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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • For the record, every major country is enagaged in Political Warfare against their enemies so I’ve said nothing controversial. Secondly, China is not inherantly bad or inherantly virtuous. They participate on the global stage just like everyone else, so you should ask yourself why you immediately dismiss China’s agency here. Finally, and most importantly, China’s approach to Political Warfare is laid out in the Three Warfares doctine, and has been well-documented. You can read more about it here if you’re really interested acting in good faith: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/01402390.2013.870071

    If not, you can continue to label people who say things you don’t like as conspiracy theorists. Oh and I’m not a Democrat, I’m probably further to the left than most people on this app but I don’t worship or apologise for vast and powerful nation states. Whether that’s China or anyone else.

    Edit: spelling





  • I think it’s important to make such arguments without neglecting to point out that some very real, very desperate people are counting on the assistance USAID currently provides. People will die because of this.

    A much less evil way to handle this is to reroute the funds to some benign organisation who will carry out the existing functions of USAID. But that’s not what Musk is doing. There’s no nuance. Much like his first month at Twitter, he’s just taking a wrecking ball to the government and seeing what’s left standing. Unfortunately the largest imperialist arms of the US government (State Department, DoD) are still left standing, while the one that is currently relied upon by some of the most desperate souls on the planet has been destroyed.





  • The Israel lobby has a stranglehold on politics in the US. Both major parties are beholden to them, and need to bend over backwards to try to keep these groups happy, otherwise their campaign is dead in the water

    The assertion that the Israel lobby would destroy Biden for simply calling a ceasefire after unequivocally supporting Israel’s post-October 7 actions, is utterly unfounded. The kind of strong condemnation of the Zionist project that would make AIPAC walk is something Biden/Harris would never do.

    On the pro-Palestine side, my view is that all the Harris campaign had to show was progress, either a ceasefire or a policy break with Biden, to get most of the protesters back on side. But I’m not 100% on whether she had the political skill to walk that tightrope.

    I do think you make my point for me, though. The party did the calculus, and came out on the side that they see AIPAC support as more valuable than the pro-Palestine vote. With that in mind, the party should own that decision and not vilify the voters they scorned for not supporting them anyway. People would be a lot less angry if they just accept that they got the strategy wrong in Michigan and commit to doing things differently next time. But they won’t, because this is a party that never learns its lessons.






  • Some insight from across the pond:

    Our last Prime Minister was a British Indian from the Conservative party. Recent right wing and far-right members of cabinet have included many more Brits of Indian descent, including two of the most heinously anti-immigrant cabinet members we’ve ever had. One of them, Suella Braverman, ran for party leadership on an anti-immigrant platform, pointing out that Indians are the largest group who overstay their visas in the UK.

    I think very similar things can explain why Usha Vance, Kash Patel, Vivek Ramaswamy and the like can align with an openly racist MAGA crowd:

    1. Class matters more than race. Most of these people grew up privileged and don’t identify with the common immigrant or brown person’s experson

    2. Power hungry people come from all backgrounds and will do whatever they need to get what they want (in Usha Vance’s case that’s being first lady one day)

    3. Submitting to model minority status, as many well-to-do immigrant families from South Asia do, means implicitly accepting, and ultimately reflecting, white supremacist values

    And as with all issues rooted in history, you can blame the British for some of this. A white supremacist world view where Indians stand above the darker races was introduced to India by the British over a century ago. The British wanted East Africa to become “the America of the Hindu” so they educated and trained a generation of Indian colonial administrators and enforcers. This world view of Indians as superior to others, if subordinate to whites, did not disappear with colonialism. A lot of the people who held those views came directly to Britain and their children became right-wing voters and politicians. The connection with the US is less of a straight line, but you can hear it when you listen to Vivek talk about African-Americans, for example.




  • I wouldn’t get too complacent about the fact that the UK finally moved ever-so-slightly to the left. The press is just waiting to tear Starmer limb-from-limb. You saw that with how they amplified all the BS stuff about his CPS days. One good scandal could topple Labour and open the door to reform. Not delivering any material improvements for people who are struggling could have the same effect