SeventyTwoTrillion

The Country of the Week is Armenia!

Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to Armenia.

If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

• What is the general ideology of the political elite? Do they tend to be protectionist nationalists, or are they more free trade globalists? Are they compradors put there by foreign powers? Are they socialists with wide support by the population?
• What are the most important domestic political issues that make the country different from other places in the region or world? Are there any peculiar problems that have continued existing despite years or decades with different parties?
• Is the country generally stable? Are there large daily protests or are things calm on average? Is the ruling party/coalition generally harmonious or are there frequent arguments or even threats?
• Is there a particular country to which this country has a very impactful relationship over the years, for good or bad reasons? Which one, and why?
• What are the political factions in the country? What are the major parties, and what segments of the country do they attract?
• Are there any smaller parties that nonetheless have had significant influence? Are there notable separatist movements?
• How socially progressive or conservative is the country generally? To what degree is there equality between men and women, as well as different races and ethnic groups? Are LGBTQIA+ rights protected?
• Give a basic overview of the last 50 or 100 years. What's the historical trend of politics, the economy, social issues, etc - rise or decline? Were they always independent or were they once occupied, and how have things been since independence if applicable?
• If you want, go even further back in history. Were there any kingdoms or empires that once governed the area?

Next thread here.

After evacuating their dead and wounded, the Israelis withdrew from its positions in Aynata, claiming to have "completed operations".

some things truly do never change

this is just the musical equivalent of body language experts

"Putin/Xi/Raisi/etc slightly stumbling that one time is actually deeply emblematic of their health problems and this is reflected in their countries, over which they have a totalitarian rule. I've analyzed the average angle at which their left hand moves versus their right while walking, noting a difference of 0.004 radians. The best training the FBI gave me shows conclusively that this means they intend to commit a brutal war/genocide in the coming years."

also

"Biden stumbling repeatedly both verbally and physically while walking is actually a show of strength, indicating that American democracy is not dependent on the person elected but every single person. If more leaders were willing to display weakness while knowing that this is actually strength, the world would be a fairer and more democratic place."

then again, there are probably 100x more of these grifters draining state resources than remotely competent empire custodians, so godspeed to them wasting as many agency/corporate resources as possible

Thousands of NATO troops have been in Ukraine for years; it's merely about whether NATO has officially moved its stance or if they'll continue to do it covertly. As in, NATO troops go home in coffins every single day, but it's only a problem if NATO begins to draw attention to it, as it'll indicate that they want to escalate it to WW3.

Though I doubt they have the real military ability to do so anymore beyond a few months of intense action before attrition, equipment shortages, and godawful training makes everything fall apart

Depite Macron’s tough stance on economic issues, the French president is defending Europe’s role as an balancing power that allows China to remain included in the global discussion. “Let’s be clear, I’m not proposing to distance ourselves from China,” he said in the interview. “Whether it’s about climate or about safety, we need the Chinese.”

Remain included in the global discussion? Them's fighting words for a continent currently tumbling down a slope towards economic irrelevancy except perhaps for the latest innovations in mortgage scams and landlord algorithms. If you're lucky, maybe China will let you remain included in the global discussion.

The article is really just a rehash of the contradiction Europe faces - they can't ditch China without dramatically accelerating their collapse, but they're under so much pressure from America that they can't do nothing about China either. They're hoping to find a middle ground, like grasping onto a piece of driftwood in a stormy sea, and maybe they'll find one for a short time, but Biden will just blow up another pipeline and leave some Chinese passports on the kayak we're meant to believe did the operation.

only once every atom of hydrogen and helium in the universe has been fused into the prerequisite elements necessary to form untold quintillions of police officers can America truly be safe

This has basically been my viewpoint for months now. And honestly, if the Resistance can effectively extend the blockade to the Meditterranean, then I think there's a solid chance that Israel as we currently know it will cease to exist by the end of this year. The road transport route isn't going to be able to replace naval shipping, and airlift campaigns are, despite what propaganda schools tell us about 1948 Berlin, not capable of supplying entire populations. Not only that, but Israeli society can be paralyzed by relatively few strikes on offshore gas and various power stations and desalination plants, and Hezbollah retains the capability to perform these strikes without even needing to invoke Iran directly. Israel is completely stuck. They cannot give up, or the entire core point of their ideology - providing a safe space for the Zionist ubermensch - is forever destroyed, and the ideology will crumble around it. They also cannot escalate, or they will be physically destroyed. They are now world pariahs for everybody who isn't a rabid, frothing, fascist dog which gets shaky with withdrawals if they don't see some mutiliated child corpses every 12 hours (which still constitutes like half a billion people in the West but alas). Being a pariah can be mended over time with some dedicated propaganda campaigns but I don't think Israel has that long.

The Israeli intelligence agencies can bleat all day long about how Hezbollah must be destroyed, or how Hamas is burrowing under American campuses; people cannot eat or drink ideology.

this reminds me of when Ukrainians took photos of captured Russian positions with various Nazi imagery or the occasional bomb hidden in a playground, which only became funnier when there was that video of a Ukrainian putting a cluster bomb or something there, taking a photo of it, and then walking away

at the time, I wondered who was stupider: the fascists putting their supplies in there to make the public try and believe it, or the public who did indeed go on to believe it despite being very obviously fake. not only have we not progressed in propaganda quality since that time, I think we've actually regressed. oh, to see the piggy that has to rush to the nearest bookstore and grabs the first book with the word "terrorism" clearly on the front page

I figure digging tunnel networks under cities is impractical just from a physics and logistics standpoint let alone a legal standpoint, especially if you wanted to make them deep enough to not be collapsed under extreme violence. Gaza doesn't have skyscrapers nor a subway system, and a population of generally supportive people from which one could enlist thousands to help Hamas. And others above have pointed out that if you really wanted some tunnel action, there are plenty of other pre-existing tunnels that could be occupied in some way, though obviously part of the effectiveness of Hamas' tunnels is that the entrances and the structure itself is largely unknown to the Zionists and so surprise attacks are relatively easy to accomplish. I think if you actually tried to reinforce a subway system then it'd be less like Hamas and more like Azovstal in its outcome. So I reckon that American protest/revolutionary movements will generally have to be above-ground unless we start seeing Maoist movements in the countryside crop up

The Cradle: Yemeni Armed Forces announces fourth phase of escalation against Israel:

• Will target ships heading to Israel in the Mediterranean Sea.
• Will prevent all ships of companies linked to Israeli ports from passing through the armed forces' area of ​​operations, regardless of their destination.
• If Israel launches an operation on Rafah, the armed forces will impose sanctions against ships associated with supplying and entering Israeli ports.

the good news is that the American Empire's time on this earth is limited and becoming more constrained by the day

(the bad news is that this will mean the deaths of tens of millions due to a supernova of fascist violence across the world in the most optimistic scenario; more likely hundreds of millions)