SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]

They were not exactly friendly until the last few years. China was looking to deepen its economic ties with the US and EU, and saw North Korea’s nuclear development as a nuisance to their path towards prosperity. You have to understand that, at least from 2005-2015, China has a lot of pro-Western libs who love America. I cannot emphasize enough how many of my friends saw capitalism as the way forward even as late as 5 years ago.

Of course, Trump gave China the biggest wake up call they could ever hope for, and things have never been the same since.

The complete financialization of the US economy.

Nearly every single S&P500 company is majority owned by institutional investors, with 88% of them having one of the Big Three (Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street) as their top investor, and with the only exceptions being Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Oracle, Walmart, Comcast and Kraft-Heinz where insiders are still the top shareholders. The Big Three has 15-20% controlling stakes in nearly every large American corporation, and through the means of coordinated proxy voting, dictates the policies of the board of directors.

These institutional investors are financial capitalists who see the companies as investment vessels, not as industrial capitalists who want to grow their respective industries. They could not care less if the companies go bankrupt as long as they see a return in short term profit. Vanguard, for example, has a deep $7.7 TRILLION assets and do not care at all if some of their businesses go down.

Then you have private equity firms, also known as “corporate raiders”, who raise high stake loans to perform “leveraged buyouts” of established companies. They conduct “financial engineering” i.e. paying themselves dividends, lower wages and force overtime without pay, layoff employees, skirt labor laws, refuse to honor contracts, strip off assets and saddle the companies with debt until these are forced to declare bankruptcy. Then, like true parasites, they ditch the host and jump on to the next companies to suck off their wealth built up over the past century.

You also have venture capitalist (VC) firms that leveraged Obama’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era after 2009 to raise easy capital to profit from tech/software companies. You can read this article about how Andreesen Horowitz perform their operations to destroy software startups:

The thing about these two strategies for VC is that they both can turn a profit. That second one, though, works a little differently than the first. Regardless of whether the company succeeds, pumping its valuation before selling your shares can mean you will make money, even if the business itself doesn’t survive in the long term. But hyping a startup isn’t something a VC can do alone. He needs help. He needs the media.

It happened to Groupon. It happened to Substack. It happened to Imgur. And many others, and it will happen to Reddit and all other software companies in America.

This is by no means only restricted to software companies though, for the rot of finance capitalism had already been sown since Reagan’s and Clinton’s deregulation era that massively expanded Wall Street’s influence, and subsequently fueled most prominently by Obama’s low interest rate monetary policy for them to encroach into every crevices of American industries.

Cisco, used to be the world’s leading telecommunications company, now a shadow of its former self after being financialized by Wall Street.

Boeing, used to be the world’s leading aviation engineering company, now churning out defective products that nearly never happened in its history, after being financialized by Wall Street.

Intel, used to be the world’s semiconductor pioneer, now struggling to keep up with Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, after being financialized by Wall Street.

And this is the fate of America - a financial oligarchy will continue to devour and strip off every remnant of the American industries built up over the past centuries, and there is nothing to stop this in its tracks.

It’s UN Security Council sanctions. They are not lifting existing sanctions, just not implementing new sanctions on the DPRK.

In Russia, there are two versions about why Russia participated in the sanctioning of DPRK.

First, is that Russia wanted to appease the West so they went along with the sanctions.

Second, is that China wanted the DPRK to stop developing its nuclear weapons (remember the Chinese leadership has a lot of libs who love America at one point, especially before Trump), but the DPRK didn’t listen (good decision, considering what happened to Libya) so China decided to punish DPRK from the UNSC as a warning, and dragging Russia to go along with it.

Both versions are not mutually exclusive.

But this is exactly what the US wants: to trigger a capital flight from Europe and devouring the rival currency bloc i.e. the EU/eurozone.

When Hitler’s General Staff were planning Operation Barbarossa, they gave themselves 4 months to crush the Red Army. After the first winter, they would run into significant logistics and manpower issues.

And yet, they still invaded the USSR, fully confident in the supremacy of the Third Reich and that the inferior Slavs - who could not even make anything more complicated than a lightbulb - would instantly crumble from the full might of the Nazi forces.

The fascist mentality never changes.

Not mentioned was how the US responded by sending Stingers and Javelins to Ukraine, first in August 2021, then December, and publicly boasted about the fact.

What kind of message do you think NATO is sending to Russia here?

Cows are evolutionarily closer to whales than horses.

How?!

The Kharkiv retreat allowed Russia to hold referenda in the four new oblasts in peace. There had been talks about the referenda to be held in August but it kept getting delayed because of the fear of an imminent Ukrainian counter-offensive. Literally right after the Kharkiv retreat, after the Ukrainian had poured their troops into Kharkiv, the Russians held their referenda. No Ukrainian attacks on those regions. A military defeat, maybe, but a political victory for sure.

To be fair, Russian media also uses red for their own side, and has been so since the Soviet times (the Red Army after all) and everyone is already used to the color scheme.

Not much actually, you’ve put it very succinctly.

I do however find it bad taste to blame a failure in scientific endeavor on a country’s political leadership (which to be fair, deserves to be criticized in many other ways) while ignoring the fact that after the Space Shuttle program fraught with disasters ended in 2011, Russian spacecrafts were the only means to send American astronauts to space for nearly a decade (with near accident-free record) until SpaceX came along. If the Russians weren’t reliable on their space technology, do you think the NASA would even think about booking the Soyuz flights? (Keep in mind that the Columbia disaster killed all 7 astronauts, NASA would not even have considered Russian space flights if the risks would involve repeating such disasters)

Finally, I think many people who live in the first world Western countries seriously underestimated the consequences of what the Washington-led neoliberal shock therapy did to post-Soviet Russia. Entire industries were being carved out and mass unemployment and poverty happened in just a few years leading to crimes and even child prostitution (which had practically been eliminated during the Soviet times) were simply unthinkable for most people.

The modern day Russia is the consequence of Western imperialism, period. You can blame all the reactionary elements in the country and laugh at their poverty, but this is what being defeated by imperialism looks like. It will take decades if not longer to recover economically, especially under unprecedented sanctions, and all that has to factor into a lunar lander program that they last tried 47 years ago, no?

The entire V-2 team under von Braun from Peenemunde surrendered to the Americans on May 2, 1945 and brought with them more than 400 core scientific-technical employees, full documentation and reports and more than 100 intact copies of the A4/V-2 rockets ready to be shipped to the front, together with the combat launchers and the military personnel trained to operate the missiles.

The Peenemunde site was by then already deliberately destroyed to prevent anything useful from falling into the Soviet hands.

Operation “Ost” did happen, however, but the highest ranked German scientist they managed to recruit was Helmut Grottrup, who was von Braun’s deputy for missile radio-control and for electrical systems. He had claimed to be an anti-fascist, we may never know the truth, but he was indeed imprisoned by the Nazis for a time.

The vast majority of the German specialists who worked for the Soviets were not former associates of von Braun in Peenemunde, but were instead introduced to rocket technology when the Soviets established the Institutes RABE and Nordhausen in Germany after winning the war.

Werner von Braun later remarked:

“… the USSR nevertheless succeeded in acquiring the chief electronics specialist Helmut Gröttrup… But he was the only important catch from among the Peenemünde specialists.”

Other German scientists who worked for the Soviets such as Kurt Magnus and Hans Hoch (leading academics in gyroscopy) as well as Manfred von Ardenne (later awarded Hero of Socialist Labor) came from the academia and adjacent industries, and were not members of the Nazi Party.

They also managed to recruit workers and technicians who were POWs liberated from the Dora concentration camp (which supplied personnel for the notorious Mittelwerk factory, where von Braun had committed crimes against humanity including the torture, beatings and execution of the prison labor). Many of the POWs were involved in the sabotage of the A4 (V-2) rocket production at Mittelwerk, and resulting in substantial proportion of misfires and inaccurate flight trajectory when the Nazis used the rockets against England.

In other words, the Soviets had to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch (the R-1, which is the copy of A4/V-2), while the Americans got everything they needed. The Americans only fired the V-2 a few times, and then went on with their own “hybrid” designs such as the Navaho, Aerobee and Viking.

And in spite of all this, with such overwhelming advantage, the Americans still LOST the race against the USSR. The R-7 became the world’s first ICBM to be launched in 1957.

To put it in the terminology of you computer nerds, the Americans got the entire core dev team, with the complete source code and full documentations, and the whole tech support team, while the Soviets had to work with and piece together information from third party developers, and still raced ahead of the Americans.

Are we pretending like Trump didn’t resumed arming the Azov Nazis that were committing atrocities in Donbass (after it was stopped before the end of Obama administration), and that Trump didn’t push for increasing spending for NATO in their European member states?

Yes, that’s what I meant. You start out as friends (whether you meet online or in real life), and develop from there as you get to know each other better.

That’s not I meant. You don’t specifically go do hobbies to date people, but they are activities where you get to meet new friends.

And as you get to know them better, sometimes feelings are formed, and sometimes the feelings are reciprocated. That’s when you start dating and form a relationship. Even if the feelings aren’t reciprocated, you still have made a friend.

It’s a much more healthy way of forming relationship than trying to meet random people who most likely aren’t compatible with you. This was how most people met their spouses (as shown on the chart in the 1990s) - through friends and as coworkers. You get to know people better if you see and interact with them regularly.

If you think about it, dating people is really just getting to know each other first. So, I don’t understand why dating apps are designed to help with “dating” rather than “making new friends”. It’s much more healthy to use the online spaces to meet new friends rather than to specifically date someone through an app.

I still don’t understand the concept of online dating.

What’s so hard to make friends through hobbies, and from there develop your relationship from? It’s far more likely you will find someone compatible if you are already friends with them first, than trying to form a relationship with a stranger that you literally know nothing about except for what they advertise online.

Of course, this would require people to actually go out and meet people. Maybe this is what they’re afraid of in the first place?

Umka is a pretty popular one. I think every Russian kid has watched it at some point.

Michael Parenti is pretty good