First comment removed from asklemmy thread about who’s good/bad re Israel/Palestine is apparently too nuanced and anti-extremist for snowflake dessalines. Ya gotta fuel the hate and extremism if ya wanna comment round tankie parts…
The linux ban was regarding a comment (pretty sure the OG comment was different) about Russian maintainers being removed from the linux project. Obviously you can’t call out capitalist Putin’s authoritarian dictatorship in the communist sub, because ML mods are pro-authoritarian and pro-dictatorship; not anti-capitalist… At this point I’m convinced most “tankies” are just PsyOps operatives.
I got banned too… It turns out that if you say that there are some Russians on a list of entities that Americans can’t do business with, that’s racist against Russians, I guess.
TIL Russian is a race
It’s definitely an ethnicity, at least. The distinction between what counts as one race or another is often incredibly arbitrary, and there’s not really much difference between hatred for a “race” and hatred for any given ethnic group.
As an example, people in Japan are generally discriminatory against Chinese people, which I’d still describe that as racism even if both have the same “race” of Asian.
Slav is an ethnicity, or at least an ethno-linguistic group, and it’s much broader than just Russia. Russian is just a nationality. Russians (specifically) are not an ethnicity unto themselves. Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and Bulgarians (among many others) all fall into the Slavic group along with Russians.
You can’t be racist against a nationality. Maybe jingoist, but jingoism is typically identified as considering a particular nation to be superior to others, rather than inferior to others.
Ethnicity has no consistent definition, and the everyday use of racism can absolutely describe discrimination of a specific nationality. It’s also just arguing pointless semantics regardless, especially when the original complaint is about russians not being a “race” which is an utterly made up term that means whatever racists want it to.
There’s often a lot of overlap between ethnicity and nationality, but they’re not mutually exclusive. In this case, Russian can apply as both. There are a lot of non-ethnic Russians (non-Slavic, even) who are native to Russia, and there are linguistic/cultural/genealogical differences which separate Russians from other Slavic groups.