Bulletins and News Discussion from October 14th to October 20th, 2024 - Paper Tigers
Bulletins and News Discussion from October 14th to October 20th, 2024 - Paper Tigers
Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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More China playing both sides so it always comes out on top news, apparently they are canceling deals with Cuba to punish it for walking back privatization.
Just an FYI for people getting angry about this: this deal to export 400,000 tonnes of sugar to China annually was suspended back in 2022, by Cuba, because Cuba ran into production issues, didn't have enough sugar, and became a sugar importer. The deal remained suspended in 2023, again, because Cuba could not produce enough sugar. This year the deal was finally cancelled because, shockingly, Cuba still can't produce enough sugar since their sugar industry has been in collapse for years.
And now the Financial Times of all places has made up some story about how China is punishing Cuba, and people are repeating it (literally no other sources exist for this, every article in English and in Spanish that I can find link back to the FT article).
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuban-sugar-industry-restructures-another-bleak-harvest-looms-2021-11-24/ (Start of the collapse and the last year people were still talking about Cuba maybe fulfilling its export but probably not because harvest was bad)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuba-cuts-plans-export-sugar-with-output-expected-stagnate-2022-11-03/ (article from the following year about how Cuba can't export sugar anymore because they can't fulfill their contracts)
Edit: China is still Cuba's number two trade partner. Could they do more for Cuba? Yeah, they could do more for literally everywhere, but complaints about how China needs to deliver more aid are way different than uncritically accepting that China is cutting trade ties with Cuba to punish them. (By the way, China is also one of the largest investors in Cuban infrastructure, so the real energy should be at wanting China to double down on helping Cuba fix their currently faltering energy infrastructure)
I appreciate your posts, but I'm personally not feeling a whole lot of hope. The trends lately have really been getting me down, and I don't know if my perspective is being warped or what.
That's fair, but an important thing to remember in regards to China: Patnaik (2020) notes that 64% of the number of persons lifted above the international poverty line since 1990 was entirely on account of China. Whatever economic complaints that people on the Internet have, China has made moves to alleviate the immiseration of a billion people in the face of an over-reaching hyperviolent global hegemony.
As far as hope, I always take to heart Mariame Kaba's assertion that "hope is a discipline."
" I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad . . . hope is a discipline and. . . we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. . . I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that. And I don’t also take a short-time view, I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of. So, that also puts me in the right frame of mind, that my little friggin’ thing I’m doing, is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but [if] it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that."
I'm back after a long day, and I looked through some sources of my own on Cuba sugar production over the last 3 years
Yes, you are right, Cuba had a terrible sugar harvest in 2022 and were not able to fulfill their contract. They were projected to have good sugar harvests in 2023 and 2024, and also did not deliver. So yes, it does make sense if the Cubans can produce to cancel the contracts.
However, the difference between the 2022 harvest failures and the 2023 and 2024 failures is that the former was due to actual bad agricultural conditions, and the latter was due to lack of access to herbicide and Cuban mills breaking down because both of these things have traditionally come from the US. Now, I don't know, maybe Cuba is going to have to find another industrial powerhouse that is willing to help it replace or fix it's existing mills, who could also step in to fill the gap left by the #2 global producer of herbicide, the US.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/12/how-cubas-sugar-industry-has-been-ground-into-dust
Have you actually looked at the team of people who run this foundation?
"Founder and Executive Director - Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado. Parsifal is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub. In 2019 he acted as an advisor on Chinese foreign policy for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the interim government of Venezuela (this is Guaido's fake government lol). Parsifal lived in Beijing from 2008 to 2016 where he served as communications manager and researcher for the China Files news agency."
Come on, at least use sources that aren't US feds.
I mean it is on multiple websites, I just didn't want to quote the fucking financial times and couldn't find the Twitter post I first learned about this from.
Sure and maybe the news that China is cancelling a trade deal is true, but the point of these types of NGOs is to frame it with a lot of unsubstantiated spin. This article you linked writes specifically that the trade deal comes as a punishment for failing to privatize, but I can't find a single non-US funded source that links those as cause-and-effect. There is no evidence that this deal is being cancelled as a lever for privatization, which is the thing that you are criticizing China for doing.
That's why when you use sources like this you can't take their reasoning at face value, that's just spreading Atlantic Council narratives.
I really do hope it's just a matter of framing, because in terms of perspective it looks like another big L in a long chain of recent L's. I can't remember their last big W at this point.
Please tell me I'm crazy to think there's a non-zero chance that China unconditionally de-nuclearizes as a gesture of goodwill towards the U.S.
Read the Chinese read out of the last few meetings with americans. They keep insinuating that usa always says one thing and does another and that makes them untrustworthy. They couch it in diplomatic language but the message is there consistently.
China looks at american diplomats as liars and clowns. You can see the derision on their faces. They trust america 100%... to be greedy shortsighted liars.
There is no risk of China pivoting. Even if they did there is no chance usa would accept anything less than complete subjugation. Just look at how hard Putin tried to do everything the west wanted. Russia did everything they could to join the "civilized" world and in return the west sent a CIA backed nazi to overthrow Putin and when that failed they started funding nazis in ukraine to start a war.
Frankly its insulting to think that the government of China can't see that.
I could find Marxist leninist maoist critiques but that would be sectarian.
Please do, actually, and find a source that corroborates what you are criticizing: that this trade deal is being cancelled in order to punish Cuba for not privatizing. Otherwise all you have substantiated is that the deal is cancelled, and not the why of it, which is what people are getting mad about. A deal being cancelled isn't really anything: that happens all the time.
...do you accept Twitter posts? Not sure what the citation rules here are and if they follow the same rules as not being encouraged to admit that hamas guy died until hamas fid a press release. Should I wait until Cuba officially criticizes Beijing?
To be fair though, apparently the sugar harvest in Cuba the last few years has been mega fucked for some reason. That could also be a factor.
@plinky@hexbear.net @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net @3rdWorldCommieCat@hexbear.net @mkultrawide@hexbear.net
You read a post by a 3 hour old account by a "foundation" that denigrates an AES states and just accept its spin without digging deeper?
Parsifal D'Sola Alvarado (ceo of The andrés bello foundation) is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
You guys are all better than this.
The primary causes of Cuba's inability to provide sugar over the last two years has been it's inability to get herbicide and the breakdown of its ancient sugar mills. So yes, they haven't been able to deliver.
I don't know, maybe I'm just emotional giving all that's going on, but I sure hope that Cuba will be able to find an country that specializes in engineering and industrial production who also happens to be the #1 producer of herbicides and pesticides that might be willing to help them.
Big L for China. At least Russia invited Cuba to the BRICS+ meeting, I hope at least they are able to join the BRICS Bank to get some aid.
Dumber than a stack of rocks, huh, i wonder if they go
like russiaI wanna be optimistic but its really hard when everything seems to be falling apart right when we need it the most, have there been any kind of China Ws recently, big or small or are Ls the norm for a while now?
China Ws are all related to technological and scientific achievements. They more or less are using AI the way you're supposed to use AI. While the West wastes time and energy trying to use AI to draw hideous drawings and code hideous codes, China is using AI to streamline industrial processes. Don't let grifting bullshit like ChatGPT fool you. China is at the forefront of AI. There is the joke that AI research papers are either written by scientists where half the scientists are Chinese or written by scientists where all the scientists are Chinese.
The problem with AI is that it consumes an obscene amount of energy, which dovetails nicely to China also embracing green tech and trying to design an economically feasible fusion reactor. They're not building solar farms for the sake of building solar farms or to save the Earth. There's a demand for energy from AI that burning nonrenewables will only go so far.
This is their vision: renewable and nuclear (ideally fusion) energy provides the energy needed to power AI, which is used to automate labor. A mining robot uses AI to distinguish ore from random rocks, a supervisory AI manages the various mining robots, and so on. The robots don't dream of electric sheep or any of that nonsense grifters peddle about AI. They're just fucking robots.
The West uses AI to proletarianize various strata of the working class. They want to turn artisans (independent artists) and labor aristocrats (software developers) into proletarians. Meanwhile, China uses AI to emancipate workers from backbreaking and mindnumbing labor.
That's definatly something good to hear in the middle of all the doomerposting, thank you. I just really hope for the best atp.
It isn't really materialist to think that "we" as individuals living in the imperial core will benefit from the global periphery setting its own priorities. They might just be serious about socialism in one country not being compatible with an axis of resistance. (A cold war era mistake that helped them but doomed the planet)
Fuck Xi. Mao should have left his family in that cave.
When you read an Atlantic Council article and then say "fuck Xi" I think the US has worked its propaganda well.
There are multiple articles from different sources about China cancelling this contract. Either post a source showing it's not true, in which case I will retract, or keep it moving.
I never said the deal wasn't being cancelled, but the outrage being generated here is that it is being cancelled as a punishment, which there is no evidence of that isn't from a US-backed source.
Oh, so the contract being cancelled is actually a reward?
It's just a contract being cancelled, that could have any number of reasons behind it (and the most likely reason is profitability, which is problematic in its own right but not at all what this thread is complaining about). But to accept that it is being cancelled as a punishment to fail to privatize is pure conjecture unless you have inside information you'd care to share.
"The most likely reason is problematic, but it's unfair to China that anyone here uses reason to determine what the most likely cause for cancellation might be."
China cancelling a contract with another communist country under siege by the US that is heavily struggling, "most likely over profitability" is exactly what this thread is about.
Show me a source and I'll retract. I'm very pro-China and even, probably to the disapproval of a lot of people here, very supportive of a lot of Dengist economic policies. What I don't like is one communist country abandoning another for "most likely profitability reasons".
I think we're talking past each other here because the article that spawned this thread is saying the cause is specifically to punish Cuba for walking back privatization, which is spin on the situation published by Atlantic Council goons. The thing I have asserted is that if you were to look at the parent comment and the linked article, and take it at face value, you are uncritically accepting US narratives.
At no point have I denied that this deal was cancelled, nor that trade deals are implemented, maintained, or cancelled, all entirely on the basis of profitability. That isn't what this thread is about though. It's about whether or not China is "punishing" Cuba.
You're right, my apologies. China didn't "intend to punish Cuba". It simply is looking out for the profit of its capitalist class, and in the process, ended a contract that will negatively affect Cuba. That's not "punishment", it's just an oopsie. A "woopsie daisy".
Xi has done great work at curbing corruption, enough that western sources mention it uncritically. You don't think that is worthy of consideration?
So true, I would have voted for hu jintao a third time if I could