There is still a significant pro Ukrainian resistance operating in both Crimea and Donbas. Russian has had to resort to brutal tactics to suppress them, but has still not been entirely successful. Many of the resisters retreated to fight with the rest of Ukraine, and they are certainly giving Russia a fight. In any case, it’s still imperialism.

I see you have your cut and paste propaganda all ready to go there.

The people in Crimea and the Donbas wanted to join Russia, to protect them from Ukraine,

Sounds an awful lot like claiming Iraqis wanted the US to overthrow Sadam and would welcome it with open arms. It worked out about the same too, except for the Russian military embarrassing themselves. Even taken at face value, all you are doing is justifying the imperialism, not showing it doesn’t exist.

China is the biggest debt holder nation in the world. Zambia just had to default on loans for infrastructure that largely served Chinese needs, and Kenya and Ethiopia are not far behind. Meanwhile, the DRC is falling into debt paying for infrastructure to ship Copper and Cobalt to Chinese. China has not been as abusive as the west was, but they aren’t that much better either. It’s still the same tactics.

New Labor Forum: Chinese Investments in Africa: Twenty-First Century Colonialism?

Russia isn’t imperialist, it has no colonies nor neocolonies

Yeah, tell that to Crimea, the Donbas, or even Siberia or the puppet states like Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. Russian neo-colonialism is all over Africa.

China isn’t imperialist either, it’s a socialist country wituout any financial domination of the state or economy.

China is a kinder imperialist, but they are using largely the same playbook that the west used in Africa, including debt-trap diplomacy, undermining local sovereignty and regulation, and undermining labor movements.

They also have a mix of socialism and capitalism, sometimes getting the best of both, and sometimes the worst. They definitely dominate the state economy through control of banking and the use of capital controls to direct funding to national priorities. The current real estate crisis and “ghost cities” are a pretty obvious example.

Tell us what a non-authoritarian leader of Venezuela would look like

Presumably they would look not-authoritarian, a description that doesn’t fit Maduro at all.

It could well be that, in the face of US policy regarding Venezuela, only an Authoritarian could hold onto the country. That still doesn’t make Maduro not an Authoritarian.

it seems to me that leftist leaders are always denounced as authoritarian by North American and European based NGOs and governments.

That’s a fair observation but, again, that doesn’t mean they are wrong when they say it about Maduro. Maduro is referred to as dictator by Human Rights Watch, the Organization of American States, and other human rights organizations, including some inside Venezuela.

Maduro is a dictator. It’s largely the fault of the US that Venezuela has a dictator. If the US succeeds in ousting Maduro, it will almost certainly replace him with an even worse Dictator. All of that can be true with no contradictions.

But there are an estimated 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, some of which are hundreds of solar masses, not to mention the Accretion disks of black holes all kicking out radiation. That’s gotta add up to something, even with the inverse-square law fall off. The galactic core has unfathomable levels of radiation and puts out its own galactic wind, and some stars have observable bow shocks with it.

Every planet is a star which wasn’t big enough. Some are just more challenged than others.

I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.

So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.

Oh, no, let me assure you, I totally get the nuance you are trying to show. I’ve only been hearing it from naive people about Bill Gates for about 30 years now, and he just keeps doing more things to make it more ridiculous every year.

I’m sorry dude. I’ve had a passion my whole life for technology most of my 50+ year life and this asshole has been doing his best to fuck it up since day one. Every dollar he made was by ripping people off and by leading the charge in ruining the software industry.

Sure, he peeled off a miniscule fraction of his ill gotten gains for some charitable causes, but who’s to say that we wouldn’t have been better off if he never took it out of the economy in the first place? Do you have any idea how much of a drain the Microsoft tax is on the world economy? Without companies like Microsoft, we probably never would have deteriorated to the point where we would elect a fascist like Trump.

Then he decided he was hot shit and knew better than professional educators how to teach and forced his opinions on the rest of us by buying influence, ultimately fucking up education for well over a decade.

Then of course there is the Epstein scandal. But who really cares about child sex trafficking anyways.

Not at all. It’s absolutely true that Hitler had some good points to his personality. It’s silly as fuck to bother defending him by pointing them out, but they existed.

The same is true of Gates, and it’s nothing like the silly tomato analogy.

It should be classified as a sign of mental illness.

It is. They call it hoarding disorder.

It’s quite literally like the Good Place

LOL, just no.

Just hear me out guys, Hitler was a nature lover! You can’t be judging people by just their worst acts!

I really don’t think it has much to do at all with ICE vs Electric vehicles. It just so happens that both transitions are going on at the same time. If anything, the electronics involved in running an average modern ICE vehicle are more complicated and more proprietary than an average electric vehicle.

Trump didn’t want the deal. He wanted to end the filibuster then use domination tactics to essentially cancel the midterms. He’s only talking about caving on the subsidies now as damage control for Republicans.

including a plethora of unions

If there iwas anything that pissed me off more than the Democrats abandoning support for workers it was union leadership doing so.

Least bad perhaps. There are no good ones.

Well, I’m waiting. You made quite the charge there. How did I betray my values? How did help bring Trump to power?

You don’t get to call yourself “left” when you help bring Trump to power.

And how did I do that exactly?

More like a last minute concession. There is no point to an endorsement when it’s clear the die has been cast.

Nope. First of all, the Trumper tactic is always to overturn the game-board. They don’t give a shit about goalposts. Second, the goalpost was “line up and support Mamdani” which you actually moved to “endorsed Mamdani” which is not the same. Their endorsements were nothing more than concessions. It was last-minute realignment to position themselves to benefit from the win, or at least not suffer as much embarrassment. It was never support.