Greenleaf

Mashallah!

Israel escalates bombardment against Lebanon in the Ghaziyeh region close to the heart of the country. Video footage captured massive explosions which were verified by Israeli military radio.

Israel's northern war front has increasingly escalated with the withdrawal of some troops from Gaza, and the massive military deployment to the border region in preparation for a looming Israeli ground invasion against Lebanon's Islamic resistance group.

Local media report Lebanon's resistance groups have already responded with counterattacks on the occupied Al-Samaqa region. Since October 7, fighting in the border region has intensified in response to Israel's war of annihilation against Gaza.

Recent polls by the Israeli newspaper Maariv show that 71% of all Israelis are in favor of an all-out war against Lebanon.

From theredstream on Telegram. Israel was not prepared to fight Hezbollah all-out before Oct 7th. If they think they can take on Hezbollah after the Resistance has dealt them so much damage, that is insane. It would be a fitting end to the Zionist entity if it’s the hubris of their fascistic genocidal population that ultimately does them in.

TL;DR

Cuba one million percent doesn’t want them there, it’s just they can’t do anything about it. Taking it back militarily would definitely trigger war / an invasion. It was created when Cuba was conquered and colonized by the USA.

It’s 2024 and no one in America even questions the existence of an actual colonial outpost. The UK and Portugal suck but at least they gave back Hong Kong / Macau.

Hold on, the most expensive games right now are around $70? Far be it from me defend game studios, but I distinctly remember spending like $50-$60 on N64 carts like Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time back in the late 90s. That’s almost like, price deflation since then.

I’m a big fan of Strange New Worlds and will defend it as the best Trek since DS9… and even for me, the episode they did in season 2 that was basically Black Hawk Down is maybe my least favorite trek episode ever. Even worse than Sub Rosa. Doing literally what you said, making starfleet a military force.

100 years from now, historians will talk about how the Russia/Ukraine war as well as Ansar Allah’s actions in the Red Sea were a prelude to a totally new way of war in the same way the Russo-Japanese war was a prelude to the style of war in WW1 (trench warfare).

Modern navies are done, this is the age of the cheap drones and missles.

Another vote for "things will just get shittier over time", not total collapse at any point, except for one possible scenario (I will describe below). If we use the Roman Empire as template, they never really "collapsed" all at once. Britain experienced "collapse" when the legions left in the 4th century, but the Roman area around Constantinople did "collapse" until over 1,000 years later. It's common among Roman historians to not even talk about "collapse" much per se, and focus more on evolution and change. Heck, some parts of the empire actually saw conditions improve after Roman control ended (in North Africa, they could stop sending all their grain to Rome every year, for example).

Now, there is one scenario I could see that could cause a total rapid collapse: if the US could no longer extract value (i.e. exploit) from the global south. I'm on a Capital vol. 2 and MMT kick right now. Basically, the key insight IMO from the first 17 chapters is that it's only in the sphere of production that value is created. It can be the production of goods or services, but that is the only place where value is created (well, Marx gives some very narrow examples of value being created in transportation of good and sometimes in storage, but those are extensions of production, really). This is where the fact that Americans don't make anything really comes back to bite them in the ass. Obviously we don't make things here but what most people don't realize is even American companies like Apple and Nike don't actually "create" value. The subcontractors they use in place like China and Bangladesh is where the value is created. It's just that Apple and Nike appropriate the value from those places and distribute it here among their marketers, lawyers, etc. The entire non-financial sector of the US economy resembles a merchant capitalist (where no value is created, it's just taken out of productive capital which is all overseas) economy than anything else.

So what does this mean? If Americans aren't creating value within the country, and it's just that value is taken from other parts of the world and distributed here... if you cut that off then all of the sudden the US is a country that isn't creating much value and isn't even capable of that outside of a Stalin-esque centrally planned industrialization program. The US depends on circulating capital taken from the global south domestically, not producing it domestically. So if that's not circulating, and Americans have no real capacity to create value domestically... then material conditions probably degrade on a scale that's hard to even wrap your head around. THAT would be a hard and fast collapse.

Admittedly, the catalyst for that (the rest of the world preventing the US from exploiting production in the rest of the world) is pretty far-fetched, so at this point it's just academic and why I saw that I really only see a slow motion degradation happening.

One of the major factors that pulled me away from this crap and pushed me left was just taking a big step back and thinking about what this kind of world would really be like. Sure, everyone’s “rights” were protected and everything is all so very internally consistent… but if life sucks what’s point.

This is the person who is telling you you’re just not smart enough to understand the economy is doing great, actually.

Your posts about MMT have convinced me to look into for myself. L. Randall Wray has a new edition of Modern Money Theory coming out in April, that book seems to highly regarding so I’m going to check that one out.

I have also read Super Imperialism and want to echo how important it is for leftists to read. However, I would also caution folks who don’t have a solid econ background (and to be honest, even if you do) to allow yourself a lot of time to research stuff on your own as you are reading through it. Otherwise you might find yourself extraordinarily frustrated. Because Hudson really throws you into the deep end and expects you already understand a lot about international economics - which is a notoriously difficult topic. I mean, I recall Hudson calling out Paul Krugman for getting something wrong in an article he wrote (talking about balance of payments only in terms of trade and not govt flows). And while Krugman is wrong about a lot, it’s not like he’s uneducated when it comes to econ. This is complicated stuff but then again no investigation no right to speak.

But for an example, Hudson talks about the pressure the Vietnam war put on the system. But as I’m reading it, I’m confused because in my mind, the war spending is being done domestically by paying American soldiers and weapons manufacturers in the US. Hudson doesn’t explain how and why there was so much spending done in Vietnam/outside of the US, I had to research that myself. A lot of examples like that. Really, I wish Hudson made Super Imperialism to be twice as long and break it up into multiple volumes, and use the extra pages to really explain the details.