Didn't realize La Pen was still haunting French politics. But then, I can't pretend i am particularly well versed in European politics as a whole. This NYT article helped me understand this a bit better. For fellow clueless Americans, the OP article makes a lot more sense after reading that NYT article.
To be honest, we should be pushing for peace there too. Ukraine is taking hits that they won't recover from and it is quickly turning into a much bigger global conflict. We need less war and less war machines in the world, not more.
Yes, both the US and Russia use proxies in the middle east to fight each other and have for years. But that has little to do with Israel's active genocide.
Who you were responding to mentioned Hamas and you immediately equated that with the Palestinian people. You really can't defend Hamas and Russia in this when this is just a recurrence of the power plays that have historically shaped our current system. There are very few on the "right" side of this.
Conveniently, Israel treats all Palestinians as if they were Hamas militants (who themselves are a resistance group resisting modern settler colonialism). Hamas is a convenient reason for them to ethnically cleanse a whole people. How is that difficult to see as the wrong side?
You can't just handwave Israel committing atrocity after atrocity after (but especially prior to) October 7th. It isn't that difficult to see which side is the wrong side for anyone with a couple brain cells and a functioning moral compass. Colonialism was terrible in the past and it is terrible in the present. Genocide and apartheid are bad for anyone who are not racists. Pretty easy line there.
edit: also the person I responded to poorly defends Israel in every thread and regularly uses bad faith argumentative tactics to spin out more propaganda. That is partially why I felt the need to respond.
Did you stalk my comment history too? You would see I'm 100% for the Palestinian people and against this genocide. My point being, if you're gonna run to a side in this you just picked wrong.
Edit: Imperialism is the enemy here not colonialism, which was stopped being used in the 1940's
I didn't stalk anyones comment history, I have just interacted with that person a bit. Come on lemmy is not that active, especially on beehaw. It is basically the same names commenting on this shit lol
But Israel is a settler colonial project which is a type of colonialism and is still valid. And I don't understand your point, it doesn't make sense.
Whoa, colonialism is absolutely alive and well. Colonialist projects, Israel included, still exist today, and of course many countries that began as settler-colonialism (which is distinct from plain 'colonialism') still exist everywhere, and still keep their native populations marginalized and under attack.
Israel is quite practically the most textbook definition of a Settler-Colonialist state that there is, especially given that they themselves still even use the term "settlements" to describe their continued displacement of Palestinians.
And yet modern colonialism isn't the key topic that needs to be mediated between these two parties. This fued goes 5000 years back to when these two cultural groups shared this exact same land. That's the myopic part of these arguments. Calling them colonists isn't going to settle an ancient blood feud. Bonus points if you recognize that both groups are Semetic and both have committed anti-Semitic crimes.
Bruh, no one in modern day Israel or Gaza is fighting because of 5000 year old feuds. They're fighting because one group displaced and started mass-murdering the other in order to establish an ethnostate.
Would you like to look into what the minority group and it's situation was like in Palestine before this colonization happened? How the human rights were for this minority group? It was the exact same except the other way. Still keep on about how it's all different now.
I will restate my point that if your taking a side in this that isn't the humanitarian one. You're on the wrong side of history. And back to my original sentiment that calling this an issue of colonization is not getting this argument anywhere.
You think that family members (and let's be honest, "ancestral genetic brothers" are not actually family members on any psychological level) only have ever killed each other over religion? Not money? Not land? Only religion and 'culture'? Please.
On a massive scale ongoingly for thousands of years? Yes. Let's bring to light the many attempts at colonizing the Middle East by western powers, ie the crusades or Mandatory Palestine. These attempts were all money and land inspired and respectively very short and unsuccessful. There is no doubt in my mind that Western colonialism has wreaked havoc in the middle East for far too long. But to land those motivations on Jews and Palestinians (those who by birthright the land belongs to) doesn't sit right with me. Let's settle on the fact that Western intervention has been the real catalyst for power struggles there, while the violent puppets that play out the wars on the world's stage are only being made into scapegoats in order to justify the greed and power grabs of outside interests.
How do you want us to push for peace there too? Because we have been since the beginning of the war in my eyes.
What do you mean by "won't recover from"? Because they have lost things that can't be recovered since the beginning of the war. Russia is losing things they can't recover too; thousands of its people for example, it's money reserves, its military inventory, its non-military-sector economy. Where do you draw the line for Russia and Ukraine of what is "won't recover from"? Western nations have already committed to helping rebuild the country and especially its destroyed infrastructure.
How is the war in Ukraine "quickly turning into a much bigger global conflict"? Fighting is still only within Ukraine and the border to Russia. Western material support has been the case since the beginning.
I have to assume by pushing for peace you mean Ukraine should accept losing large parts of its territory and human atrocities in order for the fighting to end. Is letting Russia win going to reduce conflict long term though? They'll have more resources to invade other countries next. And proof that it's a worth investment. That works and they win from. There was precedent before the current war in Ukraine, which is why they started this invasion in the first place. Only this time it didn't go as smoothly.
Throwing gasoline at a fire is not going to put it out.
The US and NATO recently authorized Ukraine to use Nato controlled weapons offensively. That is a global escalation that involves Nato member states for coordination. If you don't think the escalation is growing then you aren't actually paying attention.
There has been peace talks but there has been western pressure to decline the deals. The US doesn't give a shit about what happens to Ukraine. Come on, they don't even care about us (americans), their own citizens. Ukraine has been proxy to the US for a while and the US will use whatever proxy they have to do battle with Russia no matter the collateral damage.
There is a lot of propaganda on both sides of this conflict but everyone on lemmy and reddit gobble up the western propaganda without a doubt. Let's put away the military boners and try for some actual fucking diplomacy.
The US backed coup in 2014 and the threat of NATO expansion on it's borders are some fairly obvious pieces of that puzzle but everybody here just claims "russian propaganda" when those facts are brought into the discussion.
Are you seriously calling a populist uprising a "US backed coup", implying the US had a hand in it, simply because the US ideologically supported their goals?
NATO expansion is not a justification for invading another country, especially a non-NATO one. Ukraine has the right to self-determination and freedom to associate with whomever they want, and Russia doesn't get to tell them who they can or can't be friends with.
I can only assume based on this that you philosophically support the Bay of Pigs operation, as the US saw Soviet expansion near them as a threat.
Putin didnt make his move on Crimea because he was trying to defend Russia, he did it because he knew that his plans to reassimilate Ukraine were threatened by the new Ukranian government. And the 2022 expansion of the invasion just proves that.
Fitting but a little ironic to bring that up. The Bay of Pigs and everything that lead up to that is a great example of what the US gets up to globally and exactly the kind of thing that makes me question the western narrative. They (the CIA) didn't just stop doing shit like that.
That being said, I don't support Russia either. I am not apologizing for their actions just providing pieces of explanations. Let's not pretend that they haven't had NATO expansion as a big red line on their list for a long time. The threat of more NATO at their border within an arms reach of their major cities is obviously fair. But I do think they are using that as an excuse while at the same time I think the US is taking major advantage of this situation. That is, in my opinion, a problem for peace.
Sure, countries have the right to self determine but you can't ignore the diplomatic consequences of that. Shit doesn't exist in a bubble. And the populist uprising was not so free from western influence. Come on thats CIA playbook 101 😅
Anyways, it is obviously a complex situation but the instant overnight prowar stance everyone has had since day 1 of this invasion is steeped with propaganda and people are immediately shutdown for questioning any part of the narrative and being labeled "putin's puppet". That is my real issue with this discourse. You cannot look at history and honestly think America is the good guys at pretty much any point post-ww2 so question the fuckin narrative.
I appreciate your willingness to question the narrative and push for peace even while everyone seems to have a real appetite for war. I found this article from 2014 that discusses the US's influence in the 2014 protests. The cited experts are Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern. They discuss a recorded phone conversation where two US State Dept officials are going over who they want in power in Ukraine. Snyder seems pretty convinced that the 2014 protests and elections were genuine, regardless of State Department conversations about who they want to win. Then you have McGovern, who has experience in this sort of thing, saying that the CIA does not really do this sort of thing anymore, and so the State Dept does it instead. And as i'm reading, he seems quite convinced that the US was placing its thumb on the scales, and he seems to agree that maybe this should be resolved by everyone coming to the table.
McGovern's most convincing piece of evidence is this:
The other thing is, you know, Professor Snyder talks about the parliamentary vote, voting in the new government. Well, he must know that that was a rump vote. I think it was—I think it was unanimous, something like 253 to nothing, which, you know, really is sort of a nostalgic look back at the votes that I used to count in the Soviet Union. There’s something very smelly here.
But I looked it up, and it seems like in 2014, the Prime Minister Yatsenyuk was elected via a parliamentary election where he got 371 of the 372 members that voted. Which sounds suspicious, but you should factor in the other 78 members that were either abstaining or not voting. Is it strange? Sure, but here's another theory: the protests happened with no or very little Western influence, but the elections happened with lots of implied Western influence. There was a lot of crisis and turmoil, protests and corruption combined with Russian soldiers on the doorstep. The Parliament was under a lot of pressure to act swiftly and decisively to ease unrest. So they picked up the phone when the US called, and listened to their advice. In this way, the US got the outcome it wanted, but not by particularly manipulative means. They just offered their advice, and the Parliament listened. And so, all of the anti or neutral-to-Russia Parliament simply fell in line, to bring stability to the country.
Now, I have no evidence of this. This is just my extended thoughts on the matter after trying to understand your point of view. I think the reason many are quick to defend Ukraine's side in this conflict is that Russia has shown itself to be corrupt, fascistic, and manipulative in foreign and domestic affairs multiple times over the past decade or so. And in the context of what has happened and continues to happen, it's hard to be sympathetic to Russia's "position" when they've been shown to argue in bad faith over and over again. It's impossible for us to know what the people of Crimea want because they live under an authoritarian regime. It's impossible for us to make treaties and concessions to Russia because they always break them. Every barrier to peace seems to be created by Russia, so people side with Ukraine, the underdog that they know very little about.
It isn't even apologetics, it's just analysis that isn't "russia bad america good". My point in the other thread you called me out in is just as valid here, nobody can talk about this shit rationally without spewing western propaganda and even when actual facts and valid criticisms are brought up, this is the rhetoric people retort to. "This person said something that gives a sliver of doubt to the active liberal thought pattern therefore he must be a russian shill."
I just have to assume you are a bunch of children or state actors at this point because it is infuriatingly ridiculous and naive.
You don't get fewer war machines by rewarding aggressors for their invasions. You shut them down swiftly, and make it clear that war isn't an acceptable means to resolve conflicts.
"If you invade us, we'll try to sue for peace as quickly and obsequiously as possible to end the war so there are fewer wars" just encourages imperialist aggression.
Yes, obviously the US is a massive Imperialist power. I don't want it to have those bases, or nuclear weapons, or even a military or government at all, but I sure as hell don't want it to be replaced by an openly autocratic imperialist power that also has all those things anyways, which is what Russia is aspiring to be under Putin.
But that is a completely orthogonal discussion as to whether Force is required to stop malicious actors from imposing their will on others through violent Force themselves. That is, as an anarchist, a basic requirement of human interaction; self defense and defense of others.
Jfc, can't we just fire all of these demon encrusted maggot sacks already? The military industrial complex is a cancer on the world and basically all of our politicians are corrupt pieces of shit.
The military industrial complex is currently also doing what it's supposed to be doing by helping defend Ukraine and thereby Europe. There are two sides to this coin. One could also argue that it makes a lot of sense for the United States to help defend the only democracy in the Middle East, not just for strategic reasons.
Sorry, but both sides of the coin are the same. The military industrial complex has been abusing its power over the world for far too long. It is a cancer and it is terminal.
"The only democracy in the middle east" is a piece of shit and just as rotten as the military industrial complex. AIPAC is basically the military industrial complex using Israel to further its needs. It is not good for the Israeli citizens, Americans, or the Palestinians. It is also damaging to Jewish people worldwide because Israel is hiding behind fake antisemitism claims to shut down people speaking against their atrocities. Pretty obvious how that will be damaging in the long run.
Look at the UN findings on your dearly beloved. The "most morale army" practices systemic sexual abuse. And what do you know, ethnic cleansing?! It's a bunch of Europeans/Americans cosplaying as middle eastern so they can do nazi shit.
I don't expect you to comment on what is important because you routinely avoid topics you can't twist to spin more propaganda out of. You need some flair that reads "Izzy shill" or "Fed" so people know what kind of person they are engaging with.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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Two key congressional Democrats have given their approval to allow the Biden administration to proceed with what is believed to be the biggest weapons package for Israel, expected to be worth more than $18 billion and include some 50 F-15 fighter jets.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had delayed signing off, telling CNN in April that he was still looking for “assurances” from the Biden administration over the types of weapons before giving his approval to the sale.
“I continue to support the administration’s pause on certain munitions transfers due to concerns about ongoing civilian casualties in Gaza.”
Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave the green light after the sale went through the review process, a spokesman said.
“Any issues or concerns Chair Cardin had were addressed through our ongoing consultations with the Administration, and that’s why he felt it appropriate to allow this case to move forward,” committee communications director Eric Harris said.
While Israel has steadily increased its operations in Rafah, further displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the administration has argued those activities didn’t cross the line.
You're supposed to be a little more subtle than an endless flood of "here's why Russia is powerful, and absolutely definitely winning the war in Ukraine" and then "here's why Trump is awesome and the Democrats are bad."
A heavy helping of "here's why I am definitely from Texas, look, Texas Texas Texas" is not sufficient to disguise it, I don't think.
We know by now that the economy doing well won't translate into helping us. And any minor benefits we do see will then be hoovered up by landlords, businesses that gatekeep essential goods, and legally-required expenditures like insurance, before we even have any chance to decide for ourselves how to allocate it.
"Hey, SF raised minimum wages by 2.50? Great! That means I can bump the rent on my non rent-controlled properties by a couple hundred bucks next lease! Thanks, SF!"
No matter how you slice it, there's a gap between how the economy is doing and how Americans feel about it.
Why do they keep insisting that we are the ones that are wrong? The economy isn't their numbers. The economy is a real thing, proper operation of which ensures well fed people.
The purpose of an economy is to fond optimal distribution of resources for people. Ultimately it's people that need all the things, right? Either things are materials to produce things for people, or products useful to help other products reach people.
If the people think that's not working, it isn't working. They're not just parroting what they see on the news, they're living day by day, minute by minute in this environment. They see what day to day life costs for them. They're wrong but the eggheads tracking the over fitted model are right? When a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure, that's where the disconnect is. If you want to fix the economy then quit pretending your metrics are more important than people's standard of living.
I think it is more writing to people for whom that is the case.
The economy is shifting to a set of haves and have-nots. The problems that the haves deal with are tied a lot more to economic performance than have-nots.
You also have a case where unemployment is still low, with a lot of the issue being tied to low minimum wages. Usually, the problems that have-nots have with the economy have been tied to unemployment. You can get a job in this economy, it just won't be well paying.
The GDP is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people. The difference between perception of economic barometers like this one is that people used to have more faith in capitalism and it has become so painfully clear that this faith is unwarranted. In the past, people in desperate financial situations could easily delude themselves that they were temporarily embarassed while everyone else in the same situation was probably just lazy. Now people are starting to realize the system is causing it and are much less willing to eat the table scraps thrown to them during times of "economic prosperity."
The measures they use to say the economy is 'good' have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.
They account for value in dollars, that's true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren't really anchored to anything meaningful.
For example, let's say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You've got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn't cheap, but that's because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.
Now let's say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these 'inefficiencies' in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren't as thick, but it's still better than the other options, so they keep coming.
At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren't eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.
Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.
At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you're selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.
Except you've just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that's actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.
Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?
All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don't really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can't get a good smoothy.
The whole thing is a mirage that we've been killing our society chasing.
Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.
In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we've seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80's, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.
Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it's unquestionably a lower quality product they've displaced.
Across the beverage industry as a whole, you've got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.
So that's a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.
We're angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn't feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.
The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.
Basically, people are more aware of how they, personally, are affected by the economy.
The economy in general is doing better, but the majority of citizens are able to apply less and less of that to the things they value, and they see more and more of it being funnelled to the already wealthy.
FYI: The Mises caucus is an even more far-right faction of the (fake) Libertarian party that leans pretty heavily into ethno-nationalist policies. I'd take everything this organization says with a massive grain of salt.
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't know the Mises caucus, and they sound terrible. Actually, I only knew of Mises and some other dudes from the Austrian school of economics and thought it would be a legit institute. Looks like that's not the case.
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