Maoo [none/use name]

Well yeah we should ideally abolish cars for all but the most necessary uses - rural living, etc. But that is something I think falls squarely in the “what we can do after overthrowing capitalism” vision bucket. Folks can grasp that even things more realizable under capitalism are simple and can be fought for. Those fights will also usually fail but in doing so can teach valuable lessons about the nature of bourgeois electoralism.

Yes absolutely. Also the problems of right on red are solved by bettee designs of the streets themselves. Dedicated, separate bicycle lanes. Curb bulbs. Raised pedestrian crossings. Stop lines farther back from the intersection.

I love the combination of insults and degrading what I said while suggesting you never even read it (as you announced you were blocking the instance. Incidentally, instance-level blocking wasn’t possible at the time, to my knowledge. That’s part of Lemmy v0.19.x.

But not to worry! I’ll just share what I said with you again. Be sure to explain how it’s uninformed, stupid, and devalues Ukrainian lives! I’m just too big of a dum-dum to figure it out.

whataboutism

It points out the double standards westerners gladly accept in order to favor themselves and disadvantage others. How hollow the rhetoric is. How much rides on accepting propaganda, such as adopting the term “whataboutism” as a way to deflect from valid criticism. That’s an old cold war term you picked up, probably from society in general, but it was propaganda to help ensure Soviet criticisms of double standards could be dismissed by Amerikkkans.

Minsk 2, like we don’t know Russian army went in there with heavy weapons in 2014 and sponsored separatists

The form of this argument is “whataboutism” btw, lol.

But anyways, Russia’s presence in 2014 was at best covert and there’s little evidence. They did provide some supplies. However, why would this contradict any points made about Minsk 2? Anyone familiar with the diplomatic efforts knows that the West was far more brutal and aggressive, targeting civilians in Donbas, and repeatedly avoided diplomatic solutions. The (ignorant) rallying cry seems to be that Russia should have unilaterally done everything even while the West did nothing and even escalated. They didn’t even honor ceasefires.

that by helping the attacked invaded country, the west is somehow making it worse?

“Helping” is doing the heavy lifting in this sentence. If it’s making the situation worse, it isn’t helping, is it? The “it” matters. The “it” from the West is weapons, loans, and auctioning off the country to Western corporate interests. The latter two get called “aid” even though they throw the poorest country in Europe into deep debt and exploitation. The former is weapons, it is direct support for the war, and whether that is “helping” depends on your understanding of where this war is going, what the realistic outcomes are, and what unexplored alternatives exist to propping up the UA military.

The simple version is that UA is fucked. It is not going to win and “reconstruction”, if it ever comes from the West, will come at the price of foreign ownership, low wages, and further stripped social safety nets. Since it will lose, the question is really: how long do you want this to go on? How many Ukeainians do you want dead? I want none. The US government will accept any number so long as it hurts Russia. Do you accept any amount of dead Ukrainians so long as it hurts Russia? I don’t. I want those people alive.

Sending weapons just ensures more and more Ukrainians dying so that the West can “stick it” to Russia. Not so that UA will win. Not so that the outcome is better. So that the outcome is objectively worse, so long as it’s “hurting the right people”. And all the while, the less horrible options are kept off the table, which is to say, diplomacy. Both by simply avoiding or preventing talks as early as March last year, but by ensuring the Western populace is unable to accept diplomacy at this point. This is why they tell you UA is winning, that Russians are subhuman monsters, etc etc. So that you support endless violence and think diplomacy is a bad idea.

This is also all before we get to the MIC, which drives war to fill its pockets. This is another of the real reasons the “helping” is happening: so that Lockheed-Martin can sell more weapons, keep more millions, all while children are plunged back into poverty. They steal from our children and our lives so that more Russians and Ukrainians may die, and there’s always a new target of the violence ready to go for these bloodthirsty monsters.

Had you decided to listen rather than throw a tantrum, you might have learned these things.

Per the other reply to you, you might recall when I went over our consensus perspective on Ukraine, how it is motivated by understanding the best possible outcome for Ukrainian lives and contrasting this with the bloodthirsty liberal approach you’ve supported (all dressed up in “concern”).

Is it the “uninformed” and life-devaluing comments you’re referring to?

Tell me, what was your reply to that explanation?

You mean our informed comments that actually value the lives of Ukrainians?

Ethnic cleansings in those territories are a fabricated casus beli for Russia ‘green man’

The ethnic cleansing was and is part of official Ukrainian policy. Do you think the sneaky Rooskies infiltrated and forced Kyiv to drop Russian as an official language, one that could be learned and used in schools in Donbas? Did they cleverly rename the streets to Bandyerite fascist names? Did they create the Azov Batallikn, Righy Sector, etc - the Ukrainian fascist groups weaponized against the ethnic Russian civilians of Donbas and now directly incorporated into the government and armed forces? Did Russia secretly create the entire Kyiv side of the civil war that heavily targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure on the Donbas side?

Cool to learn, I didn’t know that.

Ok, I will not be defending those actions of NATO

You’ll just ignore their relevance to why NATO approaching your doorstep is, in fact, hostile and aggressive.

NATO was literally created to oppose the USSR and the left in Europe generally, and did not disband after the fall of the USSR, instead taking up further aggression and at greater range, and keeping a very clear encirclement position around Russia. The bases got larger, the spending increased, and membership was sought to undermine any countries stepping out of line of the American-imposed order.

non hostile sovereign state

Non-hostility is when you do ethnic cleansing against the ethnicity the neighboring country is named after, engage in a war right by the borders to support that ethnic ckeansing, violate your treaties to end that war, and cozy up your coup government to the military organization intended to encircle that country, an org that regularly engages in aggression.