thank god they have cooler heads or we wouldn’t be talking about thousands of injuries in Lebanon, we’d be talking about thousands of deaths in Iran (though hopefully a few sunk US ships too)

it’s hard to believe that we can be almost a year into this war and like two and a half years into Ukraine, both wars of attrition, and people will still look at sudden events and instead of calming down and thinking logically about potential responses and waiting for official statements, they’ll start running around in panic and fear - just as the Israelis want them to do!

we’re still in the preparation phase for the Iranian response to an Israeli assassination nearly two months ago. there’s very obviously a long-term ongoing strategy that will not be disrupted by terror attacks. this is a war of independence just like its historical predecessors. Vietnam didn’t win in 6 months.

practice some god damn self-discipline, both mentally and in terms of the people online or offline that you listen to. you’ll need it over the coming years and decades.

If Iran and Hezbollah don’t attack Israel in the next few hours, they will have essentially surrendered.

not at all true, they should take their time to formulate a meaningful response, and I know that they will because it’s what they’ve done every time Israel has attacked them.

the attrition strategy actively benefits from drawing things out and making things as painful as possible for Israel. they have time on their side; Israel does not.

At least it’s not concerning from a “were the pagers also wired to intercept communications” perspective. there’s that famous clip of Nasrallah talking with Assange about how they know that the Israelis are listening in on their communications, so they rely on the sayings and metaphors of local soldiers’ villages to encode information; and Hezbollah has gotten thousands of surprise attacks in with the Israelis having no prior warning.

Still, very strange. Given their widespread use in hospitals, I wonder if this was a roundabout way of doing a hospital bombing in Lebanon. Also, apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was also injured by one, so perhaps an assassination attempt there, but I wouldn’t have thought that a pager could hold much explosive material without being pretty suspiciously heavy. From the footage, the explosions aren’t like, roiling fireballs, I feel like you’d have to be sitting pretty close to one to have it outright kill you, so maybe it was just designed to cause injuries?

It’s weird that Israel did this and (so far) haven’t followed up with any invasion or aerial bombing attempts, because inciting chaos in your enemy before rolling in the tanks is a common strategy. Indicates to me that a) it hasn’t affected all/most of Hezbollah’s communications (truthfully I don’t know what exact methods Hezbollah uses to communicate with), and/or b) it was just a terrorist event lashing out because recent Israeli defeats (like the Yemen missile, and continued Ws by Hezbollah in the north).

Still, I’m on guard for any movement by Israel soon, in the coming hours or days, because of this and other things (like leaflets being dropped in South Lebanon).

And I’m going to be honest here: if it ever comes to this, you should consider yourself lucky if no Global South demands reparations from America. Otherwise it’ll put on an even heavier toll on the economy.

we’re gonna end up with some Treaty of Versailles shit. the American Hitler figure who takes power after the post-defeat resentment of America to try and revitalize the country and crush all working class organizations is currently a 10 year old laughing at skibidi toilet memes

grim reaper knocking on doors meme except there’s like 12 reapers lying on the floor outside the Yemen door

The Houthis, who control most of Yemen and the capital Sanaa, said the missile was a hypersonic one. The Israeli military denied it was hypersonic.

this is just the distinction between ballistic missiles being hypersonic in a period of their trajectory vs a cruise missile which can be supersonic or hypersonic depending on how good the missile tech of the country is, right?

Next megathread here.

keeping the news mega going for a little longer than planned just to fuck you over in particular

they’re a unique type of Ukraine supporter, who make the defense of NATO and opposition to Russia basically their whole identity, which is only increasingly bizarre as the number of people in the West who actually give a shit about the war anymore is fairly miniscule and mostly limited to the top strata of politicians, as well as their underlings who occasionally make comments about it.

it’s very meme focussed. one of their big symbols was/is doge; I think conceptualizing them as “4chan in 2016 but if it was rabidly pro-Ukraine” is pretty close to reality. their contribution to the warfare is propaganda, focussed on the younger demographic, who have that sort of irony-poisoned “non-political” nihilism where they don’t really care about the serious adult stuff about NATO defending democracy and standing up against dictators as much as being seen as a rebellious nuisance where they’re trying to annoy their enemies to death instead. “trolling for teh lulz” stuff but for zoomers.

as I said before, they were really only notable earlier on the war because that’s when more people cared about it and when Ukraine had some resources which could potentially, if they played their cards very well, lead to a genuine stalemate or even negotiated victory over Russia. at this point, when Ukrainian defeat is truly inevitable, Russia has not collapsed, and American imperial decline is visibly continuing, it’s just a rather sad remnant of grifters.

imagine being like “This war HAS to keep going, MORE people have to die. I’m willing to give up my entire life for the mere opportunity for more Ukrainians to be killed by artillery.”

yeah, I mean, ultimately, if it were impossible to overcome a hegemon from within the financial system that it creates, then half the planet would be still be singing God Save The King

every year, we’ve seen new crises breaking out that seem to strongly suggest that American imperial hegemony is breaking down. so I clearly have to distrust my lying eyes and believe that the US is on the verge of total world domination.

saying that “actually, the US’s inability to win a war against Russia nor to provide Israel any victory as we approach one year straight of war nor to defeat Ansarallah nor to overcome Chinese tech domination nor to maintain a stranglehold on exports of gas to Europe and any number of other things - all those things don’t really matter because the US’s power is financial and not industrial” is like saying that it doesn’t matter that you’ve cut my leg off and it is bleeding profusely, because I only need my arm to hold a gun. you will die of blood loss before you finish your firefight with the rest of the world, even if none of them have as big a gun or as much ammo as you.

And is it just me who thinks it’s completely insane to see left wing publications regurgitating neoclassical myths like using monetary policy to control inflation (or the US deficit is too high it’s going to bankrupt, for that matter)? Like, why are leftists succumbing to neoliberal theories? Does the Western left even follow Marx these days?

The piece does not subscribe to this view. Earlier on:

To answer, it is necessary to consider the recent history of the Federal Reserve. Throughout the neoliberal era, it has subscribed – in practice if not explicitly in theory – to the Friedmanite view that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’, and that the cure is therefore a reduction in the money supply. Most progressive economists reject this approach, arguing that it tends to lead to recession and high unemployment.

New Left Review on US inflation:

Three points are noteworthy. First, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure clearly understates inflation. It takes account of the ‘substitution’ that occurs when households shift to buying lower priced goods, effectively using households’ coping mechanisms as an excuse to artificially lower the inflation figures. It also gives a lower weighting to shelter costs, even though they have skyrocketed thanks to the housing bubble and the everything bubble. Second, since 2000, when the Federal Reserve accelerated its efforts to drive bubble-driven growth and changed its preferred inflation measure to PCE, the CPI has often been above the 2% target. No matter which inflation measure is used, inflation has generally been above interest rates during this period, making real interest rates negative. Finally, inflation today remains well above the 2% target, even if it has dipped below interest rates in recent months; yet the Federal Reserve flatly refuses to raise rates further, having brought them to 5.33% in July 2023. After all, this rise has already caused major ructions, from the failure of a string of banks beginning with Silicon Valley Bank to the instability in the commercial real estate, private equity and treasury markets and beyond.

Though the Federal Reserve claims that inflation is now down to 2.9% and predicts it will fall further, the Bureau of Labor Statistics disaggregation of the inflation numbers shows a rather different picture. While inflation has been dragged down by the lowering of food and energy prices, core inflation, a measure that excludes those prices because of their volatility, is still at 3.2%. With food and energy prices expected to increase in the coming months, not least thanks to continuing US and NATO warmongering, Powell’s declaration of victory may be premature.

What of his claim to have achieved a ‘soft landing’? There is equal reason to be sceptical. On the one hand, adverse jobs data suggest that a recession could still be looming. On the other, if interest rate cuts manage to prevent a recession, this leaves the door open to continuing inflation and ‘no landing’ at all. Raising the curtain on neoliberalism in 1979 with historically unprecedented rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has since, by nursing successive asset bubbles, deprived itself of the ability to use the only anti-inflationary weapon in its arsenal. Having arrogated to itself responsibility for managing the economy, it has now proven unable to do so.

if Harris loses Michigan (and possibly the election) because of the Muslim vote, a) it will be EXTREMELY funny, and b) we will then see anti-Muslim sentiment among Democrats the likes of which haven’t been seen since 9/11, which will be very much not funny. every socdem on social media will be like “it’s your own fault!” when they see videos of Muslims being oppressed by police and institutions.

of all the reasons why the Democrats should lose, the most deserved one is Gaza. this is the potential avenue through which Gaza could have a serious impact on the election; not because the average white American (young or old) gives a shit about brown people nor people outside their borders (they never have and still do not) but because of this.

it still might not shift the election, I haven’t seen the swing state polling, but if it will, it’ll be because of this.

this reads like the journalist writing this was being threatened at gunpoint by an agent to keep talking about how non-American the protestor was, and the dude is just panicking and sweating and asking if it’s enough words yet

“sir, please, I have a family, I have kids. this has gotta be enough, right?”

“just one more paragraph, and you’re free to go. talk about how they’ve never been inside a McDonalds, nor witnessed a baseball or football match inside a stadium.”

are they willing to, y’know, give in to at least some of Russia’s demands or are they just effectively asking for a Russian surrender still?

only a tenth of the duration of the thousand year reich

Ukraine does not have unlimited resources. They have a lot of people that they’re willing to sacrifice, but it’s been the case for many, many months now that Ukraine has been operating with much less equipment and artillery and ammunition and airpower than Russia, hence why the territorial acquisition has been accelerating and the Kursk salient is collapsing. Wars of attrition are slow and tedious, whether you’re talking about Russia attriting Ukraine or the Resistance attriting Israel, and it’s often unclear to bystanders without the intel of how much equipment is present, the current rates of losses, etc, how long it’s going to take or which side is even winning. It’s pretty odd that we’re privy to so much information compared to previous wars, which I imagine were fairly opaque without the rapid spread of information that the internet allows.

Russia win’s condition is literally to just keep doing what they’re already doing until the front line has been pushed back as far as they desire; they don’t need to engage with PR in the way you’re suggesting and a pullback at this point would be the most counterproductive move in the history of human warfare.

example #532904242 of left-wing analysis getting taken out of context and its ideological structure by right-wingers and grifters and mutating it into something it never said.

something measured like “American hegemony is in a period of seemingly irreversible decline due to the internal logic of neoliberalism, and the process of dedollarization will gradually strip it of its financial power, while China and others advance technologically beyond the US; like the transition between the British Empire and the American Empire, this will take several years, possibly 2-3 decades to occur, and inter-imperial and anti-imperial wars (both hot and cold) are the main way that this collapse in hegemony will occur, just like how the European empires fell.”

gets turned into “AmErIcA wIlL cOlLaPsE iN sIx MoNtHs! BuY gOlD nOw!”

and then when America obviously hasn’t collapsed in six months and the dollar still seems pretty much okay, you get people who are like “looks like the tankies are wrong again!”