Maduro’s grip on power relies fundamentally on electoral manipulation.

All the “Maduro cheated to win the election” stuff comes from the same people insisting Biden cheated to win in 2020 and Obama cheated in 2008.

Following the contested 2024 election, Maduro launched “Operation Tun Tun” (Operación Tun Tun), a brutal crackdown described by experts as “state terrorism”.

Were these experts affiliated with Elliot Abrams?

Conservatives do love self-owning with the anti-Castro rhetoric

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for a Glorious New War we can all watch on the TV.

Russia is right at our doorsteps

That hasn’t been true in over 40 years. And even when it was true, Europeans suffered far more under the paranoid police states of their own governments than any cross border conflict.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Not like any of us have a material say, but enjoy conscription I guess.

Eh, if you run away from fascism instead of fighting against it, it will simply eventually find you as it spreads like a disease.

The goal of war is not to die for your country but to make the other fucker die for his.

The Ukrainian military has done a far better job getting it’s people killed than killing fascists. There’s no benefit to getting dragged into an army that won’t train you, arm you, or deploy you to maximum beneficial effect.

You can’t ask bullies politely to stop making you suffer, because they never respected you in the first place.

This isn’t a schoolyard brawl, it’s a high tech killing field. If a neighborhood bully fires a cruise missile at you, there’s no benefit to standing your ground.

Biggest global rearming since WW1 and people are cheering about it like they don’t understand what happens next.

But what about those on the left?

Idk about the rest of y’all, but I’ve been volunteering with the Houston Chapter of Food Not Bombs at every opportunity.

There’s far fewer of us than cops, and we’re more focused on keeping our impoverished neighbors alive than getting in gunfights with the police.

But maybe that’ll change. I guess we’ll see.

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot?

Thomas Matthew Crooks tentatively raising his hand

鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|

Is a regular hater and chronic pot stirrer. You’ll get used to them.

Where are the bearers of arms who bear arms in case of government tyranny?

They’re the guys in the ICE uniforms, more often than not

It does. Developers train the AI on specific sets of images and cluster the outputs under categorically headings.

The end result is these pre-fabbed cookie cutter appearance to AI output. Even before you notice the surplus of fingers or weird melty background elements, an experienced eye will catch orientation and framing and composition that all look the same.

It’s funny, because I’m the exact opposite. I’ll be absolutely burnt out at the end of a week, but put me in a crowd of people Friday night and I get juiced to joke and sing and ham it up until morning

They’ll pivot to being the world’s largest RAM re-saler and clean up.

what happens when your profile starts to match up with someone who commits crimes?

I’d dismiss this as fanciful ten years ago. But we’ve got ICE agents staking out grocery stores and flea markets looking for anyone passably “illegal”. Palantir seems to have made a trillion dollar business model out of promising an idiot president the ability to Minority Report crime. And then you’ve got the Israeli’s Lavendar AI and “Where’s Daddy” programs, intended to facilitate murdering suspects by bombing the households of relatives.

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit more paranoid.

Oh yeah man, the 1930s brought some real prosperity.

It was bad that the Nazis invaded Ukraine, I agree. Postwar, they saw more economic growth in a decade than they’d experienced in the prior century.

you believe Soviet Union to be a tragically lost utopia

Every industrial era country gets it’s golden age. The question is whether you’re allowed to enter the industrial era or you’re trapped in subsistence for the benefit of your neighbors.

Soviet governments prioritized industrialization, which is what made them rapidly improve in the postwar era.

That upsets a lot of anarchist diehards, because they are convinced the mean old Leninists simply cheated them out of an equivalent heyday

If they wanted them gone bad enough, they could starve them out.

Who is “they”? Clearly, the German business class don’t want American soldiers gone. They’re a profit center. And the locals who have to deal with these dickbags running around, crashing vehicles, assaulting people at bars, and otherwise making anyone within half a mile of a base miserable clearly don’t have any kind of actual economic control of the municipalities.

Nato was formed in 1949 which was before the korea war and was always about preventing soviet aggression.

Why wasn’t West Germany invited until six years later?

However, Germany could just refuse to allow anyone to supply food, power, petrol etc. to American bases

Why would German business interests turn down lucrative contracts to supply heavily marked up commodities to a captive clientele? And why would the German state government interfere with the finances of prolific political donors?

Maybe the German citizenry could boycott the bases. But they’d need a large nationalist labor movement for that kind of effort. And I’m not seeing it happen in a nation as sharply divided along regional and ethnic lines.

The reason nato was created was the threat of the soviet Russian empire

Not until after the Korean War, and the official entrance of West Germany to NATO, did the goal shift to Soviet containment. The original explicit stated purpose of the organization was to prevent German re-militarization - a perceived error of the original WW1 settlement. Soviet Russia was considered an ally and partner in this purpose under FDR and only became a belligerent under Truman, in the scramble to entrench capitalism as the primary economic model of the Pacific Rim.

You seem to make the mistake of subsuming the whole of anarchist Ukraine under Makhno.

I don’t think that’s a mistake I made, because it was wrapped up long before I was born. But the Anarcho-Communists of the Ukraine failed to reconcile with their neighbors in Russia, despite having a host of overlapping priorities. There were clearly more Red Guards than Makhnovists. And so they lost to a numbers game long before a shot was fired.

The factory councils sure didn’t rely on him leading all of a sudden.

Didn’t they? We saw what happened to organically constituted Workers Soviets without an armed defense in Shanghai and Paris. Makhno was pivotal in defeating the Whites when they came knocking. So his army was definitely instrumental to the movement lasting as long as it did. And there was even a generous overlap between membership of the Bolsheviks and Makhnovists, given how easily guys like Peter Arshinov changed sides.

How many Ukrainian factory councils slide effortlessly into USSR colors when Lenin came knocking?

The irony of the Makhnovist Movement is that it succeeded because of the Bolshevik Revolt in St. Petersburg and the subsequent splitting of Russian forces into the Red and White Armies.

But because Ukrainian agricultural production was so critical to the survival of pre-industrial Russia, the Reds weren’t inclined to let Ukraine exist independently any more than the Whites were.

The workers can only free themselves be freed by the most dedicated marxists!

Makhnovshchina gets to be a purist movement because it dies in infancy. Compare Ukraine to Yugoslavia, a country that embraced many of the same socialist tenants but managed to persist as an independent entity for half a century rather than half a decade, and suddenly they’re Evil Freedom-Hating Baby-Killing Communists again.

You’re never going to find half as many Tito-lovers on Lemmy as Nestor Makhno-lovers, because Tito died in his 80s while leading his country and Nestor died at 45 - alienated even from other anarchists - of tuberculosis as a penniless exile in France.

Meanwhile, the workers in all these countries vanish from view. No armchair Lemmy anarchist seems to care how Soviet-Era Ukraine prospered. Or how the Soviet collapse in 1991 brought in the corporate vultures to pick all these countries clean. We’re always and forever living in 1917, convinced a short-lived militia movement was the Secret Sauce to Real Working Anarcho-Communism, despite all historical evidence to the contrary.