You’ll get labeled as terrorists regardless.

They are just edging this bill till nobody pays attention. Democracy at work!

These kinds of articles make sure that the sides of the canals where I used to live, will never be rust free.

The only substantive aid it delivered, was aid Israel in the massacre of Palestinians. Team America at it again.

The Freikorps consisted mostly of veterans of the Prussian army, and the specific division that executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht was led by Waldemar Pabst a high ranking official in the Prussian army.

What I am “implying” is that there was good reason why in the interwar period being anti fascist and anti SPD was not an uncommon opinion.

Calling it a democratic government is quite a short cut. They were in the middle of a revolution, in the process of deciding what the future of Germany would look like, no elections had taken place. In the population there was huge support for dismantling the Prussian military institutions, but the SPD decided to not only keep the military as is but also to use it against their political opposition. I’m not saying the Spartakusbund were the good guys, I’m saying that the excessive violence of the SPD was foreboding of what was to come.

The line “first they came for the communists” from Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, goes back longer than just the Nazis.

After the fall of the Kaiser the SPD started working together with ultra rightwing shock troops (Freikorps) to subdue communists, the broader left and the labor movement. Gustav Noske (SDP) literally called himself the bloodhound (bluthond).

Lookup the death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht for more fun facts about the SDP in that era.

I only read the article before, but Christ that video is shocking. He just intensionally twists the question three times, and then accuses the journalist of not doing his job for only citing two sources (the fucking Israeli government and the UN). Plus the moderator constantly interrupting the journalists while the government is just obviously lying. Staatsräson in action.

They should have asked Annalena Baerbock she has seen the videos.

Out of curiosity, if this is ever legally recognized as a genocide, is there anything human-rights law or international law says about people knowingly spreading lies in support of it?

Edit: And will she be just as vigilant about Israel systematically raping prisoners as a form of torture (something for which there actually exists multiple sources).

If Russia succeeds in occupying Ukraine completely it will take an immense amount of resources to subdue the population, I don’t see why this will be any different than Iraq. Given the current resistance it might even be impossible for Russia to simply occupy Ukraine and extract its resources, this is also probably the reason why they have tried to sue for peace multiple times.

Putin is a moderate in Russian politics, and it is relevant because it means there are ways to negotiate with him.

How does this argument work, the military spending of the Nazis was insane in the build up to the war, up to 40% in 1939, no such numbers in Russia. Even now it’s just estimated at 10% and they clearly need all of it just to fight the war in Ukraine. How are they ever gonna steamroll Nato with those numbers, there is no tangible proof that they are planning for this.

The Putin is Hitler mantra also doesn’t make any sense, he has been a moderate (all be it an authoritarian) politician for decades, and now he suddenly is the rebirth of Hitler. Just looking at his politics he’s clearly not a fascist.

We’ve been sold that Ukraine can win this war militarily, and the collective west can cripple the Russian economy with sanctions alone. Now that this turns out to be complete BS, they (a subset of western politicians) are looking for a way out, and clearly their preferred way is further escalations. So now they are selling us even more BS to justify this.

A leaked draft of the UNRWA report detailed an interview that gave a similar account. It cited a 41-year-old detainee whe said that interrogators “made me sit on something like a hot metal stick and it felt like fire,” and also said that another detainee “died after they put the electric stick up” his anus.

So they are raping people to death…

I was more stating what I think will happen rather than wat we should be doing.

In terms of pure physics it is ofc easier to turn off the metaphorical tap, but in terms of power and politics we seem unable to transition to renewables. And I’m afraid once we switch on the geo-engineering button we still won’t transition. Only once oil is priced out of the market completely, be it fusion or abundant solar and wind (with energy storage), will we make the transition. But again I might be too pessimistic.

Fusion would solve a lot, but even if we invent room-temperature superconductors today, it would still take so much time to roll fusion out on a big scale and replace oil infrastructure with electric infrastructure.

I tend to be very pessimistic about climate change, but I hope I’m wrong.

If it was possible I would put quite some money on that geo engineering (like stratospheric aerosol injection) will be seriously discussed on a UN level within ten years. Climate change seems only to speed up and co2 emissions are still rising. At one point there is simply no alternative.

It already was after Iraq, but now they dragged it upstairs to throw it out of the window again, just to make sure it’s really dead.

100% agree, no longer being oil dependent would make the middle east a saver place (as well as having many other advantages).

But even the green revolution needs cheap labor, recourses, and rare-earth metals. Countries that do not want to play game and want to nationalize key industries for instance, will be coerced financially or militarily by greater powers (be it the West, China, or Russia).

So the idea of one country being worse than the other is not really relevant and moreover a known strategy for getting war support. I am happy that I don’t live in Iran or Saudi Arabia, but escalating conflict with either of them will not improve anybody’s life. Look at Syria or Libya.

Remember kids: Iran is the bad Middle East autocracy and Saudi Arabia is the good Middle East autocracy.

US foreign policy has always been and will always be interest based rather than value based, but they will use moral arguments and threat inflation to drum up support for their misadventures abroad.

But they are not gonna leave, and we can’t make them without risking worse (for Ukraine and the world at large).

And of course we can’t force Ukraine to stop resisting (nor should we, it is their right), but I have the impression the west does not want this to end (regardless of the cost of Ukrainian lives), and sees this as an opportunity to weaken Russia.

The world of geopolitics is a world without police, so I agree that the invasion is a war crime, but in practice there is not much we can do that doesn’t make the situation worse.

In my opinion the best we can hope for is peace by means of a balance of power.

The lack of credible enforcement of international law is made very clear by the Iraq war, a war of aggression where the perpetrators were never held to account because the US was powerful enough to prevent that.

I don’t think it’s morally bad to be pragmatic in that sense, if trying to punish Russia leads to nuclear annihilation.