The shock liberalization of the Russian economy caused a massive drop in the quality of life that lead to millions of deaths and created the conditions for a strong arm man like Putin to come to power.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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chapotraphouse
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My new favorite bit for Ukraine libs hating on Putin is to say "So you agree, the world would be a better place if the USSR was never overthrown?"
They also hate China because "it has billionaires," so I like asking them if they're Maoists.
They also hate China because "it has billionaires," so I like asking them if they're Maoists.
Why else would you not want China to have billionaires? I don't think Elon Musk minds that other countries have them
A lot of them have in their mind that Putin is seeking to re-create the USSR. If only!
The frequency of “HEXBEARS BAD, plz defederate” posts I’ve seen from some of the libbier instances has been higher the last week or two.
Amusingly most of them, once you review their post history to see what the unpleasant interaction they had was, seem to just be weird blue maga trolls. I still don’t get the concept of centrist trolls, like it just doesn’t compute.
Silver lining, all the defed posts reminded me that I don’t have to suffer having .world in my feed thanks to instance blocking.
I still find it funny that the majority of anticommunist posts I've seen are from people on instances who aren't federated with hexbear but they're just upset hexbear has fixed it's federation issues which is very funny to me.
There're a few wannabe power mods railing against hexbear et al who really want to grow the fediverse to be the next big thing so they can feel important. Specifically their instances. I feel like those guys don't hate commies, they hate the fact they don't have any power on those servers. Without us around, they wouldfind a reason to hate every instance that they didn't directly control
Yes, in most of the ones I’ve seen, they’re just pissed Hexbear exists it seems. Most of them also have no interest in discussion, they seem to only want internet community for mirroring their convictions.
Some are world people that for some reason think we used to be federated with them and trolled them until defederation, really funny.
Unfortunately, Lemmygrad was nice enough to withhold the power of this incredible effortpost from the libs over there, and they still couldn't handle it
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I still don’t get the concept of centrist trolls, like it just doesn’t compute.
Centrists make sense when you realize they're just right-wingers in denial, purposefully or not.
You never hear shit from them that's remotely left-wing, it's always right-wing radio shock jockey bullshit disguised as "I'm a centrist, but"
Yeah that’s probably true. Like a core of right wing, covered in a candy coated performative virtue signaling shell. But definitely ok with a little genocide, as long as it’s their guy, and he’s “distraught” about it.
I'm a centrist. I think both anarchists and communists have a point.
I'm a centrist but you Republicans keep pushing me further left with your extremist beliefs
I bet it's every accusation a confession. Like they assume we have an ahistorical stance that isn't tempered with theory because they don't. They probably graft things that feel good, things they heard on TV, and anecdotes over uncomfortable situations. If we're saying "the world would be more or peaceful ~~with~~ WITHOUT I MEANT WITHOUT Israel and the US" they probably think saying something like "tariffs are what happen when you don't vote for Kamala" has equal sting and edginess. The fact that you come back and disagree with them defies their sense of the terminal nature of mud slinging. There's no Liberal Manifesto. What are they going to read? Kierkegard? You going to debate a communist with some shit written by Kissinger or something? You going to misunderstand Martlin Luther King Jr? No! You said something mean and the lefties were ready to talk about it and that's bewildering.
Yeah ok your point about “there’s no liberal manifesto” neatly describes what I think I was trying to articulate. Which is, I understand more extreme behaviors from left and right—they’re farther from the cultural setpoint, and the farther you are from where you think you should be, the sorta stronger your rhetoric and convictions need to be in order to have a hope of moving things closer to a world you want. But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.
Also I wonder in some cases, if it actually requires more mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance to maintain a pure liberal viewpoint, than to reside in the right or left. At least when you’re on either side of the spectrum, you have clear thoughts about how you disagree with the present and the direction things need to move, but if you are a status quo enjoyer, you have to somehow discount and explain away internally any thing that is ugly or not working, which is how we saw tons of these liberals urging us to tolerate an actual genocide in favor of preventing a hypothetically worse future genocide under Trump. And certainly, Trump will most likely be as bad or worse for Palestinians, but it was just shocking to see people claiming to hold progressive tendencies accepting what happened to Palestinians over the last year + of the Biden regime.
Clearly there were no actual red lines in terms of what actions were acceptable to undertake, instead it was: no matter how horrible our actions are, they are at least going to be slightly better than the opposition.
David Adler, from the University of Oxford's Department of Politics & International Relations, published a study in 2018, that demonstrated that in surveys of their views "centrists" were meaningfully, contrary to conventional rhetoric, more anti-democratic, least supportive of democratic institutions, and most supportive of what he classifies as "authoritarianism".
(That catch-all term again, I know) 
It's not very long (it's mostly survey results and graphs) and you can read it here.
I do think that you could argue that this is a manifestation of their ideology being predicated not on a fixed ideology or particular material reality, but on an almost gnostic belief in their own position as being simply 'the right one' and therefore all others being inherently worthless or even malevolent. It's essentially the divine right of kings but for self-defined superior wonks.
The benefit of having an ideology that's so rootless and immaterial is that you can shift to whatever position is neccessarily to maintain the status you create for yourself. The downside is that its immateriality means that it's a mirage, an illusion of a position, and so any alternative beyond its current makeup cannot be valid, but also the illusion cannot exist without defining itself against them.
All outside perspectives become an existential threat and can only be proclaimed to be untrue and from bad actors. Your material experience of the economy is wrong, everything's great! Views beyond my centerist consensus can't be real people, it must be disinfo spread by bots! Jewishness is definied by my narrow defininition the 'correct' amount of support for Israel in this moment! Yes, we wrote articles for 20 years about the worrying influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, but they've all just stopped being Nazis and are democratic patriots! History is sacrosanct until it differs with the personally beneficial version I was taught! We believe in science until listening to scientists on the climate or Covid would negatively influence my lifestyle or stock portfolio! And so on.
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But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.
The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
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There's no Liberal Manifesto. What are they going to read?
I'll one-up you: the Harry Potter series. This configuration of government was talked about in Harry Potter 4: Deathly Hollows when Harry had to demean a dementor:
blahblahlblahablaalhabalhalabalhabalh
I could offer you sources for my claims but you'd just point out how they can be traced back to western government funded cutouts, you Tankie!
Every. Single. Time.
Makes ya think
America sucks. Israel sucks. Capitalism is collapsing.
This doesn't trigger them nearly as much as saying "China does some things well." Or any non US aligned state. Liberals are much more willing to concede that domestic policy is bad but never cross the foreign policy party line.
Look I'm not going to sit here and say the US doesn't have a whole lot of problems, but I do hope the state department and NATO achieve all of their goals and continues to project power and untold misery across the globe because the Chinese or anyone outside of 
would be even worse 
I think people instinctively understand that foreign policy is largely managed by unelected three-letter agency bureaucrats who couldn’t care less about who happens to be president in a given year. So foreign policy is outside of electoral politics and therefore outside of the concern of most Americans. Not to mention so much information is classified that the public can barely hold an informed opinion.
All of the above makes it easy to believe that somehow American foreign policy is immune to the clown show tendencies that pervade domestic electoral politics. We are also in the afterglow of Hoover’s FBI which was wildly successful in shaping the image of the government as a set of elite organizations run by the brightest people in the country.
I agree with all that, but I think it's largely that the average American doesn't care about things that don't directly affect them.
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Comrade Xi will be justice to the so called "workers" of the Amerikkka Empire
McDonalds tastes like piss
I thought you liked piss? 
They didn't say they hated mcdz
True.... Any justification for that, owl? 
crackers can't cook
Talk to me when you’ve had my midwestern mother-in-laws cheesey salmon casserole.
If it ain't cooked in a dishwasher, it ain't salmon.
I'll have you know she makes a mean Jell-O salad.
I've had salmon cheese steak before. Cheese does not pair well with salmon.
It does not at all. Some may say it’s sacrilege to mix dairy and seafood.
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Just yesterday we had slava ukrani and gyna authoritarian libs that everyone got to collectively dunk on. Very wholesome.
What is a gyna authoritarian lib?
Nothin, what's a gyna authoritarian lib with you?
spoiler
Gyna = 
CHINA!
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
It's you lmao
Did you ever read the Losurdo essay I sent to you yesterday?
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Death to amerikkka
Boy I sure love bourgeois parlementiary democracy, right fellas?
Kill Whitey!
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