Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery . . .
Liberalism is also associated with the invention and virtually entire existence of chattel slavery along with the exporting of the criminalization of queer people to cultures that did not feature such things.
I may have screwed up in my summarizing of the statement. When I wrote “gain ground” I meant gain support., that’s my bad for doing a terrible job of paraphrasing. What he said in the statement was “[the separatists] were flailing and had comparatively little public backing until Russian troops moved in to support them in 2014.” That’s my bad but I don’t know if what he actually said helps his case.
Then it's just a [citation needed] issue since they did just fine on the referendums that neoliberals reject out of hand, the Azovites still saw fit to butcher thousands, and the East is consistently interested in a conciliatory stance towards Russia. It's still a weak argument. What happened? The public only gained enough confidence in them once they got the direct support of one of the larger militaries in the world? Is that an own somehow? Anyone would gain more public confidence when they went from being shelled to shit to actually winning because Russia put its whole fist on the scale.
With regards to finding solace in my fellow students, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. So far everyone in my classes follows a similar line of thinking, even when one girl (who is an immigrant from Latin America) criticized Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” piece we had to read for our holocaust week, in another class she doesn’t pull any punched against the Soviets (essentially equating them to Nazis in how they treated the Polish). Maybe future courses will be better but I won’t hold my breath.
Some people are much easier to disabuse of their shit than professors. Even the person you mention here might be able to be dissuaded. I once dissuaded a student who said "Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators" in a single conversation after class. It's just a matter of certain stories being normalized and never challenged, but often students are much less attached to specific positions than academics are. If someone takes a rhetorically flimsy point but you don't feel up to fighting it during class, consider just approaching them after class and just expressing concern. Avoid being mad or confrontational even if you are frustrated and speak to them like they're a fellow human who is also doing their best but may have been let down by people they trusted to guide them on the right path.
Also consider that there may be people (perhaps like yourself) who don't agree but just don't speak up. Sometimes you need to look for more subtle tells than someone shouting in the middle of class "The Maoist peasant uprising against landlords was the most successful and comprehensive land reform in history . . ." etc.
it wasn’t a civil war, they were Russian backed separatists
i.e. Ukrainians, therefore engaging in a civil war
who had so little public support that they only gained ground after Russian soldier boots hit the ground
They weren't trying to "gain ground", they were trying to separate the ground they had from Ukraine! Why would a minority in Ukraine seek to totally defeat the Ukrainian military like Russia is doing? That would be suicide to attempt. This dude is a fucking rube.
There is a right wing presence in Ukraine but it is not that pervasive, especially not in the military and government.
Citation fucking needed that Azov does not represent a pervasive issue, or that Holocaust-denying ambassadors don't. This fucker can only make a claim like this by rewriting history to claim banderites were progressive and then on top of that ignoring the Nazi iconography and actual hate crimes and war crimes committed against other ethnicities. Worthless perspective.
The Red and Black flag is literally "blood and soil", this isn't hard. Jesus . . .
These arguments are so bad they refute themselves. Unfortunately, that doesn't help you all that much since he's dumb enough to assert them. This guy reminds me of some other well-meaning de facto liberal historians I've known. You're better off trying to find solidarity with students than professors most of the time, unless you can find the odd immigrant or someone whose lived experience encourages them to take a perspective more like yours. It sucks, but you can probably find at least one or two allies.
Even if everyone at your school does suck, remember that you aren't alone and you aren't crazy. Being "fringe" is to be expected of decent and informed people when the status quo is monstrous, and in fact I'd say it's necessary.
At a point they turned off completely - was it Boeing's amazing safety record or the pilots being cool because it was a night flight and there was some sweet views of nighttime city lights to take pictures of.
tbf it is normal to turn lights off at some point during the flight so passengers can sleep more easily. No idea if that was the case for your flight though.
Edit: By the way, if you look this up, you'll still see popular media lending a lot of credence to this claim, because no lie is too pathetic to be asserted about the DPRK today.
I mean, you can always posit another hypothesis because it is very difficult to prove a negative, but if a coagulant or something was administered to him, it should turn up on an autopsy. Ultimately, given the position of Ukrainian intelligence here, the more reasonable conclusion is that people die eventually and that's the extent of the meaning of what happened (or perhaps you could add that the stress of his situation hastened his demise, which is probably true).
I think it's unfair to someone this credulous, so I will let you in on the fact that they are fucking with you when they call you a Russian bot or whatever. People are just really sick of dealing with ignorant neoliberals who treat Navalny like Tank Man. The other things they said, about him being a fascist, etc., were sincere and have even been covered in overly-sympathetic sources like Atlantic.
It's wild how up in arms liberals always get for the human rights of fascists. Eight years of kids in Donbas getting shelled: I sleep. Leader of an ethnonationalist faction gets assassinated: criminal and horrific act.
Literally not a fallacy, your reasoning hinges on Great Man Theory. The two most popular parties (the second being the communist party) both mainly support the war and the assassination of a sitting President would not, in fact, make the country more dove-ish. It's a cartoon view of the conflict that the war spawned from Putin's brain and is his personal pet project that he is subjecting the rest of Russia to.
You know that many Israelis did come from anglosphere or now-EU states, right? It's not like it's just a new social formation of people who already lived in the region.
It's a project overwhelmingly lead by western states that has resulted in a huge importing of people who were born and raised in western states pretending they are indigenous to the region. If not for the west, Israel would neither have the resources to maintain its colonial project nor the population needed for occupying Palestine.
Monster is comically anticommunist, at least. Like, I think there might be one episode where they "both sides" things a little, and obviously it's also anti-Nazi, but the main plot hinges on completely absurd anticommunist brainworms about Soviets torturing children to, uh, make another Hitler or something? It's really hard to keep track of what anything means because the mangaka has the worst Mystery Box proclivity that I've seen in literally any medium.
Meanwhile I think Chainsaw man is at least mildly progressive, way to OOP's left, considering the allegory about nukes that implicates the Japanese and US governments in absolutely heinous crimes. idk, I guess you're right that Denji being porn-brained means channers would like it, but is that really why it's on here?
The slogan of the country, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, was originally written to be Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.
Minor correction, the original Locke slogan was "Life, Liberty, and Property", not "Pursuit of Property". He was making a (clumsy, ridiculous) deontological argument that one must never infringe upon the "Life, Liberty, or Property" of another as a means of defending aristocratic property relations against egalitarian movements that would redistribute land.
Liberalism is also associated with the invention and virtually entire existence of chattel slavery along with the exporting of the criminalization of queer people to cultures that did not feature such things.