Joe

This is impressive energy for a position that still hasn’t crossed the non-sequitur gap. 🤣

You are falling back to that lie? In short: Yes, ukraine had and surely still has some neonazis, but the far right parties barely make a dent. So no, they are not the government. You are starting to go around in circles. Perhaps you should take a seat.

DPR and LHR are the result of the first russian invasion, and no fair elections were possible. They were in violation of the minsk agreements, had ad-hoc voter lists, the election bodies were created by armed groups, and there was no judiciary or electoral oversight. In short: they were illegitimate and the result was almost certainly predetermined.

He went against what the people wanted, and the platform upon which he was elected, and protests ensued. Killings, more protests, lost political and police support, and he ran away with his tail between his legs to mama russia. He abandoned office, and lost his position for it. New elections, new chance. Except for russia. Yawn.

Someone else recently said it better, but here I go: Russia brought war and death and genocide to Ukraine starting in 2014, when there was generally peaceful civilian life and normal political discourse beforehand.

Ukranians quite consistently voted for EU integration and moving away from russia’s sphere of influence… they wanted it, and they did not want russia. No guns necessary, just an increasingly well educated and inspired population. Russia sent guns instead.

Mostly just people who believe that the path to a better world is aligned with whitewashing russia’s acts of aggression.

There’s plenty of good causes in this world, and plenty of ways to support them. Supporting a genocidal war by russia just because they are not the US’s doesn’t move the needle.

Nothing wrong with being a communist. Not my suspicion.

You dump irrelevant links and make non-sequitir arguments. When challenged, you dump more links and make more non-sequitir arguments. It seems to be your MO, and it (along with the huge number of comments) makes me suspicious of your motives.

Your comment history is open to all.

(edit: OP edited his post to remove a copy & paste link dump)

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Billionaires were nearly non-existent when he started, and only went up for a long time under him (*exchange rates play a role here, if we talk USD) until economic hard times, where the numbers sunk… I’m not giving Xi that.

Its naval neighbours will disagree with you on assertiveness, but I can’t dispute the US, although I wouldn’t call it an empire, rather a superpower with long and tawdry history of abusing its position. And now, trump is leading it into a death spiral, making it far less predictable and more dangerous.

In times of chaos, it’s not the altruists who are out in front, but those who act fast and decisively. It’s likely going to be a shitshow.

Corruption efforts are nice, but are also about control and loyalty - keep your head down and stay loyal, and you may prosper. Extreme poverty is way down (yay!), but so is social mobility and opportunities for younger generations. The huge number of chinese millionaires are very telling here - second only to the US. Something is going very wrong.

Then there’s its military assertiveness, which could lead to a new regional or world war…

Sigh. I am clearly talking about real world impact, not debating political theory or implementation.

China has done well at lifting itself up over the years without external wars and minimal internal conflict after the cultural revolution, but let’s not romanticize it too much… Under Xi, it is no longer heading in the right direction. We can say: it’s doing better than many countries, including the US (that bar is pretty low). I still hold hope, but not with Xi at the helm.

You are talking about military aid, which is something else. Eg. Israel gets military aid, Gaza gets food and medicine. Pre-trump, there were reductions and slow-downs of the former based on intelligence reports, and attempts to guarantee the latter, trying to limit the civilian humanitarian crisis of Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack on Israel. Hamas opened pandora’s box.

On Ukraine: Many countries throughout the world are supplying both direct and indirect military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine so that it may continue to defend itself against an illegal war of aggression, initiated by russia against a peaceful Ukraine. Pre-2014 saw ukranians and russian speaking ukranians living and working side by side (including in the east and in crimea). Conflicts were primarily driven by elites in politics and business, and not borne by ordinary citizens. After russia invaded in 2014, a russia perpetrated genocide of Ukranian culture began in all occipied regions. Rigged “elections”, oppression of proud Ukranians (forced relocations, imprisonment, social restrictions) along with forced conscription (DPR/LPR, later Crimea too). Peace destroyed on a political whim by a neighbouring country. This initial invasion led to the militarization of Ukraine, whose military was small and weak in 2014. Russia then expanded the war in 2022, attempting and failing a complete takeover of Ukraine. The number of civilian casualties skyrocketed as a result, along with military casualties. Millions of lives destroyed, all because of russian political decisions.

My opinion: Russia fears the prosperity and anti-corruption efforts that will come with EU membership. NATO is a bogeyman for russia, while the real risk to russia comes from a prosperous independent Ukraine, hence the desire to keep a foot on its throat.

China? As already stated, they aren’t a particularly big contributor to the world’s humanitarian aid given their economy… they are mostly doing business deals for influence. China is the up and coming superpower, and saw an opportunity while the US focused elsewhere. While Europe pays to keep migration crises at bay (often excacerbated by russian and US involvement), China reaps the reward of pragmatic engagement with any country, democracies and despots alike. Good for them, I guess.

It has better wealth disparity than the US, but that is a very low bar. It’s main success seems to be that the bottom 50% get to share 8% of the wealth (US ~3%, UK ~5%).

GINI index suggests it’s hot on the tail of the US.

EU average GINI seems much lower.

Honestly - it looks like the kind of place whwre non-flaunted capitalism with human exploitation win out, while flaunting it may get one investigated. If you have party support, then you get a paved road… if not, you have to pave it yourself.

Opinion: It’s a bit different, but nothing to rave about as far as protecting workers goes.

FTR, China (as the big communist-style economy) seems to be one of the smaller donors among the big economies to international aid programmes for both food and healthcare.

The US (until the schmuck) was the biggest by far for food contributions via the WFP, with the EU and individual donors making up the majority. Healthcare seems more balanced contribution-wise (not so much from the US)

Obviously it is hard to get exact numbers. In particular, China also has its own aid programme too. Estimates are of USD 5 billion to USD 8 billion per year (1,000 million) … a total for all aid.

Sure, aid is also used for leverage (soft power), but there certainly seems to be a historical pattern of the capitalist superpowers helping to feed the world, despite it often still not being enough…

It will be interesting to see if China has stepped up, with the US cutting back under trump.

edit: In a world where leaders and governments put the needs of people first, one wouldn’t need as much aid, of course.

Most of the people not alive today… sometimes the torture is spread out over 80 years or more. It’s a horrible tragedy of needless human suffering.

Why? Because DOS and Windows 3.11 kind of sucked and I wanted to learn and experiment.

Even though I started out working mostly with the console, it was amazingly refreshing. X came a year or two later, when the web made it worth it. OS/2 Warp 3 also slipped in there for a while. Great times.

For future reference:

https://discuss.tchncs.de/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=798981

It had nothing to do with Rule 2 (avoid excessive reposting, nor rule 1). It was just arbitrary, and if one were cynical, perhaps intended to support the desired narrative in these parts and bring the thread to an end.

Shrug. Modlogs are indeed interesting.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=798981 for those curious.

Rule 1 is “be civil and and nice”. boggles

It is an instance and community’s right to censor and ban as they wish, but rule 1 should perhaps be changed to “I don’t like the cut of your jib” 🙈

While I was trying to make a particular point in the original response, I should have still rebuffed the core lie in it (the suggestion that russia is a victim): Russia attacked first, and it has escalated first, and it can stop the war at any time. All responses to russia’s aggression are expected and justified.

Trump and JD Vance are doing their best to replace the US as the “leader of the free world” with a coalition of increasingly well armed and assertive independent blocs and states. Totally wild to see it cut its own throat like that.

The rest aren’t really wardogs, despite France and the UK seizing the opportunity in Libya a few years back. I don’t think the UK was quite over the Lockerbie bombing, and who the fuck knows with France.

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