Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine

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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by pedrodelavega » 24/08/22, 23:38

Obamot wrote:
rpsantina wrote:If you allow me, the Soviet/Nazist rapprochement could be linked to the beginning of Japanese activities.
We talk about the 39/45 war in Western vision but the first actions started in Asia around 1932/1933 with the invasion of China (or the Korean peninsula, I don't know anymore) by Japan
The rise of Germany on one side and Japan on the other was not an ideal position for the Soviet bloc.
Until Hitler broke the pact in 1941 if I remember correctly.
It is not “Soviet/Nazism rapprochement” (would miss more than that!)

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacte_ger ... prov=sfla1
"Would miss more than that"
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Obamot » 24/08/22, 23:56

Ah... For you a “A pact of non-agression" it's a "reconciliation”...? : Shock: In fact it was an attempt to ward off a threat, which ended in betrayal.

It follows the Munich agreements of 1938 between Hitler and Western countries, leading to the dismantling of Czechoslovakia, and the failure of the Soviet-Western negotiations for a possible alliance against Nazi Germany
Note that your intervention gives a relief which makes it possible to remove certain doubts.
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by GuyGadeboisTheBack » 25/08/22, 12:29

When you don't want to read, not understand and systematically rot any discussion...
In addition to a commitment to neutrality in the event of a conflict between one of the two parties and the Western powers, the German-Soviet Pact included a secret protocol, which delimited spheres of influence between the two countries, and whose implementation will result in the invasion, occupation and annexation of certain States or territories (Poland, Finland, Baltic States, Bessarabia). Signed during the Soviet offensive against the Japanese in Mongolia, the pact significantly deteriorated the relationship between Germany and Japan and put an end to Japanese anti-Soviet plans.
(wiki)
There you go... : Mrgreen:
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by dede2002 » 29/08/22, 20:51

sicetaitsimple wrote:It's a shame, because despite some swerves that are difficult to avoid, this thread initiated by Ahmed seemed to be of some interest. I noted for example the return of Sen-no-Sen, even if we did not agree.

.


I tend to agree with sicetaitsimple, a "non-journalistic" approach implies another angle of reflection.

A war with good guys on one side and bad guys on the other doesn't exist. There are bad guys on both sides : Mrgreen: .

What would be interesting is not to know who started, but to understand why it continues!

For fifty years it has been said that oil is not expensive enough.
But now that it is increasing, I don't think consumption will decrease, it's mainly the monetary flow that will increase.

We spoke of a "multipolar" world above, but there is still only a negative pole and a positive pole, which shifts a little.

The difference in potential is only increasing, our system is "prosperous" thanks to a huge imbalance (1 dollar per day for many people in Africa for example), beware of those who want to go "against the current".

Do you remember the journalistic approaches when France attacked Libya? :!:
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Ahmed » 29/08/22, 21:32

dede2002, you say:
The difference in potential is only increasing, our system is "prosperous" thanks to a huge imbalance (1 dollar per day for many people in Africa for example), beware of those who want to go "against the current".

The difference in potential is necessary for the proper functioning of the current system and is categorically opposed to the idea of ​​a prosperity which, gradually, would spread universally. The fact that this difference is increasing results from the fact that the previous extension in other regions of the globe is currently no longer possible, since the trick is done and it is imperative to find other bases for the creation of value. abstract.
This is not the only option, because it would prove insufficient in view of the amount of capital to be made profitable: a centripetal movement is now exerted in return on the ordinary categories of the population of the countries of the center which had previously benefited from the external extractivism. This is still insufficient and it is therefore necessary to resort to a simulated anticipation of future earnings to "complete" the budget. It represents a prodigious acrobatics through which it is assumed that the present impossibility of achieving sufficient gains can be diametrically reversed and become profusely achievable in the indefinite future. It's like extending the concept of extractivism to future populations!
it is necessary to understand the abyssal implications of the process: it is no longer the so-called "real" economic activities that allow an accumulation* of abstract value in a quantity corresponding to the mass of capital, but it is the opposite that occurs. The financial industry, by pre-emptive anticipation without any basis, subsidizes the "real" economy in a form of reverse capitalism.

* Both because the base of human producers has shrunk too much due to automation, and because the share devoted to non-value-producing activities has grown tremendously due to the increased role of systemic controllers in a globalized and very complex economy.
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by dede2002 » 30/08/22, 14:59

Hi Ahmed,

it goes back to what I was saying at the beginning, the financial industry is a winner, with all the credits that will be created.
All these weapons delivered, it is "on credit", like the future reconstruction of Ukraine, at the expense of the taxpayer...

But, electrically, it will be necessary to charge the battery, for the moment it is the extractivism which takes care of it.
If there are no more electrons at the negative pole, the battery can be recharged in the other direction. it seems impossible...
Less than: "the idea of ​​a prosperity which, gradually, would extend universally"
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Ahmed » 30/08/22, 17:53

Of course I am completely in agreement with your analysis and a war represents the paroxysm of the dissipation of energy for all the reasons which you underline. Normally the production sector is organized rationally, at least according to the criteria it has to face, but this is not the case with "consumer work" which is like the other face of this binomial; in a war situation, not only do the flows increase, but the sector that absorbs them becomes entirely predictable since it is subject to state planning.

When I say "potential difference" I am not referring specifically to an electrical source, but to energy in general, in whatever form it comes. The current paradox is that we are coming back quite massively to what Marx called the "absolute added value" which made it possible to increase the value produced in a day by lengthening it or stepping up the pace (as opposed to the "relative added value" which was based on an improvement in work tool or better organization).
The difference in potential (therefore in wealth) is essential in this system to compel those who would carefully abstain from it* (causing systemic arrest!) to work if they had the means to live, as noted with humor Coluche"They say that people want work.. It's not true, money would be enough for them".
There is no alternative to the accumulation of capital, that it must henceforth appeal to a pure fiction to fulfill its augmentative functionality can only postpone the consequences of the contradiction it comes up against.

* the constraint is all the stronger if the targeted tasks would never be accomplished spontaneously.
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Ahmed » 19/12/22, 23:12

I transfer here the answer ofObamot which followed a message I had sent on the Ukraine war feed:
Ahmed wrote:
Perhaps if we don't talk about anthropotechnics, it's because that's not the subject? : Oops:

Yes, I tripped over the carpet a bit, but in the end not so much since you say that the war is its “paroxysmal” exacerbation? Besides, how many “real” journalists would be able to write an intelligent story about it?

Ahmed wrote:
2) I think that we can begin to see things a little clearly if we reason on two successive levels. First on that of geostrategy. It is a fairly limited tool, which can only answer certain questions and whose use is certainly currently being abused, but which is suitable for a rough first approach. There is a shift in the center of power, from Europe (in the broad sense) to the Pacific zone. However, there is a rule that minor conflicts take place at the periphery: this was well illustrated by the long series of armed conflicts of the Cold War. Going to the peripheral zone means we have to suffer this kind of inconvenience (sic).
In principle, this should be a minor conflict, but if we understand you correctly between the lines, it is not...

Ahmed wrote:
3) However, this does not explain the root of the problem, even if it has the inestimable advantage of allowing endless commentary on all the marvelous facets of the foreign policies of each of the stakeholders...
Isn't this a big gap to cut short the reflection on this problem - of shifting the geopolitical center of gravity towards the East - or an elegant way to make us understand it without having to go and dive into a complexification from which it would be difficult to escape unscathed. Anyway, that's what I'm trying to understand by “not thinking myself” (it seems that since Kant: “we couldn't anymore”?) : Cheesy: There I would say that on the contrary, I would like to hear an explanation on this “anthropotechnical drift from the West to the East”, since thus formulated, it is paradoxically more a matter of magnetic attraction than of warlike confrontation. (which would prove how fake it is), but no one has your equal in telling us what is fake, why and how it fits.

Ahmed wrote:
4) The other plan is more complex (I would have warned you, don't come complaining!). On the one hand, any system always goes to the end of its possibilities, as Bertrand Méheust liked to write, but there inevitably comes a moment when the circumstances which made it operational disappear, either spontaneously, or in the case which interests us. because he himself brought about this change by the mere fact of his development.
In terms of going all the way, what the Russians wanted from the EU was more rapprochement than conflict, they had previously worked extensively in this direction for decades, with regular sticks in the wheels... Geostrategic question, it was therefore quite clever (but hideous and unsustainable) to force the completion of the possible towards war (which will only postpone a rapprochement until later, when the hypocrisy of bipolar stigmatization , will have moved us away from the war...) between neighbors are we not condemned to get along according to Méheust?

Ahmed wrote:
5) The sprinkling of substitute liquidity had made it possible for a long time (and more and more) to simulate the operation of part of the "normal" mechanism of production of abstract value which is seized up, but the threat of "peak All" limits the usual strategy of headlong rush and renders it obsolete. The economy cannot be reduced to a simple rivalry between competitors, that would be too limited a vision: it is in fact a war against the living (in the broadest sense, therefore including against humans). It must be admitted that the sometimes very ambiguous benefits of technology are only appreciable because their negative sides are carefully externalized (which also promotes conflict).
If one agrees, by an unusual gymnastics of the mind, to consider that any expenditure of energy conceals a potential violence, then one will understand that war is only a paroxysmal form of the economy and that it fully finds its place when the usual economy finds itself in a deadlock situation: this is the case with tectonics, which can often release its power by fairly continuous, small-scale shifts, but in the presence of obstacles, it accumulates tensions which are released suddenly and very brutally.
It is this last point that I saw in the process of materializing for ten years... Thinking perhaps a little naively that things would eventually work out, but that was without counting on the "until- endianness” of the parties involved. And more particularly from the West, since according to the Western propagandist narrative (“we are on the right track as a democracy, much more advanced than dictatorships, and much more responsible for the outcome of things”) ...and therefore if we are to believe this speech, it was the Westerners who had to see it coming, give guarantees to Russia, to give it time to reach a higher maturity in its quest for its own maturation democratic state. Quite the opposite happened...

Ahmed wrote:
6) The current tropism towards “strong” and very right-wing regimes (in an open form or in a more hypocritical way) which suddenly find themselves trivialized and legitimized is only the transposition to politics of this new state of affairs. I had already described this easily foreseeable evolution a long time ago. Another manifestation of this is the enthusiasm aroused by the programs of the various nations for rearmament, I will not insist on this.
The transposition, the one that is debating and that is divisive so far even in this forum, is the paradoxical reversal of roles between right and left! The former having improvised, forced to become the guarantors of certain values ​​of the latter, which the latter betrayed after being enticed by a kind of “social liberalism” somewhat modeled on the Germanic model, but leaving the door open open to economic and financial liberalism, and to all-out speculation (after letting the wolves into the sheepfold!)

This created a stir in a forum “rather on the left” who found himself accused (wrongly) of having gone to the other extreme. Which seems totally unfounded to me in view of the above... And it seems to leave everyone a little hungry, some having lost their minds... (troubled period that was coming, just as I had announced at Remundo at the very beginning of the year)!


***************************************************** ***************************************************** ***************************************************** *********************************
I pass on the first paragraph to answer the second.
2) I can not comment on the degree of seriousness of these events, all I can say is that we must carefully avoid reading between the lines and be satisfied with what is stated positively. So, normally it should remain peripheral, but unforeseeable circumstances can change an initial trajectory...
3) The drift observed results from the differentiated state of the various economies. Although it would be inappropriate to distinguish stricto sensu an "old" capitalism from a "young" capitalism, it should be noted that the methods of its operation differ according to this temporal criterion and that the old industrial nations accumulate a certain number of handicaps which limit its performance, not that the most recent are exempt from it, but the latter still have a greater margin of maneuver, if only in terms of physical resources and especially the ability to control the population. This, I repeat, does not mean that basically the crisis situation is not global, but that particular modalities induce noticeably different situations at a time T (and can thus lead to erroneous analyses).
4) On this point, it is going a little hastily by presupposing the good faith of poutine, because the latter is in no way inferior in terms of bad faith to its American competitors. Let's say rather that the two parties use all the subterfuges to advance their pawns. As for invoking B. Meheust, still it would be necessary to do it wisely and not to extrapolate unduly: it is easier to argue with your neighbors than with distant strangers...
But here we fall back into the journalistic rut...
5) It is a gross misunderstanding of what I wrote to reduce it to the single issue of "West versus Russia". This conflict suits many governments despite the inconveniences it generates (it hides, by accentuating it, the previous crisis situation and provides a certain way out in rearmament). In an absolutely general way, it is absolutely necessary to have an enemy, because it is easier to unite a people against something or someone than for a common positive cause. The USSR had long held this essential role for the West and especially for the USA (the converse being of course true); from this point of view, the new Russia takes up this attribution...
6) This last paragraph is important. If we oppose the right and the left, we cannot hope to understand anything, since it is precisely this false antagonism which is the keystone of political systems and their mystifying character (no conspiracy there- inside!). Right and left are the two sides of the system and the different positions can be the fact of one or the other party depending on the time (as I mentioned a little while ago), as long as they perpetuate their opposition . This alternation of convictions is a sign both of the desire (not necessarily conscious) to distort the judgment of voters and offers the attentive observer confirmation of the irrelevant nature of this apparent duality.
As suggested F.Fukuyama in his end of History, representative democracy represents the ultimate in a prosperous economy and as he imagined that the vocation of the economy was to eventually spread universal prosperity, he had no doubts about the generalization of this mode of government. What followed, of course, proved this propaganda work wrong. In periods of difficulty, all economies are forced to resort to interventionist measures (which is not equivalent to dictatorship). If we examine situations that are no longer cyclical, but structural, we understand the attraction for "muscular" forms of governance. But I will have the opportunity to develop this last point.
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Ahmed » 21/12/22, 21:57

I take up and develop point 3 which is particularly important:

- We must insist on the fact that what is generally considered to be a "slippage" of productive areas is in fact a global structural problem of progressive inability to fulfill the essential criterion of our economic system: to succeed in increasing its mass of capital by exploiting the human labor that constitutes the origin of valorization (as a social relationship). This means that far from being manifestations of obsolescence or, on the contrary, of youthful vigor, the disparities between the countries must rather be analyzed in terms of different levels in the realization of the process. It is these different levels of maturity which are expressed within a general crisis and which modulate it according to them. Obeying the same pattern which is to produce value from human work and at the same time to have to destroy the mass base of this work through automation and the considerable increase in managerial tasks useless to this valuation, we arrive at an insurmountable contradiction. Because the problem is not perceived that way by standard economics, coping with the crisis tends to reinforce earlier processes that have worked in the past, such as the externalization of predation (and now even self-determination). predation!), and to find artifices making it possible to simulate a functioning at half mast (the most important being the recourse to borrowing).
Add to this gloomy picture of secondary crises, albeit linked, like that of the Covid and it will be understood that laying the responsibility for the situation on the incompetence of the political "elites" is in no way satisfactory: would they be perfectly qualified as 'they could not do much in the midst of a perfectly interconnected economic system, within which nothing could be moved without causing an effect contrary to what was intended (as for example when Europe tries to circumvent the supply of Russian oil by soliciting Saudi Arabia which, in order to satisfy this demand profitably, "launders" this same oil on a large scale!).
Countries can be cataloged according to traditional economic criteria, even if they are in reality not very relevant, between developed, developing and in recession. The middle category being the most uncertain.
Russia is a very special case from this point of view. It is interesting to trace a brief retrospective of its history. Without going back to its origins, Russia, very early on, felt a strong tropism towards the West: in the XNUMXth century, French was the language of the elites there. There was, however, a formidable gap between its culture, the representation of its diplomatic importance and its political and economic stagnation (the two being linked) at an agrarian stage. The revolutions of the beginning of the XNUMXth century were going to drive the transition to the industrial stage and impose a catch-up modernization at the cost of a coercive system and even slavery on an unprecedented scale; when this system ran out of steam and showed its inability to reach the level of its competitors (who had themselves progressed in the meantime), it collapsed, as you know, to dissolve into a mafia oligarchy whose members the main resources of the Soviet empire are shared and exploited as rent. Russia's economy oscillates between two main and opposite poles: a strongly exporting mining activity (coal, oil, gas, etc.) to which should be added agricultural exports, a combination that links it to Third World countries and cutting-edge industries in the nuclear, astronautics and armament fields, which places this country on par with the most modern Western countries. This contradiction confers on this country both ambitions as a major actor on the international scene and a humiliating devaluation due to its inability to fill this gap and to face a certain disdain for the form of its governance (then even though these two aspects are interdependent).
When a country is equipped with a very important armament, inevitably comes the temptation, or rather the need to use it. ** Russia is faced with several major challenges: general standard of living quite low and above all stagnant , autocratic governance which cannot be legitimized by an increase in GDP, structural inability to compete with the Western competitor. In the logic of current global functioning, economism serves as an outlet for the dissipation of energy and corresponds to the exercise of low-noise violence. On this point, Russia appears as restrained and as a victim: it is undergoing the economic pressure from other nations without being able to use its potential for European power, it is a very frustrating situation and a dead end. Which is not sustainably sustainable.*
On the other hand, it must be considered that the USA is concentrating more and more of its attention in the Pacific zone, which opens up a free field which had already been taken advantage of during the annexation of Crimea and other more or less less analogous.
This tilting of the center of gravity of the World finds its manifest translation in this Russo-Ukrainian war: if it is possible, in addition to the previous considerations, it is because this kind of conflict takes place preferentially in the peripheral zones, such as those which took place during the Cold War or after it, except that now the periphery has moved and is now found in Europe...

* One could attempt a parallel with a young man from the suburbs who aspires to dissipate his energy (like any living being), but who comes up against competition he cannot measure up to: the temptation to commit criminal acts is then great.
** It is also the major risk of a generalized rearmament which would thus produce, in the long term, the opposite of its security purpose.
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Re: Non-journalistic approach to the war in Ukraine




by Ahmed » 12/03/23, 23:46

I mentioned above the paroxysmal character of the energetic dissipation of wars. I must specify that this option can only be transitory, both because of the quantity dissipated, but also of its relative ineffectiveness.
I explain this paradox: if the dissipation is very large, it is all the same limited by this time factor. The return to purely commercial methods in the most classic sense will certainly mobilize (sic) a lesser activity, but related to a long duration, this ultimately translates into a greater quantity of energy in absolute value.
Conflicts can also be viewed somewhat as violent versions of the potlatch, albeit in a completely different context that also suggests different ends. The aggressor country voluntarily sacrifices part of its capital to destroy as much as possible that of its rival (we are always well in the competitive competition) in the hope that the final differential will be to its advantage and will allow it either to ransom the defeated country or , which is about the same thing (it's only a matter of terms), to annex its resources for its own benefit. The history of the interwar period obviously hardly confirms this scenario, which is more a matter of initial motivation. But in a world where resources are becoming constrained and where the financial industry, which is essential, cannot create illusions without some tangible translation (this is a nod to Dede2002) in terms of physical production, the annexation of Ukraine is very interesting, without even mentioning the great Russian aspirations which, in another register, probably constitute a powerful spring.
Clearly, this simply means that current geopolitics allow Russia to consider appropriating a greater quantity of these future assets which are likely to represent major assets in the "economic transition". It allows this because of the problems encountered by declining powers which have allowed previous actions to take place without reacting other than by formal protests. Not that the Western camp is devoid of dubious actions, but it would have been legitimate here to prevent what risks causing major destabilization. Was it possible? It's hard to be categorical. If we use the metaphor of plate tectonics, this conflict corresponds to a displacement of the geological layers caused by a slow but inexorable drift.
I leave you to meditate on this sentence of Marx "It is men who make history, but not the one they believe..
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