vovchik_ilich [he/him]

[…] is a provocation worthy of military invasion?

See, that’s an entirely different statement. Threatening to join Russia’s geopolitical rival’s military alliance while bordering Russia, is provocation. The acts in Donbas since 2014 are provocation. Is it “worthy of military invasion”? I don’t believe so. The proto-fascist Russian government is clearly not acting entirely out of pure will and self defense, and I’ll be the last to defend it since I have loved ones directly suffering under that government. But it’s important to frame things correctly, and yes, threatening to join NATO while bordering Russia is a huge provocation.

Particularly, NATO has no history of defensiveness (as far as I know it has never intervened for the defensive purposes it’s supposed to uphold), but it has a history of offensiveness. Yugoslavia and Libya can both attest to that, and extra-officially (technically not NATO interventions even if many NATO members participated one way or another), countries such as Iraq can also attest. The case of Iraq is a perfect example of what unprovoked invasion in modern times is, and we are still forced to see libs fall heads over heels for a fucking Dick Satan Cheney endorsement to Kamala “most lethal army in the world” Harris.

So, yes, when a country bordering you chooses to join a historically aggressive military alliance that openly challenges you, that’s huge provocation. And it’s important to state so when we talk about the war in Ukraine.

completely unprovoked

considering joining NATO

Those two statements are in the same phrase… My god

How so? I’ve never heard that before

They absolutely don’t both solve the problem, plenty of homeless people in the capitalist world compared to the 0 people in former USSR

I’ll fight you alright. I’m Spanish, and making pa amb tomaca for breakfast feels like waking up to a godly meal. I also visited the US for like a week, and I remember my delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns and Cholula sauce that I had one day, or french toast another day (never had french toast before).

Insane that we allow for the privatisation of wavelengths.

"NO!! ONLY I CAN MOVE ELECTRONS AT THIS FREQUENCY, I PAID FOR IT, RWAAAAHHH!!

Not very hopeful but it’s something

Incredibly intelligent thinkers:

“The things that we have in our current system have been created in our current system”

Mind = blown

Checktank maties

I’m literally going to print your comment and glue it somewhere close to me

Edit: done

Researchers have long thought that Maya cities were largely isolated and self-sustaining

I wonder how anyone really thought that’s possible. There’s no case that I know of, in any civilization ever, of cities being sustainable by themselves without vast rural areas providing the necessary agricultural produce. Don’t archaeologists simply run the numbers of “ok, these many people lived here, that would require X hectares of agricultural produce comparing to similar agricultural development in these past civilisations”?

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Not really. Accounts from people who actually lived the first years of the arrival of Spanish to central America, such as that of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, portray in detail the executions and sacrifices. Remember that when the Spanish got there, there was more or less a system with a central empire (the Mexica) oppressing the surrounding nation (the Tlaxcala) through very brutal means, the latter having to supply vast amounts of humans for sacrifice rituals and for cannibalistic practices. It was brutal to the point that the Tlaxcala took the arrival of the Spanish as a prophecy, and joined the rather few (1000 at its peak) Spanish soldiers in a fight against the Mexica. When they ended up conquering the capital of the Mexica (Tenochtitlan, modern Mexico City), the Tlaxcala were so bloodthirsty against the Mexica that they carried out a large massacre that the Spanish unsuccessfully (given their few numbers) tried to stop (according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo).

For reference, in Mesoamerica there were monuments (whose name is Latinised to tzompantli) showing the skulls of human sacrifices or war captives, with the biggest monument’s showcasing tens of thousands of skulls.

Edit: none of this should be used to excuse the erasure of culture and the atrocities commited by the Spanish on the different native American cultures over the following centuries

Just wanna say your username tickles my wordplay part of the brain real good

Probably depends on the country, I’m pretty sure here in Spain you can donate books to libraries, and I highly doubt they go to the publisher and call them to ask “hey, want any good ol’ buckaroos?”

Russia’s Putin as opposed to…? Just funny phrasing

There’s so much talk about markets, in reality the modern computing tools we have at our disposal make markets unnecessary. It was hard to plan an economy the size of the USSR with pen and paper, and even then it was done to massive success (this post talks about the soviet economy failing already during Stalin, the reality is that it grew at VERY healthy rates until the 70s, and many people expected the USSR to overtake the US). How come, then, after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine still haven’t really improved the economy over what it was in the late 1980s, despite 3+ decades of markets and the new availability of cheap raw materials from poor countries through unequal exchange?

With modern computing and big data capabilities, we could have a democratically centrally planned economy with immense efficiency, no overproduction, extremely correct distribution of goods and services, and basically perfect knowledge of the economy to be able to manipulate it into whatever we desire. Why are we still thinking of relying on markets, which are imperfect in their transfer of information through the economy, when we could have perfect knowledge and control over the economy through the usage of the internet and modern computing, with much better control by citizens democratically instead of “price signals”??