Europe needs working industry to produce ammo, and steel mills are certainly important for producing all kinds of weapons and parts for the military. Steel mills aren’t the only thing shutting down. It’s a systemic problem https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-04/german-energy-reprieve-too-little-too-late-to-save-factory-jobs

They’re already high enough for things like steel mills to start shutting down, and once the pipeline reserves Europe filled up from Russia during the summer run down, then it’s LNG prices from there on out https://oilprice.com/Metals/Commodities/European-Stainless-Steel-Mills-Are-Closing-Due-To-Energy-Crisis.html

not with the energy prices they have now

I’ll wager that the pretext of the war will now be used to dismantle the social safety net in Europe and create mass austerity to feed the war industry. European capitalists will be thrilled because social safety net is what sets the standard for the quality of working conditions. As we see in US, when you create horrific conditions for the unemployed then people will be willing to accept slightly less horrific conditions at work.

clown world

Even a neocon think tank admits this was almost certainly a weather balloon https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinese-spy-balloons-skys-limit

US certainly gave China a good precedent on how to react if any US aircraft happens to make its way into their airspace in the future.

An interesting point to consider is that US shooting the balloon down sets the precedent that China can use to shoot down any US aircraft in their airspace under the same pretext.

Notably, Taiwan is part of Chinese airspace as well. This is the position held by the UN, and it’s the fundamental basis for having diplomatic relations between US and China per Potsdam Proclamation that was signed 77 years ago between China, the US & the UK. US state department website makes this crystal clear as well:

The United States approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence; and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means.

Sure, but people in US are kicking and screaming for lots of things already. Healthcare, livable wage, and police violence are just a few examples. The regime clearly doesn’t care what the people want though.

Of course, I’m strictly referring to the ruling class and their propaganda machine here.

The whole US infrastructure is designed around car use. Many places in US don’t even have functioning public transit, and certainly not at scale that could support mass use. Meanwhile, due to lack of any sane city planning, all the necessities are scattered so that they’re not in a walking distance. People have to drive to get to work, they have to drive to get to stores, and to do pretty much anything.

Higher gasoline prices aren’t going to change the amount of driving people do in a significant way because driving in US is a necessity. The way you reduce pollution and fuel burn is by building public transit infrastructure and doing city planning. US has shown itself to be utterly incapable of doing either.

The point here is that the west has no place vilifying Russia. People in the west would do far better holding their own regimes to account rather than spending their time pointing fingers.

He’s been consistently excellent I find.

https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot

And even if you want to pretend that the US is just as bad as Russia… The west villifies the US all the time, we’re widely regarded to suck pretty hard. Why should we pretend Putin is a saint?

There is no comparison between Russia and the US. Nothing Russia has ever done even begins to come close to the atrocities US is committing around the globe. War on terror alone massacred over 6 million people. US is currently facilitating a literal genocide in Yemen, and starving Afghanistan after going on a murder spree there for two decades. Comparing Russia to this is frankly laughable.

I don’t really see the point. There are already tried and tested methods for overthrowing capitalist regimes that don’t rely on libertarians.

Cryptobros is just not the demographic I’d go after for radicalizing to be honest.

A government represents the interests of the class that holds power. In western countries, capitalists are in charge and the government is formed by this class to serve the interests of this class. So, the problem isn’t with the concept of a government but with whose interests the government represents. Working class needs to seize power and form a government that represents the interests of working people.

I’m talking about liberals here, I find libertarians are closest to anarchists ideologically.

I find liberals are the hardest demographic to move left in practice. Liberals strongly believe in individualism above all else, and this precludes having a systemic view of the problems we face. In a liberal world view, it’s always the individual that’s the problem as opposed to the system. Traditionally, when push comes to shove liberals inevitably embrace fascism instead of moving left. I thought this was an excellent analysis of the ideology.

@shreddy_scientist@lemmy.ml thanks both! :)

Thanks, glad to hear it! :)

Nowhere did I justify Russia invading anything. Thanks for confirming you’re a troll though given the nazi problem in Ukraine is a well documented fact.

I love how you just homogenized Ukrainians here. The Ukrainian regime that insists on continuing the fighting certainly does not represent the totality of people of Ukraine. It’s a large country with diverse demographics and right wing extremists that the west backs do not speak for all of Ukraine. Either you’re a troll or utterly ignorant on the subject you’re bloviating on.

Please explain to me your galaxy brain logic of why killing more Ukrainians to achieve the same result is desirable. You’re not personally affected by any of this, so it’s easy for you to advocate ruining lives of countless other people to spite Putin.

If you feel so strongly about this then why don’t you pick up a gun and go to Ukraine yourself, if you’re not willing to do that then kindly shut the fuck up.

Imagine voluntarily signing up to live in Elon’s private fiefdom on Mars.

Yeah, people tend to conflate financial economy with real economy and the two things are not the same. What ultimately matters is whether countries are able to produce the things they need to meet the needs of their people. The west outsourced much of its production to Asia and put itself in a very vulnerable position by doing so.

Your assumption is completely baseless, but there’s clearly no point continuing this.

Have a nice day.

The claim about Ukrainian military production capacity having been destroyed comes from Ukraine. And last I checked Russian ships haven’t moved out of range of the neptune missiles that Ukraine supposedly used.

Also, imagine thinking that Russian military uses unencrypted phone calls to communicate. It’s absolutely surreal that people don’t realize there’s a propaganda war going on along with an actual war and just uncritically swallow everything they see in the media. There have been lots of examples of Ukraine making things up, like claiming that the troops on the snake island were killed when they were captured, or claiming that Moskva’s captain was killed when he miraculously appeared at the ceremony a few days later.

The reality is that Russia lies, Ukraine lies, the west lies. Everyone is doing propaganda right now.

Russia isn’t retreating from anywhere. They pinned a chunk of Ukrainian army around Kiev which allowed them to surround the main force in Donbas. Now that the main army is surrounded they no longer need to keep troops around Kiev, and so they’re redeploying them to help the main force.

The whole notion that they were going to take Kiev is absurd when you look at the numbers of troops. It required around 40k troops to take Mariupol which is a tenth of the size of Kiev. It’s pretty clear that 40k troops Russia deployed around Kiev were in no position to take the city.

It’s also not at all clear who is responsible for the attacks on the civilians. For example, the fact that the attack in Kramatorsk was from a Tochka-U rocket that’s used by Ukraine, but was decommissioned by Russia back in 2019, strongly suggests that the attack came from Ukrainian forces. There need to be independent investigations into these incidents, however UK weirdly blocked the UN meeting to run these investigations.

Russian demands have been clear from the start and haven’t changed. The entire war could’ve been avoided if Ukraine formally agreed to remain neutral and to implement Minsk protocol which it signed.

One of Russia’s main stated goals for the invasion were to demilitarize Ukraine. This is well under way with Ukrainian military production capacity having been destroyed. Without capacity to produce ammo and weapons or to repair current inventory, Ukrainian army is not going to be able to continue fighting much longer.

Once the army is defeated then Russia will be able to dictate its terms to Ukraine. These terms will continue to get worse as Ukraine’s position continues to become ever more untenable. So, again, the longer this drags on the worse things will be for Ukraine. People of Ukraine gain absolutely nothing from this conflict.

There is no scenario here where Ukraine can win against Russia. All this conflict does is prolong the suffering of the people there. The only ethical thing to do is to help find a diplomatic solution and encourage negotiations. Unfortunately, western powers have been doing the opposite of that encouraging Ukraine to continue fighting and sending weapons. The reality is that the west doesn’t actually care about the people of Ukraine, and just wants to use them as pawns to drag Russia into a prolonged conflict there. It’s a ghoulish thing to do.

For decades, the notion of free speech was peddled as the differentiating factor between enlightened western democracies and the authoritarian eastern barbarians.

The reason this was possible was because there was a very narrow Overton window in western mainstream. Majority of the population of western countries shared a liberal worldview. This system worked because quality of life that westerners enjoyed was generally better than the rest of the world and this reinforced the idea that liberalism was the best system possible.

The lifestyle in the west is largely subsidized by brutal exploitation of the countries the west colonized. However, as Lenin notes in his Imperialism essay, capitalism inevitably turns the process of exploitation inwards towards the heart of the empire and this is the phase we’re entering now. The wealth of the west is increasingly becoming concentrated with the oligarchs, and the material conditions for the majority are rapidly deteriorating.

The collapse in the standard of living has opened up the Overton window much wider. There is no longer a single mainstream world view in the west. The liberal centrist narrative is shrinking while both the left and the right are growing. Most of social media platforms in US share a liberal bias because that’s the predominant ideology in the tech world. Now that there is a significant number of voices outside the liberal mainstream we’re seeing platforms like Twitter starting to censor speech that falls outside liberal mainstream.

It’s pretty much unheard of for liberals to be banned on Twitter even when they say absolutely heinous things or spread misinformation. The same standard that’s applied to the right and the left is not applied to the mainstream.

The notion that these companies don’t care about politics is pure nonsense. However, the belief that this is the case is entirely real. People who hold mainstream views often see themselves as being apolitical. And they see the mainstream as the natural order of things.

The west starting to admit that a certain amount of censorship is in fact necessary for a society to function cohesively. This negates one of the strongest arguments the west had for its superiority.

It’s hard for people to accept that their world is collapsing.