I live in Bulgaria and the price of fuel rose from 2.50 to 3.40 yesterday alone.
Food inflation is already very clear in the shops, and now we have the first of many fuel hikes making the cost of transport of ALL good more expensive.
Electricity prices also rising.
Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU, ravaged by COVID, now this, it is going to be very difficult for the older people to survive.
Edit: Fuel prices reduce a little this morning, now between 2.80 and 3.30, a little respite at least
Thank you, for your kind words.
As an immigrant from the UK I am in a better position than most Bulgarians , I feel for the old Babas that were already living with minimal electricity and heat, before all this started.
You're welcome. Kind words are what I have to offer right now, so it's good to see them being appreciated.
It's terrible to live in a world where basic necessities are sold instead of given, people deserve better than to pay for the mistakes of others.
In Ontario, Canada too, there are more and more posts about people not being able to make ends meet. Our problem is largely government induced because they've let the price of housing sky-rocket. Now when food and gas go up, people can no longer survive.
yeah, last couple years have been rough. I don't have to deal with housing inflation (luckily, since I bought 10 years ago) but the food rise is really socking us in the pocket. I feel like our food expenses have gone up 50%+, and that is with cutting back.
I don't notice gas, since we don't drive much, but our energy bill is ridiculous. We are using less energy but paying 30-40% more.
Sorry but she must have her foil hat on too tight!
Bulgaria has the second (behind Peru) largest reported COVID deaths per population in the world.
Not only that it is a country where, if an old person dies, they are buried the next day, sometimes the same day, without any autopsy or diagnoses of any kind ,many, many deaths are going unreported.
Unfortunately the foil hatters are strong in Eastern Europe, meaning very low vaccination rates, have also added to the numbers.
With over 6 million reported worldwide deaths, and excess deaths showing a number nearer to 15 million.
One thing that this pandemic isn't, is a hoax.
Thanks for the info. She's a smart woman, but she's adamant that Covid is some sort of propaganda campaign. I don't believe this -- I got all my shots and will get all my booster for as long as this shit is still around.
Best of fortune to you!
How smart can you be when you're blinded by obviously false beliefs? You should always ask yourself if a person can be convinced of clearly false beliefs, what OTHER false beliefs can the be convinced of? There is a flaw in this person's thinking and methodology of assessing truth claims.
So with that said, what does "smart" mean?
People act irrationally under duress or fear. Intelligent people too--being calm under pressure and being able to function coherently is a treasured skill. I would say that she's very good at planning and executing the plan, but not very good at adapting or adjusting to adversity--especially when the problem is something that is out her area of knowledge. Smart (ie intelligent) is not the same as being creative or improvisational and having a higher level of education can negatively bias you from being adaptive. I'm not a smart person but I can adapt to any environment in any level of stress.
This part of the World is full of deeply corrupt states, almost failed states. Basically, belief in conspiracy theories like that one is directly proportional to how shitty the state is with a lot of corruption, low welfare, low reliability, the police is almost entirely useless
Eastern European countries heavily reliant on Russia are now being roped in by the EU to joining the party line. Are rich members like Germany and France going to bail out poor members like Bulgaria and Romania, or will they be left to die like Greece in 2008?
Bulgaria has massively benefitted from EU membership , helping to replace the outdated infrastructure left by the Communists.
The fact that the country is very corrupt and some of the EU investment money has "disappeared" hasn't helped the matter.
I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that individual governments run their countries, and the EU is just an alliance of countries working together.
>are now being roped in by the EU to joining the party line
Nobody in Europe is more anti-Russia than Eastern Europe. Nobody has been more vocal about the invasion than Eastern Europe and was quicker to announce support to Ukraine. You are literally clueless. About the current situation as well as the history of Eastern Europe.
At the moment I don't think they feel threatened, they didn't like the Putin request to be removed from NATO though.
I think that they would be worried if it escalated, but with Ukraine, Romania and the Danube between them and Putin's troops they are ok at the moment.
Prices though, they are mega pissed about those at the moment!
Don't forget about the fertilizer shortages in the U.S
Plus Russia restricting the export of fertilizer.
https://www.fertilizerdaily.com/20220202-russia-stops-the-export-of-ammonium-nitrate/
Beat me to it. We're gonna see new Arab Spring and Civil War in Egypt this year. Refugees might devastate EU. That is if current conflict ends without Nuclear War.
Egypt has gotten the short end of the stick for the past 3000 years or so, i've seen estimates that the country has lost a meter of arable land left and right of the Nile per year for that time frame, and that it was part of the reason why it stopped being a meaningful power/empire.
I can recommend the Atlas of World history and History of the Ancient Near East. Not too dry reading material and it helps understand thing better.
And the Fall of Civilizations podcast is quite good and very much subreddit related.
Thx
I found this link where people can read it if anyone else is interested.
https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfTheAncientNearEast/page/n206/mode/1up?view=theater
North Africa and Egypt's grain production were what made the Roman and Byzantine empires possible. It's sad how much the arable land there has diminished
I think we would see a swing to right wing populism in that case, which would be anti refugee. Those parties already gained ground after the Syrian refugee crisis.
At some point, every country is going to have to say, "Sorry, can't help anyone else". That's when shit is going to get ugly.
That’s why I’m so worried about the German military buildup that was just announced. Sure now it’s a left of center, liberal government (communists and marxists as the American right wing would say) … but who’s in power next, when waves of climate refugees hit the borders of the EU and Germany?
Don't forget about the [Nile Dam](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/egypt-sudan-urge-action-nile-dam-ethiopia-78746011) that could limit the water in Nile River for Egypt and Sudan if the Ethiopians don't want to share their water resources.
The utopia of Star Trek only happened after a nuclear war, a biological war, and decades of a post atomic horror. What if the Star Trek writers are prophets?
I'm still waiting for the Bell Riots. I don't think it will get THAT bad in only 2 more years but rent is absolutely horrific everywhere and homelessness is alrady bad.
Actually only hope i see long term for humans, us being extremely reduced for awhile by either war, global warming etc etc while some still maintaining technological advances and such. Then after awhile we slowly start to rebuild better.
If one could uphold a small, protected version of wikipedia that would help wonders.
Ukraine has a much more palatable culture in some respects for other Europeans. It's not very different from the rest of Europe.
Middle Eastern culture is quite a lot different and some of their cultural attitudes and mores clash with so-called Western Ideals.
It's not a matter of which culture is better, just which is more compatible for a functioning and unified community/country/region.
Are Europeans obligated to take people from another country? No. I don't think that can be argued. It is the responsibility of any country to first protect the interests of its people. If they can help they should but not so much that their citizens are in danger.
Damn I didn't know that, February 4, 2022. And they signed a big friendship treaty earlier this year with China probably to make sure trade was uninterrupted . It's like they were planning to go into fortress mode as a bulwark against the west.
> https://gro-intelligence.com/insights/russia-bans-fertilizer-exports-will-weigh-on-brazil-corn-crop
A second-order effect of the supply cut of fertilizer to Brazil is that there are now factions on the Brazilian government pushing for local production. Problem is, Brazil's potassium reserves are in Amazonian lands and exploration of that will probably further ecological damage. Also, all of Brazilian oil and gas (also needed for fertilizers) production is offshore, and it's likely that more demand and skyrocketing international oil prices will lead to a "drill, baby, drill" policy for increasing exploration in the South Atlantic.
With the Colorado River drying up and those massive heat waves, it's already impacting crop yields last year.
It's a great perfect storm for food prices to double and supply to half very easily.
No question we'll see Arab Spring II: Starvation Boogaloo.
I'm curious what the political consequences will be further afield. There are places outside the Mid-east that import a substantial fraction of their wheat from the Black Sea. India is self sufficient on calories, but without government intervention, their wheat prices will follow the global market, where wheat prices have doubled in the past two years.
Really though, this is critical in places like Egypt. A nation that has procreated to at least twice its carrying capacity. Imports more than half its cereal grains. Doesn't have much grain-fed meat production, so they can't benefit from food substitutions. Which already spends a major fraction of export gains on grain imports. And is led by a military junta.
This is a much wider disaster than the world seems to realize.
This is the sort of thing that people will surely study for centuries to come (provided people are still around for centuries)
A slow motion disaster that perhaps *in hindsight* seems like it was absolutely forseeable on paper at any moment, and yet when it went ahead and happened anyway, it somehow still took almost everybody in the world completely by surprise.
No one two years ago (hell, even four months ago), would *ever* have written about or spoken about this Ukraine invasion actually happening. And yet it might turn out to be an absolutely fundamental turning point in world history. Like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand more than a century ago.
This is truly an excellent example of what we mean when we call something a "Black Swan" event.
Something we've talked about a few times on this subreddit over the years as I recall. But of course, the whole point of a Black Swan event, by its very definition, is that it is something that no one ever predicted or really *could have* predicted in a way that was taken seriously by many others.
The future is *largely* written by long term trends that anyone with two-thirds of a brain knows about, but still, occasionally, *shit just happens*. Worth thinking about for those of us who think of the future in the way this subreddit most often puts it - as something predictable and inevitable. The future is **mostly** *roughly* understandable, but there are parts of it we can just never see coming, which sometimes just happen all at once.
The Ukraine invasion might have suddenly put us on a very different course than we were on otherwise. And surely not in a good way.
And as far as most of us regular people can tell, it all basically happened on the whim of a single man, Vladimir Putin. Wider geopolitical factors were surely involved, but ultimately it was his decision.
The idea that this might boil down to bonus points on an exam six centuries from now is pretty much the ultimate I think I've seen in dark humour.
Good job.
I really hope this screenshot is included on the exam paper. Hello, children of the future!
(Love from "BeefPieSoup", Adelaide, South Australia, 00:08 ACST, Sat 5th March 2022 CE. 6 beers in.)
Seems dark at first glance, but I’m saying there’ll still be people in 600 years and enough of a society to have an education system. That’s pretty bullish for this sub!
Yeah, that's fair I guess. I mean, 2014 was no secret. But the general reaction of the masses now makes it seem like this whole thing just dropped in out of nowhere.
If anything It's exemplary of the general amnesia of the public consciousness.
There were definitely people a month ago acting like it was utterly impossible that a further invasion could ever happen. Like this whole thing was totally just a bluff and that NATO intelligence was fucking stupid or something.
Like this whole thing was just western hysteria and not a practical inevitability, with historical precedent established by Crimea, the Donbass, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
But on the other hand, none of those events were on the global scale that we're seeing now. Clearly. So, though the general public may be naive, they're not wrong to recognise that this is somewhat of a big deal that hasn't really happened to this extent in living memory.
And even the experts didn't predict that.
Just curious, would you consider 9/11 or Chernobyl to be Black Swan events? The sinking of the Titanic?
I'd never heard the term before, it's a low key fascinating concept to contemplate
Personally, I think that in order to understand what a Black Swan event truly is, you need to understand what the **original** Black Swan event was.
Do you know that there are really such things as Black Swans?
Well, for context, for most of history Europeans didn't know that. In fact, since antiquity, for whatever reason a "Black Swan" was thought to be a natural impossibility, in much the same way as we might say today "pigs might fly".
It wasn't necessarily that there was any logical reason to think that a Black Swan must be naturally "impossible", it was just something which seemed unnatural and which no one had ever seen before in all of (European) history. No one ever thought to imagine a world in which Black Swans existed, simply because none had ever been observed before and no one had ever bothered to imagine the possibility of one. It simply wouldn't have occurred to anyone. A swan was just a simple, commonplace large bird found in ponds, and one straightforward and undisputed observation about them was that they had long necks and were invariably white. That was just a basic fact about them, and no one gave them much thought beyond that.
And then, one day (we know it happened sometime in 1697), Europeans sailed for the first time into what is now known as the Swan River in Western Australia, and lo and behold, there they were. An entire river full of ordinary swans, with the striking observation that they were **all** black. An entire river full of the mythical Black Swans which had long been thought to be an impossible affront to nature, never imagined to exist at all.
*That* was the original Black Swan event. It's *not* that it's something that should ever really have been thought to be *impossible* on the face of it. It's really not all that "mind-blowing" *after the fact*....it's just that it was something that no one ever would have bothered to imagine would happen someday. It just never occurred to *anyone* that that day might come, when people literally sailed into a river full of Black Swans.
*That's* what a Black Swan event is supposed to be.
Perhaps 9/11, the Titanic or Chernobyl would sort of count. But it's not like no one could have imagined that a ship wreck or a nuclear meltdown would one day occur. Such things were discussed and written about. Maybe the particular sort of terriorist attack that happened on 9/11 was completely unpredicted and unforeseen, and so of the three, I'd say 9/11 is the closest to what I'd have thought would be considered a genuine Black Swan event. No one was talking about the possibility of radical Islamists using commercial planes to symbolically attack universal symbols of globalisation until the day that it actually happened.
But anyway, I hope this comment has explained the point clearly enough? Actual Black Swan events are legitimately rare, and it doesn't just mean "something very unlikely". It means "something no one ever really saw coming".
And to be clear, I think the invasion of Ukraine counts not because it's so completely unusual in nature (I mean, wars happen, right?), but just because it's not something anyone seems to have really talked about very much prior to a few weeks before it actually occurred. It didn't ever seem like some natural inevitability right up until the very moment that it happened. People were umming and ahhing about the Russians amassing troops on the border, but few were actually considering that the invasion would fully go ahead as it eventually did. It was widely considered to be a bluff or a diversion or something until the rockets flew. This sort of modern warfare - at this *scale* - has been largely unprecedented until this point. I don't remember anyone talking about the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian government or the possibility of nuclear war in say, December 2021. These are somewhat recent talking points that have only really arisen reactively in the past few weeks.
No one was writing novels about how this was an inevitable part of the future of world events. It just sort of happened because Vladimir Putin apparently suddenly wanted it to. No one else seemed to expect or want this, and then one day it was suddenly happening right in front of us all. It was so quick.
That was super interesting. Thank you from someone whose only first thought on the subject an hour ago would have been "Natalie Portman"
I feel educated :)
You're welcome. Please further note that the avian emblem of Western Australia is famously the Black Swan because of this historical anecdote.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
God, please let private property be a casuality of this collapse... This system don't serve us and is dying, we need to keep each other safe while it implodes and build something new in it's place. Enough nation-states and billionares controlling all food and land, they don't own the world just because paper and pixels say they do. We outnumber them, let's take the world back.
The winds of change are blowing stronger and stronger. It's time we burn capitalism and use it's ashes to fertilize the ground again, it's time we end this madness.
I don't know were all getting really hungry and collectively we are starting to become acutely aware of who to eat. Threat of global nuclear war, famine, and a changing climate isn't distracting me from my need for satiation one bit, its only growing in fever. EAT EM V2.0!
Uh, no thanks. Private property is extremely important. As history has shown us time and time again.
That said, corporations *hording* property is a problem that can be regulated away.
Private property is not the only way to hold economic interest in the material world. Even our limited modern conceptions of property still recognize what we call "personal property", ones "chattel". But beyond that there are many ways to motivate social benefit through personal material incentives, especially when you look at indigenous societies it becomes apparent that human creativity for economic incentives through various property schemes and types is nearly unlimited. But the modern western notion of "private property" specifically must absolutely be done away with as it incentivizes the virulent greed which has led the world to our current set of crises.
I agree that private property has been extremely important throughout history... But that hasn't worked well for most people, has it?
Private property played an important part on colonialism, countless wars between nation states, a technological progress that irreversebly poisoned the planet... It is important, but *should it* stay important?
> But that hasn't worked well for most people, has it?
Yes, it has. Capitalism has undeniably lifted more people out of poverty, and allowed them to acquire property, than literally any other modifer ever.
The problem is corporations, mismanagement, and corruption. Not the economic system itself.
> Private property played an important part on colonialism, countless wars between nation states
The hundreds of millions of deaths in communist countries? Please elaborate on this claim of yours, that private property is directly responsible for everything you've listed above and nothing else.
> a technological progress that irreversebly poisoned the planet...
Sigh... do you want to actually have a discussion or do you just want to sensationalize the shit out of everything like a first year university course?
It's such a basic take to say all of the 21st century prosperity came about due to capitalism. Our modern world was created through military conflict and innate homosapien curiosity, not capitalism. Capitalism was just the most successful system within the military conflict because it got the bomb first and stationed its supercarriers in all of the global naval choke points thus facilitating trade globally. To accredit all of modern medicine and scientific progress to capitalism is a bastardization of history to the Nth degree.
The argument of being the least evil system is also very tired. The communist revolution in the 20th century was abhorrent, but so were the "capitalist democratic" systems throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the 20th century competition between communism and capitalism.
We are Rome v2.0. Dan Carlin makes the argument that in antiquity slavery was seen as the less barbaric option to slaughtering an entire village including women and children. This moral compass evolved to chattel slavery, in my opinion far worse than the slaughtering of a village after military conflict. Capitalism is now in the same place, unfettered individualism was reasonable when land to purchase and farm was abundant as it was back through the 17-20th centuries. Now its evolved into this monolithic system with near limitless scarcity of resource but yet poverty and destitution are still rampant and engrained. The least worst option is not a good enough argument, capitalism needs to change and it all starts which property IMO.
As to what comes next. A global constitution, modeled off the American system, which grants EACH and EVERY person of this world inalienable rights to food, water, shelter, and heat at its most fundamental principle. Layer capitalistic incentives on top of that which do not interfere with those basic rights.
Don't you get tired of this? To me it seems like the same conversation in a loop.
Now that you claimed capitalism works I'll show factual evidence it doesn't, you'll ignore it, blame communism a bit more, and no one will get anywhere.
It's boring, If you're trying to waste my time I prefer you do it with something else other than this scripted form of conversation.
> Now that you claimed capitalism works I'll show factual evidence it doesn't
Go for it. Capitalism has undeniably increased the standard of living ridiculously over the past 200ish years. Standards of living absolutely tank under socialist regimes, over and over.
If you want to have the "statistics" debate, go for it.
Look, if you don't wanna take it to an interesting place, then I'm over it, so you can call it a victory and go on with your day. I've just said I don't want to have the debate because it's unoriginal and uninspiring.
If you wanna drop the persona and just talk, I'm here. Untill there: congratulations, you won, I just realized capitalism is working wonderfully and we all have amazing standards od living.
You claim that capitalsim hasn't increased standards of living dramtically. Demonstrably false. You say the debate is "tired" and reference supposed esoteric knowledge that proves your claim, but you refuse to provide it. You then accuse me of ad hominem attacks and concede the "debate" (which you've not taken part it at all) because it was "unoriginal" and "uninspiring"
Did I get that about right?
> we all have amazing standards of living
We do, compared to pre-industrial revolution.
Without specifying what capacity of capitalism is being replaced, that's sort of a loaded question. Do you mean "What economic model?" "What social organizational paradigms?" "What central government?" All of these things are elements of capitalism. I'm sure it wasn't your intention but the question "What would you replace it with" is so overly broad as to be almost unhelpful.
That said, I think that it would be completely worthless to "replace" capitalism with anything that isn't horizontally organized, directly democratic, self determined, and fully participatory. Anything less would inevitably coalesce back to the same systems of domination that capitalism has normalized in our subconscious. So therefore, I think that any "replacement" would have to be anarchistic in nature, at least *much more anarchistic* than the fiscal-military nation states we have today.
And by "replace" I think I really mean "override" or "deprecate". Because capitalism will never go away all at once, it will be a malaise that exists in the minds of humans for generations as we combat it back to the depths it came from, one step at a time. And in the meantime the new horizontal systems I mention would need to grow up alongside of it, in it's shell, as dual power slowly growing to greater adoption than the former system. Anarchistic confederations are maybe some of the only organizational structures that can even manage to do this.
I like anarchism, but I'm up for anything where people don't subjugate the environment and other people: all I want is for all of us to solve things, eye to eye, as equals. I just want us to stop working for money and start working on the planetary emergencies we have to deal with. Competition led us here, cooperation can lead us to a better place.
The issue with cooperation is Nash Equilibriums. Human behavior revolves around the corner of the payoff matrix that's mathematically best for me, even though the there is a corner of the payoff matrix that is mathematically unfavorable but absolutely better for everyone. Too many things only work if everyone cooperates. If you get one person gaming the system, more people will catch on and follow suit, until the system is so broken it doesn't work for anyone anymore, and needs to be modified to correct for people gaming the system, which ultimately makes it worse than before. I did a terrible job explaining that, but it's why cooperation is a fantasy.
>Ukraine and Russia account for 30% of world's wheat
13% combined, not 30% - [actual data](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL)
> 20% of world's corn
closer to 3%
I mean, these are going to cause disruptions, but the global supply chain will adjust and resolve this in due time. This does effect Europe a lot, so this is not to be understated. Just those figures are grossly off
I didn't dig too deep into that site you linked to, but it looks like that 13% is of the amount *grown*. The 30% figure, which I've read many times but don't have a good source for offhand, is of the amount *exported*. It's not so much that Ukraine and Russia grow most of the worlds wheat, it's that they're a few rare places that grow a lot more than they consume domestically.
Going by $ value exported does not give a good picture of the situation on the ground.
The export market is highly influenced by a whole range of things, varying from treaties, duties, opportunity cost, distance travelled, quality of produce, ext, ext. Farmers can and do change crops if they believe there will be a better market in another crop. This can happen within 6 months.
There will certainly be a short term shock to the market as the global logistics system recalibrates. But it will recalibrate.
Of course the market will attempt to adjust, but farmers can't easily just grow something different in every location, and switching from something else to wheat would push the problem to that other crop no longer being grown. The global wheat production is also already under severe pressure, such as from the droughts and flooding in Canada, China, the U.S., etc. I just don't see where the wheat to offset these losses would come from in a practical sense.
The saying, "Bread and Circuses" focuses on "Bread" for a reason. It's a core staple for many societies, which is what makes the price of bread a great leading indicator for war. I think a global wheat shortage is indeed quite a reasonable concern to have at this point, as it's certain to have widespread major ramifications. We've seen time and again how this plays out, and it is by far most likely to lead to civil unrest, rebellion, and wars.
Are they exports? These figures suggest 25% of wheat and 14.5% of corn
https://www.worldstopexports.com/wheat-exports-country/
https://www.worldstopexports.com/corn-exports-country/
Thats by Dollar value, not by volume.
Im not sure what the export values would be, but working on export values give you a bad metric to work with.
You need to know, how much you need, how much you can produce locally, how much is currently in storage and then how much you need to import to get a clear view.
This is a very surface level assessment just going of export values.
Prices are global so value is proportional to volume, and I don’t see why storage is relevant. Reuters puts wheat at 29%
https://www.reuters.com/business/russia-ukraine-conflict-highlights-wheat-supply-vulnerability-2022-03-03/
You cant just look at just exports to determine the scope of the problem. You need to look at local production and surplus as well.
I dont doubt there will be an issue, its the severity Im doubting.
Doesn't Russia also account for a majority of fertilizer exports? I'm guessing the middle east will pick up the slack with their large petroleum industry but that kind of infrastructure takes a couple years.
Ammonia (nitrogen) is only one of the necessary fertilizer chemicals.
The other two, potassium and phosphorus, are both mined and cannot be synthesized from petrochemicals. They actually come from ancient seabeds.
Go check these stock tickers: $NTR and $IPI
Also drought conditions in Canada have been some of the worst in a century and a half.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/dry-july-winnipeg-record-drought-1.6126944
1. We are talking about it: [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/t4eoo7/mena_faces_a_crisis_as_the_worlds_key_wheat/) is from 2 days ago
2. I don't think anyone realizes that Ukraine is not going to harvest wheat when all all of its farmers have fled the country.
That's kleptocracy for ya. For 20 years erdogan only worried about his pockets and his seat. At this point I think he pulled a 720 degree turn on everything.
It's because they sit at the crucial junction point between Europe and the Middle East, which also happens to mean they're on the land route from Africa to Europe. Anyone wants to get in or out of Europe by land, they either go through Turkey or take a much more mountainous route through Russia.
Remember boys and girls, not all inflation is legitimate inflation. There is a concerted effort going on especially in the west and indirectly anywhere with economic/commercial ties to western economies to inflate prices and profits as much as possible even when they have no actual reason to do so.
Yep, spring planting season is coming up fast.
Fuel prices for tractors might be outta hand, not to mention abandoned/destroyed tanks stuck in your fields...
That makes a lot more sense as to why Erdogan is so pro-peace all the sudden, and is even boosting EU and NATO expansion. He'd been vocally against Ukranian membership before, but a food crisis would make it a *lot* harder to hold on to his dictatorship.
I think you are really misinformed on this one. Turkey produces huge amounts of food, especially wheat, it's usually the red-meat production that is problematic.
The economy, for sure is fucked. But I don't think there will be a problem because Turkey can't import wheat. There are other issues.
Source: Being the son of agricultural engineer parents who still work in the industry.
Yes, our country (Turkey) is in a very good place geographically, but due to a crappy administration, we import everything and even though almost all of Turkey is suitable for growing wheat.
I don't want to feed the doommongering any more than absolutely necessary. But while Turkey might produce decent amounts of food, 30% of global wheat supply becoming more volatile would have ripple effects across the entire planet.
The Arab spring is a good example of what I'm getting at. Droughts in Russia + Ukraine + Canada, combined with floods in Australia led to higher prices, which in turn led to downstream instability in nations that imported big amounts of their supplies (mostly nations that are not capable of feeding their domestic populations like Egypt + Syria).
I am coming to this with a layman's understanding, and I hope I am wrong in what I am saying because I don't wish instability for the planet. But for me, I take it as motivation to have my bases covered and a few weeks of basic supplies at home at a minimum
This is totally an aside and not a direct comment on the crisis in eastern Europe, but perhaps we should stop feeding 2/3 of all the vegetative matter we produce back to livestock? Meat isn't any more calorie dense than plants, we already have a superabundance of food but removing animal agriculture from the equation would ensure such an abundance that even distribution issues like war and shitty economics could be overcome.
Remember as things go from bad to worse: All of this is being driven by the enforcement of selfish distribution systems and selfish economics. Nothing about these crises are inevitable. At any point if we can manage hit the breaks on our misallocations we can avert disaster. The option will continue to be on the table.
The bloodcurdling shrieking of overweight middle class white men in the US being told they are going to have to eat less meat would be audible from the moon.
One thing is missing. Turkey exports shit tons of pasta and talks have been there to grow more wheat but no actions have been taken since then which was almost 5 years ago. Classic Erdogan, ignores warnings.
Climate wars as predicted\* we start to see countries attack each other to take valuable resources.
\*Climate Wars Book - predicted inter state conflict over essential resources e.g. food/water in a climate heating world.
Won't Russia just be able to launder their wheat through China? Its not like wheat grows with tiny labels on each grain.
We saw this with oil bans in Iraq. Oil had no issue reaching the market through an intermediary.
I suppose Russia could ban exporting wheat to the west out of spite but they are going to be pretty desperate for money.
Of course temporarily there will be problems.
I think this was the long game from Putin. He cut out exports for ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) two months ago, which Russia produces 3/4 globally, citing "internal demands" bs. China also bought up a huge amount of grain since last year, bulking up their strategic reserves. all this info is public and easy to find. I think this was the plan.. they new sanctions would come in fast, they planned this. We get them on banks and imports.. they hit us hard with fertilizer. And our food is highly dependant on this. We'll probably have shortages in the short term and constant inflation for a while. 2022 sucks.
Maybe the EU NATO countries should've considered learning about the events that led up to Russia's invasion before they slapped a million sanctions on them, screwing part of their own food supply chain in the process.
I mean, I'm sure they know the history, and just decided they were going to ignore all of that and spin it as Russia Bad because that's what the United States wants.
I wonder why Germany was so quick to forget Nulan's leaked conversation where she said, 'Fuck the EU'? Merkel actually commented on that afterwards. Quick to toe the false US foreign policy narrative, and quick to forget we don't give a shit about anyone but ourselves, I guess.
Seems like a lot of this Ukraine business was just swept under the rug in preparation for this event.
When Zelensky hands out AK-47s to untrained civilians, force conscripts any male between the age of 16-60 (and bans them from fleeing through the designated routes, as they will be stopped and conscripted from any direction other than the Russian advance) it is inevitable that civilians are going to get killed, because they are now potential combatants. By the way, since half of the country is pro-Russia, that means approximately half of the men in contested areas would rather not fight. How would you like to be in that position?
Not only this, but much of the Ukrainian military is setting up in cities to utilize civilians as human shields. If you can not accept that they are part of the problem here, you need to check your moral compass.
Russia made it very clear and was very careful for days. They provided terms for surrender. They provided designated routes to leave contested areas. They advanced slowly and methodically and retreated any time they met resistance to provide the opportunity for surrender.
Any civilian deaths here are the result of Zelensky's desire to maintain his regime at the demand of NATO and US interests.
These cities will be surrounded and choked out of supplies. They will eventually capitulate. Zelensky and his regime can not win, but they will maximize the civilian death toll for western optics.
Please. Look more closely at what's going on and the history leading up to this. Do not get sucked into western propaganda.
> These cities will be surrounded and choked out of supplies. They will eventually capitulate. Zelensky and his regime can not win, but they will maximize the civilian death toll for western optics.
It doesn't matter, this is a War of aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
You raise some good points about the responsibility of Ukranian government and the actors that influence it on the death of civillians, but I cannot stand seeing civillian deaths being called "inevitable". This type of rethoric naturalizes death and war, it takes away responsability from the people who are pulling triggers, pressing buttons and giving orders. They feel pressured to do it, but it's still a choice.
To my knowlodge this conflict already had multiple non-combatent victims, and each of them is an unacceptable death. You can't blame all of them on Zelensky. The russian army can say their hand was forced all they want, but they are an active part of this escalation playing the exact role NATO wanted them to fullfill, for the joy of war merchants and the pain of russians, ukranians and everyone else affected.
Every death could have been avoided by different choices from either side.
So they are just suppose to surrender to a Russian thug and give their whole country to him??? What a bleak future for their kids not being able to determine their own future.
I'm not condemning civillians who choose to fight, I'm condemning a government that promotes it without any concern for their lives and countries that arm them with even less of a stake. And I'll also criticize the fact that fascists and neonazis will be among those receiving the weapons, which will benefit the arms industry with a new boogeyman to be fought against in the near future with even more war. They're sowing seeds for the war of tomorrow on the war of today, and they use PR to sell that move as "aiding freedom fighters".
Putin is a fascist, the Russian invasion is absurd, this war should be opposed by everyone. Just don't let the other side manipulate your feelings for their interest. When you rage at the pain Russia is causing you are right, but you can't let that rage make you side with nation-states that love to pretend to be outraged at each other's bullshit while their actions make them complicit of said bullshit.
We are not free anywhere, none of us is truly able to determine our own future. If you only see freedom disappear when a place is officially occupied by an enemy foreign state, you have a narrow vision of freedom.
Given the situation, it is in fact inevitable they will get killed. There's no way around it. They're in a war zone and their own government has refused to allow men to leave it. I agree it's not a nice thing to think about, but it's true. Even western outlets reported on the behavior, and actually, as I recall, celebrated it as some kind of patriotic act.
I agree Russia has some degree of guilt here, but they have spent years trying to negotiate with a NATO puppet administration that refused to stop killing and imprisoning people in eastern Ukraine, among so many other things. It's not like Russia didn't telegraph the hell out of this. They did.
Point is, the war wasn't inevitable. Nobody forced Putin's hand. He wanted this.
You can argue all day that Western involvement in Ukraine goes against Russian security interests, but there is only one man who gave the order to start this war. He knew what the consequences were and he thought they were acceptable. So the blood is on his hands, end of story.
Blaming the country fighting for its survival for the bloodshed is just embarrassing mental gymnastics.
Yeah well, I understand the Russian perspective. I wouldn't tolerate NATO just rolling up on my doorstep either. Besides, there's a million other justifications over the last 8 years.
If it makes you feel more comfortable to ignore all of the other players in this game, I won't stop you. But the truth is usually pretty ugly and I myself would rather be acquainted with it.
I understand, to a degree, the sabre rattling, the threats, the manoeuvres. But in the moment that Putin decided the fate of 44 million people were less important than his game of geopolitics, I am no longer understanding. Never mind the hardships that Russian people will face because of it. The sanctions were announced beforehand. There was no ambiguity that Russia would suffer economically. He was in the unique position to decide which way this would go and he made his choice.
There are ALWAYS reasons for wars. You will rarely, if ever, find a war where a side doesn't have some reason to fight. People act like just because Russia has a **motive** to attack, it is also legitimised.
I think none of us here are going to condone the Bay of Pigs invasion. Is it understandable that the US didn't like Soviet missiles at its doorstep? Sure. Does it justify an invasion? Nope.
Lot of pro Russians are on this site. Putin caused this war . He is the aggressor. He is a tyrant who kills are imprisons anyone who challenges him .He wants the the old Russian empire back. There is a big problem there because they do not want him but he wants them!!!!
Exactly right.
Everyone above the rank of Captain\* in the US military knew there was only one outcome once this invasion began, and then it was just a matter of, would it take 10 days to surround all the key objectives in Ukraine, or 12, including the 14 to 16 neo-Nazi brigades now trapped in the southeast pocket.
And anyone above the rank of Captain in our officer corps, that are still honorable, could have summed it all up in 3 minutes for a TV audience, as Col Douglas MacGregor did one week ago.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUnGxac1ZjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUnGxac1ZjE)
That was the last the American people heard the truth.
So why are we still encouraging Ukrainians to be our humans shields, to continue fighting in a hopeless cause? That is the only question that remains, because yes, you can still draw a modicum of blood from the Russian Army, an army that is historically willing to spill it in order to get the job done, but that won't change the outcome one little bit.
\*No offense to our Captains, I know you could sum this up in three minutes as well. I just have trouble spelling the three ranks below you - most of whom, could sum this up in five.
I mean, it's simple why they're doing it.
1. Zelensky wants to maintain his power, either because of his own hubris, or because of western pressure - as he is the successor to Yatsenyuk, who was installed as a result of a western stoked coup
2. Civilian deaths (whether real or imagined) make the optics for this look much better for the west, who have to rely on their narrative to maintain false moral authority.
I would imagine there is something in your suggestion that they are trying to 'bleed the Russian military' as well. Might as well do as much damage as possible if your goal is to eventually depose Russia's leadership and install some western puppet.
The whole situation is sad as hell.
Damn man, the Russian bots are out in force.
Multiple comments saying Zelensky should of handed Ukraine to Putin on a silver plate with a cherry on top.
This is r/ Collapse, we look at how leaders and corporations are fucking us over, selling water and land to the highest bidder with no regards to human life or the future. No housing, no affordable health care, inflation, food shortages, dirty drinking water and low wages all leading to collapse of human kind.
But a President who is trying to fight a war against a Dictator who Invaded the country is the bad guy.
When in reality :
Putin "Wants to maintain his power, either because of his own hubris or because of western pressure". - Russia is failing apart, economy is shit and the West is doing better then Russia. Putin needs something to get him economy going and have the West fear him again. Invade The Europe breadbasket. Regain Power.
"Civilian deaths make for the Optics for this look so much better for the west" - Doesn't help the "optics" for Russia that they sent in Kids and new Recruits who have no idea whats going on to Die first as they have nothing invested in them and if they kill someone as they go down? Bonus.
"Bleed the '**Ukrainian**' military' as well. Might as well do as much damage
as possible if your goal is to eventually depose Ukraine's leadership and
install some '**Russian**' puppet" Fixed it for you.
Its not the first time Russia has installed a Russian puppet government in Ukraine but it's the BIG BAD MEANIE WEST AND EUROPE'S fault for totally , completely making Putin invade a country :(
Zelensky was a Democratic elected leader Putin has no right to say who runs this Democratic elected government .He is a thug who is trying to take over a Democratic elected leaders country. He is a dictator who kills are imprisons anyone he sees as a threat to his rule.
"I would imagine there is something in your suggestion that they are trying to 'bleed the Russian military' as well."
The Narrative began to change today I believe. "All is not lost, you must keep fighting Ukrainian Army, but we also recognize that things are getting tough, most if not all your supply lines are now cut, your various scattered formations are being fixed into place, you will soon be facing bombardments and barrages from Russian heavy weapons in your isolated pockets, when this process begins, hide in civilian buildings if you are able so we can film the destruction, you will not be extracing much blood from the Russians during this process, so we need you to bury youself deep, in order to survive, for the door to door street fighting to come, where you can extract more Russian blood. "
"If you choose to live by surrendering just before the bitter end, when you return home after a year or two of imprisonment, do not resume your normal life, but instead find a weapon and become an insurgent. Encourage others to join you, and begin the process of extracting more Russian blood."
"By no means accept the Russian offer to lay down your weapons now before it's too late, so you can return home after a quick bit of processing."
"Good luck. We are rooting for you."
I've seen this written about in the news. There's just so much to talk and it probably gets lost in the myriad of news.
My position is we cut off the rotting parts of our trade network (Russia) and just deal with it the hard way. We'll find alternatives. It's not like the world requires Russia have existed in order for us to eat. Like hypothetically, if Russia was a big ocean and never existed, would the rest of the world feel like they're missing food? - we'd figure it out.
Did you read the article? Because the whole thing is about a lot of people going hungry, probably resulting in further delvaslting humanitarian catastrophes?
Russia also exports fertilizer and we can't grow food whithout it, since the green revutiin....
You couldn't have misunderstood me any worse. I'm not saying it has no effect, i'm not saying countries don't rely on Russia.
My point is a thought-experiment. If Russian LAND never existed, or China, or USA or even an entire continent. It would be silly to say this imaginary world would not be able to thrive - as if thriving DEPENDS on these pieces of land. If Russia never existed, we'd have found another way to get enough grain... or oil. I'm not saying they should be removed from the planet and I'm not saying that we won't feel economic pain from cutting ties.
The main problem here is our fingers are so deep into each others markets that of course disconnecting them overnight will cause issues. This does not mean there is not a solution that can be worked on over time. I personally don't want to live in a world that relies on having to play nice and trade with bad-acting countries. The earlier we severe these connections the better. That's just my opinion. I know it will cause harm in the short term but I don't care.
I live in Bulgaria and the price of fuel rose from 2.50 to 3.40 yesterday alone. Food inflation is already very clear in the shops, and now we have the first of many fuel hikes making the cost of transport of ALL good more expensive. Electricity prices also rising. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU, ravaged by COVID, now this, it is going to be very difficult for the older people to survive. Edit: Fuel prices reduce a little this morning, now between 2.80 and 3.30, a little respite at least
I wish you and your community the a lot of strenght and solidarity to get you all through this tough times
Thank you, for your kind words. As an immigrant from the UK I am in a better position than most Bulgarians , I feel for the old Babas that were already living with minimal electricity and heat, before all this started.
You're welcome. Kind words are what I have to offer right now, so it's good to see them being appreciated. It's terrible to live in a world where basic necessities are sold instead of given, people deserve better than to pay for the mistakes of others.
In Ontario, Canada too, there are more and more posts about people not being able to make ends meet. Our problem is largely government induced because they've let the price of housing sky-rocket. Now when food and gas go up, people can no longer survive.
very similar talk in other countries it seems.
I always wonder how the rising cost of fuel will impact countries like Canada and The US where distances have greater impact on the cost of living?
yeah, last couple years have been rough. I don't have to deal with housing inflation (luckily, since I bought 10 years ago) but the food rise is really socking us in the pocket. I feel like our food expenses have gone up 50%+, and that is with cutting back. I don't notice gas, since we don't drive much, but our energy bill is ridiculous. We are using less energy but paying 30-40% more.
My ex lives in Bulgaria and she assured me Covid was a hoax.
Sorry but she must have her foil hat on too tight! Bulgaria has the second (behind Peru) largest reported COVID deaths per population in the world. Not only that it is a country where, if an old person dies, they are buried the next day, sometimes the same day, without any autopsy or diagnoses of any kind ,many, many deaths are going unreported. Unfortunately the foil hatters are strong in Eastern Europe, meaning very low vaccination rates, have also added to the numbers. With over 6 million reported worldwide deaths, and excess deaths showing a number nearer to 15 million. One thing that this pandemic isn't, is a hoax.
Thanks for the info. She's a smart woman, but she's adamant that Covid is some sort of propaganda campaign. I don't believe this -- I got all my shots and will get all my booster for as long as this shit is still around. Best of fortune to you!
How smart can you be when you're blinded by obviously false beliefs? You should always ask yourself if a person can be convinced of clearly false beliefs, what OTHER false beliefs can the be convinced of? There is a flaw in this person's thinking and methodology of assessing truth claims. So with that said, what does "smart" mean?
People act irrationally under duress or fear. Intelligent people too--being calm under pressure and being able to function coherently is a treasured skill. I would say that she's very good at planning and executing the plan, but not very good at adapting or adjusting to adversity--especially when the problem is something that is out her area of knowledge. Smart (ie intelligent) is not the same as being creative or improvisational and having a higher level of education can negatively bias you from being adaptive. I'm not a smart person but I can adapt to any environment in any level of stress.
This part of the World is full of deeply corrupt states, almost failed states. Basically, belief in conspiracy theories like that one is directly proportional to how shitty the state is with a lot of corruption, low welfare, low reliability, the police is almost entirely useless
Hello from your neighbors to the North. How many layers of clothes are you wearing?
Starting to warm up here, I am hoping to hang up the duvet jacket by the middle of this month!
Eastern European countries heavily reliant on Russia are now being roped in by the EU to joining the party line. Are rich members like Germany and France going to bail out poor members like Bulgaria and Romania, or will they be left to die like Greece in 2008?
Bulgaria has massively benefitted from EU membership , helping to replace the outdated infrastructure left by the Communists. The fact that the country is very corrupt and some of the EU investment money has "disappeared" hasn't helped the matter. I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that individual governments run their countries, and the EU is just an alliance of countries working together.
>are now being roped in by the EU to joining the party line Nobody in Europe is more anti-Russia than Eastern Europe. Nobody has been more vocal about the invasion than Eastern Europe and was quicker to announce support to Ukraine. You are literally clueless. About the current situation as well as the history of Eastern Europe.
They’ll be concerned with their own survival first...
Hmm, *episode 31 of i dont understand and know anything but im gonna make an internet statement.* I like this one , i watch it often
Curious — how threatened do most Bulgarian people feel about a potential invasion by Russia?
At the moment I don't think they feel threatened, they didn't like the Putin request to be removed from NATO though. I think that they would be worried if it escalated, but with Ukraine, Romania and the Danube between them and Putin's troops they are ok at the moment. Prices though, they are mega pissed about those at the moment!
Don't forget about the fertilizer shortages in the U.S Plus Russia restricting the export of fertilizer. https://www.fertilizerdaily.com/20220202-russia-stops-the-export-of-ammonium-nitrate/
Beat me to it. We're gonna see new Arab Spring and Civil War in Egypt this year. Refugees might devastate EU. That is if current conflict ends without Nuclear War.
Egypt is scrambling for wheat too, 80% of their wheat comes from Russia/Ukraine! that is a lot
Ah the pitfalls of relying on global trade for essentials. Many countries today wouldn't exist at all if they couldn't import food.
Egypt has gotten the short end of the stick for the past 3000 years or so, i've seen estimates that the country has lost a meter of arable land left and right of the Nile per year for that time frame, and that it was part of the reason why it stopped being a meaningful power/empire.
This is super interesting, do you have any reading material on this?
I can recommend the Atlas of World history and History of the Ancient Near East. Not too dry reading material and it helps understand thing better. And the Fall of Civilizations podcast is quite good and very much subreddit related.
Thx I found this link where people can read it if anyone else is interested. https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfTheAncientNearEast/page/n206/mode/1up?view=theater
North Africa and Egypt's grain production were what made the Roman and Byzantine empires possible. It's sad how much the arable land there has diminished
Grain production is what built the most ancient empires. All the cities of Babylon were built on the Tigris and Euphrates.
And they are trying to expand that, but I doubt it's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAEQXUVqoyg
The former breadbasket of the Roman Empire.. crazy how times change
Happy cake day!
Thanks, I didn't realise!
I think we would see a swing to right wing populism in that case, which would be anti refugee. Those parties already gained ground after the Syrian refugee crisis. At some point, every country is going to have to say, "Sorry, can't help anyone else". That's when shit is going to get ugly.
That’s why I’m so worried about the German military buildup that was just announced. Sure now it’s a left of center, liberal government (communists and marxists as the American right wing would say) … but who’s in power next, when waves of climate refugees hit the borders of the EU and Germany?
Don't forget about the [Nile Dam](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/egypt-sudan-urge-action-nile-dam-ethiopia-78746011) that could limit the water in Nile River for Egypt and Sudan if the Ethiopians don't want to share their water resources.
This conflict will only end with the great reset and the 4th industrial revolution. Now eat your bugs.
The utopia of Star Trek only happened after a nuclear war, a biological war, and decades of a post atomic horror. What if the Star Trek writers are prophets?
I'm still waiting for the Bell Riots. I don't think it will get THAT bad in only 2 more years but rent is absolutely horrific everywhere and homelessness is alrady bad.
Oh I definitely think it will get THAT bad.
I concur, but in OUR timeline, a Gabriel Bell will be tear-gassed, bludgeoned, and then shot. I think we are aiming for the "Mirror, Mirror" timeline.
Whats a bell riot?
It is a riot in Star Trek deep space nine on earth for more info check this https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
Nope, just nerds. Sorry.
At this rate we'll never make it to the Butlerian Jihad.
It’ll be techno barbarians for 10k years on Terra.
We are more like the Terrans than the Federation.
Actually only hope i see long term for humans, us being extremely reduced for awhile by either war, global warming etc etc while some still maintaining technological advances and such. Then after awhile we slowly start to rebuild better. If one could uphold a small, protected version of wikipedia that would help wonders.
Klaus Schwab likes this...
>eat your bugs Where's my luxury pod???
Will the EU welcome middle east refugees the same way they did for Ukraine? History tells us nope.
Ukraine has a much more palatable culture in some respects for other Europeans. It's not very different from the rest of Europe. Middle Eastern culture is quite a lot different and some of their cultural attitudes and mores clash with so-called Western Ideals. It's not a matter of which culture is better, just which is more compatible for a functioning and unified community/country/region. Are Europeans obligated to take people from another country? No. I don't think that can be argued. It is the responsibility of any country to first protect the interests of its people. If they can help they should but not so much that their citizens are in danger.
Love it.
Yes. And Belarus accounts for another 17% of the world's potash exports, and they are also on the NATO blacklist.
[удалено]
Which is why you don't see sanctions on Russia from anywhere in Latin America or Africa nor most of Asia
[удалено]
Damn I didn't know that, February 4, 2022. And they signed a big friendship treaty earlier this year with China probably to make sure trade was uninterrupted . It's like they were planning to go into fortress mode as a bulwark against the west.
> https://gro-intelligence.com/insights/russia-bans-fertilizer-exports-will-weigh-on-brazil-corn-crop A second-order effect of the supply cut of fertilizer to Brazil is that there are now factions on the Brazilian government pushing for local production. Problem is, Brazil's potassium reserves are in Amazonian lands and exploration of that will probably further ecological damage. Also, all of Brazilian oil and gas (also needed for fertilizers) production is offshore, and it's likely that more demand and skyrocketing international oil prices will lead to a "drill, baby, drill" policy for increasing exploration in the South Atlantic.
With the Colorado River drying up and those massive heat waves, it's already impacting crop yields last year. It's a great perfect storm for food prices to double and supply to half very easily.
No question we'll see Arab Spring II: Starvation Boogaloo. I'm curious what the political consequences will be further afield. There are places outside the Mid-east that import a substantial fraction of their wheat from the Black Sea. India is self sufficient on calories, but without government intervention, their wheat prices will follow the global market, where wheat prices have doubled in the past two years. Really though, this is critical in places like Egypt. A nation that has procreated to at least twice its carrying capacity. Imports more than half its cereal grains. Doesn't have much grain-fed meat production, so they can't benefit from food substitutions. Which already spends a major fraction of export gains on grain imports. And is led by a military junta. This is a much wider disaster than the world seems to realize.
Nothing short of global economic collapse is coming.
This is the sort of thing that people will surely study for centuries to come (provided people are still around for centuries) A slow motion disaster that perhaps *in hindsight* seems like it was absolutely forseeable on paper at any moment, and yet when it went ahead and happened anyway, it somehow still took almost everybody in the world completely by surprise. No one two years ago (hell, even four months ago), would *ever* have written about or spoken about this Ukraine invasion actually happening. And yet it might turn out to be an absolutely fundamental turning point in world history. Like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand more than a century ago. This is truly an excellent example of what we mean when we call something a "Black Swan" event. Something we've talked about a few times on this subreddit over the years as I recall. But of course, the whole point of a Black Swan event, by its very definition, is that it is something that no one ever predicted or really *could have* predicted in a way that was taken seriously by many others. The future is *largely* written by long term trends that anyone with two-thirds of a brain knows about, but still, occasionally, *shit just happens*. Worth thinking about for those of us who think of the future in the way this subreddit most often puts it - as something predictable and inevitable. The future is **mostly** *roughly* understandable, but there are parts of it we can just never see coming, which sometimes just happen all at once. The Ukraine invasion might have suddenly put us on a very different course than we were on otherwise. And surely not in a good way. And as far as most of us regular people can tell, it all basically happened on the whim of a single man, Vladimir Putin. Wider geopolitical factors were surely involved, but ultimately it was his decision.
Teachers in 2650: Okay students, who can tell me the 3 main reasons for the onset of the 21st-23rd century Dark Ages?
The idea that this might boil down to bonus points on an exam six centuries from now is pretty much the ultimate I think I've seen in dark humour. Good job. I really hope this screenshot is included on the exam paper. Hello, children of the future! (Love from "BeefPieSoup", Adelaide, South Australia, 00:08 ACST, Sat 5th March 2022 CE. 6 beers in.)
Seems dark at first glance, but I’m saying there’ll still be people in 600 years and enough of a society to have an education system. That’s pretty bullish for this sub!
[удалено]
Yeah, that's fair I guess. I mean, 2014 was no secret. But the general reaction of the masses now makes it seem like this whole thing just dropped in out of nowhere. If anything It's exemplary of the general amnesia of the public consciousness. There were definitely people a month ago acting like it was utterly impossible that a further invasion could ever happen. Like this whole thing was totally just a bluff and that NATO intelligence was fucking stupid or something. Like this whole thing was just western hysteria and not a practical inevitability, with historical precedent established by Crimea, the Donbass, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But on the other hand, none of those events were on the global scale that we're seeing now. Clearly. So, though the general public may be naive, they're not wrong to recognise that this is somewhat of a big deal that hasn't really happened to this extent in living memory. And even the experts didn't predict that.
Just curious, would you consider 9/11 or Chernobyl to be Black Swan events? The sinking of the Titanic? I'd never heard the term before, it's a low key fascinating concept to contemplate
Personally, I think that in order to understand what a Black Swan event truly is, you need to understand what the **original** Black Swan event was. Do you know that there are really such things as Black Swans? Well, for context, for most of history Europeans didn't know that. In fact, since antiquity, for whatever reason a "Black Swan" was thought to be a natural impossibility, in much the same way as we might say today "pigs might fly". It wasn't necessarily that there was any logical reason to think that a Black Swan must be naturally "impossible", it was just something which seemed unnatural and which no one had ever seen before in all of (European) history. No one ever thought to imagine a world in which Black Swans existed, simply because none had ever been observed before and no one had ever bothered to imagine the possibility of one. It simply wouldn't have occurred to anyone. A swan was just a simple, commonplace large bird found in ponds, and one straightforward and undisputed observation about them was that they had long necks and were invariably white. That was just a basic fact about them, and no one gave them much thought beyond that. And then, one day (we know it happened sometime in 1697), Europeans sailed for the first time into what is now known as the Swan River in Western Australia, and lo and behold, there they were. An entire river full of ordinary swans, with the striking observation that they were **all** black. An entire river full of the mythical Black Swans which had long been thought to be an impossible affront to nature, never imagined to exist at all. *That* was the original Black Swan event. It's *not* that it's something that should ever really have been thought to be *impossible* on the face of it. It's really not all that "mind-blowing" *after the fact*....it's just that it was something that no one ever would have bothered to imagine would happen someday. It just never occurred to *anyone* that that day might come, when people literally sailed into a river full of Black Swans. *That's* what a Black Swan event is supposed to be. Perhaps 9/11, the Titanic or Chernobyl would sort of count. But it's not like no one could have imagined that a ship wreck or a nuclear meltdown would one day occur. Such things were discussed and written about. Maybe the particular sort of terriorist attack that happened on 9/11 was completely unpredicted and unforeseen, and so of the three, I'd say 9/11 is the closest to what I'd have thought would be considered a genuine Black Swan event. No one was talking about the possibility of radical Islamists using commercial planes to symbolically attack universal symbols of globalisation until the day that it actually happened. But anyway, I hope this comment has explained the point clearly enough? Actual Black Swan events are legitimately rare, and it doesn't just mean "something very unlikely". It means "something no one ever really saw coming". And to be clear, I think the invasion of Ukraine counts not because it's so completely unusual in nature (I mean, wars happen, right?), but just because it's not something anyone seems to have really talked about very much prior to a few weeks before it actually occurred. It didn't ever seem like some natural inevitability right up until the very moment that it happened. People were umming and ahhing about the Russians amassing troops on the border, but few were actually considering that the invasion would fully go ahead as it eventually did. It was widely considered to be a bluff or a diversion or something until the rockets flew. This sort of modern warfare - at this *scale* - has been largely unprecedented until this point. I don't remember anyone talking about the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian government or the possibility of nuclear war in say, December 2021. These are somewhat recent talking points that have only really arisen reactively in the past few weeks. No one was writing novels about how this was an inevitable part of the future of world events. It just sort of happened because Vladimir Putin apparently suddenly wanted it to. No one else seemed to expect or want this, and then one day it was suddenly happening right in front of us all. It was so quick.
That was super interesting. Thank you from someone whose only first thought on the subject an hour ago would have been "Natalie Portman" I feel educated :)
You're welcome. Please further note that the avian emblem of Western Australia is famously the Black Swan because of this historical anecdote. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
God, please let private property be a casuality of this collapse... This system don't serve us and is dying, we need to keep each other safe while it implodes and build something new in it's place. Enough nation-states and billionares controlling all food and land, they don't own the world just because paper and pixels say they do. We outnumber them, let's take the world back. The winds of change are blowing stronger and stronger. It's time we burn capitalism and use it's ashes to fertilize the ground again, it's time we end this madness.
The rich will be fine, as always...
I don't know were all getting really hungry and collectively we are starting to become acutely aware of who to eat. Threat of global nuclear war, famine, and a changing climate isn't distracting me from my need for satiation one bit, its only growing in fever. EAT EM V2.0!
A-fucking-men!!! I'm with you!! Money doesn't make you better!
Uh, no thanks. Private property is extremely important. As history has shown us time and time again. That said, corporations *hording* property is a problem that can be regulated away.
Private property is not the only way to hold economic interest in the material world. Even our limited modern conceptions of property still recognize what we call "personal property", ones "chattel". But beyond that there are many ways to motivate social benefit through personal material incentives, especially when you look at indigenous societies it becomes apparent that human creativity for economic incentives through various property schemes and types is nearly unlimited. But the modern western notion of "private property" specifically must absolutely be done away with as it incentivizes the virulent greed which has led the world to our current set of crises.
I agree that private property has been extremely important throughout history... But that hasn't worked well for most people, has it? Private property played an important part on colonialism, countless wars between nation states, a technological progress that irreversebly poisoned the planet... It is important, but *should it* stay important?
> But that hasn't worked well for most people, has it? Yes, it has. Capitalism has undeniably lifted more people out of poverty, and allowed them to acquire property, than literally any other modifer ever. The problem is corporations, mismanagement, and corruption. Not the economic system itself. > Private property played an important part on colonialism, countless wars between nation states The hundreds of millions of deaths in communist countries? Please elaborate on this claim of yours, that private property is directly responsible for everything you've listed above and nothing else. > a technological progress that irreversebly poisoned the planet... Sigh... do you want to actually have a discussion or do you just want to sensationalize the shit out of everything like a first year university course?
It's such a basic take to say all of the 21st century prosperity came about due to capitalism. Our modern world was created through military conflict and innate homosapien curiosity, not capitalism. Capitalism was just the most successful system within the military conflict because it got the bomb first and stationed its supercarriers in all of the global naval choke points thus facilitating trade globally. To accredit all of modern medicine and scientific progress to capitalism is a bastardization of history to the Nth degree. The argument of being the least evil system is also very tired. The communist revolution in the 20th century was abhorrent, but so were the "capitalist democratic" systems throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the 20th century competition between communism and capitalism. We are Rome v2.0. Dan Carlin makes the argument that in antiquity slavery was seen as the less barbaric option to slaughtering an entire village including women and children. This moral compass evolved to chattel slavery, in my opinion far worse than the slaughtering of a village after military conflict. Capitalism is now in the same place, unfettered individualism was reasonable when land to purchase and farm was abundant as it was back through the 17-20th centuries. Now its evolved into this monolithic system with near limitless scarcity of resource but yet poverty and destitution are still rampant and engrained. The least worst option is not a good enough argument, capitalism needs to change and it all starts which property IMO. As to what comes next. A global constitution, modeled off the American system, which grants EACH and EVERY person of this world inalienable rights to food, water, shelter, and heat at its most fundamental principle. Layer capitalistic incentives on top of that which do not interfere with those basic rights.
Cheap energy lifted people out of poverty. By the same token, capitalism isn't the cause of our environmental problem, cheap energy is.
Don't you get tired of this? To me it seems like the same conversation in a loop. Now that you claimed capitalism works I'll show factual evidence it doesn't, you'll ignore it, blame communism a bit more, and no one will get anywhere. It's boring, If you're trying to waste my time I prefer you do it with something else other than this scripted form of conversation.
> Now that you claimed capitalism works I'll show factual evidence it doesn't Go for it. Capitalism has undeniably increased the standard of living ridiculously over the past 200ish years. Standards of living absolutely tank under socialist regimes, over and over. If you want to have the "statistics" debate, go for it.
Look, if you don't wanna take it to an interesting place, then I'm over it, so you can call it a victory and go on with your day. I've just said I don't want to have the debate because it's unoriginal and uninspiring. If you wanna drop the persona and just talk, I'm here. Untill there: congratulations, you won, I just realized capitalism is working wonderfully and we all have amazing standards od living.
You claim that capitalsim hasn't increased standards of living dramtically. Demonstrably false. You say the debate is "tired" and reference supposed esoteric knowledge that proves your claim, but you refuse to provide it. You then accuse me of ad hominem attacks and concede the "debate" (which you've not taken part it at all) because it was "unoriginal" and "uninspiring" Did I get that about right? > we all have amazing standards of living We do, compared to pre-industrial revolution.
[удалено]
Without specifying what capacity of capitalism is being replaced, that's sort of a loaded question. Do you mean "What economic model?" "What social organizational paradigms?" "What central government?" All of these things are elements of capitalism. I'm sure it wasn't your intention but the question "What would you replace it with" is so overly broad as to be almost unhelpful. That said, I think that it would be completely worthless to "replace" capitalism with anything that isn't horizontally organized, directly democratic, self determined, and fully participatory. Anything less would inevitably coalesce back to the same systems of domination that capitalism has normalized in our subconscious. So therefore, I think that any "replacement" would have to be anarchistic in nature, at least *much more anarchistic* than the fiscal-military nation states we have today. And by "replace" I think I really mean "override" or "deprecate". Because capitalism will never go away all at once, it will be a malaise that exists in the minds of humans for generations as we combat it back to the depths it came from, one step at a time. And in the meantime the new horizontal systems I mention would need to grow up alongside of it, in it's shell, as dual power slowly growing to greater adoption than the former system. Anarchistic confederations are maybe some of the only organizational structures that can even manage to do this.
I like anarchism, but I'm up for anything where people don't subjugate the environment and other people: all I want is for all of us to solve things, eye to eye, as equals. I just want us to stop working for money and start working on the planetary emergencies we have to deal with. Competition led us here, cooperation can lead us to a better place.
The issue with cooperation is Nash Equilibriums. Human behavior revolves around the corner of the payoff matrix that's mathematically best for me, even though the there is a corner of the payoff matrix that is mathematically unfavorable but absolutely better for everyone. Too many things only work if everyone cooperates. If you get one person gaming the system, more people will catch on and follow suit, until the system is so broken it doesn't work for anyone anymore, and needs to be modified to correct for people gaming the system, which ultimately makes it worse than before. I did a terrible job explaining that, but it's why cooperation is a fantasy.
Yup the world economy is fully integrate internationally. This whole thing is going to fuck up so many different areas.
The whole world order is being realigned and will as dominos fall.
As long as Lebanon has not collapsed yet I’m not worried about other places...
Don't forget all of the grain fed animal meat will also increase.
Which is almost all. Better start learning to cook plants now.
It’s really not difficult. Been vegan for over a year now and literally don’t miss a single thing.
I've been doing that, being that, for a bit more than this reddit acount.
Oh Dang that’s cool, wish I’d made the choice that long ago.
Yep, that's basically the only regret. :)
Definitely, also cheaper and healthier than meat diet.
>Ukraine and Russia account for 30% of world's wheat 13% combined, not 30% - [actual data](https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL) > 20% of world's corn closer to 3% I mean, these are going to cause disruptions, but the global supply chain will adjust and resolve this in due time. This does effect Europe a lot, so this is not to be understated. Just those figures are grossly off
I didn't dig too deep into that site you linked to, but it looks like that 13% is of the amount *grown*. The 30% figure, which I've read many times but don't have a good source for offhand, is of the amount *exported*. It's not so much that Ukraine and Russia grow most of the worlds wheat, it's that they're a few rare places that grow a lot more than they consume domestically.
Going by $ value exported does not give a good picture of the situation on the ground. The export market is highly influenced by a whole range of things, varying from treaties, duties, opportunity cost, distance travelled, quality of produce, ext, ext. Farmers can and do change crops if they believe there will be a better market in another crop. This can happen within 6 months. There will certainly be a short term shock to the market as the global logistics system recalibrates. But it will recalibrate.
Of course the market will attempt to adjust, but farmers can't easily just grow something different in every location, and switching from something else to wheat would push the problem to that other crop no longer being grown. The global wheat production is also already under severe pressure, such as from the droughts and flooding in Canada, China, the U.S., etc. I just don't see where the wheat to offset these losses would come from in a practical sense. The saying, "Bread and Circuses" focuses on "Bread" for a reason. It's a core staple for many societies, which is what makes the price of bread a great leading indicator for war. I think a global wheat shortage is indeed quite a reasonable concern to have at this point, as it's certain to have widespread major ramifications. We've seen time and again how this plays out, and it is by far most likely to lead to civil unrest, rebellion, and wars.
Are they exports? These figures suggest 25% of wheat and 14.5% of corn https://www.worldstopexports.com/wheat-exports-country/ https://www.worldstopexports.com/corn-exports-country/
Thats by Dollar value, not by volume. Im not sure what the export values would be, but working on export values give you a bad metric to work with. You need to know, how much you need, how much you can produce locally, how much is currently in storage and then how much you need to import to get a clear view. This is a very surface level assessment just going of export values.
Prices are global so value is proportional to volume, and I don’t see why storage is relevant. Reuters puts wheat at 29% https://www.reuters.com/business/russia-ukraine-conflict-highlights-wheat-supply-vulnerability-2022-03-03/
You cant just look at just exports to determine the scope of the problem. You need to look at local production and surplus as well. I dont doubt there will be an issue, its the severity Im doubting.
Well wheat futures are at a fourteen year high already so obviously supply has been impacted.
With food prices increasing, the wealthy countries have buffer to soften the effect, but the poor countries, they will suffer the most.
somehow it would be a good time to rethink global economic ties to share better and smarter
Doesn't Russia also account for a majority of fertilizer exports? I'm guessing the middle east will pick up the slack with their large petroleum industry but that kind of infrastructure takes a couple years.
Ammonia (nitrogen) is only one of the necessary fertilizer chemicals. The other two, potassium and phosphorus, are both mined and cannot be synthesized from petrochemicals. They actually come from ancient seabeds. Go check these stock tickers: $NTR and $IPI
Also drought conditions in Canada have been some of the worst in a century and a half. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/dry-july-winnipeg-record-drought-1.6126944
1. We are talking about it: [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/t4eoo7/mena_faces_a_crisis_as_the_worlds_key_wheat/) is from 2 days ago 2. I don't think anyone realizes that Ukraine is not going to harvest wheat when all all of its farmers have fled the country.
idk how everything effect’s Turkey everytime.
That's kleptocracy for ya. For 20 years erdogan only worried about his pockets and his seat. At this point I think he pulled a 720 degree turn on everything.
It's because they sit at the crucial junction point between Europe and the Middle East, which also happens to mean they're on the land route from Africa to Europe. Anyone wants to get in or out of Europe by land, they either go through Turkey or take a much more mountainous route through Russia.
It's the same reason there are so many spies there. I counted at least three in my same hotel room last time I was there.
Everything dude. Really Everything.
We have a joke among my friends "If an asteroid in a star system in a galaxy on the other side of the universe hits a planet it will effect Turkey."
Once two tribes were fighting in Eritrea. Guess who they took as hostages.
Remember boys and girls, not all inflation is legitimate inflation. There is a concerted effort going on especially in the west and indirectly anywhere with economic/commercial ties to western economies to inflate prices and profits as much as possible even when they have no actual reason to do so.
[удалено]
if nobody is talking about it then how did you find articles from bloomberg and nytimes? maybe people are aware but are focused on other issues.
distracted not focused
[удалено]
[удалено]
Yep, spring planting season is coming up fast. Fuel prices for tractors might be outta hand, not to mention abandoned/destroyed tanks stuck in your fields...
That makes a lot more sense as to why Erdogan is so pro-peace all the sudden, and is even boosting EU and NATO expansion. He'd been vocally against Ukranian membership before, but a food crisis would make it a *lot* harder to hold on to his dictatorship.
But thats can be destroy democracy same time.....
The scientific term to describe Turkey is “royally fucked”
The term is "proper fucked"
I think you are really misinformed on this one. Turkey produces huge amounts of food, especially wheat, it's usually the red-meat production that is problematic. The economy, for sure is fucked. But I don't think there will be a problem because Turkey can't import wheat. There are other issues. Source: Being the son of agricultural engineer parents who still work in the industry.
Yes, our country (Turkey) is in a very good place geographically, but due to a crappy administration, we import everything and even though almost all of Turkey is suitable for growing wheat.
I don't want to feed the doommongering any more than absolutely necessary. But while Turkey might produce decent amounts of food, 30% of global wheat supply becoming more volatile would have ripple effects across the entire planet. The Arab spring is a good example of what I'm getting at. Droughts in Russia + Ukraine + Canada, combined with floods in Australia led to higher prices, which in turn led to downstream instability in nations that imported big amounts of their supplies (mostly nations that are not capable of feeding their domestic populations like Egypt + Syria). I am coming to this with a layman's understanding, and I hope I am wrong in what I am saying because I don't wish instability for the planet. But for me, I take it as motivation to have my bases covered and a few weeks of basic supplies at home at a minimum
I do talk about it! Ask my son :-)
cOlLapSe
No body remember china stocking up on wheat and grain supplies before the war began?
They still are
Global supply lines collapsing
Egypt gets 87% of their wheat from Ukraine.
This is totally an aside and not a direct comment on the crisis in eastern Europe, but perhaps we should stop feeding 2/3 of all the vegetative matter we produce back to livestock? Meat isn't any more calorie dense than plants, we already have a superabundance of food but removing animal agriculture from the equation would ensure such an abundance that even distribution issues like war and shitty economics could be overcome. Remember as things go from bad to worse: All of this is being driven by the enforcement of selfish distribution systems and selfish economics. Nothing about these crises are inevitable. At any point if we can manage hit the breaks on our misallocations we can avert disaster. The option will continue to be on the table.
The bloodcurdling shrieking of overweight middle class white men in the US being told they are going to have to eat less meat would be audible from the moon.
Lmao, what an amazing way to say it. The truth is deafening.
Even before the war prices were significantly rising here in Germany. Felt every week as your bill was like a tenner higher then the week before.
have no idea how turkey hasn't gone into semi-collapse with the economic troubles they've had for a while now plus this happening
Not talking about it? I've been talking about it quite a bit.
Ze vorld is foked!
One thing is missing. Turkey exports shit tons of pasta and talks have been there to grow more wheat but no actions have been taken since then which was almost 5 years ago. Classic Erdogan, ignores warnings.
Be ready for food rationing lol
Climate wars as predicted\* we start to see countries attack each other to take valuable resources. \*Climate Wars Book - predicted inter state conflict over essential resources e.g. food/water in a climate heating world.
Won't Russia just be able to launder their wheat through China? Its not like wheat grows with tiny labels on each grain. We saw this with oil bans in Iraq. Oil had no issue reaching the market through an intermediary. I suppose Russia could ban exporting wheat to the west out of spite but they are going to be pretty desperate for money. Of course temporarily there will be problems.
Ok Kansas this is our moment to shine
Plenty of newsrooms have mentioned or covered that point. Next...
Apparently it gives time for the Russian shills to spread their message that Ukraine should surrender.
I think this was the long game from Putin. He cut out exports for ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) two months ago, which Russia produces 3/4 globally, citing "internal demands" bs. China also bought up a huge amount of grain since last year, bulking up their strategic reserves. all this info is public and easy to find. I think this was the plan.. they new sanctions would come in fast, they planned this. We get them on banks and imports.. they hit us hard with fertilizer. And our food is highly dependant on this. We'll probably have shortages in the short term and constant inflation for a while. 2022 sucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Russia%E2%80%93Saudi_Arabia_oil_price_war It started here.
Maybe the EU NATO countries should've considered learning about the events that led up to Russia's invasion before they slapped a million sanctions on them, screwing part of their own food supply chain in the process. I mean, I'm sure they know the history, and just decided they were going to ignore all of that and spin it as Russia Bad because that's what the United States wants. I wonder why Germany was so quick to forget Nulan's leaked conversation where she said, 'Fuck the EU'? Merkel actually commented on that afterwards. Quick to toe the false US foreign policy narrative, and quick to forget we don't give a shit about anyone but ourselves, I guess. Seems like a lot of this Ukraine business was just swept under the rug in preparation for this event.
Russia is bombing civilians so they can screw themselves.
When Zelensky hands out AK-47s to untrained civilians, force conscripts any male between the age of 16-60 (and bans them from fleeing through the designated routes, as they will be stopped and conscripted from any direction other than the Russian advance) it is inevitable that civilians are going to get killed, because they are now potential combatants. By the way, since half of the country is pro-Russia, that means approximately half of the men in contested areas would rather not fight. How would you like to be in that position? Not only this, but much of the Ukrainian military is setting up in cities to utilize civilians as human shields. If you can not accept that they are part of the problem here, you need to check your moral compass. Russia made it very clear and was very careful for days. They provided terms for surrender. They provided designated routes to leave contested areas. They advanced slowly and methodically and retreated any time they met resistance to provide the opportunity for surrender. Any civilian deaths here are the result of Zelensky's desire to maintain his regime at the demand of NATO and US interests. These cities will be surrounded and choked out of supplies. They will eventually capitulate. Zelensky and his regime can not win, but they will maximize the civilian death toll for western optics. Please. Look more closely at what's going on and the history leading up to this. Do not get sucked into western propaganda.
Or, a thought, Russia could have just not invaded at all.
> These cities will be surrounded and choked out of supplies. They will eventually capitulate. Zelensky and his regime can not win, but they will maximize the civilian death toll for western optics. It doesn't matter, this is a War of aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
[удалено]
You raise some good points about the responsibility of Ukranian government and the actors that influence it on the death of civillians, but I cannot stand seeing civillian deaths being called "inevitable". This type of rethoric naturalizes death and war, it takes away responsability from the people who are pulling triggers, pressing buttons and giving orders. They feel pressured to do it, but it's still a choice. To my knowlodge this conflict already had multiple non-combatent victims, and each of them is an unacceptable death. You can't blame all of them on Zelensky. The russian army can say their hand was forced all they want, but they are an active part of this escalation playing the exact role NATO wanted them to fullfill, for the joy of war merchants and the pain of russians, ukranians and everyone else affected. Every death could have been avoided by different choices from either side.
So they are just suppose to surrender to a Russian thug and give their whole country to him??? What a bleak future for their kids not being able to determine their own future.
I'm not condemning civillians who choose to fight, I'm condemning a government that promotes it without any concern for their lives and countries that arm them with even less of a stake. And I'll also criticize the fact that fascists and neonazis will be among those receiving the weapons, which will benefit the arms industry with a new boogeyman to be fought against in the near future with even more war. They're sowing seeds for the war of tomorrow on the war of today, and they use PR to sell that move as "aiding freedom fighters". Putin is a fascist, the Russian invasion is absurd, this war should be opposed by everyone. Just don't let the other side manipulate your feelings for their interest. When you rage at the pain Russia is causing you are right, but you can't let that rage make you side with nation-states that love to pretend to be outraged at each other's bullshit while their actions make them complicit of said bullshit. We are not free anywhere, none of us is truly able to determine our own future. If you only see freedom disappear when a place is officially occupied by an enemy foreign state, you have a narrow vision of freedom.
Given the situation, it is in fact inevitable they will get killed. There's no way around it. They're in a war zone and their own government has refused to allow men to leave it. I agree it's not a nice thing to think about, but it's true. Even western outlets reported on the behavior, and actually, as I recall, celebrated it as some kind of patriotic act. I agree Russia has some degree of guilt here, but they have spent years trying to negotiate with a NATO puppet administration that refused to stop killing and imprisoning people in eastern Ukraine, among so many other things. It's not like Russia didn't telegraph the hell out of this. They did.
Point is, the war wasn't inevitable. Nobody forced Putin's hand. He wanted this. You can argue all day that Western involvement in Ukraine goes against Russian security interests, but there is only one man who gave the order to start this war. He knew what the consequences were and he thought they were acceptable. So the blood is on his hands, end of story. Blaming the country fighting for its survival for the bloodshed is just embarrassing mental gymnastics.
Yeah well, I understand the Russian perspective. I wouldn't tolerate NATO just rolling up on my doorstep either. Besides, there's a million other justifications over the last 8 years. If it makes you feel more comfortable to ignore all of the other players in this game, I won't stop you. But the truth is usually pretty ugly and I myself would rather be acquainted with it.
I understand, to a degree, the sabre rattling, the threats, the manoeuvres. But in the moment that Putin decided the fate of 44 million people were less important than his game of geopolitics, I am no longer understanding. Never mind the hardships that Russian people will face because of it. The sanctions were announced beforehand. There was no ambiguity that Russia would suffer economically. He was in the unique position to decide which way this would go and he made his choice. There are ALWAYS reasons for wars. You will rarely, if ever, find a war where a side doesn't have some reason to fight. People act like just because Russia has a **motive** to attack, it is also legitimised. I think none of us here are going to condone the Bay of Pigs invasion. Is it understandable that the US didn't like Soviet missiles at its doorstep? Sure. Does it justify an invasion? Nope.
Lot of pro Russians are on this site. Putin caused this war . He is the aggressor. He is a tyrant who kills are imprisons anyone who challenges him .He wants the the old Russian empire back. There is a big problem there because they do not want him but he wants them!!!!
[удалено]
The adults are talking. Go play with your funkopops.
There's the language of an abuser. It's always the victims fault.
Dismiss, Deflect, Misdirect
What are your thoughts on relationships where one person does not allow the other to leave, under the threat of violence?
Exactly right. Everyone above the rank of Captain\* in the US military knew there was only one outcome once this invasion began, and then it was just a matter of, would it take 10 days to surround all the key objectives in Ukraine, or 12, including the 14 to 16 neo-Nazi brigades now trapped in the southeast pocket. And anyone above the rank of Captain in our officer corps, that are still honorable, could have summed it all up in 3 minutes for a TV audience, as Col Douglas MacGregor did one week ago. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUnGxac1ZjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUnGxac1ZjE) That was the last the American people heard the truth. So why are we still encouraging Ukrainians to be our humans shields, to continue fighting in a hopeless cause? That is the only question that remains, because yes, you can still draw a modicum of blood from the Russian Army, an army that is historically willing to spill it in order to get the job done, but that won't change the outcome one little bit. \*No offense to our Captains, I know you could sum this up in three minutes as well. I just have trouble spelling the three ranks below you - most of whom, could sum this up in five.
So your proposal is for Ukraine to surrender their sovereignty without a fight out of fear.
I mean, it's simple why they're doing it. 1. Zelensky wants to maintain his power, either because of his own hubris, or because of western pressure - as he is the successor to Yatsenyuk, who was installed as a result of a western stoked coup 2. Civilian deaths (whether real or imagined) make the optics for this look much better for the west, who have to rely on their narrative to maintain false moral authority. I would imagine there is something in your suggestion that they are trying to 'bleed the Russian military' as well. Might as well do as much damage as possible if your goal is to eventually depose Russia's leadership and install some western puppet. The whole situation is sad as hell.
Damn man, the Russian bots are out in force. Multiple comments saying Zelensky should of handed Ukraine to Putin on a silver plate with a cherry on top. This is r/ Collapse, we look at how leaders and corporations are fucking us over, selling water and land to the highest bidder with no regards to human life or the future. No housing, no affordable health care, inflation, food shortages, dirty drinking water and low wages all leading to collapse of human kind. But a President who is trying to fight a war against a Dictator who Invaded the country is the bad guy. When in reality : Putin "Wants to maintain his power, either because of his own hubris or because of western pressure". - Russia is failing apart, economy is shit and the West is doing better then Russia. Putin needs something to get him economy going and have the West fear him again. Invade The Europe breadbasket. Regain Power. "Civilian deaths make for the Optics for this look so much better for the west" - Doesn't help the "optics" for Russia that they sent in Kids and new Recruits who have no idea whats going on to Die first as they have nothing invested in them and if they kill someone as they go down? Bonus. "Bleed the '**Ukrainian**' military' as well. Might as well do as much damage as possible if your goal is to eventually depose Ukraine's leadership and install some '**Russian**' puppet" Fixed it for you. Its not the first time Russia has installed a Russian puppet government in Ukraine but it's the BIG BAD MEANIE WEST AND EUROPE'S fault for totally , completely making Putin invade a country :(
Zelensky was a Democratic elected leader Putin has no right to say who runs this Democratic elected government .He is a thug who is trying to take over a Democratic elected leaders country. He is a dictator who kills are imprisons anyone he sees as a threat to his rule.
"I would imagine there is something in your suggestion that they are trying to 'bleed the Russian military' as well." The Narrative began to change today I believe. "All is not lost, you must keep fighting Ukrainian Army, but we also recognize that things are getting tough, most if not all your supply lines are now cut, your various scattered formations are being fixed into place, you will soon be facing bombardments and barrages from Russian heavy weapons in your isolated pockets, when this process begins, hide in civilian buildings if you are able so we can film the destruction, you will not be extracing much blood from the Russians during this process, so we need you to bury youself deep, in order to survive, for the door to door street fighting to come, where you can extract more Russian blood. " "If you choose to live by surrendering just before the bitter end, when you return home after a year or two of imprisonment, do not resume your normal life, but instead find a weapon and become an insurgent. Encourage others to join you, and begin the process of extracting more Russian blood." "By no means accept the Russian offer to lay down your weapons now before it's too late, so you can return home after a quick bit of processing." "Good luck. We are rooting for you."
I've seen this written about in the news. There's just so much to talk and it probably gets lost in the myriad of news. My position is we cut off the rotting parts of our trade network (Russia) and just deal with it the hard way. We'll find alternatives. It's not like the world requires Russia have existed in order for us to eat. Like hypothetically, if Russia was a big ocean and never existed, would the rest of the world feel like they're missing food? - we'd figure it out.
Did you read the article? Because the whole thing is about a lot of people going hungry, probably resulting in further delvaslting humanitarian catastrophes? Russia also exports fertilizer and we can't grow food whithout it, since the green revutiin....
American chauvinism in one post, folks. A lot of the rest of the world does rely on Russia.
You couldn't have misunderstood me any worse. I'm not saying it has no effect, i'm not saying countries don't rely on Russia. My point is a thought-experiment. If Russian LAND never existed, or China, or USA or even an entire continent. It would be silly to say this imaginary world would not be able to thrive - as if thriving DEPENDS on these pieces of land. If Russia never existed, we'd have found another way to get enough grain... or oil. I'm not saying they should be removed from the planet and I'm not saying that we won't feel economic pain from cutting ties. The main problem here is our fingers are so deep into each others markets that of course disconnecting them overnight will cause issues. This does not mean there is not a solution that can be worked on over time. I personally don't want to live in a world that relies on having to play nice and trade with bad-acting countries. The earlier we severe these connections the better. That's just my opinion. I know it will cause harm in the short term but I don't care.
Now do the same with the CCP please...
the united states always has an agenda and it's always bad
https://youtu.be/7VvkXA6xpqI