Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name] @ Gosplan14_the_Third @hexbear.net

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3 yr. ago

If anyone's going to attack Poland (which they won't.) it's gonna be from it's own sabre rattling. There's nothing more that pleases people from PO to PiS and anything inbetween than it's neighbors getting losses, be it Germany, Russia, Belarus and any country that's not in its own sphere of influence like the rest of the Reddit Belt

I'm in awe of how these liberals that have been spawning from the gates of hell after the Federation are 2500% confident of what they're spouting, even if it's hilarious nonsense.

Do you think the fact that European manufacturing is evaporating at an unprecedented rate is simply "market forces" or some nonsense like that?

I mean, that IS the reason. Governments which represent interests of actors in a market economy (i.e. The bourgeois) know how to exploit and steer these to their own benefits.

Market mechanisms are also for example the reasoning given for sanctions etc. Like when a ship can't enter a US harbor for 6 months after trading with Cuba, why does the shipping company obey? Why, because they don't want to lose a more profitable route, or risk seeing their own income under direct attack for disobeying.

High energy prices due to the start of the Ukrainian War and the European insistence on following in America's footsteps and separating itself from the Russian market as well as normal methods of profit-driven behavior from capitalist companies (I.e. outsourcing) meant that European industry had a disadvantage in the form of higher production costs compared to their American counterparts, especially when paired with for example measures to saveguard American industry like the Inflation Reduction Act (something that was complained about by politicians in Germany, where I live). Add to that stuff like the Nordstream Pipeline, which was mentioned below, where there's a strong suspicion It was done by at least pro-American forces to keep Europe from re-establishing Trade ties with Russia... or the additional angle of getting it to buy American LNG exports (might be a case of unintentional, but welcome effect).

Under a free market economy, if a company can't profit or doesn't profit enough - no matter the usefulness of the product or its position in the supply chain - it closes, relocates, downscales and so dependencies are created as well as oligo- and monopolies. If say Volkswagen and other German car manufacturers went bankrupt and Chevrolet took a dominant role in the market, it would be difficult for a new German manufacturer to reconquer the market share. It would be expensive, it would be behind technologically, it would need to force its workers to worse conditions, while imports would be simply cheaper.

Being unable to get rich from business makes the local wealthy get really angry, and support political views that promise to cut off dependencies and allows them to regain market share. Because they're not going to voice support for a movement that wants to place economic sectors under worker control, you get a lot of support for fascism, which than turns even previously friendly relationships into competitive ones and possibly even Wars until possibly a new balance is reached.

Due to ways capitalism works, such as the way selling goods and services for a profit becomes more challenging the more competition there is (because there's less people buying your stuff) unless there's a way to keep expanding (which in the post-1990 World is pretty difficult... unless you're willing to undermine the already existing competition), this is basically guaranteed to happen and historically the reason why the big world wars have happened.

Crises like the aftermath of the start of War in Ukraine only make the process faster for some countries (in this case, the EU) and slower for others (the USA)

That's not even a characteristic of finance capital, but all Capital. The endless thirst for new markets and expansion possibilities. And in case where this isn't possible, cannibalization processes, forceful expansion starts.

I don't know if it's an intentional or accidental effect of Biden's reforms, but American capitalists aren't going to say no to the prospect of getting rid of European competition and getting the chance to fill in their old market share, supposed ally or not.

Eh, this doesn't mean anything.

Similarly how I found English speaking RETVRN TO TRADITION stickers in the city I'm in. ("Wage War on the Modern World"... The local terminally online fascist should be aware most locals don't speak English) - could be a similar case, could be some edgelord thinking he's funny, could be a Russian nationalist passing by, or it could be not in Poland at all.

One sticker in a public toilet is about as interesting as some guy posting on reddit.

Views on Russia are overwhelmingly negative here and there's a lot of army recruitment ads, army patrols, shooting lessons ads, etc. here out east. It's a mixture of people being afraid, rattled by the Sabre rattling and thinking Russia is gonna invade, and people whose trigger finger itches to kill Russians.

Support for Russia is basically confined to the fash to the right of the government and even then it's mostly just a lesser evilism of the hating Ukrainians more kind. I suppose one group it could appeal to are terminally online Fascists like the guy who stickered the main square of [City], Lubelskie

Polish TV said a few minutes ago the government will be deploying 10k troops on the border with Belarus. This is paired with accusations that there's Wagner camps massing on the Polish border there and that Germany is doing Putler's bidding and attempting to rig the Polish election because a CSU politician said some unflattering stuff about PiS.

Also it showed racist propaganda about how western europe has fallen to roaming gangs of black people, attacking events and doing all kinds of evil.

Meanwhile, the libs are doing their usual Poland is bankrupt and literally 1984 shtick, while calling for stuff like abolishing or massively scaling back all welfare state things the fash government created (which is keeping them popular).

This place is a fever dream and it drives me mad. It's like it's specifically designed to torture all my political sensitivities.

Nirvana is mid, actually. I still gotta respect the concert where Kurt Cobain deliberately gave a bad concert in Buenos Aires to a crowd that was harassing the opening act.

It's rated 8,77/10 (Manga) and 8,66 (Anime) respectively

I had a similar morbid curiosity "how bad can it get?" binge with Oreimo

The show's either awful or a masterpiece if you have brainworms of the bad Media enjoyer kind.

But the problem is that such media is allowed to exist and in fact thrives, from either genuinely brainwormed people or morbid curiosity prone people, likely the same in Japan as here.

Normalizing pedophilic content, Incest, etc. That's really not a good thing, to say the least.

That federation thing is annoying because when I see libs making claims I have the urge to effortpost in reply, and get really frustrated if I'm not 100% sure on something or am struggling to find the correct wording.

And of course, odds are they won't listen or that I am wrong after all gah

The Euromaidan Revolution has indeed been rebranded the Revolution of Dignity in the last few years.

Hunter-gatherer societies started settling down with the invention of agriculture, and force began being used to grant ownership of the land to the strongest.

These societies began coalescing and creating the first cities, and these landowners expaned their power to take over as Kings and less powerful ones as the nobility.

With the use of that might, people belonging to other realms were forced to work as slaves.

Slavery became widespread (in western countries) and needed constant war to get more slaves as the economy grew, because less slaves = more labor needed to expand.

Expanding in that way is unsustainable and leads to stagnation or overextension, such as what happened to the Roman Empire. It was in a deep crisis when it collapsed in the 5th century and its slave based economy was becoming obsolete.

This system was replaced by armed nobles dividing the land and its subjects between themselves, giving them a small piece of land and protection in exchange of forced loyalty, taxes and the ability to be forced to fight for the lord of the land. An attractive proposition in times of societal collapse like Europe had.

Eventually, this rule of noble families started losing its power as improvements in technology and colonization gave inner city artisans a growing amount of influence and wealth from the ability to produce things increasingly fast and easier.

Peasants started moving into cities and leaving the lord's lands. This process accelerated drastically with the invention of the steam engine and the nobility began being seen as obsolete and parasitic. The revolutions of the late 18th century made this decline permanent. The remaining nobles were forced to either join the bourgeois and become businessmen with fancy titles, fade away into obscurity or fight back and have their country become a Target of capitalism.

Capitalism, the new system, is based on producing more and more, faster and faster. Because you need to outdo the competition to not go bankrupt, and the competition needs to do the same. You need to lower costs and increase profits. You have to produce cheaper so you fight to keep wages low and working conditions poor, extract resources in ways that are cheap (even if damaging the environment), find more places to sell your goods to (even if they don't want you to), drive your competition out of business, etc. Especially as new businesses are founded and join the same race to the bottom against you, making it faster.

It's not even that they necessary want to do this stuff. It's just the ones that "blink" and chicken out of doing one of these things is more likely to fail at doing business, go bankrupt, stagnate, exist as a niche only, etc.

It's the issue of "You have 10€ in your wallet. The product from the place workers are treated well and does everything by the book costs 15€ and the one where they dump trash in a ditch out back and don't clean the floors is 7€, which one do you buy?"

That outline of Russia on the wall is quite garish ngl

It's a symbol from the Weimar Republic.

It was used by the iron front, the socdem paramilitary organization of the SPD. it meant opposition to nazism, monarchism and communism.

There's two kinds of people - Bozos who know what it means and have vile political views, and those who don't know what it means and think it's a generic antifascist symbol... but likely still have similar views to the ones mentioned before.

Poland diaries 2, days... I've lost count... Oh God people from the Federation are gonna be reading this too

Being in one of the most urban decayed cities in Poland was an experience, and discovering just how disfunctional the City was was an experience that kept on giving. Another ugly side was the even more vile than the usual anticommunist reactionary propaganda. Football hooligans with graffiti with stars of David on a hangman's noose? Yup, commonplace in Poland.

Similarly, when we stopped by a bigger city for an hour to walk around for a bit, we bought a fridge magnet for the small collection I have back home. Turns out, the seller gave us a gift of a "lucky jew-let" a caricature of an orthodox jew with the purpose of increasing one's luck with money... yikes. Unfortunately not the first time encountering such nonsense in this country.

The City itself was nice and even quite modern, but touristy and having the usual polish problem of having an extremely reactionary population. I suppose if you want to visit anyway, there's a sizeable international student population due to the university and a bunch of Ukrainians who came in 2014 and 2022.

We had some refreshments in the form of ice cream and waffles (gofry), but dear God did they overdo the sweetness. An interesting observation is that on the old roads connecting cities there's a lot of roadside restaurants (mostly serving polish food) which can range from awful to actually excellent. There's a restaurant on the road from Radom to Lublin where I had the best Pierogi I ever ate a few days ago. On the other hand, the more European-standard multiple lane roads built in the last fifteen years or so mostly do away with these and instead have the usual gas station + American fast food (McDonald's, Burger King, KFC) combo.

Heading to the actual destination, so far east that the sign "Border Area" indicates the entrance to the county was much more relaxed because the "I was worried for 15 minutes before I actually thought about it" radio reports saying Wagner was massing on the polish border in Belarus was revealed to have come from Ukrainian Intelligence sources (phew), in addition to the regular untrustworthiness of local media. And besides, I'm simply very tired and just want to push on through to the end of the trip, even if there is a lot of military activity here. Many army trucks driving around, probably patrolling.

The part of the trip, gawking at urban decay and enduring the feud in my family is now over, giving place for the part where I endure pure ideology from my family and hope WW3 doesn't start, before I RETVRN to the place where fascism is only rising instead of hegemonic.

The 80s were less progressive in some ways, such as the rampant sexism or the "Lolicon Boom" in the mid part of the decade, which sometimes left it's ugly traces on anime outside of Wretched OVAs.

On the other hand, the production of Anime was left to people far to the left of today in many cases. Be it unionized workers attempting to block the making of Future War Year 198X over its antisovietism, or openly anti-imperialist plots in say Fang of the Sun Dougram, SPT Blue Comet Layzner or the second Patlabor movie (1993, but still) to even outright progressive stances on LGBT+ people such as in a famous episode of Dirty Pair back in '85. Apparently Stop! Hibari-Kun (1983) features a transgender protagonist, and is full of transphobia... but the transphobes are the butt of the joke.

Then starting in the mid 90s Evangelion came and old lefty directors from the 70s and 80s started retiring, leaving the door open to Anime produced by weebs for weebs and the stuff that brought Anime infamy started showing up more and more (it was profitable). Probably peaking in the 2010s.

Season 1 of Sailor Moon was in 1992, while the last episode of the original run was on the 8th February 1997.