multitotal

If we all agree that a people can experience trauma on a large scale and that trauma can then pass onto the descendants, then the reverse must also be true -- a people who have inflicted trauma on a large scale pass that experience onto the descendants.

People who are descended from people from slave-owning and imperialist nations carry with them the scars of slave ownership, genocide, oppression. It shows in the way they act, speak, think. Their worldview is informed by their history as masters of "lesser people".

I reported that, but no action was taken.

Calling for ethnic cleansing of Kurds at the hands of Islamic fascists should be against the rules... right?

I can't wait for the inevitable "All of Russia's men are dead, the soldiers fighting for Russia are Korean. We did it reddit!"

Sunken cost fallacy.

I went through Trump's cabinet picks' stance on Ukraine. Only one person is pro-UA and anti-Russia, the rest are various degrees anti-UA, pro-RU. This leads me to ~~believe~~ hope that the aid to Ukraine from the US will stop soon after Trump becomes president, and soon after the war. HOWEVER !!! this does not mean that these people are "good" or should be supported, it's still a cavalcade of fascists, racists, nationalists, China hawks, bigots, Zionists, etc. !!!

I apologise for the poor formatting, the person's stance is in the spoiler below their name.

CABINET:

• Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (obviously anti-UA, NATO-skeptic, became infamous after her support of Assad)
• Matt Gaetz as Attorney General (anti-UA, he's actually on the myrotvorets list)
• Marco Rubio as Secretary of State
  anti-Ukraine aid

  Rubio's public statements on Ukraine appear to be very much in line with Trump's broad plans for the war — a swift end to it.
  Rubio's statements and actions have been very much geared towards negotiation and an end to the war rather than giving Ukraine what it needs to evict Russian forces from its territory.
  Rubio was among the 15 Republican lawmakers in the Senate who voted against the $61 billion military aid package for Ukraine, which eventually passed in April 2024. Its delay severely hampered Ukraine's fight against Russian forces.
  
• John Ratcliffe for CIA Director
  China hawk

  As director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe focused on space issues and on China, which he labeled as America’s primary threat.
  John Ratcliffe was one of the sharpest critics of former Attorney General Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
• Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security
  anti-Ukraine aid

  RBC-Ukraine pointed out that Kristi Noem had opposed US assistance to Ukraine in the context of her potential appointment as the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
• Doug Collins as Secretary of Veteran Affairs
  
  anti-Ukraine aid

  Collins balked at the suggestion the military aid would have saved Ukrainian lives and that "this money did not stop that." He later referenced the testimony of under secretary of political affairs David Hale, who in November said the military aid for was "future assistance ... not to keep the army going now."
• Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior <-- only pro-UA
  pro-UA aid, anti-RU

  Doug Burgum (R) bluntly stated that the United States is “actually at war with Russia.” What is his take on the House not including military aid funding for Ukraine in the stopgap measure?
  When it comes to sending Ukraine military aid, Burgum points to Ukraine’s ability to have already taken “out a huge chunk of [Russia’s] capability,” adding, “I don’t call that irresponsible spending, I call that a bargain.” The Republican governor did add a caveat, though: “There’s no blank checks — there has to be accountability. We have to track every dollar.”
  
• Lee Zeldin as Head of the Environmental Protection Agency
  all I could find on his stance on UA

  (doesn't think US should send troops to defend Ukraine
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Head of Health and Human Services
  anti-UA, geopolitic realist, blames NATO for war in Ukraine

  "He’s in Ukraine because he warned us he was gonna go in Ukraine if we put NATO in Ukraine, and the Russians, not just Putin, the Russian leadership have been warning us of that since 1992, when we promised we would never do that. ... And James Baker famously said to him, 'We will not move NATO one inch to the East.' Now we’ve moved it 1000 miles to the East, 14 countries. We put nuclear-ready weapons, missile systems, remain in Poland, 12 minutes from Moscow. So we could decapitate the entire soviet leadership in 12 minutes, and we walked away from the two nuclear weapons treaties unilaterally, we had two intermediate weapons treaties with Russia, and we unilaterally walked away from both. So we’re sending a message to Russia, you were the enemy, we are surrounding you and we’re going to put NATO everywhere. Russia has always said this, what you’re doing, is wrong, it is hurting our national security, it is hurting our sovereignty, but the one thing you should never do is go into Ukraine because if you go into Ukraine, we gotta get you out. And they have good reason for that. Russia has been invaded three times through Ukraine, ..."

---

WHITE HOUSE:

• Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff (she was the head of Trump's campaign)
• Mike Waltz as National Security Adviser
  China hawk, pro-NATO, pro-peace in UA

  Waltz is also on the Republicans' China Task Force and has argued the U.S. military is not as prepared as it needs to be if there is conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.
  Waltz laid out a five-part strategy to preventing war with China, including arming Taiwan faster, re-assuring allies in the Pacific, and modernizing planes and ships.
  On Ukraine, Waltz has said his views have evolved. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he called for the Biden administration to provide more weapons to Kyiv to help them push back Russian forces.
  But during an event last month, Waltz said there had to be a reassessment of the United States' aims in Ukraine.
  "Is it in America's interest, are we going to put in the time, the treasure, the resources that we need in the Pacific right now badly?" Waltz asked.
  Waltz has praised Trump for pushing NATO allies to spend more on defense, but unlike the president-elect has not suggested the United States pull out of the alliance.
  
• Tom Homan as Border Czar (lol what a dumb title)
  can't find anything on Ukraine

  Because he's super into "border security" so probably doesn't have a stance on UA. probably an "against aid to UA until the border is fixed" type. Not pro-UA, probably couldn't find Ukraine on the map tbh and he probably doesn't care about Ukraine.
• Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy
  anti-immigration, pro-USA nationalist fascist

  Can't find anything on his stance in Ukraine, probably doesn't think about or give a fuck about Ukraine.
• Dan Scavino as Deputy Chief of Staff (Trump's former Goebbels, moving up in the world)
  Trump sycophant, anti-UA if Trump is

  Scavino was the longest-serving aide in the Trump Administration. He remained as Director of Social Media until the end of Trump's term as president.

---

AMBASSADORS:

• Steven Witkoff as Special Envoy to the Middle East
  Zionist

  His selection, which requires Senate confirmation, was widely welcomed by Israeli officials who oppose a Palestinian state, a longstanding U.S. goal.
  Steven Witkoff, who was named on Tuesday as the incoming administration’s Middle East envoy, raised a vast amount of money for Mr. Trump’s campaign — including from Jewish voters after the Biden administration stopped shipping some bombs to Israel.
• Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel
  pro-Israel

  the right wing of Israeli politics has welcomed the president-elect’s appointment of Huckabee, seeing it as predicting another term of American policy highly favourable to their longstanding aims of holding on to territory in the West Bank and expanding settlements.
  The appointment was greeted with joy by two far-right ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich messaged his congratulations to “a consistent and loyal friend", while Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, wrote "Mike Huckabee" with heart emojis.
  
• Elise Stefanik as Ambassador to the United Nations
  changed from pro-UA to anti-UA now that Trump picked her

  New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, is now refusing to stand by her previous push for Ukraine’s NATO membership — a stance she once framed as critical to regional stability.
  Her office also declined to say whether she still believes Russia committed genocide in Ukraine, as she said in 2022.

These people are out of their minds.

b's analysis:

I doubt that he will be able to close down the war in 24 hours, as he had promised. I rather think that he will escalate it.

Trump will likely select (neo-conservative) hawks to run his defense and foreign policies. They will take all possible measures, even against Trump's declared will, to keep the war going. For them it is down to the last Ukrainian, then down to the last European - if only to show that the U.S. will never give up.

To cover for this Trump and his acolytes may well offer an immediate ceasefire. But that will not work.

The war will go on. Russia will have to, as Gordon Hahn predicts, cross the Dnieper, retake Odessa and threaten Kiev. Zelenski is unlikely to politically survive such a situation.

Only a direct intervention by NATO, could be able to change that trajectory. That however would likely expand the war into a global contest that not even Trump's hawks will want to pursue.

I am actually hoping Trump follows up on his promise of ending the war quickly, by stopping the weapons deliveries and money, and forces Zelenskyy to negotiate with Russia. Trump is a populist and I am pretty sure his staff is feeding him correct information on the opinions on the war: most Americans are cooling off it with a large number against it, Germany is in chaos, EU is out of equipment/ammo to send. It is obvious that the US needs to continue providing the bulk of the support, which Trump, if he wants to be popular, won't do.

Sounds ridiculous, but Putin just needs to offer Trump something good. lol

War is peace.

I'm surprised there haven't been posts about it (or at least I haven't seen them on all the usual suspect communities). My guess is that people are hesitant to call it out in case the story turns out to be true, but I have no such qualms.

How it started

It started when Kyiv Independent quoted a "Western source" that the DPRK has sent 10.000 troops to Russia,. The Western media then ran with the story and said Ukrainian intelligence believes DPRK soldiers are sent to Russia. Once Zelenskyy started talking about it that was good enough for Western media to accept it as fact. I can't find the article now, but I distinctly remember a headline saying "Zelenskyy confirms North Korean soldiers fighting for Russia", they must have changed the headline because of how it sounds. I need to remember to take more screenshots.

At the same time as this story was "breaking", the Western media ran a parallel story about how the DPRK soldiers have already fled their positions. Of course, no videos or pictures of these "deserting soldiers" were ever posted or shared. The Western audience believes these things because they want to believe them to be true.

Racist undertones

Ukraine+Western media are saying that Russia is going to use the DPRK troops to form a Buryat battalion. Buryat people are a distinct ethnicities within the Russian Federation. Ukrainian intelligence services have no doubt chosen the name "Buryat battalion" because in low quality videos and photos Western audiences are not expected to know the difference between a Buryat soldier and a Korean soldier. They are also claiming the Koreans are receiving Russian passports, documents, etc. so if they ever come across the bodies of dead Buryat soldiers they can just claim those are actually DPRK soldiers.

How it's going

The latest "evidence" posted of these supposed DPRK soldiers "fighting for" Russia is two videos without a date or location, but purportedly from Russia's far east. In both videos you can hear Korean being spoken. In one video they are outside training, and in the other they are receiving Russian uniforms.

The Western media can't even get their story straight though. First they reported that South Korea's intelligence has said 12000 DPRK soldiers are fighting for Russia in Ukraine but then they revised their story to say 1500 DPRK troops are fighting for Russia. If you look at the CNN url, you will see that it still says "12000 troops", although the title and the body of the article have changed.

Why are they saying this?

It is obvious that Zelenskyy & Co. are trying to present this as an escalation and evidence that this is becoming a "world war". The fact that Ukraine has been supported by countries from around the world is irrelevant. They claim 1500 DPRK citizens getting Russian uniforms is a big problem, yet when some 20.000+ mercenaries from the West received Ukrainian uniforms that was actually wholesome big chungus move.

Regardless of the reality, most people in the West now think that DPRK soldiers are actually fighting Ukraine on the ground, despite the fact that "NATO has not confirmed that thousands of North Korean troops are preparing to join the war, Secretary-General Mark Rutte said on Thursday."

But what if the Western media turns out to be right, and there are DPRK soldiers fighting in Ukraine?

I'm happy to say that this story is bullshit because what are 1500 soldiers going to do for Russia? Russia supposedly has some 400k soldiers in Ukraine right now. According to Ukraine+Western media, Russia suffers 1000-1200 casualties a day, so DPRK just sent them a day's worth of fighting force.

But even if that were true (and it isn't), it's not a big deal. Where was the outrage six months ago when Macron said he is considering sending French troops to Ukraine? People don't seem to understand that nobody is stopping individual countries like Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. to send troops to Ukraine. It won't trigger Article 5 and it won't drag NATO into war. But no country wants to do it, and no country will do it in response to 1500 supposed DPRK troops being sent there.

If DPRK troops are indeed in Russia and Ukraine, then they are there probably for training, education or to oversee the transfer and use of the artillery ammunition they had sent to Russia earlier. NATO has thousands of its own personnel working in Ukraine, in addition to all the spooks and spies.

The media loves this story because now it's Ukraine "alone" versus Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. It feeds into their underdog story, which only works if they completely ignore all the assistance Ukraine received from the West from the start of this war.

This may be unpopular, but I am getting tired of all the questions to enter a space or create an account, not just in the lemmygrad-sphere, but basically every leftist space on the internet.

I wanted to create an account on ProleWiki, but to do so I need to pass an exam.

FIRST SET (please answer all 8 questions)
SECOND SET (choose 5 questions to answer)

I have already answered pretty much the same questions to get on lemmygrad and matrix. If I knew I'd be asked the same things over and over, I would have saved them from the first (or second) time I typed them all out. Mind you, lemmygrad isn't the first place I visited/joined, so I have answered a similar set of questions probably 6-7 times in the past few years.

The biggest problem with the questions is that they don't work. As in, they're not going to filter out any bad actors, because people intent on joining for destructive purposes aren't going to be deterred by a few questions they can answer with a quick google search. Bad actors will also know what answers you expect to see and write those. It's a bit like when the US border control gives you the green form with the question "Are you a terrorist?" But the questions will turn away people like me who are simply tired of writing an exam just to create an account on a webpage.

I have always had problems with tests/exams as in I have a problem they exist and I literally have traumas from them lmao. The pressure, the uncertainty, the doubt... I mean there's a reason people still have anxiety dreams about missing a test or not studying long after they have left school.

By all means, have questions in the signup forms, but:

Fewer questions

Two to three questions max. You don't need theory questions, they can be googled. You don't need LGBTQ questions, that should just be a statement "Here we respect LGBTQ people and their right to exist, use pronouns people ask, don't discriminate, etc. violation of this rule will result in a ban, possibly permanent." Done.

Right kinds of questions

If you want a theory/reading question ask something like: What was the book/article/work that got you into Marxism/communism and why? or What's the most recent work of communist literature (book, article, novel, pamphlet, zine, etc.) that had an impact on you and why?

People will tell you more about themselves by actually talking about themselves rather than answering questions about theory. Not to mention it's harder to fake being a communist when you have to give your own personal understanding of something that's not a big issue. Asking about Palestine, DEI, culture war topics doesn't make sense because again they can look up what you want to hear. But if someone says the most recent work they read is the Capital or Manifesto and they think everyone should be equal then that should raise a red flag (not for being wrong, but for not being genuine).

No wrong kinds of questions

There are some questions you simply shouldn't ask as a matter of principle.

For example, you have this is number 3 of the mandatory questions for ProleWiki: "3. Have you read our principles? Comment your agreements or objections to their points."

Since a person filling this out is only requesting an account, asking for comments on the principles may come across as you simply rejecting anyone who doesn't agree or will want changes. This shouldn't be a question, but a statement: "These are our principles, joining means you agree to them." I don't know how ProleWiki is run if there are meetings where principles are modified/added/removed or if they are set in stone. If set in stone, then it definitely makes no sense to ask.

Questions that are questions, not several questions hidden as one

Asking things is easy, but whoever wrote the questions has no respect for people's time. This is just way too much work, people have things to do. The time spent answering questions could be spent writing an article for the wiki. There's an idea! Instead of answering all those questions, just have a list of topics people can write a wiki article on. That wiki article is the entry form. Simple, elegant, dare I say... beautiful?

What's there now though:

Where did you find ProleWiki from?(1) How familiar are you with it?(2) Comment what made you want to join ProleWiki(3) and what areas you are interested in contributing to.(4)

That is 4 questions.

What current of Marxist thought do you uphold? Describe as thoroughly as needed your path towards your current political perspective.

That is 2 questions, one of them an "essay question".

Have you read our principles? Comment your agreements or objections to their points.

There are ten subheadings in the principles, with more sub-subheadings. That's a question and an essay question. Q: 6 E: 2

What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support the LGBT community?

2 questions.

What is your position on Joseph Stalin(1) and Mao Zedong?(2) How would you describe their historical role?(3,4) Share any comments or critiques you have regarding them.(5)

5 questions.

What are your thoughts on China,(1) Vietnam,(2) Cuba,(3) DPRK(4) and Laos?(5) Do you believe any of these countries is socialist?(6) Why or why not?(7)

7 questions.

What is settler-colonialism,(1) are there any countries that still fit that description(2) and what should be done regarding them?(3) Further, what is to be done about the decolonization and liberation of indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, and immigrant groups in your country?(4)

4 questions.

What is your analysis of the situation in Palestine?(1) What do you think of the 2023 October 7 events(2) and the groups involved from both sides of the conflict?(3)

3 questions.

I count 23 regular questions and 2 essay questions. And that's only the "8" mandatory questions.

TL;DR too many questions to get an account (like ProleWiki, lemmygrad, matrix, but other leftist spaces too). ask fewer (2-3) but more poignant questions. rules about LGBTQ and other rules that aren't up for discussion shouldn't be a question but a statement to be accepted or not. answering so many questions is mentally taxing/exhausting.