144 million is greater than 38 million

Even that understates the disparity. Ukraine certainly doesn't have 38 million now anymore and i highly doubt they had that much in February 2022 either. Their last census was over twenty years ago IIRC.

I used to think otherwise but as i've grown older i've come to understand that most of the time the only way that people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their fingers. China's going to need to get burned quite a few times, just like Russia and Iran, before they really understand who they're dealing with. Honestly the only country that has always understood exactly who the West is and how one must deal with them is the DPRK. Everyone else has to learn the hard way, sometimes many times over.

This is what happens when leftist orgs are gutted

This is what happens when there is no left anti-EU, anti-NATO, non-Russophobic alternative.

I've said it before and i'll say it again, westerners just don't do well with the existence of contradictions. We tend to have a hard time understanding that things can be both good and bad at the same time. For many of us, even for well-meaning leftists, it has to be either one or the other. If something has even one bad aspect to it then it cannot possibly be good, or conversely if something is good it cannot possibly have bad sides to it. There is a kind of infantile, Marvel comic book way of thinking that has infected far too much of western society.

Perhaps it is because of the dualistic, (good vs evil) nature of western religions as opposed to eastern philosophies which more often consider two opposing aspects to be able to coexist in the same thing (Yin-Yang)...anyway, i don't want to get distracted with metaphysics here. Point is we need to learn that it is possible to admire the many good aspects of a society like the DPRK while rejecting the problematic ones. The same goes for having critical support of other, even more problematic countries but which nonetheless fulfil an important anti-imperialist function and which do not deserve to be the target of western orchestrated hybrid warfare, coercive economic measures or color revolutions. Purity fetishes will get us nowhere.

We have to accept that not all contradictions of a society can or will be resolved immediately, especially when that society is facing existential external threats and is still struggling materially. Yes there are also exceptions such as Cuba which has admirably managed to institute some of the most progressive social legislation in the world even while suffering under a brutal blockade, but in general we should expect that most societies need first to resolve their primary contradictions before being able to resolve their secondary ones.

Because he was unshakeably principled as a communist and anti-imperialist, and during his leadership the USSR posed the biggest threat to the global system of capitalism that the world has ever seen. He could not be reclaimed for the purposes of anti-communist propaganda like Trotsky nor relegated to the status of a mere theorist like Marx or an idealist revolutionary like Lenin is sometimes (erroneously) portrayed. Stalin achieved too much in practice for the building of socialism, while the victory of the USSR in WW2 under his leadership gave socialism an immense prestige boost around the world.

In short, he scared the bejeezus out of the bourgeoisie for what he represented and what he could have inspired in people across the world had he not been smeared with the lies of Khrushchev and the anti-communist propaganda of the West (frequently borrowed directly from Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda), so they vowed to forever destroy his image and make sure no one like him would ever arise again.

Sadly, this ploy worked. Thanks to Khrushchev's speech of lies you even had other principled communists (at one point even Che Guevara believed some of the accusations leveled at Stalin) around the world start to doubt what they thought they knew about Stalin and the USSR which caused a worldwide crisis of confidence among communists and a massive split between those parties who accepted the Khrushchevite lies and those who didn't.

Meanwhile in capitalist societies anti-communist indoctrination raised entire generations to internalize the belief that Stalin was equivalent to Hitler and the USSR another Nazi Germany, which destroyed their communist parties as effective political forces and made sure that most remaining communists and socialists would have an almost instinctual aversion to the Marxist-Leninist line and practical revolutionary politics.

This led to Western communists retreating into the realm of purely academic Marxism as an economic and not a revolutionary theory, or into all sorts of schools of pseudo-Marxist radical liberalism (like the "Frankfurt School"), anarchism, ultra-left deviations, or just straight up defect to social democracy.

But i will end this on an optimistic note and remind everyone of what Stalin himself said:

"I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy."

Of course. What is the point of building infrastructure if politicians and their corporate buddies can't pocket a few billion in public tax money? Can you even imagine such madness as building a bridge at cost and on schedule? Can you even imagine your country not being ten years late and three times over budget when they build, say, an airport for their capital? I can't.

A little reminder of who this fascist CIA asset was: he regularly participated in neo-nazi marches, advocated to strip non-ethnic Russians of their Russian citizenship, and called muslim Chechens "cockroaches".

Also, Hasan's reaction

Ugh...sorry but i tried listening to ten minutes of that and i immediately remembered why i stopped watching him. He is such a lib and his audience is even worse. It's like they have the attention span of a five year old and are physically allergic to learning history. No, Hasan, Putin is not spending 30 min giving you a history lecture because that history (at least the pre-21st century history) somehow directly justifies the actions he is taking, that is not the argument at all. He is doing it to give you context and educate you because you and most of your audience are historically illiterate ignorants with zero knowledge about the background of a region of the world where you now think you are qualified to comment on.

From Twitter, this post sums it up best:

"Westoids complaining about Putin's interview being too pedantic have an inflated sense of self-worth: they assume the interview is primarily designed to appeal to them. Little do they know the West has become so irrelevant that it's no longer even necessarily the chief intended audience for Putin's transmissions. For instance, many of Putin's statements go viral in China, generating hundreds of millions or even billions of views/impressions on sites like Weibo, vastly larger engagements than the entire population of most of the West combined. In the east, where the citizenry is learned, historically-literate, etc., Putin's longueurs are actually appreciated, dissected, and discussed. This is particularly the case in China, where the majority of people are not only history buffs, but have a sacred respect for history and tradition.

In the West, Putin's words may fall on deaf ears and be drowned out by illiterate popculture noise, but the West is no longer relevant to the world. In other places, Putin's words will reverberate, consummating their intended effects."

The good thing about anti-natalists is that they can't pass their anti-natalist ideology on to their children.

Literal SS divisions and Bandera's band of sadistic mass murderers were not right wing extremists according to the German government, nor are the Azov thugs with swastika tattoos, and anyone who dares to challenge this official narrative is a left wing extremist, Putinist, and an enemy of freedom and democracy. This is not an exaggeration, you can look this up: all the actual (non-socdem) left wing parties in Germany are on government watch lists and are considered a threat against the constitutional order. But they dare to claim that the DDR was a totalitarian police state. The BRD is just a continuation of Nazi Germany.

Hahaha, this is such whiny loser behavior. They chose to kill their own industries with the sanctions they effectively imposed on themselves, then they cry foul cause China is winning since it didn't do dumb shit like cut itself off from its main supplier of cheap energy or from a whole market of 140 mil people. Suddenly competition isn't so great when you're losing huh?

Also, what is stopping Europe from subsidizing its own industries more like China does? Oh yeah, the dumbass neoliberal rules that they imposed on themselves. So now because they are being fucked over by their own self-imposed limitations in what the state is allowed to do they expect other countries to shackle themselves in the same way? Lol.

And who are they going to go crying "no fair" to? The WTO? Good luck getting a sovereign state like China to let some loser Westoids dictate its domestic policies.

I can tell you right now what the Europeans are going to do which is what they always do: double down on their idiocy and resort to the only "solution" they know which is more sanctions. They're gonna try to ban Chinese EVs which won't really work because the demand will still be there so there will be a hundred loopholes and workarounds.

Instead it will hugely backfire as these things usually do, possibly ending with Europe losing the Chinese market for their own EV exports.

Lol, the cope is really getting out of hand. First it was "China can't domestically produce high end chips", now the talking point is "ok maybe they can but only cause they violated sanctions". Do they realize this is an admission that a) their sanctions aren't working, and b) that they have nothing to do with any "national security" but simply with a futile attempt to hamper a competitor nation's technological development because their own industries can't handle competing on an even playing ground.

Not that we as communists give a single shit about "free market competition", there is nothing wrong with a weaker nation using protectionist measures (although we must be clear about the fact that sanctions are not protectionism, they are the polar opposite, they are aggressive economic hybrid warfare) to prevent a stronger one overrunning their economy, but it shows the hypocrisy of their own neoliberal "free trade" mantra.