I post things in English because the audience here speaks that.

The thing with your source is that 98% of state communist in the region are Russian sympathizers and as such legitimate targets in war conditions. They will be oppressed for siding with enemy

your response did illustrate my point well though

it doesn’t prove anything, I was making a joke that in the US a guy running for Senate had straight up Nazi tattoo on him, the problem isn’t limited to Eastern Europe.

in fact it seems like the nazism problem in Ukraine is more of a civil society problem, as in rather than getting state crackdowns on speech, if you say the wrong thing you might get a group of patriots showing up at your door to teach you a lesson.

here’s a video from a ukrainian communist in kharkiv explaining the issue, translated by a ukrainian from mariupol

fwiw, in the US we have a guy running for senate as a Democrat who had a totenkopf on his chest, in the same style as those used by neonazi ukrainian groups such as misanthropic division

You keep asking me to answer the same questions, I think I’ve made myself clear. I even linked you his book of articles defending the Iraq war. Why I call him a neocon: he made himself an accomplice to the full-scale invasion of Iraq, defending it publicly in major publications.

re: subtext, the reason I even mentioned Hitchens was because you asked me a diversionary question on an unrelated topic- something you just tried to posture as being outraged at me for doing. You’re clearly looking to provoke a response and certainly not interested in internalizing anything I’m saying.

You will spend endless energy defending white dudes with nazi tattoos complicit in invasions that slaughter millions of people as long as they’re white and appeal to your ‘democratic socialist’ sensibilities.

You linked me examples of my site admin purging content from a user who has demonstrated a willingness to defend literal nazis, if I were in dessalines position I would have banned that user entirely by now.

That community that you frequent is rife with these types of people. I wish I could say I was surprised that the user who can’t stop calling people degenerate roaches was back at it again after only a 7 day slap on the wrist.

You also seem pretty chummy with him, weird how the more I look around you the more fashy shit I see.

Clearly. Obviously. I mean, describing someone disagreeing with you as “losing your shit” and “calling people tankies” instead of what it is, firm criticism with citations,

You just had a pretty public crashout getting banned for defending the dude who was saying that hexbear users should kill themselves and that they weren’t ‘really’ trans. You did a whole retaliation defed, it was a weird reaction to have when all that’s needed is some self-reflection.

Additionally you just sent me a whole rant about some other person who stopped talking to you in this thread, the topic coming up pretty much out of nowhere. You did link me to them making a reference to being in the military, but didn’t even link me where they claim to live in the same town. I’m not interested in a fishing expedition.

I’m sorry that they stopped talking to you, but I’m also done with giving you social advice at this point.

In fact, after digging up those links and revisiting your recent conduct, I’m questioning why I’m even continuing to talk to you at all.

if you want to abandon the Hitchens thing and just say you were playing a bit

I feel like you missed my point entirely, mostly because to reckon with it would require you to do any amount of introspection [impossible].

I would still really advise you that this “subtext” and “provocative” is fuzzy thinking in a way that opens you up to thinking things that are not true

Ah yes, the old ‘thinking about implications makes you gullible’ argument. Very airtight.

All language, art, and politics have subtext. Calling attention to subtext isn’t “fuzzy thinking”; it’s analytical. It’s how meaning works.

Ambiguity isn’t the same as confusion or being false; some truths are inferential. Subtext is where ideology hides.

That’s absolutely a nazi tattoo on his chest.

The fact that someone didn’t continue to respond to you doesn’t make them a liar, however playing dumb about a nazi tattoo you’ve had for 20 years kinda does.

Russia isn’t ‘Israel’; they’ve not been genociding a captive population for the last 80 years. Was America genociding Iraqis when they invaded and Hitchens supported them? does that make him a genocide apologist?

I don’t think the US government makes much effort at intellectual consistency. I think they wanted to make their friends rich who sell weapons and mercenary services, benefit some other friends who buy and process oil, and do something exciting and politically popular.

The point isn’t that the US government pulled off some great subterfuge, many people could see what they were doing, even myself as a teenager. What I take from that is you agree that Hitchens also saw that it was a lie, but went along with it anyways. You realize that’s worse than the first option, right? It also doesn’t make his ‘ideological committment’ look like anything other than thinly-veiled xenophobia/racism.

I cited him as a neocon, because from the left perspective, he was. You can ‘want’ lots of nice things, but if you’re spending your time talking about how it’s actually good that the soul harvester is landing on a civilian population, people are going to conclude that you approve of using the soul harvester on civilians.

Pretty much no one actually does that thing you are accusing (again, at least that I have seen)

Calling people tankies is pretty much the first response people here have to hearing a geopolitical opinion they don’t like, feels like obvious gaslighting for you to say otherwise.

It means that the users exist in protected spaces where it’s hard for people to disagree with them, and so they interpret someone just telling them they’re wrong as this wildly unfriendly act. When was I lacking in nuance?

Philip, you are describing yourself. You are always losing your shit because you can’t interpret someone disagreeing with you as anything other than hostile people lying about themselves. You surround yourself with nazis to complain about the evil troika. I wish I could say I was surprised that you’re digging in so hard to defend a white guy with a nazi tattoo.

Sure, let’s talk about this whole new conservation and topic lol.

my dude we are here having this conversation because you just did exactly that here and I indulged the question, even though it was beside the point.

In my response I picked someone I knew would be a provocative and ironic choice in the context. And now here you are trying to debate me over the surface reading, acting like me explaining my intended subtext to you is changing topics.

If you’re having such an issue with people making broad assumptions based on geopolitical positioning, maybe you should reconsider the extent to which you do that yourself.

I guess “liberal hawk” is maybe similar to “neoconservative” to some extent… at least in the genuine version of it, which is very different from 2000s-era neoconservatism, which was gangster capitalism dressed up in the world’s least convincing disguise of caring about democracy and liberal values.

You say it was not convincing, but it was convincing enough to get all these ‘liberal hawks’ on board with the imperial program. That seems like a pretty damning indictment of anyone who went along with the Iraq war, do you think were they dupes or willing co-conspirators?

The guy in these comments who was claiming he was in the US military…

I have no context for this, if you want me to read a comment chain then link it.

I have routinely pointed out - and linked to - comments from myself and others with lots of upvotes shitting on the Russian government in the troika comms. Shitting on the government for presiding over a capitalist, misogynist hellscape, and groups like CPRF for going along with it.

You have lots of nuance for the dead guy who openly supported a full-scale invasion of a country in order to impose gangster capitalism on it (and bring democracy™️). I know that wasn’t the entire body of his work, I read several of his books prior to that. I am asking you to have that same level of nuance for living communists and anarchists who haven’t written dozens of articles for high-profile magazines in support of a full-scale invasion, but have committed a far worse crime: failing to adhere to the common media narratives while posting on niche internet forums.

apology accepted, anyways the last thing I want is to be taken too seriously.

You definitely didn’t do yourself favors by bringing up Hitchens though lol, because him I do know.

I brought him up because I’m familiar with him as well, I read a number of his books early on in my own political trajectory and it was his full embrace of fearmongering about Islam post 9/11 that turned me off of him entirely. I appreciate that he was principled about waterboarding at least.

bringing him up served my wider rhetorical point that you would cry foul at association of Hitchens with neocons over a geopolitical position, but participate in spaces where a perceived alignment with Russia on geopolitics is all it takes for communists and anarchists to get smeared as secret Republicans, Russian bots, faking being trans, etc.

looks like special pleading

Nothing I saw in anything you linked to made it seem convincing to me that any other ones of these people were neocons either.

hmmm, k.

Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism.

He [Irving Kristol] was dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism”

A socialist in his early life, [Seymour Martin Lipset] later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.

also you flipped it around trying to say (apparently) that genuine neocons can also be considered as Trotskyites because of their “revolutionary posture” which to me is utterly insane.

It’s manifestly not what I said

what makes you think Christopher Hitchens is a neocon? Or is it just that one thing?

It’s his aligning specifically with neocons and writing in support of the full-scale invasion of Iraq that I took issue with. You are asking me to have a charitable read of someone who took an opposing geopolitical position. I hope you can appreciate the irony of the posts you’ve made complaining about communists on lemmy being too aligned with Russia, especially because any ‘support of russia’ that I’ve seen from anonymous posters has been significantly more muted than any of the many articles that Hitchens wrote in support of the full-scale invasion of Iraq.

you keep making broad leaps from my statements, doesn’t make you easy to talk to either. you understand that just because oranges are round not all round things are orange, right?

I said that a number of neocons started their political trajectory as trotskyists, then became neocons later in life. There’s a list of some in the wiki I linked you.

even I would not accuse it of being on the same moral and intellectual level and fighting for the same principles as Bush and Rumsfeld were fighting for.

not sure how you took that from my statement, the point is that neoconservatism preserves Trotskyism’s revolutionary posture while inverting its content: the revolution is now for liberal capitalism rather than socialism.

Ah yes, those famous neocon Trotsky fans. Clearly, your grasp of geopolitics is unparalleled, and not at all based on a fuzzy team sports based value system totally unmoored from reality.

This isn’t my own observation, it’s a well-trod assertion.

Which Trotskyist neocon was your favorite?

There’s been a lot of them, most way predating me. For me it’s probably Christopher Hitchens who started out out as trotskyist anti-stalinist and drifted over time to being in favor of the US-led full-scale invasion of Iraq.

He was the war commissar during the civil war, effectively commander-in-chief of the red army, so he’s kind of responsible for what happened to the anarchist factions in it.

On some level he was going with a party line, but based on how the guy operated and what he was saying I don’t think that was much of a deviation from his actual beliefs.

I think it’s also telling how many former Trotskyists in the US pivoted to being neocon warmongers.

Hey, what do you think of Leon Trotsky? I am just curious.

He was kind of a counter-revolutionary asshole who also happened to be in charge of killing a lot of anarchists, not a fan.

In the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Balkans, in Italy, in Spain, in addition to the so-called Southern type, which is characterized by a combination of lazy shiftlessness and explosive irascibility, one meets cold natures, in whom phlegm is combined with stubbornness and slyness. The first type prevails ; the second augments it as an exception. It would seem as if each national group is doled out its due share of basic character elements, yet these are less happily distributed under the southern than under the northern sun. But we must not venture too far afield into the unprofitable region of national metaphysics." – Leon Trotsky in his biography of Stalin

As soon as you find out a guy has a nazi tattoo you decide it’s time to support the guy 🤔 I mean I knew you were a social democrat but this is really on the nose

If you’re claiming a strong ideological stance, ie being a communist, to be simultaneously claiming ignorance of having a tattoo from one of the largest killers of communists, and having served in the military of the runner-up, makes it hard to trust him or his political understanding.

it’s like a year before the election, surely someone else is able to run.

misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks

don’t get me wrong, I know these exist. I am just expressing skepticism because people on the English speaking Internet will act like every reply they don’t like is a bot puppeteered by foreign intelligence.

It’s just more likely to be a normal person and any state actors are probably going to be focusing on the corporate-run social media spaces

I didn’t take offense! in fact I was making a joke of sorts, I understood your initial meaning.

I view my time spent talking politics on social media with people I don’t like as self-harm, I try to minimize it generally.

the distinction I’d make for hexbear is that by user base it’s also one of the major LGBT instances

not sure what “ultra-tankie” means in this context, because ultras tend to be less into lenin

gotta agree that the instance feuding is pretty toxic though

idk, I’m an adult and I don’t mind it

you: “It’s impossible to have a serious conversation here, so I wish you luck!”

me: okay, I won’t bother responding

you: “woe is me, nobody responded, only downvotes”

idk what you expected tbh