The off ramp is dead simple: leave the region.

But since they are dead set against doing that of their own volition, they act like it’s hypersonic missile science figuring out how to end the conflict.

It reminds me of when the Yankee capitalist media acts like economics is super hard and confusing when people want healthcare, and then the imperialists just press the big red Funding button when the Pentagon wants more money for war. (I know it’s a little more complicated than that, but the general idea of how priorities work.)

If you mean the emojis, probably meant to represent “um, actually” or “well, actually” - the thing where one person corrects another in a condescending or egotistical way, usually associated with people making a whole identity out of being the “smartest person in the room”.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with correcting something that is incorrect. But if you combine it with how smarmy and arrogant western chauvinists can get about their position in the world, it can get annoying.

Is Trump weighing his options for using up the rest of the US weapons stockpile attacking China?

Yeah, I’ve read Carl Marks, he was the guy who said we need to leave our mark in the world, thus the name.

That’s already been true for millennia. Every human life ends at some point.

I get what you actually mean though. But I feel compelled to put it in perspective, in spite of part of me wanting to doom myself, because dooming about climate change won’t help us with the energy to fight for a different outcome than mass extinction. We have to believe there can be a way through.

It’s a goofy premise to begin with cause there are plenty of inventions that can be lived without. You can, for example, go live on a farm with minimal use of tech and it will mainly only become a problem when you need modern medicine. Now if you have options in that way and so are cosplaying at being pre-tech, that’s more like tourism than it is actually living in the era before stuff was made or living in a region where access to the stuff is minimal.

Furthermore, gen AI (cause that’s usually what people mean when they are anti) is not yet integrated into society as essential, so naturally it will be relatively easy for people to say “yeah I can live without it.” If you asked the same about cars when cars are still a rare thing, you’d probably get a lot who say the same. And considering the environmental consequences of tons of people having individual gas guzzling cars, you could probably argue from an ecosystem-protecting standpoint that they never should have proliferated. But they did and by this point, they are, for many, integrated as essential for getting around (they shouldn’t have to be when high speed trains are an option to build, but capitalism keeps holding society back).

So sometimes it’s less about the technology itself and more about how society has developed around the technology - or in this case, has not really done yet beyond superficial application, making the concept of giving it up seem trivial. This doesn’t on its own say to what extent the given tech is helpful or harmful, it just means it hasn’t been integrated much. People are more willing to defend something they take for granted as normal, especially if they grew up with it.

Don’t tell me the white empire is gonna start another front. 🫣

Looks like you were right when you said this: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12334797/8514359

The statement does read very much to me like Hamas is essentially saying, Palestinian statehood and sovereignty is the only path to willing disarmament of the Palestinian resistance factions. Like, they’re only going to agree to it if it means there’s a recognized/respected Palestinian state that is independently (from any occupier) handling militarized matters.

And this part:

The occupation’s commitment to halting the killing and ending its attacks is the fundamental prerequisite and the first step in proceeding with the implementation

It reminds me of Iran’s negotiations with the US a bit. In that, it communicates their willingness to come to the table and negotiate, but in practice, it is unlikely to go that way because of how rabid the empire and its regional attack dog is.

I’m sure that’s part of it. Whether it’s that people don’t care or that the systems of power are so obscured that it’s harder than it looks for people to resist it within the imperial core; harder than it looks meaning, like, people in the imperial core are fed the illusion of having state-sanctioned people power (“democracy”) but in actuality, are kept far away from policy making. Not to say it’s hopeless, but it’s multi-layered, I guess. For some, there is the step of getting them to realize that the power they are told they legally have is largely fake and then there is the step of organizing them toward something different, while knowing the state will be very mad if you resist imperialism even slightly.

Kinda how I feel having empathy and being aware of ongoing genocide. It makes it a lot easier to understand why some people end up in adventurism, even if I don’t agree with it in principle as a means of effecting change.

I wonder how true this is or if they’re blowing hot air. It’s hard to imagine Hamas agreeing to disarmament, only to hand over power to some technocrats who work with occupier military forces.

I agree it’s desperation on the part of Ukrainian leadership, though I’m not sure that it would instigate anything resembling a world war (even if that may be what the Ukrainian Nazis are hoping for). Iran is already fighting / has fought off the US and israel, and various empire states have helped with the empire side of things, even if somewhat indirectly. Given the restraint Iran has shown consistently so far, the likelihood is that it would do a tit for tat with Ukraine and then stop, and like… what would the EU do for example? Condemn Iran when it already tends to militarily support the US against it? All I see it accomplishing is Ukraine accelerating its fall by pissing off Iran and getting hit proportionally harder, relative to the remaining strength it has.

Hmm. Is there a pattern here with countries getting bolder after seeing the US getting debased by Iran? This and the Malaysia statement have got me thinking.

But I was not keeping close track in the past, so maybe there is already precedent for this kind of reaction to US imperialism from countries like them. Not really sure.

Beijing is increasingly trying to fill a global leadership vacuum left by the US withdrawal from international organisations through initiatives ranging from the Belt and Road infrastructure programme to others covering security, governance and development.

While many of these initiatives begin with vague-sounding names and few detailed objectives, analysts say

Do the analysts’ titles start with “CIA”?

If China can take the lead on global AI adoption and standard setting, it will control one of the most groundbreaking technologies since the internet, giving it an opportunity to impose its values over those of the US-led liberal world order.

*US-led imperial world order.

**an opportunity to impose its values that it won’t use in the same imperialist manner as the US does because it’s not imperialist

To build foreign dependence on Chinese AI, China also launched the China-ASEAN Countries Artificial Intelligence (AI) Application Cooperation Center last year.

Psychological projection: “This is why we’d do it, [to make others dependent on us], so China must be doing that too.”

While China is touting open source, there is no guarantee that its companies will continue to make their models accessible if they come to dominate the technological frontier, analysts say.

“They’re just waiting to do the capitalism monopoly thing! They’re exactly like us! I mean, not like us. Because they’re commies. They’re the opposite of us! Except the same! Ugh, propaganda is hard.”

Still, for developing countries, China’s offer to help them navigate this complex new world would be compelling, Xu said.

“Because the developing countries will be like: ‘Well, we don’t even have a 10th of the resources that China has. How are we going to keep up with this?’” Xu said. “China’s answer is: come to our country. We will educate you with our open-source software and this is how we’re going to do it.”

Scary. Going to another country and learning. What is China gonna do next, offer free hugs?!?

Yeah, like if it came down to military confrontation, the US might have trouble occupying the country, but they could still do major damage. They eventually lost, in a sense, in Vietnam, but not before doing horrible damage to the people there, some of which is persisting damage from chemical weapons. Granted, the empire is not as powerful today as it was in Vietnam, relative to other militaries in the world. But it’s also more abstracted today, insofar as being able to do more with less boots on the ground, and has barbaric reasons to test that kind of technology on a target to refine AI and such.

Whether some of it was bluff, or fully real, the Maduro operation put Venezuelan leadership in a position where they were facing a threat of the leadership being annihilated vs. doing some dealing. I can’t remember the details offhand, but I remember an article about this, that IIRC the story is the other leaders were facing immediate threat of something happening to them too. Like the US basically had a gun to their head.

And considering what they managed to do in Iran, in spite of how capable Iran’s military is, I would not put it past them being able to do some precision assassination still, in a country that is positioned as much weaker militarily than Iran is. That would surely create blowback like it did in Iran, but Venezuela would have a much harder time turning that blowback into a military response that is capable of making the US hurt in return.

Either way, I’m not the one running a country with a gun to my head having to make that call and I have consciously tried to change my own mindset to sort of back off on matters like these when it comes to passing judgment on the peoples contending with them. In my case, there’s a layer to it where, being a “white” Yankee, I see it as part of unlearning the western superiority view; do I have experience running a country under the shadow of imperialism? No. Have I led to success, or taken over leadership on after it’s establishment, a people’s revolution? No. Have I even lived under the shadow of imperialism from the side of the most marginalized? No.

So I’d much rather be saying “I don’t know enough to pass judgment” than condemning some figure I know little about and never even bothered to learn the name of (Rodriguez) before the kidnapping of Maduro happened. I’m not gonna hold back to the point of making it a personality, where I don’t speak up on things I am informed on, but “no investigation, no right to speak” has something to it, I think. And investigation is more than reading a few headlines.

I saw a bunch of people on telegram calling Delcy a puppet for this and I just couldn’t wrap my head around what these people were on.

Maybe I’m projecting from instincts I have at times, not totally sure, but it seems to me that it goes back to the “scramble to condemn” that lefty types can get caught up in. Like if you don’t quickly condemn everybody who needs condemning, your True Lefty credentials may be in question and if you do, it helps prove how truly lefty you are. I suspect that’s some of the psychology of it. Because like, suppose that Delcy actually was a puppet, what would be the point of a bunch of people online jumping to that as fast as possible? Are they going to mobilize Venezuelans by posting really hard? That’s like the kinda shit color revolutions do, not organic revolutionary forces. So if there isn’t an immediate material benefit (for the cause of liberation) that justifies jumping to conclusions and being fast to condemn, what benefit remains? One can be personal benefit of seeming more with it, more truly lefty, someone who calls out the frauds.

In that sense, what it makes me think of is the view of Lenin that can overly focus on something like: “lol, Lenin really dunked on those frauds.” Like yeah, he criticized tendencies he thought were wrong, but he was also an organizer and doing it from the orientation of criticizing local tendencies who might overcome MLs in jockeying for control of an alternative to the status quo. For him, it was an immediate existential problem of gaining or losing control over the system as its contradictions became unsustainable.

Whereas it is questionable what’s being gained when people jump to “Venezuela compromised” or whatever. Geopolitics is rife with countries that deserve our support doing questionable things sometimes because of the horrifically abusive and repressive conditions that imperialism created–and which imperialism is currently trying to reassert even as it declines in fits and starts.

Welcome back!

To be clear, still has to pass in the senate:

The House’s approval of H.R. 8800 illustrates the increasingly partisan politics surrounding the annual defense authorization bill. Although five Democrats joined nearly all Republicans in supporting the legislation, and one Republican voted against it, the measure advanced with overwhelmingly Republican support and now heads to the Senate for consideration.

But I would not be surprised if it passes there too.

One country, two systems, but it’s colonizers sharing tips on how to mass murder civilians.

Meanwhile China rises in global opinion by doing such insidious things as helping other countries out with win-win exchanges, living in peace with their neighbors, and being a powerhouse of research and manufacturing toward pro-social ends.