While I do prefer the Russian Federation over Ukraine’s régime, I am reluctant to term this preference ‘support’, unless you think that dismissing various demonizations of the Russian Federation counts as such. Materially, I’ve never supported the Russian Federation with anything, but I do defend it against demonizations since demonizations are exactly what make lower‐class people think that it’s okay to continue wasting their tax dollars on a neoimperialist client state: the Ukrainian government.

As much as I loathe the Russian government, its invasion of Ukraine was not a naked power grab in the style of WWI, but the inevitable consequence of the Western bourgeoisie breaking its promise not to continue expanding eastward. The Western bourgeoisie has spelled out for decades its long‐term goal of balkanizing the Russian Federation, and many Ukrainian neofascists have done likewise. Such a partition would only benefit the Western upper classes at the lower classes’ expense.

For me, the goal is not so much to ‘support Russia’ per se as it is to weaken neoimperialism and hopefully convince others to stop giving up their resources to a neoimperialist client state when those resources could be better spent on services and products that we need here and now as lower‐class North Americans. I suppose that somebody could argue that I’m splitting hairs here since opposing neoimperialism effectively means supporting the Russian Federation, but I think that saying ‘I support Russia’ would be too vague and misleading to be helpful.

I never wanted to know what it would have looked like if Luke joined the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi, but now we have our answer.

Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.

The acceptance of gun violence in Imperial America reminds me of how mob violence became normalized in the Russian Federation. That sort of activity would have been inconceivable in the Soviet Union, but then the counterrevolutionaries laid waste to the Eastern Bloc and organized crime suddenly looked like reasonable means of survival.

Once, in the middle of a phone conversation, I heard some muffled bangs, and the phone went quiet. When I asked him what the noise was, he replied, “Oh, it was just the Russian mob firing their guns in the street.” I thought he was joking — he wasn’t.

I was too little to understand the controversy surrounding the Columbine High massacre, but I later did some research on it and it was almost astounding how everybody went apeshit finding somebody to blame, to the point where the capitalist media got in touch with Marilyn Manson and Doom nerds to confirm that they have no itch to either commit or endorse atrocities. Now? It’s hard to imagine the Columbine High massacre making anywhere near the same impact that it made decades ago.

As long as the victim wasn’t a white cishet capitalist man, who cares?

It was meant to mock anticommunists who deny evidence that is right in front of them, but I guess that I should have dropped a clearer hint that I was kidding. Anyway, I feel kind of guilty about making this thread now. I’ll go eliminate it.

Guess how many people I’ve converted.

Hint: the number is identical to my annual salary.

Many adults cling to Christianity because it can function as a crude coping mechanism in an uncaring society: the appeal of a higher power caring for someone is easy to see, and religious institutions in general can be convenient sources of community, especially for somebody trapped in an antisocial culture like the United States of America. I am irreligious yet I feel more comfortable revisiting a Presbertyrian church than approaching my own neighbors.

Liberation theology is not a desperate attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. For some Abrahamists, it simply feels natural or logical to them. I am willing to agree that theology of any sort is unnecessary for emacipating oneself, but it is—at best—a waste of time trying to convince somebody to discard it since they are already on our side and their spiritual beliefs are harmless. If their beliefs remain a big deal to you, though, then you need to understand that they are symptomatic and that addressing them directly would be the wrong approach to take.

Yes, the Church has frequently been complicit in colonialism. Yes, aggressive proselytization is always wrong. Nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that many lower‐class Christians have rebelled against their oppressors despite mainstream Church teachings, and that they are reluctant to let go of their beliefs since they are convenient sources of comfort, not necessarily because they are worried about retaliation. Religion is a double‐edged sword. The ruling class has used it as an instrument of oppression, but that does not mean that it has never backfired either.

I work as a Jewish missionary and the funny thing is that my job would handle the exact same way in a people’s republic as it would elsewhere.

Name a single time that a school shooting happened in the United States.

There has never been a mass shooting in the United States of America.

See, if I wanted educate others on a serious subject like, say, the dozens of millions who died because of capitalism or anticommunism, what I wouldn’t do is put it in a meme format so that somebody could go ‘HURHUR FUNNAY!!’

Unlike anticommunists, I can’t find anything amusing in millions of innocent lives being wasted.

Doing a search on Google Books regarding Mussolini and the United States, I came across a good work titled The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe, which in turn lead me to Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America, and I found copies thereof on Library Genesis.

You mean this?

I cringed internally reading these.

They reminded me of the time when I revisited a convenience store and I noticed that an employée and an investigator were looking at her car together. I tried to amuse her by joking that I broke into her car. She didn’t hear me the first couple of times that I said it, so I repeated myself until the investigator shook his head at me and said ‘It’s not really funny.’ I looked like a deer in the headlights after he told me that. I scurried into the convenience store, got what I wanted, and then got away from it as quickly as possible.

I understood pretty quickly that I only made an ass out of myself by making light of a serious and ongoing situation, and at least I didn’t embarrass myself in front of hundreds or thousands of people. These dullards, on the other hand…

That part was what really made me want to roll my eyes. How is any adult still gullible enough to fall for this crap?

Control of fertility is a precondition of women’s enjoying equal opportunities with men. Even if there are other constraints — lack of money or education, for example — effective birth control liberates them from the tyranny of unpredictable pregnancy. In invading the private sphere, [the Third Reich] tried to deny women self‐determination and choice by restricting access to birth control for ‘valuable’ women and by imposing birth control on the ‘worthless’.

While men were undoubtedly affected by these policies, Bock is right in saying that women were particular targets of both pronatalist and antinatalist […] policy because of their biological rôle as childbearers.

[…]

For the Fascists], abortion among the ‘valuable’ was a crime, and in 1933 the paragraphs of the Criminal Code which had been repealed in 1926 were reinstated in more Draconian form, punishing with a severe prison term both the woman undergoing an abortion and anyone assisting her. Nevertheless, a few abortions were permitted in the Third Reich where the life of a ‘valuable’ mother was at risk from a continuing pregnancy.

But most birth control advice centres were closed down in 1933 along with the political parties which sponsored them: the ‘Law for the Protection of the People and the State’ (28 February 1933) was invoked to close down ‘Marxist’ birth control centres (Noakes/Pridham: 1983: 142). Some survived for a time, precariously and in great secrecy.

(Source.)

For the past thirty years and more, abortion has been legal in Poland. Even before that, it was not totally banned; the Polish Penal Code of 1932 contain several exceptions to a general prohibition. If a total ban were introduced, therefore, it would contradict decades of practice, habits, and ways of thinking about the issue.

(Written in 1991. Source.)