cosecantphi [he/him]

Actually childish understanding of geopolitics and history

Ukraine hasn’t even been independent for my entire life, what are you talking about? Do you think thirty years is a long time? Are you twelve?

This is the thing that gets me with lemmy libs at times. I want to dunk on them harder, but some of them are so naive and ignorant about basic facts of recent history that in the back of my mind I can’t help but think I’m probably talking to an actual, literal child. Then I just feel saddened about it more than anything.

I’m sorry but your reply is literally incoherent, and I’m not sure what if anything in my comment caused your brain wormed mind to react like this.

Liberal solipsism strikes again

At what point did this become Russia’s aggression? Certainly after the fall of the Soviet Union by western backed coup (before which Ukraine and Russia were literally the same country). Did Russia’s aggression start when NATO aggressively expanded into the former Eastern bloc after promising not to as a major condition of the USSR’s dissolution? How about when Russia subjected its own population to devastating austerity, resulting in untold death and destruction, all in a genuine effort to liberalize and assimilate into NATO themselves? Was that Russia being too aggressive? Or did Russia’s aggression not start until after the west continued to wage economic warfare anyway, demonstrating NATO never had any intention to let Russia coexist peacefully on the world stage regardless? How aggressive was it of Russia when the west helped to orchestrate the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine to install a rabidly anti-Russian fascist government on one of Russia’s largest land borders? I guess Russia was being too aggressive when Ukraine decided to ban the Russian language and shell Russian speaking civilians in Eastern Ukraine for literally years and years in violation of the Minsk agreements, resulting in massive pro-Russian separatist movements forming to fight off Banderite pogroms.

I think I get it now, after exhausting literally all available diplomatic avenues to peace, aggressive Russia started this conflict out of nowhere by supporting the cause of the breakaway republics invading poor innocent Ukraine, wow can’t believe a country would go to war like this at the drop of a hat! Irrational aggressive Russia should just take their troops home and surrender all territory back to Ukraine, a country losing a war so badly it’s on the verge of collapse.

Maybe don’t go around making inflammatory geopolitical comments in public if you only just started paying attention to this conflict in 2022

Don’t worry, you may not live in the US, but you’re definitely an American in spirit.

And you clearly don’t seem to have problem with US prison system, only that wrong people are sent there. You’re as full of shit as the people you think you’re criticizing

Soviet Union: Sequesters fascists and counter-revolutionaries for reeducation after Nazi Germany murdered millions of people while invading the USSR with the express purpose of genocide.

The US: Uses drug prohibition as a bullshit excuse to systematically arrests racial minorities in their millions in order to continue enslavement after the abolition of chattel slavery. The conditions are so brutal that the death rate for modern US prison inmates exceeds that of the Soviet gulag system just a decade into recovering from the devastation wrought by WW2.

Lemmitor turbolib: Wow, these are morally equivalent. If you replace the words “fascist comprador looking to resume the brutalization of the working class” with the words “black people” then you tankies are starting to look an awful lot like 4channers!

lmao this lemmitors comparing Hexbear users to 4channers shit never gets old. When you liberals meet someone far to your left it must really break your brain for you to lump us in with fascists.

You know what I almost never see referred to as edgy out of hand? People who don’t want to fully abolish the US prison system, which to this day kills far more people far more often than the Soviet gulag system did shortly after the end of WW2. And that’s really strange considering the US prison system is designed from the ground up to maintain a pool of slave labor by incarcerating racial minorities on bullshit drug offenses. Personally, I’d much rather prison be used to keep dangerous reactionaries from causing trouble while they’re being reeducated.

Talking to someone who justifies this kinda shit is always a trip. They’ll say that people who aren’t earning a living wage just need to work harder and pick up a marketable skill to improve their situation. But you can simultaneously get them to agree that many of these low wage “unskilled” jobs need to exist for society to continue functioning, so which fucking is it?

The answer is that the capitalist parasites and their horde of boot lickers believe it’s totally acceptable for there to exist an underclass of human beings born to work until their bodies give out for the enrichment of their superior employer.

They can’t afford to live a dignified life doing the shit I need them to do? That’s fine, just toss 'em into the hole when they stop working and replace them with the next generation.

Honestly man, I’m getting real sick and tired of pretending to be above violent retribution when it comes to these people. My blood fucking boils each and every time I need to look my boss in the eye and pretend to smile as they say farcical shit like “we’re all a family here” or “let us know if there’s anything you need” while paying me exactly the minimum wage and hiring the exact number of employees it takes for them to avoid giving any of us enough hours to qualify for benefits.

Anyway, Stalin had the right idea with gulags, and we should bring those back. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Removed by mod

That makes it even worse. Imagine putting in all this effort and taking all this supposed risk to create a new social media platform free of the pitfalls that come with a for profit site like reddit only to slowly adopt the exact same corporate friendly code of conduct while purposefully curating a community of annoying shitheads who are nearly indistinguishable from the horde of cretins on reddit.

If making a new reddit is legitimately the best they can do, then they should absolutely just scuttle the entire project.

real this house has people in it hours

So how close to losing and being forced into an unconditional surrender does Ukraine need to be before Europe stops sending aid at their own huge expense?

And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck’s sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn’t.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people’s movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you’ll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

Veritasium

Sucks about this guy, he used to actually make interesting pop-sci videos without mangling the concepts and conclusions too badly. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the bullshit other science popularizers like Michio Kaku were dreaming up at the time. But nowadays his videos all have these extremely vague clickbait titles. And much worse than that: he clearly shills tech from sponsored companies. Not with marked sponsorship segments, but with entire videos that are essentially long form advertisements with all of the disinformation marketing entails. Other than the word sponsor being highlighted and placed before the title, there is no indication for his audience that they shouldn’t view such sponsored videos as normal Veritasium videos.

The most blatant example of this was when he shilled for Waymo self driving ride share cars in an 18 minute video they sponsored. It was about two years ago, the title:

Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now

Here’s a video detailing the ways in which Veritasium misleads his audience to produce corporate propaganda using the driverless car video as its main example. It’s an hour long, but I still recommend giving it a watch because it’s so thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

I’m sure Veritasium does still make good, well researched and well intentioned videos, but after seeing the way he intentionally manipulates his audience in certain videos, I can’t help but be distrustful of everything he says elsewhere.

Yep, and it’s a lot more successful than you’d think. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I literally have not come across a sponsored video yet that hasn’t had its sponsored segments reported. Not even on videos that were uploaded literally 10 minutes ago. Highly recommend

Congrats, that already exists as a browser addon and it’s free. Look up sponsorblock.

Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can’t know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.

It’s based, actually. So is stealing from businesses. In fact, if piracy really was the same as stealing, I’d definitely make a point of pirating more often

Tbh, I lose some amount of respect for anyone who mentions they pay for media that is easily accessed through piracy, netflix included