Russia is no more a dictatorship than the US or Ukraine are. They’re all oligarchies, run by the consent of the bourgeoisie. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

Putin actually is popular. Russians have good reason to like him: he kicked the Western capitalist neoliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country, whom Yeltsin let in. It’s still a capitalist shithole, but at least it’s their shithole and not a neocolonized state anymore.

Russia isn’t “full” of Nazis, though it certainly does have some fascists. I don’t know where you get that from. It’s not like you provide any evidence for your assertions.

Unless Germany also has something called “OSHA,” that’s not what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is about.

I think we saw the worst case already when lemm.ee shut itself down. Some communities moved to other instances. Some lemm.ee content still lives on in the database “cache” of other instances and is accessible.

That depends almost entirely on the instance. Lemmy.ml is the one that the Lemmy devs use for beta testing, and yet it’s still more reliable than many.

AFAIK, all Lemmy instances run on a shoestring budget, because there’s no revenue model. There’s only self-funding out of personal passion and possibly donations, and five nines is expensive.

This post is three days old, this thread is buried deep, and the only people still here are ones who you’re not going to convince because they know you don’t know what you’re talking about. It is you who are repeating propaganda, as if we haven’t heard it all a thousand times before.

We know all the same things you know and a whole lot of things you don’t, because we’ve actually investigated. If you have a commitment to the truth and the luxury of time, you can, too. Previously.

ADVENT was the first computer game I ever played, on a DECWriter III terminal connected to a PDP-11. I wasted so much paper. I could only play it when no one was around because it used so much memory that the other three terminals couldn’t be used.

Sure, “good vs evil” is the stuff of superhero movies and corporate media.

Your position is Russian isn’t imperial or fascist?

Yes. Previously:

Russia, if given its druthers, would be imperialist, but since it presently doesn’t, it presently isn’t. Putin tried to join NATO once, to join the imperialist club, but that was rejected, because the US wanted Russia Balkanized & plundered instead. Russia has figured out it’s better off allying with Global South countries than attempting imperialist adventures upon them. And this war has accelerated that allyship.

Previously:

It’s not like there are no fascists in Russia. There’s Aleksandr Dugin (who people keep absurdly claiming is Putin’s right-hand man), and there was Western liberal darling Alexei Navalny.

your so-called “imperial core”

The term is hardly mine and hardly new. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Imperial_core

is more fascist and/or imperial that we should ignore Russia’s?

It is, though that doesn’t mean we should altogether ignore Russia’s faults; it too is a capitalist state, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Russia isn’t anti-imperialist by ideology but by circumstance.

…And they deleted their July 2023 account.

For the world.

If by the world you mean the imperial core, then yes.

Giant repressive capitalist dictatorship

You mean the United States?

full of fascists

I don’t think you understand fascism. Previously:

• Michael Parenti » 🔈 Fascism, The False Revolution
• Gabriel Rockhill:
  • Fascism: Now You See It, Now You Don’t!
  • Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime
  • The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discreetly Internationalized It

Worse for whom?

Imagine being so communist and/or anti-American that you can’t criticize a fascist capitalist state over a liberal capitalist state.

Robert De Niro to the rescue

that’s contradicted by the fact that it’s mostly Ukrainians themselves fighting, even if armed by allies.

Which Ukrainians?

• The oligarchs running the state?
• The Banderite fascists?
• The eastern & southern Ukrainians, who, after the Maidan coup, declared independence from an unelected government, and were subsequently terrorized by the Banderites for nearly a decade, with tacit and overt support from the Ukrainian and US governments?
• The western Ukrainians who want the war to end?
• The men being kidnapped off the streets and pushed to the front lines against their will?

 
Previously: If not for the US/NATO, this war wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Previously:

Honest question from a non-communist, based on your reply here. Does one need to support Putin to be a Marxist?

In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.

Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.

Previously:

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• Internationalist 360°, 2022–2024: History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

Previously:

NATO expansion:

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

 
NATO in general:

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

Usually whatever the default serif typeface is. What I care more about is flush left (“ragged right”) alignment, ideally with automatic hyphenation. I find justified alignment very distracting.

Problems with justification » Typographic anomalies

Gracias por nuestro pan diario, Jesús.

WSWS has an okay MBFC Credibility Rating.

Not that MB/FC is credible. Previously. Previously.

Ambiguous title is ambiguous ಠ_ಠ

This retort unfortunately never works, because they’ve only ever heard lies about Russia’s motivations and desired outcomes—falsehoods about what Russia would consider to be “winning.”