you’re lucky that the volcel police are not yet the volcel army

It is always nice when wayward cth posters come home

Big beautiful posting energy. Some say the best.

Your username is incredible.

I’m hoping we get a local only general purpose discussion comm for stuff like this

c/sino is an appropriate place to discuss China. if you see sinophobic bullshit, report it and we’ll make sure it’s dealt with. and criticism from the left is fine; it just needs to be sincere/well-intentioned.

also, for general or casual discussions, including China or whatever, c/chat is also fine. again, we run it and we’ll make sure it doesn’t get out of hand, especially if you can help us out but reporting bad actors.

@silent_water@hexbear.net @Parsani@hexbear.net

until we get local comms for it, news mega might be a good place to put this stuff as it’s basically only us and a few folks from lemmygrad in there.

I feel this even more for Russia right now. Can’t say anything bad about them or the dronies will take it as a reason the US is justified in fighting them to the last Ukranian.

For what it’s worth, most threads criticizing China on lemmygrad seldom have liberals interfering. I’m not sure why, but my guess is that threads criticizing China go against the narratives they often use to dismiss leftist ideas.

once we simmer down, we’ll get back to the true internal struggle sessions and left-criticisms

Hey I’m sorry to hear you feel this way i would be super curious to hear that stuff and would absolutely not tolerate racist libs spouting nonsense

The one time I agree with the volcel police.

My hobby projects (mostly 3D printing and related) have been pretty slow since moving across the country for work, then getting laid off and having to move again, but I’ll hopefully be back at it soon enough.

Not sure if it counts but I’ve also been getting back into Blender/Unity for VRChat avatar stuff, which is fun. Maybe I should post about that when my avatar is decent enough to show off.

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I’m trying by commenting on any niche community/post that pops up with constructive comments

:confusion:

Why are so many of our comrades mushroom experts?

I’m not convinced they’re not just gonna eat that

I love you guys too! I know federation has been hard on your community, but whatever happens, I hope at least we remain federated.

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Shouldn’t you be more wary of the unexpected, Redshirt?

startrek.website might be the only good thing that came out of the reddit protests

easily the best comment on the site in ages

do you not watch Star Trek because you know you dont like it or otherwise?

The news megathread people had a really long write up about this:

Do you agree that Ukraine was invaded by russia, and that Ukraine has a right to defend itself?

Ukraine certainly was invaded by Russia, but let’s be clear about why exactly Russia invaded. The US/NATO had been pushing for membership and for Ukraine to host US missiles. These things have been explicitly opposed by Russia since even before Putin was president, and this was the stated reason for the invasion. Imagine if Russia decided to install missiles in a country close to the US, like Cuba for example? This of course happened and the US freaked out leading to a tense nuclear standoff.

Also, since the invasion, US leaders have repeatedly stated that their goal is to pull Russia into a forever war in Ukraine. They have stymied Ukrainian attempts at negotiating and are not at all interested in peace or “democracy” for the Ukrainian people.

Are russia the bad guys in your general worldview?

Russia invaded and was wrong to do so, but the US/NATO helped instigate the war in the first place and continue to use Ukraine as a pawn for their own geopolitical goals at the expense of ordinary Ukrainians. Trying to frame it in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” is absolutely wrong imo and oversimplifies what is really going on. The correct position in my view is to support negotiations that would end the conflict and allow ordinary people there to live normal lives again. This is something that the US/NATO has repeatedly opposed.

This is also in my opinion a good video on the topic and worth watching: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WZv0-0cx96g&feature=sharea

In addition to this, NATO has a pretty horrible history of involvement in things like rigging elections and supporting terrorist groups. Operation Gladio is a good place to start on reading about that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio NATO is, and always has been, a tool of US empire and nothing else. Of course people here would oppose it.

so I’d like to understand the people here and why NATO is disliked/hated.

They are currently waging a hybrid war against most countries in the world. For every year of my living memory either NATO is bombing some place in the middle east, waging lawfare/starvation wars against countries in south america, or all of the above against someone in Africa. NATO is the sort of group that would rather see the peoples of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger die of hunger rather than pay market price for their goods. NATO will continue to blockade Venezuela until their oil is owned by american shareholders. NATO has bombed half of the muslim world, and now insists that it’s leadership has been bought off by perfidious chinese money. And the Chinese, who played the game and followed the rules, even they must be cowed into poverty and submission.

It’s a defensive alliance between warmongerers, and I know that if NATO decided to stage nukes/troops against my people we wouldn’t be able to resist. Of course we stand with Russia. We wish we were them. We wish Libya could have resisted NATO. We wish Syria could resist NATO. We wish Iran, Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Niger, Palestine, and so many others could resist NATO. We can only hope that China and Russia can, because if they can’t, we are truly doomed to NATO’s whims.

And NATO’s made it clear. We are the jungle. We are less than human. And we are treated as such.

What you see as double standards is just us trying to survive your governments.

Sorry if this comes across as trolling

nah, good faith questions never come off as trolling. anyone who wants to learn is welcome here.

I noticed you consistently capitalized Ukraine and consistently used lowercase for Russia here. This kind of stuff was started by the far-right reactionary regime in Ukraine to further dehumanize Russians by refusing to recognize them as a legitimate people. You would do well to abandon this trend and properly capitalize Russia, acknowledging that Russians are in-fact human. Some people are lazy in their typing, but this seems to be deliberate in this case.

Edit: Checking your post history, there’s another instance of this from 7 days ago as of the time of this post. Russians are as human as anybody else, and shouldn’t be demoted to sub-human levels by refusing to capitalize the words “Russia” and “Russians”. Regardless of how you may personally feel about the Russian government’s actions, it’s not okay to deny recognizing an entire people’s fundamental humanity.

Edit Edit: Checking your post history from other instances reveals far more instances of this, all consistent. Point stands.

Do you agree that the Ukrainian people had the right to defend themselves from the Ukrainian government while it was trying to kill them for being the wrong kind of Ukrainian? Russia didn’t just invade, they intervened in an ongoing almost decade long civil war.

There’s nothing good about Russia. It’s the same sort of neoliberal hellhole “democracy” as europe and america.

It is a complex situation. Russia are definitely bad, and so are NATO. Both want the war. Ukraine is caught in the middle. NATO want to supply weapons and have prevented the peace talks from moving, even when Ukraine has wanted to. Russia has behaved predictably since 2014, made interests clear. Many are unreasonable, but this is geopolitics. Before conflict United States has encouraged violation of Minsk 2 and Ukraine to behave genocidally in eastern Ukraine.

Outside of this NATO is an imperialist alliance which was built by political meddling such as gladio. It is used as a tool to help United States wage war and death over the world for US corporate interests.

I’m sure someone will write it up for you, or link to our usual statements on the matter. But I would like you to read this article. It’s not written by one of us. It’s actually written by a liberal who “escaped” East Germany and worked as assistant UN secretary general.

Ideologically, he’s pretty far from us. But his editorial here hits a lot of the same major points as us, just from a western point of view.

NATO is a terrorist organisation masquerading as a “defensive alliance”. It has done nothing but lay waste anywhere it has touched. Talking about NATO or a conflict it is involved in is pointless if you don’t accept this premise or at least a little bit watered down version of it.

If you understand that Russia is just doing the same thing America usually does it might start to make more sense. Western liberals rabidly defending Ukraine and calling Russia evil is amusing considering they have spent their lives benefiting from the same brutal practices on other countries.

But for a better understanding of this, Russia has for a long time considered Ukraine as effectively their territory or one of their puppet states, much like America does with others. What you are seeing with this invasion is the result of a slow erosion of this notion by western influence. Think of this as a long game aggression similar to how it would be if foreign powers convinced one of the United States’ territories to try to secede. That is what people refer to when they speak of NATO aggression. It is all about weakening Russia by removing one of their holds on what used to be their empire. Now they are moving to protect their interests.

You may cry foul at this, but the US would likely find reasons to invade one of it’s neighbors (Canada or the United Mexican States) if there was a communist regime change that was propped up by China. You would likely happily argue that the United States has the “right” to per-emptively invade and depose the hostile government to protect its interests. It is strange that you would accusingly ask if Ukraine has the “right” to defend itself, when it could be easily argued that Russia has the “right” to invade. Zelensky is seen as a regime change by Russia and they seek to depose him and bring Ukraine back into their fold.

Considering their prior status, it could be framed that Ukraine is fighting for it’s “independence” from Russia, but at the expense of becoming under the thumb of NATO and the rest of Europe. NATO’s ambitions for Ukraine are no more honorable than Russia’s, and it is the Ukrainian (and Russian) people that will suffer by being caught in the middle of bourgeoisie power struggles between superpowers. The depiction that NATO is merely helping Ukraine defend itself out of the goodness of their hearts is a disingenuous framing of NATO’s intentions.

In the end it doesn’t matter if a country has a “right” to defend itself, but rather if they are capable of doing so. Ukraine has been on paper an independent country after the collapse of the USSR but functionally seen as still property of Russia, at least notionally. That has weakened to the point where war has broken out. A key take away from understanding the leftist position regarding this war is that we are not very invested in it and don’t feel we need to pick a side, but if you really want us to pick a side, most often we will pick Russia. Not because we love Russia, but because we hate NATO.

In regards to your question, you’re more than welcome to stop by our news megathread and ask the same question if you don’t think you’ve received a sufficient answer here or wish to hear more information on the topic