I really don’t mean this in a condescending way, and I understand why someone consuming certain kinds of media might think this… but this is truly delusional. So wildly at odds with the reality of the situation that you would probably be better served just not reading about the conflict at all than by reading whatever it is you’ve been reading.
This comment sounds like it was written by the official AI of liberalism.
Damn. This shit is depressing. Self proclaimed “leftists” still out there complaining about “tankies” in 2023. Truly embarrassing for everyone.
I have had this problem for awhile now. But it seems to be firefox related for me. Which just means I reluctantly load any archive pages in chrome instead.
Wut
Yeah… shits fucked. Feel like I’m constantly retreating into an ever smaller territory of relative freedom as capital metastasizes around everything else I once knew and loved, turning it to shit. Eventually there will be nowhere else to run. One day I’ll hear the door to my house burst open, and someone will march in with a bullhorn and some kind of warrant authorizing them to scream ad copy into my face for dick pills and make me do a live action captcha to open my ancient refrigerator.
I see how you haven’t responded in any meaningful way to my broader point that your “evil russians” statement about cold war military equipment is dumb as shit. But I get the sense you think there is someone scoring this debate and that you get a point for being a clever boy. Great job. I concede. Later.
How do you not see how gladio ties into this? It was basically the US changing sides in a war in Europe that never really ended. WW2 was about competition between imperial powers, and communism versus capitalism (as that struggle led directly to the rise of fascism). The end of the war resolved the imperialist competition, but not the question of communism. The US immediately turned around and started giving the European fascists guns, money and power after they no longer posed an expansionist threat, because fascists were still the most staunch anti communists. Again, this is why the soviets executed fascist war criminals, and the west didn’t even prosecute most of them. They became allies instead. It foreshadowed the west’s willingness to support the most brutal right wingers elsewhere around the world for the rest of the century to choke out any resistance to western neocolonial domination.
Yeah this is not really what’s happening. QE went on for a long time before inflation really took off and mostly served to inflate asset prices without any meaningful effect on the price of consumer goods. As has been said, this is because that’s where the lion’s share of rich people’s money goes.
I think the key data point here is the increase in profits recently. Which would not be happening if this was all down to bog standard supply and demand throughout supply chains. Parking money in assets like stocks and real estate doesn’t cause consumer price inflation. But if businesses all realized that the talk of supply chain disruptions and COVID causing prices to go up was a good excuse to raise prices further together, that would exacerbate an otherwise minor bout of consumer price inflation. Which is exactly what happened.
And although it’s pretty damn close to collusion/price fixing in many cases, there is no real enforcement against that sort of thing. There is software that is used throughout industries that basically does the price fixing for you using data from other users/firms. Makes it easy and plausibly deniable because it was just an algorithm that told you to do it. Big part of rent inflation in particular. If there’s no competitor willing to undercut you, even though they could, the Econ 101 bullshit doesn’t really apply. It’s basically just class solidarity among capitalists. Circling the wagons because unusual circumstances temporarily drove wages up, and they weren’t having it.
Anyway, the main point is, if profit rates are going up, it’s not money supply causing the inflation.
Lol. Those people were basically brought over at gunpoint as war reparations. You think that’s the same thing as paper clip and gladio?
Definitely did not miss that. Whatever you think about the USSR, you cannot, without grotesque distortions of history, say that they rehabilitated European fascism. They executed nazis while the western powers were giving them citizenship, jobs, money, and weapons. And if you think soviet efforts to support revolutionary movements around the globe were “imperialism,” I’m not sure what to tell you besides please read a book.
“Evil Russians.” Jesus Christ. As if the West did not rehabilitate European fascists immediately after WW2 and end up on the side of imperialism in every conflict around the world for the rest of the century and beyond. Many of which they themselves instigated. Get a fucking grip.
Nice. You could always take a page from Michael Hudson and talk about “financialization” of the economy (as being at odds with industrialization and actual production). Shareholders and all that are just as much a part of industrial capitalism, but the incentives toward destructive predation, etc. are not the same. I find this distinction to be helpful in avoiding that mental shutdown from people when their communism detectors start going off because you used the word capitalism.
It really is pretty much just this for a lot of them. Maybe the slightly more sophisticated among them will call us like “useful idiots in service of the right wing” or something along those lines. Not a lot of rigorous thought goes into this shit most of the time. It’s basically a disney understanding of politics.
Dad was some kind of fellow traveler in his youth, but I think forgot some important lessons about critical media consumption as he got older. Went from reading black panther lit and the monthly review to pretty uncritically watching shit like msnbc, etc.
I think he sort of just thinks the dems really do mean well and are doing the best they can now. Just a casualty of the end of history maybe. It’s weird though because he will occasionally concede that I’m right on certain fundamental things when we inevitably argue about politics. He’s maybe just really lowered his expectations over the years.
Liberal thinks the shitty neoclassical economics taught in 99% of universities is economics itself. Imagine my surprise.
“The other party” implies that there is a party representing the left/workers. I assume you are talking about American politics, and are specifically implying that party is the Democratic Party. To which all I can say, if you are actually serious, is LOL.
True enough. Though I can understand being a little reticent about a full on war. Shitstorm it kicked off may have been a little tougher for them to weather 8 years ago (though the fighting itself certainly would have been easier). Not exactly the same situation as Stalin before the war, but sometimes there’s reasons to hold back or play for time.
This is mostly what I wonder about. Is it cowardice that is keeping Putin from whipping the central bankers into line, or is this somehow a political impossibility? I know we in the west are very good at pretending there is something inviolable about the independent central bank, but that doesn’t line up as well with my (albeit limited) understanding of the Russian state.
Yes, it would be cataclysmic. In the longer term though, I would argue that just about everyone on the planet would be a winner if the US empire were finally put down. You can’t really overstate how much of an impediment the US is to global human welfare and development.