The Philippines was a relatively recent US colony (1899 to 1946), and has been ruled/fucked by US backed and US boot licking governments (like the Marcos).

Iran-aligned Lebanese group Hezbollah

Why don’t any of these news outlets say “American backed Israeli group”?

It makes perfect sense that many European members are hesitant to pledge yearly military support to a country that may loose the war it is fighting. This pledge alone would signal that western leaderships have no plans for the end of the conflict. Furthermore, I’m sure that many European government officials want to normalize economic relations with Russia again in order to get cheaper gas. They don’t want to live near a permanent conflict zone.

These new changes are still pretty dogshit, and nothing close to a permanent solution to the problem. There is even a provision in this program that people married after 17th of June 2024 don’t apply, meaning that some years down the line, the problem will just reappear again. Calling this a bandaid solution is an insult to bandaids.

Perhaps the range of responses could also include the shooting down of drones carrying out reconnaissance for Ukraine over the Black Sea. This would also allow for a total ban on their flights in the adjacent waters. Russian deterrence could also be complemented by maneuvers in the Baltic, Mediterranean or North Atlantic with other states that are considered to be Western adversaries.

The expectations from use of deterrence should be weighed against historical experience, which shows that the response to such actions is more often to harden the adversary than to encourage them to make concessions. In particular, this calls into question the validity of sometimes heard suggestions of nuclear strikes for demonstration purposes. Such actions are more likely to have the opposite effect to that envisaged by their authors, i.e. to bring direct military confrontation with NATO closer rather than further away.

I don’t think it is possible to enforce deterrence against an enemy who actively wishes for war. Unless Russia can somehow convince NATO that a war with Russia will be a guaranteed defeat, there isn’t much that can be done. Even the threat of MAD does not faze the western leadership, as a significant portion of the western populations and leaderships prefer ruling a kingdom of ashes to being equals in a prosperous world.

The type of deterrence which shows that winning against Russia is more difficult than anticipated might however work. But this comes with a risk. Either the deterrence demonstrated is strong enough to sober up the western leaders, or it is too weak and ends up being seen as provocation.

Business owners have more income than workers, so often they can afford time saving technologies in their personal life (eating out instead of cooking, childcare, etc), which allows them to put more time in their business. This may also be a factor in how hard they appear to work. Because your average worker doesn’t work a small amount of time.

Furthermore, in the case of business owners, their work directly adds value to their wealth, but in the case of workers, working more than what is necessary often doesn’t increase your income at all. So there is an actual incentive for business owners to work hard.

What did you expect from a liberal? They instinctually hate democracy and wealth redistribution (despite what they say).

I think it is many factors:

1. The actually existing project(s) that a community latches onto affect the community culture. Imagine us trying to be sectarian with each other when our supported factions are constantly making the news for making alliances between completely opposed ideologies. This also affects the liberals, which is why even they aren’t too sectarian.
2. Any real project will be full of imperfections, and no faction will appeal to you 100%. If you can already tolerate this for the projects that actually impact the world, you can tolerate it for the random internet users.
3. Ultras and Anarchists are united/defined mostly on the basis of hating AES and revisionists. This does not build any strong community unity, or even sensible theory. Instead, it builds the mentality of accusing the other members of being too much like their boogeymen.

God can there not be a single china article on lib spaces without some fucking brainworms in the comments?

Russia is winning because it has developed a steady momentum for keeping losses low while attriting Ukrainian forces harshly.

The victory is not by any means a phyrric victory, given that the Russian army is now larger, more experienced and has more material than the start of the war. The Russian economy is also holding up. The only thing that could be phyrric about the war is the loss of life, which is still not too high for russia.

Given the recent offerings, it is obvious that putin does not want to take the whole country of Ukraine. Not only will russia have to pay for the rebuilding, but it will have to face massive amounts of internal resistance for years to come, which is a headache that russia has no reason to deal with as long as they get their demand of no nato membership.

Finally the terms themselves are very generous as I have previously outlined. The loosing side in a war doesn’t just get to keep everything with no concessions. That is not how wars work. I have also clearly stated the reasons why a ceasefire now on putin’s terms is actually beneficial for Ukraine especially if the war were to flare up again. It would buy them time to recover fighting strength while the Russians would have to unwind their militarization, as maintaining a war economy outside of war would not be taken well by the population.

Being against “anti-authoritarians” is not the same thing as being “authoritarian” as these categories are not useful in the first place. No marxist considers themselves to be either category.

Authority as indirect or direct force (essentially the engels) argument is the only logical way of definition authority, as the hexbear post argues using the example of the armed mugger. The definition of authority as blind obedience (as defined by the anarchist) is completely flawed in that it doesn’t account for the source of the blind obidelience and isn’t easy to measure.

That’s exactly how most social movements, including slavery, evolved, but OK.

Have you … not heard of the civil war?

This is very delusional thinking. Imagine trying to negotiate with the winning side and your minimum negotiating conditions are for the winning side to just abandon all of their gains for no discernible reason. This too while the winning side offers generous terms which still leave Ukraine with access to ports and most of its territory, despite Ukraine being in a desperate situation now.

It is even more farcical when consider that these demands are already the de facto conditions. Russia holds most of the territories it is demanding. There are no current plans for Ukraine to join NATO as NATO doesn’t accept members already active in war, and the NATO countries have no actual plan for either shoring up Ukraine’s security in the future or even for rebuilding. The closest NATO states got was trying to use $50 billion from Russian funds to loan to Ukraine for rebuilding, which they didn’t even go through with because the deal involved the EU taking all of the risk while benefiting the Americans.

In fact, ending the conflict now on Putin’s recent terms is more beneficial to Ukraine and NATO than it is to Russia, even if the conflict were to start up again in the future. The returning Ukrainian refugees will restore Ukraine’s manpower, and the NATO militaries will gain the time needed to restock weapon supplies, which they need more than the Russians do because Russian (and allied) military production is higher than that of NATO in volume.

I am of the opinion that the terms Putin has offered are cynically generous. He knows that the west won’t let Ukraine end the conflict right now, so he can afford to boost his image right now. In later negotiations, he can point back to these terms and tell the Ukrainians that if they wanted better terms, they could have gotten them earlier.

This is the kind of analysis you get when you have no understanding how organizations work. Mao was not some lone actor who miraculously acquired supreme power, and then starved “half of China” for shits and giggles apparently.

Anyone familiar with the way that Mao operated knows that he made frequent use of the mass line and mass mobilisation. He also made use of the collective leadership of the party, and was often frustrated by their lack of cooperation with him (at one point even threatening to launch a revolution against the party). Even anti-communists who have at least studied China in detail know that the lone dictator nonsense is well, nonsense. It is just great man theory of history. A society is made of many moving parts.

As to the failures of the glf, they were entirely technical. The rush to industrialise in a decentralised manner left agricultural production vulnerable to poor weather conditions. This was compounded with the fact that much of the country at the time had poor transportation and communications, and ruled by corrupt cardie, leading to a disastrous lack of effective coordination across the nation. It is only with higher level organization today that countries can mount effective disaster responses. The glf proves the opposite of your point.

The laws or nature impose required forms of organization upon human society to function. The “double slavery” idea is not some obscure idea. When humans enslave nature to use it for their benefit, nature enslaved humans and imposes specific forms of organisation in turn. The specific form of organization imposed upon a society of large scale industrial producers is large scale centralized organization, in which the will of singular individuals is drowned out.

You are wrong on the factual level.

The role of money in soviet society was always subordinate to material production. Money was necessary only due to the technical limitations of planning a vast economy without sufficient computing power. The sphere of commodity exchange was supressed as much as possible. Much of the soviet citizen’s consumption was either heavily subsidised or free. This went all the way from food, transportation to even fancy entertainment (like spas and theatres). In fact, the heavy distortion of prices in soviet society is often cited as a reason for its eventual collapse.

Therefore, calling the soviet union state capitalist is absurd. Capitalism requires a dominant bourgeois class, the operation of the law of value and the anarchy of production. None of these elements were present in the soviet union.

Going by the other comments, his sin appears to be having a Russian passport

This is what hate the government not the people means.

Given that the Russians have been fighting this war for 2 years now, their military is sufficiently experienced. Fighting in wars is what makes conscripts into veterans in the first place. Given that NATO troops lack any experience fighting harsh land wars, and the Ukrainians facing severe manpower issues, the Russian military is in a much better shape than its enemies. Russia also outproduces the west in artillery by many times. In simple terms, Ukraine is not going to win this war, short of a black swan event.

If you lose 95% of your skilled veterans and all you have is green recruits your experience level goes down. Larger and greener.

Yeah, Russia has lost of 95% of its skilled soldiers, just like how they don’t have rifles, running water, and their tanks are made of paper mache, right? Pure copium analysis. If the state of the Russian military and economy is really so shit, it is even more humiliating for the collective west that they are being massively outproduced. The US spends more on its military than the next few powers combined and still can’t beat Yemen or Russia.