Depends if you’re hungry.

The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.

The US state department lawyers and the British House of Lords have evidence. That’s why they’re pursuing convictions of the Chinese leaders involved. No, wait— sorry, I misremembered. They both concluded there is insufficient evidence.

Right. Sus, like I said. You can’t trust people willing to use their authority to protect kids.

Although, when it’s put like that, it seems people are also sus who want to or would use their authority to force users to accept the risk of seeing porn and gore by allowing NSFW communities. You know. They could always go somewhere else that already allows it but no they’ve got to cry that they want it here or there, a place they already don’t like and don’t want to visit.

I have a feeling everyone involved in those equations would disagree.

Censorship is certainly the kind of thing that drove people away from dotworld for preemptively defederating from Hexbear by fiat.

You should read some communist literature before pronouncing about it.

Historically, who funded fascists and who fought them?

Because liberals sleep in the same bed as fascists and both are ready to fight socialism tooth and nail?

Other than, you know, the millions and millions and millions of them organised in parties throughout the world.

That’s right, not wanting to have SFW communities interrupted by porn and gore is sus.

That is not what happened.

When the Lemmy software was first created, the original Hexbear (it had a different name, then) created a fork. A development or two down the line and the two forks were incompatible. The Hexbear devs started working on a fix long before the Reddit API-debacle exodus. It wasn’t easy because the fork added features that were incompatible with, let’s say, vanilla Lemmy until recently. The Hexbear devs eventually made the fixes, which made federation possible again. And the long-planned re-federation occurred. The timing is a coincidence.

As for federation, Hexbear asked it’s community which instances should be federated. To maintain the friendly culture of Hexbear, there was an agreement to only federate with a few instances. Before that happened, dotworld defederated preemptively. Since then, I have no idea whose federated or defederated with who because I quickly lost interest with the drama.

I should say that I’d never used Hexbear before federation with my instance. I learned all this because it’s publicly available knowledge. After federation, with all the drama, I searched ‘federation’ and some similar search terms on Hexbear communities and learned what I’ve just explained. The key point is that you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain motives for and the chronology of federation because, like the modlogs, the relevant conversations are still available to read.

They’re hand in glove, that’s for sure. Any attempt to paint Musk or any other haute bourgeois as separate from the capitalist state is intended to confuse readers and hide the material relations in capitalism.

The reason it seems like I’m dodging the question is because if I can challenge the assumptions in the question and show that it’s a faulty question, the answer becomes irrelevant. Still, if you keep reading, you’ll see that I have provided an answer below.

As for my opinion, it’s like anyone else’s. It isn’t worth much. My statements of fact, however… in a world where people try to paint the US in a positive light, endlessly making distinctions to deny any blame to the US state for all the horror that it unleashes on the world… probably also not worth much.

I either make a logical argument that stands up to scrutiny or I don’t. If my argument stands up, it doesn’t matter whether I look like a weak idiot. If my argument fails, it doesn’t matter if I pretend control or to appear smart or to act it.

For a bourgeois state, it is ahistorical to separate the government from it’s businesses. Companies and the government go hand in hand. It was, for example, the East India Company, rather than the British ‘state’, that colonised so much of Asia.

In relation to WWII and the US-Nazi connection, Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, CA, 1997, p17):

Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus Cologne was almost levelled by Allied bombing but it’s Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed German civilians began using the plant as an air raid shelter. [Citing Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Dell, NY, 1983).]

Fn14: After the war, Herman Abs, head of the Deutsche Bank and in effect “Hitler’s paymaster,” was hailed by David Rockefeller as “the most important banker of our time.” … Rockefeller [failed to say] a word about Abs’ Nazi connections, his bank’s predatory incursions across Nazi occupied Europe, and his participation, as a board member of I.G. Farben, in the use of slave labor at Auschwitz: Robert Karl Miller, Portland Free Press, Sept/Oct 1994

All this, and we haven’t really touched on:

• the way that US state officials intervened to—
• • protect Nazi war criminals from prosecution at Nuremberg,
• • rehabilitate and promote Nazi officials to lead NATO,
• • doing the all this with Mussolini and others,
• how the US ruling class platformed Nazis in the US press and silenced critical domestic voices,
• the relationship between the US government and its ruling bourgeois, the familial relations.

The US is to be applauded for is role in defeating the Nazi war machine, including supplying the allies. The US soldiers who fought the Nazis were heroes. But it is problematic to claim the US (i.e. it’s ruling class) was on the right side of history through that period.

Likewise, in Ukraine, the US worsened the whole mess, possibly caused it all, by meddling in the region since before the 90’s. Since the recent invasion US media and spokespersons have been nonchalantly saying the US has reaped many benefits from the war with very little cost (except for Ukrainians—added in parentheses, as if the Ukrainians are of secondary concern).

I do think the invaders are bad, whichever war were talking about.

I think we agree in principle and I think I know what you mean but I must raise a challenge. There’s an example that shows an invasion is not necessarily bad, the one that you pointed out: the Allies invading Nazi Germany.

If invasion is not bad in one example situation, then logically it doesn’t hold as a blanket statement. It cannot of itself lead us to conclude that Russia is bad for invading Ukraine. To be clear, I am not saying Russia is good for invading Ukraine; I’m saying it is not self evidently bad by virtue of being the invader.

To further the clear statement, I wish Russia had not invaded. I wish the war would end today. Short of that I wish a ceasefire could be negotiated for today, so that peace and an end to the war can be negotiated for the near future.

No flippant comments about how dangerous war is for the workers who must fight in it. Only firm conviction that the only right choice is to stop the killing and maiming as soon as possible, not to send increasingly dangerous weapons with increasingly higher chances of causing collateral damage.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, the US wanted the opposite at all stages and it’s representatives (officials and corporate agents) have machinated to ensure that war broke out and now that it cannot stop.

You brought up the example of the US in relation to WWII. If you make a comparison, you can’t get stroppy when people point out that it contradicts your main argument and in fact supports the argument that you’re trying to challenge.

However, for as long as you think the US is the Good Guy^TM, you’re going to struggle to find examples that support your viewpoint, so you may want to be careful with any comparison. Otherwise, you’ll start to notice a pattern of them pointing out that the US was as monstrous as always in the cited example and then you’ll say they’re doing whataboutism ad infinitum.

The yanks were funding the WWII Nazis before they ‘sent supplies to the allies’.

Congratulations on your promotion.

It’s often the way. Hopefully someone else reading will see the flaw in forever calling an alternative viewpoint ‘bad faith’ because it’s presented with humour.

If you’re talking about violence used to uphold their rule, you can’t separate domestic and foreign violence. All those people living, working, and dying young in atrocious conditions outside of the US for US prosperity, all those people gunned down in the dark or in protests against their government’s subservience to the US, and all those people murdered in wars and ‘conflicts’ and by sanctions to further US interests must be counted.

Otherwise you’re doing that thing where you redefine violence in such a way that distorts the picture. It doesn’t matter whether you now explicitly mention the US because by nature of a comparison, the US is implicated, anyway. Likewise, replace US for every other government in the above equation for the true figures of how violent a state is in its own protection.

Did he assign a trait to liberals? Because if not, there’s no inconsistency.

Then a follow up question: is there a difference between ‘liberals’ as a group (i.e. not liberalism) and a government (i.e. an institution)? If so, there may be no inconsistency.

What I mean is, when people talk about governments it’s often as a non-human legal person, which can act, omit, sue, and be sued, but which does not have the full range of human traits, like insincerity. Whereas a group that does not have legal personality and only describes a collection of humans, albeit in the abstract, like ‘liberals’, can demonstrate a fuller range of human traits.

Then, as an experiment, switch the terms and see if it has the same ring to it:

politics for [governments] are just a big reality show

Does this anthropomorphise ‘governments’ in the same way as attributing human emotions to them?

I don’t necessarily have answers to these questions but it seems that you can’t be calling someone out for bad faith unless you can strongly argue yes, no, yes, to the above questions.