The international community being G7 countries accounting for 15% of world population. Nobody gives a fuck what the west thinks at this point.

lmao even Scholz is starting to realize Ukraine lost the war

The difference in China is that banks are largely state owned and consumer debt can be easily forgiven.

Because it's a war, and saving lives of thousands of troops can take priority over accommodating people living in a few villages. You should let Russian general staff know of your brilliant military strategies though.

They are doing their darndest to dispel such misconceptions.

Seems pretty obvious why the Russian military would want to expand the front creating logistics problems for Ukraine. Creating a large front has literally been the doctrine since WW2 times. Ukraine is now stuck in Kursk because politically they can't just pull back, so now they have to keep feeding valuable resources into a battle that has zero strategic value for Ukraine. Meanwhile, this is weakening actual strategic places like Pokrovsk. Once Russia takes that, it splits the front in half between north and south which will make it impossible for AFU to reinforce its southern forces. This will create a huge cauldron where Ukrainian troops are trapped. Even mainstream western media understands this, yet here you are.

You mean places where Russia is actively advancing right now? https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/europe/ukraine-military-morale-desertion-intl-cmd/index.html

This just underlines my point that certain areas seem to be more Russian than others, despite being part of the Russian Federation. It seems even Russia forgets they annexed the areas.

The only thing this underlies the fact that you're utterly clueless on the subject you're attempting to debate. Russian military strategy is to defeat the Ukrainian army, this will involve letting go of territory when it makes strategic sense to do so. Even western media openly admits that Kursk incursion isn't going to last long.

evergreen meme

These numbers are meaningless without considering the cost of living. Meanwhile, a recent wealth report found that a typical Chinese adult is already richer than the typical European adult https://archive.is/uzLgx

The problem with social democracy is that it's fleeting by its very nature. A capitalist society may give some concessions to the working class for a period of time, but those concessions will inevitably be rolled back sooner or later. In fact, this will likely be occurring all across Europe now as austerity measures will be implemented to deal with the unfolding financial crisis.

Yeah, nobody learns Maxwell's equations anymore, they're so 19th century. 🤡

These books are fairly accessible and touch on a lot of the same ideas you'd find in seminal works like Das Kapital

• Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies by Michael Parenti
• Understanding Marxism, Economics: Marxian Versus Neoclassical, and Understanding Socialism by Richard D. Wolff
• Super Imperialism and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents by Michael Hudson
• Capitalism, Coronavirus and War by Radhika Desai

Last I checked, Russia evacuated the citizens living in these few villages, and now it's become a cauldron for the AFU where they have thousands of troops stuck who can't leave. Was real gift to Russia as even Forbes admits. Ukraine is losing twice as many vehicles in this debacle as they were previously. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/08/17/out-in-the-open-and-on-the-move-in-russias-kursk-oblast-ukrainian-forces-are-vulnerable-and-losing-lots-of-armored-vehicles/

Guess what's gonna happen once this "offensive" burns itself out. Russia is going to do a counter attack and open a new front in Sumy region against the depleted and demoralized AFU.

Kursk is in fact one of the major factors accelerating the collapse as even western media admits now. If Ukraine couldn't hold well prepared positions in Donbas, then they obviously have no hope of holding anything in Kursk either. All it did was stretch already thinning units to a new front and create a logistics nightmare for Ukraine. Also, if you think a few villages in Kursk constitutes large parts of Russia then it's clear that you haven't seen a map in your life.

I feel like being able to run things locally is really valuable as well. This has been one of my biggest issues with stuff like aws where it's very difficult to have an offline local environment. You have things like localstack, but it's not perfect.

I, for one, welcome our cyberfungal overlords!

The books Marx wrote are the evidence. If you read them then you'd see why they are obviously relevant today. Of course, reading and understanding serious literature takes more effort than trolling on public forums.

It's always hilarious when illiterates proceed to make clowns of themselves by discussing things they haven't read.

I love how libs are downvoting you for pointing out basic facts of the situation. These people don't give a shit about democracy, they just want to make sure they're in power.

🤨

without a hint of irony

The spymasters criticised the “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence, and its cynical use of technology to spread lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us”.

I'm sure that'll turn the military collapse right around.

🤣

Yeah, it's a good series overall.

It is rare that you run a book that sucks you in the way Piranesi does.

It left a big impression on me as well, the world the way he sees it is so peaceful and tranquil, but then you start gradually realizing the horrific situation he's actually in. And this contrast between the way the character perceives his circumstances and the reality of the situation is kind of haunting.

meanwhile in the real world https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine

Piranesi is a real gem, I ran across it last year and it was absolutely delightful.

a few books that I found enjoyable recently

• Doors of Sleep
• The City and the Stars
• The Windup Girl
• Consider Phlebas
• A Scanner Darkly
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• The Mountain in the Sea

So when Estonian jails fill up, they'll ship them as volunteers to Ukraine?

You know libs, when the butcher of Iraq throws his support for your candidate, maybe it's time to accept that you are the baddies.

The discussion here is regrading the behavior of the US government when a US citizen was detained by the client regime of the US. These are the services that US would normally offer that were denied in this case https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/emergencies/arrest-detention.html

Nice straw man you got there. Nowhere did I say that American law applies to foreign countries. What was actually said that the law he broke in Ukraine was one restricting freedom of expression. A supposed value that US is helping Ukraine defend. Not only that, but apparently US regime didn't really care about the fact that their puppet regime in Ukraine arrested and tortured a US citizen for exercising his speech, the core value that US regime purports to be fighting for. Quite telling that you're aggressively working not to understand what's happening here.

It's interesting that you apparently support the Ukrainian censorship of freedom of expression applied to US citizens. Very revealing.

To sum up, a US citizen was arrested for exercising his free speech, then thrown into prison where he was tortured and denied medical care, dying as a result. If that happened in Russia you'd be screeching about fascism right now, but since it happened to somebody you dislike, and was done by the fascists you support, you see no problem.

What crime did he commit again bud?

Where was he being held when he "died of pneumonia" again? https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/04/father-of-gonzalo-lira-american-jailed-in-ukraine-speaks-out-against-political-imprisonment/

Ah yes, being a piece of shit is a crime worthy of being tortured and murdered by literal nazis. Liberal values on display as usual. 🤡

or by Ukraine, as I recall Gonzalo Lira who was a US citizen, was tortured and murdered by the Ukrainian regime and the US didn't give a shit

Michael Parenti addresses this well:

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.

Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

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