Maoo [none/use name]

The United States, alleged land of the free, has the largest prison population on the planet.

Ice is made up of water molecules. Very tiny things.

When water molecules move around really fast, that’s the exact same as them being hot. They are steam when they move around a lot, and steam is hot - and a gas. Steam might even be so hot it hurts - that’s because they’re smashing into the molecules in your body and making them move around too even when they shouldn’t and could damage you. Your body senses this and sends you pain signals so that you know to move away from the steam.

Water molecules can also stick together. With steam, the molecules move so much that they’re just bouncing around all over the place and the stickiness doesn’t really matter. If two water molecules stick together in steam, other ones are likely to ram into them and break them up This is why steam billows out in all directions. When water molecules in steam cool down, as in slow down, their stickiness to each other becomes a more important factor than before. The molecules still move around, just less than before. They interact with one another, keeping themselves tied together in the same general area but still moving a lot. This is why water settles into one place in a glass and why you can pour it as a room temperature liquid.

When water molecules get even cooler, the stickiness starts to matter even more. The molecules aren’t bouncing off each other much anymore, they’re just stuck together. This is what a solid is and ice is a solid.

Now, I’ve been saying stickiness, but with how small water molecules are, and what they’re made of, it’s actually very specific properties of the molecules that make them interact to “stick” together, with the strongest one being charge polarity. But that’s for a difference explanation!

Finally: so, for ice to melt, you need to get its molecules moving again. One way to get them moving is to expose them to a hot material, i.e. one that’s moving around a lot. Put your ice cube on a room temperature table and it will slowly melt because the molecules in the air and table are moving along so much that if the water molecules were doing the same they’d be in “liquid mode”. Another way is to add energy to the system in the form of radiation, which induces movement within the molecules and, therefore, between them since they’re in close proximity. The reason it makes them move is complicated and is literally quantum mechanics so I’ll also leave that for a different explanation.

Japanese carmakers were trying to go with hydrogen fuel and did a big grift on their government to get it subsidized. I think the idea was that Japan would have a national disadvantage with EV production as they don’t have the material base for batteries but they could have an advantage with hydrogen.

Those failed, or course. Now they’re a decade behind - there were only two Japanese EVs sold internationally just a few years ago.

Hell yeah

This is a classic move where the students will get absolutely nothing material but the admin gets everything they want.

If any of you are helping with encampments, make sure to spread the consciousness that merely meeting or planning something is not a material concession is literally in PR playbooks used by universities to pacify student movements.

Free speech has never existed in the form told to us in school and on TV. Every liberation fight has faced violent state reaction and required compensatory resistance on the part of the people actively fighting the system. There has never been a turnaround on marginalizing policy that happened due to peaceful, state-protected debate in the marketplace of ideas. It’s all been precipitated by hard fights that inevitably found enemies in the cops and the feds.

This applies to every Western country, especially those most desperate to cling to their chauvinist myths.

If you know this, you can protect yourself and others by knowing what response your actions will receive and therefore how to avoid unnecessary risks.

1. “Offensive” was autocorrected to “official”

Okay so it’s just a straw man then. Can you have this conversation without inventing things for me to defend?

2. Russians did not destroy infrastructure because they hope to use for themselves (the fact that I have to explain this makes me think engaging with you is a waste of my time).

Are you sure? Russians also have a cultural connection to Ukraine, particularly the Kievan Rus. There is/was also a need to manufacture consent for invading a “cousin”. Also, how do you discount them simply being less brutal than the NATO countries that have consistently done far, far, far worse to their targets?

It seems you’d like to avoid the reality that Russia has been so much less brutal. After all, this flies in the face of the (usually racist) narrative about the invasion, which seems to have successfully indoctrinated you into a belief in simplistic camps of good vs. bad. You sure do seem to suffer under the childish illusion that if I push back on the anti-Russia nonsense out there I must be offering a defense of invasion, like I support it. In reality, this is so beside the point that I have never said anything remotely like this, but it is inconceivable to your propagandized worldview that anyone would be doing anything other than being for team A or team B rather than looking at a greater context.

That’s the difference between a war of invasion and the mindless bombing the USA likes to do in whatever conflict they get involve in on the other side if the globe

I already gave the example of Iraq, which was two full invasions and a horrific sanctions regime.

Typing on phone is annoying, so my messages get a bit terse. But your whole rant previously is about how bad the Ukrainians are.

No it wasn’t.

OK, sure. I have not much interest in that. But, how does that justify the Russian attack?

See what I mean? You’re limited by your ideology to conceive only a team sports understanding. You can’t imagine that I would (correctly) describe UA from a critical perspective without being pro-SMO. Not only that, you seemingly can’t imagine there being anything else to care about. Only this one thing enters your mind, lol.

I don’t think my framing has been that myopic to leave so much room for interpretation, though. I am pushing back on false imperialist propaganda narratives that have successfully misled those in imperial core countries and among sycophants for those countries. The wider problem is imperialism itself, which first undermined the Soviet Union and contributed to its destruction, then dismantled Eastern Europe, killing tend of millions, and finally isolated Russia et al from the imperial spoils, giving them the third world / peripheral treatment. Capitalist Russia was forced into its current position as paraiah by pushing back against this and attempting to reestablish itself as an independent power (national bourgeois interests) rather than an exploitation factory for the US, UK, Germany etc (intentional bourgeois interests). And in response, it has received a new cold war treatment of isolation and maximum pressure from the groups drawing from the literal legacies of literal Nazi staffing and ideologies and pogroms.

If you want to understand the point of this, aside from the value in not being constantly wrong about geopolitics, it is that you should fight to end this regime of maximum pressure, exploitation, and militarism that your own country, whatever it is, likely either supports, (proximally) benefits from, or has significant movements attempting to do so. I would hope that being consistently wrong and having to literally make things up about what I’m saying to make your arguments easier would be the impetus to become informed and start pointing the right fingers and doing the right work in your own local context. Or maybe just not saying things until you’ve done research?

How is any of this Ukrainian nenonazi stuff relevant?

All of it. The imperialist narrative tries to paper over the coup, the ethnic cleansing, and the nature of the civil war that are proximal root causes of the invasion. The timing and quantity of shelling in Donbas is conspicuous just prior to invasion. So is the Western imposition on killing negotiations right after invasion. These things are all tied together - who funded the neonazis? Why are they in military command? Where and when did they become organized? It all comes back to imperialist projects.

Russia was never under threat from Ukraine.

This is absurd. You don’t think NATO encroachment and a civil war on the border is a threat? What world do you live on?

Even if literal-Hitler was reborn there, how is bombing Kiev helping anyway?

Hitler was just one guy. Naziism was born of the conditions and politics of Germany and its capitalist class, a lashing back against the left that took great inspiration from US empire and genocide.

Anyways, why bomb Kiev? At first, to try and force early contrition and negotiations of a Minsk III type deal. Guess who put a stop to that.

Authoritarian governments LOVE wars

This is a dog whistle for political miseducation. All governments are authoritarian. This includes yours. Many people forget this because they accept, or are ignorant of, where that authority is directed and who has to accept the violence. What is more authoritarian than pushing a coup in UA, for example? Perhaps your government helped with that. Either way, every state is authoritarian.

it gives them an enemy, it gives them power, it gives them a mean to get rid of political opponents.

If the bourgeois that dominate a country don’t want a war, it won’t happen. The main impetus for war is usually a geopolitical struggle that has, at its base, ruling class interests. Russia is a direct threat to the piece of the pie that Western imperialists want for themselves. They want to own and sell, for example, Russia’s oil. They want to have control over the people, resources for which they contend with Russia. Similarly, instability and extraction from countries near Russia benefit the imperialist project but hurt Russia (e.g. Syria). This is a constant and dominant aspect of capitalist geopolitics. They do not let you rest or develop independently. You will be destroyed if you are not aggressive in opposition. There is a massive graveyard of countries that failed to do so sufficiently.

Russia plays a role as a country isolated from the international capitalist pie that faces constant and extreme pressure to become that aforementioned extraction target by international capital. Its international actions are grounded in a reaction to this: the interests of its national bourgeoisie that would aspire to be international were they allowed into that fold.

So we can either believe Putin a philanthropist ready to sacrifice bravely his troops for no benefit but the de-nazification of a nuke-free, not-in-nato country, or we can recognise this as just a pretext for grabbing land (supported by the preservation of infrastructure).

Obviously there are other, more correct ways to think about this aside from this Great Man Theory false dichotomy.

Oh and that part I wrote about authoritarian governments loving war applies to Russia just as well by the way.

I assumed you were applying it exclusively to Russia.

After all of this, if Russia is in it for no personal benefit but a moral victory, why are they not withdrawing? After all they have supposedly nothing to gain by continuing the war, since they don’t intend to occupy the country?

Like I said, Russia initially wanted to force a Minsk III, as evidenced by its actions. The Western controllers of UA, who gladly support its Nazi militaries, prevented this. The RF then had to choose between withdrawal with no gains or an attempt to maintain a status quo invasion, occupying the Donbas and further pushing for contrition. This is, further, in the context of the West using their financial nuclear options on Russia (and really, the economies of Western Europe as well) and utterly failing to directly damage Russia, and in fact subsidizing it via higher oil and gas prices on oil they were still easily selling. The status quo was comparatively tolerable. There is the additional outcome of the long attritional war strategy they have undertaken, which is the effective demilitarization of UA over time due to lack of manpower, materials, and economic base. This accomplishes a similar goal to exclusion from NATO. The territory of the Donbas additionally buys a buffer zone from NATO and access to coastal oil reserves.

In short, Western actions made the current trajectory the most favorable one for Russia to head in.

Such a long post to avoid explaining why the Russian official is justified.

What Russian official? I haven’t talked about a Russian official nor has the person I responded to said anything about that to me.

Half of what you wrote is in bad faith (not destroying critical infrastructure… Out of good heart? Really?)

It’s kind of funny that while incorrectly labeling what I said as bad faith you actually made some things up to straw man me.

Anyways it’s no bad faith I’m directly telling you that Russian has been relatively restrained in their tactics. They did not target civilian infrastructure as NATO countries repeatedly have, though they are increasingly doing so as part of a ramp up.

Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with, for example, how civilians were targeted in Iraq for decades, first through the destruction of infrastructure during the Gulf War, then through sanctions that killed millions, then the invasion that further decimated civilian infrastructure and intentionally employed terrorism. Compare the two and get back to me.

or simply not relevant (should we invade every fascist government out there? Besides, nothing better to consolidate an authoritarian government than a war, so good job Russia on that front ?)

What did I say that was not relevant? Have I suggested any countries should be invaded? I have no idea what you’re talking about.

You seem confused.

Even if it were so, Russia provides it a raison d’être. […]

Rather than address the point I made you decided to go on your own Russia Bad tangent.

It seems that you don’t really care that you’re being dishonest. You sure didn’t reply to where I previously pointed out bad faith behavior. That’s something else you share with fascists.

Aside from being stupid and wrong it’s also boring so I’ll probably ignore you pretty soon.

Yeah, so shooting those people and kidnapping their children will provide a great way for them to build a better social consciousness and not double down on chauvinism. […]

More deflection lol. You just said “yeah”, implying you know you were wrong to minimize UA’s Nazis in high places, but then decided to change the subject rather than honestly accept the fault.

PS if you haven’t noticed I’m ignoring everythy you say after catching an example of bad faith. So far that’s the first sentence in each response!

Do you know why Russia invaded Ukraine? You seem to think it had no cause

There is no justification for levelling cities and kidnapping children. None.

You didn’t answer my question. I believe in you! Use that big brain to think about what I’m asking!

You are arguing against yourself here.

You think me calling your little stories fantastical nonsense is arguing against myself? It’s starting to look like you have a grab-bag of meningless quips rather than thoughts.

You said that if UA killed Putin and sieged Moscow,

No I didn’t lol. I assume you didn’t read the usernames very carefully and are just very confused about everything all the time.

Please read Article 5. It doesn’t say what you think it says.

Feel free to share your thoughts about how I’m wrong. This is how people usually share their knowledge and disagreements - if they actually understand something.

Yes, NATO’s goal is that if Russia decides to attack one member, they have to fight all members. […]

Deflection to avoid the point. Again.

Yes, defending your country from people who burn your cities and steal your children has no point, we should all bow down to Putin.

Deflection to avoid the point. Again.

Sounds like your answer to their question is yes: you cheer the Saudi invasion of Bahrain and NATO’s support for it. Truly monstrous.

No. Please go and work on your basic reading comprehension.

Hey you’re the one who, rather than directly answering the question (you seem to have trouble giving straight answers), instead started justifying it. You’ve gotta be more clear in your meanings if you implied the polar opposite of your actual view.

So, what is the direct, straight answer to the original question about the Saudis invading Bahrain?

Yeah, Ukraine has no agency. If you are not just repeating Russian propaganda here, you could try harder to think for yourself.

You mentioned earlier that this is a proxy war. Do you know what proxies are? lol.

Your incoherence aside, to the extent that agency means anything when applied to states, UA has quite limited agency, yes. As a state, it was couped about a decade ago and was then plunged into civil war. Its elections are arguably illegitimate because a large minority of the country, the one targeted for ethnic cleansing, hasn’t voted in national elections in a decade. It has already sold off much of its assets and bows to the whims of other states acting against its best interests. Its paramilitaries, now part of the official armed forces, have substantial autonomy and routinely ignore orders. It was easily invaded and would be easily overrun if Russia used NATO methods, i.e. did not treat civilians as humans.

Though I should point out that “agency” is something that people have. Individuals. States don’t work that way. They’re controlled by social interests, political interests. I’ve helped you out by assuming what you really mean is sovereignty.

Anyways, yes, NATO countries made the decisions I mentioned. Are you unfamiliar with the early peace talks? Sounds like it. More pretending.

UA will not recover for generations unless Russia takes the whole thing and pumps it full of resources

Like it has always done with its colonies. I grew up in one of them, I know how that looks like. Incompetence, theft and agitation. That’s all Russian-style leadership is capable of.

Where and when did you grow up?

So yeah, the US may not be the best led country, and it has indeed committed gross crimes against humanity, and an alliance with them may indeed be a deal with the devil.

The relationship between the US and UA is not an alliance. It’s far more predatory than that and I’ve given you examples. You ignored them.

But you can’t ally with Russia, you can only submit to them.

If you count the USSR, which you seem to conflate with Russia, then it was literally allied with the US during WWII lol. Possibly the most famous alliance in popular knowledge.

The US may swindle you out of your money, but Russia will rape your women and kidnap your children, and by the way, also rob you of your money as well.

Hey look, a racist Nazi mythology! You sure do repeat a lot of those.

I think you just don’t understand what Russia did and is still doing to Eastern Europe

Oh?

and you are sitting in a cushy chair ideologizing and damning people for ideological impurity

The people I’ve damned are Nazis and war criminals.

when if you were in their place, you would have to live with a daily fear of being robbed of your dignity, your freedom, and your life, even just for the crime of showing pronouns in your username.

Ahahahaha what are you talking about?

I just don’t see that NATO ever threatened military action against nations supplying the Russian side. Do NATO countries fire off weekly nuclear threats against Pakistan, Iran, China or North Korea for sending munitions to Russia? Does Ukraine?

NATO is the military wing of the global seat of capital. It does not need to threaten to invade as its first course of action. Instead, it first makes economic threats and supports coups.

Has the US instigated sanctions on those countries? Have any of them faced a coup attempt lately? Is one of them frequently bombed by Israel? These things are not separate.

Yes, there are far-right elements in Ukraine, yes, some are even in the government.

As a general rule I recommend not minimizing Nazis. “Some” is minimizing. There was a period where you couldn’t find a picture of “brave UA soldiers” without a wolfsangel or swastika or sonnenrad, nor a UA politician not shaking hands with them. The head of the MoD said and says Nazi shit all the time and the entire country has been rehabilitating Bandyera as a national hero, putting the committers of pogroms on street signs.

Oh, and don’t forget: ethnically cleansing ethnic Russians for over a decade and violently suppressing the left.

If you defend that shit you are a Nazi sympathizer.

And if this is news to you then why do you think you should have opinions? Isn’t humility better?

I thought the party line was three days? Or is that too fantastical a claim nowadays.

If Russia acted like NATO does it would have been over in days, yes. NATO has prolonged this war but not on its own: Russia has shown massive and unexpected restraint, or at least unexpected if you’re used to the tactics of the “civilized” West.

Russia could have, but did not, destroy the entirety of UA’s infrastructure in a few days.

Overwhelmingly RUSSIAN landmines, heavy metals from RUSSIAN military machinery, and unexploded RUSSIAN bombs.

While much of that is disputable it’s also a deflection to avoid the point that was made. You’re falling into a trap in thinking that NATO can’t take blame if Russia does something bad. This is embarrassingly bad logic.

You are presenting a false dichotomy. Russia was not obligated to murder all those people, Russia was not obligated to flatten Mariupol, Russia is not obligated to invade Ukraine.

Do you know why Russia invaded Ukraine? You seem to think it had no cause and was not responding to anything for which NATO shares blame.

Ukraine is obligated to defend itself.

Ukraine is in a much worse position because it’s following NATO dictates. Its only option is to follow NATO dictates because it hasn’t been an independent country since at least 2014, not because it’s the only strategic option.

Ukraine could have signed a peace deal days into the invasion.

Right now, UA’s future is being thrown away because it’s being used as a proxy for Western interests, not because it’s the best, let alone only, option.

Russia has a choice to stop this war, Ukraine does not. Not if it still wants to exist after.

You have it completely reversed. UA is on the path to its own destruction due to the decisions of its captured state. It’s forced into massive debt, its assets sold off to imperialists, is suffering huge losses in population by sending them into a meat grinder commanded by Nazis, and it will still 100% lose this war. There is no serious person that thinks UA will win.

It is. If Ukraine retaliated in a proportionate way against Russia, Russia would escalate the conflict. (…)

So much hypothetical and make-believe nonsense. It is a flagrant escalation and you should respect yourself more and recognize the obvious.

By the way, you like to act as if Russia’s escalations and threats are just elements of nature. If Russia, a nuclear power feels threatened, it will use nuclear weapons, that’s just the way of things.

Russia has been repeatedly threatened and has never used nukes. It’s only a member of NATO that has ever used nukes and it was on two large civilian population centers. A very basic grade school history lesson contradicts you.

But if France, a nuclear power, has people carrying small arms into battle against invading soldiers, that’s an irresponsible escalation.

Do you see how you had to massage your language to be more passive and therefore avoid the obvious? France entering a war by sending troops is an obvious escalation and per NATO’s own logic is basically dangling a nuclear conflict over everyone’s heads via Article 5.

If you have to use this bad faith logic, don’t you think that means you already kind of know you’re wrong? Deep down? Instead of doubling down and doing Nazi apologetics, which I hope is reluctant, you could instead take a break and resolve this cognitive dissonance, maybe even do some readings.

NATO has a duty to avoid escalating the war (…)

Not while pretending it’s anything other than a belligerent and escalatory organization. Initially staffed with literal German Nazis by the way. We’re telling you what NATO is and why escalation is bad for Ukrainians and you’re acting like you should be able to go tell teacher that the Russians are hypocrites or something.

My conclusion is that you have an unrealistic idea of what the possible outcomes here are. Only someone who hates Ukrainians or who (even erroneously!) thinks they can win would think “but it’s only fair!” is comparable to their destruction.

You’re also confused about this being a Good Guy vs Bad Guy issue. All of your argumentation is centered around deflecting blame to Russia when you’re presented with basic facts about NATO’s role. Rather than acknowledge, you think it’s great argumentation to say, “Russia bad”, as if there is a person here that’s saying Russia is good. This is a fantasy you’ve constructed to avoid having an adult conversion.

I wasn’t aware France would be sending soldiers to help Ukraine violently quell a sectarian protest and uprising of Ukrainian people

Sounds like your answer to their question is yes: you cheer the Saudi invasion of Bahrain and NATO’s support for it. Truly monstrous.

I suspect you learned of this for the first time during this conversation, but that doesn’t make your response any better. Bloodthirsty LARPing.

Never said that. It’s obvious NATO has a vested interest in Ukraine winning the conflict.

Wrong. While there are plenty of dum-dums in NATO, they don’t think UA will win lol. Their actions have consistently led to UA losses in order to try to hurt Russia. NATO countries have decided to sacrifice the Ukrainian people for this project and they keep hoping it will exhaust Russia. At this point, UA will not recover for generations unless Russia takes the whole thing and pumps it full of resources, as NATO countries will just strip the remainder for parts.

ext4 for system partitions and zfs for anything dedicated to personal data storage.

This is a great opportunity for people like us to do political education. If y’all have a local encampment get involved and run some teach-ins on why your demands need to be concrete and realized before giving up your leverage and promises aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Come prepared with historical examples. There are probably very recent ones re: BLM promises in your area.

I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don’t have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.

The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.

For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.

It pointed to "disinformation, sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference… and other hybrid operations

Every accusation is a confession lol.

Imagine if NATO lovers applied these standards to themselves. All of Western Europe would just be one big crater.

Dems voters openly accepting 99% Hitler rather than do literally anything but whine about the people fighting back:

He touched grass

Wrong

Do you guys not have phones?

Europe overall is still buying tons of Russian fossil fuels, they’re just overpaying for it due to sanctions. A high bill is exactly what that entails!

Isn’t it cool to be directly paying for NATO aggression?

No he’s just inconsistent, trying to appease different audiences.