They also do that because they want to cling to the idea that “actual” or “regulated” capitalism works fine for everyone.

That’s a lot of assumptions to make an argument.

Ok, so Zelensky has banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents. And furthermore he cancelled elections that were supposed to happen next month. Will you be condemning Ukrainian conscription then, since the government will neither be democratic or legally elected?

So the 15000 civilian deaths caused by Ukraine bombing its own provinces before Russia intervened, the constant efforts by Russia to resolve the issue diplomatically, the naked refusal of the West to even engage with Russia, the West openly backing a fascist coup in Ukraine, and then arming it with the explicit dictate of provoking Russia, the West pressuring Ukraine to not accept the generous settlement offered by Russia in May after the war started, all that doesn’t count?

It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.

[citation needed]

US trying hard to not repeat the Killdozer

Maybe not at the personal user-end, but most corporations and other organizations are completely reliant on MS365 and/or Windows. Especially, in the education and finance sectors, Microsoft has taken over. COVID lockdowns made things worse as everybody switched to using Teams for corporate communication.

Edit: it might seem really silly that corporations went that heavy into Teams or Office, when there’s free alternatives like Discord and LibreOffice respectively, that have the exact same functionalities and are arguably more reliable. The reason is MS products offer a lot of tools to surveil employees

I’m guessing your company’s server (or whatever other form of central hub you are using) has Edge as the default browser. Alternatively, it could be some admin default setting your IT forgot to switch off for your accounts.

Show me the numbers. Curious how population growth rate in both USSR and China rises unprecendently, after these two came to power.

That’s a pretty vague definition you came up for to dismiss people.

Oh yes, wanting to raise people out of poverty is totally what fascists want.

You don’t know what you are talking about. You are just repeating something someone in authority once told you to believe. Ironic.

1. Everyone

2. China

3. The USA

The map doesn’t show it, but I think it was Israel.

Or you can use an ad-blocker. Also youtube is profitable just fine. If it wasn’t Google would have shut it down a long time ago.

Spot on!

They apologized, so it’s fine. The former colonizers can keep exploiting their former colonial subjects through economic, social and political strangleholds. If it’s such a big problem they can just apologize again. This whole article is one big dump of projection.

The US is sanctioning 1/3 of the world’s population. Sanctions have murderous results on innocent people in an effort to swing public opinion in favor of more pro-US policies from countries. Their consequences have been described as worse than war for some countries. They are the equivalent of siege warfare: starving out a population of a country until it does what you want.

It’s good that Latin American countries finally refuse to go along with this, especially as some of them have been targets of these very same sanctions before.

Thank you :)

Depends who you ask. If you ask a Marxist, they’ll tell you that in an electoral system where elections are largely determined by who has the most money in order to reach the most ears, is not really a democracy.

A democracy would be a system that gives you the right to actually and directly influence specific policy through voting (e.g. through referrenda), and direct control over representatives (e.g. ability to recall them if they are not doing their jobs).

In Norway and Germany (to use your examples) people might enjoy a lot of personal freedoms and a high standard of living, but both domestic and foreign policy is still functionally determined by corporations and the rich elite.

The economic system of capitalism makes it so governments realistically care more about the interests of business, rather than the interests of the citizens. And that’s an oligarchy. It’s just that some countries are better able to pacify their populace because they happen to have the resources to do so. But we still see that in Norway and Germany (and any other traditionally-regarded “good democracy”) the social welfare systems, that make them such appealing examples, are systematically diminished and destroyed. I do not think it’s the citizens who demand that.

All this, without getting into the fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives in a feudal-like or dictatorial system we call “job”, where we hardly have the power to influence how it operates.

As a Greek speaker who also knows Latin and Ancient Greek, both words mean the same thing and come from the same roots in their respective language (demos = publius = people/community/population). I don’t know why political theorists try so hard to separate them. The only real use of separating them is for easily differentiating the Athenian Democracy from the Roman Republic, for historical purposes, but nowadays both democracies and republics are functionally the same thing (and linguistically should be the same too). The only difference is sometimes the functioning leader’s name (president vs prime minister). Every other difference between them are for the sake of local cultural/historical traditions.

In the classical sense, Parliamentary/Representative Republics/Democracies ARE oligarchies. A true democracy would give voting power not just for electing representatives but also for determining specific policies and laws (i.e. Referendums), which very rarely, if at all in many cases, actually happens.