SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

all it cost them was shutting down their industries to use less gas to keep gas prices low

Just because a country does not conform to a Western definition of “democratic”, doesn’t mean that that country is not a democracy.

I would personally say that the United States is not a democracy by a typical definition, because voters don’t actually have the choice to vote for anything they like, and not just crank things but even things that are very popular and very important - medicare for all is a popular policy that neither party represents for example, and third parties are so disempowered by the voting system that it is essentially impossible (but not technically! as if that matters!) for any other party to gain power in their place. The generally low approval ratings for various parts of the government (the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court) are an indication of this. Is the mere ability to choose between two options, especially bad options, really a good definition of democracy? Might, perhaps, there be better ones?

Compare this to China. Sure, it’s a one-party state, but it’s a communist one-party state, as opposed to the United States’ capitalist one party state that is merely separated into two separate parties to meet their own, bad, definition of democracy. That being said, it’s actually quite a highly decentralized country, with regional and local officials elected by the people. More importantly, it has very high approval ratings and the people’s needs are generally met. I think this is a much better definition of democracy because where the people’s needs are made the priority. It’s harder to game that kind of system - the former definition has the “cheat code” of just splitting one party in two and then having the rich “lobby” both of them (AKA, legalized corruption) to have the same policies where it counts, whereas the latter can’t do that, it actually has to deliver the goods. Of course, it’s not as if you can’t have both - a system where you can choose everything about your country, and one where most people’s needs are generally met and most people approve. But if we have to have one or the other, the latter is the more important feature, IMO.

“What if they invaded, pillaged, and coup’d the countries WE were going to invade, pillage, and coup! Can you imagine the tragedy?! Better that us, The Good Guys, exploit these countries than The Bad Guys!”

they’re turning their coal power plants back on after shutting down their nuclear power plants. oh, and planning on converting existing natural gas pipelines to carry hydrogen instead… likely generated by natural gas.

@SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net

I know this is up your alleyway, not sure if you have any detail to add

While modern liberal capitalist Russia with its oligarchs and chud politicians can eat my shit and hair, a) Putin isn’t personally responsible for the craft crashing, this is just “Bad thing happened, how do we blame it on Very Bad Man” which is just pathetic journalism, and b) lots of things go wrong with these kinds of missions all the time. Even the successful ones are like “Oh, awesome, our craft landed upside down, there’s dust over the solar panels, and one of the legs is broken, but we otherwise have a connection? That’s a big W in my book!”

I put a solid 80% of the blame on Gorbachev and Yeltsin (and the absolute blood-sucking monstrous ghouls who conducted the shock doctrine) for everything in the Russian state decaying after the disastrous fall of the USSR. Putin’s far from innocent in terms of liberalization of the economy and ideally he will be put up against the wall in a people’s tribunal, but he inherited it from those two dipshits and it would be silly to pin the blame for the decay of Roscosmos solely on him.

Unrelated, but also worth noting that Russian missile and rocket engines are still second-to-none, so they still have a big role to play in a spacefaring near-to-mid future.

this has been a very funny saga, beginning on May 30th I believe. apparently businesses were just too afraid of Iran to take the oil and congressmen had to get involved

average leftist meme

but , this is basically the backbone of a potential essay on why we are against NATO in this conflict and why Putin isn’t Hitler reincarnated

imperialism isn’t “when a country goes into another country”, it’s a specific relationship of domination and resource extraction and impoverishment of the people living in that country in order to exploit it for the benefit of the imperial core (more often, its bourgeoisie).

it’s really disgusting to see people using the language of the left to describe the USSR abolishing homelessness and poverty in their constituent states, and building schools and homes and providing jobs and extremely low costs of living, as if this is even remotely comparable to the horrors that the Europeans and United States have wrought in developing countries around the world, including sweatshop and plantation slavery, forced starvations, and genocides.

“but they did those good things authoritarianly!” a) literally who gives a shit, and b) every government does everything authoritarianly, it’s the definition of authoritarian. ripping away resources from the rich landowners and distributing them to the poor is extremely authoritarian and I definitely support doing that

the ratio of artillery is essentially a proxy for the casualty rate because this is an artillery battle. I remember an interview with a foreign volunteer in Ukraine who claimed that most Ukrainians never even get to see a Russian soldier, and when they do, it’s the slightest glimpse before they retreat and start blasting them with artillery again.

there’s a counterclaim that astshually it doesn’t matter that Ukraine is firing 10 times less artillery because they’re 10 times more accurate, but this is just a very strange claim; Russian artillery is superior to the West’s and any issues earlier on in the war with lots of misses have been largely solved by now

at the end of the day, who is constantly doing counteroffensives? Ukraine, not Russia. who is constantly needing to do mobilizations? Ukraine, not Russia. who is needing to kidnap people off the streets to funnel them into the military? Ukraine, not Russia. whose country is overflowing with graveyards? Ukraine, not Russia. most of Russia’s September mobilization - the only one they’ve done - hasn’t been devoted to the battlefield yet because they’re being properly trained and nurtured for some future role, which would be impossible if Russians were dying in large numbers as Ukraine claims.

one can be like “oh but Russia is just hiding all this stuff” but I think it’s a lot harder to hide that level of mass death than people think. if Ukraine could, I reckon they would, and they have the entire Western propaganda network at their backs.

truthfully I don’t know exactly how many Russians and Ukrainians have died, but claims that more Russians have died than Ukrainians is genuinely comical, like “Oh, I know this person is a complete dipshit and I know to never listen to them on any take if they can be so completely moronic here,” it’s like the “100 million people died under communism” of Ukraine War talking points at this point. and I would genuinely be extremely surprised if the ratio was less than 1:2 in favor of Russia. Lukashenko thinks it’s 1:8, which is probably too high but like, he also probably has a better idea than me.

Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.

In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.

In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.

watching libs go through the cycle of

obnoxious, deeply racist, uncritical support of a war -> war ends -> hmm maybe this war is more complicated than I thought -> hmm maybe we even did some bad things -> hmm maybe we were in the wrong the whole time -> dang, I will never believe US propaganda so uncritically next time, I’ve learned my lesson -> holy shit that country over there is doing really bad things, we need to get involved! -> obnoxious, deeply racist, uncriticla support of a war

for the umpteenth time in the last century

people like the hexbear news threads I guess

this is what is meant by “permanent revolution” I believe

“the last time I looked at China’s economy was in 2005, but I reckon nothing much has changed there since then. hasn’t changed much since then in the West, so…”

This is just a silly argument. We’re already polluting those countries anyway with the current fossil fuel regime. We’re already putting massive quarries for the minerals currently needed for energy generation and transmission there (coal, copper, gold, etc). We’re already prospecting those countries for oil and gas. We’re already chopping down rainforests to get to all these resources, not to mention to clear land for cattle grazing for the titanic meat industry.

Mining has to be done somewhere to create a decent standard of living (though Western lifestyles require exponentially more resources than those elsewhere so we can make improvements on the demand side of things). What isn’t set in stone in that the extraction of resources has to be exploitative for the people living in those countries, nor that it has to be excessively environmentally damaging. Which it currently, absolutely is, because the capitalist profit motive dictates it to be so.

the unspoken (hell, sometimes spoken) assumption is that China would be doing a lot better with a Western-style neoliberal economy, which is an extremely funny assertion when all these economies are doing even worse than China is

there’s a manufacturing and possibly soon-to-be services recession everywhere. hyperfocussing on China while everybody else metaphorically (and literally) burns around them is just silly.

and, as others have said, the US is literally declaring economic war against China! again, it’s Schrodinger’s Sanctions! They both exist and are good, but also aren’t doing anything and it’s all that country’s fault! “Ooo, Russia is experiencing a fall in GDP in 2022, this proves that Putin’s war machine isn’t sustaina–” no, it proves that you’ve put sanctions on them! “Aha, Cuba and Venezuela’s economies are collapsing and they can’t afford enough basic necessities, this just shows how socialism is–” No, it proves that the sanctions that you actively boast about putting on them are working! “See, China’s economy is now not doing so hot (defined as “only” growing by like 5-6% or whatever), this is really a lesson in how Marxist econo–” Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you’re putting sanctions on their industries instead, the thing you, again, boast about doing?

“See, this patient is blacking out when we put pressure on his carotid artery, this shows how their vascular system is simply inferior to our own (which isn’t being actively strangled)!”

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool

Showing that China is doing similar things to the US doesn’t seem like a strong argument if the thing the US is doing (in this case indefinite detention without trial in a horrible prison) is bad. Is the idea that post-federation there’s users who don’t view the US as doing bad things?

The problem is that liberals are operating on “Our country (the US, UK, a European country, etc) is better than China because of these reasons, China bad, 100 million dead” and so the idea is to first go “Actually, China isn’t doing anything worse than the United States is doing” and then later on go “…and, in fact, the United States is the one that’s by far the worst.” Basically to cushion the blow of having their worldview swept out from under them.

So the first step is to go “Oh, is China bad because they imprison people for revealing state secrets? Then look at all these people in your own countries that have done the same.”

And then the second step is to go “And, in fact, China has a lower number of incarcerated people than the United States despite having almost five times more people.”

of course, then they start blubbering about “buh buh buh, they’re lying and a-actually have trillions in prison and they’re killing them and xi is personally beating them because he’s evil and a monster and the CCP they’re bad and they–” but the seed of doubt has still been established

go outside then? the sun’s there