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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

@ SeventyTwoTrillion @hexbear.net

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142
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2794
Joined
4 yr. ago

"Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back."

  • I am genuinely fascinated by what exactly Iran will do in response to this, because they clearly went into this situation knowing that they'd face heavy reprisals and yet that hasn't seemed to dissuade them. They seem pretty confident by directly attacking Israel, whereas Israel's responses are usually more covert or via proxies ("oh yeah, that terrorist attack DEFINITELY wasn't linked to us, no sirree").

    I wonder, for example, if the monarchies currently begging Iran to not hit them and telling Israel that they can't use their airspaces will actually change Iran's strategy, or if they'll just blow everything up anyway.

    If you directly attack a nuclear-armed state backed by another, more powerful state with even more nukes when you yourself do not have nukes, then you've clearly got some reason to believe you can win or you'd just keep maintaining semi-plausible deniability by arming your regional allies and attacking Israel that way. Sure, states can and have made counterproductive decisions based on bad intel but Iran knows perfectly well that Israel could drop nukes on the 20 most populated cities in its territory within an hour or so and yet does not seem to be dissuaded.

  • what is the news mega position on the Schleswig-Holstein Question?

  • Apologies, edited!

  • Thanks!

  • The Country of the Week is Moldova!

    Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to Moldova.

    If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

    • What is the general ideology of the political elite? Do they tend to be protectionist nationalists, or are they more free trade globalists? Are they compradors put there by foreign powers? Are they socialists with wide support by the population?
    • What are the most important domestic political issues that make the country different from other places in the region or world? Are there any peculiar problems that have continued existing despite years or decades with different parties?
    • Is the country generally stable? Are there large daily protests or are things calm on average? Is the ruling party/coalition generally harmonious or are there frequent arguments or even threats?
    • Is there a particular country to which this country has a very impactful relationship over the years, for good or bad reasons? Which one, and why?
    • What are the political factions in the country? What are the major parties, and what segments of the country do they attract?
    • Are there any smaller parties that nonetheless have had significant influence? Are there notable separatist movements?
    • How socially progressive or conservative is the country generally? To what degree is there equality between men and women, as well as different races and ethnic groups? Are LGBTQIA+ rights protected?
    • Give a basic overview of the last 50 or 100 years. What's the historical trend of politics, the economy, social issues, etc - rise or decline? Were they always independent or were they once occupied, and how have things been since independence if applicable?
    • If you want, go even further back in history. Were there any kingdoms or empires that once governed the area?

    Check out the reading list.

  • If I went out with even a tenth of the courage of Sinwar, I'd be happy.

    I had no idea that he was fighting alongside his soldiers this whole time, or at least on occasion. Makes him surviving a year of war and genocide even more impressive than it already as.

    I think we all knew that Sinwar's death was inevitable, especially after the death of Nasrallah proved there was no reluctance about killing Resistance leaders (versus trying to capture for intel, propaganda purposes, etc). They were both ageing men in an occupation where you usually die young. The Resistance will not weaken - if anything, it will grow stronger, especially with the video proof that even the leaders are war heroes through-and-through. They'll probably have to start turning down new fighters in Lebanon and Gaza, they'll arrive in such large numbers.

    The modern Che Guevara.

  • if Ukraine wins: look at how smol little Ukraine managed to take on all these different countries and organizations all by themselves with zero aid whatsoever, no help, Russia just sucks that much and Ukrainians are truly the ubermenschen

    if Ukraine loses: well, it wasn't really a fair fight anyway, smol little Ukraine got ganged up on by a bunch of imperialist terrorist regimes, very unfair, very much against the rules-based international order

  • We are getting to the point where Israel is having to choose which missiles to let through, which is not a great spot to be in when your population has a very low tolerance for casualties.

    You really don't wanna be in a position where you have to protect your civilian centers just on the off-chance that Iran will hit them (even though they and Hezbollah and Yemen don't seem interested in causing mass civilian death and instead strike military facilities) while leaving your airbases and planes unprotected, which are the only functional part of the Israeli armed forces given that their soldiers seem more interested in taking selfies and wistfully gazing out of windows in Gaza and then getting blown into chunks than actually executing a competent invasion strategy.

  • Militarily? Both absolute and relative decline, the invention of a small quantity of high-tech arms does not at all make up for industry shifting abroad, and other countries now have militaries that can take on the American military especially if it insists on dividing itself between a bunch of wars around the world

    Economically? Increased absolutely but decreased in relative terms, largely thanks to China which has skyrocketed (and is bringing dozens of countries up with them). The end of the process of dedollarization is decades and millions of deaths away (just as the transition between the sterling/gold standard and the dollar took decades and two world wars which killed tens of millions of people) but the fact that we're even on that path now is a clear sign that alternatives have grown stronger

  • man, I really fucking hate it when I establish a settler-colonial regime upon acts of great violence and cruelty in order to make the local and regional populations break, and then those populations start resistance movements and get guns, and then I assassinate the leaders of those resistance movements because that'll surely break them this time, ah shit half the region is pissed off at me, well if I just keep attacking them then they'll surely break and we've labelled this strategy "deterrence" so it must be real, but now those resistance movements have new leaders and better guns and lots more of them, so now I'll just keep attacking them and once again kill their leaders and surely, finally this time they'll break, oh fuck they've come back with yet more leaders and yet more guns, okay well surely...

    but yeah anyway I'm sure at the end of this process we'll eventually be able to live in peace, we'll just kill everybody that opposes us for centuries on end until the buildings have turned to rubble and the rubble into stones and the stones into dust x100 and this entire time we're being repeatedly attacked from all angles FOR NO FAULT OF OUR OWN, yeah I reckon this is a sustainable long-term strategy, hey wait what did you just say about American arms production rates

  • I think the most cynical interpretation is that they're kinda just occupying forces but without the baggage of having them necessarily be Western. The slightly less cynical view is that they're just there to make the UN seem like it's accomplishing anything while not actually doing anything because the UN is more-or-less just another diplomatic/military arm of the United States. It's like pretending to work on something innocuous like writing emails or whatever while your boss walks behind you, but your actual secret job is being a drone operator murdering children all day long.

    I think the UN could probably be shifted towards doing some good in the world, it's not necessarily fatally flawed from the foundation upwards unlike most US imperialist institutions, but in practice I think that it'll go out once the US hegemon has well and truly fallen, just like the League of Nations collapsed once the British Empire/Western Europe was in its final years as the hegemon, and it'll be replaced by a China-headquartered version sooner or later. If for no other reason than in 20 years, the US will have probably sanctioned every country outside of Europe and getting diplomats into New York will be a total nightmare.

  • Israel is at its weakest moment and continues to get weaker; there will be no return to the status quo, nor even an attempt to do so.

    Do not mistake the desperate flailing and biting of a terminally wounded animal with a leg torn off and an arrow in its side as a sign of strength and power.

  • Yeah, I really recommend it if you want some good in-depth historical analysis on how austerity, neoliberalism, anti-communism and fascism all links together into a coherent whole. It's definitely laid out more like a thesis-turned-book rather than something more pop-politics, but I never found it that hard to understand, the arguments and chapters are all laid out very well

  • this is literally TikTok manifestation but for geopolitics. if we keep saying that something is true, it has to become true, even as we feed the next wave of Israeli soldiers in to take selfies 500 feet away from a border village and get obliterated by Hezbollah rockets. it's always worked for us before, why wouldn't it work now?

    trying to manufacture alternative realities only really works if you have a decent chance of, y'know, winning, and therefore stand a chance in the future of creating those alternative realities that you've been establishing via propaganda. there is nothing that Israel could do short of carpet bombing southern Lebanon with nukes that would meaningfully degrade Hezbollah. it is simply too deeply embedded, both literally (miles of tunnels underground), socially, economically, and politically. taking out Nasrallah and the subsequent bombings since then have taken Hezbollah from 100% strength to like, 99.5% strength. Hamas is still very much intact and still killing Zionists after a year of war and they are almost entirely shut off from the world; Hezbollah can keep going as long as there's a border to smuggle goods across, and it is impossible for Israel to totally occupy Lebanon. they can barely occupy a small village.

    this leads me to believe that the Israeli strategy will be to eventually withdraw and stop trying after taking colossal losses, then in the classic Israeli fashion, declare victory and say that Hezbollah has been destroyed, but I'm unsure what the point of that will be when the missiles keep firing over the border and settlers are still unable to return to the north because Hezbollah will still be 95% intact.

  • it's like in Ukraine when the Russian army had been totally destroyed for the fourteen time in the war after 100,000 soldiers were killed in a human wave attack because Putin is both evil and stupid, and so the only conceivable explanations as to why Ukraine had not fully taken back its territory is either a) Russian ghosts fighting back, or b) Ukraine was firing on its own troops whenever they tried to advance

    like, the West just kept asserting that Russia had run out of missiles and even though they were repeatedly wrong, they didn't really have anything else to do other than keep repeating it in the hopes that it maybe it would come true. perhaps a Russian weapons manufacturer would see the headlines and go "damn, really? alright, I won't check the latest figures from my factory, I'm just gonna turn this place into a bakery."

  • Yeah, personally, I think it was a really bad idea for the Jews and the Nazis to engage in such a counterproductive, endless cycle of violence against each other. The Nazis would kill a million of them, and the Jews would kill a few dozens in an uprising here or there.

    I think that the Jews ultimately should have been the bigger man, so to speak, and came to the table and agreed that the Nazis had a right to exist, which would have clearly meant that the Nazis would be forced to agree and let the Jews be. Just like today, in Israel and Palestine. Hamas should have promised to take down the concentration camp they had set up over the Tel Aviv urban area, in exchange for the Israelis taking down the Gaza concentration camp. A very fair deal, in my opinion.

    We must both be enlightened centrist pacifists, unlike the immature tankies on this godforsaken website. It is only through peaceful agreement and diplomacy that issues can be settled and violence just leads nowhere. The wisest man in history, Gandhi, once said that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. He also said that "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs," which shows his real commitment to forgiving your oppressors.

  • a mobius strip of fascism