It’s just strange that I keep seeing people from Hexbear leaping to the defence of Russia and China, and indeed repeating their propaganda points. E.g. the idea that Ukraine is a Nazi country. There are some far-right people in Ukraine for sure, just like there are in Russia, and in Germany, and in the USA, etc. But I don’t think it’s accurate to call Ukraine a Nazi country. I don’t think their Jewish president plans to exterminate Jews, or expand the territory of Ukraine through conquest.

any time people say something positive about the USA, do you pipe in and ask them how they feel about mass incarceration in the US, which has a far higher incarceration rate than the USSR did even in the worst parts of the purges?

I don’t know if that’s true about the rate, although I suppose it could be. In any case the gulags were very harsh right? I assume harsher than American prisons at the time. Anyway I’m not saying the USA is a perfect country. I was just questioning the idea that the USSR had “institutions for public wellbeing”. Maybe they had some but the USSR was known as pretty oppressive.

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

That map shows Germany as having monuments for Nazi collaborators, but I don’t think modern Germany is a Nazi state. It’s a pretty liberal country and they even outlawed Nazi symbols right?

If all they wanted was independence and sovereignty, why do they keep putting black suns on their uniforms

I bet it’s just a minority of Ukrainian soldiers who have those. I think independence and sovereignty is all they want, and it definitely seems to be what they’re fighting for. Do you honestly believe they’re fighting for the right to put Jews in death camps? When their elected president is himself Jewish?

as they fire pork grease laced bullets at Chechen Muslim soldiers

You can say that’s not the best conduct in war, but come on. I don’t think a pork-grease-laced bullet is the worst offence in the world, when Ukrainian civilians are being killed, and their children are being kidnapped by Russia. I think it’s fair to criticise Ukraine for the pork bullets if you want, but that doesn’t mean you should regard Ukraine as a Nazi regime - I really don’t think it is one.

The current hegemonic narrative in the West is that there’s a clash of civilizations, the West and the East, where the West is white-coded and the East is the Other.

Russia invaded Ukraine. That’s why many people in the West aren’t big fans of the Russian state at the moment. I don’t think it matters whether Russia is east of Europe, or west of Europe, or anywhere. Russia has seemingly taken other actions against western countries too, like assassinations within western countries (Alexander Litvinenko in London, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin).

Remember that the West used to collaborate closely with Russia in the G8. I think if any member of the G8 had invaded Ukraine, they would have been kicked out of the G8. I don’t think Russia has been criticised just because it’s Russia, or just because it’s in the east. Their government has been criticised for their actions.

all the institutions for public wellbeing that the Soviets had built

Like gulags?

you get Banderites

Probably all countries have some far-right elements. Ukraine has some far-right people, Russia has some far-right people. But I think the main strand of nationalism in Ukraine at the moment is probably not “fascist”. I think they just want independence and sovereignty.

Can you do the same for NATO? Or are they too white to criticize?

Ukraine and Russia are both pretty white I think, so if I was trying to pick the “white” side, then there would be no reason to support Ukraine over Russia, or Russia over Ukraine.

Tankies advocating for the Kremlin for about the billionth time… hm…

Maybe Hexbear was established by the Kremlin and all its posters are paid by the Kremlin. I wouldn’t be surprised. Otherwise, Hexbear is just doing that work for free.

I definitely want people to have control over their data. And I like open source platforms, which is why I’m using Lemmy. But I just think if we want a European social media platform that sees widespread adoption among normal people, then such a platform would probably have proprietary elements. Surely if it was completely open source then some company could come along, take the open source stuff, bolt on some proprietary novelties, and start grabbing market share.

Most people want to use a service which is big and popular and just works, and I don’t think they care about code licensing…

It would be cool if Europe could make a really successful, open source social media platform which most Europeans want to use, but if it was open source then I expect some company (maybe a foreign one) would take the code, bolt on some proprietary features, and start stealing users.

Realistically though, proprietary tech services tend to be more successful. Whether it’s Facebook, or Windows, or the most successful European tech service: Spotify.

I like open source, but realistically if we want a successful European social media platform, it would probably be largely proprietary.

Yeah maybe there’s stuff I’m not aware of. I’ve seen some people on Lemmy point out that Bill Gates lobbied for the University of Oxford to not open source their Covid vaccine. I suppose that seems shitty on the face of it.

I got downvoted on Lemmy the other day because I said that I prefer Bill Gates to Musk.

Maybe there are things about Gates I don’t know. Maybe he is actually quite an evil person; I don’t know. But he does at least spend billions of dollars helping vulnerable people, right? And Bill’s stances on global politics are far more sensible than those of Musk.

By that logic we shouldn’t ban anything for teenagers. But we do: smoking, gambling, alcohol, etc.

Jupiter, the emperor of Europe…

Ah okay. It looks like some people believe the summary is AI-generated though because six people (at the time of me writing this) have upvoted the comment claiming the summary is AI-generated. I really did write it myself though.

Maybe I wrote it in a matter-of-fact way. It’s just a long article so I thought I’d explain the gist of it.

I wrote the summary myself, I didn’t use AI for it.

Something I dislike in movies is when a movie is set in a non-English-speaking country, but all the characters are speaking English. I would rather have the characters speak the proper language for the country, with English subtitles. But I guess the movie execs have calculated that subtitles will make the movie less profitable.

I like DST. I like having sunlight later into the evening during the summer.

I don’t know about the apps because I normally use Lemmy on the web. There might be an option in your app to just see posts from your subscribed communities though.

On the Lemmy.world website you can see posts from your subscribed communities by clicking the “subscribed” tab near the top of the page (the other tabs are “local” which shows you just posts from your instance - Lemmy.world in your case - and “all” which shows you the top posts from all Lemmy servers).

Also on the Lemmy.world website, if you scroll down on the main page, you can see your subscribed communities in a list on the right-hand side of the page. I sometimes use that list when I want to look at a particular community.

AfD got 21% in the election though, higher than just 6%. I think it’s like someone else in this thread said - the right don’t want to buy Teslas because electric cars are seen as “woke”, while the left don’t want to buy Teslas because they don’t like Musk.

94% say they won’t buy a Tesla car

This reminds me of something I read from a British left-wing journalist the other day (source). She suggested that perhaps the left should focus less on identity politics, and more on wealth and class:

By making a virtue of marginalisation, breaking ourselves down into ever smaller and mutually hostile groupings, we make it impossible to build a mass movement capable of taking on extreme concentrations of wealth and power