The only certain thing is that wherever we think the next front will be, that is where it won’t in fact be. Many of us dismissed that Russia would invade Ukraine before it happened, and none of us expected October 7th. We got jumpy with Venezuela during their border issue because we’re all waiting to see what the next flashpoint is. We’re all looking at the DPRK and China but it’s gonna turn out that in twelve weeks, a group in fuckin’ Tajikistan or something will hit a secret US base near India and a war will start there. Central America is as good a guess as any.

I understand that it probably isn’t anywhere near this simple but I do wish that Russia would just hand over the blueprints for their S400s or even S500s to China and then China just sets up a dozen factories overnight and in six months, half the countries under threat by the US suddenly possesses top-tier air defence systems. you’d also have to train specialists ideally locally and that would probably take years but the general idea of like, if China is the world-factory now, it should be mass-producing stuff to at least help countries defend themselves against the US

the modern equivalent of the USSR sending military equipment and advisors to colonies trying to overthrow their oppressors should be China sending defense equipment to shoot down American jets and missiles and drones

The Scourge of Peepee-poopooitis has truly ravaged through Hezbollah and we are now in a competition to see whether Russia, China, or Hezbollah will collapse first

It really does prove that you can be given the most advanced panopticon and supreme surveillance state apparatus on the planet but if the people running it are completely incompetent dullards who pop out of the womb and are instantly promoted to vice-admiral, it doesn’t really matter.

It’s why the whole “We actually knew Hamas was going to attack, we just didn’t do anything about it because we just, uh, didn’t wanna” is such a hilarious story, because I guarantee that all Sinwar had to do was send messages to Obeida via a cell phone he knew was being tapped about how he was gonna turn Hamas into a thinktank for the advocacy of a Palestinian state by 2070 and these gullible morons in a base in the Gaza envelope were just like “Finally, we knew those cowards would give up. Time to send half our soldiers on holiday to Morocco,” and now they’re just trying to cover their own asses so they don’t get fired. I’m not a Sun Tzu guy but he went hard when he said:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Especially given that I’m pretty sure Sinwar learned Hebrew so he could read and analyze Mossad operations and learn how to counter Israel, and he survived for over a year in one of the most bombed areas in human history.

But all this stuff is phrased in the most intimidating way possible for regular people, like: “Using our bleeding-edge cyberintelligence capabilities and intelligence gathering using top artificial intelligence algorithms…” so they’re just like, well fuck, Palestinian opposition is hopeless I guess, when it’s demonstrably not

American politics really is just the same 20 people on a carousel going round and round for their entire 150 year lifespans until somebody finds their phylacteries and smashes them (e.g. Kissinger, Feinstein). There’s never any sense of closure or carthasis. I wanna be glad that Blinken is gone, for example, but I know that he’ll have a high-up position in the government for at LEAST the next 50 fucking years because he’ll live forever so what’s even the point celebrating. Same with Gaetz, he’ll be around forever too.

You know what, fuck it. My official prediction is that Biden will run again in 2028, solely because we live in hell, he’s the only Dem who has won since Obama, and the Dems also wanna join in on the Grover Cleveland action. The carousel must spin.

IIRC, Sri Lanka has been flipflopping between different presidents and parties over the last few years as the same economic hardship is hitting them as everywhere else, but even the “good” presidents are totally unwilling to resist IMF austerity, and even the most principled and well-intentioned communists just cannot get anything done if they aren’t willing to tell the World Bank to fuck off. I’m unsure whether this is a corruption/morality thing or if it’s because Sri Lanka genuinely is in such a shitty place that it would be provably worse for them to stop taking loans (i.e. they might be well and truly debt-trapped and only foreign help from China and friends could save them), because Sri Lanka has had such a complex history that I just haven’t had the time to look deeply into it with ~200 other countries also taking up my attention span.

The Medici? More like the Midici. I’m going to Florence and we’re going to sign a better deal, the best deal that we have ever known

the neolibs realize that strong economic growth is now impossible while simultaneously maintaining strict class warfare and divides (replicating the growth of Golden Age America is NOT worth the massive marginal tax rates on them), so now they’re trying to instead engineer recessions in order to profit from corporate collapses and strip the wiring out of the walls, and starting wars in order to burn up stockpiles of military vehicles by selling them to Eastern Europe to get turned to scrap in Ukraine as well as topple governments and install compradors

the US is the world champion of the good ol’ technique where you set a deadline for something in order to placate people who are asking you to do something so they don’t keep annoying you by asking you to do it every few days, and then you fail to meet that deadline and go “well jeez, some unforeseen circumstances hit me there. whoops. well, here’s a new deadline, I’ll definitely get it done by then”

but every time they do it, another hundred thousand children are murdered

Interesting. Hudson has always struck me as very… I’m struggling to think of a good term. Strength-focussed? Pessimistic? As in, there are scholars who take every new piece of information and go “Here’s why this means the US will fall soon,” interpreting US failures as total and victories as pyrrhic, and I’ve always felt like Hudson is the opposite. So it’s weird to see him say that Western civilization is definitely going out, when he’s always been so focussed on how the US has craftily and cunningly developed a geopolitical environment where even when they’re losing, they’re winning because the dollar is doing well or something.

The silver lining to all of this is that the kinds of violent oppression that the imperial core is planning can actually be defeated, we have many case studies of that happening throughout the 20th century and Hamas and Hezbollah and Ansarallah and others are the torchbearers of those liberation movements. Defeating imposed austerity and godawful loans and such seems to be considerably harder to mount resistance against (though Russia and China are vaguely working on it), probably because it’s much less destructive outright, but in the long term of decades and centuries, the combined human misery of poverty outweighs the relative quickness of a bitter war, as that famous quote on the French Revolution illustrates. I’m not in any way encouraged by historical trends per se, but I don’t really see any other way that an empire can end other than violently, so if we’re entering that violent phase now, then let’s at least get it over with so our descendants can live in peace rather than this shitty fucking empire lasting another two hundred years.

King Frederick William I: 1688-1740

“the most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers, they are my weakness.”

Donald Trump: 1946-20??

“I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals. They were like from a movie. Better looking than Tom Cruise, and stronger. And I had more generals than I’ve ever seen, and we were at the bottom of this incredible room. I said, ‘This is greatest room I’ve ever seen,’”

welcome back, the King of Prussia

Even for people here who were arguing that a Trump presidency could be less damaging than Biden’s on a foreign policy standpoint were never under any illusions that the people Trump would appoint would be any less monstrous, because there aren’t really any non-monstrous candidates left within ten miles of power. It’s purely an argument based on the mixture of incompetency at the helm and mounting American military exhaustion after nearly three years of the Ukraine War and a year of Israel’s genocide.

Any conservative who voted for Trump partially on the basis that the people he would appoint would be less bloodthirsty are gullible dipshits, including Jackson Hinkle.

I think this is one of those sentiments that is theoretically wrong but practically right. Kinda like how if you just take the exact opposite position that America does in every single situation domestic and foreign, which, being a simple if/then statement, is far easier than following an ideology with a bunch of axioms and arguments that require hundreds of pages of reading to internalize, you’ll actually end up 95% correct anyway and just need a few things corrected and ironed out.

contrasting hitler’s reputation with leopold II’s specifically drives home just how steeped in white supremacy western society is and how far-reaching the impacts of that are. god damn the west

Not only that, but I think this is why Israel’s actions are so mind-bogglingly shocking to anybody who actually believed in a sort of psychological or ideological development of the West on human rights issues and white supremacism over the past hundred years. If your conception of history is that the imperial core “decided” to become less brutal in terms of human rights because their own magnanimity and the legacy of Hitler’s inhumane actions casting a spotlight on their own actions, then what’s going on in Israel just seems completely random and inexplicably evil. Like, where the fuck did all this come from? It has to “logically” be the product of evil people at the top of Israeli society, some weird regression from a period where we cared about human rights.

I genuinely believe, without a hint of irony and glibness, that there has been ZERO development or “healing” of white supremacism in the last hundred years. ALL the gains in that department have been from people violently opposing that system, such as anti-colonial movements and the Soviets helping those. Inside of Europe, the same attitudes have ruled in the halls of power this entire time, they didn’t change or become less white supremacist, only the way in which that supremacism was discussed changed. There’s that famous quote on the Southern Strategy where explicitly racist rhetoric was phased out in favour of supporting measures that would inconvenience minorities slightly less directly; you don’t discriminate based on race, you just make all black people poor and then discriminate based on wealth, which is much more acceptable in America. Nowadays, that violent opposition has declined with the rise of more detached methods of rule (less armies of redcoats invading Zulu territory, more bleak IMF austerity and debt) and the USSR is gone. So the EXACT SAME white supremacism that fueled Churchill and Leopold and Hitler are fueling Israel and the imperial core today.

The scary realization about Israel is that what it’s doing isn’t new. It’s actually very old. The AI and massive bombs and digital surveillance are, in the grand scheme of things, actually not very meaningful developments. If you time travelled back to the 1900s and talked to the rulers of Europe and described to them what Israel was doing, they’d just be like: “Ah, I see our strategies for domination continue well into the future! Verily, what glad tidings you bring me! Now, I must get back to my fox hunt!” Like, here’s some examples that people may not know about:

CW for stories of atrocities, murder, genocide, and brutal SA. Seriously, some of this stuff is awful.

The potential coming world where there’s dozens of Gazas created in response to political instability and immigration isn’t us advancing into a grim, depressing future - we’re actually just going backwards, rEtUrNiNg To TrAdItIoN, to before and during the colonial uprisings of the mid 20th century. Nothing has changed inside Europe since Leopold. Send Scholz back in time to 1940 and he’d be goose-stepping within the hour.

No, like, I think this is 100% true, that was the single biggest error of German imperialism and fascism from the perspective of imperialist interests. If the Germans had just done the Holocaust with the exact same number of deaths but in Africa then I’m convinced that Hitler would have been an obscure historical figure.

Very few people know who Leopold II was and he killed millions upon millions of people in the Congo. The UK was responsible for dozens of millions of deaths just in India alone and all that it gets is a “well, the history and legacy of such a long-lived empire is complicated…” There were concentration camps across Africa years before the Germans brought it to Europe. There would probably be Hitler statues across Germany without anybody knowing he was a “controversial figure”, just the same as having statues of colonialist and white supremacists across Europe and America where their historical value is “hotly debated” and all that horseshit.

Thank you very much, comrade.

It’s very interesting to me how Trotskyism is forming the most coherent left-wing opposition in Argentina - I struggle to name any other countries where that’s the case. There are Trot parties through the imperial core but they aren’t even remote threats to power in virtually every case.

never leave the news mega folks, it’s not worth it

There are multiple summaries out there, such as this one here

The short of it is that the mod team, as part of an initiative to shift site culture, shuttered the dunk tank and dredge tank and opened up c/gossip and c/counterpropaganda to generally, but not entirely, replace the two comms. This was, depending on your position and level of knowledge, either a brave attempt to encourage better values in a time of massive upheaval where organizing will become more important, or the mods being bitter wet blankets who think they know better and are dictating to and patronizing independent adults.

This was pretty unpopular, especially because there was no democratic vote; the comms were just locked out of nowhere. A series of massive communication errors from both the moderators and admins alike culminated in responses that failed to address the concerns of the users and made remarks that were offensive to the userbase (saying that the users gave off “white cishet vibes” when the userbase is not largely cishet) especially without the context of knowing who said those remarks (thereby making people think that some clique of bioessentalist transphobic moderators existed, when none in fact did).

TC69 returned and was getting re-acquainted in the middle of this chaos, instantly promoted to admin, for better or worse. This gave TC69 the power to just start waving the banhammer left and right like Sauron taking out soldiers without actually considering whether this was helpful, or perhaps even completely counterproductive, and there was a mixture of irony-poisoning and patronizing statements basically stating that those who objected were just widdle babies who needed to take a week off.

Eventually, other admins stepped in and stopped this, apologizing and unbanning most people. TC69 decided to resign and leave the site again, after doing far more harm than good. I also resigned from the mod team for my (small but still non-zero) impact during all this, though will stay on the site and keep doing things pretty much how I’ve been doing them, so no significant changes are expected in the news mega.

I think Cuban leadership and to an extent the people of Cuba know what capitulation to the US means: a future more bleak than anything they are going through now.

I agree, I think this is Cuba’s real strength in that regard: whatever domestic situation they’ve created, it withstood what the USSR could not. It wasn’t just the Soviet citizenry becoming disillusioned (or perhaps, a better word is “illusioned”) that led to the fall but it was a big factor, and Cuba has managed to mitigate that despite living mere miles from the US.

Though it’s still possible that the US tries something in their increasing desperation and attacks Cuba, and even with the US’s profound lack of military ability to perform competent invasions they could still just bomb the shit out of the island for a year until there are no structures left standing.