SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @ SeventyTwoTrillion @hexbear.net

"Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be

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not gonna happen, he's gonna negotiate it downwards

if he is allowed to do it because he avoids getting a frank discussion from the alphabet boys in a smoke-filled room, and dodges a bunch of heart attack guns, then Trump is truly the greatest anti-imperialist of our age

Do you believe that the Hezbollah of 2006, which beat Israel, is relatively weaker today than the Hezbollah of today? I have seen no evidence that Israel is doing relatively better than they did in 2006, and only evidence to the contrary.

doing an ethnic cleansing of civilians while not defeating your enemy militarily is called "losing"

I can make it my "goal" to shit my pants; if I then proceed to violently doo-doo myself, if I then say "mission accomplished. victory has been achieved, all objectives secured" then everybody around me isn't gonna start clapping and cheering at my success

Next megathread here.

@LargePenis@hexbear.net I will do a Morocco COTW next week if you want to write something up. I can leave the post preamble blank if you need a few days to put it together.

I think you could abstractly argue that Biden has been such a continuation of Trump's policies (losing abortion rights, massive assaults on trans rights, oil expansion, incompetent and pointless attempts at reindustrialization, needless hostility to China, getting NATO back in line, etc etc) that people will look back and kinda summarize 2016-2028 as The Trump Years, but honestly it's not really about Trump as much as it is America quadrupling down on neoliberalism and its imperial ambitions, and the imperial boomerang returning. It would be reading America's incompetence and banal evil through the lens of Trump's incompetence and banal evil, as if a president has some profound psychological ability to establish a paradigm and isn't 90% constrained by all that has come before (which we, of course, live in the context of, coconuts, something something).

of course, as you say, the Dems will do the worst bad faith version of this argument and in 2028 ask us to just pretend that Biden was never president and that Trump is responsible everything bad

The utterly monumental task of getting three imperialist anglo countries to commit further to an organization they were already part of; the diplomatic genius required to pull off such a move is staggering. It makes China getting together Saudi Arabia and Iran - countries that share historically fairly hostile competing Islamic doctrines and on opposite sides of a geopolitical divide, with allies that have been attacked by the other side - look like child's play

One wonders if the Hannibal Directive would apply in that case. They just have a squadron of Israeli bombers overhead in every country that Netanyahu visits, ready to act if he becomes a "hostage"

Like with Gaza, it's impossible (and not very useful) to know which side "controls" what territory, considering the nature of guerrilla warfare and Hezbollah's subterranean capabilities; the further Israel advances, the easier it is for Hezbollah to hit supply lines and set traps. Also like Gaza, Israel's own casualty numbers are unreliable to the point of not even having a superficial relationship to reality. An Israeli column 5000 strong could get 100% obliterated by a bunch of MOABs and they'd say "1 dead, 2 lightly injured"; an Israeli force of 10 could get all killed and they might tell the truth. It entirely depends on what breaches containment, what Hezbollah reports, and what they think they can release to manipulate the internal mood. So it's a frustratingly yet understandably opaque war compared to Russia-Ukraine.

Nonetheless, it's pretty clear to me that Hezbollah is winning fairly handily. The big battle right now is at Khiam, which seems like a mixture of a conventional battle akin to Bakhmut, and a guerrilla battle like in Gaza. Like with locations in Gaza, Hezbollah isn't really "defending" the city as much as it's using it as a way to attrit Israeli forces, as far as I can tell, but that quasi-defense still seems pretty strong. Hezbollah appears to be a hybrid army, you can't quite compare them to Hamas nor a fully conventional army. There's been a degree of advances all along the border that have over time been repulsed, reinforced, repulsed again, etc, but nothing so far that looks like it could convincingly lead to a meaningful Hezbollah tactical defeat at any location. Israel is maybe 25% of the way to Tyre, for instance.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has continued to put steady pressure on Israel via drone and missiles, with no detected diminishing of capability (strengthening, even). Haifa and its surrounding environment is hit pretty regularly, and with a population of 300,000, forcing it to evacuate (either in an official manner or by people deciding to flee south of their own accord) would be a big event. Hezbollah has demonstrated that it is capable of hitting basically anywhere it wants inside the country as Israeli air defense continues to degrade, but has (very intelligently) focussed on hitting military targets instead of civilian ones, whereas Israel is doing the opposite. It's obvious that Hezbollah is holding back its most devastating barrages for key later moments, as we know they have enough missiles to make civilian life inside Israel very unpleasant if they decide to start firing.

All ceasefire news is total bunk and should not be paid any attention to. They are replicating the Gaza strategy of being constantly two weeks away from signing a deal but never actually doing it in order to invent a false reality and make their actions seem a little more palatable. Israel will be defeated by force and forced to retreat. There will be no ceasefire until every Zionist is south of the border AND outside of Gaza, or until there is no more Israel for there to be a border with.

I love how they have some real goddamn passion in them. Even when the US is describing its set of Bad Evil Countries, the way that US propaganda functions (at least partially) is constant repetition of a set of words or phrases, which are brainworms that burrow into the heads of people, influencing you at least somewhat even if you try and consciously reject it. "Full-scale invasion" or "unprovoked invasion" are two big ones that everybody here is familiar with and rolls their eyes at, as well as "rules-based international order".

But these words and phrases are so bloodless and dispassionate. The words "detestable" and "murderers" is so much better than "authoritarian" and "regime". The phrase "a country where criminals take pleasure in human blood" feels like a human wrote it, compared to whatever bland quasi-AI description the US trots out about Hamas or Hezbollah. The DPRK saying that "Joe Biden is a rabid dog who must be beaten to death with a stick" has real emotion behind it, unlike the stupid fucking "Putin is just like Voldemort and NATO is Dumbledore's Army!!1!" sludge that the West pipes out

on the bright side, if nuclear armageddon does come for us in the UK, it'll only take 15 minutes for the nukes to arrive. less fretting about imminent destruction. if I'm getting vaporized and can do nothing to stop it then I want as little forewarning as possible

I guarantee that if this is a genuinely effective treatment then all the Western coverage will be along the lines of "China curing Alzheimers only makes their CATASTROPHIC population issues even worse by keeping people alive for longer. A wiser strategy might be to execute by firing squad every person over retirement age (below a certain net worth, of course), both fixing the youth/elderly imbalance and providing firing squad jobs in a APOCALYPTICALLY crashing economy that may result in the total destruction of the CCP any second. At the very least, they could force the surgery to cost $200,000 per person in order to rally a collapsing GDP."

bonus points if they accidentally leave in "full-scale invasion" and "brutal, unprovoked, failing war" as the mandatory 16 buzzwords per article before realizing they were talking about one of the other Bad Countries

we're gonna see an increase in human rights propaganda targeting Canada very shortly

(though it's not even gonna be propaganda really)

video 4 looks like fucking space laser bursts

you know I like my ICBM fried
cold beer on a friday night

It’s not the first time that reports of tensions between La Libertad Avanza’s top two have emerged. Earlier this year, Villarruel described Milei as a “poor little ham” sandwiched between herself and his sister, presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei – whom he describes as “the boss.”

I don't believe in the technofeudalism hypothesis by Varoufakis but it's undeniable that as events move forward, we are seeing increasingly archaic things come back to the present. Milei is the twice-farcical return of Louis Philippe, given the relationship with his sister.

hey, we all do it. all of us have moments where we refuse to connect cause and effect

Today: "I have expertly delegated the completion of this vital task (the dishes) to tomorrow"

Tomorrow: "Some incompetent lazy asshole has unfairly given me the task of doing the dishes today"

Today: "I'm staying up late because I need extra time to unwind and relax."

Tomorrow: "Yet another day of being inexplicably tired, god fucking damn it"

Security Council veto power probably has prevented additional world wars, possibly nuclear ones, so I guess it's nice in that respect, but it does definitely come with the inability to punish a Great Power diplomatically.

In this vein of discussion: I'm honestly unsure what the stage after the United Nations looks like in this regard. Until global socialism, there will be nuclear-armed countries with differing interests; even relatively close allies can have major problems. The UN is (more-or-less) the diplomatic arm of American hegemony, so perhaps it falls as the US falls, but the US (and the UK and France etc) will still have nukes even as a regional power, so perhaps not. Maybe the UN will stay approximately how it is until the breakdown of capitalism, with a declining US hegemony only making other parts of the UN a little more functional? It's not really high on my list of priorities to care about though.

revving up the electric cattle prod and only dust comes out

"fully" is hard to define; I think Bangladesh's "problem" is that Hasina tried to develop domestic industry gradually with the idea of moving up the manufacturing chain, and the US wasn't fooled. She did have legitimate problems as well but the US supports literally dozens of terrible, unpopular, and genuinely tyrannical leaders around the world at any given moment so that wasn't the thing that got her overthrown