It’s still up right now, they plan to kill it by 2024 and YTMP will supposedly be online by then. I suppose this has to do with reallocating their developers and avoiding redundant apps. Not that they’re consistent with the latter.
It’s not like podcast players are particularly complex to build and maintain, so they don’t require that much cashflow. Podbean sustains itself quite well with the odd image ad and AntennaPod is FOSS. I think the problem is more the opposite, since competition is so easy and monetising it would suck interest out of it, Google has no interest in actually competing. Which is why they’re trying to build their own walled garden with uploading your podcasts only directly to YouTube, RSS feeds be damned.
But if they blow up every house, there’ll plenty of housing to be built later on by EU companies. That’s basically the same thing, right? That’s what the citizens want, right?
I usually don’t spring that one on them because I’m pretty sure that a lot of Ukraine enjoyers don’t actually know about the Donbas war. It’d be a while to explain, so I try to meet them in the middle a bit, but yes, that would have been the absolute best decision back in 2014.
We don’t need to know what “bad” means, right? Ukraine is bad due to some magical inherent property, not because of instituting drafts and migration bans, right? I am of the position that the war (which wasn’t necessarily unprovoked to begin) wasn’t the main cause of those things I am criticising, the government proposing those is the one at fault. I think that framing is at least a bit more complete than just “Ukraine bad.”
And never mind calling critical people Russian apologists, like one can’t hold critical views of both sides of a conflict.
Russia has been holding strong to the land for about an year now, and it seems the Ukrainian counter-offensive didn’t work as advertised. Nobody should be enjoying anything in this war, including your imagined situation of Russian obliteration, but thankfully that is only your sadistic thoughts and not reality. This war needs to end ASAP, or what we will actually see is just even more of what we’re already seeing, a lot of suffering and death of both Russians and Ukrainians (but mostly Ukrainians) for absolutely nothing.
AFAIK there was no such vote, but even if there was it would not have counted the separatist regions of Donbas. That’s the main issue with this war, it was already ongoing in some form long before Russia invaded last year, going on since around 2014. Since the invasion, the government has also declared there will be no elections and started banning or even arresting the opposition (like the communist party).
The situation of democracy in Ukraine right now is incredibly shaky at best, which is why a lot of people (like me) criticise the government a lot. I understand that it’d be hard to have a referendum on the initial marshal law, but banning all adult men from even emigrating, and sometimes sending those who try to escape anyway back to the front, is to me a serious abuse by the government. IIRC During the start of the war, they also relied a lot on volunteers for the military, but now they’ve turned a lot to drafting civilians, which doesn’t bode well for how many people actually want to fight. But it’s really hard to get proper statistical data from Ukraine due to the aforementioned marshal law.
Being in the military reserve myself against my will, I deeply believe that nobody should be forced into military service. Not only does it sound really inefficient to have uninterested personnel, but it also is a gigantic breach on a person’s rights and can mentally and physically scar them for life, not to mention the risk of death.
Usually, yeah, reading and investigation is the main basis for getting informed. Specially for something so far away. How do you get “informed”? Through sheer willpower and thought?
It’s the Sargon of Akkad tactic of screaming “I don’t care!” while inserting themselves into every single conversation. Somehow they seem to think their dumb uninformed opinions are always equally worthy of merit despite doing zero homework. If you look into the thread, you’ll notice most people didn’t even read the article.
Wow, I had never considered before that Russia might be in the war. \s
Yeah, if you see every geopolitical conflict this simplistically, you’ll often find that the exact group you already dislike is the cause of all your problems. There’s no other way this could’ve gone, the moment Putin got in power we could already all predict that Zelensky would be elected and that his government would ban all men aged 18 to 60 from fleeing the conflict. It was also similarly inevitable that there would be mass conscriptions not only for war but also for work. Tangentially nobody but Putin had any impact on whether Azov would be formed or on the war against the Donbas separatists.
This was all solely the fault of a single group and nothing anybody else could’ve done. Come on now, child, you know that politics is not as simple as that. And if you think I somehow think that “Russia good,” because I criticise the other side of the war, you might need to read some history of bourgeois wars. It’s a reactionary liberal bourgeois country, just like the USA, but much smaller, less entrenched, and with some opposing interests, if you want my opinion on them. It’s not really relevant though.
Yes, that’s the prime determinant of the current situation.
So could Ukraine not find other solutions to their present crises? Off the top of my head, accepting Russia’s ceasefire requests, letting their civilians leave and not demanding that every worker also present their conscription documents in order to work, all sound like pretty good initiatives to combat the labour shortage. But no, obviously the Ukrainian govt has no agency on their own country and it’s all only in Russia’s court.
Ukrainian government is still fighting for the existence of the Ukrainian state and against genocide of the Ukrainian identity.
No they aren’t. The Ukraine state has had it’s existence guaranteed by Russia so long as they concede defeat and allow the independence of the eastern separatists. Besides that, just also not joining NATO. Russia has shown very little interest in annexing the entirety of Ukraine and the Ukrainian identity is safe and sound within the conscript dictatorship of Ukraine. If anything, the NATO puppet government probably has more Ukrainian blood on their hands than Russia for insisting on this lost war for the past 1 year.
But do spell it out then. How is Ukraine’s draft only Russia’s fault, with no responsibility for it at the Ukrainian government’s/NATO’s feet? I’d be happy to hear it.
I don’t follow. Yes, they are at war. How does that justify labour conscriptions and banning fleeing? I do care about people not dying and having dignity, you see. But sending teenagers into slaughter or forcing them to work to that same slaughter industry doesn’t help anybody. It is basically a self-genocide by the Ukrainian government. No wonder that it started as a war against eastern Ukrainians.
Who here exactly defends genocide when the only thing I want in this war is for the suicidal tactics of the Ukrainian government to pause for a second so that civilians can flee and live better lives elsewhere? But you don’t care about that, you’re a liberal who will justify every war crime from your favourite North Atlantic countries and their puppet governments, under the guise of empathy.
See, 2 can play that game of ad hominem. Answer the question: “How is this not comparable to a modern slave state?”
Care to elaborate? AFAIK, forced labour under the threat of harm and no conditions for escape fits very well into most modern definitions of slavery. But go on, why should I support Ukraine despite this?