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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • Personally, I for one would really appreciate it if you provided the archive link in the OP especially if you’re posting paywalled articles. When the OP is the one who does it, then all the readers who want to follow the link that the OP posted won’t have to, and the people who don’t even know about archive sites will still get to read it when they wouldn’t have otherwise (and maybe even learn about what archive sites are as a result). In that sense, it’s not about entitlement, it’s about one person doing it one time rather than (for example) 30 people all having to do it while others may not even be aware they can do it.

    Another thing is that while it may be ultimately just a drop in the bucket, it does help cut down on the amount of traffic that mainstream western media sites will get, which I think you would agree is better than helping increase it for them. It’s for that reason that just as a reader browsing, I almost always archive any MSM news articles I read, including the ones I see in posts here. On the occasion I do post, I always make a point to link the archive or frontend (like piped/invidious for youtube, redlib for reddit, used to do nitter for twitter, etc.) It’s a very minor annoyance to have to do, as either the reader or as the poster, but I’m all the more appreciative of posters who do do it and wish that more would.

    It’s not like you have to, but it would be courteous and considerate if you did.



  • If all countries under discussion ramped up to full war time economies, like Russia is already doing, the West would outproduce Russia by at least an order of magnitude, maybe even two.

    Well, sure. But you may as well say “if all countries under discussion magically whisked an army of robot supersoldiers into existence, they’d outpace Russia’s fighting ability by an order of magnitude.” It’s just a pipe dream that ignores the material reality of the entire situation. The countries under discussion can’t ramp up to “full war time economies” because they’ve long ago outsourced nearly all of their production capacity. If right now, they dropped everything else in order to rebuild their productive forces (that they willingly and knowingly dismantled for the sake of finance capital profits and honestly to also prevent domestic labor from having the kind of leverage it used to have) then it would take well more than a decade to get back to the kind of productive capacity necessary to outproduce Russia the way you’re talking about. And that’s if we’re being extremely generous. That’s simply not going to happen for numerous reasons ranging from the greed of finance capital to plain old logistics.

    This is the economic imbalance that “Putin knows.” He has known it all along and never needed to undercut western support of Ukraine because of it. The waning support from the west is due to the fact that they’re now realizing what a lost cause Ukraine truly is and that no NATO Wunderwaffen or boomeranging giga-sanctions are going to save them.

    subversion of the political process via corrupt politicians, keeping the US and others in a state of hand-wringing and infighting

    This is just silly. Putin does not have that kind of ability.

    believed any of his own propaganda, he would already actually be at war with NATO (instead of just claiming to be and not actually touching any NATO territory), and the West would coalesce around the clear immediate threat and begin the war time economic ramp up.

    Fantasy land. Cloud cuckoo. Complete failure to understand how geopolitics even begins to work in the age of nuclear powers, or even the meaning of the term proxy war, let alone the material circumstances of the countries you’re talking about.


  • The only people I know of who don’t know what the word “liberal” means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don’t like most Americans, I’m not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying “liberal” and knows it’s a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn’t have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don’t already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what’s being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for “the average person.”