Thanks for the shoutout! The power move was a clear violation on the side of Rooki. Words and other fluff aside, the new rule additions are the best indication of not only the lack of change but also doubling down on Rooki’s original position, as described in further detail in my recent comments.

Once I’ve made the last comments and it’s been a few days since the Lemmy.World announcements, I will fully migrate to lemmy.zip because of this incident, so going to my user page on here should make it easy for anyone curious about the events to get a much clearer picture.

Meanwhile Lemmy.World moderator Rooki:

To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died.

correlation != causation

(comment source, thread archive)

I’m not a moderator of !vegan, so I can’t speak on behalf of the moderators here. Either way, each community has its own rules in addition to the instance rules, so a community can be much stricter (or more subjective) than the instance, which I would expect to be more or less neutral.

I fully read your comments before responding. I also had a look at the Chomsky interview, which contained some of the other points already addressed in the open letter I linked. I’d say you were on the money when you brought up China and how some or more people on the left end up siding with it in their quest to call out the US. I think we’d also agree on that there’s nobody we agree with 100%. My problem is that I find it shallow for someone to not be able to harshly criticize the US government without siding with (or praising) Russia or China, let alone acting as their agent by repeating their main talking points. That’s where I’d want to draw the line at least as far as openly recommending those people, and possibly where we differ the most.

From this I get the broad sense that Chomsky does not side with Putin nor does he support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What I get from it is the same thing as enlightened centrism. The Trump-style position of “very fine people on both sides”. The kind of spineless response that only enables the fascists, as they’re the ones to force their views on everybody unless clearly and consistently opposed. Another example? “I’m not racist but”, because that’s exactly the structure of his response at your link. He spent just a bit on criticizing the invasion only to spend 95% of the time on echoing Putin’s narrative of it being related to the expansion of NATO, the US, and some made-up promises (most recently reiterated in Putin’s interview to Tucker Carlson). Also worth noting that for Putin, the kind of wishy-washy “all sides bad” response is precisely the goal of the many years of influence operations, as exemplified by the trolls from Olgino posing and organizing US demonstrations as both Blue Lives Matter and BLM, pro- and anti-Muslim activists, among other things (documented at the same link with reliable sources like The Washington Post).

Authoritarianism is what it is no matter the label, so that’s what I meant by comparing him to the tankies. Putin’s views often revolve around the idea of the greatness of the Soviet Union, which also explains his intent to rebuild it by force. Chomsky’s position on Ukraine is easy to find with a simple search for “Chomsky Ukraine”. Personally, I like this response to his talking points which echo Putin’s.

As noted there, the agreements you mentioned are essentially made up. A dictator like him doesn’t need to be triggered to act. Look up the role of the Russian FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings that helped his rise to power, shortly followed by his hostile takeover of the independent media station NTV. Another highlight of those years was the inaction and censorship related to the Kursk disaster, clearly showing that from the very beginning, Putin cared only about power, not the people. We can go on and talk about the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow, the 2005 and 2006 killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya and others to no end, but let’s just focus on the first year. Would you argue that in the first year of Putin’s presidency or even before it, the US managed to somehow wrong him and turn him into a dictator? That would be wild, especially given that Yeltsin reportedly picked Putin as his successor specifically over his work in the KGB in order to protect himself and his family. Then if you really want to attribute any of it to the West, go farther back, into Putin’s own memories from his KGB work in Dresden and his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He expected order but that was ruined by the demonstrators, resulting in the revolution. Even from this event alone, it’s easy to explain his reaction to all the revolutions in the post-Soviet countries, be it Georgia or Ukraine, which were his first targets for the invasions.

Chomsky isn’t far from a “tankie” given his support for Putin’s narrative regarding the invasion of Ukraine.

They won’t. For most of its history, Russia has been ruled by dictators. Democracy is viewed as chaotic and unpredictable.

It’s a requirement both on paper and in that, even though Microsoft document an official way to bypass it, they will warn you that they do not even guarantee security updates unless your CPU is supported. Moreover, we know of at least one game, Valorant, that will not work on Windows 11 unless you are meeting its hardware requirements. The bottom line is that installing Windows 11 is a risk.

It’s not even a matter of when. I was recently given an i7 6700K, and no game, old or new, comes close to fully using it, and it’s not even overclocked. If anyone is in doubt about the requirement being artificial, try this CPU.

Could you explain how it’s pennies, rather than over $100 a year for the domain and the server?