Farmer_Heck

Not a lot on a large scale, our news publications will always demonize the enemies of the state.

But, you can talk to the people around you and try to convince them that China's not at all what Western propagandists tell us about. Some people will be receptive, but others will cut contact with you for so much as implying that China isn't an evil dictatorship that steals organs and imprisons Muslims.

So play it by ear, if it seems like a person might listen about certain things, they might be convincible. But the people who'll argue and fight with everything you say (or even just start to say) are not going to come around on anything, so conserve your energy with those sort. Your mental health will thank you.

This advice stretches to anything else we're propagandized about. Most people will prefer to believe what's widely available to them, simply because that's what we're supposed to conform with. But some will be willing to learn more.

NATO keeps claiming things "aren't escalation" right after Russian officials bluntly state that it is.

It's like poking a wasp nest with a stick and saying "It's okay, this won't anger them" while the nest loudly buzzes with the noise of hundreds of angry wasps.

all of the people who were part of Anonymous who were worth a damn at hacking back in the day work for the state department now. The movement could very likely have been a psyop, given how many high-level hackers from that era there are on government payroll.

I stand in solidarity with the gay furry hackers.

your quotation is wrong. I said "legitimate", not rightful.

"Legitimate", as in they're the dominant governing body within the country and have been accepted by nearly every country as the genuine government of Afghanistan.

And it is fear-mongering. I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, I grew up seeing the US villainize Islam and Arabs in real time. In my youth, we were told that the Taliban were the greatest evil to ever walk the planet. There is a lot to criticise about the Taliban, they're not leftist and their interpretation of Islam is heretical. But they're not the human embodiment of the devil Americans so desperately want to believe they are.

In the instance of this headline, western news publications want people to think "Taliban = hate", then think "if Putin works with the Taliban, that means he endorses them". Thus stoking anti-Russia sentiments by using the decades of anti-Muslim fear-mongering they've been giving us since the 1990s.

Loathesome Dongeater mentioned it, but it's important to realize that the Taliban existed as they did for 20 years to fight against American (and western) Imperialism in Afghanistan, and when the US pulled out of their country they became the dominant political force.

Though the Taliban isn't a group MLs should be rooting for, they are the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and they have been committed to fighting ISIS - a US-grown insurgency in the Middle East & Northern Africa.

Western publications benefit more from just putting "the Taliban" into their headlines than they do from posting "the Afghani government". The fear-mongering associated with two decades of imperialist war in Afghanistan helps their arguments monumentally.

thank fuck

I really hope they meant NazBol, because that's logically what they should've put there.

I am not going to sit through 17 minutes to find out if they made a mistake, or if they simply refused to do any actual research.

Apparently, it was first reported that the F-16 was shot down. Then the story was pulled and replaced with one about it crashing on its own accord.

If the guy who is being reported as "the best pilot in Ukraine" crashed an F-16 during a mission, that says much worse things about the Ukrainian Air Force.

Mind you, Russia has sophisticated anti-air capabilities and can easily dominate Ukrainian airspace if they need to. But, sure, that billion-dollar high-tech jet fighter crashed itself.

It's still too early to say whether or not it's going well, but the Ukrainians have been making decent gains.

I'm assuming the Russian response will come in the coming days or weeks, and the Ukrainian forces will get pushed out. Their stated goal of the operation has already been nullified (and frankly didn't hold water anyways) so I don't know if the Ukrainians will invest many of their resources to keeping that front open, but if they do it could have dire consequences to their overall resolve.

Ukraine is already at a serious disadvantage in its manpower and resources, so this operation (at least to me) looks to be an act of desperation. You wouldn't try something so bold and borderline suicidal if you saw a future otherwise. I won't say this means the war is ending soon, but I will say that the end of the war may have finally crested the horizon.

**update: It seems the Russian response has begun, the RAF are retaking ground in the Kursk region & stopping Ukrainian advances. While ramping up their missile attacks across Ukraine. Prepare yourselves for copious amounts of Ukraine cope from people who don't understand how war works.

the Russian Armed Forces have been making constant gains in the Donesk front, and their dominance on all fronts but the northern Luhansk Oblast operation has inspired Ukraine to launch an invasion into the Kursk region so they can have anything at all to leverage in negotiations.

But sure, it's an "if" situation... and Russia is totally going to lose.

if somebody has the time and the mental ability to sit through this video, i wanna know what the verdict was.

Obvi, in reality, the USSR was a union. Each of the SRs had their own government, made their own decisions, and had the right to petition to leave the Union at will. But anti-communists hate that the USSR had such a fair system, so HM will probably quote directly from those "historians".

moving to a reply for a similar story (really it's a rant) of my own.

My party had a few anarchists in it, they made up something like 10% of the party at a point. A small enough percentage that you can simply ignore them during votes or party motions, but a big enough number that you couldn't ignore them during discussions.

There was one Anarchist who would volunteer themself to speak on behalf of all Anarchists at every discussion, taking personal issue with anything that could possibly upset an Anarchist. A member of the party might want to simply talk about the great technological innovations that happened in the USSR, and that Anarchist would find a way to steer the discussion towards "USSR bad". A member might want to discuss the guerrilla fighting in the Cuban revolution, the Anarchist would go on and on about how Cuba is "an authoritarian dictatorship". This goes so on, and so forth. And every time we tried to bring up the issues that were created by them doing that, the 29 other Anarchists would stand up with them and claim we were trying to make them leave.

Leadership thought it would be a good idea to make them their own wing within the party, so they could be autonomous and have their own discussions apart from the main party discussions. They treated it like we were moving them to the "kiddie's table" and threatened to start disrupting other party functions. A few members of leadership decided, without consulting all of leadership, to appoint that very vocal Anarchist to a seat within leadership to keep them from complaining as much.

Nobody abused the power of leadership in our party like they did. They would make unilateral decisions without asking anyone else.

Later on, we would find out that the whole thing was an ego trip for them. They liked feeling like they were at odds against any authority, so they'd put themself into positions to be at odds with party leadership. When they were put into leadership, they had no idea how difficult the position actually was, so they simply refused to act within the guidelines.