Bulletins and News Discussion from March 24th to March 30th, 2025 - The Genocide Continues - COTW: Qatar

Image is of Gazans breaking their fast with the Iftar meal during the ongoing Ramadan.

Due to a request by @miz@hexbear.net, this thread's COTW is Qatar.

The ceasefire deal broke down early last week after Israel unilaterally changed the terms of the agreement and then blamed Hamas for not meeting them. Violence against civilians has rapidly accelerated to pre-ceasefire levels, with many hundreds dead already, aid once again cut off, and Israeli soldiers once again entering and occupying the attritional labyrinth that is Gaza.

I'm not yet in a position to make any solid predictions or analysis, as the geopolitical situation in and around Israel has changed fairly substantially over the last 6 months; in some ways benefiting Israel, and in other ways not. We know for sure how Hamas and Ansarallah are reacting (thankfully, with open hostility to both Israel and the United States), but the state of Hezbollah has been a giant question mark for months now, and precisely what Iran plans to do (beyond the usual level of supplying weaponry and intelligence to all the allies it can) is unknown. Syria will be almost certainly be a big wildcard, and we'll have to see if the compradors in Damascus can weather the storm.

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604 comments

Dead Letters: Neoliberalism Kills Mail Delivery In Denmark
Postal services in the Nordic hermit kingdom will cease at the end of this year after 401 years of continuous operations. Postal operator PostNord, a neoliberal "run it like a business" abomination jointly owned by the Danish and Swedish states, has announced that it is no longer profitable to distribute letters and that they will end the service. The iconic red letterboxes will be removed from the streets, postage stamps will no longer be issued and 1.500 mail carriers will be fired.
- Damn that is dark. Mail service is one of the fundamental pillars of civilization.
  
  They really hate the idea of the government doing stuff because stuff needs to get done. Utilities, transit, public housing, mail delivery, periodic car inspections, getting a new passport - it all has to work like a busines and be profitable.
- Dumbass social democrat in Burgerland: I wish the US was more like the Nordic countries.
  
  Social Democracy never works.
  
  Social democracy "works" very well actually. Having the moderate wing of fascism, redistributing some of the spoils of empire to the labour aristocracy of the imperial core bribing enough of the population off to defuse any threat of revolution worked very well for capital. It also created a class of consumers to buy the stuff produced by capitalists.
  For the workers that were let into the social democrat "people's home" it worked very well too. They experienced getting healthcare, pensions, childcare, elder care and sharply rising standards of living. Suddenly they got a level of material safety and comfort that their parents and grandparents could only have dreamt about.
  It didn't work for workers in the periphery who were being exploited brutally to provide the material basis for all of those nice stuffs. It also didn't work that well for those in the core ergo were excluded from the social democrat idea of "the people", like ethnic minorities and indigenous people.
  I get why American liberals wants to be more like the Nordic countries, of course they want to have healthcare and all of the other nice things from the social democratic welfare state. Who wouldn't want that? It is a completely reasonable demand to make.
  The Nordic nations have also been very good at branding themselves as being all welfare and knit sweaters and candles and hygge. Very few westerners thinks of the actual mechanics of how social democracy squares the circle of maintaining capitalism and also providing a relatively high standard of living for the broad population.
  All of this is what you could call "classic social democracy", the nice glossy version that Nordic succdems (and lots of self-identified leftists) likes to congratulate themselves for pulling off. But actually existing social democracy, the ideology and politics of social democrats wielding actual power in the imperial core, is a very different beast.
  While still stubbornly insisting on being the only legitimate political voice of organised labour and of working class in general, they have departed from the ideas of "lifting from the bottom" and improving living conditions generally. They have been fully complicit in neoliberalism and more often than not the gutting of the social democrat welfare states has happened with social democrats in charge.
  Modern social democrats are more concerned with a conservative preservation of past achievements for an increasingly more narrowly defined "people". Ignoring the enormous diversity of the actual working class, modern social democrats only represent white cishet workers with steady employment, preferably down at the sparks and steam factory. This butchering of the concept of the proletariat has been made possible by the social democratic movement's distancing themselves from Marxist theory as part of the class collaboration policy that enabled the welfare state and lacking any serious class analysis they are now able to define workers by all sorts of whimsical cultural and educational markers rather than by their relationship to the means of production.
  This ideological decline has enabled modern social democrats to pivot to a deeply reactionary ideology, promoting racism, class hierarchies, nationalism and imperialism. In large parts of the imperial core this kind of social democracy still "works" as the not-so-moderate wing of fascism. It still sucks out the air of attempts at progressive labour politics and it distracts the labour aristocracy by blaming immigrants, the unemployed, the woke cultural elite etc. fire everything that's wrong while still offering a hope, although a fake one, that they can provide material improvements.
- This is crazy. How are they going to deliver official sensitive mail that I assume is protected in the state run postal service?
  In my work I send people a lot of old fashioned mail still and these rely on the laws and regulations of the postal services. It would not be possible to mail these via any private operator without breaking the law. I assume this is similar in all the nordic countries, but maybe not?
  
  Official mail is delivered digitally. A couple thousand of mostly elderly people have been exempt from having to use digital mail. The government will now have to pay a private business to deliver those letters. They recently changed the law to "liberalise" the "postal market" so it is completely legal.
  
  Well that sucks, so many struggle with digital services, not just the elderly but this also fully futher excludes people with no papers or phones etc. Just like the move away from cash which has genuinely made public transport inaccesible to the poors. Afaik Stockholm with its endless brainworms about gangs is a real poster city for this exclusion atm.
  The digital boom is a thing here too, but it's still mandatory to deliver anything official by mail if it has anything to do with the persons rights, healthcare, services etc. People can opt in to a digital service though.
  Pretty sure we will follow on this one too, whatever shitty thing the big boi nordic countries do, we follow a decade later latest.
- Thats crazy, obviously people dont send recreational letters much anymore, but its still a key aspect in a lot of business stuff. Getting a new passport, setting up bank accounts. As someone who doesn't regularly check their email or phone I kind of rely on the post to tell me important shit, in my mind if the company wont send you a letter it isnt important enough.
  
  A reason why the amount of mail has dropped is that most of these things have been moved to digital platforms and they already require you to go to a municipal office and pick up your new passport in person.
  People are required and expected to communicate with public authorities digitally. A few thousand people, mostly elderly, has been granted exemption and still receive physical letters. The government will now have to pay a private company to deliver those.
- when the U.S. is not as neoliberal as you that is a very bad sign
  
  Workin' on it, though.
  (I kinda half have to wonder if the mountains of junk mail we get is an op to make us not care whether the Post Office is abolished, too.)
- Hva faen

604 comments