@F1Krazy, yes but it alters how the answer is read - so I have to point out that something should be there, but isn't. It's only in the context of a deeply violent and uncivilised place, that a reasonable person perceives the need to have a gun to defend themselves.

@alamar, even Stalin had some people behind actually making the guns and bullets, and the "butter" to keep soldiers' bodies and souls together. But he'd already spent many years preparing economically for confrontation with the Nazis before they turned up at the gates. Putin winning the war on the ground in Ukraine won't be the end of the conflict with the West (who will be left smarting and bitter by their defeat), so gearing up for both further military confrontation and for economic siege, is a perfectly sensible approach to Putin waging the kind of war he is in with us.

@thegodsfromengineering, I imagine someone would pay if the spill needed to be cleaned up. It might just be on the basis of the party desiring the cleanup pays, or the Russian state pays according to the politics of the situation.

"That's 2.5% of the working-age male population which does not produce anything in the economy and which has to be supplied and paid for." - lots of jobs and positions don't effectively contribute to anything useful being produced. The benefit of a war economy is that workers are able to bargain much more strongly and get a bigger piece of the pie, that there is no longer a justification for an intentional reserve army of labour, and that workers themselves are massively improved with skills, training, abilities, and experiences.

Regards the "shadow/dark fleet", there's nothing really shadowy or dark at all about the ships. Western financiers and insurers who dominate the sector have boycotted the Russian merchant navy, so the Russian state has responded by just sailing the ships anyway, under insurance guarantees arranged directly by the Russian state. They have also ceased to register with Western agencies or consistently broadcast their positions using Western technologies - because the West would use such information for their own aggressive purposes, rather than normal regulatory purposes.

@PeteW, we're obviously working from broadly the same understanding, but on race and gender, the liberal has never promoted racial politics on principle, or had any prejudice about gender. They'd happily send everyone down the mines for a pittance - man, woman, white, black, adult and child. In fact in the Victorian era, they happily did!

@bharring, can you organise your thoughts first and then post them as a minimal number of comment blocks? Modern liberal propaganda about what their own views consist of (as might be found on Wikipedia), does not decisively resolve the question of what actually moves liberals and what its essence has been over centuries. It's possible to have political movements that lie about their own intentions and nature, like a Nazi saying "work makes you free" or "this is the way to the showers".

For reasons that are partly but not wholly related to propaganda, those who actually call themselves "conservatives" are often in fact radical liberals and an assortment of other reactionary forces, who don't want to maintain the status quo at all (as the post-war liberal typically does), but want to either go back to a purer form of liberalism or to innovate it into perceived new forms (as for example you see with the owners of tech platforms who espouse various forms of lawlessness and deviance). (2/2)

@PeteW, I'm describing what liberal has always meant in essence. The liberal does not necessarily agree with equal political rights like voting, since there were property qualifications and plural votes tolerated (much as the liberal seeks to extend the scope of the market, where the rich can exert force in proportion to their wealth). The "1970s progressive-liberal" in the USA is not really a strand of intellectual thought, but simply a mass of true conservatives who want to solve minor problems whilst reproducing the essence of the status quo. (1/2)

@bharring, it's important to note that the distinction between serfdom and slavery is the dispossession of the slave and the right of the master to treat the slave as his own movable goods, and to trade ownership to another master. It is not defined by the oppressiveness of the working conditions (as the serf might suffer and occasionally rebel against), nor captivity in one place (as the serf is), nor by a general environment of poverty that may cajole the proletarian to move around seeking employment.

@PeteW, the organising principle I've articulated is freedom for capitalists. It's crucial to understand that they mean freedom to engage in capitalist activity, not any other kind of freedom. So too with "equality of opportunity" - they mean equal legal rights to engage in capitalist activity, and no rights which are reserved to those with particular biological lineages. They don't mean equal access to wealth, or fairness of the conditions in which each generation begins.

@bharring, that's nonsense. Slavery hadn't been legal on the British mainland during the entire memory of the common law. You might be getting confused with the tolerance of it in the British colonies.

@lidar, I was thinking American Revolution to American Civil War as being roughly 75 years. It's actually 86 years - 1775 to 1861. I perhaps should have said "within a lifetime or so", but the point anyway is that it didn't sustain for long as a legal status, and there was hostility to the practice of slavery long before the Civil War adjudicated on it.