Reminder: As the aggressor in an imperialist colonialist war, Russia can end the war at any time, just by returning all its troops to its own territory. The continuation of the war is purely the choice of the extreme right-wing Russian dictator and his cronies, who continue to violently exploit the Russian people.
Not really, as you argue without respect to the core of the problem, that is, the US is building a geopolitical tool next to Russia’s borders (obviously against Russia). Even if Putin suddenly disappears, another politician will get support from Russia’s elite and probably easy consent from the Russian public to pursue an anti-NATO foreign policy.
Nothing will change until the US will change it’s foreign policy towards Russia and stop meddling with countries bordering with Russia.
Also this does not contradict that Russia is not an oligarchy or Putin is not a dictator, before you call me pro-Putin. Russia can be the aggressor, an “extreme right-wing dictator ship” that attacked Ukraine and at the same time Ukraine was set up like a red flag in front of a bull by the West.
Remember, there is no reason a country like Russia should perceive the US and its vassal states as friendly. They have no way to assume whatever they do with Ukraine or try to do with Belarus is not against them. In fact, the opposite is true, the foreign policy of the US writes that Russia is their enemy and they will allocate so and so much funds to fight it. You think you need to be a right-wing dictator or an ex-KGB agent to grasp that the goal of the west is to subdue your political class or to turn your country into a gas colony for them?
But of course, being a biased lib that thinks the world is built like Lord of the Rings or a comic book, what’s class consciousness to you? You believe that there are ebil people like Putin, that suddenly went crazy and decided to invade Ukraine for no reason than being evil.
Don’t you think if the Russian capitalists are investing so much money into the war because they see Ukraine as a pawn of the US and as a threat? And they will continue fund it if it stays a threat to them, beyond Putin? Nah, they put in billions for the lolz. Because Putin said so.
I feel like you want to have this argument with someone and, sure, go for it, but I feel like you’re painting OP as the average /r/worldnews poster, and that’s a very rude thing to do. For all I know they might agree with you but the hostility isn’t helping.
Sorry if this is a little forward or “tone policing”, it just bugged me.
“And, as Putin said yesterday, one of the tasks was to demilitarise Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely completed. Ukraine is using less and less of its weapons. And more and more it uses the weapons systems that Western countries supply it with.”
Ah, the subtle differences between demilitarization and upgrading to NATO standards.
If his statement had ever anything to do with reality. Probably just feel-good words directed at the domestic audience.
Can the cowards downvoting the comment I’m responding to and others in this thread respond to this comment? I want to block you guys but you timidly refuse to stick your head out and post your disagreements out in the open.
@Spzi Ukraine has been demilitarized of soviet equipment FWIW. Imagine how long it would've taken Ukraine to do this had it not been an invasion on its land. Thanks, Putler!
Bonus: Putler has also demilitarized former Warsaw Pact members of Soviet weaponry even further. Can you believe the benefits of it? I'm in tears of joy rn.
dying on the ground riddled with bullets haha! You see, I have successfully disarmed my opponent, as they are now entirely out of ammo. Mission accomplished!
Inflation was only ever caused by two things: corporations increasing prices, and massive balance of payments inequities. Except that it’s almost always the former, since the latter almost never happens (except for the US and their exorbitant privilege) and leads to hyperinflation.
We do need action on all levels of society, and we need to be treating this as a crisis.
On a local level (in the UK) there are a lot more community and Council groups being setup to try and find solutions I would absolutely recommend attending those.
Other than that, ensure your pension is invested in green and eco investments and try to fly less (maybe even drive less).
Pension, lol. I don’t know how old you are, but I wouldn’t count on pension in very few decades.
We would need to do much more than flying less, driving less and invest money. We would need to change the entirety of our lifestyles. And by now we probably need to have luck as well.
Lifestylism is not something that will magically save the planet, there are actors bigger than us and who control more power over the planet then the entire population located on it.
Also flying less and driving less, you can only do that if the infrastructure is built for it. In Europe? Yeah duh, look at Italy it killed domestic flight thanks to trains. But the US? Forget it! Amtrak fucking sucks, and you still have to drive from your suburb to the train station because viable public transport does not, and will not exist there. It’s been gutted completely by General Motors who essentialy are defacto the US government. (EDIT: The previous statement is to say that the US does not respond to the needs of it’s citizens but to those of capital)
The true enemies of the world are the shareholders willing to kill it for profit, and they have names and adressess. (Side note; do not commit to adventurism)
If we’re going to do this whole “your source is unreliable” nonsense, can we at least get some consistency? Attack the BBC for outright lies and misinformation and siding with moneyed interests at the expense of the rest of humanity; attack CNN for the same; attack The Economist for the same; attack NYT for the same; attack the Washington Post for the same.
Also, just because their editorial opinion differs from yours doesn’t mean they’re unreliable. Just because they “defended Bashar Al-Assad” doesn’t mean they are “fake news”. There are plenty of people in the world whose world-view does not align with yours, and they aren’t all lying and wrong. It should also be noted that if an article links out to other sources, then even if you don’t agree with the article’s editorial opinion, you can still gauge the truthfulness and form opinions on the subject by following to the sources.
Edit to add: In this specific case, we saw several news sources you are unlikely to call ‘fake news’ all report the same lie with tiny variations: NYT, CNN, and Politico, among others. What they said was so blatantly false, even the Pentagon denounced it. Cuba condemned the reports, saying:
Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the accusation is “untrue and unfounded”, arguing that the articles were “promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba”.
Before you get all up in arms that a news outlet from another country or side of the political spectrum must be spewing 100% lies, you should ask yourself why you are willingly to blindly believe the entrenched western media outlets, who have proven time and again that they are used to manipulate world events, manipulate public opinion, and are overall a blight on the average man’s wellbeing.
Wow this is horrifying, can’t even imagine. I also can’t imagine the survivability of such a small vessel means there is any chance of them being alive. Horrible
Who is surprised by this? She’s xenophobic and racist. This is the same “Law and Order” nonsense as in the USA. Look at who is the primary target of this legislation to get an idea of her real intentions.
Suella Braverman has said people who enter the UK illegally after crossing the Channel on small boats “possess values which are at odds with our country” as well as “heightened levels of criminality”.^1
She’s not wrong that the people coming over likely do have values which are at odds with hers and those in power: these people are coming over to better their lives, which is something those in power absolutely do not have as a goal.
Last year, the UK agreed to send tens of thousands of people more than 4,000 miles (6,400km) away to Rwanda as part of a 120-million-pound ($146m) deal.^3
Mind you, she’s also a hypocrite who definitely understands what she’s doing:
In her maiden speech, she recalled how her father, Christie Fernandes, had fled tensions in Kenya to seek a new life in the UK. “On a cold February morning in 1968, a young man, not yet 21, stepped off a plane at Heathrow airport, nervously folding away his one-way ticket from Kenya. He had no family, no friends and was clutching only his most valuable possession, his British passport. His homeland was in political turmoil,” she said.^4
How can you believe that her actions here are for the greater good, when she repeatedly proves she’s not able to do good things? How can you not believe that this is yet another angle in her policy push that disproportionately hurts the already disadvantaged.
These sorts of quasi-legal police stops are already used to enforce “pre-crime”: simply being caught with rope, or spray paint, or various other items is in itself enough to be detained and questioned for an extended period of time, if not charged. These are violations of rights, plain and simple, and yet instead of correcting them, people like Braverman are pushing to make them more defensible within the existing legal framework.
“Nothing of the sort has been implemented but there are discussions so that we can trade in local currencies of countries like India, Russia or China,” Egyptian Supply Minister Ali Moselhy was quoted as saying by Reuters
Lol, not quite what the headline sensationally implies
The title is sensationalist but it is indeed a reality that we will see unfold in the next couple months/years. I honestly can’t wait for my country to finally be free from the dollar.
My country and my Brazilian brothers are already planning on creating a local currency called Sur Global, and it seems the trend after the proxy war in Ukraine is shifting towards trade done in other currencies among the Global South. I remain hopeful we will be free from your oppression in the future, even if you do not wish to see my people better!
In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and western capitalists. **The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.**State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997.
Improvement of living conditions in the USSR for example happened not just for a massive number of people, but at a pace not seen before.
In the USA, a prime example of capitalism gone wrong, there’s poverty so bad that it’s the 4th leading cause of death (and worse, the poverty may even be underreported). There’s rolling back of social programs, overturning of child labor protections, destruction of the public education system, over-incarceration and for-profit slave labor-driven prison systems[^1]. Try to make me a similar list of government-backed initiatives in the USA that are intended to lift people out of poverty rather than put them there or keep them there. There’s a lot of effort being spent on making sure people can’t get themselves out of poverty. The USA is much more interested in punishing and continuing to exploit the impoverished than helping them–helping them isn’t profitable.
Another thing you’re conveniently overlooking is the destruction of the rest of the world, that is, the ones not being supposedly lifted up in those capitalist states. Even if everyone in the capitalist states was lifted out of poverty, if the cost of that was destruction of other country’s economies and lives of the people therein, effectively putting them into or keeping them in poverty, then it’s a wash at best. Capitalism is great at externalizing negative costs: externalizing it not just onto consumers, but onto citizens of the world, and, worse, onto the future stability of the planet and its ability to host life.
If you take into account the number of people forced into and kept in poverty worldwide and compare that to the number of people truly lifted out of and kept out of poverty due to capitalism, I don’t think you’d be able to assert what you have.
[^1]: And if you’ll remember, the only reason most of these social programs ever existed in a somewhat-useful manner in the first place was because the USA had to convince its populace that the existing capitalist system was better than the competing socialist/communist states it was waging economic and ideological war on. Once it was able to destroy the ideological competition, it could change its narrative as well: now, the failure of those socialist/communist states was due to inherent failures of the underlying ideology and not due to a concerted external effort to defeat it. Once there was no competition on the “treating-your-citizens-better-and-like-humans-deserving-of-empathy” front, tearing down of these programs sped up, and the money that was taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket that should have funded those programs was not returned to the taxpayer but instead funneled cleanly upwards.
The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history
Should be pretty easy to provide some actual numbers then, doesn’t look good according to this:
I’m not even including North Korea as people are literally starving because of military spend, and Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Is that data supposed to go back before 1990? Because it doesn’t on my end, and as such that data isn’t going to prove your point or disprove mine.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation. Similarly in Cuba: not every fault can be blamed on the USA, but if you don’t think the continuous trade embargos aren’t partially at fault for the situation, I don’t think you’re honestly evaluating the situation.
Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would much rather have access to any sort of free healthcare than not have access to any, as is my current lot in life. I don’t care how good certain exclusive healthcare is, when the majority of the population has no access to healthcare. But frankly I think you have an unjustly negative view of the Cuban healthcare system:
Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors per inhabitant in the world. We have more than 100,000 doctors for a population of 11 million – 9.2 for every 1,000 inhabitants. We also have the highest ratio of health workers per inhabitant – 500,000 overall. But it’s not that we have leftover professionals. We don’t have so many doctors because we like training them, but because we have a health policy that employs all of them. This includes those who are in management positions and those who are committed to our international solidarity missions, our collaboration in health.
… and Cuba doesn’t hoard its medical professionals …
We do a lot of international collaboration. Cuba has been there to support others during all the major health disasters. During the Ebola crisis, Cuba was one of the very few countries that sent medical brigades in Africa. We are always present during earthquakes, fires, and floods. And we always favor communities where most of the time there are no health workers, or we go to places that lack healthcare services. This is the vision of Cuban medical collaboration, which is implemented through two main channels: health workers’ training and provision of care.
Notice that healthcare works differently when it isn’t purely profit driven. It works differently when incentive structures favor patient health over profit.
I mentioned this later in my comment: if you look at the suffering caused externally by capitalism, it’s at best a wash with the benfits caused internally by it. You’re also pointing to examples where things aren’t great because of USA’s interference. It’s disingenuous.
The USA loves to wage economic and ideological war and, when it makes some progress in tearing down its target, point to the downfall of the target and pretend that the downfall is purely due to internal conflict. And you’re buying in to that narrative.
The latter part of my comment was, in my opinion, more important than the first part. The proportion of the world’s population being hurt by capitalism, compared to the proportion of the world’s population helped by it, is massive; the fact that you’re putting more value on small benefits conferred to a small proportion of the population at the expense of the rest is unfortunate but to be expected in a defense of capitalism.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation
If the place is not so arable, why is South Korea doing so well?
It’s almost as if communism leads to autocratic states in every country to try it…
Up close, things look different. According to a recent survey of 5,000 persons, 75% of 19-34 year old natives of the world’s 11th richest nation want out
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, hilarious for you to mention Cuba and DPRK given that your shithole excuse for a country has done everything possible to choke their trade with the world. Good thing that SWIFT is going the way of the dodo now.
Lol, you’re claiming one measure in physical quality of life means communism is great. Ignoring the fact that all of those countries have now either failed or have moved to a market based system in order to improve life.
Yeah, pretty hilarious that once these countries abandoned communism and switched to capitalism quality of life rapidly deteriorated. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Not according to actual data from the last 30 years, but you don’t actually accept facts so discussing anything with anyone as deluded as you is pointless
Why do you think 19th century ideology is relevant in the 21st?
And it’s the height of ignorance to think that communism is a 19th century ideology that hasn’t been successfully evolving for over a century. I knew that UK education system was bad, but holy shit that’s embarrassing.
In fact, capitalism is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in history and is currently destroying our ecosystem at a planetary scale. You should also learn the difference between correlation and causation if you think that technology is developed as a result of capitalism.
No, capitalist ideology that necessitates constant growth and capitalism is directly responsible for setting the conditions for how humans behave. Meanwhile, technology develops much faster outside capitalism as USSR has shown where nearly a century of capitalist progress was accomplished in mere decades with USSR going from an agrarian society at the time of the revolution to being the first in space.
The page you posted is just using the SWIFT network. People who don’t trade in USD generally don’t use SWIFT. USD is still the dominant currency but I have seen numbers somewhere around 50% not 80%.
Human rights defenders this week condemned President Joe Biden’s upcoming state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was once banned from entering the United States for supporting violent Hindu supremacists who massacred Muslims—as part of an ongoing U.S. “whitewash” of the right-wing leader’s extremism.
“For almost a decade now, human rights activists and others have regularly brought to the White House—Democrats or Republicans—that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, it’s right-wing, it’s anti-Muslim, and it’s anti-minority” Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, told Huff Post.
“To fail to note Modi’s violent, anti-minority, authoritarian tendencies, and his corrupt mismanagement of the Indian economy, is not only to ignore the U.S. government’s own findings but a strategic blunder with the potential to jeopardize global stability,” IAMC said.
Human Rights Watch published a letter to Biden ahead of the visit, critizing the disregard for human rights by Modi’s government:
There are numerous areas of concern. Increasingly in recent years, BJP leaders have used toxic and hateful speech targeting religious minorities, inciting violence or discrimination against them. BJP-led authorities have tightened restrictions on free speech while ramping up censorship and using overbroad and vague laws to investigate and prosecute critics. Modi’s government has also demonstrated blatant bias in protecting BJP supporters and affiliates accused in a range of crimes, including murder, assault, corruption, and sexual violence. At the international level, Modi’s government has often proven unwilling to stand with other governments on key human rights crises, abstaining or refraining from condemning grave human rights violations elsewhere.
I hope they get a fair trial, are allowed to present their defense, and are treated properly by the courts as defendents.
If they’re found guilty I hope they’re given a very long sentence in a very dark hole. No, I won’t shed a tear if they’re convicted. They’re both human pieces of shit. If they’re tried and convicted pieces of shit then the world will be a little bit better while they’re incarcerated.
How fucking deranged is to put such a horrible condition in the relationship of the two biggest countries in terms of economy against each other, specially given the historical context between them being not friendly, over a fucking bullshit thing such as a balloon, just to create some magazine drama. Four months of non diplomacy between this two countries feels like years and it seems anything could happen. China and the US need to be on friendly terms, they can cooperate and help their people.
That's almost the size of Sweden. We really should get used to eating less meat. The worst part is it has to be a global change since most of the meat is exported and that's where they get the most profit.
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