SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

Capitalism on the one hand, communism on the other… man, I just support a Third Position!

Russia has the power to stop the war and retreat.

Yes, but if they do this, Ukraine may kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the previously occupied territories, including Crimea. Such an outcome is obviously unacceptable to Russia. The Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries have seen the pro-Russian separatists as subhuman for many years.

Yeah the west and Russia where saber-rattling. But Russia choose to act and it.

Russia chose to act on it because it was quite literally the last moment they possibly could have done so, given the rhetoric at the time of Ukraine potentially joining NATO (and even Zelensky asking for nukes!). NATO attempted to provoke Russia into war for decades by marching their military forces towards Russia’s border and establishing anti-Russian governments in ex-Soviet countries. Many in Russia accuse Putin of cowardice because he didn’t act sooner against NATO and Ukraine and getting them into this mess now when almost every country of note has been converted into NATO vassals, far from opposing him for being a tyrant or whatever. I’m not saying that this makes those civilians correct, it’s merely outlining how Russia “choosing” to act on it might not have been a random act of cruel violence by Supreme Dictator Putin but instead an action informed by a whole bunch of factors and that the Russian government has generally been pretty non-violent up until this point even when America is directly spitting in their face and adding more and more countries to the Fuck Russia Club. The Russians might say that they heavily disagree with these countries having NATO membership because it imperils them - and it very obviously does - but when the Baltic states joined NATO for example, Putin didn’t march his army to conquer them in retaliation. When Finland joined, he didn’t send the tanks over the border. It was a measured decision by Russia to intervene in Ukraine, and it is important to have understanding beyond cliches.

The thing is putin will only use diplomacy on his on terms, and these terms alone will threaten the existence of Ukraines souveränity itself.

This is untrue. At the beginning of the war, in April 2022, Russia and Ukraine almost made peace along the lines of Ukraine regaining Kherson and Zaporozhye, and ceding control of the Donbass, which they already didn’t really control anyway due to the Donbass War that has been ongoing since 2014. Ukraine was also allowed to join the EU, but not NATO. The West - in the form of Boris Johnson - came along and told Zelensky to not make peace with Russia, and so the deal was cancelled. We know this because Putin showed off this unfinished peace deal to various African politicians earlier this year. Ukraine could have kept millions of people inside their borders and hundreds of thousands of men alive, and kept two oblasts that they now do not own, if they had taken this deal and ignored the West.

Even so, Russia stated numerous times that they were still willing to make peace. It is Ukraine that does not seem to want it, because their terms are always “If Russia completely withdraws their forces then we will begin to talk,” which is an absurd condition no matter whether you’re in the right or wrong in any geopolitical or military situation. You see this a lot in history, where countries say “Oh yes, we won’t declare war on you, you must only agree to a set of conditions that we know you will never accept,” because it makes them look slightly more reasonable to other countries for not just marching in there. I’m sorry, Ukraine could be the most perfect, utopian society that has ever graced the world and Russia could be the most barbaric, backwards, evil nation ever seen in world history, and I would still see Ukraine’s demand for Russia’s total retreat as ridiculous.

And victim blaming is never ok, even when you think the victim is an asshole.

The question of who’s the “victim” here depends on how far you’re willing to look back in history, what you think are relevant facts about the situation, whether you believe the 2014 coup was in fact a coup, whether you believe that Ukraine is plagued by fascist paramilitaries like Azov or whether they’re cutesy fun girl scouts, and quite literally hundreds of other things. I’m not even willing to be automatically contrarian and say “Actually, Russia is the victim and NATO is the aggressor!” because that’s also not correct, the situation is way too complicated. This isn’t Harry Potter vs Voldemort.

absolutely unfuckingbelievable. the entire entertainment industry just churns people through exploitative systems and phenomenally rich bastards and spits their husks out at the end, I would be amazed if piracy was affecting the outcomes of artists and musicians by even 1%. pretending that this is damaging the EU economy is also very funny, the Europeans are having zero troubles damaging their own economies by cutting off from China (read: acting as if they’re decoupling from China and then buying the exact same Chinese products through third countries at additional cost)

I literally have this link bookmarked for dipshits like you.

Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries

We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nations of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill.

This story is so widely propagated by the aid industry and the governments of the rich world that we have come to take it for granted. But it may not be as simple as it appears.

The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken.

What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States.

What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

Foreign aid from the West is literally a scam to cover up vast flows of money and resources away from the developing world and towards developed countries. It is the equivalent of the Gates’ of the world donating 0.00000001% of their daily income to charity and the media getting on their knees and fellating them for it. And, as others have said, even the absolutely paltry sums of money donated in foreign aid by the West merely ends up back in the hands of their own investors, because developing countries exist merely as debt peons to be endlessly harvested, without meaningfully developing them.

This is the face of modern imperialism.