SeventyTwoTrillion

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[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 36 points 2 years ago (5 children)

An article in the Financial Times, the contents of which aren't terribly important beyond the fact that the bourgeois media are directly stating that Netanyahu should be gotten rid of, which is pretty notable.

Biden’s mounting self-harm on Israel

The US president should do whatever it takes to evict Netanyahu.

The train wreck has been a long time coming. Alas, it will take still more needless and costly weeks before it happens. Benjamin Netanyahu is running a policy that is directly at odds with the explicit priorities of his chief benefactor, Joe Biden, and is repeatedly giving him the middle finger. What puzzles me, and vexes many people in the Biden administration, is why the president does not bring forward that inevitable split by doing things that events will force him to do anyway.

That would mean imposing — rather than hinting politely at — conditions on US aid to Israel. It means insisting that Netanyahu endorse the two-state solution and take steps to prepare for “day after” talks with a rebooted Palestinian Authority. It means withholding aid while settlers in the West Bank continue to radicalise the Palestinian population with continued evictions, shootings and settlement expansions. Hamas’s ratings have continued to grow in the West Bank, where a helpless local population is saddled with a toothless Palestinian Authority that is unable to defend their rights. This has been Netanyahu’s policy for 15 years. It helped to create the conditions for the barbarous Hamas slaughter on October 7. Yet he is not changing course.

I understand that Biden has a deep place in his heart for Israel. Unfortunately, sentimentalism often gets in the way of clear thinking. In Biden’s case, it is the source of a severe mental block. At a fundraiser in Washington this week, Biden finally warned Israel that it was on a dangerous course. That is something, but he should have gone much further. Israel is on a self-defeating course, which will breed more instability and less security in the coming decades. As his own secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, said last week: “The centre of gravity is the civilian population and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 38 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If anybody was worried about the finances of the alphabet boys given that their opium trade in Afghanistan got shut down, don't worry:

Myanmar has become the world’s largest center of opium production in 2023, having overtaken Afghanistan, a new report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has found.

Released on Tuesday, the UN publication reports that from 2022 to 2023 production of the illicit crop in Myanmar increased by 18% to a total of 47,100 hectares under cultivation.

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

#Tradle #655 2/6
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://oec.world/en/tradle

spoilerguessed western africa initially, once I saw that it was between the smattering of east African islands I thought it was gonna take me like 4-5 guesses but I got lucky

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 22 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I would say that this would be as similarly unrealistic as Ukraine's demands for Russia to fully retreat before having peace talks but Hamas and Hezbollah combined (with Yemen heroically trying to implement a kind of sanctions regime by itself with Iranian support), plus the ineptitude of the Israeli military, plus the death-by-thousand-cuts strategy continuing to take its toll... could combine into such a demand being eventuality feasible?

It's always hard to tell whether one side increasing the terms required for peace is because they are actually winning (e.g. Russia in the last six months especially) versus doing it due to political necessity as the war further consumes their society and peace is harder to accept, sunk cost style.

Due to the Zionist propaganda curtain and the fact that none of us know what Hamas' and Hezbollah's current states are, how much they've lost, etc, because they're, y'know, underground in tunnels and aren't going to tell us bad news, and guerilla wars simply cannot be assessed by looking at territory "held" especially with extensive tunnel networks... all of this means that really only the Resistance can answer whether this position is due to strength or sunk cost, so I'm unsure how to really analyze it. I think the former is more likely but that's just my vibe.

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm not worried about them toppling neoliberalism, I don't think we've seen any of the reactionary populists meaningfully take action against that, what I wonder about is what happens when the reactionaries also fail to improve conditions.

Like, if the post-1990s West is defined by anything, it's stagnation, but active decline is a more recent phenomenon and I just don't know how that shapes the political sphere throughout the 2020s and perhaps 2030s. The reaction would ordinarily be obvious - just ramp up exploitation of the periphery even harder - but that a) requires a continuation in the supremacy of western financial institutions, and b), it requires the threat of overwhelming military force, and depending how the Ukraine war ends and the Palestine war ends and how China acts in the coming years, both of those could be seriously weakened. They could also be strengthened, which is the worst case scenario outside of nuclear war, but the profitability crisis is really knocking on the doors of western capitalists right now, and it cannot be removed, only delayed. So we'll be right back to this position two decades from now, only with an even more actively decaying climate and biosphere.

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

there is a very significant difference between an age limit which nonetheless allows both parties in a de facto two-party state to participate in a state election, versus (effectively, as Trump will be the Republican nominee) outright banning one of the parties from participating in that state election

whatever Trump has done legally wrong isn't worse than Biden, for example, to name but two of his many crimes, being complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and thousands of Palestinian people and the destruction of most of Gaza City. in a just world, both of them would not only be unable to become president, but would be sitting in prison on life sentences even before Biden's term began and he had immunity, so certain crimes are just being emphasized over other ones whenever a court says that X party or candidate cannot run in an election

again, I don't give a shit about the Republicans nor the Democrats and it's meaningless regardless because Colorado isn't a republican or swing state

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Freezing your semen before you leave implies that there is a possibility that you are killed, which is impossible because we are ubermensch Zionist supersoldiers where everybody who serves for 2 weeks is made a general because we're just that hypercompetent

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

It is kind of bonkers that this is even a thing that they can do, obviously we all know the US is a totalitarian capitalist regime but even if we briefly accept the definition of democracy that libs have where democracy = able to vote for one of two similar candidates on one day every four years and having zero power on the other 1459 days, this is a pretty obvious violation of that

I couldnt really care less about it because it doesnt impact the left regardless, if we put up a candidate left of Mussolini then the CIA would put their ballot (sniper bullet) in the ballot box (their skull) if they got close to power, without all this law bullshit, but even so

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 30 points 2 years ago

probably the best case scenario for everybody involved including everyday Americans, as I think that many missile silos are away from populated areas

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 51 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I will hit the griddy

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 51 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

Do mercenaries who die in Gaza also get their semen harvested or is it just Israelis?

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 47 points 2 years ago (2 children)

"I don't understand where all this talk of sinking American ships is coming from, Yemen doesn't have any destroyers or aircraft carriers. How are they going to do anything to American ships?"

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