SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Because arriving at a party when there’s not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren’t already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

I think there’s (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it’s not even necessarily based on sect, I’ve seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won’t even deny that I don’t still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don’t even think that they could be propagandized - that’s a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!

And second, there’s can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself “more of a leftist” regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don’t do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you’re that person, you might think “Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I’M the one who’s more strictly obeying the scientific method!” Again, they’re obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some “leftists”.

In the broad sense of “using euphemistic language”, obviously quite often, and it’s not always intended to be bad even if it is obfuscating the truth - but only really when doing things like explaining complicated topics to a very young child, or when both people in the conversation know that doublespeak is being used (e.g. saying “he’s in a better place now”, which is technically hiding the truth with something more pallatable if you didn’t already know that that phrase is synonymous with “he died”.)

In politics, which is the most appropriate place to use the term, I would argue it’s a standard, even characteristic, part of capitalist politics and economics, because the actual truth of the matter is directly opposed to the interests of the working class, and you do not want to anger them or encourage them to organize in opposition.

“Increasing efficiency in X sector” simply means “We’re going to fire a bunch of people and reduce the money we spend on it with no increase in quality of service.”

“We should cut social security spending and stop giving handouts so people work harder” simply means “We need to increase the profits of the capitalist class, and so hundreds, thousands or even millions of people will have to suffer and die.”

“We should restore freedom and democracy in X country” simply means “This country is opposed to our capitalists in one way or another and we should kill their leaders stopping us from having greater market access, even if that plunges that country into years of suffering” for example in Libya. Countries with dictatorships and monarchies that are subservient to American rule are rarely targetted - if anything, several of them were put there by America itself (e.g. Pinochet).

Hell, the words “market access” in that previous one is just doublespeak for “widespread exploitation of that country’s resources and institutions”, like how the ex-Soviet states were massively privatized under the Shock Doctrine and their resources harvested for Western capitalists.

One of the important first steps for any leftist is seeing these phrases for what they actually are, because otherwise you just continue to exist in the dreamy world of capitalism where actions are disconnected from consequences, and the problems and what caused those problems are shrouded in fog and confusion and become difficult to discuss. For example:

“Wow, cool, we should definitely increase efficiencies in the healthcare sector! Efficiency is a good word that means good things!” -> five years later -> “Dang, it sucks how our healthcare sector is in such dire straits, look at these long waiting lists, look at these burned-out nurses, how could this have possibly happened? Perhaps we didn’t increase efficiences enough! As efficiency is a good word that means good things, it is inconceivable to me that it might have done something bad!” -> read a post online from a leftist -> “This person is saying that we should hire more nurses and doctors and give them free degrees and training and lower housing/rent prices! Don’t they know that this will decrease efficiency and lead to - gasp! - bloating in the healthcare sector? That’s how we got into this bad situation in the first place! Socialists are so ridiculous, they need to read a book on the subject because they clearly don’t see what is patently obvious to people like me, who can see common sense without even needing to have read a book on it, I’m just that smart and read all the articles! (most of which are owned by the people trying to privatize healthcare)”

It’s likely that at no point have the people arguing for “increasing efficiency” actually laid out exactly what they mean by that word, or if they have then it’s couched in further doublespeak (“incentivizing hard work” = “increase hours without a meaningful pay rise so we can fire people and save labor costs”), whereas because left-wingers are too honest to come up with their own doublespeak phrase for what we propose, we have to lay it out bare.

who has donated a lot of money to charity

where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don’t magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it’s necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn’t do the labor to get that much money - it’s literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.

it’s akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity

there are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc who still believe this

Old people aren’t really the problem, capitalists are

I’m going to assume that you’re being facetious when you talk about “culling” them (otherwise that’s pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.

literally 95% of my interactions with other instances’ liberals have been them saying something absurdly reactionary and not expecting to receive any pushback for having dogshit takes, and then going “Ohoho, the Hexbear tankie redfash have arrived to defend the CCP and Putler’s regime! Why am I not surprised!” without offering even the slightest counterargument because they know they have none

we have cultivated a community of genuine good-faith discussion on Hexbear over the last three years and we aren’t about to lose it

perhaps North Korea might be in a better condition if the United States didn’t murder a fifth of their entire population and raze every single building to the ground

North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period. Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s. Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans. Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

usually how conversations go is this

1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk

2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect

3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like “Oh, so you’ve come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it’s much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you’re wrong because of [link to wikipedia]”

4. we then start dunking given that they aren’t operating in good faith

perhaps reddit’s typical style of “debate”, where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of “You’re wrong, here’s why you’re wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don’t then you’ll start screeching ‘CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH’ at us”

additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven’t for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I’ve seen arguments become people just saying quotes like “Well, communism works on paper but not in practice” and “If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither” or “Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?” and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily “when you have elections” or if there’s something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner’s knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I’ll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.

no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don’t “contribute to the discussion”, no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into “I dislike you and/or the point you’re making and I’m not going to explain why. fuck you.” disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or “struggle sessions”) rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it’s by far the healthiest online community I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. it’s also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of “if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can’t downvote” means that we’re all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.

Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.

In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.

In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.

Capitalism on the one hand, communism on the other… man, I just support a Third Position!

people like the hexbear news threads I guess

Russia has the power to stop the war and retreat.

Yes, but if they do this, Ukraine may kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the previously occupied territories, including Crimea. Such an outcome is obviously unacceptable to Russia. The Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries have seen the pro-Russian separatists as subhuman for many years.

Yeah the west and Russia where saber-rattling. But Russia choose to act and it.

Russia chose to act on it because it was quite literally the last moment they possibly could have done so, given the rhetoric at the time of Ukraine potentially joining NATO (and even Zelensky asking for nukes!). NATO attempted to provoke Russia into war for decades by marching their military forces towards Russia’s border and establishing anti-Russian governments in ex-Soviet countries. Many in Russia accuse Putin of cowardice because he didn’t act sooner against NATO and Ukraine and getting them into this mess now when almost every country of note has been converted into NATO vassals, far from opposing him for being a tyrant or whatever. I’m not saying that this makes those civilians correct, it’s merely outlining how Russia “choosing” to act on it might not have been a random act of cruel violence by Supreme Dictator Putin but instead an action informed by a whole bunch of factors and that the Russian government has generally been pretty non-violent up until this point even when America is directly spitting in their face and adding more and more countries to the Fuck Russia Club. The Russians might say that they heavily disagree with these countries having NATO membership because it imperils them - and it very obviously does - but when the Baltic states joined NATO for example, Putin didn’t march his army to conquer them in retaliation. When Finland joined, he didn’t send the tanks over the border. It was a measured decision by Russia to intervene in Ukraine, and it is important to have understanding beyond cliches.

The thing is putin will only use diplomacy on his on terms, and these terms alone will threaten the existence of Ukraines souveränity itself.

This is untrue. At the beginning of the war, in April 2022, Russia and Ukraine almost made peace along the lines of Ukraine regaining Kherson and Zaporozhye, and ceding control of the Donbass, which they already didn’t really control anyway due to the Donbass War that has been ongoing since 2014. Ukraine was also allowed to join the EU, but not NATO. The West - in the form of Boris Johnson - came along and told Zelensky to not make peace with Russia, and so the deal was cancelled. We know this because Putin showed off this unfinished peace deal to various African politicians earlier this year. Ukraine could have kept millions of people inside their borders and hundreds of thousands of men alive, and kept two oblasts that they now do not own, if they had taken this deal and ignored the West.

Even so, Russia stated numerous times that they were still willing to make peace. It is Ukraine that does not seem to want it, because their terms are always “If Russia completely withdraws their forces then we will begin to talk,” which is an absurd condition no matter whether you’re in the right or wrong in any geopolitical or military situation. You see this a lot in history, where countries say “Oh yes, we won’t declare war on you, you must only agree to a set of conditions that we know you will never accept,” because it makes them look slightly more reasonable to other countries for not just marching in there. I’m sorry, Ukraine could be the most perfect, utopian society that has ever graced the world and Russia could be the most barbaric, backwards, evil nation ever seen in world history, and I would still see Ukraine’s demand for Russia’s total retreat as ridiculous.

And victim blaming is never ok, even when you think the victim is an asshole.

The question of who’s the “victim” here depends on how far you’re willing to look back in history, what you think are relevant facts about the situation, whether you believe the 2014 coup was in fact a coup, whether you believe that Ukraine is plagued by fascist paramilitaries like Azov or whether they’re cutesy fun girl scouts, and quite literally hundreds of other things. I’m not even willing to be automatically contrarian and say “Actually, Russia is the victim and NATO is the aggressor!” because that’s also not correct, the situation is way too complicated. This isn’t Harry Potter vs Voldemort.

absolutely unfuckingbelievable. the entire entertainment industry just churns people through exploitative systems and phenomenally rich bastards and spits their husks out at the end, I would be amazed if piracy was affecting the outcomes of artists and musicians by even 1%. pretending that this is damaging the EU economy is also very funny, the Europeans are having zero troubles damaging their own economies by cutting off from China (read: acting as if they’re decoupling from China and then buying the exact same Chinese products through third countries at additional cost)

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool