possessed by the spirit of Rybar again? I'll go get the exorcist, hang in there friend
Simplicius writing stuff like "...I have some really, really bad fucking news guys. 100 Russian soldiers have been lost over the last 3 months in the Ugledar direction." (that isn't the real number probably, just an example) is always so funny to me when comparing it to the daily "Alright, another 1500 Ukrainian casualties today..." updates
these guys will be cursing the utter and complete incompetence of their military and wondering how their generals can even put on their clothes in the morning without help all the way into Kiev while driving through the scrapyard of tens of thousands of NATO vehicles and the graveyard of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainain troops
A wave hit it. Chance in a million. It's now being towed outside the environment.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi discussed Red Sea tensions with Yemeni Foreign Minister Shayea Mohsen Al-Zindani in Beijing on Tuesday, saying they're a spillover effect of the ongoing Gaza conflict and China is willing to play a constructive role in solving the crisis.
Al-Zindani is in Beijing to attend the 10th Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum which will be held on Thursday. Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said the current priority is to stop the conflict in Gaza as soon as possible to avoid a greater humanitarian disaster.
He urged the international community to make greater efforts to implement the "two-state solution," and called on the relevant parties to stop harassing civilian ships and maintain the safety of waterways in the Red Sea. Wang added that China is willing to continue playing a constructive role in this regard. He also stated China hopes that all parties concerned can stick to the political settlement and actively respond to the mediation efforts of the United Nations and regional countries.
Al-Zindani expressed appreciation for China's support for Yemen's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and China's long-term assistance to Yemen's economic and social development without attaching any political conditions. He added that Yemen looks forward to China playing a greater role in promoting the de-escalation of the situation in the Red Sea as well as the reconciliation and reconstruction of Yemen. Yemen believes that the 10th meeting will push China-Arab cooperation to a new level, said Al-Zindani.
In this context, it just sounds like they're doing the standard Chinese thing of "uh well I mean we want international rules to be obeyed, missiles firing at ships isn't ideal, so if eventually everybody could come to an agreement once the Gaza issue has been settled, that would be cool and nice" which makes a lot of sense if their entire multipolar vision is a genuine application of the UN Charter. it's hard to be in support of that and then turn around and say "oh yeah, and firing at cargo ships going through straits is cool and based" especially given China's geographical position.
it's not "YEMEN, WE ARE TIRED OF THIS. STOP THE BLOCKADE NOW OR ELSE." The Yemeni FM sounds pretty okay with it based on what they said in the article.
Marxist theories of imperialism — both the classic ones advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin and the modern ones, such as David Harvey’s theory of the “new imperialism” — link aggressive foreign policy to the contradictions of capital accumulation. In this view, interimperialist rivalries have a structural cause that is irreducible to messianic imperialist ideologies or the search for security that creates insecurities for other states, as in the realist accounts of the “security dilemma.” According to the Marxist interpretation, domestic industrial overcapacity and the overaccumulation of capital compel the national bourgeoisie to seek external expansion. In this endeavor, capital enlists the help of the state to protect its overseas investments, markets, and trade routes. The clash between nation-based capitals over markets and profitable outlets for investment leads to interimperialist rivalries. Some argue that such conflicts are obsolete due to the emergence of the transnational capitalist class (TCC), with the nascent “transnational state” to serve its interests. However, the TCC thesis looks increasingly problematic from an empirical standpoint. Research shows that global capitalist networks remain highly regionalized and uneven, with limited interlocking between the Global North and other countries, including China. The concept of the “transnational state” seems even more far-fetched, with rising militarization, protectionism, trade wars, and conflicting geopolitical visions such as the US “Pivot to Asia” versus the Chinese “Belt and Road Initiative.”
One might respond that the US-China rivalry could be driven by national security elites and their competing visions of the “national interest,” rather than by capitalist elites who would have otherwise preferred the globalized accumulation regime without the national divisions. In other words, due to the relative autonomy of the state from capitalist interests, interimperialist rivalries may have noneconomic causes. While this argument cannot be dismissed in principle (and, as we shall see, it plays a central role in explaining the US-Russian confrontation), it is hardly applicable to the US-China rivalry. Based on the historical record and Chinese strategic thinking, we might well deduce that China in particular is a reluctant imperialist nation, with a certain tradition of avoiding confrontation. Nevertheless, its relentless search for markets and investment opportunities abroad, driven by domestic overcapacity and capital overaccumulation, almost mechanically leads it to expand its global military presence as well, creating both the economic and the security tensions with the United States. Facing the threat of expanding Chinese capital (which is tightly interwoven with the state), factions of the US capitalist class have embraced a more confrontational stance toward China despite the economic interdependence between the two countries and the importance of the vast Chinese market for American businesses. The stage is set for the inter-imperialist rivalry that will define the twenty-first century.
This is, basically, where the "Soviet Union = imperialist" model gets you. I don't even disagree with a lot of the analysis on a theoretical basis, I just think that doing all this and then immediately, almost instinctively lumping China in as just another imperialist because they like, have markets and sell stuff to developing countries, leads to incorrect predictions and conclusions from otherwise good theory.
From Chapter 2 of Desai's Geopolitical Economy:
[UCD = uneven and combined development, a theory which held sway during the time of the Bolsheviks]
Postwar developments made UCD and the classical theories of imperialism more, not less, relevant. If capitalist competition did not lead to further world wars, this was substantially because the USSR became part of UCD’s further unfolding. As a revolutionary state founded on UCD’s understanding of the capitalist world order, it took opposition to imperialism beyond national (capitalist) opposition to imperialism to encompass working-class opposition as well. As such it represented the strongest form of combined development: rather than trying to hasten capitalist development it sought to skip capitalism entirely. That communist China did so too, and survived to rank as the strongest of the so-called BRIC contender countries in the early twenty-first century, is also telling.
The significance of Soviet combined development was not confined to its borders. After its decisive role in the defeat of fascism in the Second World War, the USSR ensured decolonization and supported combined development in newly independent countries, strengthening resistance to imperial pressure among many ex-colonies. The USSR’s existence also ensured that combined development, as well as ‘full employment’ and welfarist policies, had to be tolerated in recovering economies. As Chapter 7 will show, by the time the USSR disintegrated, sufficient combined development had taken place among recovering and developing countries to make the US ‘victory’ in the cold war pyrrhic.
Not saying that current-day China and the USSR are one-to-one matches; China seems less willing to supply weaponry to revolutionary movements (or if they are, it's done so secretly that not even the US has found a way to accuse them of doing it much). But they play a remarkably similar role given the different historical conditions that we're in, 35 years on from the collapse of the USSR and like 75 years on from the time of Stalin.
sometimes I love just refreshing the main page and looking at the taglines, especially the ones from people with Hexbear Derangement Syndrome
"Please note that though hexbear.net claims to be “leftist,” their users’ primary focus is spreading right wing propaganda via strawman and red herring tactics, usually in swarms."
"At this point Hexbear is essentially co-opted by astroturfing terrorists"
"Hexbear really are GOP advocates, I personally think they’re a small community that has been prodded along and mentored by Pro-CCP foreign agents, bots, and bad faith actors to create political divide and discord while also increasing support of the CCP and their immediate allies, but that’s all just armchair theorizing at this point."
there's just something about liberal psychoanalysis that never fails to make me smile
you'd think we were all posting shitty impact font memes at each other with titles like "THIS IS SO TRUE!!" like the triple-divorced dads who haven't talked to their kids in five years do on pro-Trump sites but we're literally just like, in favour of Gazan children not being bombed and an end to unnecessary wars killing hundreds of thousands of people for no benefit whatsoever like in Ukraine
us: "I think the guy putting trade restrictions on Chinese green technology and not doing anything to constrain American fossil fuel industries might not actually care very much about the environment"
libs: "aha, so, my body language analysis of the Hexbear menace has revealed that they are an LLM psyop invented by a joint campaign by the GOP, Russia, China, and North Korea to spread propaganda on the lemmyverse"
#Tradle #814 2/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://oec.world/en/games/tradle
reasoning
very small economy, lots of primitive accumulation and no marine exports (not an island), so probably Africa. I think West African small countries are more agricultural usually so I went with Burundi, in central Africa. the clue confused me for a little bit because for whatever reason, I keep thinking that the Central African Republic is doing better than it actually is, and it's pretty medium-sized for an African country so I thought it'd reach at least a billion dollars in total exports. but no, some places are just that goddamn exploited.
Politico: Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden
Famed Russo-Chinese state propagandist, Politico, is also joining the chorus of panic over Biden and whether there's actually any reason to vote for him.
Some choice quotes:
A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.
“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely. But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said. “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”
Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.
While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [...] The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”
...
But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.
“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent.
And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.
“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”
“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.” He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.
Judging from the socdems/social fascists I sometimes watch (e.g. at r/curatedtumblr), the anxiety is also heightening in the non-wonk population, too. Increasingly frequent shit like how you're transphobic if you don't vote for Biden, etc. Entirely plausible that if Biden can't get the cost of living down in the next five months, it is officially Joever. And just bleating "the economy is actually great, the best it's ever been actually" won't change that. You can't gaslight somebody into thinking that they haven't spent noticeably more money on bills lately no matter how many fancy indices you throw at them.
I do think an issue with the "dollar is everything, dollar is life, dollar is god" narrative is that it can lead you down an ideological path in which quite literally everything that occurs, ever, is a sign of the US's growing strength.
country gains independence? great, now they're gonna get shafted by the IMF and keep dollar hegemony going.
country loses independence? great, now they're gonna get exploited by western corporations directly and keep dollar hegemony going
nothing happens to a country? great, now the debt crisis they're probably in is going to continue and keep dollar hegemony going.
50 earthquakes strike a country simultaneously? great, now foreign construction companies are going to come in and exploit them and keep dollar hegemony going.
massive development in a country in a short period of time? great, now the fruits of their labour will generate dollars and keep dollar hegemony going.
sell treasury bonds? actually this keeps dollar hegemony going
buy treasury bonds? you better believe this keeps dollar hegemony going
see a child walking down the street? that kid is going off to buy candy with - you guessed it - dollars. bet you feel real stupid now.
stubbed my toe on the desk? that desk cost dollars, and if I hurt myself badly enough, I'll need to spend dollars to get better! I am keeping dollar hegemony going! fuck!
so you're basically stuck. it's feels very non-dynamic, very capitalist-realist in a sense. this doesn't make it wrong or bad necessarily, but I do think analyzing everything through that lens can be unhelpful because it means you're less likely to see genuine anti-imperialist developments as anti-imperialist. it's like being told that a rocket is under construction to go to space, so you watch all the parts being gradually constructed, but you notice that all of these parts are being made on the surface of the earth, so by simply assuming a trend, you assume that the sum total of the parts will also stay on the earth and never escape it.
if currency hegemons were inescapable then we'd still be living under the gold standard or the British Pound. there's nothing really that unique about American hegemony tbh. in fact, I'd argue (and so does Desai, Hudson's cohost at GPE) that American hegemony is a mostly failed imitation of the OG British hegemony which was much stronger, and American power has basically been a series of fragile illusions mixed with propped-up dictators who were told to keep the illusion going for as long as possible
the best part of this gaza pier debacle is that we'll eventually find out that it only really cost like $10 million to construct (or whatever a reasonable price is, I'm not a pier expert) and the rest of the hundreds of millions of dollars were due to a contractor and subcontractor and subsubcontractor and so on 15 times down the chain grifting it at every single stage
I get that the mere dollar injection is a big part as to why these massive cost overruns are tolerated as our resident dedollarization expert+doomer constantly explains, but is it still entertaining to watch the projects of American empire fall apart due to sheer ineptitude despite knowing that? yes. I mean they could have just built a functioning pier worth 428 gazillion dollars and achieved the same result but I guess the notion of gaining profit by making and selling things specifically to be destroyed so that you can keep making them and selling them, such as with Western military equipment in Ukraine, is just that in-built at this point
Interesting things happening in the India elections. They'll soon be in the seventh phase of voting and on June 4th-5th, we'll probably have a pretty good idea of who's won.
The ruling BJP's slogan is essentially that - screw just a majority, we're gonna get 400 seats or more out of the 543 seats in government for our ruling coalition (the NDA). In the last election, the BJP got 303 seats, and the NDA as a whole got like ~350, so that's quite a few seats to climb to reach that goal. But even if don't reach the goal, they still have a majority.
Right now, major pollsters are estimating between 335 and 393 seats just for the BJP. Meanwhile, there's people in the opposition who are estimating that not only will the BJP not get to 400 seats, but that they'll actually fail to get even a majority. The reason why is some polling data, which doesn't show exact voter sentiment for the parties but instead on what issues voters care about.
- 40% of those surveyed favour the BJP but satisfaction with the government is lower than in 2019, due to your regular suite of economic issues (inflation, poverty, unemployment)
- The whole thing where Modi goes out and consecrates a temple over the ashes of a mosque or whatever fucked up thing they do, that was only a major source of satisfaction for 33% of NDA voters and only 23% of the electorate, so not exactly great returns on that.
- Fewer respondents agreed that the government should get a second chance (44%) than in 2004 (48%), and the BJP lost that election.
- 2019 was an election marked especially by total opposition chaos, and even in those elections, a full 75% of the electorate did not vote for the BJP.
- The BJP won 60% (183) of the seats in 2019 by a margin of over 15%, so that's 40% (120 seats) of the seats that could be deemed vulnerable in an Indian election (where swings of 5-10% and up to 15% are pretty typical). And it won about 79 of those vulnerable seats with a margin of up to 10%. So if the BJP loses just half of the total vulnerable seats, or at least a big proportion of the more vulnerable ones (only a 10% lead in 2019), then it loses the election.
- In 2019, the BJP got a national vote share of 37%. This was a plurality so it wins in a FPTP system, obviously. The issue with projecting too much from this is that the BJP's bastions get them large amounts of unnecessary votes (60% or even higher, when they just need a plurality), while their vote share in less BJP-friendly zones is considerably less sturdy. But all the voters in the bastions masks that effect on a national scale.
- There's also obviously been the farmer's protests, which have dampened enthusiasm a little, too.
- There's also some more in-depth analysis about Karnataka in there too which I'm not knowledgable enough to talk about really.
So what's the takeaway? IDK, I'm not an Indian elections guy. If I woke up to a big BJP majority in early June then I wouldn't be surprised. And there's probably a ton of electoral shenanigans just like in every liberal "democracy", which would favour the party in charge of the government during the elections. But it's at least statistically possible beyond mere blind hope that the BJP is at least having a tougher time than I had initially thought here.
I wonder, when Israel collapses in the coming months/years, if Mossad is gonna have an absolute free-for-all in revenge for America not helping them enough. They're gonna reveal that like 80% of Congress are pedophiles or something