NATO keeps claiming things "aren't escalation" right after Russian officials bluntly state that it is.

It's like poking a wasp nest with a stick and saying "It's okay, this won't anger them" while the nest loudly buzzes with the noise of hundreds of angry wasps.

all of the people who were part of Anonymous who were worth a damn at hacking back in the day work for the state department now. The movement could very likely have been a psyop, given how many high-level hackers from that era there are on government payroll.

I stand in solidarity with the gay furry hackers.

your quotation is wrong. I said "legitimate", not rightful.

"Legitimate", as in they're the dominant governing body within the country and have been accepted by nearly every country as the genuine government of Afghanistan.

And it is fear-mongering. I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, I grew up seeing the US villainize Islam and Arabs in real time. In my youth, we were told that the Taliban were the greatest evil to ever walk the planet. There is a lot to criticise about the Taliban, they're not leftist and their interpretation of Islam is heretical. But they're not the human embodiment of the devil Americans so desperately want to believe they are.

In the instance of this headline, western news publications want people to think "Taliban = hate", then think "if Putin works with the Taliban, that means he endorses them". Thus stoking anti-Russia sentiments by using the decades of anti-Muslim fear-mongering they've been giving us since the 1990s.

Loathesome Dongeater mentioned it, but it's important to realize that the Taliban existed as they did for 20 years to fight against American (and western) Imperialism in Afghanistan, and when the US pulled out of their country they became the dominant political force.

Though the Taliban isn't a group MLs should be rooting for, they are the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and they have been committed to fighting ISIS - a US-grown insurgency in the Middle East & Northern Africa.

Western publications benefit more from just putting "the Taliban" into their headlines than they do from posting "the Afghani government". The fear-mongering associated with two decades of imperialist war in Afghanistan helps their arguments monumentally.

thank fuck

I really hope they meant NazBol, because that's logically what they should've put there.

I am not going to sit through 17 minutes to find out if they made a mistake, or if they simply refused to do any actual research.

Apparently, it was first reported that the F-16 was shot down. Then the story was pulled and replaced with one about it crashing on its own accord.

If the guy who is being reported as "the best pilot in Ukraine" crashed an F-16 during a mission, that says much worse things about the Ukrainian Air Force.

Mind you, Russia has sophisticated anti-air capabilities and can easily dominate Ukrainian airspace if they need to. But, sure, that billion-dollar high-tech jet fighter crashed itself.

losers want to say that it's pay to win, and that's the main criticism that you'll see when you look into the game. The second criticism you'll find is people being sinophobic about the game's developers being Chinese.

I haven't put a single cent into the game, but that hasn't put me at a disadvantage against the players who do buy currency. If you understand tactics and make smart choices, the gear tier of your enemies never actually matters. It's not pay to win, because you'd have to actually win as a result of putting money in.

is anybody else playing Arena Breakout Infinite?

I've been playing it since it was released to EA and I'm loving it.

It's still too early to say whether or not it's going well, but the Ukrainians have been making decent gains.

I'm assuming the Russian response will come in the coming days or weeks, and the Ukrainian forces will get pushed out. Their stated goal of the operation has already been nullified (and frankly didn't hold water anyways) so I don't know if the Ukrainians will invest many of their resources to keeping that front open, but if they do it could have dire consequences to their overall resolve.

Ukraine is already at a serious disadvantage in its manpower and resources, so this operation (at least to me) looks to be an act of desperation. You wouldn't try something so bold and borderline suicidal if you saw a future otherwise. I won't say this means the war is ending soon, but I will say that the end of the war may have finally crested the horizon.

**update: It seems the Russian response has begun, the RAF are retaking ground in the Kursk region & stopping Ukrainian advances. While ramping up their missile attacks across Ukraine. Prepare yourselves for copious amounts of Ukraine cope from people who don't understand how war works.

the Russian Armed Forces have been making constant gains in the Donesk front, and their dominance on all fronts but the northern Luhansk Oblast operation has inspired Ukraine to launch an invasion into the Kursk region so they can have anything at all to leverage in negotiations.

But sure, it's an "if" situation... and Russia is totally going to lose.

if somebody has the time and the mental ability to sit through this video, i wanna know what the verdict was.

Obvi, in reality, the USSR was a union. Each of the SRs had their own government, made their own decisions, and had the right to petition to leave the Union at will. But anti-communists hate that the USSR had such a fair system, so HM will probably quote directly from those "historians".

moving to a reply for a similar story (really it's a rant) of my own.

My party had a few anarchists in it, they made up something like 10% of the party at a point. A small enough percentage that you can simply ignore them during votes or party motions, but a big enough number that you couldn't ignore them during discussions.

There was one Anarchist who would volunteer themself to speak on behalf of all Anarchists at every discussion, taking personal issue with anything that could possibly upset an Anarchist. A member of the party might want to simply talk about the great technological innovations that happened in the USSR, and that Anarchist would find a way to steer the discussion towards "USSR bad". A member might want to discuss the guerrilla fighting in the Cuban revolution, the Anarchist would go on and on about how Cuba is "an authoritarian dictatorship". This goes so on, and so forth. And every time we tried to bring up the issues that were created by them doing that, the 29 other Anarchists would stand up with them and claim we were trying to make them leave.

Leadership thought it would be a good idea to make them their own wing within the party, so they could be autonomous and have their own discussions apart from the main party discussions. They treated it like we were moving them to the "kiddie's table" and threatened to start disrupting other party functions. A few members of leadership decided, without consulting all of leadership, to appoint that very vocal Anarchist to a seat within leadership to keep them from complaining as much.

Nobody abused the power of leadership in our party like they did. They would make unilateral decisions without asking anyone else.

Later on, we would find out that the whole thing was an ego trip for them. They liked feeling like they were at odds against any authority, so they'd put themself into positions to be at odds with party leadership. When they were put into leadership, they had no idea how difficult the position actually was, so they simply refused to act within the guidelines.

Reading this made me remember how much I do not miss being a party leader.

There are two good ways to can try to handle this situation, and both may look like hostility if egos are at play.

The first is to simply talk to the Trot directly in private and try to direct them towards better historians and convince them to read ML theory. If they're receptive, they might shift their ideological position and stop being a nuisance. If it fails, they could claim that you're trying to "bully" them into being a "Stalinist".

The second is to talk to either party leadership or fellow party members and try to get them to agree on more rigid party lines. If successful, it'll become easier to keep conversations on track and productive, as most of your party members will agree that tirades against the USSR aren't helpful. You can pair this with readings or studies of the USSR to help the less informed members of the party come to a mutual understanding. If it fails, they could accuse you of trying to co-opt the party and get you kicked out.

These are the kinds of murky waters I had to try to navigate daily within my party when it existed, inner-party politics is a hard game to play, and it usually results in battles of egos.

really it's just the mental gymnastics of Ukraine supporters. Russia is simultaneously both winning and unstoppable, while also being weak and nearing failure. Western governments need to prepare for the war to last 10 years and put plans into place to ensure that Ukraine won't fall, and Russia is losing the war and will collapse because of it.

love Balkan Mapper.

When I read this earlier today I audibly laughed.

Man back to back said "The Russians are too powerful" then "We will reclaim Crimea from the Russians at any cost"

All I'm seeing is people putting themselves into hysterics talking about it on social media, demanding that it has to be staged and his death would be an objectively good thing. And it's all just people who don't know what they're talking about, but refuse to ever shut up.

The right is going to retaliate for this eventually, but Trump getting off with only a minor injury was the best possible outcome of this. If the injury was serious or fatal, the fascist bandit armies would come out in droves. It would be worse for everyone. Remember a few years ago when the right kept doing terror attacks in progressive spaces? Imagine how much worse that would be if their dear leader was murdered on camera. Liberals really need to stop celebrating the idea of this attempted assassination, all it did was open a door that none of us should want to go through. This is a rallying cry for the right, this is a green light for violence. The far-right will use this event for years to come to justify murders and hate crimes.

I won't discount the possibility that it's staged, but this one doesn't ring that bell for me.

It's very possible that some liberal with a rifle and a dream thought he'd become a hero. Given the media coverage that Trump gets from the """left""", it's most likely that he's just the victim of someone who lost the mental health battle.

By all accounts, he had to have been actually injured based on the wound and the blood pattern. More than what a razor blade could do. As well, Trump would've needed to make the incision himself. It's extremely unlikely that he would've agreed to do something like this while he's already leading in the polls and doesn't need a stunt.

His reaction is also normal for someone who has just been grazed by a bullet. The first thing our body will do in an extreme situation is fill our brain with adrenaline, numbing pain. It's well documented that soldiers could be shot more than once in combat before fully realizing what's happened, this is even more true for grazes. An injury like this won't be fatal, and won't cause any long-term damage. His ear will get patched up, and he'll be back to normal with nothing but a scar and possible mental anguish.

And I'd like to close with a personal gripe, I'm seeing way too many people who aren't big into marksmanship not understanding why the shot missed. The head is a target the size of a cantaloupe, and a man like Trump never stops moving. From the noise of the rounds in the footage, I estimate a minimum distance of 150m. That is a damn difficult shot to make, of course it's going to miss. Then factor in that the shooter took (I counted but could be wrong) three shots. After that first round, it gets significantly harder to keep the rifle on target. The two follow-up shots might as well have been directed at random. Media has made so many people believe that hitting shots like that is easy, but it really isn't. Please stop with this one.

There's not a lot that can be done if they're unwilling to learn.

You could try to explain the lies colonialists told, and the systems of oppression they built. You could try to show them the direct results of colonialism, like the famines, the reservations, etc. But if they're closed off from accepting that colonialism was an evil system, perpetrated by white supremacists, you won't be able to fix their issue.

It depends very heavily on the individual, but some saw the USSR as the only valid socialist state. However, many Ultras refuse to accept that any Socialist state was or is legitimate in any meaningful way.

It's always "Yeah but, what about [obscure thing, or anti-communist propaganda]. that makes them Bourgeois."

The simplest explanation is that the American "left" is rightwing, because they've been told that actual leftism is bad.

We're only told about leftist ideology or politics in the context of "these bad people in the past did bad things", and many Americans refuse to actually tackle those lies. because of this, no one in the American "left" is willing to be anti-capitalist in any way that actually matters. Nor are they willing to use materialism in their dialectics, because their political education comes from Liberalism, so they're more willing to listen to right-wing talking points and integrate them into their views.

This is why you'll see Americans who'll call themselves "leftists" pair a statement for working rights with a statement against immigration. Or you'll see them decry the horrors of fascism, then support whatever new war NATO has wrought.

You're right, but please be nice.

Anarchists will really try to rip us apart for being "authoritarian", but when you ask them how their system would deal with crimes, upholding socialism, or maintaining any semblance of order, their responses are almost always far more extreme than ours.

Genuinely had an Anarchist call me an "evil person" and a "future baby killer" for saying that I'm ML. Then when I asked them about their proposed methods for preventing counter-revolution, they described a system where anyone can murder anyone else if the victim was suspected of wanting to act against the revolution. No trial, no investigation, just the word of the murderer.

Edit to add another thought to; "their responses are almost always far more extreme than ours."

If it's not more extreme, it's lax to the point of being nothing. So the poles are either a system of total chaos, or substanceless idealism.

this time on; White Westerner ruins their own relationship by not listening to their partner who is from the place in question, and has a far more intimate understanding of the situation and refuses to accept direct sources because of their own political bias.

seems to me the whitey did the liberal thing, wherein they marry someone from a culture they deem lesser so they can "rescue" them from it. Bro went to FU and Yale, if anyone would understand direct sources and intellectual honesty, it's them.

me when a fellow ML says "tankie";

me when literally anyone else does;

"made them the dominate voice"

bro, tankies made lemmygrad for tankies

once again right-leaning proletariats show that they're still better than any Western politician.

It's almost as though the people who actually live and work with certain things know more about it than liberal politicians. I would, of course, prefer if they'd use class consciousness and advocate for a leftwing solution to the green deal. But I can't really change reality.

The TLDR version of this history;

Lenin and Stalin were colleagues, and there's not much that actually supports any sort of "beef". The thing that's usually used is this letter, wherein Lenin complains about Stalin. There is reason to believe that the letter is faked by devious actors, but even if it is real, it just reads as venting. Taking "Lenin hated Stalin!" from the letter is like assuming best friends secretly hate each other because one of them made a post while upset on social media.

Stalin was a staunch supporter of Leninism, and stayed true to Lenin's ideals of the Soviet Union while expanding the theory to fit the geopolitical situations that unfolded under Stalin's time as chairman. Foundations of Leninism is a summary of Leninism written by Stalin himself, who wasn't much of a writer.

The whole thing seems to be propaganda by Trots and Anti-Communists to pose Stalin as an evil dictator who illegally took power of the Soviet Union for his own benefit, against the will of Lenin. But the reality is Stalin was democratically elected into this position and staunchly upheld Marxism-Leninism and led projects that benefitted the entire Union and her people. Stalin is a beloved figure by not just Russians and Communists in the western-sphere, but by people in every corner of the world for good reason.

trot to fascist pipeline showing itself again

gotta love (sarcasm) that my people tied the political ideology of Zionism in with their faith and ethnicity, so now braindead liberals think they're the same.

Zionism is as far from the Mitzvah you can get, they're about as Jewish as American Christians are Catholic. (which is to say, not very much at all)

comrade mouse

publishes a statement with propagandist statements in it

claims their universities pursue the truth

If someone is being harassed on Lemmy, we can figure out who's doing the downvoting and ban them. Bring the issue up with a site admin.

Personal opinion time, I strongly disagree with removing downvotes on LG because it disenfranchises comrades who lack time or energy for comments.

sure if you disagree with something you should leave a comment explaining why. But the person who's too burnt out from living under capitalism isn't going to want to do that, and the person with executive dysfunction who just wanted to scroll for a minute wouldn't want to either.

In my moderation and in my leisure scrolling, I know what kind of discourse a post is just by looking at the point total. If it's upvoted well, it's usually good shit. If it's downvoted to hell, the poster either needs an explanation or mod action. This also helps the average scroller, if they see a post or a comment has been downvoted a ton, they're probably not going to pay much attention to it. Also, from a first-person perspective, if you said something and got more downvotes than up, it's probably time to self-crit. That's a valuable tool.

TLDR: downvotes are valuable.

Oh look, they're repackaging Cold War anti-communist propaganda to once again fearmonger against entire groups of people & justify atrocities against them.

once again fearmongering leads the sheltered white world to believe that anything that resembles the "enemy" is actually the enemy.

a 6-year-old boy and his mother were stabbed in Illinois, leaving his mother in the hospital and the boy dead. Just because our media has to fearmonger about the scary brown people.

Israel is trying to claim they didn't do it after getting shock and horror from the west, but they're the only people who could've done it. And if it wasn't them the only other logical option would've been the US, and that's a much bigger fish to fry.

this whole ass colonizer country is trying to "nuh-uh" warcrimes.

**update, MSM is trying to say Hamas' "incompetence" did it. You can't make this shit up, MSM is trying to uno reverse card their way out of admitting that Israel is objectively evil.

It's hilarious to me when even the most staunchly anti-communist economists have a more rigid understanding of Socialist markets than Maoists do.

Maoists and Trots are literally the same, the only difference is which Socialist superpower they chose to invalidate.

I did just a little bit ago.

Their take on the conflict in Palestine follows the logic of Zionist organizations, and generally, they show that they don't know much about the world outside of their narrow Western perspective. So, good fuckin' riddance.