I hope you enjoy my lengthy responses, I tried to summarize it from my reading and for what it’s worth I tried to approach it as impartially as I could given the circumstances.
Yeah, I’m completely fine with a serious discussion about it, because you seem like you’re capable of a serious discussion. So, right from the jump, the first comment they made:
That immediately to me is super offensive. Probably more so than pig shit pictures, definitely more so than me being condescending to them. Why? Because it is deliberate lies in service of killing. I still dealt with it factually, and I indicated I’d be open to a factual exchange. You want me to be nice about it also? Why would I do that? That doesn’t seem like it’s necessary.
I have no idea if that person actually thinks that Putin will honor a cease-fire, whether randomly unilaterally announced or not. It is clear to me that he will not. Actually, you seemed to acknowledge that they know he won’t (saying that all of these cease-fires tend to fall apart and not be honored). There are plenty of cease-fires that get honored, definitely plenty that aren’t broken on a huge scale right away on purpose.
Bottom line: I’ve known people from Ukraine. I’ve talked with them about their country getting torn apart, people they know getting killed, with an endless stream of lies coming from the other side about the reasons why and the things they can do to stop it from happening. I just don’t have patience for it. My whole SA analogy is in absolutely no way frivolous. I think it’s an absolutely spot-on way of expressing the horror of Russia claiming they’re only blowing up apartment buildings and hospitals because someone might be trying to resist them or give a security guarantee, and they didn’t like that, so they have every right to keep killing until they feel like stopping. And, someone on Lemmy saying the answer to that all is to stop arming Ukraine so they can’t fight back anymore. I think it’s disgusting, and I don’t think I’m required to be nice when explaining why.
I don’t think anyone on Hexbear has any right to request that someone not be “overly antagonistic” when they speak to them. For obvious reasons. The whole framing reeks of privilege and dishonesty, of creating rules for other people without any pretense that you’re planning to follow them yourself.
I do think that some of the Hexbear people are just confused and going along with the herd in terms of their beliefs and behavior. The whole propaganda framing is pretty powerful. Calm conversation is “sealioning” and it’s bad. Dissenting voices are conflated with bigotry, even if they have nothing to do with it, and so banning dissent is “protecting the space” from bigotry and just standing up for the oppressed which no other instance will do. Of course. There are all these words that get redefined as other different words, and all sorts of facts that aren’t true that are repeated so aggressively and often that they start to get accepted, and so these things they believe and do start to make sense within the off-kilter light they’re seen in.
Nakoiochi’s response is not jingoistic here either
Yes it is.
There are two narratives about shelling in Donbas:
That Ukraine’s Nazi government was randomly shelling civilians in Donbas and Russia tried their best through good means to put a stop to it, and eventually, they had no choice but to invade.
That Moscow funded separatists to start a mini-civil-war in Donbas and then blamed the resulting death on an imaginary Nazi government in Kyiv.
I know that several times I’ve asked people who told me the first narrative to back it up, and they couldn’t. They would send me sources that said one thing claiming it said something else, send me random Youtube videos that didn’t actually prove anything, that kind of thing. I don’t actually know whether it is the second narrative that’s true, or whether it’s sort of a “truth is somewhere in the middle” type of thing. It’s hard to say, at least for me with as much as I’ve looked into it. But I definitely have seen several people who said it was the first thing and found out afterwards that they were talking purely out of their ass.
Uncritically saying that Moscow’s narrative is definitely true is jingoistic. And actually, dealing with people who disagree by simply shouting them down in a pack is more or less a key component of jingoism to me. The fact that Moscow says the first narrative is what happened means absolutely nothing to me, since they generally lie about all kinds of things constantly. I touched on that in that big conversation (with no substantive response, go figure). I’ve never heard anyone outside of that bubble say that’s what happened. And, like I said, even if it did happen exactly the way Moscow claims it did, that wouldn’t excuse three years of mass killing in Ukraine. They’ve killed more Russian-speakers now, probably a hundred times over, by sending them into the meat grinder or just semi-accidentally bombing their homes in the course of the war, than anyone ever claimed had been killed in Donbas.
If someone is ethnically Russian in eastern Ukraine, and they’re unhappy with the Kyiv government, there are means to deal with that other than starting a civil war.
I want to link here this - Ukraine Found Complicit in 2014 Massacre By European Court of Human Rights I’ve just seen too many swastikas over the last 3 years to say this is anything but an unfair assessment.
This is a great example of what I was talking about. It’s just lies. The underlying fact is true, the court did order Ukraine to pay some people because of what happened in the burning of the trade union building, but it’s being summarized in a wildly misleading way. On purpose. To tell lies to justify slaughter.
I would actually really recommend that you read the actual judgement that they’re summarizing here in this way. You tell me whether this page you linked me to is summarizing what the court actually found in an accurate way.
Like I say: I’m fine having a factual discussion about it, but I don’t see why I would be obligated in any way to be nice to someone who doesn’t want that and is also willing to be 10 times more offensive than I am when they’re on the other side of the disagreement. To me that’s not offensive, it’s just fairness.
I don’t think anyone on Hexbear has any right to request that someone not be “overly antagonistic” when they speak to them. For obvious reasons. The whole framing reeks of privilege and dishonesty, of creating rules for other people without any pretense that you’re planning to follow them yourself.
My suggestion was more from the direction of if you hope to be getting something from the conversation other than generating adrenaline, (I know I’m not always the best example of this) maybe you shouldn’t be so antagonistic. The path you took resulting in a few back and forths, then you obliquely accused someone of being Russian and got banned. I don’t think that trying to tie that in to a broader echo chamber narrative tracks from that either. The internet is full of places where people seek out others with similar politics, it seems like a simpler explanation for their ideological uniformity.
From what I could tell it was only two top level comments in 4 hours from hexbear, Sasuke’s comment was entirely innocuous when it comes to the Ukraine war and you replied to it by soapboxing about hexbear broadly. I don’t think that type of reaction really serves your own goals, it just makes you look like you’re overreacting out of nowhere.
I have no idea if that person actually thinks that Putin will honor a cease-fire, whether randomly unilaterally announced or not. It is clear to me that he will not. Actually, you seemed to acknowledge that they know he won’t (saying that all of these cease-fires tend to fall apart and not be honored). There are plenty of cease-fires that get honored, definitely plenty that aren’t broken on a huge scale right away on purpose.
I don’t think any of us can really know what’s in Putins head, there’s tons of other factors besides that which also will contribute to if a ceasefire holds. ie, how much control do both armies have over the individuals, are there miscommunications, do people continue to restrain themselves in spite of the violations, etc, them I don’t think it’s all down to one person if the ceasefire succeeds or fails.
And, someone on Lemmy saying the answer to that all is to stop arming Ukraine so they can’t fight back anymore. I think it’s disgusting, and I don’t think I’m required to be nice when explaining why.
I’ve also known many people from Ukraine over the years, you will forgive me if I don’t give too many personal details, I don’t think me supplying my own anecdotes would help anyways. You seem to feel very strongly about your position and don’t seem very curious about why people might disagree.
There are two narratives about shelling in Donbas:
That Ukraine’s Nazi government was randomly shelling civilians in Donbas and Russia tried their best through good means to put a stop to it, and eventually, they had no choice but to invade.
That Moscow funded separatists to start a mini-civil-war in Donbas and then blamed the resulting death on an imaginary Nazi government in Kyiv.
I’m inclined to say somewhere in between, take for example the Donbass self defense forces, some of those were definitely Russian military and some of those were absolutely locals. Either way, they could not have survived without Russian military aid. However to say people are ‘moscow funded’ the equivalent is also true- the Ukraine government is US funded. Ukraines media is US funded.
Uncritically saying that Moscow’s narrative is definitely true is jingoistic. And actually, dealing with people who disagree by simply shouting them down in a pack is more or less a key component of jingoism to me.
I would say that if someone who’s Russian was behaving in support of Russia the way I’ve seen a lot of pro-Ukraine lemmy users behave I would probably be more inclined to call it as jingoistic. Not to be edgy or anything, but I’ve been in my share of Russian telegram groups, I’ve been to family gatherings, I have run into my share of Russian jingoism. As near as I can tell the person you were responding to (Nakoiochi) is a US anarchist. They weren’t calling them Khokols or gloating, they just mocked Trumps promises to fix this in 24hr because there is a standing offer that he could accept- unless he just has no control over the situation. (likely)
Either way a core component of jingoism is nationalism, and it feels weird to be accusing people of being nationalist for a different country, when they’re an anarchist, just because you don’t like their understanding of world events. I don’t think people who are saying something that happens to be in agreement with the position of a particular nation are then necessarily nationalist as a result, especially if they’re not even from there and in fact live in the geopolitical enemy.
If someone is ethnically Russian in eastern Ukraine, and they’re unhappy with the Kyiv government, there are means to deal with that other than starting a civil war.
In my previous response I asked twice about your position on self-determination, that wasn’t me being flippant, but more trying to get at a core contradiction in the way separatist regions looking for self-determination have been treated. When it was Kosovo it was acceptable to allow for separatists to break away, do you think that it would have made the situation better for Russia to start dumping weapons on Serbia in that situation to help them counter the ‘invasion’ from Albania? It’s a hypothetical and not really logistically feasible, but my point is more that this situation went from bad to worse because fuel has only been continually added to this fire rather than de-escalation.
Re: Odessa Trade union
The article I linked did include large sections from the reporting along with the broader context. There’s details which are actively disputed; the point is not the grisly details which are always ripe for propaganda embellishment, but rather the points as laid out in the report. The picture painted is of a government which actively made the situation worse, and enabled those very Russian propaganda campaigns by their own complicity in the massacre and the subsequent investigation.
Quoting the report: (directly)
spoiler
As regards the adequacy of the investigation, the Court considered that the investigating authorities
had not made enough effort to properly secure, collect and assess all the evidence. For instance,
instead of putting in place a police perimeter to secure the affected areas of the city centre, the first
thing local authorities had done after the events was to send cleaning and maintenance services to
those areas. The earliest on-site inspection there had been carried out only almost two weeks later
and had produced no meaningful results. Likewise, the Trade Union Building had remained freely
accessible to the public for 17 days after the events.
The Court found that, considering the scale of violence and its death toll, the involvement of
supporters of two opposing political camps in the context of considerable social and political tensions,
and the threat of an overall destabilisation of the situation, the authorities should have done
everything in their power to ensure transparency and meaningful public scrutiny of the investigations.
Instead, there had been no effective communication policy in place, with the result that some of the
information provided had been difficult to understand, inconsistent, and had been provided with
insufficient regularity. The Court noted that distortion of the events in Odesa had eventually become
a tool of Russian propaganda in respect of the war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine
since February 2022. Enhanced transparency in the related investigative work by the Ukrainian
authorities might have helped to prevent or counteract that propaganda effectively.
The issue is it’s hard to dismiss calling the Ukrainian government ‘Nazi’ when there’s been this level of collaboration between right wing (in some cases openly nazi) gangs doing political terrorism to people. Those gangs are now a part of the military, as long as their military tolerates people running around with a black sun or whatever nazi paraphernalia it’s just going to get photographed and circulated on Russian social media, feeding into that same propaganda campaign you yourself expressed an interest in combating.
Yeah, I’m completely fine with a serious discussion about it, because you seem like you’re capable of a serious discussion. So, right from the jump, the first comment they made:
That immediately to me is super offensive. Probably more so than pig shit pictures, definitely more so than me being condescending to them. Why? Because it is deliberate lies in service of killing. I still dealt with it factually, and I indicated I’d be open to a factual exchange. You want me to be nice about it also? Why would I do that? That doesn’t seem like it’s necessary.
I have no idea if that person actually thinks that Putin will honor a cease-fire, whether randomly unilaterally announced or not. It is clear to me that he will not. Actually, you seemed to acknowledge that they know he won’t (saying that all of these cease-fires tend to fall apart and not be honored). There are plenty of cease-fires that get honored, definitely plenty that aren’t broken on a huge scale right away on purpose.
Bottom line: I’ve known people from Ukraine. I’ve talked with them about their country getting torn apart, people they know getting killed, with an endless stream of lies coming from the other side about the reasons why and the things they can do to stop it from happening. I just don’t have patience for it. My whole SA analogy is in absolutely no way frivolous. I think it’s an absolutely spot-on way of expressing the horror of Russia claiming they’re only blowing up apartment buildings and hospitals because someone might be trying to resist them or give a security guarantee, and they didn’t like that, so they have every right to keep killing until they feel like stopping. And, someone on Lemmy saying the answer to that all is to stop arming Ukraine so they can’t fight back anymore. I think it’s disgusting, and I don’t think I’m required to be nice when explaining why.
I don’t think anyone on Hexbear has any right to request that someone not be “overly antagonistic” when they speak to them. For obvious reasons. The whole framing reeks of privilege and dishonesty, of creating rules for other people without any pretense that you’re planning to follow them yourself.
I do think that some of the Hexbear people are just confused and going along with the herd in terms of their beliefs and behavior. The whole propaganda framing is pretty powerful. Calm conversation is “sealioning” and it’s bad. Dissenting voices are conflated with bigotry, even if they have nothing to do with it, and so banning dissent is “protecting the space” from bigotry and just standing up for the oppressed which no other instance will do. Of course. There are all these words that get redefined as other different words, and all sorts of facts that aren’t true that are repeated so aggressively and often that they start to get accepted, and so these things they believe and do start to make sense within the off-kilter light they’re seen in.
Yes it is.
There are two narratives about shelling in Donbas:
I know that several times I’ve asked people who told me the first narrative to back it up, and they couldn’t. They would send me sources that said one thing claiming it said something else, send me random Youtube videos that didn’t actually prove anything, that kind of thing. I don’t actually know whether it is the second narrative that’s true, or whether it’s sort of a “truth is somewhere in the middle” type of thing. It’s hard to say, at least for me with as much as I’ve looked into it. But I definitely have seen several people who said it was the first thing and found out afterwards that they were talking purely out of their ass.
Uncritically saying that Moscow’s narrative is definitely true is jingoistic. And actually, dealing with people who disagree by simply shouting them down in a pack is more or less a key component of jingoism to me. The fact that Moscow says the first narrative is what happened means absolutely nothing to me, since they generally lie about all kinds of things constantly. I touched on that in that big conversation (with no substantive response, go figure). I’ve never heard anyone outside of that bubble say that’s what happened. And, like I said, even if it did happen exactly the way Moscow claims it did, that wouldn’t excuse three years of mass killing in Ukraine. They’ve killed more Russian-speakers now, probably a hundred times over, by sending them into the meat grinder or just semi-accidentally bombing their homes in the course of the war, than anyone ever claimed had been killed in Donbas.
If someone is ethnically Russian in eastern Ukraine, and they’re unhappy with the Kyiv government, there are means to deal with that other than starting a civil war.
This is a great example of what I was talking about. It’s just lies. The underlying fact is true, the court did order Ukraine to pay some people because of what happened in the burning of the trade union building, but it’s being summarized in a wildly misleading way. On purpose. To tell lies to justify slaughter.
I would actually really recommend that you read the actual judgement that they’re summarizing here in this way. You tell me whether this page you linked me to is summarizing what the court actually found in an accurate way.
Like I say: I’m fine having a factual discussion about it, but I don’t see why I would be obligated in any way to be nice to someone who doesn’t want that and is also willing to be 10 times more offensive than I am when they’re on the other side of the disagreement. To me that’s not offensive, it’s just fairness.
My suggestion was more from the direction of if you hope to be getting something from the conversation other than generating adrenaline, (I know I’m not always the best example of this) maybe you shouldn’t be so antagonistic. The path you took resulting in a few back and forths, then you obliquely accused someone of being Russian and got banned. I don’t think that trying to tie that in to a broader echo chamber narrative tracks from that either. The internet is full of places where people seek out others with similar politics, it seems like a simpler explanation for their ideological uniformity.
From what I could tell it was only two top level comments in 4 hours from hexbear, Sasuke’s comment was entirely innocuous when it comes to the Ukraine war and you replied to it by soapboxing about hexbear broadly. I don’t think that type of reaction really serves your own goals, it just makes you look like you’re overreacting out of nowhere.
I don’t think any of us can really know what’s in Putins head, there’s tons of other factors besides that which also will contribute to if a ceasefire holds. ie, how much control do both armies have over the individuals, are there miscommunications, do people continue to restrain themselves in spite of the violations, etc, them I don’t think it’s all down to one person if the ceasefire succeeds or fails.
I’ve also known many people from Ukraine over the years, you will forgive me if I don’t give too many personal details, I don’t think me supplying my own anecdotes would help anyways. You seem to feel very strongly about your position and don’t seem very curious about why people might disagree.
I’m inclined to say somewhere in between, take for example the Donbass self defense forces, some of those were definitely Russian military and some of those were absolutely locals. Either way, they could not have survived without Russian military aid. However to say people are ‘moscow funded’ the equivalent is also true- the Ukraine government is US funded. Ukraines media is US funded.
I would say that if someone who’s Russian was behaving in support of Russia the way I’ve seen a lot of pro-Ukraine lemmy users behave I would probably be more inclined to call it as jingoistic. Not to be edgy or anything, but I’ve been in my share of Russian telegram groups, I’ve been to family gatherings, I have run into my share of Russian jingoism. As near as I can tell the person you were responding to (Nakoiochi) is a US anarchist. They weren’t calling them Khokols or gloating, they just mocked Trumps promises to fix this in 24hr because there is a standing offer that he could accept- unless he just has no control over the situation. (likely)
Either way a core component of jingoism is nationalism, and it feels weird to be accusing people of being nationalist for a different country, when they’re an anarchist, just because you don’t like their understanding of world events. I don’t think people who are saying something that happens to be in agreement with the position of a particular nation are then necessarily nationalist as a result, especially if they’re not even from there and in fact live in the geopolitical enemy.
In my previous response I asked twice about your position on self-determination, that wasn’t me being flippant, but more trying to get at a core contradiction in the way separatist regions looking for self-determination have been treated. When it was Kosovo it was acceptable to allow for separatists to break away, do you think that it would have made the situation better for Russia to start dumping weapons on Serbia in that situation to help them counter the ‘invasion’ from Albania? It’s a hypothetical and not really logistically feasible, but my point is more that this situation went from bad to worse because fuel has only been continually added to this fire rather than de-escalation.
Re: Odessa Trade union
The article I linked did include large sections from the reporting along with the broader context. There’s details which are actively disputed; the point is not the grisly details which are always ripe for propaganda embellishment, but rather the points as laid out in the report. The picture painted is of a government which actively made the situation worse, and enabled those very Russian propaganda campaigns by their own complicity in the massacre and the subsequent investigation.
Quoting the report: (directly)
spoiler
The issue is it’s hard to dismiss calling the Ukrainian government ‘Nazi’ when there’s been this level of collaboration between right wing (in some cases openly nazi) gangs doing political terrorism to people. Those gangs are now a part of the military, as long as their military tolerates people running around with a black sun or whatever nazi paraphernalia it’s just going to get photographed and circulated on Russian social media, feeding into that same propaganda campaign you yourself expressed an interest in combating.