I am pretty certain they need him dead. The allegations, including a monitoring room of the entire mansion and lots of compramat seems a lot like he's a black Epstein, an asset for the CIA. They probably will kill him

The outset of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine exposed Russia’s ground forces as incompetently led and beholden to a tyrant in thrall to his own arrogance and neoimperial ambitions. The ensuing stalemate, now well into its third year, has been a strategic calamity for Moscow.

Wat?

I think the US will absolutely attempt it. I don't think Taiwan will agree to it.

The US would have to get some true psychotics into Taiwanese leadership for them to agree to hosting nukes.

What a weird question to ask in response to that comment? What did you mean by it?

This is many years in the making

This wasn't need shit. This was a supply chain attack. Most people saw supply chain attacks as pure cyber - backdoors, remote listening, etc. This is the first supply chain attack I know of that added lethality. This is something every organization is going to look for on all electronics shipments now.

They didn't bother. It's called collaterals damage and they don't think any outside of Israelis are full humans.

I was wondering if this was a supply-chain attack. Fucking sophisticated shit.

Jesus Christ. "Can we use nukes without destroying our country's ability to feed people? Or if we use nukes do you think our people might starve and therefore revolt against us?"

It's the judges job to review the arguments for congruence with law. In a contrived example, if you go to court for a speeding ticket and argue ignorance of the speed limit, the judge's job is stop that shit from consuming court time because it's not the job of the jury to determine whether ignorance is a valid defense. By the rules, it isn't.

Are heads and tails of a coin the same? Are they still part of the same coin?

Keep doing this. It's super helpful

Let's fucking goooooooo!

I think we agree that it's a both/and situation with economies of scale, so let's explore Netflix.

The vast majority of energy for Netflix is not in centralized data centers but at their massive number of distribution points. Those distribution points serve a specific problem: end-user-acceptably fast download speeds.

Is that a reasonable problem to solve? Yes, sort of. Instead of people going back to a central server for their content, they go to a regional server. In essence, while end users don't own their own storage and search infrastructure, the next best solution is a localish solution for the customers in that region.

But what if we just solved the lack of storage and search at home? No profit. So you've got that part right for sure

Than encrypting and decrypting for DRM reasons? Yes. But the reason the cloud exists at all is because economies of scale are real.

Very dialectical

Streaming itself is the problem. Storage is CHEAP. Every human should be able to have enough storage for their media consumption for their lifetime. There is no need to consume a stream for the same piece of media through your entire life.

I think you've got it backwards. The energy cost is real, so economies of scale make sense.

"Building trust" is an abstraction that covers many many activities. The fact that Russia did many things that could have built trust but didn't is completely lost on you, so you have no ability to question WHY trust wasn't built as a result of the actions taken. Because if you DID question why, you would see that Ukraine's transition to a right-wing Euro-centric government entailed it being Russophobic and part of the European project to dominate Russia.

You said most of the value is extracted by the bourgeoisie. I said that the way they extract it passes through the labor aristocracy. They could extract it without the labor aristocracy but they'd have revolutionary conditions on their hand. So instead they pay salaries from the surplus value generated by the periphery and then reclaim those salaries through rent, taxes, etc.

If the surplus value is retained by the periphery, the salaries cannot be paid from that anymore. That means rent cannot be paid from it, therefore we go through a potentially revolutionary adjustment in cost of living.

The problem is that there's very little surplus value domestically. Yes, historically the USA had industry, but they built it on top of genocide and land theft. Now, though, the USA doesn't make much of anything from raw to finished. Everything that it does make, like food, relies on major inputs from the global south like fertilizer. But more importantly, it relies on massive road infrastructure to maintain it's imperial dominance over the continent. That road infrastructure is highly dependent on global exploitation.

How did China build industry without imperialism? Self-exploitation. It did not retain the surplus value of the labor of its proletariat. It intermediated the flow of value but it did not revolutionize the flow of the value. It attracted capital investment from the global bourgeoisie explicitly by maintaining their ability to profit from exploitation, that is, extracting surplus value from the labor of the Chinese proletariat.

As China increases wages, it is partnering with countries who also have been exploited by the imperialists and it is intermediating that value stream now. This allows the Chinese proletariat to improve their conditions and the Chinese state and Chinese bourgeoisie to allocate capital without triggering destructive reactionary behavior from the global bourgeoisie.

The value streams are remaining mostly intact, the global bourgeoisie is still extracting surplus value through China, and China has not chosen to shutdown the exploitation of its people.

Which brings us back to the North Atlantic labor aristocracy. European society is unsustainable. They devastated their peninsula of Eurasia and had no land left to exploit, so they went to sea. They spread like a cancer all over the planet, but they didn't find anything to replace their land until they arrived at Turtle Island. Once here, the European cancer devastated two entire continents and the people on it. Completely unsustainable, just like Europe, but the land was vast. It's only been 530 years since then. Conditions change. The USA is a completely unsustainable economic system on top of a completely unsustainable settler system on top of a completely unsustainable genocidal system.

If the flow of surplus value were to stop immediately, America would face total catastrophe, and in the face of total catastrophe it would launch a massive war campaign, just like the Euro virus always has when faced with catastrophe. Such a war would be in service of maintaining the flow of surplus value for generations to come by destroying the productive capacity of the rest of the world, forcing them to rely on the imperial bourgeoisie for rebuilding and thus ensuring surplus value is extracted by the imperialists.

What would not happen is sudden domestic investment to build production in the USA and a re- proletarianization of the labor aristocracy. And the reason that wouldn't happen is because the capabilities no longer exist in ready form in the USA and because the native population and the formerly enslaved population will force the issue of liberation, forcing the USA to allocate resources to domestic control and genocide instead of production and reproduction.

I think you're missing the strength of the social welfare systems created in Europe and Scandinavia. That constitutes a substantial portion of distribution to the masses beyond salaries. In the USA salaries are huge but there's little social safety net, so even though the USA is doing most of the looting, it has way more poverty. European hegemonies are used to prop up the social democracies that were created to appease workers and prevent a communist revolution. As Europeans lose their social welfare, the only thing that's going to prevent a communist revolution is convincing the workers to fight another world war against other workers.

It's not zero sum. We could be in relations that multiply our effectiveness. We are not. This is real. Those landlords in the imperial core get their money from rent. That rent comes from salaries. Those salaries come from the value of commodities. The majority of the value in those commodities is not created by spreadsheet jockies, cold email biz dev specialists, social media influences, PR firms, marketing agencies, website design consultancies, logo rebranding exercises, corporate event planning, change managers, business analysts, strategy consulting, and thousands of other jobs and activities that dominate the imperial core.

You could reduce the price of housing to its actual cost, but it won't help if you can't get fuel to travel the scores or miles daily that American life requires.

Yeah that "being dragged down to equal" is sort of a fantasy trope related to the whole "civilized" vs "uncivilized" framing. The reality is that the USA is built on unsustainable imperial largesse at industrial scale.

Roads. Cars. Fuels.

No other nation on the planet lives like we do in the USA. Just imagine gas at $8/gallon. Imagine ALL of the road maintenance, the machines required, the materials required.

Then understand the impact transport has on food distribution in the USA.

Then realize that 46M people in the USA, so about 20%, live with water insecurity. American shoppers spend almost $50Bn on bottled water annually.

Yeah, it's going to be incredibly ugly. Right now, climate change is the biggest threat to the American Southwest. But if the world shut America out of primary economic dominance, cities in Arizona would be abandoned within a few years as no one would be able to secure sufficient water to live there. The climate refugee crisis is going to crush America even if it remains the global hegemon, but if it doesn't and the labor of the global south ends the "free ride", it's going to be horrible for the average American.

Think about those people in Tuscon. Where are they going to go and how are they going to get there? Vehicles. Roads. Gas.

And that doesn't even get into cell phones, computers, industrial equipment, medical equipment, plastics, clothing, SHOES.

It's not that Americans aren't struggling. It's that we're living in an incredibly inefficient setup. And that wording is HILARIOUSLY understating it.

People saying doctors, lawyers, and software engineers are wrong.

The labor aristocracy is essentially the majority of the proletariat in the West. They add very little value to a commodity relative to their wage. Most value is added in the periphery where they extract raw resources from the earth and process it. The labor aristocracy benefits from the exploitation of the laborers in the periphery. If the miners in Congo collected the full value of their labor, the proletariat in the West would lose massively as the cost of their commodities would go up at retail AND their would be very little added value left to justify their salaries.

It's relevant because despite your ideology driving your solidarity with laborers in the periphery, your material conditions world get substantially worse if those laborers had a communist revolution and captured the full value of their labor. That is a major problem for leftists in the imperial core to wrestle with and solve.

The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong

How foolish. Japan violently occupied Korea. After the USA nuked Japanese civilians, they took over Japan's dominance of Korea, threatening both Russian and China. The USA was internally debating nuking Korea and also invading China.

When the Vietnamese revolted against French colonial rule, the French brutally repressed them, but still lost. The USA came in to maintain that colonial dominance and destroyed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, all in positions to threaten China.

The Dalai Lama's brother has written a book expressing his regrets around working with the CIA as they used the Dalai Lama and his family to threaten China. The USA was training Tibetan terrorists and literally airlifting them into Tibet to create violence and chaos and undermine China.

When China underwent a civil war and the losers fled to Taiwan and established a brutal fascist dictatorship and executed the White Terror, the USA and UK blockaded the island to prevent the civil war from continuing because the West wanted the fascists to win.

It's real simple, the USA needs to get the fuck out of Asia entirely, they need to stop withdrawing from nuclear treaties, they need to stop occupying Korea, they need to stop training terrorists in East Asia, they need to remove their 600 international military bases, they need to get rid of their immunity for their soldiers from any and all crimes they commit on foreign soil, they need to drop their policy of invading The Hague if a USA official or soldier is ever tried by the ICC, they need to stop trying to undermine MAD and developing nuclear first strike capabilities, and they need to stop brutal sieges of nations all over the world causing shortages of food and medicine.

No risk of taking it as gospel. The only gospel I need is the ever developing analysis of historical materialism, and what we know so far is the USA nuked civilians, dropped DU in urban Yugoslavia without any reason (except experimentation), has a long history of killing people for experimental reasons, and currently operates secret bases in other nations to avoid its own domestic laws constraining its behavior.

I am pretty open to new accusations against the USA given its history, and I'm not very receptive to Western narratives discrediting accusers.

They're threatening us.

Good info. Not sure why I would trust the guardian that has dormyert spread conspiracy theories and complete fabrications to profit from them

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/is--israel--using-small-nuclear-weapons-in-gaza-and-south-le

This is the first source from the substance editorial

Wait what the actual fuck?!

Sodium metabisulfate...

Meanwhile in the USA farmers spray wheat with glyphosate a week before harvest and then we all ingest fucking herbicide in every goddamn food product

Jesus. Fuckin. Christ.

They're actually doing it. They are testing tactical nuclear weapons in a theatre they can examine so they can observe the effects on humans they consider expendable. This is the legacy of Operation Paperclip

Yo, I am so optimistic it hurts.

It is in China's self-interest for the era of imperialism, complete with its colonialism and neocolonialism, to come to an end. It turns out, that's also in the self-interest of literally everyone, even the imperialists. So the fact that this is in the interests of China is sort of a moot point.

That's like saying a doctor is only curing people of life threatening diseases so she can eat a decent meal and sleep in a comfortable bed. Uh, sure... I think we can all agree that whoever helps out should get a good life. What's the point of saying what you're saying, exactly?

Uhh, I think you missed the OPs entire response to you.

Iran is going to do what is in its best interest. There's no way to save the Palestinian people if Iran becomes engaged in full scale war.

Iran should do what is best for Iran AND what is best for the region AND what is best for the world. I have every belief that they are working through that calculus, or they have already and are taking the necessary steps to bring about the conditions needed to the best of their ability. That could mean preparing their military, rooting out infiltrators, tightening operational security, coordinating with allies, etc.

We should not be backseat driving a sovereign nation, especially not one that is actively resisting the hegemon.

There is an archive link right in the post description