My suggestion was more from the direction of if you hope to be getting something from the conversation other than generating adrenaline, (I know I’m not always the best example of this) maybe you shouldn’t be so antagonistic.

Honestly my main goal is just to push back against their narrative. If they're going to come into my post's comments and spout propaganda I am going to speak on it. If I get banned, then well, that solves the problem of them mucking up my posts.

I actually don't think I would be doing anyone any favors by being excessively polite to them. There have been a few different writings recently about how engaging politely and purely-factually with this type of content on the internet is a mistake because it leaves room for them to decide what of your facts to engage with, when to just switch to abuse instead of responding, basically just gives them room to employ a bunch of tactics that are pretty effective at spreading their message. I'm still being factual with what I'm saying, but not really being nice to them, I think is fully justified and the right thing way to respond.

Again, if they felt like upholding their end of the social contract and agreeing not to be randomly abusive any time they don't like something in some other context, or have a serious discussion about what they're saying, it would be a totally different story. And like I say you will notice that I'm completely factual and happy to have a serious discussion about it if someone's up for that. I just don't think that my rudeness or not has the slightest bit to do with whether Hexbear people are going to respond with factual calm rational discussion.

you obliquely accused someone of being Russian

That wasn't really the point of me saying that, although I can see it coming across that way.

Like you said, it was just kind of a low-effort response to a low-effort insult. Since they were engaged overall in boosterism for the Russian war, I was pointing out that the Russian military and government are fucking up the war. Nothing really deeper than that. I have no idea whether the person I was talking to was actually Russian and I wasn't aiming to imply that they were.

Sasuke’s comment was entirely innocuous when it comes to the Ukraine war and you replied to it by soapboxing about hexbear broadly.

By that time, I'd read 13 comments by Hexbear people. That was the 14th. I'm not going to give a calm patient response to every single one. They'd also come in and made 172 upvotes for each other's content.

That's the point that I was making. From the POV of the Hexbear monoculture, I know it might seem "out of nowhere" or like it's not clear what behavior I'm reacting to, but you'll notice that 100% of the people who reacted to my comment upvoted it. I think they generally know exactly what "let's all gang up and say the same things and upvote each other" behavior I'm talking about when I point at the comments with their Hexbear participation and refer to it as a problem.

This is also what I was saying about talking reasonably about the merits of the argument, after the 14th browbeating comment or whatever, being a losing game. I'm fine with talking with someone who's up for talking about stuff, but that's generally not what goes on in Hexbear threads.

You seem to feel very strongly about your position and don’t seem very curious about why people might disagree.

I've already gone through it with a lot of people. I was completely curious at the beginning. Anyone who wants to show me something that's a strong argument on the other side, I'm completely into, and I really will look at it, as I did your source about the Trade Union fire. But my experience is that they generally don't do that, they just yell and repeat the same types of framings. And also give me abuse, and tell me what I believe and ignore me when I say I believe some other thing. So I'm fine at this point just stating my side. You'll notice that I very directly addressed what the first Hexbear person said, in the thread, and only after a few messages with them totally ignoring what I was saying did I just say okey dokey and start clapping back.

I’m inclined to say somewhere in between, take for example the Donbass self defense forces, some of those were definitely Russian military and some of those were absolutely locals. Either way, they could not have survived without Russian military aid. However to say people are ‘moscow funded’ the equivalent is also true- the Ukraine government is US funded. Ukraines media is US funded.

Yeah, all makes perfect sense, I 100% agree with this.

Either way a core component of jingoism is nationalism, and it feels weird to be accusing people of being nationalist for a different country, when they’re an anarchist, just because you don’t like their understanding of world events.

If I think their understanding is based on lies and propaganda, then that's how I will call it. Where they come from and who they are isn't all that relevant to me, I'm just basing it on what they say. If it is jingo in service of some government I'll call it accordingly if I see it that way.

In my previous response I asked twice about your position on self-determination, that wasn’t me being flippant, but more trying to get at a core contradiction in the way separatist regions looking for self-determination have been treated. When it was Kosovo it was acceptable to allow for separatists to break away, do you think that it would have made the situation better for Russia to start dumping weapons on Serbia in that situation to help them counter the ‘invasion’ from Albania? It’s a hypothetical and not really logistically feasible, but my point is more that this situation went from bad to worse because fuel has only been continually added to this fire rather than de-escalation.

My position is very different from how regions "have been treated" by the big powers. Generally I just support free individual people above whatever state entity. I think Palestine has a clear right to self-determination and anyone on the Israel side who's been taking it away (even before the full-scale slaughter started late last year) should be in prison at a minimum. I don't have a clear position on Kosovo or Chechnya just because I don't know that much about them, but the massive contradiction between how Russia reacted in Chechnya versus Donbas is one example of why I don't take their narrative on anything seriously at all.

I don't think Moscow intervening in Donbas had anything at all to do with free people's self-determination. Like I said, I get it if someone from there feels like they're badly represented in Kyiv, but having automatic weapons flow in from outside so that they won't have to honor the government that won their country's election and can seize some government buildings and declare themselves free people is guaranteed to make things ten times worse for everyone involved. And look, it did, look at all the piles of corpses now.

The US are pros at this stuff too, we basically wrote the playbook on using that tactic to destabilize a country. Honduras and Venezuela recently, and then going back a few decades, it's half or more of Central America. That's fucked up also. I don't like it when the US does it or when Russia does it, it is a crime against democracy and generally a prelude to mass murder. There is no contradiction in terms of what I think, at least that I'm aware of. If you feel like the US State Department is being hypocritical in saying it's unfair to destabilize a country and install a friendly leader even if that kills a bunch of people, because that's what they do, then I will 100% agree with that, but you have to take it up with them not with me.

Does that address the question? It's a fair question but I feel like you're assuming similarity that isn't there, between my POV and the State Department's POV.

The picture painted is of a government which actively made the situation worse

Correct

, and enabled those very Russian propaganda campaigns

Correct

by their own complicity in the massacre

Absolutely wrong. This is where I think you didn't read the report carefully enough.

So the summary story says that the Ukraine government empowered fascist thugs to slaughter anti-Maidan protestors and strangle a pregnant woman and so on, and they were found guilty by the EHCR court.

The actual court finding was that against a backdrop of periodic deadly street violence related to anti-Maidan elements trying to overthrow the local government, some anti-Maidan protestors conducted an attack with live ammunition against a pro-Maidan demonstration, then the pro-unity people got the upper hand in the ensuing firefight / riot, the anti-Maidan people took refuge in a building, both sides threw molotov cocktails at each other, a big fucking fire started, and a bunch of people on all sides died including because of failures by local authorities (which caused understandable upset which was then compounded by failures of the Ukraine government during the investigation).

That part of it is basically the total opposite of what your article says, with the only true parts being "failures by the Ukrainian authorities" and "confirmed and found guilty."

Again: I have no real idea of the underlying facts, I'm reading about this incident for the first time. But it is extremely easy to just read the EHCR report, and see for myself that covertactionmagazine.com is lying about what it contains, and I feel pretty safe in the judgement that they're probably lying about other things too.

I think that covers most of it, let me know if I missed something, as I'm trying to be detailed in addressing what you're saying without getting too dug down in minutiae.