420stalin69 [he/him]

If I were Europe I wouldn’t store my flammable gas reserves in a war zone

But it probably is the case that Ukraine was stomping Russia for pennies on the dollar earlier in the war.

When the aid was flowing the narrative was that this was a “good investment” which is why they sold you with this “pennies on the dollar” angle.

Put down the slava pipe and have a look at what the cost basis is for western military gear vs Russian stuff. It’s rarely better than 5:1 even for basic stuff like shells and advanced stuff runs at around 10:1. The idea that it was “pennies on the dollar” is crazy shit.

It’s all narrative. It doesn’t have a relationship to facts on the ground. It’s a sales pitch.

Donbas = Palestine if Palestine had a powerful friend to kick Israel out of Gaza.

I think the weakness of Ukraine is also narrative.

Whatever narrative they push, it’s completely unrelated to the truth.

When they wanted western sympathy and when the western funds were rolling, it was the plucky tractor brigade killing Russians at $1.40 a kill.

Now that they aren’t getting another aid package, the front lines are about to collapse and Russia will be in Warsaw by summer.

It’s all bullshit. As in it’s unrelated to the truth. The truth has no relationship to what Zelenskyy says.

The fact Ukraine is starting to push an imminent collapse narrative is a key factor in me believing collapse is not in fact imminent.

The “Nazi economic miracle” is a myth that doesn’t die.

Wages fell by 15%, manufacturing production fell despite the stimulus spending, and the reduction in unemployment wasn’t actually anything to be proud of since even by official statistics from Goebbels their recovery was about as impressive as that as Spain or Greeces recent exit from the Great Recession - not very impressive at all and that’s before you factor in how they excluded women from the statistics, engaged in mass conscription and conscription labor programs (forced labor digging ditches isn’t an achievement), and also forced another half million workers such as Jewish laborers out of the Germany economy by various means.

Even so unemployment was still staggeringly high by 1936 which is when the rest of the world had began to recover anyway.

It wasn’t an economic miracle, it was a decade of German stagflation with lots of propaganda and for some reason people in the west seem to just implicitly trust Nazi propaganda. It’s an odd phenomenon.

Historians like Overy and Kershaw have debunked this nonsense decades ago but still people love to say “but he did make the trains run on time” in this weirdly pining way.

On top of that they borrowed like crazy to fund this lackluster pseudo-recovery and had they not looted the coffers of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France they would have faced an economic implosion even worse than the Great Depression - which they faced anyway in 1945.

Also are you saying “economic growth is fascism”?

If the public are paying for it, then it becomes a subsidy.

And good luck getting the US government to require the code to be GPLed. That’s even less likely to happen than a public subsidy for OSS at all.

They typically do the opposite and require “commercialization” to ensure the benefit of the publicly-funded technology is captured by their donors.

This is how it basically works in biotech, for example. Government grants to study the medicine and then when the scientists actually find something important it becomes a “public-private partnership” often without even a royalty for the public let alone making it a public good.

That’s not how government funding works in a modern democracy, unfortunately. It would amount to a cash transfer to big tech to make the public pay their R&D costs.

So a public subsidy for big tech to get free code?

The qualifier “progressive” is used to describe a liberal who supports progressive social issues.

Supporting gay rights or feminism etc, that’s being a “progressive” (loosely speaking, it can be defined better than that.)

You seem to want to insist all liberals are progressive liberals but they aren’t.

That’s why the qualifiers “classical liberal” or “liberal conservatism” exist.

In some countries the “Liberal” party are the socially conservative faction of society.

You’re wrong to conflate liberalism with progressivism. That’s why they’re different words.

You’re also wrong to imply that progressive stances are “owned” by “liberals”.

You want to say “progressive liberal” is a tautology…. But it isn’t.

At the rate this war is going, he might have to.

https://archive.is/d9rg0

You’re saying you think the figures are false?

Have you looked into them at all or is it just more comfortable to assume that?

You say that like US car manufacturers would last a week without government subsidies.

How are you defining success?

I’d call Russia growing at around 3.5% and booking record revenues a pretty bad outcome, from the perspective of people who think these sanctions are doing anything much at all.

Great man theory and its consequences

Archive https://archive.is/ep3wO

The article says the source has been in the USA for 8 years so even ignoring the fact he has an incentive to lie, given he now works for the US, this is at best a decade old as news.

Radio Free Asia

From Ancient Greece and the Roman republic to the modern USA and the hereditary monarchy of the UK, democracy is a facade to whitewash the raw power of monopolizing finance.

The only true democracy that ever existed was the USSR. Bottom up democracy made it real. Top down democracy is a facade and has been for millennia.

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.

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.