It was, but it was usually hidden under a veneer of civility. As in, users were gloating about dead Russians at least as far back as 2016 (witnessed it myself), but calling us “orcs” or “subhumans” usually resulted in mods deleting comments. Although I’ve never heard of anyone getting banned over it, mind you.
At this point I honestly struggle to care about “whodunnit”. Southern Ukraine is becoming a desert, western Ukraine is covered in radioactive dust. This was once one of, if not the most developed, prosperous and advanced republics in the USSR. And now? Now the world is ablaze and those who can do something about it don’t want to, because their line goes up. And those who do want something done - cannot do anything. At this point it seems to be too late. If not for the world at large, then for the region at least.
Another “fun” fact for the fine comrades. There’s an area near the dam, Aleshky sands. It was an area heavily deforested and abused in XIX century by those “innocent, hard working industrialists” in Russian Empire. Essentially, it was turned into a desert. The locals had tried to offset the erosion by planting trees, but with little success. The “ebil Bolsheviks” had made the tree planting systemic, and also created a system for watering it.
Except all of it depended on the Kahovka dam.
With the water flow interrupted, the irrigation won’t be able to support the plants, and the desert will reclaim the region. To put it into perspective, here’s a map.
Red is the projected desertification area.
USSR collapse and subsequent looting of the fledgling states bought USA thirty years of unchallenged hegemony. Now I don’t know too much about European industry and such, but looting Europe might buy them another decade or two. Time enough for the current crop of bourgeoisie to die peacefully and filthy rich, and that’s likely all they care about. Après nous le déluge and all that
Fuckin coach experts. Such confidence! Such self-assuredness! And such abysmal actual knowledge and understanding. “Only thing the country produces are fossil fuels”. Dolt.
Even if we look solely at natural resources, it wouldn’t be remotely true. Your precious wind turbines? Russian nickel. Your favourite German drills? Russian titanium. Titanium alloys, mind you, not just raw ore. Because guess who’s setting the plank for VT6 titanium alloy, used in aircraft? I’ll give you a hint - it’s not Japan. And it goes on and on, before we even consider things like nuclear reactors, nuclear fuel, automotive industry (sure we like to rag on Russian cars, but somehow that didn’t stop Germany and Korea from using GAZ plant to make their junk), buses, fuckin IT sector.
TL;DR, redditoids continue to be confidently ignorant, supporting exploitation and abuse and dividing the skin of a yet-unkilled bear
Why do libs and anarchos always have to play the semantics game man
Idealism, would be my guess. Remember that quote about “changing names of things to change things themselves”? Words are essentially magic to them. It’s not cracking down on protesters, it’s “enforcing public order”. It’s not using drones to indiscriminately murder people in the other side of the world, it’s “employing cutting edge technology to defend against terrorism”, and also the pilot is a woman, you bigot!
Their productive forces are literally less developed, their mode of production is literally less developed, it’s a technical term not a normative statement about the worth of the people living in those countries
And now time to catch some flack from the comrades. Try using this term to describe the native Americans during the colonization. If you feel your eyebrows furrowing at me - the productive forces of the Iroquois, or Hurons, or Odjibwe were, last I checked, less developed than those of western Europe.
Not to defend the gits in question, but I’ve always been partial to the so-called “roadside picnic” concept, coined by the Soviet writers Arcady and Boris Strugatsky:
In their book “Roadside picnic” (later poorly adapted to movie “Stalker”, and later mutilated beyond recognition into a series of video games), the characters are dealing with a site of apparent alien visit, which left behind a whole treasure trove of strange artifacts and anomalies. The original purpose of the artifacts, as well as the nature of the aliens and their visit remain a mystery. One of the characters, a scientist suggests the eponymous theory:
Imagine taking your family on a road trip. You stop by s roadside to take a break, have a little picnic. Afterwards you drive away, never to return, leaving behind leftover food, trash, general traces of your presence. Then the animals come out of the woods and observe your “visitation site” with shock and awe.
“Defense” used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its “defense” efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders
Oh, don’t worry! They’ve come up with an even worse term for this exact case!
To preface: you are not overthinking. Quite the opposite. There are many terms and phrases that get thrown around, whose definition is just kind of “generally understood”. Freedom. Democracy. Justice. Try asking a liberal for a definition. They will most likely glare at you, glass eyed, for a second, because to them such terms don’t require a definition - they are instinctively accepted.
That is one of the great things Marx and Engels had done - they started digging into such generally accepted terminology from a scientific standpoint. To not be empty worded - in “Critique of the Gotha program”, Marx takes apart, one by one, specific points of the social democratic party’s program and shows why they make zero sense. “All workers must receive just pay” - and what does “just” mean? Who decides what is “just”? Etc.
And back topic of the thread, comrades have covered some examples that get me already, but there’s one specific (I think) to corporate speak. Back when I worked for a yankee corporation, we had these annual “training sessions” - a series of 40-minute-or-so-long courses with a test attached. The topics were “Sanctions” (aka why you must follow the US policies against sanctioned countries), “Workplace harassment”, “Slavery” (aka what to do if you think there’s slavery afoot), etc. The latter two sound reasonable, right?
But here’s the kicker. The courses had a general name of Compliance. Perhaps even “Compliance course” or “Compliance training”, my memory is a bit fuzzy. Such a scummy term. Like being threatened with a shotgun, but it’s pink and made with eco friendly materials. Compliance. Comply, wage slave. Bow down. Kiss the ring. Or else.
Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Mexico
Why is there even such an entity? Imagine a “Russian chamber of commerce in Kazakhstan”.
with renewals shrinking from 50 to 25 years
Seriously? That’s supposed to be the “unprecedented rubber-stamping exercise by sanctioning a game-changing framework”? Quarter century instead of the whole half? Seriously?
Gotta ask something as an outsider: since my only source of information regarding the USA protests is the media (internet included), it had seemed that the protests rather quickly died down after Biden got elected (naturally raising the question how organic they were in the first place). However I understand that this could be just media manipulation - artificial silence and pretending nothing is happening, as part of the crafted narrative. So which one is it?
You joke, but it’s an actual issue for me personally. My dad’s Jewish. My mum’s Russian (most likely). Sure I’m “white”.
Except I’m not considered as such. I look different from the vast majority of people in my daily life. I’ve always been made to feel like I don’t belong - even if people doing that usually mistook me for some other “white” ethnicity.
And don’t even get me started on the treatment of Jews in Europe and Russian Empire specifically.