You don’t have to worry about that too much, the mighty chinese industrial economy will steamroll the american scam economy before they’re able to implement their plans worldwide. Now, we in western countries might end up trapped in a prison society where all information is controlled by LLM chatbots, but it won’t be the fate of the whole world.
It is relevant, though. They’re geopolitically aligned with China and are the junior partner. It’s ridiculous to think that they’re the biggest threat to world peace
They aren’t ideologically aligned (at least for the most part), but they’re geopolitically aligned by circumstance.
Complete psycho, but a funny guy
I think LBJ had one of these, and he would scare people by pretending the brakes were out and then driving into the water
THE SUN SMILES AT YOU WITH ETERNAL MALICE
democracy for the slave owners?
You can’t let a pesky volk get in the way of the endsieg
Didn’t I say “admirable future goal” rather than “good idea right now”? Eventually, society ought to progress to the point where money is no longer needed, through both development of productive forces and development of societal attitudes. This is the goal of communism. The concept of money is only a few thousand years old, and humanity existed for hundreds of thousands of years longer than it, so it’s by no means impossible.
Did you ever watch the Star Trek shows? The Federation in Star Trek doesn’t have money. Both because they have replicators and can instantly reproduce any item using only energy, but also because they’re a more advanced society that has moved beyond needing a medium of exchange
I would like it if you were to expound on this in detail
I don’t think any socialist society has ever abolished money so far, though it’s an admirable future goal. The USSR certainly didn’t abolish money, they had Rubles.
Ukraine put it in their post-Maidan constitution that they had to join NATO. Sure, Ukraine’s civil war was its own internal affair, but the main issue at play was hostility to Russia and wanting to join the West. Why would Russia see this as anything but a threat? More NATO bases, another NATO member, and this one adjacent to the Russian heartland. A lot of people scoffed about US bases surrounding Iran, but it turns out that those were there for a reason - attacking Iran! In retrospect, Russia’s position looks more rational rather than less.
Do you think they were ever going to give Ukrainians a chance to be “western”? They just wanted to use them as a tool against Russia, not elevate them to a western European standard of living. The entire inciting incident of Euromaidan and all of this was Yanukovych’s cancellation of the Ukraine-EU association agreement in favour of a deal with Russia, but the thing is, Russia actually offered a better deal than the EU. This pissed off the nationalists (read: Nazis) because they really hated Russia, and pissed off the NGO liberals because they hated Russia and loved the EU.
But Yanukovych did actually have his own constituency, which was the Russian speaking east, and they saw the “revolution” as the nationalists undemocratically imposing their will on the country. The new government pretty much immediately sent in the army to quell the unrest, and this sparked the civil war, which led to the eventual Russian invasion. Once again, I will reiterate that Zelensky was elected as the peace candidate who would stop the war, but the nationalists sabotaged the peace process. He went to the frontline and ordered them to stand down, and they stonewalled him. I saw the video, and this was before AI video was even close to convincing (will smith eating the spaghetti era).
So what you have is a Ukrainian state that’s captured by, on one hand, extreme nationalists who idolize Stepan Bandera (a fascist genocidaire from WW2), and on the other by NGO liberals, who aren’t much less bloodthirsty and see the easterners (really, see the whole working class) as expendable post-soviet refuse. The NGO liberals don’t fight on the front, and while the Azovites did put up a fight at Mariupol, they seem to mostly fill the line with middle aged conscripts they drag off the street rather than have the hardcore nationalists do the fighting.
As far as what they’re fighting for, the reforms of the post-maidan government just amounted to decommunization and Ukrainization - that is to say, they removed old Soviet monuments and banned the Communist party; and they suppressed the main minority language of the country. They didn’t make life better for anyone, they didn’t strengthen labour laws or the welfare state, they just did a right wing culture war. Actually, that’s not quite correct - they also cut natural gas subsidies and lifted a ban on sale of farmland (i.e. to foreign investors),, and privatized the economy further.
They could have had a peace treaty, and the only cost would have been giving eastern Ukraine a seat at the table. Instead, the nationalists and liberals opted to let their country be used as a kamikaze against Russia. Sure, Russia could have just not invaded, but they saw the issue as an existential red line. The west knew that they would eventually respond to provocation, but they figured there would be little cost to the west, and didn’t care about the cost to Ukraine. Now there have been entire generations of men fed into the meat grinder with no end in sight, and Russia continuing to slowly advance. In what world is this better than just signing a peace treaty and ending the civil war? Do you think Europe is going to rebuild what’s left of Ukraine once this is over?
Even I know it’s not actually “liberalized”.
Yes it is, the USSR was destroyed and the economy was liberalized.
Eh, some people go a little too far with things
It’s not saying it’s bad to be anti-war, it’s saying that it’s a naive position in this case - a simple “anti-war-ism” as opposed to the more complicated “fully understands the core of modern geopolitics”. “Anti-war-ism” is still placed exactly opposite social darwinism, but is adjacent to both “fully understands geopolitics” and “dogs of US empire”.
No one believes that Russia is a moral actor in this, just that they’re acting rationally in the face of a threat. In fact, Russia should be the weakest link in the anti-imperial camp. The Russian Federation would have been perfectly happy to join NATO and assist with the oppression of the third world, but for one reason or another, NATO wasn’t interested - my personal theory is that Russia would have provided too much of a counterbalance to the US within NATO, potentially making NATO dangerously independent. Thus, Russia remained a designated enemy even after it liberalized. But, the specific reason isn’t the main point, the main point is that Russia has been forced by circumstance into the anti-imperial camp, while Ukraine has chosen to be a tool of the imperial camp. It’s as simple as that, and you can be as anti-campist as you want, but there are objectively two camps, and no unaligned alternative. If you asked any Ukrainian nationalist, they would agree that they are with the west against the oriental hordes.
Ukraine was the culmination of a process of bringing former eastern bloc states into NATO in order to surround and weaken Russia. Russia understood this, and had Ukraine as a red line. From the Russian point of view, a Ukraine allied with the west would be a hostile state placed at the furthest southern line of advance of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. That is to say, any potential attack on Russia by NATO would begin where the Germans stalled out (at least on the northern and southern fronts), and thus have a much greater chance of reaching Moscow. Or, a bit more realistically, NATO missiles and aircraft could be based much closer to the Russian heartland than before. You can argue that their assessment would be wrong, but that only makes sense if you trust NATO over Russia, where even a neutral position (i.e. don’t trust Russia or NATO) would hold that Russia’s concerns are valid.
Even then, Russia didn’t immediately invade Ukraine after the 2014 coup (Maidan wasn’t a revolution, it was just a seizure of power by right wing nationalists). Yes, they seized Crimea and supported the eastern separatists, but they didn’t fully commit until it was completely clear that no diplomatic solution was forthcoming. For the Ukrainian side, Zelensky had been elected as the peace candidate - people wanted the civil war to end, and that’s what he campaigned on. He ended up being too weak to stop the nationalist militias from fighting, so the war continued, and with a diplomatic solution dead in the water, Russia took their shot.
In short, Ukraine allowed itself to be instrumentalized by the west as a weapon against Russia. Ukraine placed itself in the imperialist camp, and this forced Russia solidly into the anti-imperial camp. To support Ukraine is to support a victory for imperialism. Thus, to support both Palestine and Ukraine is to support the empire being weakened in one region and strengthened in another - it’s a geopolitically incoherent position because it comes from a geopolitically naive read of the overall situation.
An automated factory employing machine learning algorithms is very different from an LLM chatbot. They both get lumped together as “AI” (which doesn’t exist), but machine learning is actually useful
e: to get more specific, machine learning “AI” does things like predict how molecules will bind to proteins, for purposes of creating novel pharmaceuticals or whatever. a far cry from “@grok is this real”