your quotation is wrong. I said “legitimate”, not rightful.

“Legitimate”, as in they’re the dominant governing body within the country and have been accepted by nearly every country as the genuine government of Afghanistan.

And it is fear-mongering. I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, I grew up seeing the US villainize Islam and Arabs in real time. In my youth, we were told that the Taliban were the greatest evil to ever walk the planet. There is a lot to criticise about the Taliban, they’re not leftist and their interpretation of Islam is heretical. But they’re not the human embodiment of the devil Americans so desperately want to believe they are.

In the instance of this headline, western news publications want people to think “Taliban = hate”, then think “if Putin works with the Taliban, that means he endorses them”. Thus stoking anti-Russia sentiments by using the decades of anti-Muslim fear-mongering they’ve been giving us since the 1990s.

Loathesome Dongeater mentioned it, but it’s important to realize that the Taliban existed as they did for 20 years to fight against American (and western) Imperialism in Afghanistan, and when the US pulled out of their country they became the dominant political force.

Though the Taliban isn’t a group MLs should be rooting for, they are the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and they have been committed to fighting ISIS - a US-grown insurgency in the Middle East & Northern Africa.

Western publications benefit more from just putting “the Taliban” into their headlines than they do from posting “the Afghani government”. The fear-mongering associated with two decades of imperialist war in Afghanistan helps their arguments monumentally.

thank fuck

I really hope they meant NazBol, because that’s logically what they should’ve put there.

I am not going to sit through 17 minutes to find out if they made a mistake, or if they simply refused to do any actual research.

Apparently, it was first reported that the F-16 was shot down. Then the story was pulled and replaced with one about it crashing on its own accord.

If the guy who is being reported as “the best pilot in Ukraine” crashed an F-16 during a mission, that says much worse things about the Ukrainian Air Force.

Mind you, Russia has sophisticated anti-air capabilities and can easily dominate Ukrainian airspace if they need to. But, sure, that billion-dollar high-tech jet fighter crashed itself.

losers want to say that it’s pay to win, and that’s the main criticism that you’ll see when you look into the game. The second criticism you’ll find is people being sinophobic about the game’s developers being Chinese.

I haven’t put a single cent into the game, but that hasn’t put me at a disadvantage against the players who do buy currency. If you understand tactics and make smart choices, the gear tier of your enemies never actually matters. It’s not pay to win, because you’d have to actually win as a result of putting money in.

is anybody else playing Arena Breakout Infinite?

I’ve been playing it since it was released to EA and I’m loving it.

It’s still too early to say whether or not it’s going well, but the Ukrainians have been making decent gains.

I’m assuming the Russian response will come in the coming days or weeks, and the Ukrainian forces will get pushed out. Their stated goal of the operation has already been nullified (and frankly didn’t hold water anyways) so I don’t know if the Ukrainians will invest many of their resources to keeping that front open, but if they do it could have dire consequences to their overall resolve.

Ukraine is already at a serious disadvantage in its manpower and resources, so this operation (at least to me) looks to be an act of desperation. You wouldn’t try something so bold and borderline suicidal if you saw a future otherwise. I won’t say this means the war is ending soon, but I will say that the end of the war may have finally crested the horizon.

the Russian Armed Forces have been making constant gains in the Donesk front, and their dominance on all fronts but the northern Luhansk Oblast operation has inspired Ukraine to launch an invasion into the Kursk region so they can have anything at all to leverage in negotiations.

But sure, it’s an “if” situation… and Russia is totally going to lose.

if somebody has the time and the mental ability to sit through this video, i wanna know what the verdict was.

Obvi, in reality, the USSR was a union. Each of the SRs had their own government, made their own decisions, and had the right to petition to leave the Union at will. But anti-communists hate that the USSR had such a fair system, so HM will probably quote directly from those “historians”.

moving to a reply for a similar story (really it’s a rant) of my own.

My party had a few anarchists in it, they made up something like 10% of the party at a point. A small enough percentage that you can simply ignore them during votes or party motions, but a big enough number that you couldn’t ignore them during discussions.

There was one Anarchist who would volunteer themself to speak on behalf of all Anarchists at every discussion, taking personal issue with anything that could possibly upset an Anarchist. A member of the party might want to simply talk about the great technological innovations that happened in the USSR, and that Anarchist would find a way to steer the discussion towards “USSR bad”. A member might want to discuss the guerrilla fighting in the Cuban revolution, the Anarchist would go on and on about how Cuba is “an authoritarian dictatorship”. This goes so on, and so forth. And every time we tried to bring up the issues that were created by them doing that, the 29 other Anarchists would stand up with them and claim we were trying to make them leave.

Leadership thought it would be a good idea to make them their own wing within the party, so they could be autonomous and have their own discussions apart from the main party discussions. They treated it like we were moving them to the “kiddie’s table” and threatened to start disrupting other party functions. A few members of leadership decided, without consulting all of leadership, to appoint that very vocal Anarchist to a seat within leadership to keep them from complaining as much.

Nobody abused the power of leadership in our party like they did. They would make unilateral decisions without asking anyone else.

Later on, we would find out that the whole thing was an ego trip for them. They liked feeling like they were at odds against any authority, so they’d put themself into positions to be at odds with party leadership. When they were put into leadership, they had no idea how difficult the position actually was, so they simply refused to act within the guidelines.

Reading this made me remember how much I do not miss being a party leader.

There are two good ways to can try to handle this situation, and both may look like hostility if egos are at play.

The first is to simply talk to the Trot directly in private and try to direct them towards better historians and convince them to read ML theory. If they’re receptive, they might shift their ideological position and stop being a nuisance. If it fails, they could claim that you’re trying to “bully” them into being a “Stalinist”.

The second is to talk to either party leadership or fellow party members and try to get them to agree on more rigid party lines. If successful, it’ll become easier to keep conversations on track and productive, as most of your party members will agree that tirades against the USSR aren’t helpful. You can pair this with readings or studies of the USSR to help the less informed members of the party come to a mutual understanding. If it fails, they could accuse you of trying to co-opt the party and get you kicked out.

These are the kinds of murky waters I had to try to navigate daily within my party when it existed, inner-party politics is a hard game to play, and it usually results in battles of egos.

really it’s just the mental gymnastics of Ukraine supporters. Russia is simultaneously both winning and unstoppable, while also being weak and nearing failure. Western governments need to prepare for the war to last 10 years and put plans into place to ensure that Ukraine won’t fall, and Russia is losing the war and will collapse because of it.

love Balkan Mapper.

When I read this earlier today I audibly laughed.

Man back to back said “The Russians are too powerful” then “We will reclaim Crimea from the Russians at any cost”

There’s not a lot that can be done if they’re unwilling to learn.

You could try to explain the lies colonialists told, and the systems of oppression they built. You could try to show them the direct results of colonialism, like the famines, the reservations, etc. But if they’re closed off from accepting that colonialism was an evil system, perpetrated by white supremacists, you won’t be able to fix their issue.

The simplest explanation is that the American “left” is rightwing, because they’ve been told that actual leftism is bad.

We’re only told about leftist ideology or politics in the context of “these bad people in the past did bad things”, and many Americans refuse to actually tackle those lies. because of this, no one in the American “left” is willing to be anti-capitalist in any way that actually matters. Nor are they willing to use materialism in their dialectics, because their political education comes from Liberalism, so they’re more willing to listen to right-wing talking points and integrate them into their views.

This is why you’ll see Americans who’ll call themselves “leftists” pair a statement for working rights with a statement against immigration. Or you’ll see them decry the horrors of fascism, then support whatever new war NATO has wrought.

You’re right, but please be nice.

Anarchists will really try to rip us apart for being “authoritarian”, but when you ask them how their system would deal with crimes, upholding socialism, or maintaining any semblance of order, their responses are almost always far more extreme than ours.

Genuinely had an Anarchist call me an “evil person” and a “future baby killer” for saying that I’m ML. Then when I asked them about their proposed methods for preventing counter-revolution, they described a system where anyone can murder anyone else if the victim was suspected of wanting to act against the revolution. No trial, no investigation, just the word of the murderer.

Edit to add another thought to; “their responses are almost always far more extreme than ours.”

If it’s not more extreme, it’s lax to the point of being nothing. So the poles are either a system of total chaos, or substanceless idealism.

me when a fellow ML says “tankie”;

me when literally anyone else does;

“made them the dominate voice”

bro, tankies made lemmygrad for tankies