420stalin69 [he/him] @ 420stalin69 @hexbear.net

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3 yr. ago

None of you NAFOs ever stop to consider the right of self-determination that belongs to the people who live in the eastern provinces.

It’s pretty clear that the people of Donbas, Crimea, etc, do not want to be ruled by this Ukrainian government.

A sustainable peace deal would be Ukraine agreeing to not cooperate or be supplied by NATO, agreeing to respect the rights of ethnic minorities, and giving up the provinces that do not want to be part of Ukraine.

Why is it worth sending tens or hundreds of thousands more to their deaths over that?

It’s an extremely reasonable peace and this is what they turned down at the start of the war when Boris Johnson derailed the initial peace effort. If the west wasn’t so war-thirsty then this war would have been over in a week, or wouldn’t have happened at all so cut out the pointless rhetoric about “we need to teach Putler a lesson” because you’re being blind to some basic facts about how this war could have and was attempted to be prevented when you recite that mantra.

Yes

Lmao the Taliban have practically eliminated the opium production in Afghanistan. Just like they did before the US invasion.

It was under US rule that opium production returned and surged.

So you’re talking made up bullshit.

I pretend I’m in a zoo observing people, which I guess is called disassociation.

Securing my rights to the last piece of Christmas ham by licking all the Christmas ham.

Evil Russia importing goods through duplicitous Turkey.

Enterprising Israel circumventing sinister Chinese with third parties.

They were just playing a game of spicy potato

It seems to me he’s framing it as “6 million Jews… but there were 26 million Slavic victims so who are the true victims?” which seems to be pretty much Holocaust denial to me.

He isn’t outright denying the concentration camps were a thing but he is saying that there is an element of mythmaking in the story of the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel, and he further seems to deny that modern Jews are descendants of the diaspora which is all pretty much Holocaust denial.

Like, he’s framing it all in a way to undermine the legitimacy of Israel and to undermine any historical connection to Israel that Jewish people feel, and he’s doing that by denying their Jewishness and walking right up to and putting a foot over the line of saying the Holocaust didn’t really happen in the sense of particularly targeting Jewish people.

It’s bad.

Edit: and he seems to question the reliability of 6 million Jewish victims so it’s not just a foot over the line, it’s rank Holocaust denial.

Spend 42 hours making a professional quality message queue and entity component system then shelve the project because you got bored.

There is no Nordic model. The Nordics have substantially different economic histories and have developed in different ways at different times. Finland was poor until really very recently, Denmark was and still is a colonial exploiter, Norway got oil rich, Iceland was a haven for bankers and tax cheats, and Sweden only saw a recent blip of social progress from the 40s into the 70s and then destroyed the labor movement that built those gains over the previous 20 years with the impressive equality achieved in that period rapidly eroding back to the 1920s when you look at disparate investment in education and other ways of funneling public benefits to the already wealthy. And don’t forget that Sweden are colonial bastards towards the Sami as well, and still are looting their way through those spoils for resource wealth.

Anyone who tells you there even is a Nordic model is a fucking idiot.

The UN does have the power to impose sanctions and a ceasefire.

That power is subject to veto by the US.

Which vetoed it.

You fucking moron.

ChatGPT generate me an image that represents the 2020s

It’s because in a capitalist or other market driven system, economic planning is decentralized.

Let’s say trucks become really popular. There’s a lot of demand for trucks, so you can charge a higher price and make more profit. People want to buy 1000 trucks a day but only 500 are being built per day. Demand exceed supply. You’re making bank.

Other people see that profit and want a piece so they decide to build a truck factory of their own. Let’s say 10 people decide to make a factory and each factory is capable of making 100 trucks a day.

You’ll note this increases the total supply of trucks to 1500, the original 500 plus additional capacity of 1000.

But these factories take some time to build so for a while everyone is happy. Slowly and gradually supply catches up to demand but only slowly. At first we reach 600 trucks per day, then 700, then 800… demand still exceeds supply so the economy is growing and we are all making profit.

But then the rest of the factories get finished. Now we are making 1500 trucks per day which exceeds demand. Now we have a problem. Now supply exceeds demand and the price of trucks crash which means we can’t pay back the loan we took to fund our factory.

We overinvested in the capacity to build trucks because we all wanted a piece of that profit, and as a result of over investing we have now crashed the market for trucks because we are simply making too many trucks.

This creates a cascading effect in the economy since now the market needs to “correct” this imbalance, which is economics-speak for some of us need to go bankrupt and shut down our factories since the market only supports 1000 trucks per day but we are making 1500.

As some factories start losing money, we lay off staff, some of us start going bankrupt which means the banks (we got a loan from to build our factories) have to take a loss. The economy is now in recession because in our earlier exuberance to chase that amazing profit we built too much capacity and over invested creating a “bubble” in the market. Bubbles have to pop to restore equilibrium.

You don’t get this dynamic in a centrally planned economy because in a centrally planned economy we can make a more straightforward investment decision: there is demand for 1000 trucks but we are only making 500, so only create capacity for 500 more trucks. Since our centralized planning allows for a coordinated investment decision with access to full economic data, we don’t over-invest meaning we don’t create excess capacity meaning there is no need for a “correction”.

A market based system is decentralized. Every corporation is making their own investment decisions, each corporation is trying to make and sell as many trucks as they can. A corporation doesn’t care if the economy as a whole is making too many trucks, their sole interest is to sell as many of their trucks as possible which is why a market system results of cycles of over- and under- supply.

It’s a cycle. Capital chases profit and invests in production, leading to first a boom as production soars but then inevitably leading to a bust as capital keeps piling in chasing that profit result in over-investment and excess capacity.

Markets are decentralized. A socialist system is centralized meaning it can make decisions that take the entire economy into consideration instead of only the immediate interests of a single corporation.

Obviously this pretty idealized and all actually existing socialist systems have had at least some degree of internal markets and all have had exposure to markets in the form of international trade so you still see ups and downs in centrally planned economies since an economy is never fully centralized or fully decentralized.

Also in socialist systems there is still the risk of over-investment due to bad decision making or inaccurate economic data, or eg in the USSR the economic interests of the collective farms were over-protected which resulted in something analogous to overinvestment in agriculture so there is also political risk, etc.

So you still saw periods of economic stagnation in socialist systems but the swings are massively dampened. Also with centralized planning the state can more easily intervene to correct these issues when they arise (assuming the political will exists) which makes it easier to reboot the economy when things go awry - eg the socialist economies recovered more rapidly following WW2.

The main drawback is that a socialist economy can be less responsive to demand. Like, if blue jeans suddenly become very fashionable, in a socialist system the economic planners might be worried that denim is a passing fashion trend and averse to the risk of over investing in denim production, whereas in a market system the corporations will say fuck it let’s make money today and let the future worry about excess supply issues not my problem I’ll already be rich.

So the benefit of central planning is that growth is more stable and sustained at the cost of being potentially less responsive, whereas a market economy can be very responsive but at the cost of boom-bust cycles, and at the cost of concentrating enormous political and economic power into the hands of the individuals who own the factories.

China for example seeks to get the benefit of both in a partially mixed system where consumer products and growth industries that are more likely to see rapid shifts in demand are left to private industry while the backbone of the economy that is more stable (eg mining, energy generation, etc) are subject to planning directives.

The leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the peace talks and parliamentary leader of Zelenskyy’s own political party and a central member of the Ukrainian government is a Russian bot

It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it's even less likely to happen.

The Polish far-right are a dominant political force.

And it’s under the relatively lib coalition that relations have reached their lowest point.

I think if Ukraine comes out of this with borders that roughly resemble the current front lines then they’ll keep Lviv but there’s a real possibility of political collapse in Ukraine, if things get worse and if the currently cooperating power centers turn on each other, and in that collapse scenario it becomes pretty plausible.

probably still less likely to happen than not but it’s definitely plausible and there are multiple plausible-to-likely pathways where you can see the political situation in Ukraine deteriorating to the point of collapse.

I don’t think I buy the current Russian narrative that the military camp are about to coup Zelenskyy but he’s definitely under enormous pressure right now, and even if a coup likely isn’t about to happen you can nonetheless see Zelenskyy and the military camp making political defense lines between each other, and the number of high level aides, spouses, and the like opening boxes that accidentally contained a grenade or suffered an unfortunate food poisoning incident is pretty eyebrow raising.

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I’d be so much happier if we were wrong.

Like yeah sure there’s a toxic part of me that gets some kind of boost from being ontologically correct but it’s like “ha I was right. Oh fuck…”

Crucially, he is undermining the conviction in the West that Ukraine can—and must—emerge from the war as a thriving European democracy.

Putin is cynically using the fact that Ukraine is refusing to hold elections and has banned dozens of political parties to make Ukraine seem undemocratic.

The West could do a lot more to frustrate Mr Putin. If it chose, it could deploy industrial and financial resources that dwarf Russia’s.

…

[Putin] now tells Russians, absurdly, that they are locked in a struggle for survival against the West.

…

Europe must, therefore, plan for Mr Putin as the main long-term threat to its security.

…

Weapons matter, especially air defences and long-range missiles to strike at Russian supply lines,

How absurd for Russians to view the west as a threat.

I think it’s a game of diminishing returns.

Let’s say 6 minutes gives you perfect 100% cleaning.

Well 30 seconds probably already gets you 50% or more of the total benefit just by getting fluoride on your teeth and rinsing your mouth a bit so getting people to 3 minutes is probably approaching perfection anyway and if you start asking people to do 6 minutes then they’ll say fuck it I won’t bother at all so settle for the 80% win.

I assume.

They also burned down the White House which you know critical support for the imperialist red coats on that one