To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

it’s literally just protectionist policies by the US that have to be justified by something else for whatever reason

One useful thing this conflict has done is reveal who would have absolutely, 100% been fine with Hitler’s policies when living in Nazi Germany. Not even the ongoing extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank - millions of people - is sufficient to snap you out of your election fetishism? Biden is continuing most of Trump’s policies. He’s building Trump’s wall. The suite of laws opposing the LGBTQIA+ community is happening under his presidency. Deportations and child imprisonment at record pace. Abortion rights were lost under his watch. The only reaction you are capable of having to this is “Well, imagine how much worse it would be if Trump was the one doing it!” because this is all a giant game to you. You don’t have to focus on basic survival, on keeping yourself alive and fed for the next month, and thus considering possibilities outside of the finely-curated electoral circus that your eyes were so expertly programmed to consume. If you were actually affected by any of these policies, you wouldn’t be arguing between President Who Will Take My Rights Away #1 and #2, you would be trying to form organizations and survival networks to survive the storm. Any mental or physical effort spent on these elections is wasted energy.

You are the most pliant, brainwashed people in human history. You are completely content to watch every minority around you get fed into the grinder because it’s “lesser evillism”. First they came for the trans people. Then they came for the immigrants. Then they came for the black people. Then they came for me, and as I got on the train on the way to the gigantic human flesh grinding machine, I thought “Well, at least Mango Mussolini isn’t putting me on this train! Boy, if the Republicans were doing this, it would REALLY be fascism!”

Genuine question - how many people would Biden have to kill for you to not support him anymore? A million? Ten million? A hundred million? A billion?

I’ve accepted at this point that I have to make notes in order to remember things from books. Not just textbooks but theory as well. I think “reading without understanding/memorizing” can still be a nice activity if it’s something unimportant like fiction where the point is just the activity of doing it without necessarily needing to remember any of the detail.

Yes, they love to talk about how their governments failing are the fault of everyone else

Alright, here’s a fun experiment we should try: you know what America did to North Korea? Let’s allow, say, China, do the same thing to America. That includes:

• Destroy almost literally every single building in the country, including factories, hospitals, and schools.

• Kill 15-20% of the entire American population.

• Destroying all the irrigation dams and other structures so that farming is made incredibly difficult.

• Bombard the country with so many bombs that the people are forced to live underground and only farm at night.

I think this will be a fair experiment to see if American capitalism can compare with socialism when the rubber meets the road.

Don’t you dare call me a fucking liberal.

By and large, we are only hostile to those who are hostile to us first. Perhaps the onus is on you to stop spewing hyperreactionary sewage onto the internet that is easily disproven by even 10 minutes of research, rather than expecting us not to respond when you say that shit and then acting like “Oh, golly gee, golly me! I could not have foreseen that people would have been angry at me when I stated this godawful take!”

Starting out conversations by calling us genocide-denying fascists who are only pretending to be LGBTQIA+ for plausible deniability is obviously going to get you fucking swarmed in return, don’t act like you didn’t do anything and you’re just a poor little meow meow trying to have civil discussions

they have no idea how anything works, they can’t downvote, they’re easy to ban, and they are so damn fun to troll.

ironically enough, this was a large portion of the reason why we federated with you - fascists like you haven’t read a book or essay since high school and so fucking easy to dunk on, so we wanted to have some fun with you. it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel, you make it too straightforward.

unfortunately the only line you can say is “buuuhhhh Xinjiang Xi Jinping genocide?!?!!” so there’s no real constructive discussion happening anywhere here, we can write pages and pages of well-referenced prose in response and all we’ll get is “ How’s the weather in Beijing, Chinese bot?” so it’s like, what are we even doing anymore.

but, despite that fact, I vote Nay, because dunking on you is extremely entertaining and a learning experience for everybody

literally 95% of my interactions with other instances’ liberals have been them saying something absurdly reactionary and not expecting to receive any pushback for having dogshit takes, and then going “Ohoho, the Hexbear tankie redfash have arrived to defend the CCP and Putler’s regime! Why am I not surprised!” without offering even the slightest counterargument because they know they have none

we have cultivated a community of genuine good-faith discussion on Hexbear over the last three years and we aren’t about to lose it

perhaps North Korea might be in a better condition if the United States didn’t murder a fifth of their entire population and raze every single building to the ground

North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period. Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s. Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans. Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

usually how conversations go is this

1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk

2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect

3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like “Oh, so you’ve come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it’s much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you’re wrong because of [link to wikipedia]”

4. we then start dunking given that they aren’t operating in good faith

perhaps reddit’s typical style of “debate”, where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of “You’re wrong, here’s why you’re wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don’t then you’ll start screeching ‘CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH’ at us”

additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven’t for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I’ve seen arguments become people just saying quotes like “Well, communism works on paper but not in practice” and “If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither” or “Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?” and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily “when you have elections” or if there’s something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner’s knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I’ll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.

no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don’t “contribute to the discussion”, no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into “I dislike you and/or the point you’re making and I’m not going to explain why. fuck you.” disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or “struggle sessions”) rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it’s by far the healthiest online community I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. it’s also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of “if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can’t downvote” means that we’re all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.

Part of that equation, for my point of view, includes the ability for people to think and speak freely without fear of reprisal by the government

This is like the people who say “We’re freer than the Chinese because I can call Trump a peepee poopoo pants on Twitter without being arrested!” when that doesn’t actually do anything at all

but if you try and protest and change conditions materially and meaningfully, you can absolutely bet your ass you will be disappeared like the horror stories you find on reddit about “totalitarian regimes”. The only reason why Americans don’t think it doesn’t happen in the West is either because it’s so completely internalized that it becomes memeified (“Haha, I hope the FBI agent watching me through my camera is having a nice day!”) or none of the media that they engage with reports on it.

IMO, this entire point is just a liberal ideological bludgeon, a condition that can be applied at-will to any government they want to criticize because no government will be good enough all of the time. it’s one thing if you’re an anarchist and oppose every government equally for not fulfilling that condition, that I can understand and respect, it’s quite another when you’re like “Oh, no, I hate authoritarianism! That’s why we need to constantly criticize a country on the literal other side of the planet 99.7% of the time, and then only criticize our own country when somebody calls us out on it by saying ‘Oh, yeah, America also does bad things too!’” Especially when America’s role in the world for the last century at least, and more accurately really since its conception, has been a source of capitalist reaction across its whole hemisphere and later the whole planet, with hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and tens of millions directly and indirectly killed in wars. Criticizing, say, Cuba or DPRK for these sorts of things is effectively zooming in on a single corpse in righteous indignation while ignoring the seas of blood spilled by America behind you.

we must all kill the liberal part of our brain, every single day

when my local stores here in the UK have QR codes in them showing their websites I’m going to start complaining about the tyrannical British regime that forced them at gunpoint to put it in the window

The flip side of this more equitable trade system is one dominated by corporations. There is considerable concern among European NGOs that the Energy Charter Treaty, which gives investors the right to sue governments over policies that adversely affect their investments, is making headway in the Global South even as European governments announce their withdrawal from the treaty and begin to remove corporate-friendly provisions, like Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses, from trade treaties.

The EU, along with the United States and several European governments, is also exploring what it calls “just energy transition partnerships” (JETP) with key countries like South Africa and Indonesia. These partnerships, focused on decarbonization, are a kind of Green structural adjustment program that pushes for reform of the economies of the target countries. But these JETPs differ from country to country and offer a possible opportunity for civil society in the Global South to critique Green colonialism and offer alternatives.

One mechanism gaining ground in recent years are debt-for-climate swaps. For countries in the Global South struggling with unsustainable debt repayments, the idea of reducing the burden through the protection of nature or the implementation of adaptation policies will be attractive. International financial institutions are quite bullish on these swaps. But most analyses suggest that they won’t substantially reduce either global carbon emissions or the debt burden of heavily indebted countries.

It all feels like one of those movie scenes where somebody is trying to escape from somebody else by throwing random shit and pulling down shelves to slow them down.

“We need to abolish the imperialist relationship.”

‘Okay, how about, uh, JETPs!’

“No, this isn’t enough, your corporations are exploiting the planet in search of infinite growth, we need to fundamentally change the economic system.”

‘Debt-for-climate swaps! Carbon capture and storage! Let’s give more money to local communities instead of those corrupt national governments! Random bullshit, go!’

the end result is that in 30 years time, there will be a bunch of retrospectives like “Oh, all these different and very impressive sounding ideas only reduced our emissions by 5% over the whole period, who could have possibly seen this coming? To make it up to the hundred million people who died in the 2044 Equator Incident, and the thousands being gunned down on the Turkish border every day, we must try our next idea: you get one bazingacoin for every tree you plant!”