• OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Russia wants

    It’s inherently difficult and subjective to speculate about motivations, and doubly so when talking about a country with multiple groups with their own motivations. Of course, in any conflict, enemy countries will be assigned the worst motivations possible, which is why virtually every conflict draws comparisons to Nazis, and the idea that the enemy will just keep attacking forever if they are not defeated. This was said about Vietnam (Domino Theory) and Afghanistan (“if we don’t fight them there, we’ll be fighting them here”). Those examples show that motivations assigned to enemy countries are often inaccurate.

    I don’t think it should be considered “apologia” to express reasonable skepticism that the motivations of a rival country aren’t what some people speculate. Especially when they’re still assigning a negative motivation to said country, just a different negative motivation than the one you assign. That’s kind of a ridiculous degree of purity testing, “It’s not enough to condemn Russia, you have to agree with my exact assessment of their motivations, otherwise you’re doing apologia by condemning them in the wrong way.”

    As they said, they condemn both Russia’s invasion and irredentism in general, so my main point was to correct your misunderstanding, when you asked if “tankies” don’t realize that irredentism leads to negative results.

    • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Trying to divine Russia’s True Motivations for invading Ukraine is a total Red Herring side show distraction in the context of this discussion.

      The problem we’re discussing is that tankies employ definitions gymnastics to escape giving traditionally capitalist negative labels to their beloved authoritarian dictatorships, like “imperialist” and “tyrant.”

      “Russia is not imperialist because they only invade for irredentist reasons” and “Russia is not imperialist because they oppose imperialist nations” are both half-cooked, dumb assertions.

      It doesn’t matter if Russia invades other countries and takes their resources because they think the Bible says they should, because there are people with similar genetics in neighboring countries, or because Putin is bored; it’s still imperialist.

      Imagine if someone said the USA is not imperialist because they’re only bombing Iran to fulfill a biblical prophesy, so they’re actually just theocratic. That’s obviously a ridiculous thing to say and you wouldn’t jump in to defend them because you’re biased to defend tankies but not western capitalists.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        13 hours ago

        I’m not interested in discussing anything else with you until you answer my other comment, because it seems to me that you just blatantly lied claiming you didn’t label the other user a tankie. If you blatantly lied about that conversation, then I should expect you’ll lie about this one too. Even now you’re labelling them a tankie again, after claiming not to.

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          TL;DR: “This comment you just made explains away my confusion so I refuse to respond to it because I am (pretending to be) confused about the other comment you made.”

          • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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            13 hours ago

            Oh look, you’re lying about this conversation too, just like you did the other one! I should know better than to engage with you liberals in good faith.

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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              13 hours ago

              Nope.

              Any reader can see you’re playing silly games. Allow me to make for one less reader of yours thanks to the beautiful Lemmy feature known as: Block.

              +1 in the bucket for my ongoing internal question of “Should I just block lemmy.ml?” Socialists are usually pretty cool, but it seems the tankies tend to flow from lemmy.ml more than other instances.

        • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          I’m not interested in discussing anything else with you until you answer my other comment, because it seems to me that you just blatantly lied claiming you didn’t label the other user a tankie.

          That’s because you have difficulties reading and comprehending English or logic.

          Even now you’re labelling them a tankie again, after claiming not to.

          Speaking of blatant lies…

          • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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            13 hours ago

            I actually agree with you on that. However, “being too prone to using Marxist definitions and terminology” does not warrant labelling them as a “tankie” or “Russian propagandist.”

            That’s not what I was asserting, no.

            Claiming that it’s a blatant lie after I described you calling them a tankie and you replied “that’s not what I was asserting,” wtf you’re just trolling.

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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              13 hours ago

              Claiming that it’s a blatant lie after I described you calling them a tankie and you replied “that’s not what I was asserting,” wtf you’re just trolling.

              You described why I called them a tankie, and your why was wrong.

              It’s not trolling, you’re just too thick or bad at English reading to figure it out.

              Hell, you don’t even read my comments before you downvote them and you call me the troll? Blocking you unless my most recent comment is an eye-opener and you apologize or get back on topic.

              • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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                13 hours ago

                I read all your comments before down voting them, and for the record I’m a native English speaker with a degree. It’s not my fault if you communicate unclearly and then refuse to clarify because “you don’t respect me.” And that when you finally did clarify, you explained that you didn’t call them a tankie for being too prone to Marxist definitions, but for using “definition gymnastics,” which entailed… being too prone to Marxist definitions.