What democracy? Isn’t your argument that you have no choice but to genocide? Isn’t your argument that you can never use your vote as leverage to demand what you want?
The strategy portion of what I listed is how you could attempt to be democratic rather than genocide candidate cheerleaders.
Sure, if you’re not on the same team you get defenestrated. That is a powerful motivator. But it is a powerful motivator for a coup as well.
I don’t know what those sentences mean. But I can tell you that your Great Man Theory here is incorrect.
As you well know all we have are estimates.
How can you know the real number is being hidden if you don’t know it? There is a lot of specific knowledge required to support your claim. I think we both know that is because you read it in a headline.
All realistic estimates put the number over 600000 killed and wounded.
Show me your most realistic estimate source.
Of those 68011 have been confirmed killed by name.
That is a very specific number. It is a number from BBC Russia, in fact, and it is misleading to say “confirmed” as it is actually based on trusting their guesswork and crowdsourcing. It is from 3 days ago.
Remember, your claim is that Russia is hiding the real toll. So you must know it yourself and be able to explain how it is being hidden.
There is a significant difference between what the Russian media is telling the people and what they see on Telegram and directly from their husbands and relatives. […]
You did not answer my question.
LOL. Those middle-men are not cheap.
This does not address what I said.
Russia is producing at most two to three hundred tanks a year. And most of those are refurbished tanks. Based on the financials.
What financials yell you the number of tanks Russia is currently producing?
And it is losing five to six hundred a year. Based on Ukrainian numbers.
Why would you accept their numbers at face value? Not even their NATO sponsors trust their numbers.
I call you a troll when you ignore reality and keep repeating Russian talking points.
This is how you process my disagreement with you, yes. By namecalling and making things up. Please try to do better.
I call you a troll when you demand I justify my position while providing no justification for yours.
You are repeatedly offering up absurdities. Your original comment was as simplistic as, “Russia could just leave” and you then invented a series of increasing absurdities cribbed from headlines and articles that were both know you just Googled. When you compound absurd claims you will have to spend a lot of time backing them up. At least, if the other person is paying attention.
My comments have mostly been to poke holes in the absurdities and ask you to make your implied knowledge consistent with your claims. It has not gone well.
You seem to think it is unfair that you have had to answer questions about your silly claims. This makes me think you don’t know how yo ask your own. Would you like me to teach you how to do so?
Russian inflation is right now at 9.1% and rising. Inflation hasn’t been below 4% since the beginning the war. At worst it has been at 17,8%. Compared to other economies of similar size it is among the worst in the world. Western countries are nowhere near these figures.
The 9% number is quarterly, for the year it will be around 7. Germany’s inflation rate in 2023 was around 6. It was around 4 in the UK for the same year, hitting 9% for a quarter the year prior. The US had rates of 7-9% in 2021-2022. Italy’s was 8 in 2022 and 5ish in 2023.
You are objectively incorrect about this being incomparable to other relevant states.
Most of the growth in the Russian economy has come from the war economy. This is not healthy in the long term and will cause problems when the war ends.
Ah yes, this is why 1950s America was just one big recession.
Before the invasion the ruble was around hovering around 1 USD to 70 RUB. Right now it around 1 USD to 90 RUB.
Ah, looks like I am wrong and despite early jumps it has now settled into a slightly lower exchange rate. Still not weak, however.
They are rising rapidly in the sectors that are dependent on the war economy. Others simply cannot afford to raise them and have to go without staff.
Both wages and employment are up, actually. You are telling very specific stories about behavior in contradiction of the wider facts. Presumably you are an undercover gonzo economist in Russia?
I wonder how the “Russia could just leave” person could suddenly possess such specific knowledge!
In this comment I’ve now gone through inflation and currency. What next?
You ignored sections of my last comment that would allow you to partially answer this question yourself. Perhaps instead of replying only to the parts you feel like, you could read the full response and internalize it?
When are you going to start justifying any of your positions?
I haven’t made the error if saying a bunch of silly, very specific things that disagree with reality. But you already said something like this and I already answered it.
Yeah internet culture can get pretty gross.
You’re only saying that because you got owned recently.
(this is a joke)
“Hold your nose and vote genocide”.
Rather than rewarding genociders, might I suggest opposing them? I was told this was the worst crime, but apparently it isn’t as bad as not voting for it.
If you’d like to do electoral math, being an automatic lever pull means you have no leverage. And if your conception of electoralism is to cheerlead and support top-down dictates, you’re actively disempowering yourself.
But personally, I don’t think it should require game theory to not vote for any pro-genocide candidate. Demand better or be complicit. I certainly won’t forget this depravity.
Don’t complain about me doing bad things or my buddy over here will do even worse.
They certainly are but they are all subservient to Putin.
No, they’re all on the same team and their collective is the most powerful thing. If the major owners of companies all want a policy change in a capitalist system, they get it. Putin is their political operative and has power with their consent.
They stand to lose quite a lot when Russia loses. And when they decide to cut their losses. Putin will lose his head. That’s why he is so paranoid.
When Russia loses? They are winning, their economy is booming, and the country is stable. You’ve just listed a series of implausible outcomes. Is there a probable one you haven’t told me?
Now I know you’re trolling. Nobody sane will look at Russia’s recent financial figures and conclude that Russian economy is going great.
Happy to discuss them. How is the ruble doing? Total imports and exports? Employment? Shortages? Inflation?
civil war is a real possibility because of disgruntled soldiers. Who are not getting paid
The RF pays its soldiers.
Don’t get what they are promised in terms of equipment training etc.
This also happens in the US but their only civil war was over slavery. What evidence do you have that this is widespread and leading to organized treason?
General mismanagement, corruption and abuse in the Russian army.
Have you ever heard a person that was in the US army talk about any of those things? Why would this mean one thing in the RF and another in the US?
The number of casualties cannot be hidden any more either
Hidden? So you know the real number?
Recruiting more soldiers is getting harder and harder for Russia. Why else would they pay more and more money for recruitment?
This does not make it unsustainable. This was also the logic and methodology used by the US when it was officially in hot wars.
The people know how fucked up things are for a common soldier. Especially now that Ukraine is in Kursk. Where most of the soldiers were conscripts.
You have a read on the bulk sentiment of, “the people”? How?
Then why are Chinese banks refusing to work with Russia for fear of sanctions?
Because those are small Chinese banks that don’t feel confident they’ve worked around sanctions. Small fry. I assume you just read a headline from around two weeks ago?
Why Russian banks resorting to crypto currencies and paying middle-men to conduct trade?
Because it is an easy way to bypass international finance restrictions. The necessity of things like this is why other countries are desperate to join alternatives to SWIFT.
It certainly has. Refurbishing old soviet-era tanks from cold storage. Russia is not producing new tanks nearly fast enough compared to what they are losing in Ukraine.
Oh? How many is it producing vs losing?
Again with the trolling about strong Russian economy when the financial figures give quite a different picture.
Should I start calling you a troll every time you disagree with me? Is this logical, to you?
Russian currency reserves are falling. Next to go will be the gold reserves. Russia only has Chinese yuan and gold left. And China is now demanding payments in gold.
It is spending its reserves, yes. But this means less for a country with a strong industrial base and sufficient bilateral trade.
Inflation is really high.
Tell me the number. How does it compare to other countries over the last 4 years?
Ruble is weak. And holding on by artificial restrictions.
The ruble is stronger now than before the invasion.
Due to the war and declining population, both due to brain drain and lack of children, Russia has a severe worker shortage.
Then wages should be rapidly rising. Are wages rapidly rising?
These are not the signs of a strong and healthy economy.
To get a sense of how the real economy is doing you have to look at statistics you haven’t even mentioned.
It sounds like you aren’t in a place to decide whether to engage or not, and aren’t asking for help, so I will assist you by ignoring the replies you make for the next day or two.
If, after that, you would like to have a good faith engagement, I’d be happy to do so.
Russia has far more military capacity than Ukraine. Every escalation runs the risk of Russia adopting NATO’s scorched earth tactics. Russia clearly sees value in the slow grind approach, which they explain as a de facto demilitarization of Ukraine, but if they ever stop seeing value in that…
Don’t forget what NATO member countries do to their military targets and what the outcomes are. Every population center in North Korea bombed out. Agent orange, napalm, mass bombing campaigns in Laos and Vietnam. Reckless and depraved mass killings in Algeria. Two invasions of Iraq and interceding sanctions that killed millions of children, with a heavy focus on the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
Hoping for escalation can only mean hoping fot mass death for Ukrainians. This is not a movie or an idle fantasy where we get to play pretend about knocking a knife out if the bad guys hands. This is the real world with actual troop deployments and bombing campaigns and industrial bases and drones that pick people off while they sleep and a country that still functions but can be made to not with about a week of bombings.
A palace coup by the oligarchs
“The oligarchs” are just the ultra-rich owners of companies. Like US billionaires or the South Korean Chaebol owners. This war was launched and us maintained with their consent and support. They are the head of the capitalist ruling class in the RF. If they changed their minds Putin would just appear to have decided this himself.
So far, the Russian economy has actually improved during the war and profits are high.
A civil war in Russia
Why would this be a plausible thing to happen in the next few years?
China and India stop trading with Russia
And shoot themselves in the foot? Why? US-led sanctions and financial weapons deployed against Russia have already scared countries into working together to avoid being vulnerable to the US.
Russia runs out of tanks
Russia has increased its industrial capacity during this war. The opposite is more likely: the US and Western Europe have been sending old stocks but they are failing to replace them fast enough, particularly artillery.
Russia runs out of money
But Russia is actually doing better than before. They have been forced to invest in the real economy and consequently have, against the plans of their finance capitalist economists, made their economy much more robust.
These aren’t realistic outcomes. And the problem with rose-tinted glasses here is that it means a lot of Ukrainians die for no reason.
We have to speculate about it, but it is a reckless maneuver that has led to the nee, rapid losses on the main front. I would expect that it is reckless ideologues trying to push it.
Ukraine has seen some high-profile resignations just before and during this, so it is possible that the early resignations was people opposed to invading a sliver of Kursk and the later ones might be people that wanted to invade.
But this is just guessing.
Ukraine’s government can change that law if they want to, of course. And if things keep going as they have been, they will have to choose between doing that and losing even more territory.
Attempts at maximum escalation have not produced good results for the Ukrainian people. I would like fewer of them to die given the realistic options available.
Re: Scholz I think the higher-ups in Western Europe are aware that their “support for Ukraine” is more about trying to hurt Russia than help the Ukrainian people. I would expect more to jump ship as the possibility of anything other than a full rout starts to vanish. These countries aren’t going to actually sacrifice anything they value in order to actually help common Ukrainian people. At the moment their “aid” is mostly weapons and ammunition whose main purpose is to prop up military contractors.
How do you expect that to happen?
Who was the interviewee?
He is a liberal, a supporter of capitalism.
See the map at the bottom of this article: https://www.newsweek.com/china-responds-japan-airspace-violation-danjo-islands-1944781
The plane circled over an area near the islands, then dipped a toe into Japanese airspace. China says it was unintentional.
Responding with an escalation of missile deployments is not exactly proportional. Escalation in general is a very risky thing and doing so casually is reckless and can get people killed.
You say you don’t want to engage, but you keep replying. Can I help you with this is any way?
If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.
There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.
It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!
I am always available if you would like to engage in good faith
Caleb Maupin 🤮