Hrm uh… I would describe myself as a leftist antifascist.

And I do not think that elements of fascism within Ukraine’s society and government make it somehow deserving of being invaded, absorbed into Russia, having their culture erased, and worse.

Getting more technical, maybe the term anarcho-communist is i think actually accurate, but then you end up with less politically informed people assuming I am the worst thing imaginable, a violent anarchist terrorist that wants to violently overthrow every government and replace it with nothing, while simultaneously /also/ being an authoritarian who believes in a vanguard party, no dissent allowed an oh money and property are not allowed to exist any more.

Then on the other hand you could say maybe social libertarian, but you run into the same problem woth the other terms: Every American thinks Libertarian = AnCap, and ‘social’ as a prefix denotes basically ‘communism lite’ to most Americans.

What I actually am is a person who believes in the right to privacy in personal matters, freedom of speech as in the ability to say unpopular things and be judged by people individually and by groups collectively, but not at the point of a goon squad with guns or the ability to imprison or impoverish you preventing you from criticizing an existing power structure, be it government, corporate, religious or otherwise.

I believe in protecting the oppressed, providing a reasonable standard of living, education amd medical care for all, that people should genuinely, directly care and help their neighbors (not indirectly by donating to some incredibly inefficient charity, and especially not by hypocritically acting extremely concerned about whatever issue but not actually /doing/ anything /useful/ about it).

I believe that American society is far too individualistic and selfish, that worker co ops with a democratic governance structure are a far superior way to organize economic production than the authoritarian private business model that defines social relations within especially large corporations, but even most medium and small business enterprises I have ever been a part of as well.

And I also do my best to temper these beliefs with realism, knowing that these things are an idea of a better world to strive for, in a world that is brutally unfair, difficult to predict, and is full of many, many others who disagree.

You might even say that even when societies are organized into nation states, even when employees are organized into corporations, or adherents organized into religions, at a bigger picture level they all compete with each other in a rather stereotypically anarchic way, often violating the ‘rules’ that are supposed to govern their interactions, and nearly always employing every method possible to bend those rules, break those rules and get away with it, and to be the ones making those rules.

I can, and did, easily fit in to all the chapo themed sub-lemmies, it is very easy to joke about the hypocrisy of American domestic politics and economic practices.

But they never talk about the Ukraine Russia conflict.

Sure, they all agree that Israel is doing a genocide, which is my opinion as well.

But you cannot be critical of China. I barely mentioned that /maybe/ if Taiwan wants to be independent, that a flawed democracy exerting its will to self determine should not just de facto be waived away by the geo strategic situation, and they all got extremely edgelord extremely quickly.

Eventually the topic turned to surveillance and freedom of speech, and they basically all entirely believed that China has no problems with that at all.

Delusional.

Its actually very confusing to me that online Chapo fan communities are seemingly all Marxist-Leninists, or Maoists, or even more confusingly to me think that the Chinese government and societt even is communist, when they are so obviously state capitalists (red fascists, as many here seem to say).

The Chapo podcast almost never touches on foreign policy beyond making fun of how absurd many American foreign policy decisions are and how poorly informes most Americans are about other societies.

Anyway this is a long post but here is more kindling for this thread:

I am a lefty antifascist, but I don’t believe that Ukraine’s right to self determine democratically should be overridden by the Russian state.

And though I believe that war itself is a crime… I do not see how any reasonable person can think that Ukraine should just lie down and give up.