These are some great points. I suppose “hinges entirely on the question,” was an overstatement on my part. This is only true if you are trying to shoehorn this conflict into an inter-imperialist framework while other explanations exist. One particular question of interest is, what happens if revolutionary defeatists in Russia get their wish, the Russian bourgeois state is toppled, and there is no sufficient workers movement to seize state power? We could very well see the means of production being seized by western finance capital, rather than the proletariat. This is purely hypothetical and rather unlikely IMO, but it is the future the Atlantic Council gremlins are dreaming about.

I think the conclusion here hinges entirely on the question, “Is Russia imperialist?” The answer itself, in my opinion, is not so obvious. I see a lot more people drawing a conclusion one way or the other than I do analyzing the economic and material circumstances which form the basis of their conclusion. This is forgivable. The economic situation is complex to begin with, many of the primary sources are gated behind a language barrier. To give the situation a proper analytical treatment, we need various specialists to converge and sort through the details (which is not the most reassuring thing to tell people at the peak of a crisis).

When Russia is held up against the United States, the conclusion that “these are the same thing” is laughable. If we want to determine whether or not Russia is imperialist strictly based on capital exports or the extraction of super-profits, I don’t think it is quite there yet. On the other hand, we can see the manifestation of several prerequisite trends, including the development of industrial monopolies and the concentration and increasing dominance of finance capital.

I find the question hard to answer because contemporary Russia truly finds itself in this sort of “in-between” phase in the development of imperialism, and this conflict has highlighted a few of the traps which can result from treating imperialism as a binary “yes or no” condition and basing all further analysis on that conclusion.

“No war but class war” and working towards the defeat of our local bourgeoisie is solid ground to begin from, but to understand this crisis better and anticipate where it is heading, we need a much deeper analysis than “Russia isn’t imperialist” vs. “but they’re acting imperialistly.”

Second on Fedora. It ships pretty bleeding edge software, is very well integrated, has timely updates (new release every 9 months). I’ve set up family and coworkers with it and its kept them going for years with next to no problems. If you install it yourself, you probably want to add the RPM Fusion repository for proprietary video drivers and media codecs.

I use Gentoo personally, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have an insatiable compulsion to tinker with things.

In my experience, Lemmy works well enough in a mobile browser that the need for an app has become somewhat redundant. Not to say the apps aren’t nice or useful, but compared to garbage like Facebook and Reddit, it’s amazing what developers can do on a shoestring budget when the advertising and surveillance mandates which lead to shit like the Reddit Redesign are thrown out the window.

If you mention Jessica Ashooh’s name and anything about her background, a shadowban is imminent.

As a former r/CTH poster and hexbear head, welcome to the club! 🍻 Having the rug pulled like this is truly chaotic, but it’s good news that y’all already have a backup ready and don’t have to do a month long hackathon while putting out constant fires in a 10,000 member Discord lifeboat. While the new website is nowhere near as busy as the former subreddit, the independence of having our own infrastructure developed and maintained by trusted comrades is worth it. At the end of the day, Reddit set us free.

I’m hoping things go as smoothly as possible for y’all. Also, Madeline Albright is dead! Let’s fucking go!