GarbageShoot [he/him]

nor is it to “de-Nazify” Ukraine

I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it’s crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.

If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he’d obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

Don’t you know that Stalin owned the whole Soviet Union?!?

I don’t see what the Zionist entity has to do with this, it’s not like they claim to be communist (though that would be a funny bit). I was talking about your reference to “dictator states” since Cuba surely is one of them, being communist.

I wish you wouldn’t believe what those very plutocrats you disavow tell you about Cuba.

Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.

Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.

Eco is not a definitive authority and his little checklist is extremely ahistorical.

tl;dr: You’re deeply disingenuous and talking to you is a waste of time.

Maybe spend . . . more time getting a sense of humor

It wasn’t a joke

Never believe that [reactionaries] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [reactionaries] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I called it! Though I suppose it was plain enough by the time I came across it.

Faux-populist rhetoric is not a Marx thing and Magats are absolutely not opposed to big business. It’s like Trump’s only thing that he’s a billionaire due to real estate and other related fields.

Have I finally met that unicorn of perfect ignorance for whom the “Trump Is a Leninist” thinkpieces were written for? I’m just dying to know what part of Marx is used by Republicans!

Turns out most people despise rentiers

It’s countless layers of hypotheticals away from reality and I think recommending bourgeois governments liquidate their bourgeoisie is silly in the way that, in medieval times, recommending the kings of the world abolish noble titles and the monarchy is silly, you aren’t going to get these institutions to just kill themselves. What I support is the proletariat, by reason of having class antagonism with the bourgeoisie, fighting a war against the former’s control of the state.

What do you support?

That depends on if you do or do not want to fight a global revolutionary war against the bourgeoisie, since they would never allow such a thing to succeed in their liberal republics

No, the 2% is for the ones who obey the law, and is enforced with something more like 100% for those who break the law.

Capital flight only exists where it is allowed to exist. It is possible and, in fact, advisable to have laws allowing for the seizure of assets in such a scenario.

But there are some logistical difficulties involved in holding an election in a country currently being invaded, especially with the invasion being broadly successful.

Is that also why they banned all those opposition parties? They were just getting in the way of executing the war?

Russia did hold elections and is “liberal democratic” but Russia has hardly been turned into a warzone in the same way. There are probably other examples worth citing.

No need to resort to incoherent name-calling.

Russia invaded Ukraine, but war is not genocide, as much as the banderite government likes to turn everything into genocide to minimize their history of the original Banderites and other collaborators perpetrating the actual Holocaust.

If Russia wanted to carry out the war in a way that involved genocide, just carpet-bombing cities or things like that, it absolutely could, it has maybe the second or third strongest air force in the world. Luckily for everyone involved (other than perhaps frontline Russians), Russia knows that it shouldn’t do that, and so it isn’t.

I don’t see why you feel the need to so readily call people who disagree with you fascists. I don’t think you’re a fascist, I just think you’re a well-meaning individual who was tricked by the PR of a liberal-fascist alliance. What would make me a fascist? I certainly don’t like Russia, I don’t have some fantasy of the Eurasian peninsula united under the Russian Federation. I’m not here to tell you that Putin is a good guy, he’s a mafioso like you see at the head of most liberal states. I’ve got no problem with people speaking Ukrainian, though I sure wish they’d find a better national hero than, it must be repeated, a literal perpetrator of the Holocaust, but I also think those weirdos in Russia who worship the pogromist Tsar Nicholas II should get a better idol as well. Please, tell me what kind of fascist I am.