It seems like they took Kursk without losing much.

Pretty sure they lost at least 3 columns trying to take some towns there.

Now they have a bargaining chip for peace talks…

No they don’t. For the territories they occupy to be a bargaining chip, the territories would need to be strategically important enough for their capture to threaten Russia’s ability to fight this war (they aren’t) and Ukraine would have to be able to guaranty that Russia can’t get them back by fighting and is forced to negotiate to get them back (highly doubtful given that Ukraine can’t even stop Russian advances in their own territory, only slow them down at best).

…and possibly diverted attention away from the main front.

Last I’ve heard Russia haven’t even diverted troops from the main front line in Ukraine, so no, it didn’t even achieve that. Which makes sense when you know that Russia has way more manpower and equipment than Ukraine right now, this isn’t the stare of the war when Ukraine’s army was motivated and received billion dollars arms shipments every week anymore.

Forcing the enemy army to split over more front lines only works if you have the resources to maintain more front lines better than your enemy can. Which is why it’s Ukraine who are getting stretched thin by their own shenanigans here, not Russia, the Kursk invasion was objectively not a smart move.

The western reporting may also get under Putins skin.

That’s cute, but war is won with steel and blood, not twitter ratios. “owning Putin” is at best going to be a very short moral boost that’s only gonna last until the soldiers on the front line notice that they are still getting shredded en mass by Russian shells all the same as before.

Death to Israel.

I wish Netanyahu a very

There are no truly neutral parties and there is no such thing as unbiased. If a source or a media tells you they are unbiased and/or perfectly neutral, they are either lying to you or don’t properly understand what biases are and how they work.

However, some sources are more biased than others on different things.

Take the American election observers who endorsed the election results mentioned by the article for example.

Like I’ve mentioned, they aren’t truly unbiased or neutral as that’s not possible.

BUT

At the very least, they don’t have a money trail linking them the international terrorist organization that tried to overthrow Venezuela’s government multiple times (CIA and it’s ecosystem of right wing think-tanks).

I’d like to hear how the heck you can possibly think that this ☝️ isn’t a VERY OBVIOUS bias.

Economics Explained has a massive neoliberal, pro-western bias which makes his analysis very questionable to say the least.

Their latest video about my country France for example is 18 minutes of him yapping about why akshually it’s a good thing that Macron is taking away our retirement pension, during which he says such absurdities as unironically arguing that France is kinda socialist.

Your reading of the situation is correct. There is a few reasons why this is the case:

1. De-industrialization

Imperialism allows western countries’ capitalists to exploit the cheaper resources and labor of some economically less developed nations and acquire super-profits on top through unequal exchange, since doing this is much more profitable than producing industrial goods in the west directly, western industrial capitalists have a huge incentive to move their factories to the third world. This has the effect of de-industrializing the west itself, and has gotten so bad that some European countries like the UK can barely even produce their own steel anymore, which is very bad given how important steel is to a lot of industries.

This makes the west more and more dependent on supply lines they don’t necessarily control in order to get the resources and goods they need, in this situation the smart thing to do would be to diversify your supplier countries do reduce any ones’ leverage over your country. But…

2. De-localization and American influence

The US has been hard at work making sure Europe was dependent on them above anyone else for supplies.

They have also have been offering generous advantages to businesses who would de-localize to the US, aggravating the problem for their own profits.

This is part of the reasons why the US has been doing somewhat better than the rest of the west despite de-industrialization and financialization affecting them too, they’ve been sucking on Europe like a parasite to offset the problem ever so slightly.

3. Innovation vs profits

As you’ve noted, most of the technological progress lately has been happening in the third world who has been catching up while the west seems to have lost it’s drive and is being overtaken. There are a lot of factors at play here but the main issue is the profit motive. A lot of research and a lot of things that are useful for a society aren’t profitable.

Take China’s high speed train network for example, it’s a very good thing for the peoples that there is such a good method of public transportation available, but it’s not profitable, the Chinese state is running it at a loss (offset by other income sources, but still). Because of that, such a good railway network would never be built in the west because the western companies and even governments are only interested in infrastructures if they bring in a profit.

An other example is renewable energy. For many years a lot of peoples have had and propagated this narrative that, since green tech is becoming cheaper, profit driven organizations would have an incentive to switch away from fossil energy, yet this hasn’t happened. Why? Because profit isn’t that simple.

Why can a business buy a pile of woof for 1$ and sell a chair made from the wood for 2$? Where do the added 1$ come from? It comes from work, they can take this chair made from 1$ worth of wood for 2$ because it’s not just a pile of wood anymore, something happened to it, someone used their time and energy to turn the wood into a chair. If it was possible to use some kind of spell to turn wood into chairs without effort, competition would drive the price down to the value of the dead materials that makes it: 1$, and the profit rate in the industry would be 0$ or very close to 0.

This, in a nutshell, is why cheaper green tech hasn’t pushed corporation to transition to clean energy. Sure, it’s cheaper, but it’s also vastly less profitable because green tech like solar panels and wind turbines are much more automatized than fossil fuel which mean less peoples who’s work add value to each unit of energy produced which mean proportionally less profit. This is why the green transition hasn’t happened and won’t anytime soon as long as the west is driven by the profit motive above all else.

4. What can be done?

The problem is the profit motive and private property. The capitalists shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever they want with the industries and infrastructures society needs, taking them to a different country whenever they feel like it, taking jobs away from us to exploit less developed nations, etc…

What needs to be done is to kick out the neoliberals, nationalize a bunch of important industries, restrict what capitalists are allowed to do with their private properties and moving toward abolishing private property altogether.

And the way to move toward this goal is to learn political theory and start organizing. Go to marginalized communities, poor peoples, even to the petty bourgeois not wealthy enough to move their business to the US and get left to die by the wealthier international bourgeoisie who are robbing their country, help them, listen to their problems and their complaints, help them understand where these problems come from and why the right’s analysis of the situation isn’t correct, and build a democratic popular movement able and willing to take power, by force if necessary.

Apart from the pure , you gotta love the subtly racist smugness of white westerners halfway across the fucking planet being so confident that they would know better whether or not and by who the peoples of middle-income countries are exploited than the peoples of middle-income countries themselves.

I DON’T insist on Biden at all.

Maybe not you specifically but I’ve seen a lot of peoples do.

many MORE people in this world will suffer, struggle and die under Trump than under Biden. It’s just math and all your ideology is VERY empty in the face of it.

See, I think this is where we disagree.

You operate under the assumption that the things that the Republicans want to do couldn’t happen under Biden, presumably because you think he would block Republican policies, but knowing what I know about Biden and his policies, his willingness to “reach across the aisles” and give concessions to the right, his tendency to passively letting Republican bills pass without doing anything about it even when he clearly have the power to, his failure/unwillingness to roll back Republican policies from Trump’s last term let alone the ones that he expanded instead, etc… I’m telling you honestly, I don’t believe that for 1 second.

I have not seen ANY evidences that Biden would act against Republican politics.

Heck I haven’t seen evidences that he wouldn’t do a complete 180 and start supporting Republican policies that he used to denounce, it wouldn’t even be the first time he does it.

In your arguments in favor of voting blue, you (the peoples who tell everyone to vote blue) always use this assumption that Biden couldn’t possibly be as bad as Trump as an axiom, as if it was just obvious, you never bother trying to show that it’s true, you never question it, I certainly haven’t ever seen any of you questioning it or trying to demonstrate it. You just treat it as some sort of fundamental truth to the point you don’t even seem to notice that you are using it sometimes.

I haven’t seen any reason to believe that this assumption is true, on the contrary.

When I look at the 2 last US presidential terms, I don’t see a bad president and a worst president, I see a bad president who tell you that he’s gonna to terrible shit and does exactly that and an other equally bad president that pinky promise he wont do terrible shit but then do terrible shit anyways and blames the other bad president for it when he get caught doing terrible shit.

I just don’t understand the pro-Democrat party crowd’s strategy. Why do they insist on keeping Biden as the Democrat candidate when that clown keeps nuking it’s own odds of winning more and more everyday with his stupid shenanigans? If the peoples who keep berating everyone to vote for Biden see Trump as some sort of ultimate threat, why do they insist on using a candidate that even they admit is hated by most of his own voter base against Trump? That sound like a terrible strategy to me. Shouldn’t they be mad at the Democrat party for taking such risk by insisting on a candidate so widely despised? Why don’t they call for a candidate that is actually likely to beat Trump? Why do they keep berating the folks who have made it clear that they won’t be voting for Biden under any circumstances when the over 60% of the Americans who don’t participate in politics are right there?

We won

Who could have seen this comming

When the west goes on a diplomatic trip: Our wholesome president went on a peace mission to make fair and responsible deals for the greater good ☺️

When a country the west doesn’t like goes on a diplomatic trip: Evil dictator traveled to advance his evil scheme, he probably explained his plan to his butler in his office while looking out the window on a rainy day before laughing maniacally as thunder struck outside 👿

I don’t think they ever will be completely obsolete, the paradigm will probably just shift away from big formations of big boats with big guns to smaller more maneuverable boats in smaller groups more specialized on long distance strike capabilities using drones and missiles.

Hell yeah!

That makes sense

Unfortunately and scarily, Russia is showing much of the same pattern as Germany in its most dark past, with the ruski mir looking more and more like the german lebensraum.

When you totally know what the lebensraum was.

The Nazis’ lebensraum project wasn’t just taking over a bunch of land in Europe, it was a settler colonial project inspired by the American policies of systematic forced displacement and extermination of the native populations under the doctrine manifest destiny.

Lebensraum was a pseudo-scientific racist theory formulated by pro-colonialism far right German thinkers, according to the lebensraum theory, a race needs a certain amount of space for themselves in order to attain their full potential and therefore need to take their necessary territory from “lesser” races by force. To summarise rapidly how it was developed, the German colonialists basically went “Look at America, they expanded to the west basically exterminating every native population in the way and replacing they with white settlers and now they’re super rich and powerful, so if we exterminate a bunch of native populations, take over their land and put native Germans in their place, we should become super rich and powerful too”.

The idea was put into practice in Namibia, then one of the German empire’s colonies, resulting in the genocide of the Herero and Nama.

Fast forward a bit, Adolph Hitler was visited in prison by one of the main colonialist thinkers behind lebensraum theory and Hitler was rapidly convinced to adopt it.

And that’s how was born the genocidal project of the Nazis in eastern Europe, just as their mentor the United States had rid “their” land of “lesser” north Americans natives to expand westward and make way for the “superior” whites, so would Germany rid eastern Europe of Jews and Slavs to make way for the “Aryans”.

Now comes the question: is Russia doing any of that? Does the Russian government believe in and promote a theory that rank races to justify the extermination of “lesser” ones? Is Russia shoving Ukrainians (or anyone else) in concentration camps and “reservation”? Do they steal Ukrainians houses and invite Russian natives to go live in the stolen houses in Ukraine?

The answer to all of those questions is no. If you think it’s yes you need to demonstrate it, saying “they look just like Nazis” without drawing any actual parallels between them is no better than saying “anyone I don’t like is a Nazi”.

The fact that all of russia’s puppet state demanded to join NATO (BTW: you cannot be invited it only works by writing an official demand to join and approval by all member state), is a revealing fact.

If a NATO country can somehow influence the elections and public opinion on NATO in those so called “Russian puppets”, which they very much can, they can make sure to have pro-NATO politicians in power who will demand a NATO membership, that way they effectively force the country to join while making it look like it was voluntary.

As we saw in Ukraine, Russia does not need any reason to invade a sovereign nation (their reason for invading looking also stangely like german justification for poland invasion)

“Russia does not need any reason to invade[…] their reason for invading looking also stangely like…”

Look, if you’re gonna spew bullshit, can’t you at least keep it strait and somewhat coherent?

Putin didn’t just wake up and decide he was feeling like invading something that day, whether you like it or not they had actual reasons to do it and the fact that you or I may or may not think those reasons are not legitimate does not matter since neither you nor I have a say in the Kremlin.

Also, once again you say “they look like Nazis” without showing why you think they look like Nazis. How are their reasons similar? Russia’s stated reasons for invading are to prevent all of their western frontier neighbors to become part of a military alliance they deem aggressive to them and to stop the killing of ethnic Russians in the Donbas and Luhansk regions and overthrow the current far right government of Ukraine, how is that similar to the Nazi’s excuses to invade Poland?

The countless horrors of torture, rape, murder and brainwashing by the russian state, seems to prove their reasoning right.

[citation needed]

That wouldn’t be the first time the west has falsely accused an enemy of those things so I’m really gonna need a source for that.

I do not claim that the west is perfect, with the actions of the united states and other in recent times, but claiming that russia or china have clean hands would be outright hypocritical.

You claim that the west is systematically better than Russia, China and other countries that the west considers rivals or enemy (funny coincidence that those are all countries the west don’t like isn’t it) and when we demonstrate to you that this is bullshit since the west has literally done almost every single thing you accuse China, Russia, etc of, often in worst and more than once, you go “Ha but I think the west is bad too” so that you can continue pretending to be objective even after we expose you massive pro-west bias.

Thanks to the free press, the western world made their population aware of this wrong actions and helped steer them in the right direction.

The press in the west is not free, it’s the private property of a handful of billionaires who, since they are their private properties, have complete control over what is or is not published in their outlets. I’d even say that given that the capitalists are the ruling class in the west, privately owned medias are really state owned medias with extra steps.

Not to mention the fact that western outlet are often in contact with organs of western governments, most notoriously with the CIA, who often dictate what the outlets should publish.

Just look at how they report on the genocide of Palestinians, does that look like fair and unbiased reporting to you? Those that look free pro Israel bias?

Yellen made a point of shouting out Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 visit to manufacturing and export powerhouse Guangzhou. It marked a key milestone in China’s progress in becoming a market economy, one that Yellen hopes the Xi era will emulate by leveling playing fields for Western companies.

Liberals can’t see beyond what’s right in front of them as usual, without doing the smallest amount of investigations into Deng’s reasoning for the market reforms she is preaching him as a liberal icon to peoples who know the actual reason why Deng did what he did. Having markets and bourgeois on a leash to develop the forces of production is pretty basic stuff and it’s easy to find that it’s what Deng wanted to do, but instead of looking into why on earth the chairman of a communist party would implement market reforms they saw that China’s market was open to foreign markets and concluded that Deng was a liberal without any further investigations.

This is “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong” 's evil twin “we investigated these peoples we don’t like and found they did everything wrong”