"The Communist party translated and published [Fredrick W.] Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, and high authorities brought over Walter Polakov, an American follower of Henry L. Gantt, one of Taylor’s most fervent disciples, to provide a liaison with American scientific-management experts and to prepare production charts for the entire First Five-Year Plan...

"By 1928, when the Soviets inaugurated the First Five-Year Plan, Henry Ford had become an even greater hero to the Soviets than Frederick Taylor. An emotional cult grew up around Ford’s methods and even his person. By 1925 his autobiography, My Life and Work, had had four printings in the Soviet Union, and one American in Russia reported that plant managers were studying Ford with as much enthusiasm as they had had for Lenin."

https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-so...

The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:

    on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO (which we have not dealt with here);
    on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
    and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

This is an Orwellian distortion of language.

Expansion can be interpreted in a literal sense or a metaphorical one. Organizations expand in a metaphorical sense. When we say that a company "expands" by by entering a new market or hiring new talent, we know that this is metaphorical.

NATO is a defensive pact with voluntary membership, but by calling it "expansionist," Russia plays a trick where it evokes the literal sense of expand to transform NATO into the aggressor. It seems fairly plain to me that the real expansionists would be the ones who have literally, physically expanded into a neighboring country by annexing Crimea. The expansionists would be the ones who are currently occupying territory in three foreign nations against the will of those nations' governments.

> and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbass over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

By third party estimates, the civillian casualties in the Russian invasion are about two to three orders of magnitude higher than the civilian casualties in Donbass prior to the invasion. This is like slaughtering an entire village because it contains a single murderer. There is absolutely zero ambiguity about where the moral high ground is here.

This does not even include the fact that any civilian casualties in Donbass were either incidents when counterfiring to russian and separatist shelling, or russian provocations.

We can even see this right now in the war: Russia just randomly shells apartment blocks with Grads, while UA only targets real military targets on Russian soil, like Belgorod fuel depots or Taganrog airfield. Russian propaganda doesn't even try to claim that, at least yet.

A voluntary alliance isn't an imperialist agenda (assuming that the sovereign nations have the opportunity to make a truly voluntary decision, without outside coercion).

In fact, many nations have requested voluntarily to join NATO. Ukraine was one such nation, and wasn't allowed in.

Arguing that Russia should get a veto over which defensive alliances other nations join is a pro-imperialist position. You're taking the view that Russia gets to determine the behavior of other nations, because they are "in its security umbrella". I'm sorry, but that position is inherently untenable for an "anti-imperialist".

It's a coherent position for Russian Nationalists, or for believers in Super Power Imperialism.

He seems to be claiming there wasn't weapons transfer to Donbass, etc when they were initially acting as break away republics. How does he explain MH17? I spent too much time looking at this.

To think that Ukraine was shelling Donbass and "provoking" after what we seen in the last 50 days is truly a mental distortion.

> Anyone who is still pushing more weapons into Ukraine or tells Kiev to prolong the war is putting more Ukrainian lives at risk for zero potential gain.

Surely life under Russia will be blissful with no Ukrainians harmed.

Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. Over the past few years, the idea has attracted significant attention among academics and social movements, but for people new to the idea it raises a number of questions. Here I set out to clarify three specific issues: (1) I specify what degrowth means, and argue that the framing of degrowth is an asset, not a liability; (2) I explain how degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession; and (3) I affirm that degrowth is primarily focused on high-income nations, and explore the implications of degrowth for the global South.

Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist"..

To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse.

It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.

Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem.

In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.

I hardly call that degrowth, That's just efficiency.

Focusing on decreased happiness on the assumption that it'll also decrease co2 is just 21st century puritanism.

For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”

The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.

Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.

Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.

The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.

In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.