This very well may be fake, but it’s also entirely possible to identify as trans for any number of reasons. You might say such a person is “not really” trans but, supposing that is true, there’s no contradiction between that and some person who doesn’t have such ideological convictions having a thought process like you see in this image and acting on it.
That said, I agree that it’s probably fake, though I’m not as confident that the poster is a cis impersonator.
I may have screwed up in my summarizing of the statement. When I wrote “gain ground” I meant gain support., that’s my bad for doing a terrible job of paraphrasing. What he said in the statement was “[the separatists] were flailing and had comparatively little public backing until Russian troops moved in to support them in 2014.” That’s my bad but I don’t know if what he actually said helps his case.
Then it’s just a [citation needed] issue since they did just fine on the referendums that neoliberals reject out of hand, the Azovites still saw fit to butcher thousands, and the East is consistently interested in a conciliatory stance towards Russia. It’s still a weak argument. What happened? The public only gained enough confidence in them once they got the direct support of one of the larger militaries in the world? Is that an own somehow? Anyone would gain more public confidence when they went from being shelled to shit to actually winning because Russia put its whole fist on the scale.
With regards to finding solace in my fellow students, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. So far everyone in my classes follows a similar line of thinking, even when one girl (who is an immigrant from Latin America) criticized Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” piece we had to read for our holocaust week, in another class she doesn’t pull any punched against the Soviets (essentially equating them to Nazis in how they treated the Polish). Maybe future courses will be better but I won’t hold my breath.
Some people are much easier to disabuse of their shit than professors. Even the person you mention here might be able to be dissuaded. I once dissuaded a student who said “Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators” in a single conversation after class. It’s just a matter of certain stories being normalized and never challenged, but often students are much less attached to specific positions than academics are. If someone takes a rhetorically flimsy point but you don’t feel up to fighting it during class, consider just approaching them after class and just expressing concern. Avoid being mad or confrontational even if you are frustrated and speak to them like they’re a fellow human who is also doing their best but may have been let down by people they trusted to guide them on the right path.
Also consider that there may be people (perhaps like yourself) who don’t agree but just don’t speak up. Sometimes you need to look for more subtle tells than someone shouting in the middle of class “The Maoist peasant uprising against landlords was the most successful and comprehensive land reform in history . . .” etc.
it wasn’t a civil war, they were Russian backed separatists
i.e. Ukrainians, therefore engaging in a civil war
who had so little public support that they only gained ground after Russian soldier boots hit the ground
They weren’t trying to “gain ground”, they were trying to separate the ground they had from Ukraine! Why would a minority in Ukraine seek to totally defeat the Ukrainian military like Russia is doing? That would be suicide to attempt. This dude is a fucking rube.
There is a right wing presence in Ukraine but it is not that pervasive, especially not in the military and government.
Citation fucking needed that Azov does not represent a pervasive issue, or that Holocaust-denying ambassadors don’t. This fucker can only make a claim like this by rewriting history to claim banderites were progressive and then on top of that ignoring the Nazi iconography and actual hate crimes and war crimes committed against other ethnicities. Worthless perspective.
The Red and Black flag is literally “blood and soil”, this isn’t hard. Jesus . . .
These arguments are so bad they refute themselves. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help you all that much since he’s dumb enough to assert them. This guy reminds me of some other well-meaning de facto liberal historians I’ve known. You’re better off trying to find solidarity with students than professors most of the time, unless you can find the odd immigrant or someone whose lived experience encourages them to take a perspective more like yours. It sucks, but you can probably find at least one or two allies.
Even if everyone at your school does suck, remember that you aren’t alone and you aren’t crazy. Being “fringe” is to be expected of decent and informed people when the status quo is monstrous, and in fact I’d say it’s necessary.
It’s not about revanchism but what the better aspects of their heritage are. The current government rejects the SR and endlessly lionizes the OUN and shit like that.
Being “closer to a SR than the Russian Federation is” is like being “closer to a house than an elephant is,” it’s not a useful comparison. Only the most braindead moron takes Russia’s side believing it’s still anything like the SR (contrary to some weird “anti-tankie” claims), they support it for other reasons like, idk, being more accepting of ethnic pluralism or being preferred by Donbas or not lionizing actual perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Do you really think there would be an unironic Ukrainian-flag-waver on lemmygrad? Ukrainian SR, absolutely, but not the blue and yellow.
I didn’t remember, though if this is the AI guy then I did read the post. I still need to question the deeply antisocial behavior patterns when it comes to anything having to do with communication, though.
Not that we shouldn’t give them credit for whatever good they do, we should.
I appreciate your effort to be diplomatic
You might want to reconsider your idea of what they care about, though.
If you’d like to discuss the subject, there are many comms on a handful of instances where people would be happy to!
Comparing yourself to Yezhov is worse than anything we’ve said to you
Just an endless slew of clickbait “China bad” headlines all the time. Really makes you wonder about if there is some sort of systemic problem with western media.
wishing death on the people of NATO (not just memes/quips about dismantling the organisation)
That is not what the phrase “Death to NATO” means, setting aside that “NATO” doesn’t have a “people” as it is a treaty organization, unless you mean, like, the heads-of-state and such who run it, vote in it, etc. In that case, phrasing it as “people of NATO” is the most pseudo-populist thing I have heard in years.
However, we did reach a point where people from Hexbear started defending the Taliban and North Korea.
I think that was just me and what I was saying – which you are wildly misrepresenting – is that I’d rather the Taliban be in charge of Afghanistan than the US, because with a local government rather than a colonial government there is a much better outlook for positive change due to local sentiments (and protest, etc.)
As I told you then and will repeat: I do not like the Taliban. This isn’t about “liking” anyone, it’s about the US colonial occupation not being a model for anyone in the country making progress except for a small handful of compradores.
“I only want a government that doesn’t do good things for me!”
Ten Chinese air force aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defence zone . . . Of those aircraft, the ministry said 10 had either crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which previously served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides, or entered the southwestern part of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, or ADIZ.
For those unfamiliar with the Air Defense Identification Zone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Identification_Zone_(Taiwan)
Not only does it include a lot of water that isn’t part of the Strait, right off of China’s coast, it also includes a portion of Mainland China a few times larger than Taiwan itself.
People like to talk like China is flying jets over Taipei City, but you can fly a plane from one city in Mainland China to another, only passing over land, and be in this zone. Mind you, I don’t think Taiwan having this zone is bad – countries generally should be aware of air traffic nearby – but this is part of a long history of alarmist headlines by western media regarding what is often very uninteresting air traffic in the PRC.
I’ll give them a little bit of credit for even calling China leftwing, but I think that this is more indicative of their turn against democracy and desire for a benevolent monarchy. Their conception of China still looks to be unreconstructed.