darkcalling @ darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml

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5 yr. ago

It's begging to be weaponized against LGBTQ people to push selective cases to push the narrative that they're all like that, just as the Nazis had regular columns on "Jewish crime" to give the impression the Jews were all criminals. Or to be used as a cover. I think in Russia there were stings for gay people done along similar lines, filmed and they'd often accuse them of being child molesters, of being after kids which was the homophobic narrative there.

It's a very sick individual-centered, glory-seeking approach to a problem which is fundamentally that capitalist cops don't invest serious resources in this, are often predators themselves, etc because they don't exist to protect the citizens but to protect capital. The solution then isn't these individualist acts of violence and attempts at mob justice but collective action, not for views, not for clicks, not to portray oneself as some sort of hero but to actually tackle the problem. It's also of course an issue of the family, of the lack of community involvement in each others lives which makes isolating kids easier. But that would require actual work, community-building, effort, it wouldn't be dramatic, it wouldn't stoke the egos of those involved, it wouldn't sell on youtube, so nothing is done.

Nuclear umbrella's are interesting to talk about but I think they're a bluff against any kind of peer power. Washington is not going to get LA, NYC, Dallas, Denver, San Diego, Boston, Washington DC and a hundred other American cities wiped off the map to avenge say Seoul getting nuked or Berlin getting nuked by the DPRK or Russia respectively.

Because nuclear war is hard to do in a limited way between nuclear powers. A nuclear power can nuke a non-nuclear power in a limited way because the non-nuclear power cannot respond with any nukes let alone a full barrage that completely destroys them. But once you hit back at a nuclear power that can wipe you off the map the doctrine states any limited strike is only an attempt to blind you and suppress your response before a full strike, you can't know what is or isn't coming in terms of more so protocol is launch a full response and at that point both parties are destroyed and those do no good to the umbrella party which previously was still intact and spared and could undertake other choices against the attacking party.

Likewise I'd have doubts if China extended a nuclear umbrella to say Iran that they'd be willing to hit the US with a nuke because the US hit Iran.

Certainly the US has a lot more to lose as does France in hitting back a big nuclear power than say China who is still a rising power, still does not have any kind of vassals, whose only interests in security are immediate neighbors like Vietnam/DPRK that they've assisted in the past militarily. But even there I think it would be a hard choice to make watching say the DPRK in flames but knowing if you hit the Americans back that Beijing and every other city in China will be in flames as well.

The US might buy such an umbrella for the DPRK and say Vietnam from China and not hit them but they wouldn't buy it for say Pakistan I think because of the dissimilarities there. Likewise the US probably buys Russia's threats to defend Belarus because well they've backed them into a corner, they know they've backed them into a corner and they have almost nothing left. The US on the other hand and France can stand to lose a lot, they have a lot of countries and/or ocean between them and enemy states like Russia/China.

I think it's easier to turn the other cheek unless you really think you can suppress the enemy's response.

I'm worried that they arrested this guy and his wife and disappeared them to a torture facility under the notion that they're spies because they chatted with colleagues about work topics while in China thus giving away valuable 'murican knowledge and advantage to the dastardly Chinese. Either that or they got lucky and skipped the country first, hope it's that one but I'd expect they'd be saying something.

Well in a way they would be but the US wants to be the one to actually field the weapons. The zionists have been saying they might resort to using their nukes and Trump and the US given the strategic situation are saying, "no, if they're used, we'll use them to assert our power and dominance and deterrence and enhance our credibility as an empire that can still fuck you up if you don't obey us". Plus the US doing it vs the zionist entity means less blow-back for the zionist entity directly. If the zionists do it, with the current climate against them through much of the world a BDS movement might build to a fever-pitch amid calls to completely isolate the outlaw state which would be a headache at least for the US requiring them to pour more resources in. But if the US does it, well the US is vital to world trade and though they're pissing people off with tariffs presently it's not practical to attempt to strangle them from a consumer point of view via buying choices and pressure campaigns given their size, reach, financial, economic, cultural, etc power.

And best of all with the US they have Trump in power who has been sold as an aberration. They can simply push him out or he'll die and then they paint his actions as too far, as being those of a dictator and that the US has changed(tm) and was like that then but has learned and is now better and a perfect angel.

Mostly the US fears its vassals nuclearizing and gaining independence from them that way. Very few strategic enemy countries to the US don't already have nuclear weapons already so the risk of proliferation is not really seen as a problem in using nukes. Vietnam still isn't likely to pursue a nuclear weapons program but even if they were they're important enough to China that the US couldn't invade without Chinese retaliation anyways. Other than that who is there? The AES alliance in Africa might have the raw uranium to make nuclear weapons possible but they lack the industry, the science, the knowledge, and the base to put them together and build ICBMs anywhere near fast enough to be able to create a credible deterrent (though they are close enough to Europe they could get by with shorter range missiles able to hit 2500miles away in say Berlin or Paris and use that to threaten the US into backing off, still even that would take a lot of work).

Importantly using nuclear weapons in defense of a vassal would the US may think re-assure other vassals like occupied Korea who have been murmuring about acquiring their own nukes, would re-assure them not to try and do that but that the US will use nukes in their favor if the time comes (hint: it won't as long as the DPRK can hit numerous cities in the US mainland in retaliation which it should be able to soon). So it would be a credibility building maneuver after Ukraine's humiliation.

I've often wondered and worried about this.

It's easy to be anti using nukes against another nuclear power that can completely destroy your country in retaliation (e.g. Russia), it's not so common when the enemy is a non-nuclear power who your simulations show would defeat you in a conventional war leaving you humiliated, weakened, and looking both for the whole world.

In such a situation it's obvious the option there if you'd lose in a conventional war is to deploy nuclear weapons. When you're the US you already have far too many of them for deterrence needs, they're decaying, after Ukraine your credibility is in question and nuking a smaller power that can't do the same back would send a message to the whole world: it doesn't matter if we can't defeat you conventionally, if our interests demand it we will obliterate you using nuclear weapons to maintain our empire and hegemony.

It won't cow China or Russia, it will cause them to build up even more capabilities and become alarmed but both already are to some degree by US saber rattling and actions in Ukraine as well as talk of actions in the SCS. But it doesn't have to, the point then is it cows smaller regional powers to not dare to challenge the US, to know there is ZERO HOPE, (hope has been killed so to speak) of resisting if the US deems there to be a strong enough imperative. That you either bend over and submit at our sanctions or you pray you're not important enough to war over because if the US goes to war and you're important enough and you start defeating them, they'll just nuke you. That's the message it sends. That you cannot win against the US unless you're a nuclear power and to nuclear powers it signals the US may be run by mad men who would even use nukes against them knowing they might be destroyed in the counter-attack.

For some countries becoming a nuclear power is possible but not for most. It's a time-consuming and expensive process to not only develop multiple, dozens of nuclear warheads but the capability to deliver them as payback intercontinentally to the US via ICBMs. It's also a process you cannot hide and once the US knows they might be tempted to nuke you to stop you from getting any further to say nothing of sanctioning and blockading you as they have done with the DPRK.

The thing is, what was stopping this from being done before was the US image, the propaganda narrative of this liberal/progressive shining city on a hill type place contrasted against "authoritarian" "dictatorships" of bad-places(tm), that it would look incredibly bad. But with Trump they've made a turn, no more of that, no more DEI, traditional values, traditional values and so on. Naked strength. And this I think is tied back to Ukraine, which was the moment they learned all that work, all that propaganda wasn't enough to get the global south on their side at which point some faction (which I believe has power now) said basically well we need to revert to the old ways of hard power and intimidation and open gangsterism then, hence allowing Musk to tear down the edifices of this old way of trying to shape the world, to bulldoze them in favor of this new policy, this new naked oppression and power.

More than that I'm afraid that Russia's constant threats of having to use their nuclear weapons against the west if they got directly involved, of outlining a policy where if a defeat is imminent they reserve the right to use them IF such a defeat was in a war of strategic importance necessary to the survival of the nation. I'm afraid their successful usage of this has only emboldened US planners to think and plan along similar lines and logic, the precedent is there so to speak for them. For the US defeat in any war against an important regional power like Iran would be a danger to the survival of their nation-empire so under this rational they could easily justify it using this kind of thinking. The west will never miss a beat to weaponize the desperation of a weaker country (Russia compared to US+NATO) to advance the conversation, the window of the acceptable in their interests.

And it makes sense from a cold calculating point of view. Most countries are not nuclear powers, those that are will not intervene and get in a direct war with the US to protect non-nuclear power countries who are not immediate neighbors and vital to security and interests (e.g. Vietnam and Korea for China, Ukraine, Georgia for Russia).

I honestly worry about Yemen, compared to Iran that at least has some strategic importance to Russia and some economic importance to China in the B&R, who would be outraged on any grounds but moral ones if Yemen was nuked by the US or the zionists? Not many major powers and it would be awfully tempting to make an example of them, perhaps even to use it to send a message to Iran before hitting them with nuclear weapons that they're serious and will use them.

Fact is also the US and the zionist entity smell blood in the water. Iran has been routed, they are on the back foot and have suffered major strategic defeats. Their influence and power is at a multi-decade low. They've lost Syria and Assad, Hezbollah is dazed and somewhat weakened with Lebanon pounded and their supply lines through Syria now cut meaning Hezbollah is weakened after being decapitated. Hamas can't be in a great position, there's a question I'd say of how much ammunition and weaponry they may still have for a prolonged war and sad as it is to say the zionist entity has basically won the battle, they've won US support to take and colonize parts of Gaza, they've destroyed large parts of it, they're trying to squeeze out the remaining Palestinians and I have doubts the Sunni Muslims in the region actually would do anything but some protests and flag burnings, nothing to topple the US regimes that rule them or cause the US to think twice in other words.

So the US wants to inflict the final blow on Iran and lock down hegemony and control of west Asia as part of an ability to cut off the belt and road, to encircle and blockade China as well as control that vital crossroads. Trump would accept their fealty, their subjugation to the US, their renunciation of ties with China, their pledge of obedience to the zionist entity, their in other words removal from the chessboard as an impediment to US control of the region.

Hmmm. Will we see the US invade to claim the canal anyways? Or perhaps just lean on Panama to invalidate the contracts and seize the ports to sell to the US? Guess we'll find out how much bite the US has left.

There's also this:

The person added the development does not mean the deal has been called off, and April 2 is not a hard deadline. The second source, who also declined to be identified for similar reasons, said talks are still very much underway.

Also apparently these are only 2 of 5 ports around the canal. It's interesting, the way the US propaganda rags phrase it China has exclusive control of both ends of the canal because of these ports.

Probably the company tries to do something to ease the pressure at home and give the US something but what that might be I don't know. I could see them trying to do something like selling some sort of stake but not outright control to Blackrock, something that can be presented as not capitulating in China but as a successful raid and seizing of value and a veto over port use by the US or something. I don't see the US backing down on this and when push comes to shove they can just use sanctions to pressure the company.

Honestly I wouldn't use technology. I'd avoid it as much as possible. I'd go to meetings in person without phone and make sure everyone else does the same. I'd arrange future meetings in person with hand signals to draw the person out of a room with electronic devices into one without before discussing the when, where, and why.

Just so many ways for it to be used against you by the empire with their hacking of telecoms and devices.

This is just the usual Russia pokes and prods the zionist entity's local ambassador and they issue a condemnation because they want good relations with Russia. Meanwhile the main entity itself, its government with the borders of its colonization is silent. This has been going on for several years now. The main entity refuses to condemn because well they like Nazis and there's no benefit to them.

The west has been brewing fascism in Ukraine longer than most people on this website have been alive. Besides that those Banderite fascist militias aren't going to all do suicide attacks on Europe or just give up and sit in their homes watching football.

They're going to be fighting and they are organized, armed, trained, and still have ties to western intelligence which would likely want to prevent a communist take-over as communists would be against NATO, against the US and align with Russia, China, etc.

Some of these Hitlerite worshippers will put on business suits, act as liberals, tone down the use of swastikas and so on but still make sure to find time to use the resources of state or their old friends to beat up and murder any leftists gathering in numbers and this will be fully, emphatically supported by the EU and the US.

Most Ukrainian Nazis have not been killed. They are blocking units who retreat first and keep the conscripts fighting. They will be alive at the end of the war.

They've indoctrinated a whole generation of kids into Nazism in their schools and before that liberalism.

Besides that China is strictly non-interventionist. Russia, their big important ally would not at all be okay with them meddling and setting up socialism there right on their border nor is China in the habit of exporting revolutionary thought. They very much would like for the newly joined regions in the east to be solid voting blocks for Putin's party of United Russia as they likely will be as Putin is the one who saved them.

The western parts of Ukraine have long had larger problems with fascist/nationalist sympathies as well as liberal aspirations. Very good chance they double down on fascism and stabbed in the back myth or just seek to become EU euro-liberal types thinking that's the formula for success. Fact is the Eastern parts are already part of Russia as far as Russia is concerned and they were the ones with the strongest pro-Soviet nostalgia I would bet and probably with the strongest communist movements.

Russia would accept Indian peacekeepers. The west would find India more palatable and Russia has a long-standing relationship. India would also not mind showing up China which it sees as a rival power though I'm not sure that's enough reason for them to agree to something like this given the target it might paint on their back among Banderites and other Nazis.

Russia truthfully would probably also accept a coalition of peacekeepers made up of multiple countries under a narrow UN mandate which seems plausible as a possibility. Likely in that case it would be a basket of Chinese, Indian, European, etc.

edit And if you think EU liberals are freaking out now about imminent war with Russia, they would find it completely unacceptable to have Chinese troops in their war-path. The US also would find Chinese presence unacceptable due to rampant sinophobia. Trump would sooner I think try and ram through Russian troops to act as peacekeepers than allow a Chinese military presence near Europe. He and the US empire leadership are kicking them out of civilian port ownership deals everywhere they can.

Prices of electronics would skyrocket (likely permanently for the west) and there would be shortages. The west would either cut off buying from fabs there immediately leading to a supply crunch or they'd blow them up also leading to a supply crunch but one impacting the mainland as well.

It's definitely a little upsetting in that I'd like such things preserved for evidence for any eventual proceedings long down the line in the far future but not surprising I suppose and part of me assumed most such evidence would indeed be destroyed. Funny how the USSR didn't destroy its records nor did GDR when they fell. Even the Nazis failed to destroy most of their documentation. The reasons being I suppose bureaucratic insulation, layers and layers of it foiling most normal attempts and completeness but they're being I assume quite thorough here by just bulldozing the whole structure down.

Some good answers here already. Purely from consequences it's necessary to hold people to account. For example even if you didn't believe in free will at all which is kind of a maximalist argument along the lines of your point (that people are influenced by outside factors, are indoctrinated, are not entirely responsible for their thinking and hate), most agree we still should hold the r*pist to account, we should still hold the murderer to account, we should still hold the arsonist who burned down an apartment with people inside to account. That really only those in the grips of total psychosis, who are suffering from a brain malfunction, who cannot at all tell reality from fantasy are held somewhat harmless for their actions beyond being restrained and treated until no longer a threat to others.

This doesn't mean it's not human and somewhat normal to have some pity, to see the humanity in the eyes of even a murdering colonist, the humanity they gave up with their choices to become monsters.

But some people commit acts as adults so far beyond what we can forgive that no apology can suffice, no amount of pleading that they've seen the error of their ways can be enough. The extremely rare 1 in a million who decides to atone by working themselves to death in service to their victims can be left well enough alone but most let's be honest don't take any actual action beyond crying and booing their own sadness and trauma and playing the victim.

I'm sorry I just don't think someone who bombs and kills little kids and posts memes laughing about it can do anything to change the weight of their actions and what any decent society must rule is the consequence for such. Those most directly responsible for the violence, for spreading the indoctrination to others, for defending the violence (propagandists) are soaked in blood that can never be washed off. There are those whose situations are more nuanced but there are many whose situation is not at all.

As an aside I look with some amount of skepticism at those who propose that in the west we could at some enormous scale what China did at a very small scale to a small number of high ranking war criminals and a former emperor. Quite frankly the indoctrination runs far deeper here in the west than in China. Liberalism, capitalism have been here for hundreds of years. It's interwoven with religious dogma, with cultural dogma that is entirely part of the liberal super-structure unlike in China whose culture still had strong communal non-individualist (if feudal/peasant) elements to it. You try and shame a Chinese person from that era with their ancestors and community responsibility and most feel it pretty deeply, you try and shame a westerner and they scoff at you because they, their parents, their parents' parents were all raised in individualism, in a contempt for the community, in a fuck the world and treat others as stepping stones mentality, in an economic mode that directly rewarded and venerated this behavior.

Frankly in that situation you're not going to have success, you're going to have relapses be as common as any success if not more-so. The easier solution, the more merciful for all involved including the millions of jailers you'd need under such a scheme is triaging. It's the Nuremberg solution for the worst of the worst, for the bottom rungs for whom chance of success is much stronger, re-education.

That kind of thinking is the kind of blind dogmatism that Marxism-Leninism rejects. We say for each nation, for each struggle, learn from the common path but adapt to the unique circumstances rather than trying to copy paste as the Maoists (MLM) do.

You need to take care of yourself and survive too and thrive as well. And if I'm being honest given your career desires to screen-write I think another even closeted Marxist screenwriter is a lot more valuable for the movement than another part-time, distracted, under-employed, and sad cadre. So go for it and don't feel bad.

Happy Birthday comrade!

Lol he's really trying to go there. I doubt they (SCOTUS) let him do it though because Biden was senile and there might be genuine argument his staffers and family were making these calls there is a chance they try and do a one-time only exemption just so Trump can be petty.

American farmers are going to get screwed.

I keep on wondering if this is all part of some grander plan rather than just haphazard ill management and ignorance. I have to assume the bourgeoisie have a plan. It's all good and fun to imagine they're all fail-sons running around like chickens with their heads cut off but I think there has to be something. It might be ridiculous but I'm going to be subject to it.

What if it's a good thing that they get screwed in eyes of the bourgeoisie? Just means more assets that can be bought up by the bourgeoisie to have more direct control and levers over things like food to manipulate prices, availability, to wield power of punishment and reward, to starve or flood an area with abundance. Any of the larger companies can either weather the storm or demand government bail-outs.

Trump and his backers may think they can starve the world as a form of soft power, that they can just inflict famine on those uppity Arabs and kill them off or cull their numbers at least. Bill Gates is obsessed with population control. The climate change hell is coming and with it lots of refugees, what if you were a bourgeoisie and therefore amoral and wanted to thin out the herd of refugees that would soon hit your borders or those of your outposts and climate fortress partners? You might try starving them, cutting medical supplies, hoping for plagues to ravage them and thin their numbers and discipline them to agree to whatever you want in exchange for resumption of aid conditioned on doing exactly what the US demands in writing.

I think it's just part of a shifting to a strategy of hard imperialism and as usual this kind of transition will hit the domestic proletariat of the imperial core hard as well but the fact is the world was slipping from their grasp.

Here's a big lesson that the imperialists and bourgeoisie may have learned and we don't realize they learned it: their propaganda apparatus wasn't all powerful, it failed in Ukraine when it comes to those in the global south.

And this may be a re-assessment that it's therefore not fit to task and must be completely restructured and how better to do so than with their move to no longer appeal as this beacon of "progressive values" to speak to minorities that broadly speaking had consensus for decades but instead to sell themselves as Russia does as a bastion of "traditional values" against "woke" which will be cast as China. China is woke, woke is China, communism, communism, communism! China wants to take your "traditional values". China wants to gay marry you, China has trans rights, etc, etc, etc. This plays pretty well in parts of the world the US is competing against Russia in such as Africa and well much of the developing world including religious Latin America. All these places full of people who can be whipped up with propaganda against gay and trans people and appealed to embrace a kind of traditional values. Hilariously this could be just imitation of Russia rather than some well-thought out restructuring as part of a grander ideological project I suppose but the effect is basically the same either way.

But they have been speaking in media for some time too as China and the US being in a "grand battle of civilizations" with the US cast by these reactionaries like Thiel and others as this "traditional values Christian civilization which created the modern world and all is good within it" against the "woke" (stand-in for communist and will be used interchangeably) China. They hope to use this I think to get people whose material interests are not with the US to align with it anyways against China, to legitimize strong-men and dictators they plan to place to disrupt and displace Chinese influence and trade.

Woke war criminal Putin

Woke

WTF. At this point it doesn't even mean anything, woke is just an angry slur divorced even from the culture war pro-bigotry resentment that spurred them to use it hatefully in the first place in a forced appropriation of progressive terminology.

I expect Trump will try and get concessions on at least one of those from Putin and I would not be surprised if Putin ultimately agrees on something in exchange for US support in doing regime change in Ukraine so Russia doesn't have to push its military force all the way to the far west of the country and try and deal with dismantling the whole thing itself. No NATO is too important to give up. No NATO peacekeepers the same (at least in any meaningful number). That leaves the options of Trump demanding and getting something like denazification not being completed though they are demilitarized in exchange Russia gets the 4 Donbass regions and Crimea recognized and the rest of Ukraine becomes a rump state of extremely angry nationalists possibly under patrol by a UN mandate peacekeeping force instead of NATO which the west will spin as them stopping Russia from taking all of Ukraine.

I admit it's possible that Russia gets all its objectives but I have the feeling Putin would rather not fight Ukraine fall of Berlin style where the west supplies them to fight to the last Ukrainian and keeps the sanctions on and in order to get sanctions relief and international recognition for the territorial reality I expect Putin will be flexible in some way to allow the west some amount of cope-laden face-saving. Ukraine is going to get fucked over hard by western capitalists of course and I expect that any deal will include respecting their grabs of resources and possibly striking discount deals on minerals and such from the new Russian regions under decade+ contracts at very favorable terms for the west or something like that.

I certainly hope not but I'm not about to take the word of people who were strung along and suckered by the west so long and who still so desperately want to rejoin them. People can talk of this "turn to the east" and indeed Russia has but also at every chance they state their desire to get in the better graces of the west and work together. China will need to be careful and lucky and we'll have to hope the western leadership remains inept.

Much as Moscow might call itself a Euro-Asian country the fact is Moscow, Leningrad, etc are all in the far west of the country, the leadership including top bourgeoisie has long sought integration with the west, they buy their mansions in the UK and the EU and docked their yachts there and went on frequent vacations there and loved going clubbing and boozing and picking up people for sex parties. The west will have a strong pull, a siren's song on Russia for many years, if not decades down the road that Russia will have to resist. There is a faction aware of this and they are in power, but they could lose power just as easily and be replaced with those who'd sell out every Russian child in an instant for the chance to live the European high life again in subservient integration.

I believe Lavrov is sincere and intelligent on this and other matters. But I also believe he's old and like Putin could die or be replaced or pushed aside.