darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Marco Rubio Bot eh?

Well I should point out I could easily see between high hundreds of thousands and over a million Trump people simply dying because A) a lot of them are old B) Covid which they deny and had 4 years to die from it.

I could also see a million or so being disillusioned with Trump, either Q people who thought he’d do different or people who saw something else in him that he didn’t live up in his new campaigning. Also a lot easier to just check the box to re-elect the president for a certain amount of Americans who may not even be consistent Republicans but just people who thought he did a good enough job giving them free money during Covid and deserved to continue. So those numbers are if anything low and suggest IMO he probably gained some voters as well between losing people to dying and disillusionment and such.

So then the discussion must go towards those Democratic voters, they must have really alienated them, they must have really lost the enthusiasm and angered them. Sure we can discount a couple million as racists who voted for Biden because he was a white man with ties to anti-busing and crime legislation and KKK leadership but not nearly all of them. There’s still a significant chunk, millions and millions you have to account for.

Dick and Liz Cheney and now these ghouls too? Really making me hope for a Trump win.

Acceptance is meaningless.

Democrats accept it yet they also are trapped within the confines of what is possible in a liberal capitalist empire which means nothing is done. So they protest, they ensure that the fact it is an issue is /SEEN/ and that they are /seen/ being on the right side of it but do nothing or enact plans that were supposed to be enacted 30 years ago to actually work and are far too little, too late now.

So yes eventually even reactionaries will accept it but then they’ll pull the Google CEO move which is to say well it’s too late now so might as well double down on AI and other pollution and hope some technology of ours magics up a solution for us and then when that doesn’t work in 20-25 years and the worst of it is hitting they’ll say we had no way of knowing and blame China and various bad guys and a few token dead white people who are beyond the reach of any justice.

We’re heading over the cliff, we’re over the cliff and one of the drivers insists it’s just a dip in the road while the other horrified is scolding them for driving off the cliff but insisting they needed to take that turn they missed when they headed over the cliff, they’re insistent that they take it at the next opportunity despite that option of course being long past.

Where I live they’d own Albertsons, Food 4 Less, Ralphs, Vons, pretty much everything except Target, Walmart, Whole Foods/Amazon Fresh, and some smaller and specialty grocers like Aldi/Trader Joes.

Also, last I checked, there are two Aldi corporations (Aldi sud/Aldi nord), one of them owns Trader Joes, the other one runs US Aldi stores, they’re not the same entity (though there is a history there) and though they often seen to share a fraction of product ideas I can say the same product at the two stores are often noticeably different and almost certainly made by different suppliers.

No they couldn’t have. Several people quit, they cried about Bezos blocking them from endorsing Kamala, other news outlets reported it.

All Bezos could have done in that situation would have been to say nothing but people would absolutely have been the wiser about it being blocked by him and they’d probably lose as many subscriptions as from this. I doubt his statement wins or loses him any meaningful number of subscribers, it’s just cover so he doesn’t have to come out and say actually he’d rather stay on Trump’s good side in case he wins and/or maybe he thinks Trump is better for his interests but of course would prefer associating with someone so uncouth.

It’s predicated on the old racist trope that Chinese steal everything and cannot invent anything of their own because both they are asiatic hordes and also communism no iphone. So it holds that if we hadn’t invented them, they couldn’t have stolen it and raced ahead of our plodding efforts and our existing advantage in ICE would be too great (by decades) for them to overcome from their starting position. Which is of course wrong, laughably so.

They may see with the US risking getting into a war with Russia and wanting a war with China that their own time to pull the US into a conflict to settle the region’s problems in their favor using the might of the US is quickly drawing to a close and will likely not exist in a few years so why let a crisis go to waste when they can try and get the US to take out Iran and Hezbollah for them which would allow greater “isreal” to become a reality. It’s an expansionist mindset too. Also fascists gonna fascist.

Here we go. Now did they have an ounce of sense and just pound the desert and a few unimportant places and claim otherwise in their propaganda so Iran has an out not to retaliate in kind? Or more likely did these deranged zionists hit important things and Iran has to hit back even harder and kill US troop scum manning their air defenses as well? At which point the US can either leave with its tail between its legs like Reagan did Lebanon in the 80s or escalate in some way including potentially war.

I hope the people of Iran remain safe regardless of outcome. I hope the colonizers of the zionist occupation continue to feel and be very unsafe as they should be until they stop their genocide and dismantle their apartheid regime.

Wow great read and some nice hopium!

I like this:

And America itself can’t even show up, they’re actually in the middle of a long retreat from the world, furiously throwing proxies in front of themselves and resorting to open terrorism.

It conjures up images of an old American style cartoon character whipping out things to put in front of them as they hastily backpedal.

Any links to this actual interview to save for later?

To be honest Russia isn’t as strongly denying it anymore. I’ve long thought that the DPRK should send troops both to crush fascism and the US/NATO empire and because sad as it is that war costs lives, the DPRK has no warfare experience within the last 60 years and things have changed a lot. A few brigades getting experience on modern combat with Russia could take those lessons back and save many lives if/when the occupied south attacks with the Americans.

Also AFAIK didn’t occupied Korea already send a bunch of shells to Ukraine? They may not have been operating at full steam in support of them but I’m pretty sure they already chose to get involved.

Though I am still dubious that this has happened it wouldn’t be that strange and wouldn’t change my position that Russia has the right to do this.

Though I do find it a bit unlikely Russia would actually allow it as it would give the west a pretext to pour their own troops over the border by saying Russia did it first with an ally and all is fair. Most likely the DPRK troops that are in Russia reported by the west are just there for training and learning the latest combat lessons from Russian troops in modern warfare.

Hopefully the Russian Duma ratifies the treaty on mutual defense and cooperation soon as that would certainly deter the US somewhat from attacking Korea.

They’re claiming onions.

Unfortunately for those military types they’re not in charge. The CIA has the ability with State Dept to just start a war. Instruct their pawn in Taiwan to declare independence, ensure the US president who is commander of the military knows they must intervene to defend them or else be seen as weak. President orders it, generals object and facepalm but China is already on the move and there’s nothing that can stop it at that point.

So it’s not what the generals want. Yes they can probably stop or dissuade the president from launching pre-emptive attacks for no particular reason but it won’t go down that way. Instead it will go down as a crisis (an engineered one obviously) that will occur, demand action and the US will feel based on everything that it is that it has no choice but to act and so it will be.

I suppose China could just let them have Taiwan but if they do the US will station tens of thousands of troops and missile systems and probably nukes on Taiwan before long and China won’t get it back this century in this case which is a real deal-breaker.

I think that military conflict doesn’t need to grow intense.

Like Ukraine it just needs to happen enough that the US government can pull a big lever called “fast decoupling” and force companies out of China quickly by slamming down a wall of sanctions. And like with Ukraine they can drag the EU into this via “defending democracy” and get them to pull their companies out and to do sanctions, divestment, decoupling.

This may be more about re-orienting the world for campism and a new cold war with the west withdrawing and putting up economic walls against China/Russia/BRICS and then trying to draw as much of the world as possible into their sphere while keeping out as much of the world from the BRICS sphere as possible with a strong possibility they can get India to pick up the slack from China and turn their position in BRICS into the kind of Turkish/Hungarian position inside NATO which is a spoiler who restrains the rest of it and takes contrary actions for its own self against the group interests and agenda. It’s a modified form of the cold war playbook the US used to success in the first cold war in the 50s through 70s. Strategic coups, destabilization operations (terrorism, separatism in key regions) to disrupt China’s supply routes and access to key resources and the belt and road.

This would be a time buying exercise. It would lock down NATO/EU markets for only western companies and non-Chinese/Russian firms and aim to out-compete using cheap labor while betting on crushing China/Russia on high technology leading to growing discontent and shortages as well as them falling behind. What if one of the points of the Ukraine war is to kill enough young men that they can justify importing a ton of desperate migrants to create a cheap factory (deeply destabilized due to the tensions of this situation) on the periphery of the EU to replace Russia/China along with their utilization of India? I wonder sometimes.

There’s a real chance the US will just do something like deploy mines or AI-drones and dump them in the straits to try and cut off China’s navy and land a bunch of weapons systems and special forces to fight China. The idea of a full confrontation between the US navy and the PLAN may never materialize so the intensity of the conflict will be lower. The US will use their vast air power to airlift in supplies and troops to the island. China can still win if they want to but it increases the costs and draw it out to be enough of a media spectacle that the people in the west are turned against China and the pressure for decoupling succeeds.

It’s from Season 26, ep 8, “The Curse of Fenric”, specifically part 3.

The Doctor reveals that faith or strong belief repels “hemavores” or vampires and repels a bunch by closing his eyes and believing in something. A higher ranking Soviet soldier that landed with a group of such soldiers in England during the second world war (reasons I forget) ends up separated from most of his troops who are still on the beach and instead with the Doctor, his companion Ace, and a priest. He insists he must go back for his men. Ace (the Doctor’s present companion) asks him to teach the soldier “the singing” to scare them off. The Doctor states he either really believes in something or he doesn’t to which the Soviet soldier replies he believes in the revolution. Some scene-cuts later the soldier, leaving the church is confronted by a group of these creatures and pulls out the pin, focusing on his belief in the revolution and they clutch themselves and start screaming as he walks slowly through them.

Someone made an edit with the Soviet anthem playing layered over it but in the original show it’s just dramatic music stings with some ringing noises like those that accompanied the Doctor’s actions earlier, no anthem plays.

And as mentioned elsewhere a priest in the episode can’t repel them because he lost his faith due to the war.

Seems like Magneto is kind of in the same vein too. He seems like a mutant Malcolm X who does heinous shit to justify opposing his otherwise sensible objections to the slow liberal reformism of the X-Men.

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I don’t think they were. They wanted an attack. They may not have expected the scope of it, hoped for something less humiliating and problematic that gave them justification to speed up the genocide without angering the domestic population of settlers so much and scaring some off.

Beyond that though there’s that IRA quip about those on the defensive needing to get lucky every single day whereas those on the offense need only get lucky once. It’s the same thing here. Maybe Hamas got “lucky” just as after many attempts to kill Nasrallah they got lucky and got him (I still think they followed the Iranian he was meeting with or some amount of commanders and concluded he was there). The pager thing is just unfortunately something that Hezbollah didn’t account for being a possibility in their operational security. Also it’s quite possible it was impossible to spot the small amounts of explosive without opening the batteries which few are going to do. They’re going to at most check for bugs or unauthorized hardware.

Now that further attacks succeeding serve no purpose militarily or politically they’re going to use their intelligence effectively. Though if they start losing the western crowd I wouldn’t put it beyond them to stage an atrocity of some sort happening to get the narrative of victimhood back. So far there’s no sign of a need for that.

Well obviously. But I didn’t feel like writing for hours. Any geopolitical analysis of this scale that is only two paragraphs is going to be simplified.

Whether it’s overly simple, I don’t think so. I think I captured the gist of how things seem to be going. Of course I can’t know the future, there are twists and turns and happenings no one expects.

But I do know this. Europe is bound to the US by the bonds of white supremacy and settler-colonialist legacy and the threads of neo-colonialist interest they still have. Their interests are one in certain ways and that makes it exceptionally hard for them to truly gain independence from the force that’s been occupying them (literally) and bailed out their capitalists at the end of WW2. Like a bunch of evil Captain Planet planeteers through their powers and colonial legacy, tricks, and support combined the US became capitalism’s consolidated champion as well as the global defender of the white supremacist world order.

Let’s not forget the NSA was spying on Germany’s prime minister among many others. It’s not just that they have troops in these countries, it’s that hey have dirt, leverage, ways of pushing people into or out of power when it comes down to it if they really need to make a change. They haven’t used these for decades because they’re unseemly and don’t fit with their new image so it’s a problem if they’re caught and because the EU is close enough in interests to them that it’s never been a problem. Gladio is a reminder of the tip of the iceberg of how far they’d go. Much as Google keeps Mozilla funded and alive to stave off challenges of monopoly the US allowed Europe some independence to lend legitimacy to their claims of different opinions and the idea that the EU and western Europe and most of NATO aren’t just a bunch of vassals for the US.

As Parenti once quipped, if you never go beyond where you’re supposed to go you never notice the tug of the leash, it’s only when you stray that you feel that and realize the limits imposed on you.

The Nordstream bombings was the tugging of the leash and we saw Europe very obediently heel and they’ve with a whimper accepted the US narrative lie about it being Ukraine that did it.

That’s not happening. This is meaningless talk.

They’re still withholding the machines and maintenance to the top end processes from China on national security grounds. They’ve already committed economic suicide. Germany is blaming Ukraine for the Nordstream attacks.

They lost their chance for independence this decade with the blowing up of Nordstream and when they all jumped onboard with anti-Russia sanctions and supplying weapons. The US has an interest in keeping the war in Ukraine burning or ending in a Korea type situation without a clear winner to keep Europe off Russian gas and reliant on US gas. Meanwhile the US poaches their talent, empties their industry into its pockets (some goes to China but that’s the way the cookie crumbles), and so on.

The idea of an independent Europe is laughable, it was happening but in too weak a way to ever succeed and the us sabotaged it easily and will again. After Ukraine the US is going to use Taiwan as an issue, there will be a big thing about it declaring independence, Europe will of course have to “stand with European values and democracy” and antagonize China and commit more economic suicide in decoupling from China to abide by US suggested sanctions, and so on. Europe is cooked. They’re going to go to the hard right parties after that happens since the left is not allowed at which point they’ll either start doing imperialism with the US while brutalizing migrants or they might actually take a more skeptical stance against the US and adopt a more mercenary position under the banner of white supremacy and reaction. Either way I’m sorry to say I don’t see socialism in Europe this decade or probably even the 2030s.