freagle

Who am I being thankful toward? Who am I giving thanks to in this specific case?

It’s equivalent to what they said. If someone comes over and punches you in the head should I be thankful they didn’t stab you?

You heard about peak oil, not oil exhaustion. We hit peak extraction around 2008ish but added new extraction technologies like shale oil and since then we have no expectations of hitting a peak extraction any time soon.

Now the expectation is that consumption will hit a peak and collapse oil prices sooner than extraction will hit its peak. This is expected due to electricit cars and green energy production reaching a sufficient volume to make oil less in demand.

No. I will not thank them for seizing the ship. That’s a ludicrous suggestion.

There’s a difference between electoral engagement (voting) and spending your organizing time in service of another organization that doesn’t have your interests in mind

The value of electoralism in these historical moments (the situation we are in is not unique in history) is to show the working class that electoralism doesn’t work and in fact works against them. It’s not to try to convince them through rhetoric but rather to select their best and brightest hope (AOC, Bernie, Obama, Mamdani, whoever) and when they get into office just watch how they fail to achieve the goals of the working class.

In the meantime, the left shouldn’t be wasting it’s time and energy and money and social capital striving and struggling to get votes for someone. They should be organizing the working class and developing class consciousness.

It would have been great for the left to get Bernie elected because he would have failed the working class so spectacularly they would have had a major consciousness rising moment.

So long as people believe there is an electoral path they will cling to it to avoid the grief of the alternative. But the more their favored candidates win and fail, the more they will become willing to let it go.

No. Start with the basics - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao.

It will become apparent what the path forward is and why it can’t be openly discussed.

There’s a reason for this. The information is available and has been available in the literature for over a century. It’s all there.

But you can’t publish it in a news article. You can’t even publish a summary of it. Because it would be seditious

Then it’s not part of the definition? That’s like saying the definition of “apple” is “a fruit from a tree, especially a fruit with simple uniform flesh and a thin skin” and then when I say this orange is not an apple you say “I said especially so it doesn’t really count”

So your definition is now simply military invasion.

Venezuela has had US antagonistic covert ops operating in country since at least 2007. That’s almost 2 decades of needing to find the US spies and their allies to prevent sabotage, coups, false flags, etc.

That’s just the military aspect. They’ve also been under worsening sanctions for almost as long, which has been driven by the US strategy to starve the masses so that they revolt. This processes causes increased desperation among the people, which increases crime rates.

All of these things require the use of authority and as they get worse require more invasive and obvious uses of authority. It’s hard enough to find spies, it’s even harder to find spies and neutaize them without ripping the US off as to how you’re finding them, going even further and finding spies without ever being wrong is nigh impossible.

Communism killed 100 million people.

Private property is required for freedom.

Markets are freedom.

Capitalism is free exchange.

Working the land gives you rights over it.

All of life is competition.

The weak die out and the strong survive.

Evolution is driven by the survival of the individual animals the are most fit for their environment.

The lymph system is not connected to the brain.

Black people have high pain tolerance.

Women have low pain tolerance.

Babies don’t feel pain the way we do until they have sufficiently developed.

Human psychological development stops at 18 and after that it’s all acquisition of skills and knowledge and the use of discipline and will power.

Fossilization destroys all soft tissue and no soft tissue can survive the process.

Race is genetic.

Everyone needs to do exercise with resistance (weights, bands, bodyweight). You will not get too muscular by accident. It will prevent aches and pains, it will prevent injuries, it will make it more likely you survive car accidents and false.

Everyone needs to floss, there are no exceptions.

Everyone needs time outside in nature. If you live in a city, get to a park every week, preferably every day. It changes our brain chemistry. We aren’t organized to live in boxes all day.

Learn how to breathe. If you think that sounds silly, you’re the example.

Learn to cook. When you can’t contribute anything else, being able to contribute food is universally accepted

All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.

–V.I. Lenin

It’s wild how you think your interpretation of history is water tight.

America has never been invaded and has never had to defend it’s territory with the life of its people. Neither has Canada.

Russia was fighting for its survival against Napoleon and against the Third Reich. Massive militaries with a singular focus invading The Borderlands (The Ukraine) and crossing into Russia. Those campaigns were massive existential threats. Russia never attempted to invade Vietnam with superior air cover the way the US did.

You can’t compare American battle tactics to Russian tactics when the entire context is fundamentally different. Did Russia invade Afghanistan? No. Did it use human wave tactics when it intervened in Czechoslovakia? No.

So then what actual examples do we have? Napoleon’s invasion and Hitler’s invasion. Both existential wars of defense.

Imagine blaming a country’s military strategy for its soldiers dying under the worst invasions the world has literally ever seen.

Full on sarcastic

Don’t worry. I have been posting on the grad for a long while. Just decided I wanted to get into more debates and too many instances block the grad.

As for the sources for those numbers I just copied and pasted the AI overview from Google. Low effort. Happy to dig in though.

Looks like it uses Wikipedia as it’s first source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces

The number for enlisted military on that page is sourced as an article from the AP https://apnews.com/article/putin-finland-sergei-shoigu-ee953abf7f9bf217ccdaa61ec1b35ddd

Which states in December of 2022:

The Russian military currently has about 1 million soldiers

But it provides no source for that claim.

The numbers for Europe also are backed by Wikipedia here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_military_and_paramilitary_personnel

And here’s a useful article that breaks it down pretty well

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/which-country-has-the-biggest-army-in-europe-ranking-all-european-forces-by-size-9023

What’s funny is that you say this now and then in the same breath say that Europe must build up NATO and destroy Russia to protect Europe from Russia. Nice cognitive dissonance you got there.

Which is it? Russia is an existential threat that must be met with increasing budgets, military build up, possibly a draft, and preemptive violence, or Russia being a threat to the EU is laughable?

Is this that thing about going into Ukraine without helmets, body armor, and guns?

I wish you could see what that really means because if it were true that Russian soldiers were sent in without gear in the last couple of weeks it is also true that Ukraine is still losing ground to those soldiers which means unarmored and unarmed Russian soldiers who are eating tree bark for sustenance and scavenging for guns and ammo are still able to push the UA back.

So which is it? The Russians are not gaining ground or they are and they’re doing it without gear?

Also. If it was 4:1, with Ukraine having lost at least 400k, that would mean Russia losing 1.6M which is at least 20% more than the entire size of the Russian military before the invasion.

That math just ain’t mathing.

You mean Biden who believes we would have to create Israel if it didn’t exist, who continued the war drive, who delivered weapons and training to genocidaires, who put infants in solitary confinement at the border, who was instrumental in ensuring that the prisons were full of black people who could be used as slave labor, who pardoned the judge who took bribes in exchange for sentencing 8 year old to juvenile detention for jaywalking, who failed to do anything meaningful to stop Trump, who failed to do anything meaningful to limit the power of the executive so it couldn’t be abused, who failed to do anything to stop fascism at all?

Those 4 years where voting a different guy in didn’t do literally anything to stop fascism in the least?

Sure. Do it again. I am sure continuing to not stop fascism is exactly how we stop fascism

Totally valid. You’re right. Under those conditions, voting will definitely work. But only if you shame people on the Internet to vote the correct way.