Eh…it’s a start, but it’s not particularly impressive. Ethnic nationalism is a threat to the multi-ethnic Russian state, so of course someone whose primary interest is in preserving that state would adopt this view. Not to mention the fact that fighting literal Nazis for three years kind of pushes you in this direction regardless whether you wanted it or not. So it’s not that he is any less reactionary than he has always been, it’s that the circumstances in which he finds himself leave him no other choice. It would be actually based if he restored the name of Stalingrad. Sure, that would also just be symbolic, but it would be a much clearer signal that the Russian state, even if still bourgeois for the time being, is looking seriously to its anti-Nazi roots.

Not that surprising. I heard as a rule 1 May - 7 May is supposed to be nightmarishly busy in China in terms of numbers of tourists. It’s a major holiday period for Chinese people.

For the time being.

I’ve never used it, so i can’t say. But i know it is popular and a lot of people relied on it.

I think it depends on the broader social and historical circumstances. Policies can’t be analyzed in a vacuum, they have to be looked at in context. I am not against the idea of school dress codes, but in general there should definitely be no such restrictions in the broader public, i think we can agree on that.

However, even in schools, in this case i don’t think it’s a good idea, because this is not rooted in a desire to help women and advance secularism, it’s rooted simply in Islamophobia, which in Europe is essentially a form of racism. In different historical and cultural circumstances such a ban might possibly be justified, but not in a European country where Muslim people already face prejudice, othering, hate, suspicion and discrimination.

If we were talking about this policy in the context of, say, early 20th century Atatürk’s Turkey, then i can see this argument being valid that this is a way to have schools encourage secularism and combat the entrenched religious conservatism in society, but this is not remotely the case for Belgium. What needs combatting in Belgium is not religious conservatism, that is not a major social contradiction in this society, rather it’s bigotry, racism and Euro-chauvinism.

The same cope narrative as with Russia:

“Ok, so maybe China is winning…but they aren’t winning fast enough!”

I never thought i would agree with the right wing on this but liberal universities really are brainwashing institutions. They just don’t produce leftists/Marxists like the right wing thinks, they produce neoliberal imperialists…

By the way, this is not new, the CIA has always recruited massively from Harvard and Yale.

Finland has a massive superiority complex, in more ways than one. They really thought that they could cut themselves off from Russia without consequences.

I’ll be honest, i think some of this is Russian media doing a bit of sensationalism. Reality probably was somewhat more boring. From what i’ve read the Koreans were first mainly used in the backline to get them used to how this conflict operates and then gradually given more tasks closer to the front. I doubt it was quite as “cinematic” as this describes, but it makes for a good story to portay the Koreans in this way and that sells well in Russia. Not that i’m opposed to it, i actually think that creating this legend of the Korean super soldiers is great for boosting relations between the Russian and Korean people. If the Russians see the Koreans as these heroic self-sacrificing allies that is good for both countries.

Relations are definitely bad at the moment. But they’re always bad and they usually find a way to not end up in a war.

Nope. They’ll still exist. They just won’t be rewarded for it by the system like they are now, where sociopathy and a willingness to fuck other people over is basically a requirement for amassing wealth and power.

Of course, old leftists don’t exist on the internet. I too am totally younger than 25. How do you do fellow kids?

“Rule of law” was always simply a veil of legality over the otherwise naked dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. “Rule of law” under a bourgeois dictatorship is simply another tool which the ruling class uses to keep the masses in line. The elites themselves are never subject to that “rule of law” in the same way that the working class is. Therefore the bourgeois justice system cannot be viewed as anything but a weapon of class war by the bourgeoisie against the working class. The abandonment of even the pretense of “rule of law” by a capitalism in crisis (fascism) only accelerates the demise of the system, depriving it of the fig leaf of legitimacy which the myth of the “impartial and independent justice system” allowed it to maintain. It exposes the real class nature of the state apparatus and its legal institutions; it sharpens existing contradictions.

There were no major shortages prior to Perestroika. There was slower economic growth as a result of the oil crisis of the 1970s, but otherwise the economy of the socialist bloc was doing fine pretty much until the USSR decided to liberalize. They did this primarily for ideological reasons, not material ones. Then everything became severely fucked up and this had downstream effects on other socialist countries, where you had the dual shock of losing the strong economic anchor of the USSR coupled with their own liberalization reforms inspired by the ideological movement for liberal reform that was emanating from the USSR, which then destroyed the basis of their socialist economies. Even countries such as Romania, which did not liberalize and which was doing very well up until the 1980s with some pretty incredible growth, had the rug pulled out from under them when the USSR started wrecking its own economy and abandoning its allies, and this forced Romania to go into austerity to repay IMF loans which in turn created the shortages.

Excellent text, incredible to see the Chinese government going back to emphasizing Maoist ideas in its rhetoric, and a reminder to read (or re-read) On Protracted War.

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Our mods are great! 😊

A lot of people are suggesting it’s just a cynical pump and dump scheme, and while there may be some partial truth to that (insider trading is happening, of course, they wouldn’t let an opportunity to make money go to waste), i think we shouldn’t underestimate how arrogant, stupid and ideologically convinced of the US’s invincibility Trump and certain people around him are. I think a big part of them really did think that a) the mere threat of tariffs would get any country to bend the knee and give the US everything it wants, and b) that they really would bring manufacturing back.

I mean listen to how some of these people talk about economics when they give interviews, and i don’t mean Trump and his semi-illiterate ramblings, i mean people who are supposed to be his “economic advisors”. They really are that delusional and that sold on the whole American exceptionalism thing and on “the markets will just magically make it happen if we give them an incentive” neoliberal dogma. They don’t understand how the economy or international trade actually works, and so of course they would draft and push utterly nonsensical policies which then catastrophically backfire.

Lol. I mean… when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound ideal, no.

I just think it’s an interesting thing to think about, you know, how people like to say “you can’t put the genie back in the box” when it comes to technology like nuclear weapons or AI (which i consider similarly dangerous to humanity but also a necessity for socialists to adopt once capitalists have them, as we can’t leave this powerful of a tool just in the hands of the enemy), but actually you probably could do it given a militant mass movement with sufficient quasi-religious fervor. Would it make the world a better place? No, most likely not, because the tools aren’t really the problem, the social and economic system is.

It’s mostly bullshit. Just your typical Ukrainian nationalist historical revisionism. Unfortunately this is taught to them in schools, along with other even more absurd nonsense. Very reminiscent of how much history was distorted and pseudo-history fabricated in Germany during the Nazi era.