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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It does insomuch as they are operated by US personnel.

They aren’t.

If the US pulled all support tomorrow, would Ukraine still be able to use HIMARS and ATACMS? Yes. Would they be as effective using them? No. And it’s not because of a lack of training or US personel pushing the buttons. It’s about the fact that US main support is providing intelligence and target selection capabilities that Ukraine cannot practically do itself.

No President has the right to use unilateral executive authority to permit a U.S. missile strike against another nation. It invites a retaliatory attack. It is an impeachable offense.

And this is not happening – the US President is telling Ukrainian forces that they no longer have limitations on targets they can use American supplied weapons on. There is no US missile strike. The US no longer owns those missiles. Ukraine plays within the rules because if it doesn’t there’s a chance it might not get more weapons later.

Also how was this line of argumentation applied in the last like 25 years for like:

• Yemen
• Iraq
• Afghanistan
• Syria
• etc.

Sure it happened, but nothing came of it, because it’s just not a real argument anyway. It holds no power. It’s liberal cope.

Absolutely not lol.

If SOLID is causing you performance problems, it’s likely completely solvable.

Most companies throwing out shitty software have engineers who couldn’t tell you what SOLID is without looking it up.

Most people who use this line of reasoning don’t have an actual understanding of how often patterns are applied or misapplied in the industry and why.

SOLID might be a bottle neck for software that needs to be real-time compliant with stable jitter and ultra-low latency, the vast majority of apps are just spaghetti code.

Zelenskyy literally cannot advocate for negotiated peace. The Right wing nationalist elements of Ukraine’s coalition will effectively murder him if that becomes his position. It remains to be seen what will happen to him when he’s forced into it by the reality of the war and the waning of international support by his patron states.

Michael Parenti, Richard Wolff, Chris Smalls, Michael Hudson, Claudia De la Cruz, just off top of my head

If you’re looking for a Lenin, Parenti is your closest but he’s dead. Smalls is a good union organizer but has really just organized a single Amazon warehouse and fell off.

De La Cruz got less than half the votes Debs got in his weakest run, when the population of the US was minuscule compared to now. De La Cruz wasn’t even on the ballot in her home state. You might as well say Bernie Sanders if you’re gonna say De La Cruz because their theories of change are literally the same and are proven failures.

Wolff and Hudson have one foot in the grave as 80 year old men they’re not leading anything.

Capital is running up the board as the Globetrotters and you’re fielding a team that’s playing worse than the Washington Generals.

And my point is that these people don’t matter. They’re not the demographic that’s going to drive any change.

Oh boy, “lets ignore the lumpen proletariat” is literally the most Democratic Party brained take a socialist can make. Weren’t you just singing Chairman Fred’s praises 5 seconds ago, and now this???

In practice our society is amazing at making lumpenproles, the vast majority of people are lumpenproles by the Marxist definition (not the Engles or Leninist one where he gives them the old Kulak treatment).

And in your opinion the demographic that is going to drive change are unpopular people who are subjects of news discussed on this site and this site only.

This shit is silly dude, there’s no clear theory of change here, not even an analysis on a theory of change. Just bromides.

That’s what debate, discussion, and education means.

At this point you might as well do a joke of Jordan Peterson style reasoning where you wriet debate = discussion = education. You keep using these terms interchangeably and they seem to mean whatever the hell you want them to mean in the context. Sometimes they mean that someone knows theory, sometimes they mean that someone has talked to someone else about how the boss is annohying, sometimes they mean you’re planning a violent wildcat labor action.

What I said is that there is real poverty in the US, and people are struggling to make ends meet. Nowhere did I suggest there’s going to be some sort of a proletarian revolution in the US as there was in Russia at the start of the 20th century.

My point is “real poverty” means different things across time dude. How do you not understand this? The aspects of “real poverty” in the 21st century quite literally invalidate 20th century communist thinking and strategy. The whole point is that when you’re cornered you rely entirely on quoting and throwing theory at people without explaining how that theory practically applies to the modern day.

Also, there are plenty of highly intelligent and articulate people in US who explain the problems in clear terms.

Name one. Literally name one.

The problem in US is that most people don’t think they need to be educated, and want quick and easy solutions to difficult problems.

Hmm… It’s almost like uhh they’d rather watch Mr Beast on YouTube which is quite literally my point.

You’re not competing with 20th century poverty, you’re competing with 21st century dopamine rat poverty and the left as a whole hasn’t evolved to handle that.

I’m going to stop here because it’s clear that we’re not getting anywhere convincing each other of anything. I’ve said all needed to say here.

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Unions are a product of people talking to each other, sharing grievances and deciding on collective action as the solution.

Your point was that education is the primary driver of labor activity. This is not education. This is people getting together to make a plan based on being oppressed by their boss, which is literally what I said here.

The former requires no education if you’re paid in scrip and working at the end of a bayonette. That’s literally what the history says.

Yes, the former absolutely requires education. People need to understand how class relationships work, how collective bargaining works, how effective organization works. Modern leftists who want to skip all that are deeply unserious.

Can you argue with yourself here?

Where do you think unions come from, they just appear fully formed out of thin air in your mind? Unions are a product of people talking to each other, sharing grievances and deciding on collective action as the solution.

I can assure you that they will just like people such as Fred Hampton, who did actual real world organizing instead of online trolling could.

This is a non-sequitor. My argument is literally it’s unrealistic that your labor base has a deep knowledge of theory as the basis to galvanize change in the modern era. Your counter to that started at actually Lenin exists, to actually Fred Hampton exists.

Wow a vanguardist movement had an intellectual vanguard? No way. What happened in 3 years after the emergence of that vanguard? Did everyone sacrifice gloriously for the vanguard and create the Soviet States of Chicago? Did they start a protracted people’s war?

Or was that vanguard murdered by the state? Were they scattered to the wind by kangaroo trials? Did their networks dissolve into nothingness within 5 years?

You’ve literally pointed to one of the exact fucking reasons why your theory of change is unrealistic in the modern world. It is literally not enough to have an intelligensia, it’s also unproven that it’s even needed given there are no successes, in fact most intelligensias are annoying and normal people don’t want to be around them. I’m self aware enough to understand that.

As far as your online trolling dig, I literally have several years of community organizing under my belt starting from college where I worked with Asian American communities, to direct mutual aid in my neighborhood where I spent $5k of my own money organizing community services for and feeding and caring for elderly residents living in Section 8 communities working directly with local care providers who were laid off between 2019 and 2021. And I can also tell you who wrote What Is To Be Done? but I’m not an example of anything.

Getting them to show up for what specifically?

• Your union meeting
• Your union card drive
• Your union ratification vote
• The right side of your union contract negotiation vote
• Your strike
• Your wildcat
• Your People’s Army recruitment
• Your civil war.

In that order, as it’s more difficult to actually win gains through “polite” society shit like voting and negotiations, you have to do things that require more sacrifice. And in fact the terrain isn’t an even gradient because union meetings and card signing has a lot more risk, than being represented by an existing unionized shop and showing up on the right side of a contract vote.

And yes, you are very much dealing with real genuine poverty and overwork in 21st century. Millions of people are struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, and being stuck in debt.

If you are in any way thinking that the conditions in the 21st century US are equivalent rather that merely rhyme with the conditions in the 19th and 20th in Russia as much as you can take “What is to be Done?” off the shelf and use it as a playbook then there’s really no point in this discussion.

The reality of history is that labor consciousness developed through completely two different antithetical processes across the Atlantic. The creation of the IWW literally is the refutation of the core thesis of “What is to be Done?” that class consciousness cannot spontaneously emerge out of labor action with bosses. Lenin was right for his time in Russia, he is not universal. His further global success is based on the export of support and material from the USSR to movements, and that tactic effectively failed in China which lead to the Sino Soviet Split.

Your failure to actually describe realistically the terrain of the labor movement in the US in the 21st century is literally the first hurdle. We don’t have theorists in the US capable of this anymore. We don’t produce that as a society. Russia had a grand tradition of intelligensia where there were hundreds of people like Lenin writing.

And the violent labor action in 1920s wasn’t some spontaneous event that happened out of the blue. It was a product of many years of organizing which started with having public discussions about the conditions the workers were experiencing.

This is completely untrue because union participation rate went down in the 1920’s. If what you’re saying is true then unions went into firefights intentionally on the back foot.

It was the most violent decade because bosses started becoming more violent in reaction to union activities in the 1910’s. You can trace the most violent uprising in the US, Battle of Blair Mountain as a direct thruline of the escalations of the Ludlowe and Matewan Massacres.

One thing is a prerequisite for the other. You can’t put the cart before the horse here. Without general public understanding, no organized resistence to oppression is possible.

You’re conflating, we have to fight the boss for our freedom with we have to create a glorious workers movement to build communism. The former requires no education if you’re paid in scrip and working at the end of a bayonette. That’s literally what the history says.

I can assure you that people who are going to be radicalized and who will organize aren’t the ones sitting watching youtube. They’re the people who are feeling the exploitation through their personal lived experience.

Yeah I agree, and I can assure you that those people aren’t going to be able to tell you what the Parenti Yellow Lecture is, or what What Is To Be Done? is or who wrote it.

The West is in complete denial that the Houthi movement is one of the most battle hardened and effective factions against US style war tactics in the World. Their ability to procure, build, and strategize and their experience fighting US tactics in sea and air they’re punching heavily above their weight limit. It’s seriously impressive.

Part of this denial is the heavy investment in the military industrial complex which has effectively destroyed war economics from the US point of view, but nobody wants to admit that it’s more expensive field an $11M Aegis launched SM-3 vs the Quds-3/Quds-2. While the Quds-3/Quds-2 has no public dollar amount that I can find, it’s unlikely to cost more than a Iranian produced Zolfaghar or Qadr missile which western analysis peg at $0.5 to $1.5 million dollars.

Oh and you launch multiple interceptors per ballistic target if you want to intercept, so the economic comparison is for perfect interception with no backup.

The US likely loses more money by having war ships in target range of the Houthis than the Houthis spend yearly on their weapons production.

In the modern era the problem isn’t “reaching people”. It’s getting them to show up. It’s the same problem of electoral politics dude.

If I am a McDonalds worker you have to convince me that it’s worth my time to go to your little meetings, time that I could be using to watch Mr Beast give someone a million dollars in return for the same kind of light torture I experience at my job.

Talking to leftists is the same as talking to Democrats sometimes. You just have to be “the smartest” while willfully not understanding that to a real life worker your hands look as empty as the lib next to you.

You’re not competing with 20th century poverty, you’re competing with 21st century dopamine rat poverty and the left as a whole hasn’t evolved to handle that.