Mr Hootington posted:

Good. Another victory in the fight against climate change.

MysteriousStranger posted:

Right but this isn't even a capitalism problem this is a human problem. It's in our DNA to be assholes to wreck other peoples poo poo to get more poo poo to us. You cannot undo that without the total extinction of the human race (which I am not opposed to). So we either have some sort of lack of massive wars due to peace among the rich, we go back to war all the time cause war, war, war. Or we get wiped out. There are no good options, just least bad options.

WorldsStongestNerd posted:

In all fairness in regards to something like slavery for instance, we only have about a 150 year example of it being considered bad. And even then it continues to this day in other parts of the world while we indirectly benefit. If we were slaughtering and enslaving each other for 10000 years, then the weather parts of the world kinda stopped less than two centuries ago, that seems like an anomaly. One of those relatively peaceful periods we achieve every once in a while.

Looking at world history, even just western history, and saying we've outgrown our nature is like an alcoholic saying he got clean because he managed to not have a drink for one day. Roughly a century of certain parts of the world swearing off raping and murdering is not really a trend yet in the greater context of history. Especially when it looks like we're going to backslide in the face of climate change and resource depletion.

Agean90 posted:

No, not the big plane!

https://twitter.com/elintnews/status/1499351053384527876

redneck nazgul posted:

Despite what sanctimonious Swedish teenagers tell us, aviation contributes only like 3% of the world's emissions (for comparison, road vehicles contribute something like 20-25%).

Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:

Honestly, if Russia did largely find a way to make their troops shut the gently caress up, that's a tremendous battlefield advantage.

Breakfast All Day posted:

this thread is disgusting, a repugnant disregard for human life and suffering. im going back to the good thread, no the other good thread, where we're clarifying and all shaking hands that the highway of death was a-ok

Atrocious Joe posted:

Another one asking Westerns to stop asking for military solutions and demand humanitarian corridors out of Ukrainian cities, to be agreed upon by current combatants
https://twitter.com/kazbek/status/1499109900865216513?s=20&t=gNL_HPQpYZGj--N30Z-XDQ



This slogan can of course be twisted into a call for military intervention. However, if Azov and it's allies are preventing evacuations, this is probably the nearest thing to criticism people in Ukraine feel they can openly make of the war.

Al-Saqr posted:

the Chechen s are the only people on the Russian side bothering to do propaganda

https://twitter.com/asbmilitary/status/1499385395599101953?s=21

MysteriousStranger posted:

Right but this isn't even a capitalism problem this is a human problem. It's in our DNA to be assholes to wreck other peoples poo poo to get more poo poo to us. You cannot undo that without the total extinction of the human race (which I am not opposed to). So we either have some sort of lack of massive wars due to peace among the rich, we go back to war all the time cause war, war, war. Or we get wiped out. There are no good options, just least bad options.

WorldsStongestNerd posted:

In all fairness in regards to something like slavery for instance, we only have about a 150 year example of it being considered bad. And even then it continues to this day in other parts of the world while we indirectly benefit. If we were slaughtering and enslaving each other for 10000 years, then the weather parts of the world kinda stopped less than two centuries ago, that seems like an anomaly. One of those relatively peaceful periods we achieve every once in a while.

Looking at world history, even just western history, and saying we've outgrown our nature is like an alcoholic saying he got clean because he managed to not have a drink for one day. Roughly a century of certain parts of the world swearing off raping and murdering is not really a trend yet in the greater context of history. Especially when it looks like we're going to backslide in the face of climate change and resource depletion.

quote:

But the factory system also required ‘many work-people’ – with Farey – of a rather peculiar training. A weaver, smith or farmer working in his own home, shop or field maintained a pace of his own choosing and performed the moments of production as his own skills instructed him. In the factory, the labourer had to conform to the motion of the central prime mover. She was under obligation to keep pace with it, carrying out the actions directed by its array of machines in unison with a whole team of operatives who had to begin, pause, restart and stop at signals. She must submit to the command of the manufacturer and his overlookers, who enforced compliance with the rules laid down; the hands – as they were so tellingly known – should know how to exert consistent effort, respect tools as the property of others, bow to strangers, work in a closely contained crowd.16

The water mill called forth the regime of factory discipline, which was, when it first appeared, intensely repugnant to most. Who could possibly be persuaded to enlist in these barracks? ‘It is hard for one born in a mature industrial region, inhabited by patient and disciplined factory workers,’ economic historian Arthur Redford wrote in 1926, ‘to realize the difficulties involved in the deliberate formation of a factory community.’ The traditional culture of relatively free work, cherished not as a distant utopia but as the only known way of life, made even the destitute hesitate at entering the factory, whose architecture and regimentation resembled those of a workhouse. Even if hands did show up at the gates, there were no assurances that they would continue to turn up the next day, keep up the rhythm of work or execute the orders in due order: recruitment of workers acquiescing to the discipline soon proved to be a persistent headache for the first industrial capitalists.17

...

Meanwhile, there were the towns. Few transformations of early nineteenth-century British society were so conspicuous and widely commented upon as their explosive growth: ‘A new society had arisen, owing to the congregation of large masses of unskilled labour in densely populated towns,’ one MP observed in 1844.65 In 1750, London was the sole English centre with a population exceeding 50,000; half a century later, there were eight such centres; another half a century later, twenty-nine, of which nine had more than 100,000 inhabitants. In 1801, 66.2 percent of the English population still resided in the countryside, but the share fell precipitously, and the 1840s saw the balance reversed forever: the census of 1851 for the first time registered a majority as living in urban areas. Scotland underwent a similar changeover with the rise and rise of Glasgow, passing Edinburgh around 1800, Paisley trailing one step behind.66

British urbanisation was a process sui generis: in 1851, the rest of the world remained overwhelmingly rural, perhaps one-tenth of humanity living in towns. The exceptionalism persisted throughout the century. In 1890, 61.9 percent of the population of England and Wales dwelled in towns with at least 10,000 inhabitants, while the figure for the country second on the list, Belgium, was 34.5 percent, France staying at 25 percent, China at 4.4 percent; by 1900, the metropolitan region of Manchester – including satellites such as Bolton, Oldham and Stockport – contained the largest concentration of human population on the planet. At no point in the century, however, did British urbanisation proceed faster than in the period 1811–1825. The first half of the 1820s marked the record with a 2.6 percent annual increase in the urban population of England. Certain towns evinced even more stunning rates, the population of Manchester swelling with an average of 3.9 percent in the 1820s, matched by several other northern industrial cities but outpaced by the metropolis growing faster than any other: Glasgow. Such a pace of urbanisation as Britain experienced in the run-up to the panic would not be attained in most advanced capitalist countries until the decades around 1900.67 In other words, the years of the most decisive transition from water to steam were immediately preceded by the greatest burst in urbanisation ever seen in Britain and probably anywhere else on earth too.

Well underway already in the seventeenth century, the exodus from the English countryside gradually accelerated before culminating in the early nineteenth, when the human flows were dominated by ex-farmers abandoning their villages for the new conurbations of Lancashire. In the forty years from 1776 to 1816, most of the increase of the urban population materialised through this steady drain of people bidding farewell to their valleys and moors. Such newcomers would hardly have been more apt to perform factory labour than if approached in their original homes, perhaps not too far from a waterfall, but they soon begot their own children. The manufacturing towns were disproportionately brimming with youth, the age cohorts most inclined to pack up and move, and all those young women and men – also the most fertile segments of the population, for whom reasons to postpone intercourse tended to disappear in cities – set about reproducing. Immigration gave way to natural increase as the largest source of urban population growth; as it happened, the shift occurred precisely in the 1810s and 1820s.68 From this point onwards, the ranks of urbanites swelled primarily with second generations: young boys and girls born and raised in towns with no personal memories of other forms of social existence. Now this offered manufacturers an unrivalled – both quantitatively and qualitatively – reservoir of labour power.

JuulPodSaveAmerica posted:

https://twitter.com/dmytrokhutkyy/status/1499130578138017795

mawarannahr posted:

https://twitter.com/hunterschwarz/status/1497387205647429634?s=21

Al-Saqr posted:

but how would we know that they’re winning if they’re not tweeting it all the time?

spacemang_spliff posted:

because the chuds were basically right about them (which makes sense because chuds and libs are just different forms of liberalism). they put up "hate has no home here" signs and tell themselves they care about people but at the end of the day they're still bloodthirsty American barbarians. they can't help that their brains are hosed up

Tankbuster posted:

Average nuclear war enthusiast.

Sherbert Hoover posted:

you know for as naive as libs are and as bad as their takes are, it would be pretty weird and maybe bad if everyone in the world had the kind of dispassionate realpolitik analytical reaction we tend to go for

Sherbert Hoover posted:

you know for as naive as libs are and as bad as their takes are, it would be pretty weird and maybe bad if everyone in the world had the kind of dispassionate realpolitik analytical reaction we tend to go for

gradenko_2000 posted:

all right, I'm going to take a moment here to quote from Andreas Malm's "Fossil Capital":

Do you understand what had happened here? During the birth of the Industrial Revolution, there was no proletarian mindset. People who were put to work in factories rebelled against the simplistic and mechanistic, yet exacting pace of factory work, because it was so much more different from their rural lives.

In order for people to become good little capitalist workers, there had to have been an entire generation born in the cities, who had no such memories of what it was like to live in a feudal, agrarian society, who would not struggle against working eighteen hours a day doing repetitive work, because they had no conception of better things being possible.

This is what Marxists mean by human behavior being shaped by the mode of production. People are not "inherently greedy" - people act according to what the system demands of them.

Sherbert Hoover posted:

you know for as naive as libs are and as bad as their takes are, it would be pretty weird and maybe bad if everyone in the world had the kind of dispassionate realpolitik analytical reaction we tend to go for

Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:

Honestly, if Russia did largely find a way to make their troops shut the gently caress up, that's a tremendous battlefield advantage.

mawarannahr posted:

hmm

Breakfast All Day posted:

hey i noticed you wanted to discuss whether banning russian art is justified, but you haven't given zelensky a handy yet

quote:

SENIOR US DEFENSE OFFICIAL: We believe that the convoy is stalled. It's a long convoy, so I can't be perfectly predictive, Tara, on every mile of that, whether they're moving or not.

But they are not moving -- they are not moving at any rate that would lead one to believe that they've solved their problems. So we would characterize it as stalled. Again, we don't have perfect visibility into what's going on on the ground there.

But we believe that there's numerous factors for this.

One, the Ukrainians have been conducting a stiff resistance north of Kyiv. And we have some indications that they have also, at places and at times, tried to target this convoy.

Again, I can't tell you what that looked like. I can't quantify that. I'm just saying we have indications that they have also tried to slow that convoy themselves.

And as for the food and fuel, again, our assessment is that they are suffering shortages of both. I've seen nothing in the reporting that gives me confidence that they packed, you know, three days' worth of food. I can't corroborate that. But they continue to have significant logistical and sustainment challenges.

I will say again, as I've been saying now for many days, that we would expect that the Russians will, again, learn from these missteps and these stumbles and will try to overcome them. And I think our belief is that that is still the case.

quote:

And on the coast, I mean, all I can tell you is, again, what we're seeing. We saw them move through this town of Berdyansk on the way to Mariupol. They are outside Mariupol on the coast, and we see today that they are attempting to go down from the north towards Mariupol to the south on the ground. How much of the Sea of Azov coastline they, quote/unquote, "control", I don't know. They used that coastline to move north out of Crimea, northeast of Crimea toward Mariupol. Whether they are holding coastline available to them, I don't know.

I think it's important to remember that it's our assessment that they continue to want to move on population centers. You know, we've been talking about these three axes of movement. They are all sort of aggregated towards major population centers. Mariupol is a major population center that we know they want, and so that seems to be their goal. I've seen nothing to indicate that their goal is to hold coastline, and it wouldn't be clear to me why they would do that anyway. There no maritime threat that they're facing from the Sea of Azov. So I don't know. To be honest with you, we don't know that they're holding the coastline, but what we have seen them do is consistent with a move on population centers like Mariupol.

quote:

On the C-Team question, again, we don't have a detailed understanding of the whole Russian order of battle. We've had a pretty good general sense and we've talked about that, but in terms of what units are commanded by what leaders and the mix of conscripts versus volunteers, we just don't know, except to say what we've said in the past, which is that this is a military largely made up of constricts. That's just the way that the national defense is staffed in Russia.

So it's not at all surprising to us that you're seeing a lot of conscripts, draftees, if you will, in this -- in this flow of forces. And -- and now, I would remind you, as I've said today, earlier, he's got 82 percent of the combat power that he had assembled for this war, 82 percent is already in Ukraine. So I don't know that it's a very valuable comparison to go by "well, it's whether that you've got less experienced and now more experienced" -- he has the vast majority of the combat power that he set out to use already inside Ukraine. So they're there.

Now I can't say how many of the leading elements were ill-trained conscripts versus more experienced soldiers.

Q: Just very briefly, do you see any evidence of the Russians preparing to send in reinforcements, backup, assembling further things back in Russia to be ready to reinforce?

SENIOR US DEFENSE OFFICIAL: No, we are not. And again, when I say that he's got 82 percent in there, I hope that we're not conveying to anyone that that means we think, you know, he's spent, like he's dwindling his options. Quite the contrary -- he's continuing to add to his options.

So please don't take away from the fact that he's got that much already in Ukraine, that somehow, you know, that he's in extremis when it comes to the combat capabilities that he has available to him. I will add, though, one of the things -- and this kind of gets to your question, I think -- is one of the things that we have been observing is that they don't appear to be integrating their combined arms capabilities to the degree that you would think they would do for an operation of this size and scale and complexity.

So, you know, all along, we've been talking for weeks about the combined arms capabilities -- armor, artillery, infantry, special operations, combat aviation, logistics sustainment. You know, he assembled all that stuff.

On the face of it, as we watch things unfold, in addition to seeing stiff and determined courageous resistance by the Ukrainians, in addition to seeing some logistical and sustainment issues, in addition to seeing a little bit of risk averse behavior, as we talked about yesterday, we are also seeing that the integration of these elements appears to be lacking.

Karach posted:

lol this is exactly what's happening. I was cruising the trucker freedom convoy's reddit yesterday and all the posts are like "wait! the Canadian government is chock full of literal Ukrainian nazis, and they're calling us nazis?!" and it's like you might have a point there texas_toasted49, because the Canadian government is full of goddamn Ukrainian nazi sympathizers.

Varinn posted:

exemplifying the neoliberal spirit by demanding posters earn offset credits by posting which kind of plane they would send to ukraine based on their ARMA experience, which they can use to post "is it legal for a blue check to dome a guy if he has russian vibes"

mlmp08 posted:

I think this attack by Russia was a very bad idea for them. They could have just not done it.

redneck nazgul posted:

Sherbert Hoover posted:

you know for as naive as libs are and as bad as their takes are, it would be pretty weird and maybe bad if everyone in the world had the kind of dispassionate realpolitik analytical reaction we tend to go for

Happiness posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpoDJf6PcKk&t=6s

Frosted Flake posted:

I think Ukraine should have signed Minsk II, and surrendered or negotiated a peace before their Capital and Army were encircled, separately.