In Debt, David Graeber suggests that in modern societies this only happens in situations of collapse, i.e. when currency becomes so worthless as to become essentially irrelevant, or when currency disappears from the streets. He gives the example of the post-soviet countries which, under shock therapy effectively became barter economies (a historical anomaly, for as Graeber argues, barter is very rare in most, if not all societies). As for a country effectively giving up on the use of currency, it would essentially be impossible under global capitalist conditions.

Red Sails is just the GOAT. Thanks for the share, the article looks super interesting!

Frankly one of the least convincing astroturf campaigns by far. Looked totally forced from the start (not to mention really cringe).

but rather explains a trick that is used by propagandists all over the world

Looks like you officially got the “propagandist” badge, congrats!

Also, he pretends “aid” is an entirely innocuous word, as if all the good canadians want is to be nice, instead of putting it in context of the history of colonialism, where “aid” far too often meant chopped hands and burnt villages. But expecting a liberal to consider history might be a bit much.

Libs just handwave any real inconsistency with their worldview by saying “well, it’s a trick! A magician’s sleight of hand! I don’t need to consider whether maybe my beliefs are wrong or incomplete, I can just declare it so, pull the wool over my eyes and go about my day!” Must be nice not having to consider reality.

I hadn’t considered this possibility. What’s stopping the Ukrainians from steamrolling all the way to the Atlantic, given all of Europe’s tanks and artillery are currently in Ukraine, and there is no army with even a tenth of the experience of the Ukrainians around? As has been pointed out before, they should be the ones training NATO, not the contrary. Russia is clearly a tough nut to crack; can the same be said for Germany and Poland? I sure wouldn’t want to be next to a bunch of vindictive nazis full of guns, looking for easy prey.

I personally really like Naked Capitalism, which though it is not communist per se, all the writers are very skilled and the guest posts are very good indeed. Sometimes the posts are more complex economic theory, but in general it’s very approachable; and the daily “links” post is an excellent aggregate of general news on all sorts of topics, and the commenters there are not braindead but extremely insightful (for example, Michael Hudson comments there every now and again).

For military things I like b from Moon of Alabama, he’s not left-wing exactly but he seems to be a fellow traveler sometimes. Cory Doctorow has good tech insights in Pluralistic. Michael Roberts has good marxist analysis of markets, especially focused on falling rate of profit.

On geopolitical/military things some right-wing sources are quite decent, if you can ignore the bullshit (mostly inane ravings on gender and wokeness), like Simplicius or Andrei Martyanov. Big Serge also has eventually some very good breakdowns of war stuff, but most of his posts are paywalled.

I’d mostly just check out Naked Capitalism’s daily links pages and then pick and choose whatever interesting websites catch your eye there.

Here, from the BBC, hardly a communist source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26089450, and the transcribed phone call: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

[Victoria] Nuland: Good. I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk] is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.

Guess who became prime minister of Ukraine? Precisely “Yats”, who was Nuland’s pick. The fact that such a phone call has not even been disavowed by the US government tells enough by itself. The US was clearly involved, and a phone call like this is just scratching the surface. If you want to learn more about US meddling around the world, I recommend the youtube channel The New Atlas, whose host, Brian Berlectic, dives deeply on the question.