Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

The images you describe are part of the propaganda. People think that’s the only way propaganda is delivered, and therefore they can’t possibly be propagandized.

Meaning, he’s likely a CIA asset.

Piracy is much better because:

a) happens in the background while you do other things (both downloading and uploading)

b) doesn’t usually use dedicated servers which consume a bunch of power for working and cooling (and take up land). In case of streaming services, servers need to be turned on 24/7 whether someone uses them or not. Then there’s the matter of energy used for their massive bandwidth to be able to distribute to all the clients simultaneously.

c) doesn’t use crazy amounts of power for encoding/decoding and compressing/decompressing a stream.

The third reason alone makes piracy a lot more environmentally friendly.

There’s a conspiracy theory that they are just pushing the collapse back as much as they can, so it blows up in Trump’s face when he gets into office in January.

This was a weirdly comedic read about worlds colliding:

American elites trying to create an American chip monopoly for nationalist and imperialist reasons, ask their colony to bring the factory to the imperial core.

Asian worker exploitation culture being imported to the US, where everyone likes to brag how hard-working people they are and think that the rest of the world is poor because it’s lazy.

American labour aristocrats refusing to conform with Taiwanese worker exploitation culture.

Taiwanese capitalists making concessions to American workers so they can fulfill the wishes of American elites.

American elites crying because they can’t build their self-sufficient capitalist tech utopia that will grab the chip market by the balls.

Taiwanese workers looking in and feeling that everything’s a bit too surreal and unbelievable for their taste.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/24/usa.davidteather

Police-woman enticed him to meet, pretending to be 16-year-old girl

Case dismissed and files sealed.

Someone from within leaked the story to the press to smear him.

In my own opinion, someone is out to get him and they are grasping at anything to discredit him. If the sexual offenses allegations were true, they’d use those to raid his house.

And imagine the hubris of said war criminals not attending, because their other war criminal buddies were not invited.

Can you elaborate on why he’s a shit stain of a human being? Genuinely asking, because other than his name being vaguely familiar to me, I’ve never heard of him before.

We are literally talking about the exact same people who kicked Jeremy Corbin out, support Israel and Ukraine, and in these elections said that they’ll basically change nothing.

Is this the Onion? :holding butterfly:

Ah yes, the capitalists do space so much better than communists. Yeah.

Oh wonderful. I can’t wait for the US media to cry out against the US government for hosting a world leader with an ICC arrest warrant, like they cried out against South Africa when Putin visited them.

Even though the US is a crusader for international law, so they will probably still arrest him.

Right guys?

They also do that because they want to cling to the idea that “actual” or “regulated” capitalism works fine for everyone.

the Soviet-born historian Sergey Radchenko, whose meticulously researched To Run the World has just been published by Cambridge and argues that the USSR leadership was motivated more by historically rooted psychological insecurities than by Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Finding ways to slander the USSR, in an article that has nothing to do with the USSR. Oh Bloomberg!

For reasons that future historians will struggle to understand, the US suspended its aid to Ukraine in late 2023

The reasons are clear, the author and/or the publication just don’t want to admit them. Ukrainian corruption. Russian forces adapting and finding ways to destroy/incapacitate NATO equipment that was thought to be technologically superior, and of course Russian forces utterly beating the crap out of the vaunted “Summer counter-offensive”, which was designed, prepared and coordinated by NATO. The US and NATO cannot afford any more humiliation.

Obviously, there’s also the Republicans holding hostage the most recent aid packages until they gained concessions in other policies, but that’s just something that happened after the fact.

The result is that Kyiv listens much less to Washington than it did in 2022 and 2023 — hence the recent spate of deep drone strikes aimed at Russia’s energy infrastructure, operations that cannot possibly have been approved by Team Biden

I have to disagree here. Ukraine might gain some advantage by wrecking Russian oil refineries. But they also attacked Russian radar systems whose sole purpose is to detect incoming nuclear strikes against Russia. The only one who benefits in this case, is someone with missile-mounted nuclear warheads, like the US. It is quite likely that those recent strikes had indeed been approved by Team Biden.

Thanks to Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, we know now that, when their invasion was going badly in early 2022, the Russians were ready to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine.

We know that the invasion was not going badly at all. We know that Russia always intended to settle the whole thing peacefully, that the SMO was just a way to force Ukraine to the negotiating table quickly, and that retreating was a gesture of good will.

Any chance of a negotiated peace is vanishingly small so long as Putin believes he can win this war because the US has no staying power.

Any chance of a negotiated peace is inexistent, so long as Zelensky has made it illegal for anyone to initiate peace talks with Russia. The Russians have stated multiple times that they are willing to talk at any time. They’ve made their terms known for a while now.

If this guy is a historian, I’ll eat my hat. Events seem to be passing him by unnoticed. His only interpretation of what’s going on is Western media and the propaganda they propagate.

That’s a lot of assumptions to make an argument.

Ok, so Zelensky has banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents. And furthermore he cancelled elections that were supposed to happen next month. Will you be condemning Ukrainian conscription then, since the government will neither be democratic or legally elected?

So the 15000 civilian deaths caused by Ukraine bombing its own provinces before Russia intervened, the constant efforts by Russia to resolve the issue diplomatically, the naked refusal of the West to even engage with Russia, the West openly backing a fascist coup in Ukraine, and then arming it with the explicit dictate of provoking Russia, the West pressuring Ukraine to not accept the generous settlement offered by Russia in May after the war started, all that doesn’t count?

It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.

[citation needed]

Yeah, I watched 2/3rds of the first episode and realized what kind of trainwreck it would be. Switching the story to England, totally decapitates the book’s contrast between failures that occurred during the Cultural Revolution and the successes that came later with reforms, which I understood to be a major theme in the book.