That’s precisely my point. You can’t fight injustice with injustice.

Fuck the USSR. But not on the back of and with the blood of Afghani people.

But it is possible to negotiate with Russia. Just do it in two stages: Make a show of force first, and only then have dialogue. The negotiations between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that helped to end the Cold War could not have taken place had Reagan not first exploited the weaknesses of the U.S.S.R. by exerting heavy military and economic pressure, including by supporting groups and countries that were challenging the Soviets all over the world, like the Polish Solidarity movement and the Afghan ​​​mujahedeen. This two-stage approach did the trick: When the Kremlin elite realized that they were too weak to break Reagan’s determination they began to negotiate.

I can’t believe anyone here read and understood this paragraph and then celebrates this. You guys do know what the mujahedeen went on to do, right? Right? Not even talking about instrumentalising tens of thousands of young humans to organise terror in a foreign country. Just the blowback should be enough to deter anyone from repeating that shit. That fucker just said: “yeah fuck the women in Afghanistan, at least in the 70s we showed the commies who’s boss”

And don’t come at me with the “Just do the game-theory zero sum game without the externalities then.”

e: typo

Aid and development are (mostly) not what one would expect under the name. Some of it is great - catastrophe relieve for example.

More than 90% of it is loans and the conditions and business structures under which these are distributed is at best “soft power” and at worst just straight imperialism. Keep some of the good parts, but yeah - slash the rest.

Yeah, I am there with you. There is a book ont the topic thatI like (altough I disagree on many things with the author) called “the way is shut” by benjamin studebaker. It is way too expensive, but I heard of some pdfs somewhere…

The far-right governments are not being voted in based on material shortcomings produced through immigration or refugees.

There are material shortcomings based largely on wealth inequality and the immigrants/refugees are a scapegoat.

If we start throwing others under the bus to appease the far right we lose by default. We must demand and provide a life of dignity for everyone, this is a distribtuion issue.

My point is that there are sanctions that would hit them and we must pass those. The moment we try to justify the preventable mass deportation and mass starvation of others we lose to gametheory.

So starved and (militarily) uneducated people should revolt against a dictatorship with fighter jets and drones? Or are you starving them enough so that they won’t pay the military or mercenaries? What kind of revolutionary nostalgia is this, we aren’t living in the 1800s any more.

The government that uses these humans as pawns in their power game will not care for them.

You cannot win a power game by racing to the bottom with the opponent. The sanctions will hit the devasted people living in a brutal dictatorship and the only way to directly hit the perpetrators is by establishing rules on the movement of capital and that will be prevented by a multitude of moneyed interests.

“Just send them back” is the naive approach.

They never intended to follow through, or do it so anyone can easily defect the agreement.

The US has real power. Economically and military power. There is a reason they published their plans to invade the Hague should any American be convicted at the ICC. Some similar arrangement would be found with this.

You have to think as cynically as possible, the people in power will too. Then think of something that all sides avoid that thing or you will be thrown under the bus by however holds power.

From a game-theory standpoint (which markets are an instance of such a game) he is not even incorrect. If we tax someone at 15%, while the US doesn’t they will take their business there (if possible). This is not a normative statement, this sucks and will lead to the world’s destruction (literally wiht global warming, and the same for arms races and war). But is is correct.

Here is my (semi) hot take: To really change anything in the world you cannot be game-theoretically naive. We cannot just by cynnical like the market-liberals, because they are willing to sacrifice the planet and humans for their goals.

We need to be post-cynical. Recognising that just claiming the morally right thing will never get us the power to change anything and just striving for the power to change will make us just as evil as them. If we want to change things for the better we have to hold them both in mind.

To add: The way the current “aid” for Ukraine is structured the ugly truth is: no matter which side wins the war - they will break apart and sell Ukraine in chunks.

Russia is obvious to most, but the western aid is not free of charge either (as is projected so often). They will take their aid agencies and carve up the most important industries Ukraine has: Agriculture, some mining and High-purity neon gas for chip producion. The golden straight jacket. Is it better than getting conquered by Russia: YES. We are not the saintly helpers our leaders would want us to think we are.

The US and the EU WILL be recuperating their costs from the ukrainian people. There will be an economic plundering akin to Greece - even if they win.

If I wanted to make an unbelievable list for a joke, thats what it would look like.

A think tank paid for by rich countries, banks and big corporations says that we have no other choice than to spend absurd amounts of money to defeat our rival.

If this was the first time this happened in history I could forgive that you fall for this propaganda. But there is a 70 year history of this happening to the US and its allies.

They are gonna cut social spending, they will shove money to their international friends via the IMF and “development” agencies and you are gonna applaud them for it.

If they were serious about this, if these were the “european values” everyone talks about, we would prevent the arms manufacturers from war profiteering and deliver the equipment to Ukraine directly. It is not the concept of arms delivery that I criticize - it is the concrete implementation. They take on huge debts for something that can be done much cheaper.

okay. just so i get this right.

the eonomic block with 10 times the gdp, 3 times the (unadjusted) military spending and 3 times the population must increase their spending to 5% - which translates to 50% of russias whole gdp in order to defend themselves.

I will - respectfully - disregard that opinion.

e: gdp was missspelled

yeah, those are magically adjusted for internal spending power. the raw numbers are: Europe holds a significant edge over Russia in military spending. In 2024, EU nations collectively spent $457 billion on defense compared to Russia’s $146 billion defense budget.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/europe-has-the-resources-to-defend-itself-and-back-ukraine-against-russia/ and the atlantic council is not a left or peace thinktank. those are nato boys.

I never said that. What I am saying is that increasing military budgets in central europe by 300% is not in line with the threat level russia poses. If I owned a large quantity of military-industrial stock, I would say the opposite.

War is a racket. 5% of GDP is an absurd number. The only thing that could come out of this is a literal arms race. Everything being dictated by principles of game-theory will destroy this planet in no time.

Why is it useful to specifically name the rights of jewish poeple in germany and austria?

Not all Nazis left or died after 45. We simply do not act like they did.

e: typo

Talk is cheap, he should start by not betraying the UK working class at every opportunity.

Austrian here.

There were 3 parties in the coaliton talks. ÖVP - christian conservatives SPÖ - social democrats NEOS - liberals

Theoretcally ÖVP and SPÖ have a majority, but it is too slim for their tastes.

There were two possible junior candidates - NEOS or Die Grünen (Green Party) The current government is ÖVP and Greens.

From my understanding of the news of today the 3 parties stances are as following:

NEOS: Blame SPÖ for not being willing to make sacrifices to enhance the economy. SPÖ: Blame the other parties for not considering any form of wealth/inheritance tax.

The thing was “controversial” from the start because the party with the most votes, the FPÖ (far-right) was not included in the talks. SPÖ and NEOS were never considering them, but the ÖVP leadership only talked about their head (Herbert Kickl) being too far right the rest of the party being “reasonable”. The FPÖ has had numerous neo-nazi scandals over the past 50 years. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_rechtsextremer_und_neonazistischer_Vorfälle_in_der_FPÖ

The discrepancy for the three parties is too big to make meaningful change, they do not aree on core policies like immigration and economic direction. So NEOS canceled the talks today.

The result will be FPÖ - ÖVP so a right government OR their might be another election but everybody knows that FPÖ will get an even bigger share of the votes.

IMO the options were grim from the start. A limp government of some fiddling with taxes and slowly empoverishing the population or a hard-right coalition of nationalist & protectionist economic redistribution to the top. Life will be worse here for the foreseeable future.