This is probably the least bad outcome so…yay, i guess. It doesn’t solve the systemic problems of French politics that led to the rise of the far right though and next time around they will be even stronger. So long as the left does not present a credible anti-EU, anti-NATO, anti-neoliberal and anti-war alternative, the right will continue to gain ground.

Well…yes, but this is the language that all the news articles use that i’ve seen on this so far.

Plagiarism! That’s our acronym!

Now I’m worried about the lack of falling dominoes on the continent.

In a way the retreat of European and US troops across the Sahel region are “falling dominos”. Just today we had news that German troops are being pulled out of Niger

And Chad could be the next domino to fall. They’ve had a lot of anti-French protests, they expelled the German ambassador, and the US is probably going to be forced to pull its troops out of there soon as well. Meanwhile they are building closer relations with Russia. I am hopeful that things are moving in the right direction.

Done.

it feels like Niger is going it alone

More states in West Africa going anti-imperialist would be great of course, but they are not alone: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have decided to unite into a confederation.

Some more info on this:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/burkina-faso-mali-niger-sign-confederation-treaty-4462201

Are you sure we’re talking about the same Labour party? Cause the Labour party i know is Blairite through and through. It was also under Labour that Britain started to wage ruthless and bloody military campaigns post WW2 in an attempt to cling to its colonial empire, for instance in Malaya. These are their genes, that is their fundamental character: imperialism and neoliberalism. Corbyn was an outlier, a short-lived exception.

They’ve certainly exceeded my expectations so far, and i feel like it’s a really good sign of the changing times. I wish them all the best and hope they continue to become more and more revolutionary.

It’s a nice start but i think they can do better. How about next year they cut that down to 2 million yuan and the year after to 1 million. That’s still plenty more than do-nothing parasitic financial speculators should be getting. And include private firms too.

The capitalist class and the bourgeois state are always waging class war against the workers. Every time they increase your hours, cut your wages, cut your benefits, gut your social safety nets, fire you, evict you, outsource your job, that’s class war. What they want is for you to not fight back; they want you to just silently take it like an obedient wage slave.

But workers have no choice but to fight the class war because they are always under attack. There will always be class war as long as there is class society, because the interests of the exploited and exploiter classes are irreconcilable and diametrically opposed. And there is only one way that the class war can and will end, because capitalists cannot exist without workers, but workers can exist perfectly fine without capitalists.

Typical socdem L

Probably not, but Westerners have an overinflated sense of their own importance and assume the entire world is always paying attention to what their media and politicians do and say. I’ve heard a bunch of US commentators who are convinced for instance that Putin and Xi sat and watched the entire US presidential debate. To someone outside of their bubble that sounds absurd, but these people are so entirely self-absorbed that they are convinced they are the center of the universe and they project their own obsessions onto everyone else.

It’s sad that they were duped but hopefully this experience has taught them a lesson.

There have been on and off protests but has it actually stopped the raising of the retirement age?

Also China is above striving to act like the decrepit capitalists states in the EU. Its best they decide against it.

That’s what i’m saying. I believe and i hope that China will continue to show that it has a government which behaves in a qualitatively different way.

There is a reason why publications like the Economist are trying so hard to push the idea that China needs to do these things supposedly for its own good, and it’s because China refuses to act like western neoliberal governments do. The West are trying to gaslight the Chinese into thinking that these are the kinds of policies that you need to implement if you want to be part of the modern, developed world. But at this point i don’t think anyone in the Chinese government is falling for that; all they have to do is take a look at the shitshow that Western countries have become and contrast it to how much better things are going in China. Why abandon successful policies in favor of a clearly failing model?

People said the same thing about the raising of retirement age in various European countries but in the end what little pushback there was didn’t matter. If a government wants to do something it will find a way to do it. I just hope that China’s government will decide against it.

I wish i could be as optimistic but i still think this will go well into next year. Would love to be wrong about this though.

“Steiner will come through any moment now.”

The US and EU did in 2 years what Putin not only couldn’t but didn’t ever really want to do in over 20 years, and Russia is better off for it.

I say vote but vote against the uniparty. Vote only for people who are not only not associated in any way with either side of the uniparty, but who are actively opposed to it. The most delusional stance is not so much thinking that voting makes a difference (which it barely does, if at all), rather it’s thinking that anyone can ever “change things from the inside”. Once you are in the uniparty system it swallows you up and assimilates you like the Borg. We’ve seen this over and over again. Even so-called “independents” more often than not end up in the ecosystem of one or the other part of the duopoly, and they justify it by telling themselves it’s only for fundraising purposes or whatever, but that’s just how you become part of the blob.