It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135509
this is practically a child’s view of the world. good guy vs bad guy. Russia = bad, NATO = good. plus, someone should tell her she has it completely backwards: ending russia is kinda natos entire thing
If you’re anti soviet union then you’re pro nazi germany
ending the soviet union is kinda the nazis thing 
Sorry I missed the part where NATO was an authoritarian regime that genocided people en masse.
Also hasn't Russia repeatedly threatened countries to not join NATO? https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/12/russia-threatens-retaliatory-steps-if-finland-joins-nato.html
I get that NATO is a primary threat towards Russia because, y'know, they're currently attempting genocide against Ukrainians, but to compare NATO to Nazi Germany is a little disingenuous don't you think?
to compare NATO to Nazi Germany is a little disingenuous don't you think?
Hmm...
HMMMMMMM.....
NATO gave informal promises to Gorbachev to not expand eastward (Gorbachev was stupid to believe these promises and not get them in writing as formal, legally-binding promises)
HMMMMMMMMMM?!?!?!?!
??????????????????????????????????????
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
to compare NATO to Nazi Germany is a little disingenuous don't you think?
No, it's about right. I mean, the US is essentially Nazi Germany except successful. They even directly inspired Nazi Germany's policies.
Also NATO was made up of literal Nazis from the jump, Adolf Heusinger was the fucking chairman of NATO like 15 years after being one of the heads of the Nazi army
Sorry I missed the part where NATO was an authoritarian regime that genocided people en masse.
clearly
Those Libyans chose to be slaves/s
It's just the free market at work, you wouldn't understand you commie.
The countries in NATO have been engaged as aggressors in almost all wars in the 21st century.
I mean for sure, but also that's not addressing the other points in my comment. Russia is clearly the aggressor in this case.
I'm not sure why people are whole-hog against NATO when there's a more imminent threat against world peace pounding on the door of its neighbors. Y'know, the same one that was found to have directly affected the election of the US. The same one that's also stomping human rights into the ground (okay the US is also doing this to its own people for this one, you got me).
Maybe once Putin keels over we can dissolve NATO.
Do you think politics is just good guys and bad guys?
Russia is clearly the aggressor in this case.
The war that started in 2014 where Ukraine broke two ceasefires with the separatist regions, and has been doing ethnic cleansing against ethnic Russians on the Russian border, that Russia didn’t join until 2022?
Y'know, the same one that was found to have directly affected the election of the US
lol
How do you libs still believe in Russiagate?
Mostly based on the fact that Russian disinformation campaigns were found to have a widespread effect on the election and people's voting decisions. There's nothing to "believe" in, it's just a fact that it happened.
Russian disinformation campaigns were found to have a widespread effect on the election and people's voting decisions
lmfao America is just full of reactionaries and racists who liked the idea of voting for a billionaire, building a wall, and killing immigrants. They didn't need to be brainwashed by Putin into voting for Trump.
This is not correct and I've posted a link to the Nature Communications article elsewhere - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
Russia is clearly the aggressor in this case.
Why did Ukraine break two seperate ceasefires with the seperatist regions? If they didn't this wouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure why people are whole-hog against NATO when there's a more imminent threat against world peace pounding on the door of its neighbors.
Because you're wrong and NATO is the much larger threat, demonstrated through their whole bloody history.
Y'know, the same one that was found to have directly affected the election of the US.
US allies also spend similar amounts or greater on advertisements around the US election. Russiagate was kind of just xenophobia applied to something everyone has been doing.
Maybe once Putin keels over we can dissolve NATO.
Oh, okay, you're operating on great man theory and not material analysis. This makes your content make sense.
"The official Twitter account of the Donetsk rebels said in the early hours of Sunday that its forces were "taking Mariupol", but later accused Ukraine of breaking the ceasefire. Fighters from the Azov battalion, who are defending the town, said their positions had come under Grad rocket fire.
Earlier on Saturday the truce had appeared to be holding, with only minor violations reported, as hopes mounted that the deal struck in Minsk on Friday could bring an end to the violence that has left more than 2,000 dead in recent months.
Both sides accused the other of violating the ceasefire, but there did not appear to be any serious exchanges of fire and no casualties were reported."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/06/eastern-ukraine-ceasefire-russia
" The war began in April 2014 when armed Russian-backed separatists seized government buildings and the Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. It continued until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas_(2014%E2%80%932022)
At least be correct about what you're citing. Russian backed separatists claim to be "taking Mariupol" and then backtrack with "oh no! We didn't break the ceasefire! I promise! ".
Unsourced guardian article and Wikipedia lmao
The person I'm replying to did not even attempt to cite anything, but you're gonna try and discredit my sources. Okay lol
Get smoked fascist
Love using twitter as Casus Belli and waving the bloody shirt of literal Nazis. Also the Guardian being your basis for these events is so fucking telling
Please enlighten me as to how an official account for a separatist group declaring they're attacking is not cause for retaliation.
Russia is literally a fascist government.
Either you don't understand what a fascist is or you don't know what literally means.
Also a tweet is not the same as a formal declaration, but more than that your idea of when a war starts is AFTER genocidal policies and the crushing of self determination. The war started during Maidan, the separation was in response to something. History is not just good actors and bad actors. And yet despite viewing it as such you still manage to simp and accept at face value literal fascists. Azov are literal Nazis, let you treat them as innocent defenders. Go ahead and support the OUN why don't you?
You're looking at this from an emotional standpoint, not geopolitical.
NATO's existence is why Russia js aggressive. Think on it geopolitically, not emotionally:
You're the leader of a country. The vast majority of your western border - the half of the country most inhabited by your population - is surrounded by hostile nations. The hostilities date back a few decades to the Cold War but that ended when the previous political system of the country dissolved. You spent the first decade or so of the new political system trying to make friends with these nations, but they keep refusing, all the while portraying you in all their media as the bad guys. Any move you make on the geopolitical scale for your own nation's sake is tarred, while similar actions by the other countries are praised. No matter what you do, you cannot please these other countries, and they continue to threaten to put military bases and nuclear weapons on your border, eventually sealing your entire western border away behind hostilities.
What the fuck is one expected to do in this situation, and if this shit was happening to the US or anywhere in Europe, you know full well they wouldn't take it lying down. Why is there an expectation that Russia does, when the world wouldn't?
Maybe I'm drinking stupid juice, but I think that people hating Russia isn't really a valid reason for them to invade Ukraine. I know that's not specifically what you're saying, but in essence that's the line of reasoning that I've heard throughout this thread.
That said, Russia can't be painted as "innocent" like so many posters here are stating. They routinely violate human rights. See:
Russian censorship of, among many other things, the internet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Russia
Russia's anti-lgbt policies: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/europe/russia-upper-parliament-lgbt-propaganda-law-intl/index.html
Russia's anti-protest laws: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly_in_Russia
Russia's general laundry list of human rights violations: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/russia/report-russia/
I'm not saying the US is much better, although it is marginally, but claiming that Russia is just "scared and defending itself" doesn't really track. It's an authoritarian regime.
If I'm misunderstanding this, somehow, please let me know.
I found this to be a good video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 also no one here is defending Russia when it comes to their human rights abuses
the same one that was found to have directly affected the election of the US
Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
Sorry I missed the part where NATO was an authoritarian regime that genocided people en masse.
Sorry I missed the part where NATO was an authoritarian regime that genocided people en masse.
Where the fuck have you been the past decades you absolute buffoon
For the first 40 years of NATO's existence it sought to undermine democracy and reinforce the states of NATO aligned countries in Europe through terrorism and assassination.
They then rather genocidally carpet bombed Yugoslavia killing and wounding thousands of civilians ( many of whom were from Kosovo the people they purportedly wanted to help), 3 foreign diplomats by bombing a foreign embassy not in anyway involved in a conflict and completely destroying the infrastructure of Serbia.
They then genocidally invaded Afghanistan where they destabilized the country, toppled the government and then put pedophile psychos in charge because they were the ones willing to work with us, killed nearly 100,000 civilians, and then ended up putting the original government back in charge 20 years later.
Finally they genocidally took the most prosperous country in Africa, a country with universal college, healthcare, jobs programs, and housing, a desert country that had a 200 year supply of water and bombed the fuck out of it, destroying the water supply, plundering the gold, supporting the precursors to ISIS, and turned the country into a place with fucking slave auctions.
But yeah NATO isn't genocidal, they just topple governments and bomb/terrorize civilians.
Russia literally requested, many times, to join NATO. Wrong way around - NATO's whole purpose is to see a country of people reduced to rubble (and also any other countries it feels like along the way).
If we can support Syria and Iran critically, we can do the same for Russia in its fight against American imperialism.
amen. emphasis on critically tho. too many liberals think “critical support” means “super extra support”. all of us here understand that Russia is capitalist and pretty horrible on LGBTQ rights (not rlly worse than amerika tho). the difference is that NATO represents western empire: an institution that suppresses most of the world and extracts $10 trillion every year from the global south. Russia’s imperial ambitions are strictly regional, thus much easier to curtail by AES states. the global empire is infinitely more harmful to the proletariat of the world than a regional empire. im preaching to the choir here but i hope lemmy libs read this and understand
Can you share more about your perspective concerning treatment of LGBTQ+ citizens between the two nations?
I agree on all your points except for the existence of Russian imperialism. By Lenin’s definition—correct me if I’m wrong—imperialism is when finance capital is consolidated enough in a given country for that country to begin exporting capital abroad. This might have been the case before the war since so many Russian oligarchs had their billions stashed in western banks, but the contradictions of imperialism itself—its need to grow and consume itself from the inside—now mean that this is no longer the case. Those Russian billions are either frozen or withdrawn as far as I know. Russia’s alignment with China and the BRICS, its long history of fighting for the global south (consider the images we’ve seen for years now of African protestors waving Russian flags), suggest to me that Russia is not actually imperialist and that it is indeed fighting for its life and existence (as it says). Putin is an opportunist appointed by Yeltsin (himself appointed by Clinton!), but opportunism can sometimes point in the right direction because there is no other way for it to survive. (The current president of South Africa is a criminal who likewise deserves our critical support due to his alignment with the BRICS, although none of us are going to be complaining if the EFF takes over next year.) All of us likewise know that a NATO victory in this war will just begin another nightmarish chapter of imperialism in eastern Europe, while a NATO defeat will present opportunities for workers around the world to throw off the American yoke.
For context, were you alive and politically aware in 1991?
Can you please explain how you think Bill Clinton appointed Yeltsin? Or are you playing with words and just referring to cooperation between the Clinton administration and Yeltsin's?
The USA was attempting to destroy the USSR from day one, and even invaded Russia (unprovoked) within months of the October Revolution. Yeltsin would have lost the ‘96 election to the communists without Clinton’s direct intervention. When you combine this with the USA’s relentless obsession with funding Nazis worldwide to destroy communism both within and without the USSR, it becomes quite clear that the situation with Russia and Ukraine today is a direct consequence of American meddling overseas.
This seems so weird. Funding Nazis? What do you mean by that?
The Nazis were funded with American capital. There are many, many other examples of this from around the world. The Batista regime in Cuba, the Contras, the US-backed fascists who built South Korea or Taiwan, the list just goes on and on. I will cite sources at your request, but I would ask you to do a simple google search—i.e., "was Park Chung Hee a fascist?"—and a little reading before doing so.
and even invaded Russia
Which is just not taught in American schools by the way
Yes, very mysteriously even the best history teachers in the country seem to have trouble finding the time to mention this. I took APUSH five days a week an hour a day (or so?) for a year and it was never brought up. Curious! It’s almost as though the USA looks like the bad guy throughout the 20th century and into the 21st when this fact is mentioned. It also completely recontextualizes the Cold War. Very concerning!
I dunno ask Time magazine
Found the article. No mention of appointments anywhere. :(
"@confusedbytheBasics" 
I wonder how Libyans feel about this:
NATO gave informal promises to Gorbachev to not expand eastward (Gorbachev was stupid to believe these promises and not get them in writing as formal, legally-binding promises)
The Soviet Union tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn't allowed
Meanwhile NATO kept expanding
and including "former" nazis in its ranks
