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VictorPath

403 karma · joined June 19, 2021

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VictorPath··on [dead]
> you can't even eat in most non-urban places or foreign countries because the insane concept of not cooking with animal fats and eating and using animal products just doesn't exist. You have to survive holding your breath from one hipster downtown area to the next.

I don't know about their vegan traditions, but vegetarianism has been big in India for at least 3000 years. It sounds like tradition to me, religious (Jewish and Muslims do not eat pork, Hindus do not eat cows), and something outside a hipster downtown area.

I suppose going to McDonald's and eating a super-processed burger from some chemical injecting factory farms in the antithesis of "bugman".

VictorPath··on ‘Limited’ Tactical Nuclear Weapons Would Be Catastrophic
> Something tells me that the anti-NATO folks on the Far Left who hold ineffective anti-war rallies don't understand the need for the threat of force if agreements aren't followed.

As Putin's recent addresses have been denouncing gays in the West, and the vast majority of conservative republicans to liberal democrats in the US congress have voted to send more arms to the Ukraine, I suppose the provenance of peace in this conflict is, as you say, on what is called the "Far Left".

Whether anti-war rallies are ineffective or not I can not say. The lowest estimate for the London anti-war rally in 2003 was 750,000 people. In my experience when more than 750,000 show up against something it has a political effect. Of course rallies and marches alone do not change things, a sustained campaign of education, organization and agitation is needed. Historical records show the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War had political effects in preventing escalation.

There is the far left, and there are architects of the Vietnam War like Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He spent his retirement warning of the dangers of a small conflict between major powers spiraling into a full-scale nuclear conflict, and that it was something that could happen, he was in the room when these decisions were made and he helped craft these decisions. Not a far left view, but a Republican Ford CEO who worked to crush the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

The point being there is danger on either side. Nuclear proliferation and escalation seems more dangerous than moves toward disarmament to me. Nowadays the US, UK, France, Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea are all members of the nuclear club. And Russia and China both have significant nuclear triangle capabilities.

In a class-based society of nation states, where idle class heirs expropriate surplus labor time from wage workers, over a long enough timeline, a war involving nuclear weapons seems an inevitably.

VictorPath··on Kharkiv Rubyist during the war: We are still here
> the International Criminal Court (ICC)

The USA passed a law that its armed forces can invade the Hague if the ICC ever tried to charge the US.

It shows the farce of all of this - fresh from murdering Afghanis, Iraqis, Somalis, Syrians, and by proxy Yemeni, Palestinians etc., the US presses fir a "court" to try Russia in some sanctimonious exercise that it can not be a subject of.

VictorPath··on Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses
> How do you think the French would react to the import of Arabs

An Arab from Morocco would "import" to France - Morocco is an independent country. Israel does not recognize Palestine as an independent country but as territory belonging to Israel, and the IDF patrol the West Bank and haredi settlers create settlements there, in violation of UN resolutions.

VictorPath··on Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses
There is no law banning inter-religious marriage in Lebanon either.

What different churches and such allow in terms of inter-marriage is left up to them, just like in, say, the US. But no laws prevent religious intermarriage.

VictorPath··on Israel passes law denying naturalization to Palestinian spouses
> These 2 nations are de-facto at war

Israel has said Palestine is not a nation, and has worked to block Palestine from entering the UN as a member state.

VictorPath··on A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
> Stalin foreign policy (not unlike Chamberlains) was to pull Germany to his side

Sort of. Prior to 1933 was the Third Period where the Comintern was antagonistic in Germany even to socialists ("social fascists"). From 1934 to the end of 1938 the USSR was looking for a self-defense pact with France, or the UK, neither country of which was interested (Blum in France was not for complex reasons). In 1939 the USSR and Germany signed a peace treaty, which Germany would break within two years, but it gave the Soviet Union enough time to prepare for invasion. Also Germany having a western front helped the Soviet Union.

Stalin was initially unsupportive of Lenin's plan for a socialist government in Russia in 1917. Then again, neither were most Bolsheviks. Lenin did not have global goals with himself at the center, and Stalin's goals were even more modest. Of course they made the most of whatever foreign good will they had.

VictorPath··on Vladimir Putin is pushing Russia into past: Maybe a generation, maybe a century
US-armed Israel was bombing hospitals and clinics in Gaza last year.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MSF/status/1393868206566223872

Of course Israel said Palestinians they were fighting were nearby, but that is what the Russians are saying too.

I don't remember the maudlin, mawkish melodrama of hospitals and clinics being bombed by a US armed country being such a big deal in the US last year.

Actually Biden's team is in Saudi Arabia right now discussing a deal for Saudi Arabia to export more oil if the US drops its minimal sanctions last year relating to its bloody war in Yemen and disembowlment of a Washington Post reporter in a Turkish embassy.

VictorPath··on When families un-adopt a child (2018)
> Luckily this is a self-correcting problem

Being as people have been around for at least 500 centuries, and birthrate are leveling off, if this were going to "self-correct", it would have already.

VictorPath··on Ukraine accepted to NATO cyber defence centre
Also in 1918 the US, UK, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Romania etc. invaded Russia.
VictorPath··on Advice on accessing BBC News
Or when the Irish elected Sinn Féin MPs to parliament and the voices of the MPs were banned from the BBC.
VictorPath··on BBC resurrects shortwave broadcasts as Russia blocks news of Ukraine invasion
Ofcom has sent out notices, and the UK has blocked news of Russia from its citizens, by banning RT and such.

https://news.yahoo.com/rt-russian-backed-tv-news-105214336.h...

Russia seems to be doing what the UK is doing to it, blocking the BBC in retaliation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the English locked Irish people in concentration camps without trial. In Derry people marched through the street and the British Army opened fire on the crowd killing 14 civilians. The queen then decorated the regiment who did this with medals. The Irish began to elect (abstensionist) Sinn Féin MPs to the UK parliament, but the BBC was banned from broadcasting their voices. So this kind of censorship is not new to the BBC.

VictorPath··on New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
Look at what unions did to North Carolina.

North Carolina is in a tie with South Carolina for lowest unionization in the US. The textile mills promised workers if they didn't unionize they would be OK. They didn't, yet the textile mills closed up and left the country any how. After years of low pat they are now low skilled workers with little savings in a town without industry.

In Detroit, workers like Larry Page's grandfather battled during 1930s strike and wound up making a good living. He sent his son to college, and his son founded Google, holding aloft the improvised weapon his grandfather made in the 1930s UAW strike.

The difference is when Detroit was a union town, it produced grandsons like Larry Page. Burlington, North Carolina was never a union town and it was working class then and nowadays over one third of those under 18 are under the property line.

Also Detroit was in a union state when one-income families with the breadwinner working 40 hours a week owned a home, had a car (or two) working in a factory. Now Detroit is not in a union state, it is in a so-called right-to-work state.

VictorPath··on New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
> they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it.

The heirs receiving dividends from the New York Times company slack off to the extent of never working a day in their life, yet receiving massive amounts of money from those doing the work and creating the wealth at the New York Times company.

The union works so that the workers creating the wealth send less of it to these lazy, slacking "job creator" parasites.

VictorPath··on New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
> Meritocracy

Large corporations who have been around a while are controlled by heirs who have never worked, the purpose of which (according to law) is to extract as much surplus value profit from those doing the work. It sounds like the antithesis of meritocracy.

Unions are organizations where union elections are comprised of those doing the work and creating the wealth.

VictorPath··on The war on gifted education
> meritocracy...children compete to get into the best nursery school

If the round hole is the mythical meritocracy, the comical square peg is wealthy parents having their kids "compete" to get into a nursery school and declare the entrants got in by "merit". What a farce.

VictorPath··on No need to declare captured Russian tanks, other equipment of invaders as income
> the cookies claim is a tell that you spend a lot of time consuming Russian propaganda

It's not a claim, there's video of her doing it. So "Russian propaganda" means a video of a US assistant of secretary of state handing out cookies in the Maidan Square where the Azov battalion etc. were overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government.

VictorPath··on Helping Ukraine
The link you posted says the opposite of what you said - it said the CIA was involved in the insurgency before the USSR came in.
VictorPath··on Helping Ukraine
> Many in the West perceived the Talibans and Bashar al-Assad as illegitimate rulers that oppressed their populations.

Afghanistan had a secular, left-leaning government in the 1970s - the US armed and funded the mujahideen, the radical Islamic jihadists, to overthrow that government.

VictorPath··on No need to declare captured Russian tanks, other equipment of invaders as income
Who was handing out cookies in Maidan Square during the Euromaidan? Just the tip of the iceberg of the outside help.

In another forum, someone said to watch for the coming "let's roll" vignettes. Of course they were right, the US corporate press seems to be looking for narratives of heroic Ukrainian resistance, whatever the evidence - the defiant Snake Island defenders (who there later emerged video of them surrendering and Ukrainian officials saying they may still be alive), the Ghost of Kyiv fighter ace (who does seem like an actual ghost) and on and on. Of course it's difficult to verify the facts of these heroic narratives spun from rumor and propaganda during the fog of war, where the first casualty is the truth.

There are also many reports from almost the first day about how the Russian military is on its last legs and so forth, which sounds absurd. There may be one or two small there's there, but from US corporate media reports you'd think they were on the verge of defeat. Kind of like how the NLF were said to be on their last legs in 1968, prior to the Tet Offensive.

VictorPath··on Please, delete all new places since the start of war 23th of February
Well, Kiev in the Ukraine will have Russian tanks rolling through any day now, but at least they got OpenStreetMap to throw out its on-the-ground rules and say the Crimea was still part of the Ukraine. The honorary tae-kwon-do black belt Putin got was stripped too.

The Ukrainians were really played as a bunch of saps for the US/UK, and its encouragement of belligerence in the Donbass and in the Ukraine's application to NATO. And the Ukrainians are and will be paying the price for their belligerence and gullibility.

VictorPath··on Cozy Futurism
> Californians overwhelmingly don't want this

From 1960 to 2010, Americans when polled if someone with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health insurance or government-funded care not only wanted that by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority. Nevertheless it was blocked for half a century in the legislature.

There is a narrative that many of these things don't happen because Americans don't want them, but that is a false narrative.

On the half century theme, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 50 years ago. All productivity gains have gone to the rentiers, to the heirs. Why are the people doing the work and creating the wealth going to support something they see no benefit from?

VictorPath··on Russian Ruble just lost ~30% of its value
> Controlling arctic energy resources will essentially make Europe less reliant on Russia if both the United States and Canada starts heavily investing in it.

So you're saying we should enact the plot of "Don't Look Up", but in real life.

VictorPath··on Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Feb 26, 2022
> And madman though Putin may seem to be, he knows NATO isn't an offensive organization

Sure, like the defensive bombing of Libya by NATO.

VictorPath··on Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Feb 26, 2022
> The goal is to topple Ukraine's leadership and install a puppet who will be more aligned with

So like the western-backed Euromaidan basically (without Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan square).

VictorPath··on Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Feb 26, 2022
The Winter War was not a colossal blunder, the Soviet Union got the territory it needed to protect Leningrad from attack, which happened a year after the Winter War ended.

Also various reforms happened after the Winter War that readied the Red Army for the soon coming invasion of the USSR.

There were military, and possibly political, blunders by the Soviet Union in the beginning of the Winter War, but the result was a successful one for them.

VictorPath··on KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's warning to America (1984)
> post-modernism, a direct offshoot of Marxism

The communists manifesto says

"Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."

This grand narrative and ideology spoken with objective certainty with regards to binary oppositions, is the complete opposite of postmodernism.

Milton Friedman's works in a similar vein although on the other side are the opposite of postmodernism as well.

VictorPath··on How old are democracies across the world?
> It's limits on government power (regardless of what a majority want) and the ability for the people to kick out the current government that imo are most necessary for a free country. The other details don't really matter if you don't have these.

So a country where the people can't change their own government are what you call liberalism and democracy. Got it.

VictorPath··on Marxism vs. Liberalism: An Interview Between J.V. Stalin and H.G. Wells (1934)
> People on the left were outraged. How dare you give work to people on a government mandate

The heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth are the ones who not work. Their wealth is from government mandate - the government was created by them to do this and enforce it. When are they to work?

VictorPath··on Marxism vs. Liberalism: An Interview Between J.V. Stalin and H.G. Wells (1934)
There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the family, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the family. There should be no such contrast, because family, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the family."

Horrifying.

Not really. In a well-functioning family individual and family interests are in tune (of course there are not well functioning families where, say, step-parents and stepchildren get into physical altercations.

Contrast to Georgia in 1860, where an individual slave had interests contrast to that of the plantation.

Odd a worker in tune with his fellow workers is horrifying. What then is a wage slave grinding it out in some Amazon warehouse to enrich Bezos and his investors?

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