What has me perpelexed is the fact that the USSR also did this, just to a slightly less genocidal degree - all the other SSRs largely served to supply the RSFSR, but some people do not consider it to be imperialist.

The greed for power and resources can stem from capitalism, but it really isn’t the only possible cause.

I think you’re putting words in my mouth, never did I imply or think that Ukraine is responsible for what is happening, or that Ukraine is not right in wanting all their territory back. However, it is factual that if Ukraine wants to secure its territory, which is entirely justified, it will not be by means that are describable as “peace” or “peaceful”, because russia is not backing down like complete idiots(a common theme).

Is what I am saying false?

Fair enough. I guess I’ve spent too much time seeing disingenuous calls for “peace” on the internet, mostly by pro-russia shills, with the intent of painting the western support of Ukraine as evil warmongering or something.

We do wish for peace ultimately, but there’s a whole lot of violence to happen if it is going to be on Ukrainian terms, because russia does not look like it wants to back down.

Considering the Ukrainian position is basically “any loss of territory is unacceptable”, there is little room for both peace negotiation AND support for Ukraine simultaneously. Tough position.

but working in tech I just know there’s no such thing as “online gambling”.

I wouldn’t call pseudorandomess(if that’s what you’re implying) as disqualifying something from being gambling - it only needs to be random enough with an even distribution.

If instead you’re talking about odds being slightly in favor of the house then… that’s literally no different than gambling irl either. At which point, I have to question what you even define as “gambling”.

That’s the charm! Make one big goal, and it shatters into a hundred small, achievable ones.

The most impactful single decision one can make in terms of not making things even worse is not reproducing. It is the single most sustainable decision in terms of resource use, pollution and climate change.

The fact that people are voluntarily doing this is good, the presupposed “dangers” of population decline are dangers to the systems that demand infinite endless growth, which I would argue are dangers to people in the first place. Fuck 'em.

Mileage will vary depending on the type of games you enjoy. In particular, the worst group of games are multiplayer competitive with invasive anti-cheats - those tend just not work at all.

Otherwise, gaming in general has gotten very viable(especially easy on Steam), they run anywhere from okay to great from my experience.

I wouldn’t trust anything involving fucking Kim Dotcom lmao

Maybe you’re right. Best we can do is be active here.

That’d be a silver lining if it were to work out that way. However, seeing the stats of old.reddit usage is depressing - it’s a very small minority, would barely make a dent in reddit’s traffic if every old.reddit user migrated in such a case.

My personal issue is that reddit has that critical mass to not only sustain generic wide-appeal communities, which Lemmy also achieves, but also small niche communities, which Lemmy really doesn’t for the most part. Reddit needs to fuck up even worse, way worse than just discontinuing old.reddit.

I find that most of those issues are nonexistent the way I am on reddit - just use old.reddit everywhere. Yes, even on mobile. I’m special, and not in a good way, but it works.

I fear the day old.reddit gets shut down, considering the amount of communities that don’t have an (alive) analog on Lemmy, so for now I use both…

My problem with Lemmy is the lack of activity in niche communities. You’re right that there needs to be a critical mass and arguably Lemmy has it, but only for the most mainstream, generic type of content. It doesn’t have the mass to sustain any sort of niche, outside of maybe tech related topics because of the way the userbase is slanted.

I find myself going back there often because of that, but I hope that the userbase for generic content enough to sustain and grow, from where more active niche communities can spring up.

The meme about liberals is also applying that same kind of logic, so I guess it’s all just petty insult flinging in the end. Proves hoodatninja right nicely.

It doesn’t, but in this thread’s we see a simultaneous claim of “We aren’t tankies, of course Stalin and Mao are not good examples of communists” and “Eastern european people were better off under the USSR”. Of course, I don’t think the same people are making both claims, but just the fact that some people can claim the latter and not get collectively shunned is indicative of a huge problem in leftist spaces, it’s disgusting frankly. Tankies are significant force, at least partially representing leftism to everyone else.

“observable scientific and philosophical truths” cannot point to an existence of any sort of higher power, by the very definition of a higher power. All you can do is believe in a higher power, all religion is dogma.

And when people who actually lived in these area during that period almost ALL of them say communism was better!

Lol. Almost all of my grandparents and greatgrandparents disagreed and personally told me about their life during USSR occupation, and the two that don’t were well connected with officials and generally lived much better than the average person, enjoying vacations to Cuba frequently, something tue average person could never afford.

Everyone else just lived in pretty poor, if stable, conditions. None of that “communism = starve to death” meme nonsense that some try to push, but it just wasn’t good. After fall of the USSR, things went worse before they became better, but now things are significantly better for the average person.

From my eastern block friends they are very confused how the USA could have allow homelessness

Yeah, looking from the outside, the USA seems like it’s in a mess that it needs to fix.

but they do talk about how everyone at least had a home and some standard of living - where it seems the standard of living is higher in Western countries.

It is easy to look back at worse times in the past with pink glasses of nostalgia… Yes, everyone did have a home, but the standard of living was piss-poor - except for people with connections, who had it much muuuuch better, like my aforementioned grandparents.

I’m from one of the Baltic states, and honestly the standards of living now are much better for the vast majority of people than it was in the USSR, even for minimum wage earners.

Sure, but the meme refers to the communities on the internet that unironically go full tankie, praising Stalin and Mao.

Worst of all, tankies tend to inflitrate sane leftist spaces and slowly transform them. I’ve witnessed it many times, and that just makes me think that Marxists-Leninists are just the most dominant form of leftism on the internet, which is horrible.

A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days…

Being from here, I can say that those are are people who either 1. Look back fondly just because they were young back then, and now they’re old, or 2. Were connected enough to the party to be privileged.

Grandparents from one side of my family were the latter, and their political views nowadays are strongly pro-Russian these days, while everyone else(whose lives were improved after fall of USSR) is pro-Western. Funny how that works.