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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Jesus, I would love to see the world as simply as you do. You are literally going to avoid engaging with or thinking about every single point and reduce it to “Russia bad, NATO good?” You really see zero nuance in the history of NATO, its conception, its expansion, and the power it has? Does it not give you even a little pause? If not NATO, what about the world leaders who wield it?

    I’m not trying to sound “intellectual,” and if I do it is because I am trying to be very specific and clear in what I say. I understand how closely this aligns with tankie talking points. That said, there is some level of intelligence or curiosity necessary for these conversations. If you reduce conflict around the world to some Marvel-esque “bad guy invades because he’s evil” scenario and never stop to ask who created the bad guy, you are never going to be able to understand human conflict or contribute to the avoidance of it.


  • Just breathe. This is such a typical, hyperventilating response. The critique here is not that the West “made” Russia invade Ukraine and only Russian sympathizers are saying that. The critique is of Western diplomacy over the last 30 years that directly contributed to the tensions in the region. The critique is that when the Warsaw Pact dissolved and Russia was at its weakest, the commitment by the West to also disarm and cease expansion militarily into former USSR territory should have been upheld. It’s the idea that unity and peace in the region should have been primary goal, not the liberalization of former USSR territories via NATO membership.

    What exactly are you denying as “true?” You seem to have interpreted my comment as saying “Russia invaded Ukraine because of one singular thing the West did.” Well of course that’s not true, but that’s also not what I said. There isn’t one thing that Russia invaded Ukraine over. It’s a mix of national desperation, a psychotic despot, and regional tensions that made for an easy target. My only contention here is that Western diplomacy failed in Eastern Europe and a different approach would have had a different outcome. Diplomacy is a very long game. This isn’t a “hindsight is 20/20” issue, either. This strategy of military expansion for three decades despite Russia’s protests has been widely criticized.

    You don’t have to agree with Russian interests here (I certainly don’t,) but you seem to be having a hard time grasping the concept and purpose of international diplomacy and separating it from your own political views. The purpose of a diplomatic relationship should be to advance the goals which benefit the citizens of one’s own country, while working within the constraints of a given political landscape, and to advance the good of all nations where possible, not proselytize liberal democracy via military expansion. Why don’t you tell me what you think the benefit of NATO expansion post-Cold War was for the citizens of the West? How did that benefit the citizens of my nation, the USA? From where I’m sitting, it didn’t. It seems more like a needless expansion of military power by the West despite prior commitments and despite the fact that it increased tensions with Russia and jeopardized peace in the region. Don’t forget that this expansion was spearheaded by the USA, not the nations that volunteered to join. Spearheaded by a nation that has maintained its superpower status by being involved in and often instigating every major conflict for the past 80 years. Now Western Leftists are suddenly going to forget that and give them a pass because Russian sympathizers are using it as an inconvenient talking point?

    I am 100% for supporting Ukraine in this war. That should have been clear by my comment, but somehow you decided I was instead promoting the rape of innocent children. However, I also believe that after this is all over, there should be a healthy discussion about how we got here in the first place. The most absurd thing is that everything I am saying would have been widely accepted as fact by Liberals prior to the Ukraine invasion. “Western powers, particularly the USA, love destabilizing and exerting control over other weaker nations, even when they pose no threat.” Now that Russia finally did the horrible thing everyone knew they might do, this is now somehow a “pro-Russia” position to hold. It’s ridiculous.


  • I’m sorry, but the greatest stupidity I’ve seen from the Left during the course of this war is the complete abandonment of the belief in US accountability for foreign conflict and destabilization, which was so common in discussion before the war. Was it just more convenient for us then?

    Putin is a vile human being and Russia is an insecure, inept power. The invasion was a crime, and a horrific one. That does NOT absolve the US from responsibility for the regional instability that led to this war. In fact, we spearheaded and encouraged it. It is clear by our foreign policy that our leaders wanted this war.

    And now we are letting Russian sympathizers use it as a talking point and we have no rebuttal because we refuse to accept it as truth. It’s a massive own goal and reveals so much of liberal discourse in this nation to be ignorant, self serving drivel that can be abandoned as quickly as conservatives can abandon their “values.” It is disgusting.

    No idea what channel this is, but I searched for a summary of the last 30 years of our diplomacy and NATO expansion and found it. I agree with everything said and it is all historical fact.


  • That’s why the response has been so negative. Every instance that federates with another stores a complete copy of the posts and comments from every federated user.

    If the majority of instances do not defederate from a Meta instance, that Instance will inevitably become the primary destination for discussion, even between and by non Meta-Instance based users, just because the communities in that Instance will be so large and active.

    Meta will then have carte blanche to collect data on a huge collection of users from outside their own Instance.

    Fuck that.



  • I’ll reiterate what @chaddy@feddit.de says. Sports streams are so finicky and the F1TV app is full of tons of content that doesn’t seem to make it to the high seas. I understand pirated streams for pay-per-view events, or sports (like soccer) that are dispersed across a million different broadcasters, but F1TV has so much content.

    If you are in the USA, F1TV is a ridiculously good deal here, if it’s in your budget. If you are elsewhere, it’s worth VPNing for (that’s kinda pirate-y, right?) Especially if you split with friends, as I believe you can stream three screens simultaneously. And if you do find some streams, F1TV is $3/mo for full access to everything, including replays, just without the live race stream.


  • You know, when you look at where the subscribers were and what the default subs were, I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. There’s a reason Lemmy/Kbin already feel more like “old” Reddit, and it’s because that was always the “alt” social media users, generally a bit more tech savvy and certainly more open minded to new platforms. At some point Reddit filled up with Facebook and Instagram scrubs and I didn’t even notice.

    I was definitely a power user of Reddit, but I’m not sure I was even subscribed to a single default sub. Whoever was hitting up Reddit for r/aww and r/funny was probably never going to take a principled stand over API debates and the centralization and profit chasing administrative choices.



  • There’s no way those specs are right. Their games are notoriously CPU dependent, I refuse to believe a R5 3600 can get stable 60fps gameplay out of this engine but a 6700xt cannot.

    But if they’re right, there’s gonna be a lot of complaints surrounding optimization around launch, and the 30fps BS on console will make a lot more sense.

    Edit: In fact, your GPU does meet recommended spec, because it outperforms the “recommended” 2080 in every benchmark I’ve seen, and has 50% more VRAM. Ignore this garbage, wait for reviews.


  • Exactly. The issue with TikTok isn’t that it’s somehow inherently less trustworthy, it’s that it’s so aggressively algorithmic. I use it (mostly because my SO sends me comedy and pet videos), and my algorithm reflects my interests and my tolerance for bullshit, which is little to none. The misinformation on TikTok is fed to people with an appetite for it. That’s dangerous, yes, but these people already had horrible media literacy, and TikTok is a platform that allows creators to prey on that, even if the algorithm is “neutral.”


  • What I don’t understand is why there are SO many missing comments when reading threads in one instance from another instance. For example, the top “Hot” post on Fedia right now is a post about community fragmentation on Lemmy. When viewed from Fedia, it has 8 comments, but when view within the source Lemmy instance, it has 40.

    This is an issue I’ve seen in every instance on both Lemmy and KBin and it’s a huge issue. One of the main reasons I joined the Beehaw instance, since it seems less affected. In fact, Beehaw shows more comments than even the NATIVE Lemmy instance, at 57!