General Discussion

I'm trans. Tell me more. 🤷‍♀️

The people who boil complex geopolitical events down to "haha western imperialism is finally getting challenged, lol shitlib get owned" are immature teenagers arguing in bad faith or on things they don't understand. That would be what we call a "tankie".

The same goes for those blindly supporting Israel because "omg hamas is terrorist" or whatever the hell they even justify it with anymore. A lot of those may just be quiet racists or fascists happy to see a dictator like Netanyahu have his way with Western support- obviously never thinking for a second that they themselves have an equal chance of being on the receiving end of such treatment, not the delivering end.

Both of these situations are absolutely horrible. But neither can really be boiled down to simple ideology over human lives as much as the lower-quality people love to do so. People want things to fit how they think so that they can feel good about their thoughts. Many things get shaped in that lens and it gets worse every day. And, unfortunately, the only real solution is just not to interact. Their minds can never be changed once they set up their world view to be self supporting.

Your views mirror mine closely. Ukraine's war is awful, but it never needed to happen if Putin wasn't such a trigger-happy, imperialistic dictator. His war is purely for territorial and ideological expansion of control at the expense of human life. Same goes for Palestine, while the operation was framed as being anti-terrorism at first, Netanyahu has gotten completely unhinged and fallen out of line in some crazy drive to control all of Gaza and eliminate Israel's competition. However, I support Ukraine and do not support Israel, despite these being philosophically contradictory in the terms of "preserving human life over ideologies" since Ukraine is still killing people. The context makes the conscience.

Valuing human lives is itself an ideology/viewpoint. A great one obviously, and one I fervently agree with, but once you realize this it's easier to understand how other people can put other viewpoints ahead of this one.

Sometimes, but it's more complicated than that. It depends on the ideology. Sometimes ideologies clash in ways that can't be reconciled without the loss of life. For example, I think it's a good thing that the rest of the world collectively put our ideology above the lives of Nazis, and fought in ww2.

Politics should put people first, I struggle to understand progression if it isn't human focused.

I was at a skating rink this weekend. It was full of families bringing their kids so their kids could have fun. Even some kids birthday parties.

Oh, and the dad wearing an anti-Biden shirt. While hanging out and skating with his kid.

Priorities.

Yeah, tankies are the worst

Yeah, I get you. Just remember though, they're trying to take us back in history.

Some people just see humans, all humans, as just another random member of the animal kingdom. Just clumps of cells doing a thing. These people usually end of believing in power, and nothing else.

You know all those villainous chars from films, books, etc? Those attitudes are not limited to fiction. They're inspired by our real life history, that's what we grew up from. Some people want to go back.

I think it’s stupid when they say America is just fighting a proxy war. No, Ukraine is fighting for their independence. Like when France was fighting a proxy war against England back in the day, they weren’t considered the bad guys.

Is this "General", or "General in the US"? I'm not saying it cannot be the latter, but if it is. I'm out. Best mentalt health choice I've done is reduce exposure to American "problems".

Every political position mostly tries to define in which ways violence is to be used. Realising this and knowing power is already established before you were even born. Seeing violence being used against your oppressor(s) is often times the only thing we feel we can still hope for.

Or from another perspective, is the war in Ukraine worth it for Ukraine or Russia, can you really say a war with so many deaths is preferable to being a russian subject, or an international embarrassment of the Russian state. Is the self determination of Palestinians really worth the terror and the war. We're the PIRA justified in bombing London for their brother's and sisters discrimination and deaths in Ireland. It's ultimately all subjective, wether the violence of the system you fight against is bad enough you can bring yourself to fight.

Nothing brings back anyone but as long as there are people who want to, and do turn us into their machines, we have to rely on our interpretation of that being wrong, and fight them for it.

I put human lives over political ideologies, and I'm pretty alone with that.
I'm a pacifist to the point that I'm opposed to the concept of "self defense" on a national level.
If someone tries to kill you, by all means defend yourself.
But this concept doesn't translate to groups of millions of people, killing each other for years over who's in charge.

This is a very grey topic for me. We can use the Russian invasion as an example since you brought it up. You can argue that more lives would have been saved had Ukraine just rolled over and surrendered immediately. But you can also argue their quality of life would be worse. But how do you compare that to resisting and fighting a war? How many lives would you trade for how big of an improvement in quality of life?

Btw I'm for Ukraine resisting, and I support them 100%. I'm just giving an example why it might not be always best to compare in human lives. Or at least, it's really complicated.