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.

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.

significantly less experienced

Lmao, what experience do western troops have? Fighting poorly equipped insurgents, women and children?

And every day Ukraine holds out is another day that Europe gears up.

Comedic gold. Europe is facing massive de-industrialisation with severe contractions in manufacturing output and sluggish fundamentals. Compared to all the g7 countries, russia faced the highest gdp growth in recent years.

As the defacto leader of the company becomes stretched thinner across his various enterprises, such as SpaceX, The Boring Company, X, and now xAI, there is growing concern about the time Musk has to focus on Teslas’ growth, strategy, and day-to-day operations. It seems, however, that shareholders are eschewing these concerns, and voting in favor of the package.

Tesla shareholders are idiots and deserve wasting this much money on the ass-clown.

America inspired the Nazis in the first place. America is more like the 0th Riech. Manifest destiny and the transatlantic slave trade were foundational to the entire ideology of the west and liberalism. It is infact what liberalism was developed for, finding a way to justify slavery + genocide while being against the monarchy. Liberals replaced the divine right of kings with “merit” and “genius”, which have always been conceived of as products of race and/or “culture”/“attitude”. That’s why liberals always froth at the mouth for more imperial conquest. They think of other nations as possessing inferior genes or “culture”, and thus deserving of subjugation.

From the comments.

Would be fun to have Javie Milei come in for a year or 2 with a chainsaw - like an internship in each G7 over a few years 🍿

That would be pretty funny to watch …

What even do you mean “a way of removing a putin” if what I have said does not suffice?

As far as my understanding of the soviet style democratic centralist systems goes (I suppose DemCent could be implemented in many ways, just like liberal electoralism can), every country has a supreme soviet which convenes some times a year to appoint, remove and review the progress of the presidium. The members of the presidium themselves have a strong distribution of powers amongst each other, and so a dictator type like Putin shouldn’t really show up at all, and if he does, he should be removed by the supreme soviet. The supreme soviet itself was elected by lower level regional soviets, which were in turn elected by lower level soviets and so on until you had the fully local soviets, which were initially organizations the factory workers and soldiers during the revolution (so they predated even the USSR), and latter (after the 1936 constitution) became location based (so similar to the local councils in liberal systems).

I have heard compelling arguments that any new DemCent system should take ideas from ancient athenian democracy like sortition and direct democracy. I agree with them, but implementing such a system in reality would likely be challenging and require many preconditions to be met (such as having a highly educated population with good amounts of free time and no worries about war or imperialism).

Aren’t people on ML instances also doing the exact same thing when they shout down and decry the wretched “liberals” (which seems to refer to anyone left-of-centre who doesn’t support communist party rule)?

Liberal is a well defined category though. Liberalism as a self-described ideology opposed to both communism and monarchy has been around for centuries at this point. Most people being decried as liberals would themselves identify as liberals.