My suggestion was more from the direction of if you hope to be getting something from the conversation other than generating adrenaline, (I know Iām not always the best example of this) maybe you shouldnāt be so antagonistic.
Honestly my main goal is just to push back against their narrative. If theyāre going to come into my postās comments and spout propaganda I am going to speak on it. If I get banned, then well, that solves the problem of them mucking up my posts.
I actually donāt think I would be doing anyone any favors by being excessively polite to them. There have been a few different writings recently about how engaging politely and purely-factually with this type of content on the internet is a mistake because it leaves room for them to decide what of your facts to engage with, when to just switch to abuse instead of responding, basically just gives them room to employ a bunch of tactics that are pretty effective at spreading their message. Iām still being factual with what Iām saying, but not really being nice to them, I think is fully justified and the right thing way to respond.
Again, if they felt like upholding their end of the social contract and agreeing not to be randomly abusive any time they donāt like something in some other context, or have a serious discussion about what theyāre saying, it would be a totally different story. And like I say you will notice that Iām completely factual and happy to have a serious discussion about it if someoneās up for that. I just donāt think that my rudeness or not has the slightest bit to do with whether Hexbear people are going to respond with factual calm rational discussion.
you obliquely accused someone of being Russian
That wasnāt really the point of me saying that, although I can see it coming across that way.
Like you said, it was just kind of a low-effort response to a low-effort insult. Since they were engaged overall in boosterism for the Russian war, I was pointing out that the Russian military and government are fucking up the war. Nothing really deeper than that. I have no idea whether the person I was talking to was actually Russian and I wasnāt aiming to imply that they were.
Sasukeās comment was entirely innocuous when it comes to the Ukraine war and you replied to it by soapboxing about hexbear broadly.
By that time, Iād read 13 comments by Hexbear people. That was the 14th. Iām not going to give a calm patient response to every single one. Theyād also come in and made 172 upvotes for each otherās content.
Thatās the point that I was making. From the POV of the Hexbear monoculture, I know it might seem āout of nowhereā or like itās not clear what behavior Iām reacting to, but youāll notice that 100% of the people who reacted to my comment upvoted it. I think they generally know exactly what āletās all gang up and say the same things and upvote each otherā behavior Iām talking about when I point at the comments with their Hexbear participation and refer to it as a problem.
This is also what I was saying about talking reasonably about the merits of the argument, after the 14th browbeating comment or whatever, being a losing game. Iām fine with talking with someone whoās up for talking about stuff, but thatās generally not what goes on in Hexbear threads.
You seem to feel very strongly about your position and donāt seem very curious about why people might disagree.
Iāve already gone through it with a lot of people. I was completely curious at the beginning. Anyone who wants to show me something thatās a strong argument on the other side, Iām completely into, and I really will look at it, as I did your source about the Trade Union fire. But my experience is that they generally donāt do that, they just yell and repeat the same types of framings. And also give me abuse, and tell me what I believe and ignore me when I say I believe some other thing. So Iām fine at this point just stating my side. Youāll notice that I very directly addressed what the first Hexbear person said, in the thread, and only after a few messages with them totally ignoring what I was saying did I just say okey dokey and start clapping back.
Iām 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 āmoscow fundedā the equivalent is also true- the Ukraine government is US funded. Ukraines media is US funded.
Yeah, all makes perfect sense, I 100% agree with this.
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 theyāre an anarchist, just because you donāt like their understanding of world events.
If I think their understanding is based on lies and propaganda, then thatās how I will call it. Where they come from and who they are isnāt all that relevant to me, Iām just basing it on what they say. If it is jingo in service of some government Iāll call it accordingly if I see it that way.
In my previous response I asked twice about your position on self-determination, that wasnāt 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 āinvasionā from Albania? Itās 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.
My position is very different from how regions āhave been treatedā by the big powers. Generally I just support free individual people above whatever state entity. I think Palestine has a clear right to self-determination and anyone on the Israel side whoās been taking it away (even before the full-scale slaughter started late last year) should be in prison at a minimum. I donāt have a clear position on Kosovo or Chechnya just because I donāt know that much about them, but the massive contradiction between how Russia reacted in Chechnya versus Donbas is one example of why I donāt take their narrative on anything seriously at all.
I donāt think Moscow intervening in Donbas had anything at all to do with free peopleās self-determination. Like I said, I get it if someone from there feels like theyāre badly represented in Kyiv, but having automatic weapons flow in from outside so that they wonāt have to honor the government that won their countryās election and can seize some government buildings and declare themselves free people is guaranteed to make things ten times worse for everyone involved. And look, it did, look at all the piles of corpses now.
The US are pros at this stuff too, we basically wrote the playbook on using that tactic to destabilize a country. Honduras and Venezuela recently, and then going back a few decades, itās half or more of Central America. Thatās fucked up also. I donāt like it when the US does it or when Russia does it, it is a crime against democracy and generally a prelude to mass murder. There is no contradiction in terms of what I think, at least that Iām aware of. If you feel like the US State Department is being hypocritical in saying itās unfair to destabilize a country and install a friendly leader even if that kills a bunch of people, because thatās what they do, then I will 100% agree with that, but you have to take it up with them not with me.
Does that address the question? Itās a fair question but I feel like youāre assuming similarity that isnāt there, between my POV and the State Departmentās POV.
The picture painted is of a government which actively made the situation worse
Correct
, and enabled those very Russian propaganda campaigns
Correct
by their own complicity in the massacre
Absolutely wrong. This is where I think you didnāt read the report carefully enough.
So the summary story says that the Ukraine government empowered fascist thugs to slaughter anti-Maidan protestors and strangle a pregnant woman and so on, and they were found guilty by the EHCR court.
The actual court finding was that against a backdrop of periodic deadly street violence related to anti-Maidan elements trying to overthrow the local government, some anti-Maidan protestors conducted an attack with live ammunition against a pro-Maidan demonstration, then the pro-unity people got the upper hand in the ensuing firefight / riot, the anti-Maidan people took refuge in a building, both sides threw molotov cocktails at each other, a big fucking fire started, and a bunch of people on all sides died including because of failures by local authorities (which caused understandable upset which was then compounded by failures of the Ukraine government during the investigation).
That part of it is basically the total opposite of what your article says, with the only true parts being āfailures by the Ukrainian authoritiesā and āconfirmed and found guilty.ā
Again: I have no real idea of the underlying facts, Iām reading about this incident for the first time. But it is extremely easy to just read the EHCR report, and see for myself that covertactionmagazine.com is lying about what it contains, and I feel pretty safe in the judgement that theyāre probably lying about other things too.
I think that covers most of it, let me know if I missed something, as Iām trying to be detailed in addressing what youāre saying without getting too dug down in minutiae.
Does that address the question? Itās a fair question but I feel like youāre assuming similarity that isnāt there, between my POV and the State Departmentās POV.
Thatās fair, I could stand to be a little more charitable on that front.
I donāt have a clear position on Kosovo or Chechnya just because I donāt know that much about them, but the massive contradiction between how Russia reacted in Chechnya versus Donbas is one example of why I donāt take their narrative on anything seriously at all.
For me it helps to put some of these things in a sequence of events. First the US/EU actually supported the Russian response in Chechnya, I think it was Bill Clinton made an analogy to the US civil war, especially after all the terrorist attacks it wasnāt totally out of place. The warcrimes, high civilian death toll and brutal crackdowns after didnāt really cause that sympathy to last long after. I donāt recall that there were even any sanctions.
Kosovo came roughly after that, and the US supporting the separatist movement is what I was referencing as that was the break from what was ānormalā for separatist regions. Thatās not to say that people in separatist regions shouldnāt be able to express themselves, but that it wasnāt the standard for how world leaders treated breakaway regions until then. Now that new standard (set by the US) has been followed by Russian in Ukraine.
I donāt think Moscow intervening in Donbas had anything at all to do with free peopleās self-determination. Like I said, I get it if someone from there feels like theyāre badly represented in Kyiv, but having automatic weapons flow in from outside so that they wonāt have to honor the government that won their countryās election
Iām sure on some level itās more a pretext than a principled stance on separatism by Russia, but also it reflects an earnest sentiment from people in eastern Ukraine.
by their own complicity in the massacre
Absolutely wrong. This is where I think you didnāt read the report carefully enough.
I did quote the official report for them in that response, in fact I only referenced so as not to include the editorializing.
and a bunch of people on all sides died including because of failures by local authorities (which caused understandable upset which was then compounded by failures of the Ukraine government during the investigation).
This is what I meant by complicity- failing to be transparent and diligent in investigating something serious, like murders, can look like youāre favoring one side. This reminds me of people in the US being mad at cops when they kill people, not because people think all cops are conspiring to kill black people (or whoever), but thereās a sentiment that they will turn a blind eye and protect cops who misbehave.
Also as not a total aside as a trans russian, but to give you an analogy for the understanding that state powers will instrumentalize any struggle, national or otherwise, for geopolitical ends. Take same sex marriage-only 14% of Ukrainians support legalizing it. In Russia, itās 9%. Both places are queerphobic as fuck, to a much greater extend than even the worst red states in the US, Russia is mostly just more mask-off about it than Ukraine.
Despite that you would see Azov routinely attacked gay bars, there have been amnesty international reports about this since 2014 when the west started integrating the more fascist UA elements to their ends. That pride parades can only happen in Kiev when it is walled off from the frothing, fascist mob is in part NATOās fault. That assaults on queer people by azov are practically never persecuted, that is at least partially due to their patronage from the west. Once the war started it was full steam painting Ukraine as pro-lgbt while they were pressing trans women fleeing the fighting into service because they were āmen.ā
That is not to excuse the ridiculous amount of anti-queer sentiment in Russia. The hunting down of queer people under Ramzan Kadyrov in the Russian province of Chechnya was probably the worst act of homophobic violence since many decades, weāre talking about thousands of people getting murdered by government death squads who spied on them on dating sites. After the murders, Kadyrov joked in front of the international press why they were asking about a persecution of gay people, āthere are no gay people in Chechnya.ā
Like that shit was appalling and largely absent from western discourse before the war.
For me it helps to put some of these things in a sequence of events. First the US/EU actually supported the Russian response in Chechnya
I donāt care. Like I said, the State Departmentās viewpoint means nothing to me. Clinton presided over a whole lot of terrible fuckery.
Thatās not to say that people in separatist regions shouldnāt be able to express themselves, but that it wasnāt the standard for how world leaders treated breakaway regions until then.
Like I said, world leaders are almost as hypocritical on this issue as Russia is. They basically, for the most part, say whateverās in their best interests and often invest significant effort into inflaming this kind of ābreakawayā region into a way to completely ruin whatever country and collapse it into a war in which they try to put their guy on top once itās all over. Thatās absolutely nothing to do with me.
Itās wrong when the US does it, wrong when Russia does it. Not complicated.
I did quote the official report for them in that response, in fact I only referenced so as not to include the editorializing.
I wasnāt editorializing. For an example, a quote is:
The attack was carried out by fascist thugs who were empowered in the U.S.-NATO-backed Maidan coup in Ukraine.
Versus
As soon as the march began to make its way towards the stadium, anti-Maidan activists approached
and attacked the demonstrators, some firing shots at them, still with no interference from the police.
Both sides used pyrotechnic devices and airguns, and threw stones, stun grenades and Molotov
cocktails
Exactly 100% backwards. They are lying on purpose. Again, I donāt see why I would need to be friendly to that or to anyone whoās posting it.
This is what I meant by complicity- failing to be transparent and diligent in investigating something serious, like murders, can look like youāre favoring one side.
That is actually what the judgement said. Thatās not what the covertactionmagazine article said. What it said was that they strangled a pregnant woman to death with an electrical cord and drew a swastika with her blood on the wall. Thatās the difference Iām highlighting.
to give you an analogy for the understanding that state powers will instrumentalize any struggle, national or otherwise, for geopolitical ends
Yes, absolutely. Which is why I have very little patience for any random individual who wants to instrumentalize whatever struggle in the same way, whichever state theyāre stumping for. Theyāre not on your side, you donāt need to help them do that.
Honestly my main goal is just to push back against their narrative. If theyāre going to come into my postās comments and spout propaganda I am going to speak on it. If I get banned, then well, that solves the problem of them mucking up my posts.
I actually donāt think I would be doing anyone any favors by being excessively polite to them. There have been a few different writings recently about how engaging politely and purely-factually with this type of content on the internet is a mistake because it leaves room for them to decide what of your facts to engage with, when to just switch to abuse instead of responding, basically just gives them room to employ a bunch of tactics that are pretty effective at spreading their message. Iām still being factual with what Iām saying, but not really being nice to them, I think is fully justified and the right thing way to respond.
Again, if they felt like upholding their end of the social contract and agreeing not to be randomly abusive any time they donāt like something in some other context, or have a serious discussion about what theyāre saying, it would be a totally different story. And like I say you will notice that Iām completely factual and happy to have a serious discussion about it if someoneās up for that. I just donāt think that my rudeness or not has the slightest bit to do with whether Hexbear people are going to respond with factual calm rational discussion.
That wasnāt really the point of me saying that, although I can see it coming across that way.
Like you said, it was just kind of a low-effort response to a low-effort insult. Since they were engaged overall in boosterism for the Russian war, I was pointing out that the Russian military and government are fucking up the war. Nothing really deeper than that. I have no idea whether the person I was talking to was actually Russian and I wasnāt aiming to imply that they were.
By that time, Iād read 13 comments by Hexbear people. That was the 14th. Iām not going to give a calm patient response to every single one. Theyād also come in and made 172 upvotes for each otherās content.
Thatās the point that I was making. From the POV of the Hexbear monoculture, I know it might seem āout of nowhereā or like itās not clear what behavior Iām reacting to, but youāll notice that 100% of the people who reacted to my comment upvoted it. I think they generally know exactly what āletās all gang up and say the same things and upvote each otherā behavior Iām talking about when I point at the comments with their Hexbear participation and refer to it as a problem.
This is also what I was saying about talking reasonably about the merits of the argument, after the 14th browbeating comment or whatever, being a losing game. Iām fine with talking with someone whoās up for talking about stuff, but thatās generally not what goes on in Hexbear threads.
Iāve already gone through it with a lot of people. I was completely curious at the beginning. Anyone who wants to show me something thatās a strong argument on the other side, Iām completely into, and I really will look at it, as I did your source about the Trade Union fire. But my experience is that they generally donāt do that, they just yell and repeat the same types of framings. And also give me abuse, and tell me what I believe and ignore me when I say I believe some other thing. So Iām fine at this point just stating my side. Youāll notice that I very directly addressed what the first Hexbear person said, in the thread, and only after a few messages with them totally ignoring what I was saying did I just say okey dokey and start clapping back.
Yeah, all makes perfect sense, I 100% agree with this.
If I think their understanding is based on lies and propaganda, then thatās how I will call it. Where they come from and who they are isnāt all that relevant to me, Iām just basing it on what they say. If it is jingo in service of some government Iāll call it accordingly if I see it that way.
My position is very different from how regions āhave been treatedā by the big powers. Generally I just support free individual people above whatever state entity. I think Palestine has a clear right to self-determination and anyone on the Israel side whoās been taking it away (even before the full-scale slaughter started late last year) should be in prison at a minimum. I donāt have a clear position on Kosovo or Chechnya just because I donāt know that much about them, but the massive contradiction between how Russia reacted in Chechnya versus Donbas is one example of why I donāt take their narrative on anything seriously at all.
I donāt think Moscow intervening in Donbas had anything at all to do with free peopleās self-determination. Like I said, I get it if someone from there feels like theyāre badly represented in Kyiv, but having automatic weapons flow in from outside so that they wonāt have to honor the government that won their countryās election and can seize some government buildings and declare themselves free people is guaranteed to make things ten times worse for everyone involved. And look, it did, look at all the piles of corpses now.
The US are pros at this stuff too, we basically wrote the playbook on using that tactic to destabilize a country. Honduras and Venezuela recently, and then going back a few decades, itās half or more of Central America. Thatās fucked up also. I donāt like it when the US does it or when Russia does it, it is a crime against democracy and generally a prelude to mass murder. There is no contradiction in terms of what I think, at least that Iām aware of. If you feel like the US State Department is being hypocritical in saying itās unfair to destabilize a country and install a friendly leader even if that kills a bunch of people, because thatās what they do, then I will 100% agree with that, but you have to take it up with them not with me.
Does that address the question? Itās a fair question but I feel like youāre assuming similarity that isnāt there, between my POV and the State Departmentās POV.
Correct
Correct
Absolutely wrong. This is where I think you didnāt read the report carefully enough.
So the summary story says that the Ukraine government empowered fascist thugs to slaughter anti-Maidan protestors and strangle a pregnant woman and so on, and they were found guilty by the EHCR court.
The actual court finding was that against a backdrop of periodic deadly street violence related to anti-Maidan elements trying to overthrow the local government, some anti-Maidan protestors conducted an attack with live ammunition against a pro-Maidan demonstration, then the pro-unity people got the upper hand in the ensuing firefight / riot, the anti-Maidan people took refuge in a building, both sides threw molotov cocktails at each other, a big fucking fire started, and a bunch of people on all sides died including because of failures by local authorities (which caused understandable upset which was then compounded by failures of the Ukraine government during the investigation).
That part of it is basically the total opposite of what your article says, with the only true parts being āfailures by the Ukrainian authoritiesā and āconfirmed and found guilty.ā
Again: I have no real idea of the underlying facts, Iām reading about this incident for the first time. But it is extremely easy to just read the EHCR report, and see for myself that covertactionmagazine.com is lying about what it contains, and I feel pretty safe in the judgement that theyāre probably lying about other things too.
I think that covers most of it, let me know if I missed something, as Iām trying to be detailed in addressing what youāre saying without getting too dug down in minutiae.
Thatās fair, I could stand to be a little more charitable on that front.
For me it helps to put some of these things in a sequence of events. First the US/EU actually supported the Russian response in Chechnya, I think it was Bill Clinton made an analogy to the US civil war, especially after all the terrorist attacks it wasnāt totally out of place. The warcrimes, high civilian death toll and brutal crackdowns after didnāt really cause that sympathy to last long after. I donāt recall that there were even any sanctions.
Kosovo came roughly after that, and the US supporting the separatist movement is what I was referencing as that was the break from what was ānormalā for separatist regions. Thatās not to say that people in separatist regions shouldnāt be able to express themselves, but that it wasnāt the standard for how world leaders treated breakaway regions until then. Now that new standard (set by the US) has been followed by Russian in Ukraine.
Iām sure on some level itās more a pretext than a principled stance on separatism by Russia, but also it reflects an earnest sentiment from people in eastern Ukraine.
I did quote the official report for them in that response, in fact I only referenced so as not to include the editorializing.
This is what I meant by complicity- failing to be transparent and diligent in investigating something serious, like murders, can look like youāre favoring one side. This reminds me of people in the US being mad at cops when they kill people, not because people think all cops are conspiring to kill black people (or whoever), but thereās a sentiment that they will turn a blind eye and protect cops who misbehave.
Also as not a total aside as a trans russian, but to give you an analogy for the understanding that state powers will instrumentalize any struggle, national or otherwise, for geopolitical ends. Take same sex marriage-only 14% of Ukrainians support legalizing it. In Russia, itās 9%. Both places are queerphobic as fuck, to a much greater extend than even the worst red states in the US, Russia is mostly just more mask-off about it than Ukraine.
Despite that you would see Azov routinely attacked gay bars, there have been amnesty international reports about this since 2014 when the west started integrating the more fascist UA elements to their ends. That pride parades can only happen in Kiev when it is walled off from the frothing, fascist mob is in part NATOās fault. That assaults on queer people by azov are practically never persecuted, that is at least partially due to their patronage from the west. Once the war started it was full steam painting Ukraine as pro-lgbt while they were pressing trans women fleeing the fighting into service because they were āmen.ā
That is not to excuse the ridiculous amount of anti-queer sentiment in Russia. The hunting down of queer people under Ramzan Kadyrov in the Russian province of Chechnya was probably the worst act of homophobic violence since many decades, weāre talking about thousands of people getting murdered by government death squads who spied on them on dating sites. After the murders, Kadyrov joked in front of the international press why they were asking about a persecution of gay people, āthere are no gay people in Chechnya.ā
Like that shit was appalling and largely absent from western discourse before the war.
I donāt care. Like I said, the State Departmentās viewpoint means nothing to me. Clinton presided over a whole lot of terrible fuckery.
Like I said, world leaders are almost as hypocritical on this issue as Russia is. They basically, for the most part, say whateverās in their best interests and often invest significant effort into inflaming this kind of ābreakawayā region into a way to completely ruin whatever country and collapse it into a war in which they try to put their guy on top once itās all over. Thatās absolutely nothing to do with me.
Itās wrong when the US does it, wrong when Russia does it. Not complicated.
I wasnāt editorializing. For an example, a quote is:
Versus
Exactly 100% backwards. They are lying on purpose. Again, I donāt see why I would need to be friendly to that or to anyone whoās posting it.
That is actually what the judgement said. Thatās not what the covertactionmagazine article said. What it said was that they strangled a pregnant woman to death with an electrical cord and drew a swastika with her blood on the wall. Thatās the difference Iām highlighting.
Yes, absolutely. Which is why I have very little patience for any random individual who wants to instrumentalize whatever struggle in the same way, whichever state theyāre stumping for. Theyāre not on your side, you donāt need to help them do that.