☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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111·10 hours agoWe are witnessing the purest expression of imperial hypocrisy. For years, the US propaganda apparatus diligently constructed a fable, a so called “debt trap” mythology, to frighten the nations of the Global South away from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It was a tale of predatory lending designed to isolate and contain a strategic competitor.
And yet, what do we find? The most eager client for these very loans, to the tune of over 200 billion dollars, was none other than the United States itself. Turns out that the entire narrative was a conscious fraud. They never believed their own warnings. They recognized that Chinese financing was a credible, attractive alternative to the stranglehold of Western financial institutions.
So, while publicly sounding the alarm to scare away other customers, the empire privately availed itself of the service. Here we see the very essence of imperial strategy. Its goal is to monopolize the very resources and opportunities it denies to others, all while cloaking its cynical self interest in the righteous language of concern.
I literally addressed your ‘argument’ in detail, and you just continued to double down on your bullshit. You’re a troll, and an artless one at that. You’re not fooling anybody here.
hey it works great on reddit :)
2·11 hours agoI haven’t tried it with ollama, but it can download gguf files directly if you point it to a huggingface repo. There are a few other runners like vllm and llama.cpp, you can also just run the project directly with Python. I expect the whole Product of Experts algorithm is going to get adopted by all models going forward since it’s such a huge improvement, and you can just swap out the current approach.
The only person inventing massive conspiracies in this conversation is you. Now you can add straw man arguments to the growing list of nonsense you are producing.
I think you are nothing more than a troll who argues for the sake of it, without a single honest bone in your body. You are the epitome of a reddit debate bro, substituting sophistry for genuine argument in a pathetic attempt to score imaginary points. You are very transparent.
You keep trying to conflate two entirely separate issues, a sad attempt at an argument I have already dismantled in detail. You have brought forward nothing new and you’re just regurgitating the same old drivel here. Take the L and move on.
I have not moved the goalposts. My position has been perfectly consistent. You are misusing a loaded term to fabricate a narrative.
Let’s be crystal clear since you are struggling with the definition. Press ganging is not a synonym for conscription. It refers to the illegal and forcible impressment of individuals into military service. What that looks like is kidnapping people from streets or their homes outside of any legal framework. That’s what you implied is happening in Russia, and it is a blatant falsehood.
What you are describing in Russia is the legal process of conscription, which includes standard penalties for evasion. These penalties like fines, license suspensions, and travel bans are common consequences for dodging a mandatory draft in many nations, including many US allies. To call this press ganging is deliberate sensationalism.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the very phenomenon you mistakenly accuse Russia of is a well documented reality. There have been numerous verified reports of recruiters literally grabbing men off the street and from public transport to forcibly conscript them, often without any paperwork or due process. That is what actual press-ganging looks like. It is happening there, not in Russia.
Your argument tries to blur the line between a legal state run conscription system and outright criminal abduction. They are not the same. The goalposts have not moved. You are just trying to score a point on a field that does not exist in reality. The facts are clear, and your conflation of them is intellectually dishonest.
You mean they imposed economic dictatorship where capitalist own businesses and decide how they operate in autocratic manner. Economic democracy would be literally the opposite of capitalism where you have publicly owned industry and worker cooperatives where workers are able to exercise democratic control.
The sources you cited literally support what I said:
Even though the bill will make conscription a year-round process, it stipulates that conscripts will enter military service only during a few spring and summer months as before.
Do you even understand what the term press ganging means?
And I directly addressed your claim explaining that there is no evidence of gang pressing happening in Russia, and that you were referring to the regular reserves draft that’s been happening long before the war.
I’m not confusing the regular draft for reserves. Both sources explicitly use the terms “draft” and “conscript” to describe the people I’m talking about.
Yes, you are absolutely confusing the draft with the call up to the front line. I’m also guessing that you didn’t actually read the article you linked because its says the same thing I’m saying:
The bill’s authors say the measure is intended to ease pressure on military conscription offices and streamline their activities, which includes performing the physicals and assigning conscripts to various military branches.
Even though the bill will make conscription a year-round process, it stipulates that conscripts will enter military service only during a few spring and summer months as before.
All Russian men aged 18-30 currently are obliged to serve in the military for one year, although many avoid the draft by using deferments granted to students, those with chronic illnesses, and for other reasons.
Even your own source is admitting that there is no increase in conscription happening.
I wouldn’t take that as “given”.
There is zero evidence for that being true. Meanwhile, the fact that it’s happening in Ukraine is very well documented https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-recruitment-army/
I quoted the NPR and AP articles, since you seem allergic to reporting from the UK.
You’re confusing the regular draft for the reserves that Russia has had since the soviet times with the war draft here. There was exactly a single time that there was a call up back in 2022.
Finally, you only have to consider the size difference in overall population. Even if there was the same rate of desertion on both sides, then Ukraine would still lose.
Ah yes, Russian propaganda as reported by mainstream western media. The BBC admits that all the western economies are doing worse, meanwhile European propagandists acknowledge that Russia can fight on for years:
Finally, Russian debt to GDP is far lower than in the west.
Nice try with your thought terminating cliche though.
1·1 day agoexactly, a great tv series on the subject incidentally https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/
They are very obviously losing right now. Ukraine is suffering from a critical manpower shortage, the west is not able to provide them with weapons, the economic situation in Ukraine is unravelling, and there’s a huge political scandal.
Meanwhile, the news from Russia for the past three years has absolutely not been that. Even Ukrainian media admits that https://kyivindependent.com/bloomberg-thousands-of-russians-return-home-boosting-war-economy
I guess UK regime propaganda is still trying to pretend otherwise though. Given that Russia isn’t gang pressing people into service it’s not clear what basis the Brits have for their bombastic claims.
The reality is that Russian economy is stable and growing, it’s able to outproduce the west militarily, and its trade is now oriented towards BRICS. Given the stark difference between Russia and Ukraine in terms of available manpower, resources, and economy, it’s pretty clear to anybody who can do grade school math that Russia is going to win the war.
61·1 day agoSanctions are not a siege: They target trade and finance. While they hurt the general population (that’s often the point), they are not the primary cause of famine when food distribution and production are controlled by the government.
If that was the case then DPRK would’ve had a famine already before sanctions. Yet, the famine directly coincides with the fall of USSR and the start of sanctions. Clearly the concept of cause and effect is just too complex for you to grasp.
Literally the first sentence from Harvard economists:
Keep on ignoring facts though as is your custom.
But GDP is the most basic measure of a nation’s capacity to produce wealth.
That’s a meaningless metric without the context of how the wealth is distributed. The whole reason occupied Korea is now in a social crisis is due to the fact that majority of the working population is unable to make ends meet. We don’t even have to make up defectors to find out how bad things are: 75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’
You’re rejecting
I’m rejecting the imbecilic narrative you’re trying to paint. I guess these types of arguments worked well for you when you were engaging with other fascists on reddit.
When you dismiss every source of information that contradicts the premise of a socialist utopia, you are not engaging in an honest debate; you are simply asserting an ideological fantasy. The evidence of systemic failure is overwhelming. Take care.
LMFAO literally what you’ve been doing throughout this whole discussion. The evidence of you being unable to engage with reality is overwhelming. Take care.
Nobody said sanctions have no effect—that’s a straw man. The point is that sanctions are not the primary cause of mass starvation.
They literally are, and plenty of studies have been done on the subject. Everybody with even a shred of intellectual honesty knows that sanctions are a modern form of siege warfare designed to starve the population.
Sanctions reduce external trade, but when a regime prioritizes the military over its citizens and uses an ideologically rigid farming system (Juche) that fails regardless of external trade, that is mismanagement.
Simply repeating nonsense over and over won’t make it true baby Goebbels.
The leadership decided to let millions starve rather than reform or appeal for help until it was too late.
Ah yes, the leadership was supposed to wave a magic wand around and replace all the food and fertilizer by wishing it into existence. The utter lack of capacity for critical thought on display here is truly stunning.
Sure, here’s the citation
Ah yes, defectors are obviously a reliable source of information who have no ulterior motives. Your intelligence continues to shine bright.
You’re swinging hard against standard economics here.
Buddy, any economist will tell you that GDP is not a measure of standard of living. The only one swinging hard here is you because you’re too ignorant to discuss the subject. Here, go educate yourself instead of continuing to make a clown of yourself in public https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-being
This is the central ideological fantasy: A guarantee of low-quality, insufficient welfare is better than the risk of high-quality capitalism.
An amazing straw man you cobbled together there. The fantasy version if DPRK you’re describing sounds fascinating.
I’ll keep believing in the hard facts provided by the UN, the Bank of Korea, and 34,000 eyewitnesses who risked their lives to escape. You stick to the fantasy.
That’s adorable.
This is a spectacular attempt to shift blame. No serious historian blames the US trade embargo for the famine’s death toll.
No, it’s the basic fact of the situation which you, being the troll that you are, continue try to dance around.
This is a spectacular attempt to shift blame. No serious historian blames the US trade embargo for the famine’s death toll.
Yeah, no possible way being cut off from trade could affect the food supply in the country. If sanctions didn’t harm the populations of the target countries then the US wouldn’t be using them. Amazing how this basic detail escaped your genius mind.
Food was hoarded for the military and elite in Pyongyang while regional populations starved.
[citation needed]
A starving population that maintains its birth rate is not an economic win; it’s a social tragedy.
Except that north is no longer starving, while food insecurity is a real problem in the south which your own bleatings claim has a better economic situation 🤡 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12939-023-01937-z
This is a classic defensive move when your system has an objectively pathetic GDP.
GDP is not a measure of quality of life as any economist would tell you. There are actual measures like PQL for that.
GDP and GDP per Capita are the standard, baseline metrics for comparing economic output. While they don’t capture happiness or inequality perfectly (that’s what the Human Development Index, HDI, is for), they absolutely measure the size of the pie a country has to divide.
Economic output has fuck all to do with the standard of living. In fact, you can have very high economic output as we see in occpupied Korea achieved through brutal exploitation of the working population.
This is outright false. The DPRK guarantees these things on paper, but the quality is nonexistent for the vast majority of the population:
It’s not, but you’ve already made it clear that you’ll just make things up and ignore facts.
What the south doesn’t have is guarantees of access. You do not have a job guarantee and without a job you have nothing. That’s the elephant in the room that you artlessly danced around.
The Total Scoreboard: 34,000+ people have escaped North Korea for the South. Less than 30 have publicly documented returning.
Sure little buddy. You keep on believing that.
This is arguably the most insane sentence in your post. Estimates range from 600,000 to 3 million deaths during that famine. A state that cannot feed its people to the point where 5-10% of the population starves to death has not “successfully weathered” anything; it has failed its most basic function. Framing mass starvation as “resilience” against US imperialism is incredibly disrespectful to the victims of that regime’s mismanagement.
What part of the north having been dependent on the trade that the US cut them off from are you struggling with there? Most of the arable land land is in the south, and DPRK had to figure out how to produce food in the mountains. The fact that you call that mismanagement exposes that you’re a just a troll.
Where is this data coming from?
From the fact that people are actually having children in DPRK unlike in the south
Trying to use GDP to measure the quality of the economy is sheer idiocy and no serious economist would suggest doing that. In fact, GDP was never meant to do that.
Even with “growth” from selling artillery shells to Russia, the average North Korean lives on a fraction of the income of a South Korean.
People in DPRK have guaranteed housing, jobs, food, healthcare, and public transportation. None of these things are available to people in the south by default. Measuring income without accounting for the cost of living further illustrates just how utterly unequipped you are to discuss the subject you’re attempting to debate here.
There is a reason 34,000 people have defected from North to South, and basically zero have gone the other way. People vote with their feet.
Meanwhile in the real world https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/18/asia/north-korea-defectors-return-intl-hnk-dst
You’re an utter ignoramus and you have no business opining on the subject. Take the L and move on.
Almost certainly given that it drastically reduces the cost of running models. Whether you run them locally or it’s a company selling a service, the benefits here are pretty clear.