yogthos

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

The west solved that problem by effectively doing capital controls for Russia. Now that Russia has been decoupled from SWIFT, moving money out is pretty hard.

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

There are always ways to try and get money out of a country, but the west made it as difficult as possible to do so. And the result has been that money is indeed staying in Russia which resulted in a big increase in business activity as IMF now openly admits.

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

The article doesn’t say anything of the sort.

Heather Rolfe, director of research at British Future, said that, despite their high level of education, many HK migrants were likely to be unemployed or working in jobs below their skill level. They are filling gaps in sectors, including retail and wholesale, information technology, education and hospitality, she said.

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

There is zero basis for your assertion that majority of immigrants weren’t able to find jobs their skills aren’t transferable. This affects certain professions to be sure, however plenty of people like software developers have skills that are very much transferable. Drivers are able to find jobs because those are the kinds of low paying jobs immigrants get, not because their other skills weren’t useful. And yes it very much does boil down to opportunities available, which in UK are slim to none even for people born there.

If you’re going to claim that lack of transferable skills was the core issue, then do provide a source to support your assertion.

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

Again, what you say is true for some professions, however you have not demonstrated that this is the primary reason for people not being able to find jobs. The fact that people born in UK are struggling to find jobs seems to indicate that the problem is not limited to immigrants.

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

cope

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

It’s true that it is often more difficult for immigrants to find good opportunities, even when they have high qualification in their home country. And the reason for why people wouldn’t want to admit that they bet on the wrong horse is pretty obvious. Imagine selling out your home country and thinking that the westerners are superior, then finding out that none of it is true. It’s a pretty embarrassing thing to admit. Saving face is particularly important in Asian cultures en.wikipedia.org/…/Face_(sociological_concept)

yogthos , 23 days ago

Another common China win.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

everyone but the NAFO trolls

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

weird how it only got more corrupt after the coup 🤡

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

🤡

yogthos OP , 23 days ago

aww it’s adorable how much projecting you’re doing

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

I am happy that the support for the proxy war is finally crumbling in the west which means the war will finally end and people will stop dying. Only a complete psychopath would not be happy about that.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

Imagine genuinely believing that Russia has more influence over Europe than the US. 🤣

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

Yeah, I wonder why parties that have been against the war from the start are rapidly growing in popularity across Europe as it becomes clear that the war is a debacle that’s now collapsing European standard of living.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

Anybody with a functioning brain understood that Ukraine could never win a war against Russia. As Obama openly said back in 2016:

Obama declares Ukraine to be not a core American interest and that he is reluctant to intervene in the country, because

Yet, western powers convinced Ukraine to fight Russia anyways because as RAND explained back in 2019, using Ukraine as a proxy was seen as a way to weaken Russia.

The reason the war started has also been publicly acknowledged by the head of NATO

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Now, after two years of the west prolonging the war, the only possible outcome is becoming clear even to dimwitted western public.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

If you understood that US has more political influence over Europe than Russia then you’d also understand why your conspiracy theory is nonsensical.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

Nice historical revision there, but those far right parties, who all have close ties with Russia and/Putin personally, have been very in favour of the Russia invasion of Ukraine right up to the point where they stopped winning.

[citation needed]

Huh? What collapse? I certainly haven’t noticed it, and the tiny drops of aid to Ukraine certainly haven’t been the cause of it. In fact, the most-opposed countries have given less than a tenth of a percent of their GDP.

Ah yes, I’m personally unaffected by the events in the world around me, therefore they’re not happening. The economic war with Russia has obviously been the cost for things like rising energy prices, which led to collapse in industrial production in Europe, and made it impossible to compete with China. The most opposed countries are now having massive cost of living increases, business failures, and showing complete lack of economic growth.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

That is literally the only possible out come of this war. How many more people have to die and how much more Ukraine has to be destroyed so people like you can finally understand this fact?

yogthos OP , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

The government in Ukraine very clearly does not represent the interests of the people living in the country. It banned all opposition along with free media, and cancelled elections. It’s a western backed dictatorship that’s literally kidnapping people off the street to throw them into the war. This is what people like you stand for nytimes.com/…/ukraine-military-recruitment.html

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

Again, it’s pretty clear what your statement is trying to say, and it’s absolutely hilarious how you’re trying to spin it into something else now.

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

A white peace would be great but I doubt Putin would accept that.

How to say you’ve been guzzling war propaganda for the past two years without saying it.

yogthos , 25 days ago

European values are showing again.

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

oh yeah I see the other one

yogthos , 25 days ago

The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s also difficult to bring their money with them due to strict transfer limits. China is shedding its parasite class, and the leeches are migrating to their natural environment.

yogthos , 25 days ago

It’s actually difficult to bring their money with them due to strict transfer limits. China has strict capital controls.

yogthos , 25 days ago

Money is just a social contract though. What they can’t take with them are the means of production. Stuff like factories that they used to own will stay in China. What people in the west don’t seem to understand is that the economy is fundamentally about allocation of labor and resources towards meeting the needs of the people. Money of itself has no inherent meaning, that’s why the government can just issue as much currency as it needs.

Many of the billionaires are complicit with members of the party, obviously, sharing the money with those in power in order to do what they please.

If that was the case in practice then they wouldn’t be fleeing China to go to places like US where they can do as they please.

yogthos , 25 days ago

exactly right

yogthos , 25 days ago

Realization they’re not in charge is likely the main driver I would imagine.

yogthos OP , 26 days ago

Ah yes, people spending time to create the content on this site are the ones entitled. Sure got me there bud.

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

Because people complain either way. Some people have plugins that don’t work with archive.ph, so people complained about me not posting direct links. Given how easy it is to go to the archive and paste the link if you get a paywall, I really don’t get why people complain so much.

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

how very entitled of you

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

Asking people to do extra work when submitting links that you can trivially do yourself is in fact being entitled.

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

as most entitled people are

yogthos OP , 24 days ago

That’s fair and I often do add archive when I know there’s a paywall. I’ve got a plugin that does a decent job of unpaywalling, so sometimes I don’t even notice it. So I agree with you that adding archived links is a courtesy, but people acting as if not posting a link at all would be better are just being unreasonable in my opinion. This is the plugin I mentioned incidentally

github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

yogthos , 26 days ago

Bro, English is not math, and your statement is not a diagram, so people are left to interpret the meaning of it. If you weren’t trying to imply that populism and fascism are closely related when you said they overlap beautifully, then why bring it up at all?

yogthos , 25 days ago

I know how Venn diagrams work buddy. I’m pointing out the lack of logic in your argument. Populism and nationalism don’t have much to do with fascism which is a product of liberalism and capitalism. There are plenty of examples where nationalism and populism result in socialist movements, Viet Cong being one prominent example.

This is to say that you don’t actually understand the cause of fascism and its relationship with populism and nationalism.

I can’t believe I have to explain this to someone but here we are.

yogthos , 25 days ago

Nazi Germany is an example of what capitalism turns into when it’s in a crisis. What we’re experiencing in US and Canada right now is late stage capitalism that’s making things unlivable for large swaths of the population.

Meanwhile, systematic destruction of socialist movements over the Cold War created a situation where the right is the only option for people who become disillusioned in the mainstream politics. This is also by design because fascism does not fundamentally threaten capitalist interests.

There are indeed some very uncomfortable parallels with the rise of nazism and fascism in Europe before WW2. It’s also worth noting that right wing extremism gets a lot of support from the rich normalizing their views. People like Murdoch and Koch brothers spent billions promoting right wing views in the media, and we have right wing groups quietly doing the same thing here with Postmedia. Even Toronto Star was recently acquired by a right wing group.

It’s also dangerous to think that such right wing movement can be stopped simply by voting. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power the mask comes off. Republicans were seriously considering similar tactics during last elections, and I’m sure we’ll see that happen again going forward.

First chapter in this discusses the rise of fascists in Italy and nazis in Germany, and it’s hard not to draw parallels with what we’re seeing currently happen in US and Canada:

After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

Beyond that I’m not going to argue with someone with their head up their ass. History has proven again and again that liberals are absolutely clueless historically and politically.

yogthos , 25 days ago

yup

yogthos OP , 25 days ago

These bombs are routinely used on the urban areas in Gaza. Ukraine uses HIMARS and ATACMS to hit civilian areas instead.

yogthos , 26 days ago

If you think that taking a decade to build a bridge illustrates US capacity to build bridges effectively, then sure.