If you don’t care why are you commenting and trying to pretend they don’t know what they’re talking about? You just bailed at the first sign that they do, lmao.
Go educate yourself, liberal, and learn how to be honest with yourself and others.
It is actually common knowledge if you know anything about Ukraine. Most Westerners know nothing about Ukraine and couldn’t even find it on a map, so literally nothing about it except “blue and yellow flag” should be considered common knowledge among them.
Look up Victoria Nuland and her comments on Euromaidan and succession.
Wars end. They either end in a peace deal with give and take or in total capitulation. Ukraine isn’t going to capitulate Russia, so you’re just in favor of prolonging war at the expense of Ukrainians. This is consistent with liberals’ general dehumanization of Eastern Europeans.
These kinds of threads are full of armchair warmonger repeats “infinite arms and Ukrainian blood against the Russians”, just repeating generic Russophobic rationalizations that justify infinite war. When the monstrosity of their views are pointed out, when they are reminded that Ukrainians are people and they want peace, out come the accusations and namecalling. Russian bot! Shill! Absurd and idiotic, but above all, playing with racism they can get away with, possibly liberals’ favorite activity next to misogyny they can get away with and homophobia they can get away with. Like an image of Putin in drag or making our with Trump.
You can verify yourself that there are variations of some of these things in this very thread. It’s just a game to these people, abstract rhetoric.
Everything I Don’t Like is a Russian Plot: A Baby’s Guide to Geopolitics
Ukraine’s strategy is to expel the invader and ask for any and all assistance in the defense of their country from Russia’s war of conquest.
Ukraine is not a sovereign country. Its affairs are dictated by the Western countries that pushed Euromaidan, selected its subsequent president, ensured the failure of Minsk II, and now support endless war to the last Ukrainian. So far as I can tell, there is not much strategy to Ukraine outside of “keep fighting”, and their overall strategy has been absolutely desolating for the population, throwing people into meat grinder after meat grinder, which Russia finds an acceptable status quo.
All of the help from Poland, the UK, the US, Baltics, Germany, and other European countries is massively appreciated.
Is it appreciated by those being forcefully conscripted? What about the majorities who want a negotiated peace? Perhaps they do, but don’t let this get in the way of understanding that endless escalation and war is not popular, and this is nevertheless what is happening.
More is requested and it’s good to see the UK is stepping up in a much bigger way to assist in their defense.
If you had read the article, you would know that it’s about (1) austerity cuts justified by (2) general fund increased “defense” spending, not specifically for Ukraine-based arms. The only mention of Ukraine is Starmer’s unhinged comments about potentially sending troops to Ukraine, i.e. NATO member troops to Ukraine, which is, again, only an escalation.
As I already mentioned, the goal of endless arms to Ukraine is one of escalation and using Ukrainians as fodder against Russia, not actually helping the country. The country is already ruined, it has been sold off to these OECD countries for a song (or for “defense”, as the propaganda term would put it). Some “aid”, getting UA’s land and industries in return! Some “aid”, i.e. loans with interest!
The UK intervened to stop peace negotiations early on and was complicit in undermining the implementation of Minsk II.
Like other OECD countries, the UK was and is happy to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia, no matter how many Ukrainians die. Their strategy is to escalate, not defend.
The UK should be abolished.
“Defense”.
Funny how that translates into bombs against brown people in their own country.
Sam Altman has refused to even provide evidence for this. His claim only has legs due to implicit sinophobia in his audience.
Then you need to work on your empathy and understanding of geopolitics.
Some of this is good advice but I recommend evaluating every protest, having a real plan for transportation and a buddy system, and trying to be as secure as possible by default and only making exceptions when necessary.
Most of the guide is about phones and how they can leak information. The only surefire way to prevent your phone from leaking location information to show you were at a protest is to leave it at home. That should be your default. The next option is to use a burner, but you must be very careful about when you charge your burner and turn it on, as you never want it to be on near where you live or work. Cell signals can be triangulated to a few block radius. The next option is put your phone in airplane mode and turn it off. Your phone is now an emergency device, you won’t turn it in at the protest unless a safety critical situation develops, such as being separated from your group by police or other right wing violence. Under no circumstances should you use your main phone to coordinate day-of at any event. If you are an organizer, use a burner to do this. This is also a reason to not use Signal for day-of coordination, as it will pressure you to either turn your burner on at home so that you can coordinate or associate your signal account with other devices traceable to your home or work. Walky talkies are best but Signal alternatives like davel suggested are also better.
Also, cover your face and wear sunglasses.
The entirety of their logic is myopic electoralism handed down to them by the most insufferable party climbers imaginable. If you are against their neoliberal blue genocider, you must be for the other tean’s red neoliberal genocider, because all of politics must be condensed to the next / the last election day and which neoliberal horse may win it.
You’re talking to people that want to continue rationalizing their tacit, frequently racist support for genocide, and their easiest out has always been to say, “but Trump is worse”. They have never done the introspection required to look at their own personal role as a political being beyond what they’re told to do by the Democratic Party and their donors: slacktivist vote shaming, always presuming the high ground for themselves (even while tolerating genocide!), and doing as little as possible on the ground outside of minor exercises in false catharsis like a cop-escorted, permitted march or an ignored letter writing campaign.
When challenged on this by people on the left that do read and do self-reflect, these are the folks that responded in bad faith, even when the context is genocide, because they have made politics into an extension of their egos rather than a project to which to subordinate yourself and devote real work to.
Whining about .ml is their way of pretending to be vindicated every time Trump does something bad, as they cannot actually argue against what the people in .ml say, they must rely on inventions and emotional implications.
In short, many on .ml vocally opposed supporting genociding Democrats. None that I’m aware of expected Trump to be better. At best, a roll of the dice.
Jokes that only Himmler would find funny.
Scratched liberal.
They also list South Africa, where Westerners love to give themselves all of the credit via boycotts when in actuality fighting Apartheid used all means available and necessary, including escalating violent campaigns and associated political parties who were the main representatives at negotiations.
Most examples of “non-violent” liberation (in some cases I should say “liberation”) are like this, it is a PR campaign putting a microscope on their preferred group or “movement” and failing to discuss the totality or criticize the incompleteness of outcomes and how this could relate to an adherence to nonviolence.
Example: MLK was notoriously incorrect about the propaganda power of seeing participants in nonviolent direct action arrestes and hurt by cops. Most people, particularly whites, disliked King, thought he and his methods were too extreme, and opposed the movement. They won impact through organizing ground game, by turning an increasing number of people out. But their wins were incomplete and King was martyred when trying to pivot to capitalism as the main racial oppressor that would live on after the legislative concessions. The groups he was active in fell apart or became a recuperated part of the system he opposed, many of his compatriots killed or houndes into silence by the FBI and local cops, and of course, black people still face mountains of discrimination and disadvage today, particularly by the “subtle” effects of the economic system. We should potentially blame nonviolence for the collapse of the movement, as it wed itself to bourgeois electoralist concessions and primed it to accept that as sufficient rather than steeling the public for a protracted fight that would not rest until liberation, e.g. New Afrika.
I’ll go through some other examples from this database.
Soviet Bloc Independence campaigns after the fall of the USSR. These were, by and large, primed by CIA-funded “civil society” organizations that congealed around liberalization (read: privatization) campaigns. Some employed violent coups to accomplish this while their states were weak due to a diminished Moscow. But in what world is the backing of the dominant superpower simply a win for non-violent action? The knife was already at their throats, they would receive the shock therapy treatment like Russia or Ukraine if they did not fall in line. Rather than an example of the power of grassroots non-violent organizing, these are examples of a great powers struggle. And once the liberal parties were in power, they enacted their privatization with brutal violence.
The Arab Spring. This was not non-violent and it largely failed due to disorganization and a lack of militant discipline. It was another case of cooption snd defanging by “civil society” style groups, but different ones this time. No Arab Spring uprisings led to a better country for their people, for liberation, for the demands sought. They list Mubarak and then fail to mention Morsi and Sisi or explain why they head the new government or what the military had to do with it. They just vaguely tut-tut Egyptians about not “keeping” the “freedom” they had won.
Latin American non-violent campaigns were essentially all crushed with violence via US-backed military coups or are otherwise misrepresented. Carlos Ibañez del Campo was removed via coordinated strikes and protests that were not non-violent. They had to fight cops. But all of this is simply called non-violence rather than organized class struggle. They list the overthrow of Pinochet without mentioning that Allende was deposed in a US-backed coups or that Chile more or less retains the Pinochet dictatorship constitution. The single man was removed from power (and allowed a comfy retirement in the US) but the system was left in place. And again, not a simply non-violent campaign and again one premised on class struggle and collective labor power.
They incorrectly label the GDR a dictatorship and fail to accurately describe the outcomes, which were primarily the DDR illegally annexing the country, stripping it for parts, and impoverishinh the people there. They don’t mention that East Germans preferred their own country and state nor that, with these conditions imposed and left parties bsnned, East Germany is still comparatively poor and is now far right. And, again, this was something pushed and funded by the US.
Note that this article was written by George Lakey, the academic behind this database. As a tenured professor for decades and now emeritus, he has no excuse for these gross cases of ignorance / omissions. He is literally paid to think about such things, to spend the time to skeptically investigate and question his own biases. But of course, such people are recruited and funded and promoted precisely bevause of their bias and selective incompetence.
Constantly replying is really driving home how much you don’t care.