think he’s accelerating the decline of the US empire. And I think a new multipolar world with China taking on a leading role will emerge shortly. Within a few years at latest.

Thinking of geopolitics as a polarity is a way to make a complex subject more digestible, however when it’s examined against actual history its highly reductive.

Even when the world was less complicated and communist nations weren’t a hodgepodge of mixed markets, nothing was delineated so cleanly into something as simple as multipolarism.

Democratic capitalist nations still overthrew emerging capitalist democracies, communist nations still went to war with other communist nations. I think it’s a bit optimistic to believe that political and economic instability inexplicably births unity.

I’m sure there will be some takers, but to be honest their real bread and butter is mostly petroleum products which directly compete with American petroleum companies. Sanctions against a competitor are vastly more valuable than the oil itself to American petroleum corporations.

As far as other minerals go, they are valuable… But most of them are going right to the production market in China.

It really doesn’t behoove corporate America to partner with Russian interests, which is kinda surprising why we haven’t really seen a lot of backlash yet. I’m guessing they’re keeping their heads down for now and seeing if the tax cuts are worth all the hassle.

I’m sure that there will be some capital holders who are willing to invest in Russia, however I don’t really think a lot of the big players will be rushing back to Russia.

A large reason Russia has had such an about face since the early 00’s is because a huge amount of western capital pulled out of Moscow after they invaded Georgia in 08. Since then Putin has had to double down in his overtly aggressive pillaging from Russia’s neighbors to maintain his hierarchy of control over the oligarchs in Russia.

The invasion of Ukraine is largely a part of a sunk cost fallacy of his blunder in 08. I don’t think he realized how skittish his power plays made foreign investors, nor did he predict the following sanctions that followed in his attempts to recover his power over the oligarchs.

always assumed American corpos would swoop in and rebuild, subsidized by the US govt and compensated by prime real estate ownership or something like that.

Yeah, but that doesn’t really require Americans on the ground doing work. They would just hire cheaper Ukrainian labour to extract the wealth.

Lol, even assuming that things work as planned and we do end up stealing the wealth of another nation…does anyone really think it’s going to be Americans physically extracting the resources?

How much is it going to cost to send skilled workers to a war zone that’s been shelled and mined to all hell for the last 3 years? And if we do end up spending out the nose to pay Americans, how the hell is that going to be profitable? Corporations will barely pay a livable wage to Americans working in America.

Yeap, a lot of people confuse market capitalization with market share. The two should be somewhat intrinsically tethered in some way, but a lot of investing nowadays is purely speculation based on marketing (aka lying).

Not uh bro, just give them another 5 years and their build quality will improve…

It’s almost like manufacturing vehicles takes skilled labor or something. I’ll be happy when their valuation finally reflects something approaching realistic numbers. Just comparing simple metrics like employee retention should have been enough to tip off investors that Tesla was massively overvalued.

I mean there’s a reason the other major manufacturers haven’t killed off unions completely. You can’t just keep replacing your entire workforce every couple years and expect any kind of quality control.

Yes, and it’s not including the initial invasion and occupation from 2014-2022. However, these types of people see any kind of logical assumption as outright manipulation and opportunities to validate their “alternative facts”.

Russia is not israel, they don’t attack civilians (despite what similar liars to yourself will claim) and civilian infrastructure and life goes on.

"As of 31 August, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) had verified that conflict-related violence had killed 11,743 civilians and injured 24,614 in Ukraine since 24 February 2022.

During the reporting period, Russian armed forces continued to target energy infrastructure across Ukraine, affecting essential services and deepening concerns about the plight of the civilian population with winter approaching."

Honesty seems to be a problematic concept for the people supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine…

Also, I am surprised you even pretend to care about constitutions considering Putin had to rewrite Russias to stay in power past 2024.

Almost as much of a waste of time as creating alt accounts solely to defend Russian geopolitics?

Honestly, what is the point of pretending to be a leftist while defending the Russian oligarchs? I get critical of the American oligarchs, but what is the point of cheerleading an even more hierarchical and violent form of capitalist imperialism?

Well, the Area of the Russian Federation in Europe is 39% of the European landmass. This has nothing to do with the Asian part of Russia. The Russian Federation is about 1.7-1.8x the landmass of the European continent.

Still… I don’t really know how mostly empty tundra is really prevalent to the discussion.

And with a hundred million Russians living in the European part, that makes the largest ethnical group, considering the differences between the slavic ethnicities.

This is true, and I do wish there wasn’t an artificial constructed delineation between Russia and the rest of Europe. However, I don’t really know how western Europe is really meant to overcome this considering Russian cultural ideology is still being haunted by the specter of the Russian empire.

As someone who’s ethnically East asian, its always funny when I hear Russians consider themselves “The East”, when the only historical ties they have to the actual East is European styled imperialism.

Ethnical, Cultural and Historical divides are a poor and often arbitrary metric to justify modern Nations borders, both in joining or separating areas.

100% agree.

Also Russian in its legitimate borders makes up almost half of the European continent.

Not sure if land mass is exactly prevalent in this, as most of Russia is just colonized portions of Asia.

When we are past this whole mess we need to stop thinking of the EU as “Europe” and the other half of the European continent as “not Europe”.

It takes two to tango… A lot of the modern ideas separating Russia from Europe was done as a way to validate Russian imperialism. This idea is being continued by people like Putin for the same reasons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasianism

Also ethnically speaking Slavs are the largest ethnic group in Europe with about 300 Million people.

Yeah… But thinking of Slavs as a monoculture is really dated, and kinda goes against the way we classify ethnicities all together. East, West and Southern Slavs are separated by distinct cultural groups, religions, languages, and about 1500 years of history.

Just as an FYI, most states have programs that will fund a disability lawyer to assist you with your disability claim. Most of the time the lawyers will be paid partly through your claim if it is successful and it’s usually free if it is not.

Also do not get discouraged if your claim is initially denied, in my state it’s basically an open secret that your first claim gets automatically denied to discourage people from actually getting benefits. With disability, it’s all about persistence, documentation, and filing as soon as you can. Even if you get denied for years, when it is successful your claim will be back dated to the date of your initial filling.

Not a lawyer, but I work in a field where most all my patients are on disability, and I have had to help my parents file in an extremely conservative state.

Did Russia consider how much it would escalate tension in Europe when he invaded Ukraine?

I don’t really understand how people forget that Russia has the primary ability and responsibility of maintaining good relations with their neighbors.

I mean, they’re definitely not a fan of the free market?

Being economically leftist doesn’t mean you aren’t culturally conservative. Births out of wedlock in China and really most of east Asia are exceedingly rare. The household registration system they use to allow families access to things like education and healthcare is tied into marriage certificates.

And they said we couldn’t run a nation solely using the power of massive amounts of cognitive dissonance…

Bergoglio brown?

I don’t know his actual ethnicity, but to a lot of European Catholics anyone from South America is brown at least by association. It was kinda a big deal that he was the first Pope from the southern hemisphere.

criticism against him is not an exclusive of US fundamentalists.

I didn’t claim it was?

But what about the shareholders? Defense requires taxation and freedom equals less taxes…right?

Yes…but no. American Catholic fundamentalism has little to do with the actual Catholic church. They’re basically a renegade sect of the church who believes the new Pope is woke because he’s brown.

They’ve steadily infiltrated the highest offices in the nation, but especially the judicial branch. They’re essentially high brow versions of southern evangelicals, with more cash and an ahistorical chip on their shoulder in regards to America’s relations to prejudice against traditional Catholics in the 19th and early 20th century.