Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them?

Our instance doesn't show any externally hosted images, it's not about what's in the image idiot

correct, we don't allow racism or bigotry on our instance, fashie. sorry that offends you.

classic centrist move, idk why people question their alignment so much

Oppression is when you stand in the way of a tank and the tank stops for you, and then you climb on top of the tank and have a conversation with the guy in the tank, and then you walk off completely unharmed

Oh, so @CookieJarObserver is using the racist Whinnie the Pooh insult.

As always. Scratch a liberal and a fascist/racist bleeds.

Have you ever seen the complete tank man video? he doesn't get run over, while in the authoritarian US state vehicles are often running into peaceful protestors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-W-7WPWfE4

How dare those tanks not run over that man! Don't they understand that freedom is when you just plow into people like US security forces do.

Recently someone started trying to bring large Lemmy instances down by posting CSAM on large instances with open sign ups, as a result the hexbear mods made it so that images from untrusted instances wouldn't be shown to hexbear users to avoid hexbear users having to see stuff like that and to reduce the mods workload, idk whether its a temporary measure or not but for now all images from untrusted instances are just replaced with the words removed externally hosted image* on our end

You think the country that has a national holiday to celebrate their Nazi era leader is the Union in this analogy?

Nice false equivalent. Keep trying.

What I think is that it doesn't matter in the context of an aggressive war against a country that was not threatening Russia.

Lol well that's just a fucking lie. Zelenksy was openly threatening to host nuclear weapons for Nato on the eve of the invasion. Do you have a selective memory or are you just fucking ignorant of the entire history of this conflict and should therefore shut the fuck up?

Minsk I came about after the Russian military had invaded and annexed Ukrainian territory.

They didn't invade; they were already there. The legitimate government of Ukraine leased the naval base to them in Crimea and when the western backed coup government wanted to revoke the lease they simply stayed. Accuse them of squatting.

The first of these two agreements is already taking place after the initial aggression and thus are not really factors in the question of whether Ukraine should defend itself from that aggression.

Well that's just fucking stupid. Peace treaties don't count if they came after a war?

Sorry you just lost my attention with that one

Russia and Ukraine are basically the same politically, except for there are more Nazis in power in Ukraine. Prior to the invasion Ukraine was categorically ranked as the most corrupt country in Europe, Zelensky himself is in the Panama papers, they absolutely are not good on gay rights either, they overthrew their democratically elected president in 2014 in a CIA backed coup to put in a government handpicked by the U.S. (we can listen to Nuland picking the government on leaked phone calls), they’ve banned political opposition and all leftist parties (not pro-Russia, just all leftists. Being leftist generally means having semi sane takes like not wanting everybody in the country to die, so they had to be banned by the Nazi regime).

Also I didn’t say Russia is a free country, but Ukraine is easily just as bad if not worse, it’s a total farce to make this about freedom or democracy or any of that shit. Hell if democracy in Ukraine was real the war wouldn’t be happening, Zelensky was elected to end the conflict in the Donbass, he went to the front lines and told the Nazis to lay down arms and they told him to fuck off lol. You can watch the video of that happening.

No sure, I get where you're coming from, but for the purposes of the other poster I think it was best to adjust my language.

At the time time, it's also best for the purposes of the other poster to reply with your perspective as well haha

I would say it would depend on the structural conditions and who holds power over whom

I can't tell how serious you're being but I read a really good book on this subject- The History of White People

The TL;DR on that is that whiteness is a social category, not an objective observation of human beings and their differences. For most of American history, as an example, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch/Low Germans and Scandinavians were considered a superior race to the 'alpine' and 'mediterranean' races of High Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. Irish weren't Anglo-Saxon, they were Celtic and were thus considered inferior. The racism people observe when they see 'Irish need not apply' signs or slurs directed at Italians in the 1800s were because those people were not considered 'white' at the time. It's an over-simplification, but these groups needed to be incorporated into the dominant group before they would be given the treatment we generally think is normal for white people.

Which is very jarring to us, since obviously Irish and Italians and Bavarian Germans are 'white'. But it literally does vary, and the entire purpose of the category is to render people inside of it superior by virtue of belonging to it, it's a category that exists to express supremacy.

Racism is inherently vague, because race is made up. There are no differences in any way between a white and black person, or any other race.

"white" is a concept made up to justify slavery and white supremacy. you are actually hitting on something really important, the definition of being white HAS varied widely in history. when the concept of whiteness was first being developed, it was in order to justify categorizing people as white or non-white, and then the eugenics movement ran away with that concept to promote racial supremacy- not racial identity, but racial supremacy. so "white" as a category did indeed refer to specifically condoned peoples with supposed genetic, moral, intellectual superiority. and the definition of "white" did indeed vary then as well as now. irish, italian, slav, spanish, jews were all once distinctly non-white by the definition of "whites" at one point. the definition has changed since then because it has always been a non-scientific concept designed to identify "us" from "them" and justify the subjugation of whoever was considered non-white at the time.

Oh so the definition of being white varies now? People are dermofluid or something? "I'm white skinned but I'm not white."

The definition of being white, like all definitions, can indeed vary based on time and place, yes. Whether someone is white "enough" to be included in the category of "white people" is not an objective fact and will change from culture to culture, from time to time, and even from one individual perspective to the next.

Racial categories in Europe were more complex than they generally are today, especially in America. It's difficult to maintain distinctions in race between different European nationalities when everyone's immigrating to the same place and having kids together, so over time these subtle distinctions have dropped off somewhat in favor of the simpler categories of "white" and "non-white." But some of these distinctions still remain, for instance, many people who identify as "white nationalists" or even "white supremacists" also hate Jews, including Jewish people with white skin. Hitler's infamous 14 words declare that a future must be secured "for our white children," yet clearly he did not consider white-skinned Jewish people to be included in that definition.

As absurd as it may be to say that someone can have white skin but not be considered white, it can happen. The reason it doesn't make sense is because race is, to a large degree, something that is socially constructed and nonsensical.

Imagine considering Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh memes to be racist, while simultaneously arguing that you can't be racist against white people.

And for good measure, considering the use of the word "crazy" to be an offensive term against the mentally ill.

Those things are crossing the line. But overt racism is fine as long as it's self-deprecating.