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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The use of developments like this is to make liberal excuses for supporting genocide less and less tenable. Like public opinion on the Iraq War, there is a point where even the mainstream lib opinion will turn against it. For some libs the combination of this and the continued full-throttle support of the U.S. will be a radicalizing moment.

    An immediately attainable goal is making Israel a pariah state and making open support for it taboo. There’s at least the possibility this will eventually affect the reality of the war, the way making South Africa a pariah state eventually affected the reality of apartheid.


  • The points I try to hit most are:

    1. There is no way for Ukraine to win short of WWIII, so the best option for the Ukranian people is to negotiate an end to the war immediately. This will not be on great terms, because that’s what happens when you lose a war.
    2. Fighting longer will only kill more Ukranians and get them a worse peace deal.

    If you can bring them around on these very immediate points, maybe they’ll listen to what you say about why the war began in the first place. If you can’t get through to them on “they lost, how many more have to die,” it’s not worth arguing much else.


  • MarxMadnesstoGenZedongFirst ICBM used in any war???
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    12 hours ago

    Lately, there has been an extremely worrying strain of “those Ruzzian orks are so stoopid their ancient Soviet missiles will probably fall apart if they try to launch them!”

    Shit that is completely unfounded and encourages dangerous brinksmanship like we keep seeing from Ukraine and NATO







  • MarxMadnesstoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    1 day ago

    If you get a DUI and the state orders you to take an alcohol class, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?

    If you do a bunch of petty thefts and the state orders you to participate in a re-entry plan that includes job training, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?


  • MarxMadnesstoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    1 day ago

    the US does not incarerate them just for being black

    Historically, this is completely untrue. The post-Reconstruction U.S. famously had all sorts of laws designed to lock up black people for being black, as well as officially tolerated (with public officials often taking part) terror killings of black people just for being black. Even after Jim Crow, the War on Drugs was was explicitly designed to disproportionately lock up black people:

    “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

    “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    Even if you argue that today this intent has been largely wrung out of the system (which is not a given, and does not address the remaining disproportionate effects of the War on Drugs), there’s still the question of when exactly the U.S. stopped doing what you’re calling genocide and started doing non-genocidal mass incarceration.


  • It’s also worth remembering Russia’s position in the peace talks that started immediately after the war began:

    Few now remember that the war almost ended before it got going. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched ground and air attacks on Ukraine on four fronts. On February 28, 2022, Russian and Ukrainian officials came together in Gomel, Belarus, to start to negotiate peace. Peace talks continued intermittently for a month before being called off…

    According to a New York Times analysis of the 2022 negotiations later that year… Russia demanded Ukrainian recognition of its annexation of Crimea in 2014, permanent Ukrainian neutrality, and autonomy for the ethnic Russian provinces, or oblasts, in eastern and southeastern Ukraine.

    Russia never wanted to annex Ukraine wholesale. It didn’t even want any new territory.

    What tanked these talks was not the Ukranian government, but their NATO puppetmasters:

    An even bigger obstacle to further talks may have been the arrival in Kyiv on April 6 of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. According to Davyd Arakhhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at Istanbul, “Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the NATO powers] are not.” Three days after Johnson returned home Putin announced publicly that talks with Ukraine “had reached a dead end.” For his part, Johnson promised Zelensky $130 million of military equipment and $500 million kin financial aid, while President Biden announced a $800 million military package to Ukraine.


  • They want a demilitarized, denazified zone encompassing their most vulnerable border, a totally reasonable desire for any state, especially one facing down the lying, bloodthirsty savages of NATO.

    And this was promised to Russia upon the breakup of thr Soviet Union – Ukraine’s constitution calls it something like a “permanently neutral state.”

    Then, after 20 years of NATO pushing east (and destroying countries like Yugoslavia and Libya), the U.S. backs a color revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Next you start hearing talks of Ukraine joining NATO and Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine start getting attacked. Then Ukraine breaks the Minsk agreements (those same ones Angela Merkel admitted were a stall tactic to arm Ukraine for this very war).

    You can disagree over whether this approaching hostility is justification for an invasion (the U.S. certainly would think so; it invaded Cuba over far less), but there’s really no argument that evil Putler just woke up one day and decided to do a land grab for reasons.



  • MarxMadnesstoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    1 day ago

    I just don’t believe the vast majority of “lesser evil” Democrats because I saw them turn around and enthusiastically cheer on Harris, and then act like someone shot their dog when she lost. If you’re reluctantly supporting 99% Hitler over 100% Hitler, you don’t go to 99% Hitler rallies and you don’t care when he loses.





  • The primary objective of the Kursk gambit had to have been to fundamentally alter the course of the war – either by drawing NATO countries more directly in, or by tanking Russian public opinion, or by credibly threatening Moscow. It failed; it’s a bump in the road, not a course change.

    And what evidence do you have that North Korean troops are in Ukraine? Keep in mind the U.S. has spy satellites that can read a license plate, so I’m looking for something solid, not merely a comment from a Ukranian official.