SeventyTwoTrillion

#Tradle #643 3/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://oec.world/en/tradle

It's so exhausting having to do through the same propaganda as we went through in Ukraine.

"Russia is running out of missiles and men and will soon break, according to expert intel" -> "Hamas seems to be close to breaking in Gaza"

"The Ukrainian gains in Kharkiv and Kherson prove that Russia is losing and Ukraine is winning the war." -> "Hamas has lost control of (the surface of) northern Gaza, with Israel planting a flag in an iconic building."

"New peace summit in Europe attended by Ukraine (but not Russia) to find a solution to the war; Russia will have to give up Zaporozhye and Kherson." -> "So, who should rule the Gaza Strip after Hamas is defeated? Israel, or Abbas?"

Seriously? We're doing the exact same thing again?

God fucking damn it. Once Israel broke through the Hamas defense line, bombed their trenches, and overcame their defense-in-depth strategy by bombing Hamas' artillery and tank brigades far from the front line, Israel has finally consolidated control over Hamas' various factories producing advanced missiles and infantry fighting vehicles, and took control of their oil supply. I guess this territorial gain represents the end of the war. Onward to focussing on Guyana instead.

(I know this is a stupid bit but there's literally people on twitter talking basically like this)

On a daily basis I only achieve Stalin levels of a mere 35%, though I can sometimes reach 47% Stalin if I go all out and time my combos correctly. What is Xi's secret to maxing out the Stalin gauge?

Your Friday Briefing

If the German election was held today, Scholz' party would receive only 14% of the vote - the lowest since June 2021. 17% of eligible voters say that they are satisfied with the SPD-led government, the lowest approval rating of a German chancellor since polls began in 1997 - though there have been worse German chancellors.

Slovakia's opposition is warning that Fico's government is working to gain absolute control of the arms industry, which... uh, yeah? That's how... war typically works...?

Armenia and Azerbaijan have reportedly had a breakthrough, and are exchanging prisoners and working towards normalization. Meanwhile, a US diplomat visited Azerbaijan and was received positively, although it doesn't seem like the hunt for US spies will be curtailed. And Aliyev warned that India and France arming Armenia will increase the chances of more war.

Putin has announced that he is indeed running for re-election in March 2024. Putin has also said that tech-sharing with China has no limits, not even military limits.

Burkina Faso's government has revised the constitution to ban French as an official language, demoting it to the role of "working language".

China is banning new steel plants in order to cut atmospheric pollution, and is working on converting factories creating blast furnace-produced steel into factories creating electric furnace-produced steel, which involves the import of scrap steel from abroad and has lower emissions (69% of US steel production uses this method). In Hebei, the top steel producing province, the number of iron and steel companies have been cut by 70% over the years to meet local targets, which has dramatically cut particulate emissions.

China has granted tariff-free access to Angola, Gambia, DRC, Madagascar, Mali, and Mauritania, in order to boost agricultural imports from Africa. They join 21 other African countries with similar tariff cuts. Xi says that he plans to import products worth $300 billion from Africa by 2024; in 2023 so far, total trade was $234 billion and imports to China a "mere" $91 billion. Meanwhile, Chinese global exports have edged up for the first time in seven months, increasing by 0.5% year-on-year to $291 billion, probably due to exporters cutting prices.

Thousands of protestors have rallied against the new far-right government of New Zealand, organized by the Maori Party, due to the anti-Maori policies that they are proposing. The co-leader of the Maori Party has said that the laws would take New Zealand "back to the 1800s."

Most Americans have depleted their excess savings accumulated during the pandemic, and 99% of Americans will be financially worse off than pre-pandemic by mid-2024. I'm still not entirely sure whether this whole "excess savings" thing is even an actual thing that has existed, because most Americans seem exceptionally unhappy about the economy and going into major debt to continue survival and have been for many months, which contradicts the idea that they had much savings at all.

Famous penis owner, Hunter Biden, has been indicted on new federal tax evasion charges, following previous charges of tax evasion and unlawfully owning a gun.

Zelensky is going to attend Milei's inauguration, which is so freaking epic. It's like that scene in Endgame where Captain America (more like Captain Ukraine!) is like, standing there, and then the dude comes flying out of the portal behind him, and they're like, about to fight Thanos's army, but Putin is Thanos and the army is worldwide communism. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

Al-Qassam:

Yesterday, as enemy soldiers tried to open the door to a booby-trapped tunnel entrance in north Gaza, the device detonated instantly, killing the son of Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff and War Minister. A number of other enemy soldiers were also killed & injured.

you'd have thought they'd have stopped falling for this trick the tenth time it happened

we're gonna go through the same process we went through with the Ukraine War

1. "fuck Maduro for being an imperialist, this is just totally cynical to distract from internal problems. the US is bad but this is worse, invading other countries is never justified"

2. "well, actually, I think it's more accurate to say that both sides are about as bad as each other here. sure, Maduro isn't motivated by the best reasoning but it's more complicated than I thought"

3. "actually, fuck the US and ExxonMobil for deliberately shaping the conditions for this war to start, it seems like Maduro could actually win this and it would be a solid blow against the empire, Guyana is just a puppet"

4. "I demand the unbanning of V_Poster365"

I'm already at stage 4, demanding the unbanning of a poster who doesn't even exist yet

I think the broad analysis is correct, but the given timescales are too short. During the Ukraine War, we repeatedly saw speculations that some high-up figure in the US government has given only a limited amount of time to Ukraine to fulfil its objectives and that funding or military supplies simply could not be supplied beyond that point, and those deadlines came and went without even the slightest indication of a change in pace. I think we will, similarly, watch January roll on by while Netanyahu and his cabinet say that, actually, they need another month or two to really wrap things up - they're 95% of the way there, they just need a little more time! This will repeat until either Israel's government as we currently conceive it no longer exists (which seems plausible but not in the short term), Hamas is destroyed (which currently seems unlikely), or everybody in the region is irradiated by a hundred nuclear bombs.

Israel - or, more specifically, Zionism - is facing an existential threat. So is Hamas, and Palestine more broadly. They are in contradiction - they can no longer co-exist. Negotiations may occur, but that central issue cannot be resolved without one side being defeated - not necessarily total defeat, but effective defeat. Israel could say that Hamas has been destroyed and then retreat to the pre-war borders, but if that didn't actually occur, Hamas would almost certainly retain the ability to fire rockets into Israel and even potentially do military operations outside the fence, and so that's not really an option in practice. This isn't even getting into Hezbollah, who I think is the actual major threat to Zionism here and has been largely ignored by the Western media.

At current rates of attrition, I don't think Israel can be meaningfully defeated for at least a few more months. I have absolutely no idea what the state of Hamas' stockpiles are, nor the state of their tunnels, but out of the 30k fighters that most people seem to believe exist, I have a hard time believing that even in the absolute most pessimistic view of the war, that more than 10% of them have been killed so far, and I think it's probably in the 5% range. Hamas fighters seem to be sufficiently trained, prepared, self-sufficient, and... whatever the opposite of demoralized is. Moralized? that to defeat them, you'll either have to kill almost all of them or use up all their weapons. Either way, a long war. Israel's current status is some ways easier and also harder to analyse, because while more is immediately known about how anti-Hamas they are (very, obviously), it's difficult to determine how strongly held that viewpoint really is throughout the country. For example, white South Africans under apartheid were, I believe, quite strongly pro-Apartheid under the pressure on them became too much, and the government and population fatigued of the conflict, and there was a very significant minority (even a majority according to some analysis I saw) of white South Africans who still held positive views about apartheid years after it ended - but apartheid did, nonetheless, end, because it was forced to end, regardless of what its supporters thought or how in favour of it they were. A similar thing could occur in Israel, but only, I think, if Hezbollah joins in, because the Gazans alone simply cannot cause that pressure throughout the populace and the economy, even if they're being quite effective in taking down the army. Guerilla warfare without external help have a depressing rate of success, but guerilla warfare with external help can actually genuinely work, as we saw in Vietnam. The death rates are always dismal, though. To pull a figure out of my ass, I think we'll see somewhere in the realm of 200,000 to 500,000 dead Gazan civilians before this is over (e.g. similar to the 20% of the North Korean population killed during the Korean War, in which there was a similar campaign of total destruction of every single above-ground structure in the country).

In a Gramscian way, I believe that the worst case scenario will occur, and that the Resistance will nonetheless overcome it.

So the question of "when will the war end" is partially linked to "when does Nasrallah deem it necessary to give the command to attack, whatever an attack even looks like from a sorta-guerrilla, sorta-state military force," and I have absolutely no idea and I don't think Israel does either. It could be tomorrow, it could be in March, it could be in September 2025. The answer could, if you're a pessimist, be "never". And I think Nasrallah likes the ambiguity that way.

“by January”.

We'll be lucky if this is over by this time next year

either that or Kid Starver

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says "Idiocracy is a documentary!!!" and invoke Hanlon's Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world