Why would any state be concerned about casus beli (FYI you keep misspelling it) when the big dog in the room doesn’t give a shit?

Because international politics is still politics. Your argument doesn’t make sense in the same way that “Iran’s only goal ever is to wipe Israel off the map and if we don’t do something right now they’ll do it tomorrow” doesn’t make sense. It’s because every country weighs the risks and consequences of an action. These things matter in as much as the reaction to them by other states. That’s literally the lynch pin of international law. There is no big mommy, the only potential mommy is a complex calculus of geopolitics.

You’re arguing international law like we’re in some kind of 4X.

If you don’t understand that’s what Russia (and Kuchinich) is also doing and from a point of realpolitik rather than international law then this conversation is pointless. I did not drag us to this crossroads. I merely saw some people yelling and decided to join in the fun.

If the problem Russia has is that it feels NATO is attacking it, then in reality Russia has no real leg to stand on, because it’s complaints are “this is a shadow war”, and a rectification of that is to just make it into a real war. They’re pushing an issue they would heavily stand to lose in if they actually believed it was a real issue.

To rephrase Russia is only making the case that NATO is being unfair by playing in the shadows because it has extreme certainty that NATO is not going to enter the war over Ukraine, and it also knows that the Russian escalation that they are threatening would change that calculus for all NATO countries overnight. Also the situation that they themselves would use that escalation in, isn’t happening and is not going to happen unless NATO heavily joins the war and digs into Russian territory. So it’s not going to actually make good on its threats.

While I agree that NATO should not provoke Russia, understanding the motives behind these political plays and consequences of what could happen in response shows that Russia itself doesn’t believe this is a provocation. What’s happening right now is there’s 3 kids in a back seat one is 5, one is 12, and one is 16. The 12 year old is beating the shit out of the 5 year old for agreeing with the 16 year old who goaded the 5 year old to do so. The 16 year old is doing the “I’m not touching you” to the 12 year old and the 12 year old while still beating the shit out of the 5 year old is saying “MOM HE’S TOUCHING ME”.

Yeah and a national budget is like a family budget so that’s why you must do austerity.

Wow. Just wow. I sure hope they get something more out of that, because 1200 dollars for fucking up who knows how many shitty chinese android boxes is worse than doing it for free. From a related article from TF:

Bug bounties and hackathons are notorious for being the coding equivalent of working for exposure. These are inherently cost savings programs so that companies don’t feel like they need to purchase these assets at market price.

idk maybe do another civil rights movement.

Will get right on that chief.

I think it’s very funny that a lot of people will post “omg communism boogeyman? is this legal???”, but they won’t do a very basic introspection of ideology and online community moderation which is at the core the entire intent here.

Almost every lemmy instance has the same rule 1, those rules textually are often the same, those rules are often have the same meanings, but those rules are unevenly enforced between instances based on the ideology of that instance. That’s why you can be a transphobe on .world without actually getting the same amount of mod action going your way as if you were a transphobe on hexbear/lemmy.ml/lemmygrad/blahaj.

Furthermore there’s sociopolitical drama between the instances like between blahaj and hexbear on what transphobia actually is and what level of irony is allowed.

A lot of people interpret rule 1 as “don’t be mean” rather than “be mean in ways that aren’t racist/bigoted/sexist/transphobic/etc”. Which is why they often complain that certain communities they can’t post certain words, but user can dog pile them with community approved shitposting.

And then there’s the lib instances who think that being mean to the Ukrainian war effort online is rule 1 and if not it’s rule no disinformatsiya.

It’s like when Twitter had to clarify, you cannot call for violence unless it’s a call for violence that is part of the United States of America’s foreign policy, because Trump as POTUS called for violence over Twitter as part of US FP. But we gotta always put the the damn commies under the microscope for making us copypasta Marxist thought.

Freakin epic bacon sauce.

Honestly the “old web” was also a hellscape for accessibility.

There’s been a lot more advances for accessibility in the last 5 years because of ADA lawsuits being successful against large companies with websites, so it’s seen as a liability.

In my personal experience in general this has been a big impetus for companies to start take WCAG seriously. However in practice a lot of this is box checking because it’s expensive and complicated.

A lot of our newer contracts have had explicit terms for various levels of accessibility, but this has lead to a problem in the sense that accessibility is something that is designed, and in practice the company has a very hard time changing it’s SDLC in most teams. So in effect the expectation from higher ups is that it’s a magic wand, these kinds of top down initiatives fail because they’re often just having people internally rewrite a11y tutorials or act as consultants to projects they know don’t have the resources to actually become accessible.

Average age of Ukranian Army 42.

Average age of the 1st Galician Grenadier Grandpa Battalion: 55.

Zelenskyy trying so hard not to draft anyone under 25 so that the war support doesn’t crater and he doesn’t cause a demographic crisis for Ukraine’s labor mix.

Russia’s “Peace Plan” is to actually take over Ukraine, and then the Baltics, and then Poland, and then Germany and the rest of the Central Europe, and then France and the UK, and rest of Western Europe, and then they’ll take over the Atlantic Ocean and Iceland and Greenland, and then they’ll come and take over the United States, state by state starting from the East Coast going to the West Coast, and then Hawaii, and then Japan, and then they’ll autocoup themselves oblast by oblast starting with Vladivostok where they’ll be dug in for months trying to make roads that connect to the rest of Russia but then they’ll keep marching West and when they finally loop all the way back around to Lviv the whole West will be defeated and we’ll all be speaking Russian and saying Hail Putler and the brave Galician racists will be rolling in their graves saying I told you so.

And that’s why at least 4 generations of Ukrainian men need to be eradicated for American interests in Eastern Europe.

Yeah every Western analyst has been saying: You’re stupid and propagandized to think that the meat grinder war can be won by the country with the most meat.

Doubt he’s “from” Odesa. The country side around Odesa spawns Ukrainian Nationalists like crazy.

The language wars have been the funniest shit to me since I was a kid in Odesa. Especially with what happened now, half the country goes on Duo Lingo overnight. Having grown up with this stupid shit, it was really funny to immigrate to the US and learn about like the slave trade and Jim Crow, and be like “damn Ukrainians really do love to complain”.

Which is heavily ironic because my dad immediately went the other way and just became mildly racist about how “black people be demanding things”. Shit’s hilarious because it was always like “in 1876 we were forced to cut out our tongues with the Ems decree, and we couldn’t celebrate the Taras Sevchenko centennial, and the evil Soviets made Russian the academic lingua franca”. But the people who literally couldn’t vote until 1964 and couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods (even to this day) are entitled.

It’s such a silly fucking position because of it’s wishy washy historicity once you start to “collect evidence” and ultimately it’s like if all complaints of oppression in America by black people were summed up with “they wouldn’t let us talk jive”.

It’s also really funny because if Ukraine fulfills it’s wildest EU/NATO/US FREEDOM dreams, in 10 years there will be less Russian and Ukranian than there is now. It will be like Iceland or Ireland where it’s fully colonized by capitalist English due to the economic realities, and there will be a large language divide between the younger and older generations in the country. Ukrainians only cling tightly to their traditions for their traditional enemies. They’ll gleefully shed all that for Westernization because it’s “the way of the world”. Sure they’ll be the classic holdouts of Galicia, but practically the country will erase its own language and culture much like Iceland and other countries suffering from success under neocolonialism.

Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.

Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it’s not meeeee doing it, it’ the maaarket. It’s the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it’s easier to protect your domestic industry. So there’s also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more “pure form” of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it’s an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it’s kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.

Sure but you’re dodging the question now.

The point is if we want to talk about what’s legal on the international stage. Russia’s views have consequences. There’s nothing that about US’s support of Ukraine that is illegal. So Russia is saying that the US is escalating and is a direct party in the war, which I can see an argument for. Which means that because North Korea has joined the war on the side of Russia, America has a legal reason to bomb Pyongyang in the same way it bombed Bryansk (in Russia’s view).

See Russia is advocating for Russia. It will throw North Korea under the bus in this scenario, the question is, is that fair to North Korea?

Sure. You’re right. So you have 2 theoretical worlds

1. There is no system, America does what they want because they’re the strongest evilest ever
2. There is a system that we agree on and that defines what is lets say “polite” and “impolite”.

By arguing about the “realpolitik” of it and the “akshually there’s direct Involvement from Americans” you’re arguing in world 2. By arguing about how the US does what it wants you’re arguing in world 1.

My point is that by arguing in world 2 and agreeing to the Russian points, you must also agree to their consequences in that by agreeing that America has direct involvement, and North Korea having direct involvement gives America a rightful cassus beli.

I don’t disagree with your point at all. All I’m saying is that you either need to agree to a system that may have side effects you don’t like / don’t support, or you need to agree to might makes right and there’s no real argument that America “cannot do these things”.

In short, tell me why this matters, you can decide the terrain and I’ll conceed a fair amount of points, but you just have to accept consequences. World 1 America does what it wants, the question doesn’t matter. World 2 if we’re taking your argument at face value that the Russians are right, America is actually a direct party to the war, which means America can rightfully drone strike Pyongyang tomorrow

My argument here in general is that regardless that America has the biggest swingingest dick in the room, doesn’t mean that other countries aren’t all also swinging their dicks, and we have to make sense of this somehow otherwise there’s no point and America should just win because it’s the biggest evilest guy.

You did not address the point I made which is that the situation has clearly improved.

Yeah and you did not address the point I made which is the situation got gravely worse and is abjectly horrible

 Same goes for Germany and most of the EU, what’s your point here?

You love having a selective understanding of economics. Small underdeveloped economy, small percentage growth = very bad. Large global economy, small percentage growth = good. Remember how we were talking about global south markets in the other thread? What happened to all of that?

What point are you even trying to make here?

I was trying to make a joke, because attempting to qualify Assad support is the lulziest shit when he’s effectively an absolute monarch of a ruin.

Okay so what’s neocolonialism then?

Okay let’s say you’re right, the US has de facto direct involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War on the side of Ukraine.

Does that mean US currently has a valid cassus beli against North Korea?

The entire point of neocolonialism is to extract labor and resources from the countries that are colonized

Okay lets start simple and define colonization for me.

Last I checked Syria is in a much better situation today than it was when US started trying to destabilize it.

Damascus today literally has blackouts daily. The US started fucking with Syria after 9/11. The Syrian energy grid was gravely damaged in 2011.

The economic situation is improving

Their GDP is not even hitting 2% growth by any realistic estimates, they’re not releasing accurate data anyway. Some years in 2020-2024 the estimate of GDP growth is negative.

Assad has more popular support than any western regime leaders.

I mean, you should go to Damascus and try to express dissent against Assad.

This shit is silly dude.