The media are irrelevant here, since a significant number of people in the West no longer trust them. And Putin's proposal was not targeting them either way. Russia doesn't care anymore what the West thinks.

However, the recent European parliament elections have shaken things up quite a bit. It has become apparent to the ruling parties that the jingoist anti-Russian rhetoric damaged them instead of helping them. And we can see that by the silence of Macron since then, and the refusal of Scholz to proceed with further sanctions. Furthermore the economic damage to Europe is no longer something to ignore.

Also, Putin was probably targeting non-Western countries with this proposal, so that they would not support the Ukrainian plan for applying pressure. And those ones ARE considering Minsk, Istanbul etc.

Putin's major target was Ukrainians themselves, and it seems to have worked. Ukrainians have started saying they want peace. That's the most critical part here. No matter how much the West might want to continue this war, if Ukrainians are unwilling to fight, then it will end.

Finally, the defense ghouls, as you aptly put it, might want to keep selling weapons, but the realities on the ground make them irrelevant as well. There is no more Ukrainian manpower, and without manpower who is going to operate these weapons? The West? Secondly, the Palestinian Uprising is now competing with Ukraine for weapons and the Western industrial complex can only barely satisfy one of them. Who do you think they'll drop?

I called mine Triton, the prawn suit Scylla, and my submarine Poseidon

It's Boris and Natasha from the Rocky Bullwinkle show. That's all it is to these idiots.

Yet you are willing to support the actual fascists who were bombing their own people, in the most corrupt country in Europe. I wouldn't expect an Andrews Air Base resident to understand.

What?

Just because you close your eyes to what is happening in the world, doesn't mean the rest of us are blind too.

Show me the numbers. Curious how population growth rate in both USSR and China rises unprecendently, after these two came to power.

The US is sanctioning 1/3 of the world's population. Sanctions have murderous results on innocent people in an effort to swing public opinion in favor of more pro-US policies from countries. Their consequences have been described as worse than war for some countries. They are the equivalent of siege warfare: starving out a population of a country until it does what you want.

It's good that Latin American countries finally refuse to go along with this, especially as some of them have been targets of these very same sanctions before.

Depends who you ask. If you ask a Marxist, they'll tell you that in an electoral system where elections are largely determined by who has the most money in order to reach the most ears, is not really a democracy.

A democracy would be a system that gives you the right to actually and directly influence specific policy through voting (e.g. through referrenda), and direct control over representatives (e.g. ability to recall them if they are not doing their jobs).

In Norway and Germany (to use your examples) people might enjoy a lot of personal freedoms and a high standard of living, but both domestic and foreign policy is still functionally determined by corporations and the rich elite.

The economic system of capitalism makes it so governments realistically care more about the interests of business, rather than the interests of the citizens. And that's an oligarchy. It's just that some countries are better able to pacify their populace because they happen to have the resources to do so. But we still see that in Norway and Germany (and any other traditionally-regarded "good democracy") the social welfare systems, that make them such appealing examples, are systematically diminished and destroyed. I do not think it's the citizens who demand that.

All this, without getting into the fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives in a feudal-like or dictatorial system we call "job", where we hardly have the power to influence how it operates.

As a Greek speaker who also knows Latin and Ancient Greek, both words mean the same thing and come from the same roots in their respective language (demos = publius = people/community/population). I don't know why political theorists try so hard to separate them. The only real use of separating them is for easily differentiating the Athenian Democracy from the Roman Republic, for historical purposes, but nowadays both democracies and republics are functionally the same thing (and linguistically should be the same too). The only difference is sometimes the functioning leader's name (president vs prime minister). Every other difference between them are for the sake of local cultural/historical traditions.

In the classical sense, Parliamentary/Representative Republics/Democracies ARE oligarchies. A true democracy would give voting power not just for electing representatives but also for determining specific policies and laws (i.e. Referendums), which very rarely, if at all in many cases, actually happens.

The problem is that going so deep means radio signals don't work anymore. The water is too dense to transmit a signal for any meaningful distance. Since they were planning to only dive at that location specifically though, they could have placed buoys to act as signal boosters, or some equivalent technology.

At any rate, it seems 5 rich people died because they cut corners on the sub. Ironic.