AES_Enjoyer @ AES_Enjoyer @reddthat.com

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Again: what part of my second paragraph of the previous comment is a Russian talking point. If it's so obvious you can definitely explain?

"You disagree with my point of view, so I'm not gonna respond to any of your arguments because my state propaganda told me your point of view is forbidden and ontologically evil and I can automatically discard any discussion about it. Yes, I'm the one whose opinion is founded on logic"

Please explain me how my concerns about the far right rising (arguably pro-russian) and the worries about the welfare state in Europe and my support for a EU-wide military alliance are Russian talking points.

The antagonism between Ukrainians and Russians is a project the west has been pushing for a century. First it was Nazi Germany weaponizing a hunger episode that hurt Ukraine disproportionately more in order to create anti-russian sentiment (see Stepan Bandera), then it was Europe+US talking of Ukraine as a Russian colony during Soviet times.

In the 1991 referendum, Ukraine voted to remain part of the Soviet Union which was illegally dismantled against the democratic will of the majority of the Soviet population. Despite this, the country was dissolved, the economy was auctioned to the most corrupt bidder, the industry was dismantled, and by 2022 Ukraine still hadn't recovered the economic level it had before 1991. The dissolution of the Soviet Union literally caused a demographic crisis in Ukraine comparable to the ongoing war.

Until 1991, the tensions between Ukraine and Russia were minor and the countries had a benign, sisterly relationship. It is the breaking of the eastern block that primarily triggers anti-russian nationalism in Ukraine and vice versa in Russia. It's the broken promise of the west not to push NATO eastward that puts Russia on its toes, and it's western-backed colour revolutions like the Euromaidan that proved Russia that Europe would always position itself against Russia, and not establishing friendly economic and diplomatic ties.

There's no requirement for spending as a part of NATO.

Not a strict requirement, but pressure to do so. Whose idea was it to raise to 5% again? The only president who rejected the idea, Pedro Sanchez from Spain, got threatened with tariffs if Spain doesn't conform.

They have reasons. Some EU nations are former Soviet states. Just the "restore the former borders of the Soviet union" reason is reason enough

Russia has been pushing for closer political and economic ties with Europe for the past 30 years. Russia was promised that if they dismantled the communist project NATO would cease to expand eastward, and NATO kept expanding eastward regardless. Turns out NATO was never about defending Europe (because it never has), it was always about creating tensions between Russia and Europe because a continuous political alliance of industrialized nations that spans from Gibraltar to Bering would be too powerful for the US to control.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is almost certainly the reason your country, whichever it is, is increasing military spending.

The justification is the invasion of Ukraine. But as a European, the number of times our military has been used to defend Europe has been 0 since WW2, it's only ever used to support US imperial ambitions, to bomb brown children, or to keep control over colonies in Africa. Europe deals so much fucking damage with its imperialism, that's one of the biggest reasons I don't want military expenditure. They tell us it's to defend from "le evil Ruzzians" but 5 years later Europe will be bombing brown children with that money, mark my words. For fuck's sake Europe can't even stop supporting the genocide of Palestinians. How can you want Europe to spend more money in military instead of engaging in diplomacy and not antagonising Russia?

Do they have the strength? Why is that included here. Does it matter?

It does matter. If Europe already has the military strength to repel Russia, why do you want the extra expenditure in weapons?

They are only useful to deter other nuclear strikes,

Why wasn't the Soviet Union or any of its satellite states invaded by the west since they got the nukes, then? The cold war was raging, and yet there was no incident of overt military conflict between eastern and western block. How so?

I'd love to see the EU with its own defensive force

If love to see the EU pushing for diplomacy and not antagonising the largest country in the world which happens to be right beyond its borders. I would line to see a European military alliance independent from the US but I wouldn't like it spending 5% of the yearly budget at the cost of already starving healthcare, education and pensions. Denmark already approved to raise retirement to 70 fucking years old in order to pay for this, Finland is pushing to remove holidays from the calendar, and England already said that raising this budget will have effects on expenditure in social services. This is absolute bullshit.

We have the far right getting stronger and stronger due to the worsening living conditions of Europeans because of austerity policy and lack of intervention of things like salaries or rent prices. Cool, let's increase military expenditure to 5% right before fucking LePen, AfD, Vox and their equivalents get to the governments, what could possibly go wrong? Remember my words: in 5 years time, the European money will be spent not in conflict against Russia, but in middle east / Africa. Supporting military expenditure of the west is absolutely crazy.

You want magic, not reality. You want all the benefits of military power without any of the costs

No, I dont want the benefits of military power because I'm not a warmongering European chauvinist like you, I want the benefits of diplomacy, of social spending, and of good relations with neighbouring counteies. I don't want my fucking healthcare money to end up in the pockets of Rheinmetall in order to lobby my politicians to go to war. I'm an able-bodied male and I don't want my country to send me to be cannon fodder in the name of European imperialism.

First of all, the country currently forcing my country to cut expenditure in healthcare and to put it into military is the US, not Russia. And the country funding and arming the most flagrant example of genocide in the 21st century is the US.

Second of all, Russia doesn't have geopolitical reasons, nor the military/economic strength, to invade EU countries. And even if it did, the EU has nukes so you don't need further military expenditure as deterrent.

Third, even if you forget all I've said above, the EU can still have a military alliance without the US, and it would be a much better thing.

Putin is famously the president of the Russian Republic, very different from the Soviet Union. I don't know why you thinking me criticising what Russia has become somehow makes me Russian?

Sorry, mixed up grandpa and boss, hence the "the fact that you're here". The fact that you could have that conversation with your boss is because the Soviets gave everything to save him.

My grandfathers fought the Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. A great uncle fought in Spain and in Germany against fascists both times

So all your family fought on the side of socialism against fascism and now you spit on their tomb by saying "socialism is just as bad"?

The Soviet Union was the most advanced and humane state of its time. Western Europe was murdering tens of millions through imperialism in the global south, the US had literal Jim Crow era laws against black people and was killing tens of millions through imperialism in Central/South America. If it weren't for the fucking Bolsheviks, the entirety of Eastern Europe would have been genocided by Nazis and the few remaining people colonised, never to industrialise. The Soviet Union was the first country to guarantee truly universal healthcare, education and pensions, and only then did Europe have to follow through for fear of revolution. Highest unionisation rates in the world, abolished houselessness and unemployment. It certainly had flaws, but it's literally the best it had to offer. For every Stalinist repression victim you quickly go dig up, I'll show you ten Africans murdered by French/Belgians, or a hundred Indians murdered by British.

The death of NATO is a good fucking thing. No more US military bases in the EU, no more forced expenditure of civil budget in weapons causing austerity, no more bombing of Libya and Yugoslavia, no more US influence in European politics. If you're European you should salivate at the thought of NATO ending.

The Soviet Union collapsing is what allowed the war in Ukraine. Do you see why rising military budgets in Europe doesn't exactly promote peace?

Wait, "attack of evil"? The US is literally funding and arming the genocide in Gaza, the US IS the greatest evil. You may argue for Russia being a close second (discounting Israel), but how is the US not absolutely the worst by any metric? How many millions did it murder in Vietnam, Iraq, Korea, and how many millions more were murdered under its approval in Southeast Asia(Suharto) or Latin America (Pinochet)?

Maybe the fact that the left supports improved working rights, unionisation, free education, equality of opportunities and between nations, freer borders for people...

I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand

I brought up WWII because the peak of the Gulag system was starting on 1936, and by Stalin's death in the mid-1950s it had essentially disappeared, it was a system implemented during a time of extreme necessity due to dekulakization, maintained during WW2 and the Nazi hysteria of the late 1930s after the assassination of Kirov, and dismantled after Nazism had been eliminated from Europe.

really quite racist

The USSR was patently the least racist nation in Europe. While in my homeland of Spain education in Basque and Catalan was forbidden, the Soviet Union for the first time in history guaranteed the citizens of all the republics an education in the official language of their choice, leading for the first time to universal education in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian, or even minor languages such as Mari for those who spoke it and desired to be educated in such languages. In France, up to 1993, there were no public schools teaching children in Occitan language, and even now I don't think there's even one. Fuck, the "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics" doesn't even have a toponym or an ethnicity in its name, how many countries can claim the same?!

evil and oppressive

Look. I'm a Spaniard. In 1936, we had a fascist coup which resulted in a civil war between fascists and anti-fascists. The policy of the western world was to do nothing and to leave the war to itself while the Nazis and the Italian Fascists bombed the fuck out of my country's partisans (ever heard of Picasso's Gernika?). The only nation in the planet to help the antifascist struggle was the Soviet Union, which is the only source of Spanish antifascists of weapons, planes, tanks and military training against the fascists. It's crazy to tell me that the only nation that helped the fight against fascism in my homeland was "evil and oppressive". Your grandpa, a Jewish man, would have been murdered if it weren't for the Soviets. The very fact that you're here is because of the 27 million lives that the Soviet Union sacrificed in order to save Europe from Nazism.

It's not just trying to build solar capacity, it's building all solar capacity in the planet. Solar photovoltaics is essentially exclusively manufactured in China, as are e.g. EV batteries. China is definitely the leading country when it comes to solar and batteries, while maybe the peak of wind technology is in Europe. They're also innovating on nuclear and they approved to build the largest hydroelectric generation plant in the planet, producing twice as much as the current largest (three gorges dam, also in China?.

So let's start hating on the world capital of photovoltaics and nuclear because of a lemmitor's predictions of energy production over the coming 20 years in China?

Hahaha that's a good one

Not about altruism, just contradicts your prior claim of "energy security". Maybe they're switching to renewables because they do care about the environment and because they're affordable?

Isn't most of that radiation blocked by the outer layers of the sun, though? Like, sure, there is a non-negligible amount of high energy photons escaping, but the overwhelming majority of the radiation comes AFAIK from blackbody radiation from the plasma at the temperature of the surface of the sun?

And yo, mate, how's it goin?

That's why China is working hard on the greatest desert reforestation projects in the world, and why it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves.

First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2

For cumulative that's debatable. CH4 is the second most important gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is short enough that over spans of 100s of years it can decompose into CO2 which has a much lesser greenhouse potential.

Per capita annual emissions

See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn't fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.

Compare GDP PPP per capita. China is very much on a lower place than the US or Germany. China is very developed compared to, say, Philippines, but still developing when compared to Japan or UK.

By which other metric would you compare development? I'm open to debate