I've been wanting to get going with woodworking on my newly made low roman workbench for a while now but I couldn't due to thesis manuscript.

Here you can see some rough planing of the surface of another workbench I wanna make for a buddy of mine, I'm gonna make a wooden bow workshop over the summer with friends and they need work surfaces to be able to do so. Thankfully I found a very cheap supplier of lumber in the province of Cuenca and the entire workbench will set me back only some 10€, kinda crazy.

This picture is just mood tbh. I love the little corner I have for my woodworking, the low workbench working both as seating and as workbench simultaneously makes it super compact, and the light was beautiful, finally it's the sunny season in Spain after a few months of unusually rainy spring

Here is the try square I wanted to make, finished and coated in linseed oil. I made some paste wax following the recipe of Wood by Wright (2 parts beeswax, 2 parts linseed oil, 1 part mineral spirits). This try square will open up a lot of possibilities regarding stock dimensioning and precise planning and lineup drawing, I'm stoked about it and it turned very straight!

Finally, a pic of the piece of log from which I split the wood to make the try square, it's from a tree they cut down locally and I hauled it home by hand, so yeah, free wood!! It's super hard, no idea what species it is, I'm used to pine and fir, so working with a hardwood like this is surprisingly different

I've been listening to Proles Pod, they have a new series of episodes called "The Stalin Eras" which I found extremely good for history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the end of the Great Patriotic War. Using that as a source and a few other sources, I've compiled some main points regarding the Motherboard-Ribbedcock that dispels the prevalent propaganda that it was a "Soviet-Nazi pact to expand the Soviet Union because they were bad". I've used mostly Wikipedia in the links so you can use it against libs:

1) Most of the invaded "Polish" territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called "carving of Poland by the Soviet Union" liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Sorry for the ugly map, I made it myself and it's my first attempt (I made it with GIMP lmao):

Edit: added the following map (source) showing the majority-ethnicities in 1931-Poland for further reference. Funny how, comparing both maps, the rough boundary between Polish and Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian ethnic majority seems to really overlap with the extent to which the USSR invaded Poland

2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn't agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.

Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.

3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union "carved Eastern Europe" in the so-called "secret protocol" was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don't have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nonbody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias (I have another post with many more quotes, these are just a few of them):

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)

I could go on with quotes but you get my point.

4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?

Edit 2: 5) I, the guy who wrote this wall of text, am a Spaniard. The Soviet Union is the only country which sold weapons to and supported the antifascist side of the Spanish civil war in 1936-1939. The Soviet Union not only declared opposition to fascism in Europe, it is the only country pre-1939 to actually fight it outside its borders. While the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis bombed the cities of the republican-controlled areas of Spain, the liberal west looked to the other side, and the USSR was the only country to offer material support and actual troops to the Spanish partisans. So, as a Spaniard, fuck you if you diminish the role of the USSR in the antifascist struggle in Europe.

Thanks for reading :)

I'll link to the comments here but I'll copy-paste them in comment format below in the comments so that it's easier to follow.

THEM: original comment

ME: quick response

THEM: Russian Lib response

ME: quick response to that (was busy with work)

ME: more elaborate response to that (had more time later, actual effort-posting)

THEM: response to my quick response

ME: final response to that response (also effortposting, interesting comment)

Thanks for checking it out. I'm saving this here for reference, because many Russian opposition libs are anticommunist in nature and these are some good responses (IMO) to some of their main points, that usually disarm them through the power of the immortal science.

I just wanna spam my friends and loved ones with Qin burning the western flags tbh, in Signal and Telegram. Is that a possibility?

"The worst part of this whole thing is that I don't get to be against those Asians anymore!!! Where's my american exceptionalism?!"

"Freaking Vance, even I could find a ton of bad things to say about China!!"

Say the word!!!

"Ackchually, China is about to collapse :smuglord: ghost metro stops! USSR shortages!!!!!"

God I fucking hate libs.

Link to post

Basically what I said in the title, the post was doing bothsideism with China and the US, comparing the Uyghur in Xinjiang to Palestine, and using wikipedia as sources. Reason for the ban, misinformation, lmao.

The writeup in question

So, the book is called "El modelo checoslovaco de socialismo" (the Czechoslovak socialist model), by Radoslav Selucký, published in Fascist Spain in 1969 from a translation of the west-German version of the same year. Radoslav Selucký is one of the intellectuals behind the proposed reforms in the 60s that didn't come to fruition because of the Soviet intervention. I'm reading the book and I, as a Marxist-Leninist, am finding it appalling, I expected to see better ideas and effort but honestly I just wanna fucking dunk on it (at least on some chapters) because I find it infuriating. Anyone interested in a more-or-less thorough critique?

Here is the leading opposition candidate saying, verbatim, during the genocide in Gaza: "as commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, MOST LETHAL fighting force in the world" To which the crowd responded by chanting "USA USA USA". The USA is a fascist and genocidal empire, no matter which of the two flavours of imperialism is in the White House.

Hey comrades, I stumbled upon a YouTube comment providing a rich list of primary sources quoted talking about the nature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a necessity of the USSR to buy time against Nazism and to prevent a one-on-one war against Germany. That said, I've been trying to check a few of the sources and, given the paraphrasing nature and possible translations in the middle, I haven't confirmed it yet. Can anyone here maybe help me verify at least a few of them so I see if I can trust them?

“ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ” Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.

“ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

“ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

“ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State) The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)

“ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.” Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939

“ We endeavored to negotiate some arrangement with Moscow, but we were late, we were hesitant, and Stalin, certain that Poland was doomed, concluded that Soviet Russia would be left to face Hitler alone. In that stark prospect, he accepted a pact that he must have found abhorrent, aiming only to defer or avert the coming blow ” Paul Reynaud (Prime Minister of France, March–June 1940), In the Thick of the Fight 1930–1945 (original French edition published 1951).

“ Stalin can see that if we fail to stop Hitler, Russia would next be in the line of fire. He (Stalin) appears convinced that we are neither prepared nor resolved to offer meaningful succour, thus leaving him alone should Herr Hitler turn east. The Soviet pact may be a shameful arrangement, but it is one they believe may defer catastrophe for them ” Lord Halifax (Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax), British Foreign Secretary (1938–1940) – Diary Entries, August 1939

“ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)

“ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ” Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940), Private Correspondence, September 1939

" It is the consensus here that the Soviet Government could not be sure of any practical Franco-British aid. Hence they opted, for the moment, to appease or placate Berlin, hoping to defer a direct confrontation. Though morally repugnant, the arrangement likely served Moscow’s immediate interest of self-preservation " Sumner Welles (U.S. Under Secretary of State, 1937–1943), Memo to President Roosevelt, September 1939

“ Stalin, suspecting that we might fail the test of true collaboration, appears to have resolved to secure his flank against a sudden German blow. He has made a bargain with the Devil, which he cannot trust; yet one understands that he does so to buy a measure of time ” Anthony Eden (British Foreign Secretary, 1940–1945, 1951–1955), Private Diary / Retrospective Commentary (Late 1939 – Early 1940)

“ The Russians have struck their deal with Germany. It appears they concluded the West could not or would not meet them faithfully should events come to blows. Distasteful as it must be, Stalin evidently prefers a German accord to being left in solitary defiance ” Sir Alexander Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, 1938–1946), Diary Entry, August 23–24, 1939

“ Stalin’s pact with Hitler is shocking, but I gather that the Soviets felt they had no friend to rely on in the West. In that vacuum, they seek to stave off the day when Nazi might will be turned upon them. A cruel logic, but one they appear resolved to accept in the name of survival ” Mackenzie King (Prime Minister of Canada, 1921–1926, 1926–1930, 1935–1948), Diary Entry, Early September 1939.

“ I well recall that the Soviet leadership never doubted an eventual clash with Germany, but also deeply questioned the reliability of the Western powers. They must believe a pact with Hitler affords precious months—or even weeks—to prepare for what they regard as inevitable ” William Christian Bullitt (U.S. Ambassador to France, 1936–1940; previously Ambassador to the USSR, 1933–1936). From Bullitt’s communications to the U.S. State Department, late August – early September 1939.)

“ We must reckon with Moscow’s view that Hitler’s wrath, if unleashed, will strike them next, and that the feebleness of Anglo-French support to date leaves them little option. Their pact is an odious expedient intended to secure some respite, if only temporary, from the German menace ” Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Secretary-General of the French Foreign Ministry, Internal Memoranda, August 1939

“ The Russians have come to terms with the very power they profess to abhor. It is impossible not to see in their action a cynical wish to keep the wolves at bay, given their doubt—well founded, I fear—that we [Britain and France] should or could rescue them in time ” Harold Nicolson (British MP, Diplomat, and Diarist), The Harold Nicolson Diaries, covering August–September 1939.

" Even among the Soviet hierarchy, there is no pretense that the 1939 agreement with Hitler was anything but a desperate expedient. They fully expected that, in the absence of firm Anglo-French support, Germany would attack them sooner or later; thus they took the only course they believed might yield a breathing space " Stafford Cripps (British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1940–1942), Cripps’s private correspondence, 1941.

“ We can be certain Stalin detests the Reich’s ideology, but he found no better shield than a pact to delay Hitler’s thrust eastward. The Russians, having little faith in Allied intervention, set survival above all else. This is the measure of their desperation ” Jan Smuts (Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, 1939–1948), Smuts’s wartime correspondence, c. September 1939. From the Soviet side between the period of the pact until the invasion in 1941.

“ The Soviet Government, in concluding the Non-Aggression Treaty with Germany, first and foremost secured peace for our country for the foreseeable future. We have moved our defensive lines far to the west. …If the war in the West continues for a long time, we stand to remain apart from it and gain those extra months—or perhaps a year or more—to strengthen our defenses. The old frontier, which was indefensible, has been replaced by a new one, affording us far greater security in the event that war is forced upon us later ” October 31, 1939 (Molotov and Stalin to the Supreme Soviet), Soviet Foreign Policy, 1939–1941: Documents and Materials (a Soviet-era collection).

“ We must not provoke Germany, for our present arrangement remains essential to keeping them from immediate aggression. This interval allows further fortification of the new Western borders ” Internal/Confidential Statements from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Late 1940 – Early 1941).

Warning: I'm aware that most around here in Hexbear are aware of the existence of problems with Wikipedia, I've written this post so that the next time someone outside here accuses me of being an authoritarian, brainwashed and revisionist Tankie for saying that Wikipedia actually isn't reliable for a given topic, I have some reference post that I can direct them towards with my opinion on the topic. That said, if you haven't ever considered why Wikipedia can be so problematic, I think my post can be a nice little introduction to the topic. The post doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive list of all problems with Wikipedia, but instead a helpful, common-language approach to a few of the (in my opinion) biggest problems with it: the average Wikipedia editor being a western, white and male; and the predominantly western sources used on most articles. Anyways, of course I welcome additions or criticism to the post. Thanks :)

Wikipedia, being a free, online, collaborative encyclopedia, is mostly maintained by people who go out of their way to spend time making contributions to free, open knowledge, with a good-will unseen in most other media, i.e. not taking sponsorships or relying on advertisers, supposedly individual and independent users editing articles instead of political actors with an agenda (let's give Wikipedia even more credit by forgetting about astroturfing and brigading by private or governmental bodies). This is Wikipedia's greatest strength: it doesn't rely on a state mouthpiece or private funding to maintain its operation, and can be therefore be considered relatively directly independent from individual actors, again, forgetting about astroturfing and brigading for the purpose of this post. But stopping to think about it: who is actually editing Wikipedia, and where are they getting their information from? Ideally, the entire humanity as a collective would collaborate in Wikipedia, and users would take as unbiased and wide a sample as humanly possible, in the most well-sourced and referenced manner. Unfortunately, it is on this front that Wikipedia hides an ugly truth.

So, who actually edits Wikipedia? Thankfully, Wikipedia seems open about it: for the most part, western, English-speaking, white men with abundant time (i.e. affluent), mostly from English-speaking countries or from countries where English is predominantly taught. So: North America and Western Europe. This lack of diversity in itself has problems, such as women reporting Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do (again, from the same article), but this implies another hidden problem: where does this biased sample of users take its information from?

As for where information in Wikipedia comes from, thanks to its standards with references (better than those in most other media available, at least in the west where I live), we again have answers. Wikipedia itself has a compiled, although incomplete list of “reliable sources”, colour-coded for our convenience: green for sources that editors consider generally reliable, red for sources editors consider generally unreliable or sources that have been deprecated, and yellow for sources were there's no consensus or there are particular considerations. A few examples of what Wikipedia editors consider reliable and unreliable sources follow:

I've brought four examples that show the bias problem in full swing, the first two both being private companies, and the latter two being state-media. The Wall Street Journal is a fully accepted source with no extra requirements on the “notes” part of the table, whereas Russia Today is a deprecated Russian Government mouthpiece. Is this really fair? Obviously, we can expect Russia Today to be heavily biased towards pro-Russian Government positions in many politically charged topics, but can't we expect the Wall Street Journal to portray similar biases when it comes to pro-US Government positions? We in the west necessarily and rightly expect Russia Today to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, their reporting of the ongoing (as of the time of writing) war in Ukraine, but can't we expect the WSJ to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, the ongoing (as of the time of writing) genocide in Gaza? Let's see what a quick Google search brings up for WSJ and Zionism:

Whoops. Colour me surprised. Western media portraying a Zionist, pro-Israel stance, known ally of the US Government. But no mention of this in the “reliable sources” notes for the WSJ in the Wikipedia list, reflecting the editors' bias.

Let's look at two state-sponsored (rather, openly state-sponsored) media: Radio Free Asia and Xinhua News Agency. Again, the USian source is good and green, going as far as saying that “editors have found there's little reason to think [it] demonstrates systematic inaccuracy [or] unreliability”, whereas the Chinese source is yellow and “the consensus is almost unanimous that Xinhua cannot be trusted to cover [subjects where the Chinese government may be a stake holder] accurately and dispassionately”. If you as a reader agree with this, that's fine, but I'm willing to bet you're in the same demographic group than the average Wikipedia editor.

This, unfortunately, doesn't stop at “mass media”. Academic sources for historical events equally suffer from this selection bias of white western men being behind the source more often than not, and the cold war-era climate and its consequences still mean that certain viewpoints more friendly to the US State Department will be much more widely funded, published and available than other viewpoints less agreeable to state propaganda. Again, how wide is the access to, say, old Soviet sources in Wikipedia for talking about historical topics? What's more likely to get funding and advertisement in 2025, a study on mass-incarceration of certain ethnic minorities in the USA, or a study on the situation of Uyghur nationals in China?

Before mischaracterization ensues, my point with this post isn't “we should blindly trust Russian and Chinese media and the Soviet Union did nothing wrong”, regardless of my own biases. My point with this post isn't even that Wikipedia sucks, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for many topics, especially less-political ones or those which may be less susceptible to biases in the user sample, and its standards are much higher than those of most traditional forms of media. The problem, is that this isn't enough to guarantee a reliable and not one-sided account of topics that have a political, gender, racial or international dimension where the bias in user representation is that large (I'm sure I'm leaving out dimensions but this doesn't attempt to be comprehensive; after all, I myself am a western, white male, the irony isn't lost on me).

Finally, for anyone who may still not be convinced, think of the following: tomorrow, a Russian or Chinese initiative for an open source online encyclopedia begins, and in a few years, there exists an encyclopedic wealth of knowledge and articles gathered majoritarily by Russian or Chinese citizens, predominantly male and of the largest ethnic group of those countries, and predominantly therefore referencing the articles with predominantly Russian and Chinese sources. Would you consider such a project to be unbiased when it comes to politically or racially charged topics, whether national or international? If your answer is no, then why are your standards different for Wikipedia?

Thanks for reading. Tl;Dr: Wikipedia is predominantly edited by white men in western countries, and almost necessarily reflects the bias suffered by that demographic, which itself is partially inflicted on them by their access to predominantly western sources.

Edit: credit to BadEmpanada, I recall watching a video of his long ago on Wikipedia and the Holodomor, and that part of the info, particularly the links to Wikipedia's own articles on its bias and source selection, I found there.

Link to the comment

https://x.com/guardiacivil/status/1852030840546476300?s=52