Yes, they are doing a genocide.

I'm not sure what other options are available at this point though.

I'd love to hear your explanation for how you totally aren't a fascist

After being sentenced, Biggs called into a vigil held by pro-insurrectionists outside the jail and declared that his 17-year sentence was "insanity," even though it was half what prosecutors had asked for. "They can kiss my ass. We're still fighting all the way to the end," he told the crowd, imploring them to "never give up." He also called into "Infowars" to insist, "We didn't do anything wrong."

No one has been scared straight here. The ones who got got are martyrs to the cause and the ones who flip are traitors or plants.

They'll either be more careful next time or they'll be just as sloppy but convince themselves it'll work out, because this time is different.

Fuck the United States. They’re easily the worst, most imperialist nation on the planet.

"But somehow I keep finding all these familiar geopolitical flashpoints where I support them."

Lol exactly, it's the last place you'd expect to find anything challenging the U.S. narrative.

most people of the left or right can see the situation for what it is

I couldn't disagree more. In this thread I have someone telling me Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably for nearly a year now. It's also common to hear Putin described as a mustache-twirling villain who just woke up one day and said "I will conquer the whole of Ukraine in three days," a take similarly detached from reality.

then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened

If they let him live, they're weak. If they kill him, they're weak.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

It's going to be hilarious in a year or so when we'll have LLM bots churning these types of articles out even at respected news outlets, and all critics of this narrative will still get smeared as being bots themselves

is somehow losing to the minor Western allies

How are you defining "losing" here? They're occupying the separatist parts of Ukraine and can do so indefinitely.

I'm a democratic socialist myself... I thought no reasonable, modern socialist would support a brutal, authoritarian country like those two.

This was me a few years ago! What changed my mind was Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (not a PDF link, but there are tons of free PDFs on that page). This passage in particular stood out to me:

The pure (libertarian) socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

That was me! I bought in to socialism at an ideological level, but I had not addressed the hard questions of how a socialist society might actually be run in a world of capitalist encirclememt. I found that my then-opinions fit pretty well with "support every revolution except the ones that succeed," which made less and less sense the more I thought about it.

It's a very short book divided into sections that are easy to jump back into. Because "throw a book at you" leftists are annoying, he also has a ton of lectures on YouTube that cover many of the same points. I'd be happy to shoot you some links or just discuss the main ideas if you're interested.

The reason we're focusing on the propaganda angle is because it's very clear to us that the impulse to defederate is at its core a political one.

The clearest evidence of this is instances defederating from both Hexbear and Lemmygrad: a notably more polite and less active (but politically similar) instance.

It is not the tone or the volume of posts people don't like; it is anything that challenges the prevailing Western attitude that capitalism is good and communism is evil.

1. Missiles being used to kill people in an endless stalemate is actually worse than them sitting in a box
2. The people sending those missiles to Ukraine are going to buy more to replace them
3. They're also going to charge Ukraine for the missiles and insist the country sell off state assets for pennies on the dollar to make payments

in a country where face is everything

In America no one cares about being embarrassed, that's only compatible with the Asiatic brainpan!

Toss Orientalism on your reading list:

The term orientalism denotes the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the "Oriental world".