• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    One should support the Ukrainian right to self-determination

    Just rhetorically? Is a Tinkerbell thing, where saying “I don’t believe in Ukraine” kills a fairy and then I need to clap really hard to bring Ukraine back to life?

    Or are we supposed to be doing something in particular, like SWATing any of my neighbors I catch using Cyrillic?

    That doesn’t confer supporting this or that Ukrainian army regiment ipso facto

    So I need to support the abstract concept of self-determination, but I don’t need to support he physical means by which that self-determination is achieved? Why? What could possibly be the purpose of this?

    feeling sad

    Okay. So the purpose of supporting the underdogs in a grisly war that only seems to benefit the MIC is to… feel sad? That’s it? All of this is just an exercise in media-induced depression?

    Again, why the fuck would I want to do this?

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Well nothing we believe in makes any single difference in foreign policy so you’re under no obligation to care about anything whatsoever.

        I’m more concerned with the reflexive need to pick a team and then get incredibly angry at your neighbors if they’re not on the same foreign-policy team. You’re clearly invested in doing something, if you believe

        One should support the Ukrainian right to self-determination and thus be anti-Russia in the sense of opposing this unjust war of aggression.

        So what’s the plan? What are you suggesting “support” looks like?

        Because, right now, I’m seeing a lot of generic hysteria and hate aimed at anyone with a Russian ethnicity (among other ethnicities that people are “aligning” with Russia).

        Personally I think you should care about things

        Does caring about things mean taking a certain posture towards people? Does this posture affect the material conditions of those people?

        Is your definition of “doing something” just “being low-key racist” towards anyone you track as insufficiently pro-AmericanUkrainian.

        Because I went through that shit after 9/11. People running around to every Mosque and screaming at Muslims to prove that they care about things. I remember people cheering at waterboarding, because it proved that you cared about things. I remember how you had to be a zealous supporter of the next big war, to prove you cared about things. And if you didn’t, it could cost you. Your social circle. Your career. Potentially your life, depending on how heated things got.

        We going to “care about” Ukraine like that, too?

          • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            There’s no need to “pick a team”

            That’s exactly what being “pro”/“anti” Russian is.

            the denial of the right to self-determination

            This isn’t self-determination, it is states feuding over the border line. Might as well apply self-determination to CSA diehards chanting “States’ Rights” as Azov dorks.

            I mean more so just as an ethical position

            The only ethical position is an anti-war position. Any assertion that you can ethically fling high explosives across a countryside is false. It can’t be done in any context.

              • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                When one state (the aggressor)

                Color Revolution, which resulted in a coup of the sitting government

                which cascaded into a civil war against East Ukrainian seperatists

                that only ended with a Russian invasion in defense of the Donetsk rebels.

                Which was the “one state” that kicked this mess off? Because I can’t find it. I see no less than three separate states actively involved for over a decade.

                So if a state invades another with the intention of occupying a chunk of it, setting up a puppet government, and enacting de-Ukrainisation policies in the east, the people being invaded do not have a right to self-defence?

                Change “de-Ukrainisation” with “de-Ba’athification” and that’s the argument I have been pitched since 2003, yes. Totally legitimate and 100% justifiable, so long as you can claim an existential threat to your motherland.

                You can say what you will about the Russians and their ham-fisted efforts at mitigating the conflict. But when NATO is proposing the extension of short-range missiles into your next door neighbor’s territory, they at least had a better “can’t let that smoking gun become a mushroom cloud” argument than anyone in DC did twenty years ago.