True. I’ve noticed this happening more in recent years than ever before, too.

Not to mention that Google is also terrible for retrieving some (most?) kinds of information. It can work with basic facts but then you’re still relying on Google (or any other search engine) not to omit other salient facts or sources.

I was like you and mainly lurked for this reason, too. The fediverse can be a lot friendlier. The atmosphere had changed a little since the latest Reddit exodus. Hopefully, most of the toxicity of that platform is left behind.

It might be helpful to reiterate that knowledge isn’t fixed and the while Google provides one answer, we could get a better answer after a discussion. So keep asking questions!

The notion of overpopulation relies on a logic of Malthusianism, which is eugenecist. Allusion only requires an indirect reference. So by referring to overpopulation but not to eugenics, the effect is an allusion (indirect reference) to eugenics. I accept that you may not have intended this.

This allusion would be strengthened were you to suggest, though, in the context of saying there are too many Chinese people, that China should depopulate itself for the good of the planet, without addressing the unsustainability of capitalism or of the lifestyles (not lives) of those who live in the imperial core.

Even though there are roughly the same number of people living in the global north as in China, the habits of the inhabitants of the global north, due to their capitalist political economy, are overwhelmingly driving climate change and destroying biodiversity.

It’s hardly playing the victim to point out that eugenicist arguments are bad, nor that westerners should have to change their models of consumption and production to ones that are far more sustainable long before we get to the question of who should not have children. And when we do get to that question, the answer should be anything but based on race or ethnicity because that would be abhorrent.

How else would a state curb the excesses of capitalist logic except by consciously being authoritarian? This very power, exercised by the working class, is why China will achieve so much.

Except for two things.

First, the way to express this is not to make eugenicist arguments alluding to Malthusian concepts of overpopulation.

Second, the links provided above offer a mere taste of what China has been doing to try to stop climate change. It doesn’t matter whether these sources are persuasive, though. The proof of the pudding will be eating it in 10, 20, 30 years time and revaluating what each country has achieved. I’d bet the habitability of my planet on China achieving a lot more than the G7, possibly combined, unless the G7 suddenly became radical and changed their capitalist ways.

You’ve completely lost me. I have no idea what you’re talking about. You may be confusing me with someone else. I’ve not made any claims about Donbas being a separate country. I don’t think it works like that. And I’ll have to check the details but I the Minsk agreements may have spoken of autonomous regions rather than separate countries.

The linked UN report(s) detail how so many thousands of people were killed in Eastern Ukraine in the years following 2014. Whether whatever happened afterwards changes or leaves unaffected the legal status of those regions, the fact remains that five digits of people were killed, with many more injured, and seven digits of people were displaced. And completely regardless of what Russian, Ukrainian, or Separatist government officials or actors were doing, the affected people were overwhelmingly innocent civilians just trying to go about their daily lives. Killing them indiscriminately is both (a) an historical fact and (b) wrong.

I bet they’re hoping that China doesn’t remind anyone that the US purposely tanked the Japanese and Korean economies fairly recently.

That would make about as much sense as criticising China for complaining about what Japan did to it in the past.

Luckily westerners never talk about WWII and what the Nazis did. No films, no books, no memorials. It’s like none of it ever happened. Good thing, too; imagine how embarrassed you’d be to try to work in good faith with people you’ve been at war with after spending years funding them.

Okay, and does that make it acceptable for Ukraine to shell Ukrainians? That is what the linked sources evidence.

What does Crimea have to do with Donbas?

Why would it worry me? I don’t have a horse in this race.

There seem to be a lot of people who don’t know or who do know and don’t care how much control western national security personnel had/have over the narrative on the major, centralised social media platforms.

And yet… a brief internet search will reveal (and I have deliberately found a mixture of sources, most of which are anti-Russian)…

@[email protected] literally just summarised a UN report on this topic: https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/aPR32_final_ENG.pdf

Europe having ~500 million and the US another ~300 million isn’t exactly responsible when each person consumes multiples of the what the average person in the global south consumes. Call it what you want, the global north is not only responsible for the lions share of emissions and other types of environmental degradation, it also doesn’t give a fuck and has no plans whatsoever to make meaningful changes to save the world from climate catastrophe. Luckily the global north is steadily and surely consigning itself into irrelevancy.

The coolest day of the rest of your life. (Not quite, but I tried.)

Out of curiosity, how do those who dispute what Putin is saying here explain multipolarisation? It would be silly to say the war would have no detrimental effects. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any benefits for Russia… how does this factor into your assessment of the situation?

Ah, in that case, I apologise and we’re in agreement. I construed it as saying the opposite, that the US wins wars without many casualties (relatively speaking) because it’s superior rather than because it learned in Vietnam that it can’t win conventional wars and so now only targets places that can’t really fight back.

I’m afraid that you may have walked into an in ongoing discussion as to whether the US military and NATO are forces for good or are particularly good at what they claim to do. People who dislike NATO and US imperialism can get a bit critical. You can’t win though, because now the USians who ‘have no [real] concept of all-out war’ will be around to get you from the other side. 😬

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the following authors’ works on imperialism, empire, or the development of capitalism? Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, David Harvey, John Smith, Michael Hudson, Zac Cope, Anievas and Nisancioglu, Samir Amin? If not, what have you read? Maybe Giovanni Arrighi, Paul Kennedy, or Niall Ferguson? I’m not saying this as a rhetorical ‘gotcha’. I’m curious as to how you define imperialism.

Russia should continue to be glad they aren’t actually fighting NATO yet, they can hardly beat the Ukrainians as it is.

I have three questions.

1. At what threshold of involvement can it be said that NATO is involved?
2. What’s NATO’s excuse for Afghanistan or almost any of its other wars against third world countries? I use scare quotes here because while it usually fails to achieve it’s surface-level, publicly-stated aims, I don’t think it did ‘fail’ in it’s real goals. That is, it’s impossible to fail by participating in a war when the point of the war is merely to participate in war to make profits for the MIC.
3. If Russia’s stated aims are demilitarisation and denazification, what does ‘beating Ukraine’ look like? I.e. are you judging Russia’s success or failure according to metrics in which it has no interest?

You mean where the US and it’s allies, with air superiority, carpet bombed the fuck out of civilian centres? Who’d have thought those school children and families cooking their supper wouldn’t put up much of a fight?

How many people did the US lose in Vietnam or Korea? How many soldiers has it lost in Ukraine, even?

Spot on.

Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don’t like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn’t tackle the key contradiction.

The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do ‘knowledge exchange’ work. It’s all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.

But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of ‘transparently’ and ‘rigourously’ giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it’s too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won’t even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)

If you’re interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.