I have no choice but to abandon gummunibm and reassert myself as a Marxist-Leninist-Bidenist.
No but seriously, it seems like Russia sucks. Thoughts? Does this inform your perspective on Ukraine at all? Does this speak to the biases of the film maker? Are you like “fuck the Olympics anyway”? In essence: you seein this shit?
There’s this documentary that follows a guy who intends to take steroids for his amateur biking competition. He wants to show how easy it would be to test negative while taking PEDs. He needs to find someone who will test his urine and he gets in contact of Russia’s anti-doping program director right before their whole program exposes its dope-injected ass in front of the world.
It paints Russia as this very negative, lying, corrupt place with this profoundly illegal and deeply ingrained PED abuse scandal.
Why would some sports scandal have any impact on your perspective in regards to an international armed conflict?
I guess in my mind it was something like “If they’re all lying through their teeth about doping in sports, I wonder how much of what Putin was saying about the context for the protection of the Donbas region was hot air and bullshit.”
But again, my source is a documentary about sports? I didn’t even make it through Putin’s speech. I don’t know.
The context for the Donbas existed long before Putin ever mentioned it. If anything, Putin did more deflection after they got Crimea and said that the Donbas regions didn’t want to defect despite the fact that the Donbas regions were very very interested in going the way of Crimea.
The lie is more that Putin wanted to go to war and is very interested in a conflict with the West. This is clearly not the case, if Putin had wanted war with Ukraine he would have pushed for it immediately after Crimea and taken the Donbas regions while the Ukrianian government was in the middle of a coup and disorganized. The fact is that Ukrianian Nazis and Nazism had been developing under Putin’s nose the entire time and he did nothing, it was only when the Russian military convinced him that not only was an attack on the Donbas imminent, that it could continue to roll into Russian territory if it succeeded, and that they could counter it with minimal force and expense that Putin ok’d the war, which is how this whole mess is now bogged down.
But idk what you would expect from a nation who literally threw away their reason for existing, sold themselves to the highest bidder, and when that didn’t get them universal acceptance into the international capitalist cult, which is something that any amateur Marxist scholar could have told them would happen, try to make up another reason for having rejected the ideology that made their nation relevant on the international stage. At this point my only prognosis is that Russia is a cursed land and Russians a cursed people, to emulate Western lies and practices but not understand that you have to actually be stupid enough to believe the lie you are telling for it to work effectively.
I feel my perspective broadening as I read this. Treadonme thank you for your incredibly insightful comments on how Russia thinks and benefits from the violence it undertakes. It’s of course more complicated than America makes it seem.
despite the fact that the Donbas regions were very very interested in going the way of Crimea.
i have vague recollection of pre-intervention polling and it was like half
Yeah, as Russia didn’t intervene, there were a lot of people who thought they should try to stay as independent oblasts, and not connect themselves up with Russia. Pre-intervention the civil war was still occuring though.
Putin pretending concern about Russians in donbas is as troll as the US pretending concern about Uyghur in China. Geopolitics in capitalist countries aren’t based on morality, they’re based on interests and power struggles. Russia is slowly losing control over its sphere of influence of the past 35 years because it can’t compete economically with the EU/US or in soft power with the US. NATO has kept pushing eastwards and funding/organising colour revolutions in countries with deep economic and political ties with Russia. Russia sees that the only way it has to maintain a certain degree of control over what it considers its sphere of influence is through military power, so it does this.
I’m not judging whether or not there are legitimate concerns for ethnically Russian people in Donbas, I’m stating that this is irrelevant for the Russian government in terms of geopolitics, and at best it serves it as an excuse to justify the invasion to its population. I’m not judging either whether Russia is imperialist or anti-imperialist in its current war against a proxy army of the west.
I’m stating that this is irrelevant for the Russian government in terms of geopolitics, and at best it serves it as an excuse to justify the invasion to its population.
This has been my observation as well. This is inter-capitalist conflict and it’s going to be dominated by what benefits the capitalists on either side at the end of the day more than whatever stated objectives are.
In Rosa Luxemburg’s Russian Revolution, her criticism of the Soviets going along with national projects in the first place was particularly prescient:
spoiler
While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of “separation,” they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian Revolution, we have instead witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these “nations” used the freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian Revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself. The little game with the Ukraine at Brest, which caused a decisive turn of affairs in those negotiations and brought about the entire inner and outer political situation at present prevailing for the Bolsheviks, is a perfect case in point. The conduct of Finland, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic lands, the peoples of the Caucasus, shows most convincingly that we are not dealing here with an exceptional case, but with a typical phenomenon.
To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the “people” who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes, who – in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses – perverted the “national right of self-determination” into an instrument of their counter- revolutionary class politics. But – and here we come to the very heart of the question – it is in this that the utopian, petty-bourgeois character of this nationalistic slogan resides: that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule. The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to “determine itself ” in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the standpoint of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie, like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism.
Or take the Ukraine. At the beginning of the century, before the tomfoolery of “Ukrainian nationalism” with its silver rubles and its “Universals” and Lenin’s hobby of an “independent Ukraine” had been invented, the Ukraine was the stronghold of the Russian revolutionary movement. From there, from Rostov, from Odessa, from the Donetz region, flowed out the first lava- streams of the revolution (as early as 1902-04) which kindled all South Russia into a sea of flame, thereby preparing the uprising of 1905. The same thing was repeated in the present revolution, in which the South Russian proletariat supplied the picked troops of the proletarian phalanx. Poland and the Baltic lands have been since 1905 the mightiest and most dependable hearths of revolution, and in them the socialist proletariat has played an outstanding role. How does it happen then that in all these lands the counter-revolution suddenly triumphs? The nationalist movement, just because it tore the proletariat loose from Russia, crippled it thereby, and delivered it into the hands of the bourgeoisie of the border countries.
Instead of acting in the same spirit of genuine international class policy which they represented in other matters, instead of working for the most compact union of the revolutionary forces throughout the area of the Empire, instead of defending tooth and nail the integrity of the Russian Empire as an area of revolution and opposing to all forms of separatism the solidarity and inseparability of the proletarians in all lands within the sphere of the Russian Revolution as the highest command of politics, the Bolsheviks, by their hollow nationalistic phraseology concerning the “right of self-determination to the point of separation,” have accomplished quite the contrary and supplied the bourgeoisie in all border states with the finest, the most desirable pretext, the very banner of the counter-revolutionary efforts. Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, they did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution.
See, and this is where you can have an actually constructive criticism of Stalin, as he was a big believer in pushing the national sovereignty of ethnic peoples because he was an ethnic Georgian, despite no one fighting longer or harder against forces of reaction. It was a blind spot in his theory that was created by his own personal experience under Russian chauvinism, but it was also supported by Lenin’s theories of political maneuvering and it was these kinds of ideas that bound him closer to Stalin than Trotsky, who was much more inclined towards Luxembourg’s ideas.
But it does lead us to ask, if the Bolsheviks didn’t give up their claim to inherit the Russian empire, would Rosa have just decried them as another imperialist? I only say this because much of her theories appear to simply be monday morning quarterbacking to Bolshevik ideas that actually got to be implemented, after all, today we could just as easily point towards the Balkans as a proof that not giving people their own national identities eventually leads to another kind of destruction and reactionary uprising, where the proletariat are easily pitted against each other by the ethnic bourgeois under ‘freedom from communist tyranny’. I think the national/ethnic question is an incredibly difficult question to answer, and it will take more than simply pitting 20th century revolutionaries against each other.
Sorry in advance for the wall of text:
I think the national/ethnic question is an incredibly difficult question to answer, and it will take more than simply pitting 20th century revolutionaries against each other.
100%, it’s not about declaring one or the other as “correct” but understanding their positions within the broader context. What I see as a goal of criticism like this is to allow for us to understand past failures and their impact on the present as well as how to move forward, rather than trying to lionize any particular figure. They are all flawed, but still worth learning from.
But it does lead us to ask, if the Bolsheviks didn’t give up their claim to inherit the Russian empire, would Rosa have just decried them as another imperialist?
Based on the nature of her critique I don’t think that she would simply have changed her tune given different circumstances, if anything I think she was hoping that those national liberation slogans were just that, slogans to rally support then set aside, rather than integrated into the socialist project once the Bolsheviks won. I do want to reiterate that she was clearly in support of the Bolsheviks, despite having criticisms for them, she had far worse things to say about social democrats and reformers:
the Social Democracy in the highly developed West is made up of wretched cowards and will look calmly on while the Russians bleed.
She had criticism for the Bolsheviks from the standpoint of what she saw as the needs of the world revolution, but her primary criticism was of the failure on the part of the proletariat of Western Europe to aid them.
On the subject of the Bolsheviks signing Brest-Litovsk, which was the basis for the criticism I cited in the previous post she had this to say about the choice from a non theoretical standpoint:
they are not to blame. They are in a jam, have only the choice between two evils and choose the lesser. Others are responsible for the fact that the Russian Revolution turns out to the devil’s advantage.” And again she writes: “The German government-socialists may shout that the rule of the Bolsheviks is a caricature of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If it was or is, then only for the reason that it is a product of the conduct of the German proletariat, conduct which was a caricature of socialist class struggle.”
At the end of the day and with the benefit of hindsight the Bolsheviks did make the best of a bad situation and while it’s possible to envision a better path it doesn’t mean that it was going to be viable in the historical context.
I only say this because much of her theories appear to simply be monday morning quarterbacking to Bolshevik ideas that actually got to be implemented
This was contemporaneous criticism though, her polemics with Lenin happened before any of this unfolded.
While Lenin and the Bolshevik line was centralization, the national projects were ultimately in opposition to that.
Quoting Lenin now on this:
the right to self-determination is an exception to the general premise of centralisation. This exception is absolutely essential in view of reactionary Great-Russian nationalism; and any rejection of this exception is opportunism (as in the case of Rosa Luxemburg); it means foolishly playing into the hands of reactionary Great-Russian nationalism. But exception must not be too broadly interpreted. In this case, there is not and must not be anything more than the right to secede." (Letter to S.G. Shahnmyan, Vol. 19).
My read of this is that both parties have their own perspective in this situation, Rosa with her perspective with Polish bourgeois nationalists, Lenin with the understanding of what reactionary russian nationalism could lead to un-checked. Not to be a centrist but they both have valid points.
As Lenin called her an opportunist, she said the same, the slogans of national liberation was commented on as opportunism and a concession to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes that would ultimately be a poison pill to the entire project, this is from 1915, well before these events played out:
Capitalist politicians, in whose eyes the rulers of the people and the ruling classes are the nation, can honestly speak of the “right of national self-determination” in connection with such colonial empire. To the socialist, no nation is free whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another people, for to him colonial peoples, too, are human beings, and, as such, parts of the national state. International socialism recognises the right of free independent nations, with equal rights. But socialism alone can create such nations, can bring self-determination of their peoples. This slogan of socialism is like all its others, not an apology for existing conditions, but a guidepost, a spur for the revolutionary, regenerative, active policy of the proletariat. So long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and the outer life of a nation, there can be no “national self-determination” either in war or in peace.
In the present imperialistic milieu there can be no wars of national self-defence. Every socialist policy that depends upon this determining historic milieu, that is willing to fix its policies in the world whirlpool from the point of view of a single nation, is built upon a foundation of sand.
after all, today we could just as easily point towards the Balkans as a proof that not giving people their own national identities eventually leads to another kind of destruction and reactionary uprising, where the proletariat are easily pitted against each other by the ethnic bourgeois under ‘freedom from communist tyranny’.
That still happened in the context of an imperialist world system. Once the USSR fell their days were numbered. I would still take the lesson from that to be that as long as capitalist states exist, the system operates on that logic and no other states can have self determination. Socialist states will be besieged by counterevolution and reaction, nationalist states will be limited by their own colonial conquests and ability to enslave others.
I haven’t watched said documentary but do keep in mind what the critical in “critical support” means
I had the rule of thumb, “if the US state department likes it, I don’t.” So if Putin felt like he had a good reason to oppose NATO and enter the Donbas region I was ready to believe him. I guess I was being uncritical in that sense. But it’s not like I was going to materially support Russia in the endeavor or sing their praises for it anyway. Right at the outset I thought of it like sending people who don’t want to fight into combat during Dark Souls 3 where the first flame is only embers. 2 nobodys nowhere fighting over nothing. So now I guess the question would be “how would I feel about Russia-Ukraine if Putin started the conflict because he was bored instead of a good reason?”
putin didn’t start the conflict, everything downstream of euromaidan did and that happened because of some trade deal that the banderites and nato didn’t like. depending on how you want to distribute credit between the west and ukraine’s festering nazis.
I would argue that any action that weakens NATO and American hegemony at all would be in Russia’s material interest, and thus he would have some material reason to do it almost by necessity. However, even if he had objectively bad motivation to start the conflict, there would still be room for critical support.
I don’t understand how this is any different than what is done with PEDs in the US, where our professional athletes just blatantly cycle through different types of PEDs depending on what is or is not being tested for, they just do it under their teams supervision as to make sure to not run foul of the regulators. Literally the entire upper echelon of the professional biking world (including the entire US Postal service team) was shown to be doping little more than a decade ago, a better question is why should Russia even care other than to just do the bare minimum to pay lip service to western standards of ‘fair-play’?
Is it just because it is unsophisticated that it bugs you?
I would have to say that it’s the recency bias that bugs me more than anything. It seemed sophisticated enough for me. They had all the good instruments for a well-equipped laboratory. I would, of course, never play a game of “well at least America…” because it’s the greater Satan.
I guess what bugs me is how ubiquitous it is/was. Intravenous injection of PEDs seems like such a hardcore thing and to have everyone just do it like they’re taking their fish oil in the morning and then to have an elaborate plan to hide samples and produce false data is so alien. It’s an inflamed sense of “everything is not as it appears”
What I mean is that they clearly aren’t doing much to actually hide the fact that they don’t really care about the samples. Having equipment and testing supplies is not that sophisticated if you aren’t bothering with a large public media charade. Hell, I have never even tested positive for THC byproducts on a job screening despite being an avid smoker for the majority of my adult life. People just don’t really care as much as they used to about this stuff. It’s all very clearly a ruse for rubes and insurance companies.
Not only are they probably aware that many people are doing it, they likely aren’t paid enough to care, and if someone wants to slip them more money for something higher risk, why should they care?
Intravenous steroids is not a ‘hardcore thing’ it is the fundamental basis of pretty much all of amateur and professional body building culture, and much of top-ranked college and highschool athletics. It’s basically ecstacy for athletes. Not everyone is on it, but if you are in the scene long enough you will know where to get it if you do want it. Most professional athletic organizations literally have steroid cocktails that they administer to their star players in the event they are injured. It’s one of the reasons why ligament and tendon injuries are so prevalent in today’s athletes, their muscular development is not in sync with their connective tissue development, which leads to devastating injuries. They are more sophisticated about it than they were before, you will rarely see huge hulking athletes way outside the statistical zones, but they will ride just into the freak athlete territory to be noticed. As well PEDs don’t automatically make you a good athlete, you still need to train diligently, especially at a young age, to be really good at the thing you are doing, which is why most players don’t really care if you are on them. It’s pretty ingrained into athletic culture at this point. It’s always ‘not everything is as it seems’.
Intravenous steroids is not a 'hardcore thing
i think a lot of normal people see medically unnecessary needle drugs as “hardcore”
I think it’s mostly due to the stigmatization of needle drugs as somehow being worse for you overall than orally or nasally administered drugs, even though they all can kill you pretty easily if you take the wrong dosage. My point is more that given what athletes especially professional athletes out themselves through on a regular basis, needles aren’t really considered to be a big deal in the clique.
I never had an opportune moment to say as much, but I came away from the documentary in agreement with that. “Oh, it’s just another way to get shit into your body.”
It was still more intense because you need technique, it made him bleed a little, it raised bumps, it caused bruising, and you need a clean needle. But it’s in the same neighborhood as other ways to ingest things.
I do my combat sports as a hobby. These are, of course, ripe with discourse about enhanced athletes. I don’t inject myself with PEDs because they have side affects and I’m not trying to do all that for my $3 medal. There’s something disconcerting to the idea that the people I know who fight professionally, the MMA fighters I’ve worked with, the coaches who teach both, and the ex-fighting coaches were in on some project to secure chemicals and inject them gives me dissonance. Like we were in the same room doing the same thing. When I think about the MMA class where I was getting beat up, it stretches my reality to be like “you’re not just a better, stronger, more dedicated wrestler; I think you’re using PEDs. I think you and coach are conspiring to invite me over and beat me up!”
To me there’s a rift you have to cross to coordinate everything and decide to inject yourself with medically unnecessary needles. But that’s a tangent from the point of posting this and an idea I want to explore and develop more.
It opened a lot of eyes as to how deep doping goes but people need to realise the problem goes beyond “gommunist state sponsored doping”. Every year there are new ways to evade detection and testing committees have been doing random visits as well. For example once USADA went into mma the performances seriously dropped. The training elite athletes do is insane.
If I don’t eat right and I do 2 BJJ classes the next day I feel like
If you do 3 a days with a 10k run and strength training as well your body needs super powers to keep it up for an entire fight camp.A variable that I don’t think gets discussed and an uncomfortable part of this is that athletes who take PEDs have taken it upon themselves to do well with chemistry alongside their strong nutrition, sleep, and training before they still have to fight the same difficult fight of performing under pressure. It’s an incredible thing to be a world class athlete.
And some athletes in strength sport for instance are hyper responsive to peds that others wouldn’t get the same results. And like you say they still have to contend with their regimen. Its not uncommon for them to play through injuries and just thug it out. Hell I won’t be surprised if haliburton was ignoring some warning signs abour his achilles before it snapped
I am convinced that most star basketball players are on PEDs (LeBron especially sweats and acts like he is on anabolics, but it could just be because he is old) at least that help them ignore pain, because injuries in star basketball players used to be related to chronic knee and ankle pain which would force them to sit out for multiple minutes, but not generally devastating ligament injuries. I think it also can lead to side effects like distracted thinking, which is why Hallie would just essentially mentally drop out of games every now and then, though that could just be him playing through pain too.
most top level players in any sport are on PEDs or have been on PEDs. its an open secret
Convinced too that they on something. Guys play 50-80 games a year and the pace they move at with their tall body types and the sharp turns they take can’t be good. Plus some of their training is… Puzzling. This vid Anthony davis using a weight vest jump and landing on ONE LEG at a constant change in direction. Its already stressful since he weighs 115 kg but doing that with a weight vest is a recipe for disaster and hes missed over 200 games due to injury. Then adding peds
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SWvPq_2Obb0&pp=ygUiQW50aG9ueSBkYXZpcyB0cmFpbmluZyB3ZWlnaHQgdmVzdA%3D%3DI found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Everyone is taking peds not just Russians grow the fuck up
ACAB includes the Olympic’s drug cops.
Why are you watching a propaganda sports doc for your political opinions
Someone said it was about the biggest doping scandal and I thought it was going to be about cycling.
im just not sure you should base your political analysis on a doping scandal documentary
https://hexbear.net/comment/6287881
I guess in my mind it was something like “If they’re all lying through their teeth about doping in sports, I wonder how much of what Putin was saying about the context for the protection of the Donbas region was hot air and bullshit.”
But again, my source is a documentary about sports? I didn’t even make it through Putin’s speech. I don’t know.
My sentiment exactly. I want to know more.
i think you should rather just look into the history of the region, read some books on the topic, apply materialist analysis. you should not take everything at face value, neither from putin nor from a propagandist doc
