• 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 10th, 2024

help-circle
  • But in the former, the 6 dividend would be over the entire 2(3) divisor.

    I have never heard of or seen an example of anyone using / and ÷ in different ways. If you want multiple terms in your divisor, either write it as a large fraction with all relevant terms in the dividend or divisor, or use parentheses. This just seems like sloppy notation to me.











  • Unfortunately, the hardware you use still matters. Hardware manufacturers just don’t care to invest in Linux support, so it’s basically all community driven. The community has done amazing work in spite of that, so a lot if hardware works, but unfortunately, if you want to make a permanent change to Linux, it really pays off to be mindful of that goal when you’re picking components. AMD hardware tends to work better than alternatives in my experience, especially in the GPU, but I don’t use and so can’t speak to any other peripherals.

    But I’ve had great luck with some of these things. I used to RDP into my Linux desktop all the time just fine, including from a Windows laptop. I haven’t really played with tiling window managers, but I know there are some powerful ones out there if you’re willing to take the time to learn how to config to your personal taste. I think i3 and xmonad are common for X11 and Hyprland for Wayland. Font and display scaling is highly dependent on the desktop environment you use. I want to say GNOME and KDE have made big strides here in recent years as they try to become adaptable to tablets, phones, and other small hardware, so if you haven’t tried that in a long time, it may be worth a look again.

    For specific software you just can’t live without like Teams, there’s two option. WINE is the less resource intensive option, and it’s basically a translation layer that turns Windows system calls into Linux ones, and it’s really good these days. In the rare (for me) case that WINE doesn’t work, if you have the spare resources on the machine, you can use a virtual machine running Windows. If you really need that VM to work fast, you can set up hardware pass through so the VM gets direct access to it. That’s generally pretty easy with CPU cores and RAM, but if you need to pass through the GPU for anything, that can get complicated fast last I knew. And of course, a VM is a heavy option for just making Teams work, but if you want on Linux bad enough, it may become worthwhile.

    Really, I feel like the only thing here that should be insurmountable is drivers. Maybe Windows software that you need if you’re really unlucky, but most of that works well these days in my experience.



  • Nah, I’ve seen enough communists agree that tankies are a thing to see this as just a No True ScotsmanCommunist fallacy. Anyone, even a professed communist who disagrees with you, must just not properly understand the true nature of communism. Honestly, should have known to drop this hours ago. I do, but against my better judgment, I thought maybe there’d be a good point here somewhere. Very typical tankie who hates to be called a tankie behavior.


  • The question isn’t if Russia is justified in invading Ukraine, but if Donetsk and Luhansk are entitled to self-determination and the ability to request aid from Russia and secede from Kiev.

    Almost. The real question is whether or not those acts were genuinely self-determined or if they were heavily corrupted by Russian influence. There’s evidence that Russia wanted to take action to annex parts of eastern Ukraine and had begun planning before the coup, as you like to call it. There’s evidence that they intervened militarily. There’s evidence they stoked separatist sentiment. There’s evidence that Russian nationals were in Ukraine trying to frame their actions as the will of the local populace. Russia themselves has managed to make that self-determination questionable at best.

    I already gave you evidence of Kiev killing civilians in the Donbass region:

    You’re right, I’m sorry. I got distracted in trying to go through the previous comment and must have gotten mixed up when I got back to it. I’ll review some of this in the morning, been at this too long for one day as is.

    Regarding the request for aid and the short timeline between then and Russia entering the civil war, as I said, Russia was already heavily involved post-2014

    Russia acted militarily in February of 2014, in the early days of what you describe as the west’s coup. They did not wait until after 2014 or even mid-2014.

    after the west coup’d Yanukovych using Banderite factions.

    Ah, yes, with all signs pointing towards the population moving away from Russia, it can only be a western-backed coup if the populace gets pissed enough at leadership cozying up to Russia, in direct opposition to that. I’ve never seen anyone provide any actual good evidence that it was a western coup, although I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find western nations encouraged things along. Probably not to the extent that Russia encouraged things in their favor in eastern Ukraine, though. Almost certainly not given Russia actually directly acted militarily, even if they lied about it for a while before coming clean. I see you put a link related to it in the list you provided here, so I’ll look at that tomorrow, too, but from what I’ve seen from the last few people who tried to convince me of this, the evidence could probably at best be very generously described as sparse.



  • Mistakes and excess can and do occur

    Okay, with this having been said, maybe I can reframe this in a way more agreeable to you. We can both agree, I think, that communist states in history have made some mistakes, have had some… lapses in judgement. That’s not a comment on the intentions of the people who did those things, no accusation of malice at all, just a statement that mistakes and lapses in judgment occurred. We may not agree on which events should be considered as such, so I won’t pick examples so we don’t get derailed, but we can probably at least agree that some events occurred that should be so considered.

    Tankies are those who embrace and laud events that are widely, but clearly not universally, perceived to be mistakes or lapses in judgement, especially when the mistake was one where their authority was used in excess to the significant detriment of at least some of their people. Even some communists consider tankies to be a particular kind of communist. Maybe you would argue they’ve fallen into the “false consciousness” that you speak of, but honestly, the one take I almost never hear is that tankies don’t deserved to be considered a separate kind of communist. I think I’ve heard it once or twice, buuuuuut before, it’s always from someone who is very clearly a tankie and just doesn’t like to be called one.


  • As I have been pointing out this entire time, this is the liberal conception of authority, devoid of class analysis. The missing factor is which class is using its power, and against which class? The state is not outside of class struggle, but within it.

    Okay, but when you’re talking to an environment that isn’t explicitly communist, maybe try to bridge that gap instead of treating us like idiots for not sharing your view in a world that explicitly attempts to discourage understanding it. You’re using words in a specialized way with people who do not share your specialization.

    And this still doesn’t invalidate the point being made. By saying “authoritarian”, we explicitly mean the ones who do not wish to use the authority properly. Trying to claim we don’t understand what we’re talking about isn’t addressing the point, it’s just shutting down the discussion without a reasonable rebuttal. To say that all communists are authoritarian in the “liberal conception of authority” would be to say that a communist will still treat some people like absolute shit, but it’s okay because those people deserve it. Judge a society not by how it treats the best of itself, but by how it treats the least. If all people are valid and worthy of basic necessities and freedoms, then all people are valid and worthy of basic necessities and freedoms. They should be prevented from running roughshod over anyone else, of course, so they shouldn’t be allowed to reform a ruling class, and the ones who have committed abuses already should of course see reasonable punishment for those abuses, but they shouldn’t be abused themselves for our own sadistic satisfaction. Some class-based restrictions are reasonable, but those who use the word tankie are speaking of those they perceive as taking things way too far, often to the point of cruelty.

    Socialism is therefore necessarily “authoritarian” from the perspective of the former ruling classes, while being liberating for the working classes.

    Cool, but none of us are the current ruling class, so… We’re not speaking from that perspective when we call certain types of communists authoritarian.

    Authority is not a general spectrum of less to more, but instead a privledge for whichever class is in power and a tool for enforcing the will of that class. Therefore, the division between communists and “tankies” does not exist in any real manner beyond fringe western organizations that disagree with the core of Marxism in practice, the establishment of the socialist state as the necessary tool for bringing about communism by eradicating class.

    Nobody’s bitching about communists having authority. We’re talking specifically about a type of communist who are perceived as very likely to abuse that authority if they’re given it. If it was wrong for the current ruling class to abuse that power against us, it’s going to be wrong for us to abuse it against them when we have it. That doesn’t mean the former ruling class can’t be punished. It doesn’t mean we allow the old ruling class to reform. It just means don’t be an abusive asshole. Which is what people tend to refer to as a tankie.



  • The point regarding the Budapest Memorandum is that the US made it clear that it was not legally binding, and already violated it in 2013 in Belarus. In 2014, the west intervened directly in Ukraine, aiding the Banderite faction in overthrowing the democratically elected moderate, Yanukovych.

    Oh, cool, well in that case, totally cool for Russia to invade and violate the agreement, too. I mean, why should Russia get left out of all the imperialist fun?

    Regarding Russia and the referendum for the DPR and LPR to join the Russian Federation, the war started in 2014, with the Banderite coup. Russia did not start the Ukrainain Civil War, it entered the Civil War 8 years after it started.

    The idea Russia waited 8 years is just bullshit, and you know it because it’s already come up repeatedly. We’ve already established that Russia didn’t wait 8 years. We’ve already extensively talked about how Russia invaded before the vote to secede. Russia invaded, THEN DPR and LPR requested aid from Russia once they were already effectively under Russian control.

    Hell, we can say they directly intervened militarily. The “little green men” were admitted to be Russian Spetsnaz, and Russia admitted to blocking Ukrainian armed forces. Russia directly interfered from the start.

    Kiev has been shelling the Donbass region and killing thousands of civilians there for over a decade at this point, which is why they voted to join.

    If there’s truth to this, I’d be open to sources. I unfortunately cannot be aware of everything that happens in every conflict, so I admit it’s possible I’m uninformed here, but I’d need a source. Reminder that you are the one who gave me grief for not providing evidence.

    As for Nazis in Ukraine, the key point distinguishing them is that they are extremely common, open, and close to the levers of power:

    Look, I’m not going to try to pretend that that patch in such proximity to the leader of the country is anything other than alarming. But I’m also not going to try to pretend that photos of… looks like less than a hundred people in all the photos you’ve shown, is enough to prove a systemic issue. Once again, even though I’ve explicitly professed an interest in seeing a quality source, even though I’m talking to someone who tried to give me grief for not providing evidence, you’re still not providing any real evidence that this is a truly widespread and systemic issue. Hell, I can’t even recognize the patch circled behind Zelenskyy with all of 20 pixels allocated to it, and the infographic doesn’t even seem to be relevant to the pictures you include with it, although it does appear exactly once in the set of pictures you shared earlier.

    As for the DPR and LPR requesting assistance, they requested on the 23rd, with letters dated the 22nd.

    Hmmmm looks like you might be correct here. Difficult to find hard information on it. I’ll strikeout my above statement as the fact it had been discussed previously is still relevant to the point I was making.

    That said, Russia once again weakens the argument for you. Russia themselves handed out medals specifying the start of the campaign as being February 20th. There are also some reports that the “little green men” may have began appearing as early as mid February, although I’m having trouble finding anything to definitively prove that. Sources have reported that special forces were put on alert as early as the 18th. Russia was very clearly preparing before then, and there’s plenty to suggest they’d begun actively taking steps in the region, including suspicion that some of the protests at the time weren’t as “home grown” as Russia wants it to be believed. Combined with them shipping in special forces and lying about their involvement, it seems quite reasonable to assume that Russia had already taken steps to create the impressions of favorable protests and to secure the allegiance of government officials.

    Keep in mind, you say those governments requested Russian support when the link I’m about to share in the next paragraph shows that support in Crimea for Russian annexation was as low as 23%, so just because the local government made the request does not mean it accurately reflects the will of the people. Given what we know of Russian planning and involvement in the region, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that Russia made an attempt to influence local leadership to act in their favor, regardless of what the local people wanted.

    As for the map, it’s the electoral map for support of Yanukovych, so no, I can’t provide an electoral map since then as the civil war has been going on since 2014.

    Well I stumbled across some polling that suggests support for joining Russia in 2013 was as low as 23% and had been actively decreasing, which makes it EXTREMELY suspicious that Russia claims the vote to secede won with NINETY FIVE POINT FIVE PERCENT OF THE VOTE. That’s just absurd to trust at face value. There is zero good reason to blindly trust results of 95.5% in favor of what Russia wants in an election run by Russia in a region that clearly espoused just one quarter of that level of support only a year beforehand. There’s just no fucking way that was an honest vote with that in mind.


  • Being asian is an intrinsic characteristic.

    So, what, if we’re talking beliefs, the distinction doesn’t matter, but if we’re talking intrinsic characteristics, it suddenly does? No, this is just moving the goal posts.

    Supposed “anti-authoritarian” communists are “communists” that reject the core communist analysis of authority, chiefly that all authority is of a class character and the proletarian use of authority is critical in establishing and maintaining socialism. Your comparison is faulty.

    Perhaps there’s some difference on how we’re using the word “authoritarian”. I and most people I have seen use the word use it to mean that the government heavily uses its power in an abusive way to coerce its population to give up reasonable freedoms. For example, most would consider it a proper use of authority to forbid you to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire or other danger present, but most would consider it authoritarian to forbid speaking negatively of the government. Maybe I could phrase the definition better, but I hope this helps illustrate the point. To my knowledge, communism does not require authoritarianism in the way most people understand the word, so I think it is very fair to make a distinction between communists and tankies.