if you wanna beat the US and its proxies, you got two options: be a superpower like Russia that can effectively (though not without your own losses) deal with their aircraft, or get your shovels and drills out and start building tunnel networks
Iran and co continuing to allow themselves to be humiliated
they literally just hit a Mossad headquarters with missiles a few days ago
when the US can't even maintain their nuclear missiles properly, you know it's all joever
One Doohickey That Shook The World
A big question really is whether Biden represents the beginning of an industrialization trend, or instead a high water mark that will be reversed by the Republicans, whether they come into power in 2024 or 2028. I genuinely don't know.
While I think there's a ton of inertia in the imperial core that prevents much industrialization and production of actually effective mass-produceable military gear occurring, it's also a tremendous mistake to believe that countries are forever locked into their current path and that fundamentally nothing will change; basically hardcore capitalist realism. I think Kaplya is correct in saying that it would require a revolution (of the industrialists overthrowing the financialists; essentially a different form of fascism) for this to actually occur. The US can do bits and pieces of industrialization here and there, but as soon as the green shoots start to grow above a certain height, the lawnmower of financialism cuts them down for immediate profit. I also agree that therefore the US will try as long as physically possible to fight China and friends via financial methods; maintaining staggering levels of debt, cutting off countries from financial institutions, etc etc. I'm much more optimistic than Kaplya is about it, but even I admit that the ultimate victor is far from certain. It's like saying to somebody in early 1914: "Alright, there's gonna be a massive war soon that engulfs Europe. Give me your predictions for the next 40 years." How many people would predict the state of the world in 1950, even moderately correctly, even with the superpower of historical materialism and Marxist analysis? An entire fucking communist superpower rises up out of a feudal backwater and is the primary rival of the United States, the major capitalist power on Earth, unseating the British Empire! For all we fucking know, the current war in Palestine leads to the fall of Israel and then the propagation of communist revolutions across the Middle East, leading to a federated superpower that goes to war with Europe or something, and virtually nobody is predicting that that's going to happen.
Will the US be the Russian Empire of WW1 and just collapse under the weight of a system that cannot adapt and develop its productive capacities fast enough before internal forces rip it apart, or will it be the British Empire of WW1, and break economic orthodoxies like the gold standard to become an industrial juggernaut and extend its reign for another few decades longer?
as a side note, It's been pretty interesting to see how journalists and analysts have largely gotten behind government subsidies and nearshoring/friendshoring given that the last three decades (as in, virtually entire adult lives of even your typical middle-aged analysts) has been dominated by "free markets" and globalization. it's not surprising, western media exists in total subservience to the US government as it's all state propaganda, but even given that, it seemed to me a rather painless shift from "the free market will solve everything and if you think governments should have any economic role then you're a commie" to "yeah actually the government investing hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and factories is cool and good"
Yemen did a racism. Yemen did an imperialism. Yemen did a nationalism. Yemen did a xenophobia. Yemen did a white fragility. Yemen did a weak apology. Yemen did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear Yemen doesn't understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of their offenses
Putin has been stopped and his military is in shambles with 500,000 soldiers dead. Also if we don't give hundreds of billions of dollars to the military (in times of desperate living conditions) then Putin is mere hours away from annexing Europe all the way to the Atlantic. Yes, both of these can be true if you're not a loony leftist who can't use logic.
Just a pet peeve of mine when people say something major is happening to "distract the narrative" from something way less important
kinda like when the US brought up aliens and the reaction from some people was "oh, they're only doing this to distract from events in Ukraine/somewhere else" my sibling in christ, Americans stopped caring about the war after a month, let alone like a year
to go off on a bit of a tangent, at the end of the day, I do wonder sometimes how much propaganda actually shifts things. like, I'm not talking about, say, engineering a global situation where citizens of most countries want to study in the West and especially America in order to bring back liberal capitalist ideas and practices to their home countries - that's clearly at least quite impactful (though I think "if you DON'T do capitalism, then we'll sanction the fuck out of you" is the greater motivator). I mean in terms of the government saying shit like "this is a war for freedom and democracy" etc etc to their populations as the justification for events, or "we need to tighten our belts because the budget is low" when that's obviously bullshit (in the US most especially). as in, if a population in general needs conditions to reach X Level Of Badness for a revolutionary situation to become possible and perhaps even probable, how much does all the propaganda actually shift X? By 5%? By 50%?
because I can't personally name any situation where I can say "Oh, this situation would have been revolutionary, the material conditions were all there and the people were all ready, except the propaganda was just that good, that it prevented it from happening." Or, alternatively, "Oh, this situation might not have been revolutionary, but man, that country was just so bad at propaganda that the conditions didn't even need to get that bad for the revolution to start." often times when it appears that propaganda is making a large difference, it's just an artefact of a worldview not focussed enough on material conditions, or with its own mythology as to why a revolution did or did not happen that is disconnected from a more "objective" analysis, or just not being educated in how bad things got, or even being so bad at analysis that you believe that Very Special Good/Evil Guy magically persuaded the population to do Good/Bad thing
my inkling is that the propaganda feels quite overwhelming and very impactful when you're living under the government creating it, but once you're outside of the system or it's collapsed, you sorta realize "oh. I was complaining all the time that the people around me are brainwashed propagandized liberal subjects who love foreign wars just because the government said so, and that they were buying state propaganda hook line and sinker, and that's the reason why socialism isn't working, but in reality it was a combination of a very strong police+surveillance state making collective action very difficult; the built environment discouraging collective action; the public services being unable to easily facilitate mass action and instead encouraging a lot of car usage; and the incredibly financialized economy and much of the means of production being shifted abroad making it much harder to create leverage over the bourgeoisie compared to workers in the early 20th century who could physically seize factories making steel and guns and use them against the police - you can't do that with like, a funko pop factory and a bitcoin mining facility. those are the factors we had to overcome, and the fact that most of suburbia was comprised of crazed racists whose only goal in life was to become a landlord was just a symptom of the disease, and we needed to treat the disease and not the symptoms, so it was useless to yell at crazed suburban racists and attempt to teach them how to become human beings with empathy again and stop posting their idiotic opinions on reddit and twitter"
I know Roderic Day's redsails essay goes into this a lot, and about how people generally won't buy propaganda (without extreme coercion) if they don't have some level of implicit support for it, but my currently tired brain can't remember if he ever explicitly says what he thinks propaganda is like, really doing, if it isn't turning Good People into Bad People (to vastly oversimplify).
the historical version of having both a Palestine flag and an Israel flag in your bio
"it would be so freaking epic if Stalin and Nicholas II got together and used their talents for the good of Russia, rather than all this petty fighting about ideologies"
Marx: "Here's why libs and their ideas suck."
Those libs: "Yeah, uh, don't read that Das Kapital book. It's, uh, way too hard for you to understand. And it's outdated. And like, capitalism is really good. And Marx killed a billion people in gulags. Did you know that Marx failed to consider the difference between price and value?"
what explains why Russian advances are so slow everywhere is that large-scale offensives by either side are almost impossible as there's way too much surveillance to put significant forces together for large pushes
it's also why Ukraine's counteroffensive wasn't even really able to get off the ground, and they were totally willing to just send 50,000 dudes to their deaths in frontal assaults if they gained like 10 meters of ground. sure, NATO tactics suck, but in retrospect I doubt even a "perfect" strategy would have gotten past Tokmak, so long as Russia didn't totally fuck up.
Russia isn't willing to face those losses so they'll go even slower.
unless and until all western military aid is cut off - or there's some massive breakthrough in anti-surveillance and anti-drone technology - it'll be attrition until a Ukrainian military collapse and then Russia will roll up to the Dniper and perhaps beyond
can't say I see what the point of blocking the Suez at this point would be, unless you just wanted to fuck over Eliat in particular. I guess Jeddah might send ships through there? Iraqi and Syrian groups might be able to score some hits on Suez as they're closer, though Ansarallah does seem to have the capability of hitting it or very close to it, even if many of the missiles would get shot down.
meanwhile, Hormuz would be a juicy target but I feel like that's only gonna be hit if Israel starts actually invading southern Lebanon and the war expands even further. right now, Israel still seems way too afraid to attack Hezbollah, and for good reason, as launching attacks into the terrain of southern Lebanon which is crisscrossed by tunnels and fortified positions and plentiful ATGMs would be a great way to destroy an army that is already experiencing exhaustion from trying and failing to hold Gaza. I still think Israel will eventually try it because they'll feel forced to and are totally unwilling to back down even a little bit, but given all the threats that Israel has made over the last few months that haven't been fulfilled and then have been laughed at by Hezbollah, you can really tell that Zyklon Bibi and his band of merry turbofascists are really shitting bricks over the prospects of a war there