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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The Democrat establishment wants power and for that they have to win elections. So having an anti establishment candidate is preferable to them over a Republicans victory. If anything good came out of the last election, it is that Trump as horrible as he is can still win elections against an establishment Democrat, so the Democrats have to change.

    Also changing the parties does not work. The problem is systematic and the US really needs to change its election system, to get better politics.


  • Mutualism allows for other goals then just economic growth. Just as an example a housing cooperative tries to provide cheap housing for its members. If it has more housing, then that is actually a problem, as that has to be maintained as well. On the other hand the cooperative will built or buy more housing, if members housing needs are not already meet. That is very different from renting from some corporation and owning some of their shares. That is actually the case for a lot of mutual projects. Worker cooperatives might very well choose to not raise pay, but cut working hours. Utility cooperatives focus on providing the electricity, internet or whatever else for cheap and high quality rather then trying to make money.

    In other words mutualism tries to meet peoples need, rather then grow for growth sake. Degrowth acknowledges that the economy has natural limits like for example greenhouse gas emissions, which should not be crossed. However within those limits growth is possible and even desirable when it improves peoples life’s. The fact of the matter is that we need something better then capitalist corporations and mutualism certainly has some good answers to that problem.






  • Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. From Wikipedia:

    In 2022, she stated that NATO and the Biden administration not taking the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO off the table may be one of the factors provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[291][292] She also argued against economic sanctions on Russia on the basis that Americans would suffer from higher oil and gas prices.[291] Gabbard stated that “the Washington power elite” is trying to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan.[293] In March 2022, she said media freedom in Russia is “not so different” from that in the United States. PolitiFact described her claim as false, noting that in Russia the government represses independent media and free speech, including imprisoning critics of the invasion of Ukraine.[294] In February 2024, Trump met with Gabbard, who has been an outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine, to discuss the future of US foreign policy in case of his re-election.[295]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsi_Gabbard#Ukraine_and_Russia



  • Because Trump wants to end the war, but the US is not the country to make the call. Ukraine still has a strong military and arms industry itself and many European countries and the EU have the money and arms industry to keep Ukraine in the fight. In fact we saw that when the Republicans blocked aid to Ukraine for months. Today it is even worse for Russia as both Ukraines and the EUs arms industry have grown.

    Russia on the other hand has been hit by sanctions for years, which make no mistake have hit the Russian economy hard. We are talking high inflation, problems finding money for the government, gas sales having collapsed, a somewhat likely housing crisis, defaults of lots of companies in Russia, coal industry collapsing, private bancrupcy rising fast and a lot more bad stuff. The Soviet era weapon stockpiles are running low and Russia has increasing problems finding new recruits.

    Ukraine can keep the fight going for quite some time, without US help. That might be long enough to bring down Russia. The key word being might, as it depends on a lot of factors, most notably European support, but also the oil price and a lot of other factors.

    Looking at this taking land has two main advantages for Putin. First of all it lowers European support for the war, as they might believe that Ukraine is going to loose, hence pushing for peace and secondly in a peace deal it gives him leverage.