I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but both sides have their defenders and haters making pictures, toons, caricatures etc like this of their opponent, they always have. But it so happens that this particular artist doesn’t like Trump or Biden (same as me).
I live in the US, born and raised. I am queer and a racial minority as well as very politically active. I and everyone I know will be refusing to vote for Biden. He has made nothing meaningfully better since Trump and in fact has made things worse. Regardless of that, I can’t in good conscience vote for someone aiding a genocide. I think everyone who is voting for Biden in the US must be very privileged and unaware or otherwise removed from the effects of the severe decline in living standards under his administration. But even if that weren’t true… he’s aiding a literal mass-child-murder genocide, and by voting for him, I’d feel like I was giving my approval for such a heinous, despicable thing. I wish the democrats had put forward a decent human being that I could vote for, but they didn’t, and I can’t. The US is sliding towards fascism and if you think that won’t keep happening just because the blue team puts their geriatric genocidal guy at the top, I think you’re painfully naive.
Wow. Unironically spouting nazi propaganda in a thread about the nazis being evil. What a load of ahistorical bullshit.
Yes, and it is booming. It keeps outperforming the sputtering western economies by leaps and bounds.
If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two.
Well, sure. But you may as well say “if all countries under discussion magically whisked an army of robot supersoldiers into existence, they’d outpace Russia’s fighting ability by an order of magnitude.” It’s just a pipe dream that ignores the material reality of the entire situation. The countries under discussion can’t ramp up to “full war time economies” because they’ve long ago outsourced nearly all of their production capacity. If right now, they dropped everything else in order to rebuild their productive forces (that they willingly and knowingly dismantled for the sake of finance capital profits and honestly to also prevent domestic labor from having the kind of leverage it used to have) then it would take well more than a decade to get back to the kind of productive capacity necessary to outproduce Russia the way you’re talking about. And that’s if we’re being extremely generous. That’s simply not going to happen for numerous reasons ranging from the greed of finance capital to plain old logistics.
This is the economic imbalance that “Putin knows.” He has known it all along and never needed to undercut western support of Ukraine because of it. The waning support from the west is due to the fact that they’re now realizing what a lost cause Ukraine truly is and that no NATO Wunderwaffen or boomeranging giga-sanctions are going to save them.
subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting
This is just silly. Putin does not have that kind of ability.
believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.
Fantasy land. Cloud cuckoo. Complete failure to understand how geopolitics even begins to work in the age of nuclear powers, or even the meaning of the term proxy war, let alone the material circumstances of the countries you’re talking about.
I personally feel these are the end days of what’s left of the freedom internet.
I hope you’re wrong. I guess that should go without saying. But I don’t know, it seems like they’ve been trying to crack down and been consistently failing at it, which is hopeful. Like youtube’s attempt to make adblockers not work anymore ending up just strengthening uBlock Origin and making it work even better than it did before. lol.
Obviously, google et al have all the power, but even so, they mostly keep losing battles, which is both hilarious and hopeful. I agree that we’re seeing the further enshitification of all the big social media giants and they’re corralling and enclosing the commons more all the time. But I haven’t given up on all the little things that spring up to address that enshitification, like the frontends, like searx, and hell, even lemmy. You were 100% right, we need to evolve, but I would say these things are good mutations that are part of the process of that necessary evolution.
I don’t know, I’m too high rn not to go off on tangents.
The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”
Removed by mod
Also, this whole post is pretty disgusting popularity contest bullshit imo. Still, there are some awesome posters here and there who deserve some sort of meta-recognition.
Not to be too cornball, but there is a core to hexbear. SFS has consistently embodied it since chao.chat days. Comedy is always spot on. One liners are consistently bangers. I mean the guy makes me crack up but also seethe at the same time. Is that not the raison d’être of hexbear? There’s also the human vulnerability. Some here are open about some of the shit they’ve gone through in life, and SFS has been through some fucking hell. I have a lot of respect for that. A good person, a comrade and a comic. There are a number of people here who the site is lucky to have posting. SorosFootSoldier is undeniably one of them.
Lemmygrad isn’t “hated” by most of the wider lemmyverse. There’s just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren’t used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.
It’s no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about “those mean tankies at lemmygrad” (and hexbear too) made by people who can’t take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don’t think most people care enough except to think “oh yeah that’s that instance with those radical lefties, they’re weird but they do make some great memes sometimes.”
Was this image just well known on hexbear or in general? Because I can’t find it anywhere except that it was submitted as an emoji here 2 years ago.
The Ukranian people wanted to join NATO
No they didn’t. It’s part of the reason so many Ukrainians especially in the east and south of the country started movements to try to gain independence from the fascist Ukrainian coup government.
The reason was safety and their fears have been justified by what has happened.
The reason was not safety and hundreds of thousands would not have died needlessly in a proxy war if the fascist coup government had not been installed by pro-NATO western powers. Most Ukrainians were not so stupid as to think striving to join NATO was anything but a road to war, which is what has happened.
And NATO would never invade Russia anyway due to its nuclear umbrella.
No shit. That’s why they’re using Ukraine for a proxy war.
And why would they want to anyway?
There are many reasons they (US/NATO/"the west’) want to destroy Russia as it is. They want another comprador government in Russia that is subservient to their interests, not an independent and powerful state that could become an economic competitor (or at least a major component of an economically competitive bloc). They want to exploit Russia (much as they did after the fall of the Soviet Union) by privatizing everything and selling it off for a pittance to American bourgeoisie, just as they have done and are right now doing to Ukraine. Another way of phrasing that last point would be to say they want unfettered access to Russia’s resources (natural resources, labor, etc.) on their terms, not in terms of the national interest of Russians. They want to want to prevent a multipolar world and maintain their global hegemony. They want a government in Russia they control to put further pressure on China. They want to prevent Europe from buying its energy from Russia so that Europe is entirely dependent on the US for Europe’s continued existence. That last one they have already achieved by destroying the Nordstream pipeline, just as Biden promised he would.
And the rebels in the Donbas are and have always been aligned with the Russian agressors, and against Kiev. Remember they used to fight the Ukrainian army even before the invasion.
Everything you’ve said here is a point against your position (of Russia and the people of Donbas being the aggressors), not for it. First of all, “always” should be replaced with “since 2014.” Think about what you’re saying, “the rebels sided with ‘the aggressors’ even before ‘the aggressors’ did their ‘aggression’!” If some kid on a playground, kid 1, starts beating the shit out of a smaller kid, kid2, and a third one, kid3 steps in and punches kid1 to stop him from killing kid2, would you say “kid2 always sided with the aggressive kid3”? If so, you’re a fucking idiot. I guess the people of the Donbas should have just allowed neo-nazis to ethnically cleanse them? They should have just been ok with scores of union members being burned alive? They should have accepted laws that banned their language and made them (at best) second class citizens? And Russia stepping in on their behalf makes Russia the aggressors, not the fascist coup government waging an ethnic cleansing campaign?
Thank you for this. Very helpful.
every time I research him, I find some new comically disgusting thing he said or did
Other than the HUAC thing, what are other examples?
Definitely. And not just “out of touch,” it’s part of the reason why we have an ancient ghoul openly talking about how he has no empathy for the plight of younger people in that office right now.
The fuck are you talking about? There are all kinds of laws that make something legal or not based on someone’s age, and they often vary by state or even locale. Hell, there’s a minimum age for running for president for chryssake and it’s well past any definition of adulthood.
Good riddance, loser! 😄
A large portion of the personal wealth in America is concentrated in real estate (mortgage debt).
When Obama became president, he could have easily bailed out the 9 million American homeowners (predominantly low income black and Hispanic families), but instead he chose Wall Street, effectively facilitating the largest transfer of wealth from the black community to private capital in history.
In this sense, Obama prevented future generations of black communities from ever becoming homeowners again.
Similar trends are also happening under Biden’s policies today, the so-called “Bidenomics” where black unemployment has risen much faster than other demographics. These are all austerity measures designed to make poor minorities bear the brunt of the economic impact if only to slow the crumbling of the system itself.
But since “the government actually profited” it’s all good, right?