If I had to guess, there's a deep layer of very sophisticated tunnels where most of the ammo and workshops and shit are kept which is mostly impervious to things like flooding due to ventilation and drainage, then a layer of less sophisticated but still quite good tunnels (the ones with the concrete around it that we've seen a couple videos of), and then a shallow layer of makeshift tunnels with little if any shielding, very earthy and narrow so they can be dug quickly, turning the whole place into a gigantic labrinyth. It feels like Israel could try and attack Gaza for years, and so long as there's enough supplies down there, they could never clear Hamas out. It's just too big and complex and they're experts at turning the entire thing into explosive death traps. You could lose entire modern armies in Gaza (and, well, one is being defeating as we speak there). Bakhmut feels like a lovely picnic in a flowery meadow compared to the hell that is Gaza for the Zionists right now. Stalingrad might be a better comparison, if the battle over it was not only horizontal but also vertical.
Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan, the Parliamentarian, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.
- @Melina@hexbear.net, for better or worse. Like, think about it: they must be responsible for the most uses of the "Block community" button on Hexbear.
- @Alaskaball@hexbear.net
- There's a few different ways you could take this tbh. Like, posting numbers, commenting numbers, starting things like bookclubs, etc. I think in terms of "Person who generates the most engagement in the community" then I think @RNAi@hexbear.net with his incredible posting (and commenting!) numbers is a big influence.
- @Aru@lemmygrad.ml
I tend to have a few books going in parallel so I can switch between them when getting through one is becoming a slog, especially because I usually make extensive notes on theory so I can remember it all better.
So what I have read and/or am reading and have finished most of:
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (lib garbage with no real takeaways but I needed an overview of the history so I had a foundation to work off for further reading; useful for me but I wouldn't recommend)
The Dawn of Everything (some questionable interpretations and lessons but a good recommendation overall)
World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (a pretty foundational text for geopolitical analysis if you use the terms "imperial core" a lot)
The Capital Order - How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (very good, absolutely recommend. really shows how western economic ideas haven't meaningfully progressed since 1920. every addition since then, like fiat currency, feel more like expansion packs on the foundation of neoclassical economics and austerity, and the language of 1920s liberal economics professors is literally indistinguishable from 2020s liberal economics professors. I had the experience of reading how austerity was implemented in Britain and Italy at the same time as Milei was starting his program up in Argentina, and was blown away by how it's literally the same shit.)
Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (meh, it's okay. vaguely interesting to see how people on the ground reacted to Libya under Gaddafi but it's only really useful if you already have a decent grasp of the history)
Late Victorian Holocausts (macabre subject matter but regardless I love the intersection of hard science and politics/history/economics. really adds a sense of concreteness to them that otherwise can seem free-floating and devoid of context)
Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (what Desai does here is kind of radical actually. It kinda feels like... you know that saying "Things seem impossible until after they happen - then they appear inevitable."? Desai's basically doing that but for the present day. Basically saying "No, actually, the US is not and has never really been a hegemon in the way that the British Empire was, their financial empire and the dollar is built on sand, and many of the reasons why we believe that the US is a hegemon is because those reasons were first stated by Americans who were trying to conjure illusions of their own importance out of nothing." It's a radical way of observing history regardless of whether you agree and I'm only a chapter in and I'm intensely curious to see where it all leads. She wrote this thing in like 2013 and was already predicting multipolarism and dedollarization, so I'm very willing to listen to her)
Might be a few others I can't currently recall. Of course, given all the goddamn articles and shit I go through on a weekly basis, I'm already imbibing a ton of information anyway, so I don't feel too bad about my relatively slow pace.
I don't really have a preset list of books and mostly go off vibes, but I don't like to read the same kind of book consecutively, e.g. I don't read a history book after reading a history book. I also try and read at least as much stuff on more current-day matters as I do about history, due to a fear of spending too much time in the past and not enough time looking at what's going on right now. I don't wanna be one of those people who just endlessly talks about how "Oh god, I wish I could have lived in Italy in 1920, or Russia as a revolutionary, or could have helped the Germans with their revolution... god damn it, we had our chance to overthrow capitalism and we blew it... fuck..." while like, the fucking Palestinians and Yemenis are actively battering down the door of American empire and Russia is taking on NATO and China is trying to develop the world and heighten the contradictions of capitalism. Eyes on the prize.
That being said, I will definitely wanna read Desai's second Geopolitical Economy book, Coronavirus, Capitalism, and War, at some point get through Hudson's Superimperialism because shit keeps getting in the way and I still haven't fucking read it (though I've read enough of his talks and interviews that I think I already grasp quite a lot of his arguments), and intersperse this with books on African communist movements, e.g. Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics, as well as works like Dark Emu and Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region. And some works of Marxist feminism and social theory in that vein.
usually the country support columns on wikipedia are illustrative about who to support, but this is one of those conflicts where it's just...
on the SAF side: Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Ukraine, the US (potentially)
on the RSF side: Chad, Kenya, the UAE, and the part of the Libyan army under Haftar, and Wagner (though they're the boogeyman of Africa right now so the US might just be making shit up, idk).
not great.
I find that people in left-wing circles tend to be pretty cynical about wars and conflicts that aren't class-based, leading to sentiments of like "neither Russia nor Ukraine will be victorious by the end of this, both will have been weakened and it's just a gigantic waste of the blood of the working class when they could be fighting the capitalists instead", but a), I've heard things like that from trots a lot and they tend to annoy me on topics like China by calling them imperialist etc etc, so I have a tendency to be contrarian against that, and much more importantly, b), I try to pay attention to the primary contradiction, which is of course imperialism, or essentially the class divide replicated through nation-states instead of people. That all being said, I really have not seen any strong arguments for either side being better even in an anti-imperialist sense, so I don't really support either of them. Part of the problem is that the conflict is being massively ignored by basically everybody, and most of the attention it does receive is given - not unjustly - to the civilian victims who are being impacted and becoming refugees by the millions. So without any prominent left scholars coming along and giving their opinion, all you can do is either also ignore it, or try and form some kind of opinion without a lot of the necessary historical context unless you're ready to sit down and read the literature on it yourself.
that all being said, it does seem like the RSF has been making a lot of progress lately and the government forces look like they're in disarray, so whether they're better or worse, they seem like they're more favoured to win.
It's like having a DPRK but in the Middle East.
I get why all these various nations have to do these careful, behind-the-scenes, diplomatic efforts and can't just say "Fuck you, actually" to the West all the time, but sometimes it's just very nice to have a country that doesn't make some deal with the US under the threat of bombardment or invasion and is just like "no, you cannot fucking pass the Red Sea, we will laugh at your attempts to make deals with us, we aren't afraid of you, in fact we welcome the opportunity to battle you directly rather than dealing with the imbecile monarchies bordering us." Somebody having and enforcing a red line has been a very rare thing over the last couple years.
they regularly made deals with the Nazis and even tried to form an alliance with them
: "Uh, Molotov-Rippentrop?"
wrong thread, but yeah. all the things you see about how women have to fake orgasms, or posts by men about how they think women biologically cannot orgasm because they've never had it happen with them (which is an admission you could not waterboard out of me but these people proudly state)... feels like it either ends with dead bedrooms or divorces, or both.
damn shame, an image with Milei locking arms with Putin and MBS would have been hilarious
the best way to do it isn't to reward power posters and creating competition/just giving the awards to the same people every time but instead take a totally arbitrary condition like "Most uses of the letter z relative to other letters" or "Funniest name" or "Person who created the best tagline in 2023" or "Most entertaining/insightful/interesting single comment of the year" or "Best freakout from a lemmitor to their comment"
such that it's not the same thing every year and that power posters and relative newcomers or people who like to create new accounts regularly are on the most level playing field reasonably possible