My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
I don’t think y’all get to use that talking point anymore after 1500 people upvoted a .world post calling the only realistic alternative to Assad, “a known terrorist.”
Seems like most people on here hold the position that the US shouldn’t have even lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, let alone given him weapons and supplies. And not wanting to give al-Sharaa weapons and supplies is what you’re describing here as “supporting Assad,” is it not?
Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.
And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.
Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.
More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.
The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.
Do not feed the sea lions.
Oh, ok, so tell me, what’s your vision for Syria, exactly? Have Turkey and Israel annex the whole thing? Or maybe create a power vacuum in ISIS’s backyard? Practically speaking, one of those two assholes was going to end up in power, and if they didn’t, the situation was going to be even worse.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if our side was the one calling for active support of one side. You’ve got it completely backwards. My alleged “support” for Assad was always just, “I don’t think either side is worth supporting, so we should leave them alone.” Which is, you know, the proper “null” position when looking at any conflict. But the “null” position of anti-tankies seems to be, “Whatever the news says.” So rather than neutrality being the zero point, it’s seen as “supporting” the opposing side. So much so that you don’t even seem to realize how much your argument is shooting yourself in the foot.
Your side, the side that labels us as “tankies” and “Assadists” and so on and so forth every time we advocate non-interventionism, is the side that “defends one asshole because you like the other less.” In virtually every foreign policy debate, it’s not between which of two sides should be supported, it’s between supporting one side or not supporting either. If you want to convince me to adopt a position of interventionism when both sides are flawed, then you need to argue the exact opposite of what you just said.