It will also be part of financial handouts to underperforming US tech companies

Buddy nobody is impressed with your media criticism process of regurgitating Media Bias Fact Check and Wikipedia. It's actually an announcement that you have no familiarity with any of this and don't know how to critically consume media yourself. Ironically you're going to mislead yourself by simply uncritically accepting what is written in those two websites.

Rather than searching around for someone else to tell you what to think about The Gray Zone, why not critically engage with the content? What do they cite? What topic are they discussing? Do you know anything about it? To what are they responding? Are their criticisms valid?

I do communist things.

The world is getting better in a lot of ways but this is despite the US, the primary state agent of death and destruction. What we can do is organize together against that while also building local class consciousness and support structures so that as that violent apparatus turns more and more inwards, our neighbors will be (1) less horrible to one another and (2) safer overall.

Surely this other monopoly will save us

"I supported genocidal rage, tried to psychologize and implicitly justify other ways to genocide, gladly accept and repeat the racist language of double standards that allows Westerners to pretend they don't already support apartheid and genocide, but don't you dare call me a Nazi."

Brave has been hyped as a privacy browser despite having several major privacy failures baked into it repeatedly. It's 100% hype. You get the same level of privacy on paper by installing Chromium with an ad blocker and tweaking a couple settings. Firefox has better privacy defaults and is better with an ad blocker installed. Chromium has a slight edge on security (FF needs to really push tab isolation harder) but if privacy is your main concern I would always recommend FF.

I love the combination of insults and degrading what I said while suggesting you never even read it (as you announced you were blocking the instance. Incidentally, instance-level blocking wasn't possible at the time, to my knowledge. That's part of Lemmy v0.19.x.

But not to worry! I'll just share what I said with you again. Be sure to explain how it's uninformed, stupid, and devalues Ukrainian lives! I'm just too big of a dum-dum to figure it out.

whataboutism

It points out the double standards westerners gladly accept in order to favor themselves and disadvantage others. How hollow the rhetoric is. How much rides on accepting propaganda, such as adopting the term "whataboutism" as a way to deflect from valid criticism. That's an old cold war term you picked up, probably from society in general, but it was propaganda to help ensure Soviet criticisms of double standards could be dismissed by Amerikkkans.

Minsk 2, like we don't know Russian army went in there with heavy weapons in 2014 and sponsored separatists

The form of this argument is "whataboutism" btw, lol.

But anyways, Russia's presence in 2014 was at best covert and there's little evidence. They did provide some supplies. However, why would this contradict any points made about Minsk 2? Anyone familiar with the diplomatic efforts knows that the West was far more brutal and aggressive, targeting civilians in Donbas, and repeatedly avoided diplomatic solutions. The (ignorant) rallying cry seems to be that Russia should have unilaterally done everything even while the West did nothing and even escalated. They didn't even honor ceasefires.

that by helping the attacked invaded country, the west is somehow making it worse?

"Helping" is doing the heavy lifting in this sentence. If it's making the situation worse, it isn't helping, is it? The "it" matters. The "it" from the West is weapons, loans, and auctioning off the country to Western corporate interests. The latter two get called "aid" even though they throw the poorest country in Europe into deep debt and exploitation. The former is weapons, it is direct support for the war, and whether that is "helping" depends on your understanding of where this war is going, what the realistic outcomes are, and what unexplored alternatives exist to propping up the UA military.

The simple version is that UA is fucked. It is not going to win and "reconstruction", if it ever comes from the West, will come at the price of foreign ownership, low wages, and further stripped social safety nets. Since it will lose, the question is really: how long do you want this to go on? How many Ukeainians do you want dead? I want none. The US government will accept any number so long as it hurts Russia. Do you accept any amount of dead Ukrainians so long as it hurts Russia? I don't. I want those people alive.

Sending weapons just ensures more and more Ukrainians dying so that the West can "stick it" to Russia. Not so that UA will win. Not so that the outcome is better. So that the outcome is objectively worse, so long as it's "hurting the right people". And all the while, the less horrible options are kept off the table, which is to say, diplomacy. Both by simply avoiding or preventing talks as early as March last year, but by ensuring the Western populace is unable to accept diplomacy at this point. This is why they tell you UA is winning, that Russians are subhuman monsters, etc etc. So that you support endless violence and think diplomacy is a bad idea.

This is also all before we get to the MIC, which drives war to fill its pockets. This is another of the real reasons the "helping" is happening: so that Lockheed-Martin can sell more weapons, keep more millions, all while children are plunged back into poverty. They steal from our children and our lives so that more Russians and Ukrainians may die, and there's always a new target of the violence ready to go for these bloodthirsty monsters.

Had you decided to listen rather than throw a tantrum, you might have learned these things.

Wrong

Its called the CCP in English.

It's called the CPC in English by China, and has been the whole time. Chinese people, including their government, also publish in English.

Folks that say CCP are demonstrating one of two things:

1. They know better but want to play up little cold war word games in their favor.

2. They don't know better and got easily propagandized by the former. Most people are like this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs Starts on the 4th paragraph.

lol. lmao.

Follow your sources and compare them to the claims.

Don't need to know hebrew to know the holocaust was bad.

Neat antisemitism. The holocaust was carried out against people who spoke a variety of languages, including Germanic and Slavic languages, Yiddish, etc. Hebrew was often limited to specific religious events. Jewish people spoke the languages of the societies they were part of.

The corrolary, if you still wanted to make one, would be, "you don't have to speak Polish/German/Ukrainian/Russian/some baltic languages to know the holocaust was bad".

Still wouldn't fit, though, because the holocaust is extraordinarily well-evidenced, well-established fact. In contrast, the claims made about the treatment of Uyghurs are an active matter with dubious characters with clear anti-China interests making most of the claims and with very little evidence. It is germane to point out that most roads lead to a casually antisemitic anticommunist (literally part of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation) that can't speak or read Chinese, let alone Uyghur. That this guy is who is the trusted source for the ever-escalating but poorly-evidenced claims, including and up to genocide.

Amazing how hexbear users make themselves known.

Yeah it's on our usernames.

Japanese passenger rail, by which assume you mean the slower trains and not shinkansen (because shinkansen is in another world of superior experience), is comfy as fuck and reasonably priced. As someone who rode Amtrak, you know neither of those are the case in the US.

The Balts were immediately used as forward positions for NATO and were allowed to keep their state programs and industry. Belarus got the same treatment as Russia.

You should probably know the answer to your own snarky questions before you ask them.