heneryville

In a real democracy the people decide what can be said, not the autocrat. That's what the election if for. Putin should make his case, not ban opposition.

Whose right? Remember, leader's don't have rights, they have powers.

1. The situation being bad for Russia does not imply it is good for Ukraine. This late in the match, they're both pretty beat up. 2. Most of the ceasefire talk is posturing to convince Trump that it's the other side stalling progress toward peace. It's not a great indicator of how much fight is left in Ukraine. As an autocracy, Russia will look strong until the day it falters. As a democracy we'll know the messy details all the way through.

Survivorship bias. The only US made goods left are those that can compete with foreign production. You cannot use those remaining as evidence that all goods could be US made without significant price increases.

This is correct. Turning a catastrophic loss into something that maybe kinda looks like a victory has been a propaganda coup for Russia. That's done in this case by inflicting disproportional pain on Ukraine. But remember, most often in war both sides lose. Russia does not win if Ukraine suffers. Russia wins if it achieves it's goals, which it has not and will not.

Russia has lost, but is substituting making another suffer as a victory, even when that in no way is helpful to Russia or it's people. Ukraine has always lost in the sense that this war was never going to be anything but a net-negative for them, and has won in the sense that they've retained most of their goals (remaining a sovereign state).

Things like this just indicate the sanctions can be leaky, but not that they are not working at all. The best indication that sanctions are working is how badly Russia wants them removed, and they clearly do want them removed.

Concluding that any amount of leakage means we should scrap the whole project would be like sacking the entire Police department because some crime still exists.

This bit of misinformation isn't sticking. Try something different.

There is literally a land war in Europe happening right now. It's happening door to door too.

Because when empirical evidence defies theory, it's time to reevaluate the theory.

This has much more to do with Russia than the UK. Not mentioned in the article is that the IMF revised it's 2023 predictions from -2.3% to 0.3%, citing strong government spending on the war.

In other words, this is where GDP figures aren't great. A country that is deficit spending to buy weapons to get its own people (and others) killed looks like a great economy on paper, but not really in actuality.

You can use the efficient market hypothesis to talk yourself out of pretty much any good idea.

Title could also read, "No conclusive evidence Western powers behind Nord Stream attacks". There is no good evidence either way. Jumping to the opposite conclusion isn't any better.

66 billion dollars is hardly pretending

[Edit] Less snark

If he were tried in the USA, the trail wouldn't need to be unfair to convict. What he did was clearly illegal. If it should be illegal is the debate.