US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
This is a hail Mary for Putin. He knows his goose is cooked if Russia doesn’t win, and the only way he can win is if Trump forces Ukrain to surrender.
The bad news for Putin is that everybody already knows this, and also knows that Trump can’t really do much except act like the assclown that he is. The Europeans aren’t going to reward Putin. And they know that Trump’s days are numbered, and each of those days is going to show more cognitive decline and increasingly grotesque displays of megalomania, even if one of his many other crimes and scandals doesn’t render him incapable of further outrages.
And whether it’s Trump or Putin who goes first, the other will soon follow. They are propping each other up, and the whole arrangement is unstable.
Unfortunately the EU is sucking up to Trump nonstop. Now weakening the GDPR for example, and promising billions of investment while receiving nothing in return but a weak promise that there will be no further tariffs.
You know when all those conspiracy nuts yelled about “globalism”? They thought it was some underground “one world government” shit coming to fruition by some secret cabal of super wealthy billionaires, and then it turns out, well, economy is more powerful than any democracy or form of government in the world, so the guy with the most dollars get the most say.
Suddenly, you have a world of suckups who do anything for money. Look at that fuck Van Der Leyen. These people are not meant to rule. Shit, they are not fit to run a fucking company, it’s just echoes of Feudalism where everybody builds their own economic little fiefdoms, because functionally, there is no way for laws to keep up with the dynamics at play in finance, and since finance and power are interchangeable, you can leverage either, to get more money, or more power, or both.
Europe’s idealism runs deep, but over time, capitalism will always subsume efforts according to its own machinations.
They own the means of production, they own the product of production, and they own us. Big club, we ain’t in it.
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I think they were kinda right about globalism. Though it’s not in the form of a secret organisation meeting in a big dark Dr Evil lair. They don’t have to meet because their goals are the same. Make as much money as they can, ideally not off each other but off the little guy. Though sometimes there’s a bit of a fight between them, they are mostly aligned.
But the end result is really globalism and it has given large corporations way too much power.
Globalism, as far as I am concerned, is capitalism. Capitalism is that great equalizer. It supersedes national law and our democracies. Money is power, right? If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government, and it runs the world. Every country. All of them. The market controls our countries. Gotta grow, or you gonna hit recession. What does that mean, grow? In perpetuity? More production? More goods? More mined materials? More more more more more? And if you don’t grow enough on a quarter by quarter basis, then you lose.
What is the end game of capitalism?
When are we done?
What is the purpose of all this?
Is anyone steering this ship, or are we just seeing where money takes us?
Because it feels like the latter might be the one Big Case we need to fucking fix. Wealth. Our conception of ownership, our markets, our monetary systems, they need a big fucking overhaul. The only thing keeping capitalism in check is laws. But capitalism bypasses laws, because if you have money, not only can you get away by buying yourself out of consequences, if you have enough, you can rewrite the very laws themselves.
Look I know I’ve been rambling a bit in this thread, but I swear, it is time people wake up to the realization that if we wanna survive as a civilization, the concept of money, wealth, and production needs to be fundamentally revised.