Frank

So in 56 the Soviets rolled tanks in to Budapest and put down the Hungarian revolt. About 6,000 people were killed in the fighting and another 300 or so were executed. This, along with de-Stalinization, convinced a lot of western leftists to turn away from the Soviets if not abandon communism all together.

But...

The US had contributed to killing like two million people in Korea three years before, including the South Korean dictatorship's mass killing of hundreds of thousands of "communists", ie anyone they didn't like, including communists.

And if you stack those things against each other...

Hungary just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Just a blip in the Cold War. Unless you had an incredibly idealistic Pollyanna view of the USSR the Soviet's actions in Hungary seem really, really mild compared to the behavior of the US and it's allies throughout the cold war. Like the French were murdering Algerian civilians left right and center at the same time. French military repression in Algiers might have killed as many as 1,000,000 civilians, but definitely killed at least 250,000.

Why was Hungary such a big deal in the context of all the other massive, horrific wars and mass killings going on literally at the same time? I can't make sense of it. Did western commies really think that the USSR was a completely bloodless endeavor with no meaningful opposition?

I'm really having trouble with this. NATO murdered millions of people in that decade, whereas as far as I know the Warsaw Pact put down a couple of minor revolts that were probably lead by Nazis anyway, and otherwise mostly stayed at home.

Ford is chasing :melon-musk: 's business model and doing an end-run around their hordes of loyal car dealership minions. Blood in the fucking water.

Neoliberals on one side, technocratic oligarchs on the other, and Evangelical anti-intellectualism on the flanks. It's an actual fucking conspiracy.

I can't believe people still believe in free will and agency. I'm not aware of anything in biology or physics that suggests we have some magic spark in a mystical plane that gives us "free will". We just do stuff in response to stimulus. I would have thought this debate would die when neurologists started opening up people's brains and inducing massive personality shifts and various cognitive aberrations by poking people's brain meat with electrodes. It's just a false dichotomy left over from weird medieval religious nonsense.

God they're talking about choosing to act Killllll meeeeeee

I'm reading the intro to Infinite Thought btws feel free to check in here because I will be cataloging my distress relating to French people who spend too much time thinking and not enough time practicing with swords.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media

Apparently these guys did a poll, or Gallup did a poll that these guys considered legitimate, and they found that about 80% of Crimeans believed the Euromaidan coup government was illegitimate. About 80% of Crimeans thought the referendum to join the Russian Federation was legit and reflected the will of the people (Western Ukrainians, on the other hand, did not believe this), and about 70% of Crimeans viewed Russia's intervention as a good thing and thought that joining the RF would improve their quality of life.

Can anyone corroborate this? I'm just poking through Wikipedia sources. Because if this is true it kind of drives a stake through the heart of the notion that Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. It sounds a lot more like the people of Crimea overwhelmingly decided that being part of Russia was a better deal and enthusiastically switched their allegiance.

https://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html

If this timeline is at all accurate Crimea and Ukraine have been doing rounds about whether Crimea and Sevastopol should be part of Russia or Ukraine, what languages should be considered official state languages, and all sorts of fights over who holds what political and legal powers in Crimea, and these disagreements have gone on continuously since the dissolution of the USSR without stopping.

As far back as 1998 a majority of Crimeans were pro joining the Russian Federation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars

Also, this shit. I'm open to the possibility that some of this is western exaggeration but on face value it looks like the deportation, cultural genocide, and mass murder of tens of thousands of people on Stalin's orders because Beria said they were traitors. And things have remained bad and complicated for them since as they were outnumbered by Russians when the Soviets finally let them go home in the late 80s and have had trouble with a large portion of Crimean Tartars struggling to get Ukrainian citizenship through the 90s and having political disputes with the Russian majority as well as some Ukrainian governments.

Also, apparently in the mid nineties a little over 50% of Ukrainians preferred Russian as their first language, and there's been constant disputes where Kiev tries to force everyone to speak Ukrainian and the Russian speaking half of the country pushes back.

Based on reading a lot of random articles this war would have been inevitable even without NATOs bullshit. Kiev has spent thirty years trying to impose Ukrainian nationalism on a population that is about 50% Russian speaking and the Russian Speakers have never wanted that. Kiev has constantly asserted over the years that Ukrainian was the only allowed official language in Ukraine, then been forced to walk back on that because obviously. The borders of Ukraine and Russia went from being a formality under the USSR to actual national borders with all the resulting economic, military, and political problems with the dissolution of the USSR, But Kiev's attempts to create a single unified Ukrainian nationality were always bogus and ridiculous since so much of the population had so many cultural and linguistic and historical and political ties across the border. The EuroMaidan coup just pressed on fault lines that had been present since the dissolution of the USSR, and the declaration of the DPR and the LPR was basically the Russian speaking minority asserting that they wouldn't be allow themselves to be forced in conform with Kiev's Ukrainian Nationalist agenda. And then this year Russia was finally forced to step in because the inter ethnic, interlinguistic, and intercultural dispute between Ukraine and it's Russian speaking minority was about to turn in to a fucking massacre.

NATO and western support of Ukrainian Nationalist factions and outright Nazis was a factor, but NATO was just pouring fuel on a fire that was already burning by empowering Kiev to constantly attempt to alienate and marginalize the huge Russian speaking minority.

The dissolution of the USSR was a fucking mistake and nationalism is for idiots. And the Crimean Tartars got totally fucked by Stalin and the Soviet governments that came after him.

A song from 1966, demonstrating that Liberals have always been feckless scum and very little has changed.

CW: Some outdated language, maybe a joke at the expense of LGBT people but I don't know enough context to know if the joke is punching down or not. The joke is referring to the "Daughters of the American Revolution" as the "Dykes of the American Revolution", and It's easy to read that as disparaging the Daughters of the American Revolution as lesbians, but I don't know how radical Ochs is, he it could be that the joke is that dykes are cooler than the DAR? Idk, if anyone knows where he was on LGBT issues let me know.

American History X is the ur-example of this. Nominally anti-racist and anti-fascist, the movie intends to depict a man's journey to recognize his own hatreds as built on prejudice and his own insecurity and anger. He learns to accept others, lets go of his hate, and returns to his community a changed man. But, at the end of the movie, we see that it's not so easy to escape the cycle of violence.

But it's also a movie that starts with a hot, ripped Edward Norton having bed-breaking sex with Fairuza Balk when he is interupted by black men trying to steel his truck. He proceeds to confront the men, gunning one down, before he wounds the other one and curb stomps him with near-orgasmic enjoyment.

And that's what the fash focus on. They laugh and mock the anti-racist messaging, choosing only to engage with the parts of the story they think glorifies their beliefs.

Fight Club is a great example. The story was written by a Gay man and the plot is pretty much "Are the straights alright?" The story follows a nebbish office geek, again played by ripped as shit Edward Norton, under going a delusional tail spin of self destruction where he becomes homeless, terrorizes his coworkers, builds a cult of disenfranchised young men, has hot sex with Helena Bonham Carter, and then engages in a major act of anprim terrorism. In the end of the book the hero defeats his depraved hyper-masculine alter ego but finds he cannot escape the consequences of his actions.

But most straight men focus on the "Ripped as shit" "Sticking it to the man" and "Fucking Helena Bonham Carter" parts and ignore how the protagonist ends up broken and completely alienated from society except for his psycho cultists.

There's a saying that there's no such thing as an anti-war movie (excepting Come and See), and in the same sense there's really no such thing as an Anti-Fascist movie. Death of the Author is in full effect. Whether it's Pink Floyd's the Wall, or something openly and enthusiastically fashy like 24, Fascists and nascent Fascists will engage with the material they like and ignore the rest.

Being stateless is one of the worst things you can be in the world, and the UK just passed a law letting the government quietly strip citizenship from anyone. The test case was a young British woman who got radicalized by the Wahhabis. She was of Bangledeshi descent but was born in the UK and had no ties to Bangledesh, but that was enough for the UK to strip her of her statehood, leaving her a stateless person. Now they've formalized the process and can do it to anyone they choose, essentially rendering null any pretense of civil rights.

I thought this was neat. Featuring our boy Kruschev

I wouldn't want the jokes to wear thin. There are lots of white but not really white groups like Quebecois and the Welsh who could take the heat for a while to give the Italians time to cool off.

I don't have anything to add except that people get ostracized brutally for shit that isn't that important and people are way to willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.