all of their costly victories in the war, in order for there to be any peace talks. Always remember that this support started with the Donbass war which has killed thousands and displaced millions, and even Zelenskyy himself has said it was a huge mistake.

That’s an interesting thing to say, because most vocal Russians on Reddit actually claimed to be against the war and blamed “the west” for demonizing Russian people for supporting the war. I agree that they’re human too but clearly the support is not as clear as you make it seem to be.

Oh wow, Russians on reddit, a website that literally banned Genzedong for being critically supportive of the SMO. That certainly doesn’t include any biases in your anecdotal experience that need to be accounted for. Apparently the support public opinion on Putin is up since the beginning of the war, but I don’t really like statista as a source and search engines are flooded with “Americans think Russia bad” NYT articles so I’m not bothering with that. Feel free to find better sources that give more foundation to your experience, but the proxy speculation I was using for the support is that the Russian military has spent the past 18 months at war while their country receives an absurd amount of sanctions. This is hard to maintain without public support, but I could be wrong.

The rest of the comment is not relevant to the discussion.

The rest of my comment is very relevant to the discussion because apparently you seem to think that providing sources and discussing on an internet forum is “disinformation,” which I think is why you don’t provide any yourself. I’m sorry to tell you, but if you come here saying nonsense and people provide counterarguments with evidence backing them, you’re just wasting everybody’s time with your speculations and hearsay if you don’t respond on their level. You should probably read before you write.

Remove an imperialist warmongering nation

By that I hope you mean the USA, the world’s leading imperialist nation. Brasil has been so aligned with “western” interests that they had some fashy president until last year who sold a lot of our industry to gringos of the north for discount prices. Just because Lula is a bit different and a complete pacifist, doesn’t mean the country is free of imperialism at all, just look at the headlines of acquisitions of land by foreign-owned corporations to exploit our resources. Russia is in there for historical and material reasons and to remove them from the council would only serve to discredit the same council’s representation power. It should be expanded to include Brasil without downgrading anybody.

But his take is still insane and naive

Care to elaborate or should we just take your word that “demanding a ceasefire” is naïve?

and the brasilian people deserve better than « not bolsonaro » as the only option.

How’s that UN’s problem? Or related to this at all? Although I agree, I don’t see why this is being brought up here when Ukraine’s war wasn’t even an issue in the election.

but he’s not being a leader on the world stage here

He’s being a leader. He’s on the world stage. Pedantism aside, this is not about domestic policy, it’s specifically about Brasil’s opinion on this war, which is that it should be stopped ASAP. I have no idea what you’re even trying to say other than randomly spouting whatever little you know of Brasil, and pretending that somehow discredits one of the biggest countries in the world.

I think it’s pretty obvious you take everything Russia says at face value

No, but I acknowledge that Russia has demands, and has had those demands ever since before the war. Also most of the sources I provided were from US-based outlets so claiming that it comes straight from Russia is misleading.

it doesn’t even matter whether the concerns are true or not as long as Russians believe it, which means there’s nothing even to address because Russians will believe what they want to believe.

Hmmmm, no? Russians will believe what they’re shown with their own critical view, much like you and me. By having NATO at the very least address those grievances instead of pretending they don’t exist (or as they actually did, escalating), it wouldn’t surprise anybody that they’d get more galvanised. It’s strangely common here to see people who just completely disregard the support for this war from the Russian people. They’re human too, y’know.

And when Russian statements get questioned you drown out the criticism with an information dump that may or may not be related to the actual criticism.

And when questions are questioned I answer then. It’s not my fault you were so off the mark that I needed to contextualise the whole thing.

It would take me days to go through everything you wrote

Take your time, no rush. You might learn a thing or two, and then I might learn a thing your two from your reply.

It’s a common disinformation tactic and it would be a waste of my time to respond to that because you’re going to reply with another information dump.

It’s a common disinformation tactic to provide a fuckton of sourced information that contextualises all that is being said and provides argumentation and conclusion. Come on now, if you don’t like forum discussions why did you even come here to discuss something you don’t really care enough about?

This one is shorter, how about that?

Cool, at least you now acknowledge that those claims have been known since before the SMO and therefore that guarantees over it would have helped prevent it happening even if Putin really wanted it by taking away wind from the sails of the government.

First source

It doesn’t go into much detail other than “they say they’re not racist, some Jewish people even drink with them sometimes.” Yeah, there is disagreement over the role of the Nazis, and the first source I provided was specifically one that shows that there are indeed Nazis not only in society but as part of the government, even if I disagree with some of their conclusions there. Azov is a far-right paramilitary that has been specifically targetting Russian-majority regions like Donetsk since 2014 when they tried to become an independent republic after the 2014 coup. Have something from the time talking about their war on a separatist group, which is not very nice in my opinion.

Besides not having anything of substance other than “they’re nice lads to me personally,” your source also includes this line, which I think is a terrible look no matter who is saying it.

On average they speak better Russian than the Russian invaders.

Not only is "speaking better " a really weird way to put it, but just because they know a language doesn’t mean the represent the people there, specially since both Donetsk and Luhansk voted to become independent before they went there. Either way, the fact that there is a paramilitary with explicit Nazi symbology occupying a separatist region and destroying monuments to those who killed the Nazis in the first place, while also celebrating known Nazi collaborators like Bandera should at least be cause for concern.

NATO

The USSR and the Russian Federation are entirely different things. In fact, the guy who made Putin who he is now is Yeltsin who is famous only for illegally dissolving the Union and selling out the entirety of the country. To skip over that and pretend they are a continuous government is misleading. You are probably referring to this article in which it’s shown that NATO was seen as a threat in eastern Ukraine. After the Euromaidan coup, those eastern regions promptly either tried to get independence (Donetsk/Luhansk) and have been at war with Ukraine since, or in the case of Crimea have joined Russia and have very high polling opinions of their own referendum. And we must always remember that NATO has backed the 2014 coup, which is a common cause for the Crimean annexation that people often ignore. Guarantees such as removing Azov members from the government and military and banning Nazi symbology (instead of the currently banned communist ones) could have helped de-escalate the conflict.

faulty source on nukes

No idea what happened there, Google failed me. Here’s a fixed one on yandex. I’m not sure on the official “why” of getting nukes in Ukraine, but it was something that was discussed at the time, and is a huge threat to the Russian national security, specially considering the previously ongoing Donbass war. Imagine if during the Cuban missile crisis Cuba was actively at war with Puerto Rico or something of the sort. Guarantees such as “Ukraine will never have NATO nukes” would have been great de-escalation tactics.

Not only NATO’s fault

Yes, it also depends on both the government of Russia and Ukraine, but most notably not the Ukrainian people. There has been no referendum on joining NATO since the promise in 2014. Russia could’ve chosen to de-escalate, but the NATO-backed Ukrainian government could also have tried to de-escalate themselves. That’s what the “guarantee” you were so flabbergasted about a while back could’ve been.

If we talk about NATO as an extension of American imperialism then American has bigger problems than Russia, primarily China.

Yes, which is why NATO is not participating directly in this conflict, but using it as a proxy war to throw western ukranians at eastern ukranians with minimal cost to their own personnel. This war is basically a risky investment for them, if it succeeds, great, if it doesn’t they cut their losses and leave Ukraine in shambles, and it won’t impact them at home much. Specially the USA who won’t have to deal with the blowback from the Azov battalion like the EU will.

But either way it doesn’t matter much because NATO can act in two fronts at once. They are still acting in the South China sea while this war is ongoing, though it doesn’t fit as neatly into the news cycle. In the case of Ukraine, Ukraine itself along with the EU can focus there more, while in China they can better use the resources from Australia and Japan. They’re big enough to do multiple things at once.

Those grievances are either false or indirectly created by the Russian interference. I don’t see how anyone could take those grievances seriously.

Those grievances are the moral justification for the war, whether you believe that they are based in reality or not. Although I don’t have hard data on this at hand, I think it’s very likely that the Russian foot soldiers at least believe these grievances on some level, and such a risky SMO would not happen without military support. By making guarantees such as “1) Azov is disbanded, 2) Ukraine won’t join NATO, 3) the war on Donbass will end, 4) no nukes for Ukraine,” the Russian government would have a much harder time getting their people to willingly go to the front lines. Those are just some random ones I can think off the top of my head, but the smart ambassadors probably have some better compromises to be reached. However we both know that NATO has been wanting this war since 2013, since Russia is a critical ally of their enemies such as Syria, China, Cuba, Venezuela and now Niger and compromising would actually reduce the chances of their desired outcomes.

To regain part of their imperial hegemony that they lost to the EU during euromaidan? Ukraine was in the backpocket of Russia until the maidan revolution, do you really think Russia wouldn’t want that power back?

You might want to read this paper on the Maiden massacre before claiming it was a “revolution.” Long story short, protesters and police were shot at by snipers from far-right paramilitary groups, which was then covered up by the new government and the NATO-affiliated press, to make it seem like they were murdered by the (democratically elected) government. Then this government which was friendlier with Russia and tried to maintain neutrality got toppled, and US diplomats directed the appointment of the interim prime minister, which led to unrest and revolt in the eastern parts of Ukraine that did not support the coup, including armed insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk, and then we got the Azov paramilitary being sent there to quell this revolt.

Following this rough timeline you can see how the war has very little to do with “USSR imperial hegemony” as if the USSR wasn’t always voluntary union from the very start. The official and moral casus belli of this war is still to maintain broader Russian national security and to support the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (and Crimea), against the encroachment of the NATO-backed government allied with the Azov paramilitary that is known for destroying anti-fascist symbols, banning/imprisoning political opponents and imposing their unpopular government on the separatist eastern regions (PDF), not to mention banning elections.

To call that a “revolution” would mean that things changed for the better and the current government better represents the will of the people. If that were the case they’d be really popular in the east and wouldn’t need to send brownshirts to fight there, right? You frame Ukraine-Russia amicable relations as “being in Russia’s pocket,” but how would you argue against the opposite claim the the previous democratically elected government was just following its democratic mandate of ensuring neutrality and amicable relations with both the EU and Russia, without having to swastika-tattooed soldiers to kill dissenters?

This all started with “what guarantees should be given” and I’ve shown you some which you have not really refuted. All else is just bonus information to get you thinking a bit more.

They generally include socialist/communist theory in their videos. This one on job interviews is a work of art.

Yeah, I doubt he’d do it, but it’s funny seeing actual Republicans being against foreign wars and NATO for what seems like the first time in 30 years.

He usually seems to go with whatever gets the biggest reaction, so who knows, maybe he’ll break away and finally start his war on Denmark over Greenland like he always wanted.

Not to mention, the reasoning for the war has changed dramatically over and over, from “stop the Nazis!” To “oh they were totally going to join NATO and attack us!!!” To “The security of Europe!” And now “they were gonna get nukes!”

All three are on the speech from the very beginning, no change there. But here’s some English sources in order.

Nazis: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946

Join NATO: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/why-nato-has-become-flash-point-russia-ukraine

Nukes: https://ria-ru.translate.goog/20220301/ukraina-1775795745.html

You’re free to believe those grievances are not based in reality, but to claim that those grievances were not well known ever since beginning of the war to the Russian public is either dishonest or just lazy.

Russia can’t win a land war

You people keep saying that, and yet Russia seems to be winning this war for like 16 months now. Ukraine in NATO means nukes within minutes of Moscow and Russia completely surrounded on the western borders except for Belarus, it is definitely something I would want if I were NATO.

Putin was looking for an excuse

An excuse for what, exactly? What, in your perspective, does Russia, both the government and the people, gain from taking part in this war that is so much more important to them that what was officially in the speech declaring the SMO in the first place?

Even if you believe Putin personally hates Ukrainian people or something and would risk his entire government just for that, those grievances are the basis of the rhetoric used for justifying the war internally, and guarantees from NATO about those (remember why we started this discussion?) would take a lot of the wind out of the sails of any war effort. War is just the extension of politics.