Diva (she/her)

Frankly the whole trotskyist tradition can be a bit woo-woo-y when it comes to talking about global revolution, at baseline.

At some level it’s also a quasi-doomer meme to be like ‘okay nuke us already so the space comrades can save us’

I don’t buy the flying saucer stuff, it strikes me as at best creative speculation.

re:

And because scientific progress can be achieved through any of these economic systems*, we can’t just assume that extra terrestrials found themselves on our doorstep due to one particular economic model.

• At different rates obviously, but progress nonetheless.

My read on the passage related to this is that there’s always some inherent inefficiency when it comes to scientific production, due some combination of the economic system (and also the need for global collaboration vs national borders/defense concerns). For example if you were viewing technological development on different planets, all other things being equal but one has a fractured global government with hundreds of different defense concerns and intra-class conflicts sapping resources and scientific ability, vs a planet that has progressed beyond that, and is able to direct all resources towards a single purpose. One of those is going to be more effective in material terms. Maybe there’s some benefit to class competition when it comes to over-stepping what is sustainable within a given system, but I would say it’s debatable.

• I would actually point out that we have an extremely pressing example on our current planet where the endless-growth orientation of our economic system is de-terraforming our planet before we have demonstrated any ability to re-terraform it, when you’re looking at things on an interstellar timescale this starts to look like something self-defeating rather than a ticket to rapid development.

I would say that given the large scientific capabilities and organization, and commitment over time needed to meaningfully act on an interstellar scale, any systems which are not at a stable equilibrium will simply not exist long enough to actually have an impact.

My original statement was:

any interstellar species is going to have already necessarily passed far beyond our existing social structures, and would looks like communists to any earthly observer.

The rationale is essentially just that any system stable enough to actually sustain existence at those timescales across those distances would necessarily look different, and could not look like a system with constant boom and bust cycles, as eventually the technology gets the the point where the ‘bust’ is a self-annihilation. I guess I’m just not that confident that we’re on a trajectory which would result in us becoming an interstellar civilization without the need for major overhauls to our political economy first, and it makes it hard to envision aliens getting to that point while still also being tied up with internal ethnic strife and economic crises.

I’m an anarchist, but I have plenty of issues with pretty much every country, I just have too many family and family of friends entangled in this to not want to see peace, regardless of where the lines on the map end up for now. I don’t think there’s anyone who is proposing a truly deescalatory position, across the board and that’s the problem.

It’s fine I don’t need to engage further with you

I have some thoughts, though I need to wait until I’m off my phone or it’s going to be a rambling mess

They still stand and the others do not in part because Russia intervened, the ones that have been under siege recently have all been used as military strongholds for quite some time. They’re not civilian centers, the civilians in Donvas didn’t exactly have many options.

Did you support Serbia keeping it’s territorial integrity against a breakaway region too?

I always read it metaphorical in terms of ‘they make available the resources with which to undermine them’

You seem like you’ve got it all figured out

Sorry I just get a bit triggered when I hear Germans talking about needing to increase their strength due to aggressive outside threats causing internal economic strife.

So what about the ethnic Russians, and the rest of the non-Ukranian speakers?

There was a base of people (30% per your post) who didn’t support this and when the government cracked down on resistance, city centers ended up shelled with artillery for years.

Just a shitty situation to get caught in the middle of, frankly. Did you support NATO intervention against Serbia when it used its military on a breakaway region?

I would expect nothing less from a .de domain 😬