NATO is seeking to take control of decision-making powers on future aid packages — normally led by the US — in an effort to limit the impact of a potential second Donald Trump presidency on the ongoing conflict.

This is wild. It's bad enough that the US president has the power to start wars wherever he wants with no congressional approval. But now they're trying to make it so that the only people with the authority to withdraw from a conflict are unelected NATO officials accountable to no one.

Dronies will support this, because they love endless war across the globe and want to remove any potential for popular support to achieve peace.

RFE also "objectively" had nothing to do with the CIA for nearly 20 years after it was created, at which point it turned out the CIA had been funding it all along. But now we know they've stopped because they said they did, and anyone suggesting that they're not editorially independent is a paranoid loon, just as they would've been in the 50's and 60's.

Some of us don't believe that the people whose job it is to lie stopped lying because they said they did. Suggesting that the CIA is still doing things that they did regularly and successfully kept hidden in the past is not a conspiracy theory.

...I said "Excerpt from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds," because it's, uhh, an excerpt from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds.

I copied it from a pdf of the book I cited because I found it relevant. Really, if you want to fully understand how fascism and communism are different and not comparable, you should read the whole book. I know, I probably sound like a crazy person for suggesting that people read a whole entire book to better understand politics instead of going off vibes, but that's just how I roll I guess.

Replace the word race with party

That's a pretty significant difference, don't you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.

The Ukrainians could stop this war anytime they want

The Ukrainian government could, the same government that banned every political party that wasn't sufficiently anti-Russia. And the last time the people got to vote, they elected Zelensky who ran as a peace candidate. So no, the people of Ukraine, the ones being drafted and sent to the front lines, have very little say over whether Ukraine negotiates for peace.

Yeah, but like, they are their worst countrymen. Nazis and such.

Regular people are being drafted, it's not just Nazis dying.

Hmm, I wonder why they didn't include what their posts said

:::spoiler emoji

Oh, like China?

You guys have been getting paid!? The whole time??

Hexbear is a large, leftist instance, that just recently federated, and most of us are pro-China. We're not bots and we're not getting paid, but we're not shy about our political views. That's the reason you're suddenly seeing a bunch more comments defending China.

You're right, what does it matter that every Chinese person gets to live twice as long as they used to, if the process of getting there wasn't perfect?

Your carefully researched and insightful rebuttal has convinced me. I hate massive increases in life expectancy now. Clearly, we have no choice but to abandon communism

Famines were extremely common before the CPC came to power. Most Chinese people lived in extreme poverty, and life expectancy was less than 35, with no significant improvement under the KMT. In between Mao coming to power and his death, life expectancy in China nearly doubled. Today, average life expectancy in China has exceeded that of the US, a feat that would've been unimaginable back then.

It's true that Mao made misteps (which the CPC readily admits), but those specific, dramatic events have been disproportionately elevated to obscure the more general trend, which has been drastic improvements in the lives of the people of China.

Of course, in addition to minimizing the frequency and severity of famines in pre-industrial China, your history books likely did not place the same level of blame on the British for the intentional famines which Ireland and India were subjected to, in which Britain did not only refuse to provide aid to their colonial subjects (often on the express basis that it would motivate people to work harder), but also did not cease their plundering - in both cases, food was exported out of the country while the people starved.