It’s no secret that Ukraine has conscription. It’s a country at war, because it’s been invaded. Wartime rules therefore apply. This is also why the election has been postponed, automatically and legally. Historically, many countries have had peacetime conscription. The UK had it until the 1960s for example, France’s until the late 90s.

Ukraine had conscription for only for 27-and-overs until recently. It’s now 25.

None of this is a secret.

Since you seem especially concerned about the moral aspects of the subject, and cite scandalous abuses, the question is unavoidable: why you are so exercised by Ukraine’s situation when Russia is far, far, far worse on all these fronts? It’s odd.

You seem to have a whole theory about what’s up, and it might even be right. Or it might not.

That’s the point. Nothing here is falsifiable, and the subject is inflammatory, so your chances of getting a productive discussion are approximately zero.

Move on.

Fair enough.

But are you aware that Russia has had multiple rounds of conscription? Have you considered that many of Russia’s hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers were not properly supplied and used cynically as cannon fodder against Ukraine - and were therefore obviously deployed under some form of duress? Either as prison convicts or press-ganged off the street in poor remote parts of the Russian Federation that nobody in Moscow cares about.

Let’s remind ourselves who is the aggressor here, and who is responsible for the vast majority of the war crimes in this pointless war that could end tomorrow if Russia called off its illegal invasion.

In the light of all this, why would you be so concerned about the aggressed party’s respect for legal procedures as defined under its own laws?

Perhaps it’s time you stopped watching this “bunch of videos” and starting getting your information from reputable sources instead.

This is the correct response to OP’s transparently bad-faith question.

Yes, your theory about inevitable concentration sounds like the one of Thomas Piketty (where war functions to keep a lid on the concentration). Depressingly persuasive.

Personally, I find it hard to deny that capitalism has been incredibly successful at creating abundance seemingly out of nothing. I see it as a kind of ingenious roaring engine, the whole question is how to somehow harness it to good purposes.

And also how to turn it off. Because I think that the abundance does not come magically out of nowhere, as orthodox economics seem to believe. It comes from plundering the natural world, which the human economy sits on top of.

Another word is needed, this one has become so baggy as to be meaningless. Capitalism has been the predominant economic system across the world for centuries now. It just means the accumulation of surpluses, creating economic growth. It has no a-priori about what’s done with the surpluses.

Just as the Gilded Age and today’s broligarchy were underpinned by capitalism, so were New Deal liberalism and 1980s Swedish social democracy. That last model in particular created a society that was freer and fairer (so: less evil) than any ostensibly “non-capitalist” one has ever been.

True, but it still gives the Malian government an ultimate authority over the domain, which just seems completely dumb to me. The also-semi-failed Libya has ultimate authority over ly domains (like bit.ly) and has actually used its power to shut down domains for being against Libyan law. Domain hacks are not just ugly, they’re dumb.

Firstly, the French troops were invited by Mali’s government to help it put down its jihadist insurgents. The Russian ones were invited, in turn, for the same reason, after a media-propaganda campaign by Russia that played on historic animosity dating from the colonial period. A propaganda campaign filled with angry rhetoric and sounding much like your rant.

Meanwhile, Mali is still a semi-failed state with a jihadi problem which was caused by neither France nor Russia. And on top of that it now has brutal boorish Russian mercenaries instead of generally well-behaved French regular soldiers. Mali got a terrible deal and it was their own fault.

You know why I’m not embarrassed to say that? Precisely because I’m not a colonialist. I believe that Mali is not a child, it’s an adult. It has agency, it’s not a colony of anyone, it’s a sovereign country that can make choices for itself. If anyone’s views here are colonialist, it’s yours.

Mentioning the French troops was a bit offtopic. But my point stands. Mali is a semi-failed state that seems to have exchanged one set of foreign lords for another, much worse, set.

This seems to be missing Mali, the home of .ml. It’s in West Africa and since the French soldiers left it’s been an authoritarian client state of Russia. Very appropriate.

Yeah you definitely forgot the word “leverage” in the v1 pitch

It has no ads and never will.

This sounds more like a dreaded VC pitch! (But true in substance.)

Just don’t tell 'em all that or they’ll never come.

Yes I know, I literally do it myself with a Python script right now for 3 sites. I just wish someone would generously provide a hosted and maintained service that does this. IMO it could be a game changer. For some people a single source that lacks a feed is a deal breaker for RSS.

If it, or some other service, could find a way to publish feeds of content for sites which don’t have RSS feeds, now that would be really useful.

Well that puts the loss of my little VPS into perspective.

And terrible, archaic, chaotic practices such as activating your 2FA without permission and then locking you out of your account for weeks pending multiple signed paper letters. Oh, and sometimes their datacenters burn down and take your server with them. I’m sad to have to throw them under the bus like this. I want OVH to succeed but personally my patience with them definitively ran out.

What would happen if everybody decided to do that? Personally I think there are places which we should be content to admire from a distance.

Which begs the question of how it can ever be justified to create a green desert using a gas-powered lawnmower.