

That’s a precursor to some extrajudicial killings and not at all an act of war
That’s a precursor to some extrajudicial killings and not at all an act of war
Then they said, “Oh God. The Germans were supposed to defeat those commies but now the commies are on track to win the entire war themselves!”
So they jumped in, fought less than 20% of the Nazis, got to Berlin long after the Russians liberated it, and then claimed that the US are the anti-fascist heroes after dropping nukes on hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians while in the middle of a negotiation with Japan.
You are likely a CCP bot and I’m conversing with a computer.
You’re a meme at this point. But, allow me to show you just how ridiculous you sound by taking your words and stringing them together.
You said:
Probably the exploit is referring to taking what is said out of context and using very key clips to drive a narrative.
To which I replied:
That is, quite literally, the definition of the news media in every country for the last 200 years (minimum)
To which you replied:
To varying degrees, yes. The key is the extent which that is true.
Meaning that it’s not sufficient to note that all news media does this because there is quantity and severity to consider here. And you will go on to help us understand the quantity and severity in your next sentence:
china is an exceptionally bad actor here, and has been for a long time.
You began the comparative assessment by saying China is an “exceptionally bad actor”, meaning that amongst all bad actors, China is such a bad actor they can be considered an exception to the, presumably, standard amount of badness of other societies.
You then double down on your comparative assessment:
So don’t throw around “everyone has always doing this” to dilute the extent or make it seem less pronounced and “everyone does this to this degree”
Reiterating your position that China is an “exceptionally bad actor”. You then attempt to preempt any further discussion with the thought-terminating cliche:
you’re just engaging in basically whataboutism.
At this point, I called you out for orientalism and then immediately provided evidence against your position that China is exceptionally bad in this regard. But first, let’s remember the context here. Your claim is that China is an exceptionally bad actor, compared to the bulk of other nations, through:
referring to taking what is said out of context and using very key clips to drive a narrative.
And here is my evidence for how China could not possibly be a worse actor than the British or the Americans:
British news media was crucial in launching the opium wars against China. The Iraq war was absolutely 100% supported by news media in multiple Western countries doing the bidding of the war hawks. China can’t possibly be a worse actor in this space than the many many examples of Western news media launching actual wars that killed millions.
I think it’s pretty clear what I’m saying and what I’m arguing against. You say China is an exceptionally bad actor at driving narratives for political gain. I then compare China to the two largest producers of news media in the world, the UK and the USA, and show that those actors are so bad that they are complicit in launching wars and killing millions. What I left unsaid was that China has never used narrative control over news media to manufacture consent for wars that killed millions.
On this basis, I argue that China could not possibly be considered exceptional EXCEPT perhaps in the opposite way you meant it. China is exceptional in that it’s use of narrative control has led to far fewer deaths overall, has led to far fewer wars and military conflicts, and has led to far less human rights violations. No doubt you will key in on this last item and make something of it.
Instead of seeing my argument as actually attacking your position with evidence, you return to your thought-terminating cliche:
More on with your whataboutism. [sic]
I assume you meant to write, “Move on with” but honestly I don’t know.
You then pivot:
Again I wasn’t saying there isn’t a similar usage of propaganda in western media but also there at least has existed the right and existence of other media which dissents from the state propaganda.
Now your claim is no longer that China is an “exceptionally bad actor” in “taking what is said of context and using very key clips to drive a narrative” but rather that China does not allow media which dissents from the state propaganda while Western nations do.
This requires an entirely NEW set of evidence and arguments, which I will not provide you, because you deserve only to be shamed for your impetuousness. Don’t fucking claim that I am a bot when you can’t even keep track of your own fucking position, you milquetoast.
So let’s review:
(You) Probably the exploit is referring to taking what is said out of context and using very key clips to drive a narrative.
(Me) That is, quite literally, the definition of the news media in every country for the last 200 years (minimum)
(You) To varying degrees, yes. The key is the extent which that is true. china is an exceptionally bad actor here, and has been for a long time.
(Me) British news media was crucial in launching the opium wars against China. The Iraq war was absolutely 100% supported by news media in multiple Western countries doing the bidding of the war hawks. China can’t possibly be a worse actor in this space than the many many examples of Western news media launching actual wars that killed millions.
(You) I wasn’t saying there isn’t a similar usage of propaganda in western media but also there at least has existed the right and existence of other media which dissents from the state propaganda.
So you can fuck right off to wherever people accept this level of asinine “discourse” where you just bang out cliches and vibes and have the memory of a goddamned goldfish and where the only people who could possibly disagree with you and try to hold you accountable are bots, because I don’t want to fucking deal with your shit.
We need this data charted
You LITERALLY made a comparative statement saying that China was a worse actor and when I presented you with evidence undermining your COMPARATIVE claim you call it whataboutism. You are an unserious person protecting your psyche.
What an orientalist claim. British news media was crucial in launching the opium wars against China. The Iraq war was absolutely 100% supported by news media in multiple Western countries doing the bidding of the war hawks. China can’t possibly be a worse actor in this space than the many many examples of Western news media launching actual wars that killed millions.
I agree. I think there’s two considerations that could flip Russia.
Military exhaustion. If the US can create a viable strategic threat to Russia, Russia may choose junior partner status over war. I think this is unlikely given the USA’s performance in Ukraine, but I know these games are played at the intelligence level and the USA may still be able to show Russian intelligence some form of dangerous strategic threat either in domestic irregulars or to Russia’s interests in Africa and SE Asia.
Financial gain for a younger faction of Russian bourgeoisie. Euromaidan showed us that despite decades of anti-West sentiment and Western duplicity, there was still enough support in Ukraine for a Western reproachment. I imagine there is likely a faction in Russia that is similar. If the USA can offer junior imperial status to them, it might convince them to seize power. I think this unlikely due to the failure of Western sanctions but it’s possible that some of the younger and willing bourgeoisie are in fact hurting and that the older bourgeoisie are dominating the partnerships with China. These would be conditions that could cause such a realignment.
I think you’ll find that industrialization happened under exactly the conditions of a pauperized indebted, poorly educated population suffering under racist policies.
Part of the challenge of reindustrialization is that the working class in America has gotten used to being part of the professional managerial class, has gotten used to things like OSHA, safety, comfort, etc. For 3 generations, at least, the cultural zeitgeist has denigrated laborious work.
What they’re doing looks like an attempt to solve this. Assuming they can even create industrial jobs:
Under these conditions, the vast majority of men are going to accept dangerous jobs in infrastructure and industry with moderate pay.
A smaller minority of people are going to be organizing resistance and revolution, just like they did during the industrial revolution, but that’s why Thiel is talking about using AI to make sure people are on their best behavior. If you can tightly surveil the workplace and the social behavior of your workers, you don’t get much labor organizing, and therefore you tank revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Then the only thing you have to worry about is the lumen, and you solve that with a militarized police force, concentration camps, and the industrialized prison system.
I am not saying this is going to work, I just think it’s important to do the thinking work to understand what these people are thinking and how their actions fit a systematized world view. We need to do this to understand the risks and to guide our actions and further analysis.
Ultimately, I think the USA has everything it needs to be second place in the industrialization game - except a market for its goods. By the time the USA industrializes enough to export more, Europe will likely be dependent enough on Russia and China that they will not align with the US economically. The only leverage the USA has on them right now is fossil fuels, which honestly might be enough to keep them as a market, but we’ll see.
Without a capitve market, the USA will struggle to export, even if it does industrialize without a fatal debt spiral. The only other solution I can see is to isolate the entire Western Hemisphere including Canada, Mexico, and the entirety of South America and then them into their market. But they’re so poor after centuries of oppression it would require some very creative financialization schemes.
It’s not about whether they will pull it off right now, it’s about trying to understand what the hell is going on in the minds of the dominant faction. I think reindustrialization is one of their strategic objectives.
Yog, you think this is going to be reproachment to ask Russia if they want to join the club? I hope Russia is hardened against the possibility by previous betrayals, but I have been worried since 2016 that the move has always been getting Russia to turn against China.
My confirmation-biased logic tells me Russia and China are only getting closer and Russia is building more dependencies on China, but my gut has been saying for almost 10 years that the only move the USA has ever had was to get Russia to join them against China. Maybe what I was sensing wasn’t world historical movements but merely the unspoken ambition of the new guard, but I have to imagine that if I am picking up on that ambition, they must have some reason to believe it’s possible to enlist Russia.
Great perspective. It makes the most sense. The faction that said “we will administer the ship of state for all of us” has been shown to have failed and a new faction is not only purging the old faction but is also purging the structures and systems they put in place. Essentially, the new faction of technologists is blowing through the old faction’s sunk cost fallacies and emotional attachments, creating the space (vacuum) for new systems to emerge.
And it’s clear what the new systems are going to be: artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, autonomous weapons platforms, domestic brownshirts, pre-crime, lebensraum, reindustrialization, and domestic acceleration of precarity.
We can only hope that it doesn’t include nukes. But I have a bad feeling I will see one used against humans before I die.
That is, quite literally, the definition of the news media in every country for the last 200 years (minimum)
The amount of effort the West puts into stopping the free flow of useful information is ridiculous. It boggles my mind to think about how much money in total has been spent on research, development, lobbying, monitoring, deployment, enforcement, adjudicating, mediating, communicating, branding, marketing, selling, consulting, repairing, PR, auditing, planning, testing, debating, hiring, firing, managing, and everything else JUST for DRM technologies.
Alternate headline: China shows people what Taiwaners say to support a particular position.
Love how you think it’s Russia and China that made empty promises meanwhile the USA unilaterally pulled out of every nuclear treaty, direct NATO to bomb sovereign countries, pinky swore to Saddam that Saddam could take military action in Kuwait and then subsequently invaded him, work with Siemens to install wiretaps in every single ambassador’s phone literally all over the world, has a standing policy to invade the international court of justice if an American is ever on trial, is the largest drug trafficking operation in the world, actively engaged in torture programs by just moving prisoners to other nations and torturing them there, trains death squads and unleashes them on poor and indigenous communities in Latin America, and has dropped more bombs during “peacetime” than China has during its entire modern existence.
But yeah, it’s China and Russia who can’t be trusted.
spend 5% on defense or learn Russian
Smooth-brain take. Russia has neither the means nor the intention to invade, occupy, and Russify Europe. You are projecting English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese crimes against humanity onto your ideological opponents.
Appeasement 2.0
It’s ridiculous that people like you think that Russia is the one being appeased. The USA is being appeased and has been since the end of WW2. The appeasement of the USA is appeasement 2.0 - from their atrocities in Vietnam, Laos, and Korea to their atrocities in the Pacific to their atrocities in “Latin America” to their atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to their outright torture of people all over the world to their oppression of people at home to their having the highest rate of imprisonment in the world to their economic bullying of the poor all over the world to their collective punishment in Cuba, Venezuela, and many other places.
Everyone has been appeasing the USA.
Yes this is absolutely about siphoning wealth into the USA and creating austerity conditions for 2 reasons:
The bourgeoisie needs to maintain concentration flows and the US is preparing for some of the flows to be constrainee by BRICS. Europe represents a source they can extract from.
The working class in Europe is too comfortable to go to war and are more likely to demand peaceful relationships with Russia and China which will isolate the USA. Having Europe under austerity creates the conditions for larger reactionary movements that can be used by the US to fight more hot proxy conflicts in an attempt to slow down BRICS economically and an attempt to create conditions for military and political error on the part of the anti-imperialist which the USA hopes to be able to exploit to create a rapidly cascading collapse of resistance.
Totally disingenuous understanding of what’s happening in this thread. There is no blind trust for the Russian government.
You have to understand one thing to unlock the perspective you need. It underpins both the reason MLs resist the official narrative of the empire and also why MLs accept certain narratives from other global actors. And that thing is an understanding of, and engagement with, history. It is our understanding of history that allows us to do readily understand when the empire is lying. It is also our understanding of history that allows us to readily understand when other states are saying something worth listening to. And it is our engagement with history that allows us to continue evaluating new statements from any sources.
In the case of Russia invading Ukraine, history is critical in understanding what’s going on. And the relevant history extends all the way back to Napoleon. Napoleon invaded Russia once. He fielded the French national military forces, along with some international forces, and marched literally all the way across Europe to invade Russia to enact discipline for Russia continuing to trade with England despite Napoleon declaring a unilateral universal blockade. It was on of the bloodiest campaigns in history and millions of Russians died.
Napoleon invaded Russia via the border that is Ukraine.
Another invasion killed millions of Russians, too. That was the Third Reich. They fielded their national military and they took marched across Europe to invade Russia. They also had international forces. They killed so many Russians.
The Third Reich invaded Russia via Ukraine.
The Ukraine border with Russia has been demonstrated to be impossible to secure without sacrificing millions of Russians lives. The solution, therefore, for Ukraine to be devoid of military threats against Russia - enough military to defend itself against European meddling, not so much that it could threaten millions of Russians lives.
We know this history. So when NATO does it’s first ever joint exercise with Ukraine in 2013, it raises a lot of eyebrows. NATO is a transnational nuclear military. It expands not by violence but by economic and political dominance. It is a standing army all over Europe but not controlled by European democracy. It has been demonstrated that NATO is controlled by the USA - again, a matter of history.
When Euromaidan happened in 2014, that was concerning to us because it was a movement that was aligned with European interests and explicitly a NATO-aligned movement. It got more worrying when we realized the US had top state actors on the ground including John McCain and Victoria Nuland. Russia choosing to annex Crimea was a clear message that Russia saw this particular movement as a threat, which we understand in the historical context of previous invasions.
After Euromaidan the NATO exercises got more numerous and more dangerous including flying B-52 nuclear-capable bombers in the region and simulating an invasion of Kaliningrad. Remember that military exercises and simulations are indistinguishable from real events until the last second when forces do not violate international law. That means the simulated invasion of Kaliningrad included the creation of supply chains and the mobilization of units and then moving them in formation to their target and turning away only when they reach the border.
This is a real and present danger to Russian security. If NATO establishes full capabilities in Ukraine, the only way for Russia to survive would be to lose millions of lives during an invasion over the border.
All of this comes from our understanding of history and our engagement with it to evaluate event and statements. So when Putin says NATO activity on Russia’s border is why he acted, we acknowledge the congruence with the historical reality. But when he says Ukraine should never have been granted independence, we understand the errors in reasoning while also acknowledging the strategic military perspective it comes from.
When Russia says they are de-nazifying Ukraine, we understand the historical context of why that statement can be made. But we are also materialists and we understand to what degree the statement is incongruous with reality and history.
This understanding and engagement with history is what liberals lack and it’s why those aligned with the empire can’t properly criticize the propaganda and it’s also why they are unequipprd to evaluate statements from other states, like Russia. It’s why counter-cultural liberals just blanket deny what empire says and then get confused why MLs are willing to support narratives that match Russian or Chinese talking points.
Unless you engage with history and dig in, your resistance to empire will always be shallow and your understanding of what the rest of the world is doing will be purely vibes based.
Nuclear war helps nobody. Hegseth doesn’t have an option here, nor does anyone in the West. They tried to push their nuclear capabilities to the last border and Russia stopped them. When the only further option is escalating towards nuclear war, then you really don’t have options. Hegseth, the media talking head that he is, has been tasked with communicating the reality on the ground, not making any real decisions here
The CIA is part of the military. So the US military is violating Mexican airspace