she/her - hammer/sickle - state/revolution
Migrating to lemm.ee
Yes. I could not give a shit about "territorial integrity". This is nationalism. I'm not a nationalist, I don't like states especially bourgeoise states.
You are putting nationalism ahead of people's lives.
That’s for the Ukrainians to decide
No it isn't. It's for the Ukrainian rulers to decide. The people don't get any choice in it, that's the problem. And everyone that opposed this war was rounded up and arrested, every left wing party in the country was shut down, and the left wing tv channels were also shut down, all under the "they're pro russia" excuse simply for being against the war. There is no "let the ukrainians decide" under that environment.
There is an easy way to end the war: Russian withdrawal. It really is as simple as that.
Not physically possible under russian law.
While we all want the war to stop, it cannot be done at any price. Ukraine must be allowed to return the areas stolen from it and Russia must return to pre 2014 borders. Either they do it willingly or with force. No one likes it, but it’s Russia that chose to attack, not Ukraine.
Again, this is not possible under Russian law. The notion that it'll be done with force is similarly unrealistic, nukes would fly before these were taken by force. But before that happens you'd have to see the removal of the Russian warships off the coast which will be obliterating anything that comes near Crimea. It just isn't ever happening without a navy or an airforce.
I hope your friends are safe, but at the same time I hope they have the sense to leave Crimea until things settle.
They're fine for now. It's relatively quiet there because the defensive line is so far away, barring these bridge incidents.
And let’s hope for peace, but recognize that it cannot be achieved by giving into the offender’s demands.
We'd be there already if not for boris fucking johnson. I really don't know why you care about the "offender's demands" either. Are you a nationalist? People are what matter. I could not give a shit about what flag exists between the two, right now it's just a situation where two extremely shit sides throw thousands of lives into a meatgrinder and all I want to see is the meatgrinder stop.
I uhh. Don't share your optimism or actually care who runs it, I only really care that the people I know there remain safe. For them and for myself the flag be waved around is somewhat meaningless compared to the human impact of all this nonsense, particularly because some of my socialist friends are gone now. With that said I don't see Crimea changing hands again, nor does anyone I have spoken to currently in Crimea. I might change that assessment if the counteroffensive ever actually sees the first line of dragon's teeth but so far it's been completely underwhelming. Everyone also sees the deployment of clusterbombs as a "let's salt the earth so it's worthless to them" move rather than anything that will change the counteroffensive's prospects.
I'm not saying it wasn't Ukrainian territory. I'm saying that the presence there was 100% russian military because it was functionally operated as their military port.
This is precisely why there was no battle over it, no deaths, no nothing. Just "this is russia now" and continued operation of it as they always had but with different flags.
What other lens should we look at the annexation through? It was clearly the early stages of this war.
I'd much prefer a non-war lens of the place and how cool it is. Most people in america hadn't even heard of it until the annexation, it's very unfortunate.
I don't think calling it the early stages of this war is quite accurate but it's not really that important and kinda gets into unnecessary semantics. The war probably wouldn't be happening if the Minsk agreement had been kept. Russia were never going to let Crimea go because they needed it as a military port but they avoided Donetsk and Luhansk up until the Minsk agreement failed. If they had taken these regions in 2014 it would have been a breeze for them as Ukraine had no military to speak of, which is why the civil war was fought by the nazi volunteer batallions (azov, right sector, etc etc). Ukraine's military was ramped up between 2014 and 2021. They did not really have much of anything until the 2016 Stategic Defense Bulletin followed by the State Program for the Development of the Armed Forces (2017-2020). In 2014 the military was only 90k active personnel with over half being civilian staff.
The denial of reality going on here is absurd. Pre 2014 I know they operated the checkpoints because I went to Crimea for 2 weeks in 2009. I'm not saying that there wasn't also fuckery involved but denying the reality of events is nonsensical. There is even a vice documentary that shows just how casual the transition was. It's extremely painful discussing these topics with people online whose only understanding of these regions comes through the lens of this war.
Crimea wasn't "invaded". Russia was already there as it leased the port and officially managed it for military use already. That's why there was no fighting. They already ran the checkpoints, they already were the entire military presence in the region. The changeover from "this is Ukraine" to "this is Russia now" was entirely the signing of papers and changed absolutely nothing about the presence in the region or the average day to day. They certainly took it over, but to say it was invaded is somewhat misleading, more of a "we've decided that this is ours now".
Crimea is 76% russian. It was almost 70% russian before 2014 and it is around 76% russian today. Almost all of these people lived there already.
How's that boot taste?
Mate I do not give a flying fuck what any of these people with zero power are. I care about actually achieving shit. Fortunately I live in the UK where this bizarre sectarianism has absolutely no presence, thank fuck for that.
If you lived in the UK you'd be against the head of the RMT union currently striking the UK railroads, who publicly calls James Connolly his political hero and is an obvious marxist-leninist. You'd be against Jeremy Corbyn, because he defends the Soviet Union and always has, he also promotes the Black Panthers who defended north korea (if you look in the corner of the video around 2:00 there's even a cute little soviet cccp statue). You'd be against Diane Abbott, because she's publicly defended Mao on national television. You'd probably find something to be against John Mcdonnell who has said his job is to overthrow capitalism on the BBC, probably because he's quoted Mao and read his little red book in parliament?
My point here is that you've got to get a grip. We don't do this bizarre shit over in the UK because there's literally no point, there is no communist revolution just around the corner, the conditions do not exist for it. What matters is what we can achieve RIGHT NOW, when a revolution is actually on the cards then we can decide what that revolution should actually fucking look like. In the meantime these people are all mild lukewarm elected MPs as socdems that just want to give people more welfare and improve basic living standards, but you would call them evil tankies for any of these things.
If you don't build at least SOME power now you will have absolutely none when the conditions deteriorate enough for a real revolution, and if that is the case it will be fascism that wins, not any sect of the absolutely non-existent left in your country.
What you're viewing above is how radical you need to be just to establish and maintain lukewarm european welfare and social safety nets. Get that into your head and you might actually stop the aussie government dumping migrants into concentration camps and help improve people's lives for fuck's sake. You should know better than this anyway, half the union leadership of australia are marxist-leninists, and the other half are trots. What union are you in? I'll tell you whether you need to throw your union leader under the bus for some fucking do-nothing liberal because of your sectarianism obsession. Are you even in one?
"Defederate from the communists because sometimes they say things we don't like!"
"No, don't defederate from the people literally killing children by intentionally giving them eating disorders with unethical research! They're fine!"
This is not particularly surprising. Lemmy was started as an anti-corporate project by leftists after /r/chapotraphouse got quarantined and later banned (subreddit for the most popular podcast and most donated patreon at the time), with the explicit goal of preventing corporate control from being able to silence leftists when they're blasting off. CTH was skyrocketing in subscribers at the time it was quarantined on August 8th 2019, and when even quarantining didn't stop its growth or slow down its activity afterwards Reddit pulled the plug under the excuse it promoted violence, but the only particularly edgy thing ever said there was "slave owners should be killed" and support for John Brown. This evolved post-ban into the assessment that Spez banned it because he wants to own slaves.
When that happened there was a massive shift in the leftist parts of reddit as we very quickly realised we'd be targeted if reddit ever deemed us to be too successful, and projects like Lemmy began in reaction. CTH's community in fact moved to Lemmy 3 years ago, and resides on Hexbear.net but has not yet joined the rest of federated lemmy due to technical issues (it used to be a fork with a different front end).
Given lemmy's specific anti-corporate origins seeing Lemmy.ml do this should surprise nobody. It's the correct move anyway.
Almost once a week for the last 5 years there is a neoliberal that screams about defederating from leftist instances that have absolutely zero power and influence in the world just for disagreeing with them politically. Doesn't matter whether you're on lemmy or mastodon or other services, this happens like clockwork.
Those exact same people are currently defending against defederating from an evil megacorporation with literal cia employees on staff that does real quantifiable evil shit in the world, and they claim to be moral.
Ok I see my misunderstanding here. In that case, let me offer an explanation for why you should be more radical.
There's a reason that the banks and ruling class were worried about antiwork. It's not a coincidence that this came out and then not long after a coordinated attack between the billionaire media forces and wreckers in the community to heighten the drama happened alongside the creation of a space (by yet more financial bros) to coopt the split they created and deradicalise the movement.
The negotiating position of "workreform" is weak. They are very sophisticated at stringing workers along with reasons that workreform can't happen, and it leaves workers in a weak position begging for change.
The negotiating position of "antiwork" on the other hand? It had no intent to negotiate. It terrified the ruling class because it showed a position that was essentially "we will abolish you". It scared them because they knew that if such a movement continued they would be forced to make changes happen, or face the reality of that abolishment.
The fear here is significantly important. A movement that strikes fear into the opposition drives them to change, a movement that does not is unlikely to see much success beyond individual victories - and they like that.
Consider another scenario - which of these messages do you find to be more effective rhetoric for the urbanist movement? /r/fuckcars or /r/automotivereform ?
This is inaccurate. The founders of the workreform subreddit had absolutely nothing to do with the antiwork team, they were Canadian bankers. This was exposed and then a lot of fuckery occurred to hide it with usernames and moderator positions juggled around. Some people from antiwork's team were either gullible(like doreen) or simply could not do without being in a "position" and got themselves added to it later added giving it credibility, that or they were collaborators all along, we will not find the truth.
The original evidence for this is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GreenAndPleasant/comments/sdpsaj/a_post_on_rworkreform_that_pointed_out_how_the/huegc4h/
I also have a very long list of posts about it that were removed for the following 6 months after its creation.
I also have the discussions I had with Belle and Kumquat about this at the time, as I was very much attempting to help in the power struggle that was occurring internally to takeover the subreddit and fill it with liberal powermods, helped along by Spez pushing them on the team presumably on the advice of Ashooh and the outside influence of the shits at Goldman Sachs that saw the subreddit as a threat.
What was your username on the antiwork team? Were you actually on the team at the time of these events or was that more or less before it? A person I shall not name also had an alt on the team when it all went down, all the discord comms and modmails were saved should they ever become useful.
Ah that is positive, in case you're not aware - the community over there was started by bankers after the successful takedown of antiwork as a means of coopting the movement and deradicalising it. They were completely successful.
Have receipts.
Are you the same people that started the subreddit? Or just borrowing the name?
Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that's fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.