Having seen some Israeli military explicitly say as much I'm starting to worry this is building up to a total genocide of the Gazan population. Not a "push them into Sinai" scenario, but one where the entire population of the strip is kettled together against the sea in a small area and the IOF just wipes them out completely with airstrikes and artillery. That idea is definitely going around in the IOF. If European countries are getting wind of this talk and afraid it might actually happen, they've got to start backing off their support for Israel. Or maybe the prospect of them repeating in Raffa what they did in Gaza City is a little too much for them to stomach. IDK
Cunigulus
joined 3 years ago
This is What (bourgeois) Democracy Looks Like!
Why are they letting him run again? What does the inside of the White House look like that no one can convince him it's not a good idea? Is Biden some kind of covert hard-ass who has his eunuch advisors scurrying around to avoid his wrath? Is someone else like Blinken really pulling the strings, forcing Biden to run knowing there's no way he'd maintain his position if another Democrat had the authority to replace him? Just a clique of mid-wits who don't like their odds should they be forced to take another spin 'round the revolving door?
Sometimes it's less about what the right move is and more about what the move is that keeps the situation dire enough that no one has time to oust you for your incompetence.
I saw someone suggesting this was revenge for the border stuff, but that didn't seem plausible to me. I've got to think there are better ways to pressure Abbot than pointing a gun at the head of the fossil fuel industry.
US hegemony is definitely collapsing. The financial stuff is fake, what matters is global industrial systems, and the US and its closest allies are not catching up. They can pull all the levers of their diplomatic-military-financial empire to try to isolate China and protect their markets, but the best it can do is force a war they can't win. China will just build a conventional military force three times the size of the US alongside literally billions of drones and crush us in 3-4 years, with a huge risk it goes nuclear. The alternative is we just go along with a relatively gradual decline punctuated by crises, and give up the empire with a whimper. At some point in 3-10 years the decline will be undeniable and reshape domestic politics in the US profoundly.
The political angle might have been decisive in winning support for neoliberal development politics in the West, but it's not the only factor at play here. The whole exchange-rate manipulation-financialization scheme is poison to an industrial economy. Building any kind of domestic industry is like marching against a river. The Asians just do everything cheaper, bigger, and now most of the time better. They're doing it all in a concentrated region connected by the newest and best infrastructure in the world. The body of knowledge and experience in so many of these fields is dwindling or non-existant in the US today. We're definitely rich enough to solve these problems of weapons production, but the MIC is mind-fuckingly corrupt and inefficient and completely insulated from military and congressional scrutiny. Any money you throw at the problem will get stolen with little to show for it. We would need a coup for the problem to get fixed and there would be a coup if anyone seriously tried.
I had to make the point to some chud on 
that Iran's foreign policy would be pretty much the same if it were a "moderately-liberal democracy". They probably never saw it because of shadow-bans.
German libs seem to be the only ones in the West truly enjoying supporting Israel's genocide. They're totally convinced that supporting Israeli murder of Palestinians makes them clever/moral good boys who are just better than everyone else. Everyone else is sheepish about it or just doesn't want to talk about it, but the Germans watch their media blatantly propagandizing them to support this crime against humanity and eat it up like Uncle Sam dripped some lard over their kibble this morning. It really encapsulates everything that is sick and wrong in the German political consciousness. They've really got a lot going for them as a society, as loathe as many of us here are to admit it, but it makes them so damned arrogant and blind to their ideological domination.
The long rule of Chavismo has terminally weakened the power base of the right in Venezuela. Their social base was already too small to effectively maintain power, and it has only shrunk in recent years with the mass emigration of any Venezuelans with a bit of money. You're far more likely to see the current ruling party take a more authoritarian turn while intensifying its neoliberal tendencies than you are to see the old-school reactionaries come to power.
Never played Half-Life Uplink. Pretty good bonus content.
They were edgy libertines who got sucked into the removed of 90's Moscow. They loved Limonov's writing and at the time the Nazbols just seemed edgy and absurdist. There were hints of them getting close to some powerful players in Russian politics too, who may have used them for political attacks on rivals. Ames even did a short stint with Russia Today after the eXile was shut down. I read them a lot in that period when I was an edgy libertarian teen and there was nothing ideologically leftist about them - there really still isn't, except that they loathe the lies of empire and are deeply cynical about capitalism. It's really more of a punk/journalistic ethos than anything ideological. Nazis seem like a big deal today, but ten or fifteen years ago they were a bad joke - I definitely don't think the eXile people are closet right-wing extremists or anything (except for whatever happened with Taibbi). I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it came out that they were working with the Russian government as some kind of propaganda operation, maybe at arms length. They jumped on Patreon pretty early, which would be an easy way to launder support. On the other hand they've had a habit over the years of getting in public tiffs with well-connected professional journalists and the worst that's come out of it was them attacking Ames over his RT work and stories in the eXiled about him sleeping with Russian teenagers. Maybe they just are what they appear to be.