Greenleaf

The Al-Jazeera documentary (on YouTube, presumably on the AJ website too) The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza is very good and is a good video to show libs who might be sympathetic but have largely tuned out to what’s happening. CW for the fact that you see the Gazans’ suffering up close.

Free market good, foreign investment good , bamboo diplomacy good has been drilled a little to deep in most political and public life even if it started as pragmatic and controled choices by the communist party

I fully understand the need to develop the productive forces after the revolution in a country that has not experienced a fully developed capitalist phase. And in a world dominated by capitalists, it makes sense to play ball with them until those productive forces are sufficiently developed. BUT… this is precisely the thing that worries me about it. You are essentially inviting the capitalist disease into the party, and you just have to sort of trust that party won’t succumb to the disease. And as successful as this approach has been in China and Vietnam, maintaining ideological purity in the party seems incredibly difficult.

What’s the Arabic equivalent of “God bless Hezbollah” or some other expression of sincere support?

Now we need only state that we can not only circumvent these sanctions, but directly violate them

Russia (and China for that matter) should absolutely violate the UN sanctions on the DPRK. The US has shown - both very recently and across the decades - that they will pursue their own national interest regardless of what the UN or the Security Council dictates. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. When the entire world votes to lift the blockade on Cuba or for a ceasefire in Gaza, and the US makes it clear they don’t give a rip. I know that’s not the same as going against a Security Council resolution but the point remains that the US would never let some vote in the Security Council that they signed ages ago to actually stop them exerting imperial power.

Yeah I should have mentioned, anything that’s “no GM” is actually preferred, I think for our group.

I’m kinda open on setting. I know that does help much but this group plays all sorts of board games so we’re comfortable in lots of different settings.

Well, they’re not the shittiest podcasts I guess…

Age of Napoleon guy is at least left-adjacent, he had Christman on for a whole episode just to talk about The Eighteenth Brumaire.

And full disclosure, I have a massive soft spot for Dan Carlin, so I may not be objective in talking about him. His podcasts were the thing that pulled me out of whatever my politics were a decade ago (he’s big into “money has corrupted the political system” thinking). He isn’t just a lib. He has a big anti-imperialist streak (he was talking about how the US shouldn’t meddle in Ukraine in 2014; and the American Peril ep is basically him saying the Spanish American War was the birth of American Imperialism) and tbh he seems like a good dude whose heart is in the right place.

Buuuuut I had to stop listening to his history podcast years ago, because frankly it just isn’t very good. I can see why Musk likes it. He tries to be about more than just “war” but somehow war is all he ever talks about w/r/t history and is almost exclusively focused on “the west”. It’s kind of a lib cliche but Carlin really is what people who don’t actually know history think a historian sounds like. Dan pays lip service to being against Great Man Theory but his scope of history is so anti-materialist it’s hard to listen to. He connect some dots correctly but come to some really weird conclusions.

But idk doubtful that Musk actually listens to any of this anyway.

Time for some real Battleship Potemkin hours…

I’m starting to think it’s such an obviously bad idea, is there something Israel knows that we don’t? Like, they plan on dropping a nuke on Beirut or something? Or that Biden has guaranteed 100,000 US troops and 2 carrier groups? Is there anything strategically we might be missing here?

Back when inbred nobles decided when to go war, I can see massive blunders like this. But presumably there are professional military folks on the IOF who can understand the costs and risks and know it’s suicidal go after Hezbollah.

Was listening to Warren Mosler talk about this on Varn Vlog. Interesting stuff. It’s stimulus, but incredibly unequal stimulus as it’s not like the working class is the one holding all the T-bills.

Yes. Nuclear scientists have estimated that if the US and Russia were to set off just 5% of their arsenals then that’s about enough to effectively end most life on earth.

America is so bought off by the corporate oligarchy that the Ralph Lauren logo is the same size if not larger than the US flag patch.

European capital is too deeply entwined with the fate of American economic imperialism to allow deviation from being aligned with them.

Just another characteristic of fascism - borrow a populist, working class aesthetic but serve the interests of capital.