What drives us ultimately is our material conditions. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. BTW, Harris’ dad is a Marxist, which is where I’m sure her comment sprang from.

If you’re willing to do that for the US state, there’s certainly money to be made.

Essentialist bullshit. You may as well say, from feudalism to capitalist settler-colonial genocide & slavery to imperialism: this is all we know.

I’ll take the CCCP, or even modern Russia—as shitty as it is—over this:

• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• A Detailed Chronological List of US Interventions, Invasions, Destabilzations, and Assistance to Oppressive Regimes (ending in 2002)
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• Shock therapy (economics)
• Are We The Baddies?
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• Michael Parenti: Africa is Rich

Do you believe the elections in Russia are held fairly?

Putin seems to be genuinely popular, so how fair the last presidential election was is somewhat moot. I think he had a clear majority regardless. Russians have good reason to like him: he kicked the Western capitalist neoliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country. It’s still a capitalist shithole, but at least it’s their shithole and not a neocolonized state anymore.

it looks like Russia actually did hold elections for their own government within occupied Ukrainian territory.

I can’t speak to the quality of those elections. Eastern Ukraine had been in a civil war with western Ukraine for almost a decade, and many eastern Ukrainians wanted a Russian intervention, but I’m no expert and couldn’t say what percentage wanted one. Back in 2014, Crimea was very easy to annex, because most Crimeans wanted to be annexed. And they fared better than their friends to their north, who suffered almost a decade of attacks by western Ukrainian Banderites.

The US has wanted to Balkanize Russia ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, as laid out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard. It especially wants to now that, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has kicked the Western neocolonial/noeliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country.

The US used Ukraine as a pawn to engineer this confrontation, with the hopes of Russian regime change, or better still Russian Balkanization. The US wanted this war. It worked for decades to create this war, much like it worked to create the Soviet-Afghanistan war decades before, to weaken the Soviet Union. The US does this kind of thing all the time.

Imagine if Russia (or say China) were expanding its “defensive alliance”* into south & central America, and making plans to expand it further, right up to the California–Texas border, which would likely lead to “defensive” nuclear weapons right on our back porch. Maybe they’re in talks with Canada as well, in an effort to “contain” the US. And imagine also if there were a large American-speaking population in northern Mexico, which were being ethnically cleansed with tacit assistance by the Mexican government. Realistically—regardless of what is internationally legal (which the US usually ignores anyway)—what would the US do?

*NATO, BTW, is not a defensive alliance.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Counterpunch, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

Right: iT WAs uNProVoKEd!

• 1: NATO expansion
  • George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
  • Jeffrey Sachs, May 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
  • Jeffrey Sachs, Sep. 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine
• 2: US-backed western Ukranians ethnically cleansing eastern Ukraine
  • Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
  • Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
  • Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
  • BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
  • Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
  • Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
  • The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
  • The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
  • WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
  • Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
  • The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
  • openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
  • Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
  • Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
  • Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
  • Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
  • NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide
  • History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

I don’t know. How should Ukraine have held an election when it has banned eleven political parties? Ukraine had a US-backed coup ten years ago[1][2]. It is nothing close to a democracy.

You may as well ask, what would happen if the Democratic party were a different party?

The DNC pulled out all the stops to keep Sanders from the general election, twice. They can absolutely win elections, when they want to block any movement toward the left.

I recommend listening to this: Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed

She spent a million of it on this chat with Oprah.

conflict with a dictator

Only one of these leaders is unelected, and it’s not the one you think.

Putin will happily send every last Russian in to the meat grinder before he accept defeat

I doubt that, but its moot since Russia would inevitably win this war of attrition without having to do it. Also, the whole Russian meat grinder/meat wave thing is just recycled WWII Nazi war propaganda BS.

now that he has his American buddy back in place

CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016

now with added musk funds

Right, Enron Musk is personally keeping the Russian economy afloat with his own money 😂 This one really takes the cake.

If this were about the survival of his people then he wouldn’t have scuttled the Minsk Agreements. And he would have taken a much better peace deal ~2.5 years ago then he’ll ever get now, saving tens to hundreds of thousands of his people’s lives. But it isn’t about the Ukrainian people, it’s about the Ukrainian state and his own hide. It’s certainly not about the men being dragged off the streets by conscription squads and shoved out to the front line to die.

I guess the US security state is having trouble containing socialism. Full spectrum dominance is having a bad decade.

It is difficult to get Drezner to understand that American exceptionalism is already dead when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢

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Maybe. I don’t think anyone knows what Trump will do, including Trump himself. He’s all id and no ideology.

The Houthis are the only Iranian proxy

The iron-clad rules of Western corporate publishing:

1. You must always call Hezbollah or Insar Allah Iranian proxies.
2. You must never call Israel or Ukraine US proxies.

Yeahno. The Lemmyverse doesn’t revolve around you. Curate your own fucking feed.

No? Despite Imperial core sanctioning efforts, Russia is doing fairly well. You wouldn’t know it from Western government propaganda or Western corporate media, though.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=RU&start=2019&end=2023

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