When they talked of bombing Lebanon “back to the Stone Age” my mind immediately jumped to nukes and I’m not surprised they’ve clarified I was correct.

They’re misogynistic.

They were very foolish not to purge the military after the last time. At the very least they should have set up armed people’s militias or something to counter and check them if even a little if it wasn’t possible to purge the military.

Fact is the US is going to continue trying to coup Bolivia forever, well as long as lithium has value to their plans which is going to be some time. That and the fact they buck the US to do things like try to join BRICS+ and yeah this is incredibly obvious and they really should have done more to secure ideological loyalty of the mid-level officers and troops.

And sooner or later and this may be the time already, it may already be too late, they’re not going to care about keeping the mask on, they’ll just straight up tell their puppets to massacre anyone giving them serious resistance and then go around jailing, torturing, killing those from the old government as is the usual modus operandi.

It’s really unclear. They shot down 4/5, the 5th which had cluster munitions (themselves unacceptable to use on anything but large columns of armor and troops and even then the risk of unexploded ordinance from them makes their use if not a war crime at least borderline because they will be killing civilians after a conflict) veered off course according to Russia and blew up over a crowded beach.

The problem here is why it veered off course. Of course Ukraine defenders would probably claim it was damaged and veered off because of that, on the other hand we know for a fact that if they can’t find anything else to hit the Ukrainians have admitted to steering munitions into civilians and maybe this was a case of them veering off the last one so it wouldn’t get shot down and deciding to hit civilians instead. We just don’t know. What we do know is if the US was intimately involved then they’re responsible. Further that the US/NATO supplied the weapons. Further that they’ve never stopped supplying weapons despite knowing for years they’re used in terrorist attacks on civilians.

This is just an extension of the crisis when I was in high school of boys sharing nude photos girls gave them with each other without consent. There’s been no real reckoning with the intersection of technology and our cruel, patriarchal, pornified culture. The girls who were victimized by that were no less ‘innocent’ than this girl, they weren’t tainted and deserving of it because their hormone-addled teen brains made a bad decision once or twice. It’s not a new problem. It’s just the same revenge-porn type thing but now with guys that never even got such photos starting it by spreading fakes. And honestly there needs to be a solution that isn’t hunt down and charge people one by one but stop it before it spreads far and wide.

And total aside but I bet discords were heavily involved in the spread of this. I swear if you shut down discord tomorrow you’d cut grooming in half, you’d cut sharing of this stuff and other bad material by more than half. It’s just such a vile shit-hole platform that allows and entices the worst kind of scum.

Not even the 90s, try the 50s with operation aerodynamic.

That’s 100% a state department, NED, or US NGO text that was pushed there by a bot. They have bots that auto-respond stuff like this to pro-Palestinian posters for hasbara so it only makes sense they make them for this kind of thing.

Could be part of some existing agreement. Maybe they’re duplicates of things on display and this way they can lend them to another country for viewing and hedge against the country falling apart and looting.

Egypt would never attack the occupation of Palestine, the US wouldn’t let them and Sissi seems compliant. So the only other things I can think of would be either an expectation of a regional conflict with Hezbollah and Iran that gets very intense (with Egypt on the side of the US probably so on the receiving end) and/or their military and/or people rising up and a civil war or collapse situation emerging because they’re very upset about the genocide happening next door while their US puppet leader does nothing.

Exciting things happening. Russia has no reason anymore to uphold UN sanctions that it earlier voted for against the DPRK now that it itself is isolated and subjected to blockade by the west.

Another win for the policy of unity among Marxists, not among liberals, opportunists, and distorters of Marxism (yes that includes especially ultras).

Yes, yes liberals are clueless about power and the nature of the state, violence etc. Little digression:

I just don’t get people who tolerate them. As someone who’s spent years blocking and avoiding them (arrrr) they just seem unnatural and infuriating but to so many people used to them they’re just an accepted part of life.

Neither Washington nor Moscow was and is a well-honed propaganda strategy employed by the CIA, US State Dept, western media, etc. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re willing to criticize them, they don’t care as long as in the same breath you criticize their enemies, implicitly acknowledge their propaganda, validate their contention that yes, things have been done badly here BUUUT the numbers of death and human rights violations (according to western propaganda) are much higher over there, thus naturally it’s better over here than there. After which comes the next step of dismissal which is “stop whining, things could be worse, be grateful, you have no idea how privileged you are, how dare you attack this great country why do you know in blah blah blah you can’t even blah blah blah?”.

People who say this are not engaging in critical thinking. You criticize the west but do you believe the Chinese media? Do you read their perspectives? If their media is invalid because they abuse human rights, so should the media you read from the west be invalid. Yet this is never the case. It is never the case that such propaganda is examined, subjected to ruthless criticism and introspection with outside the empire perspectives and discarded. Even when there is a history of people calling out problems time and again and being ignored in the moment, do you listen to them in future or breathlessly await the latest piece of China bad news to make you feel slightly better about your problems?

Self-effacing and dishonest acknowledgement with a framing that it’s still the best you’re going to get is not helpful. Acknowledging too little too late and offering worthless words of salve to the victims.

Education and awareness are worthless. The past is the past. It only matters if you learn to prevent it in the present and future. Do you think the dead care about you saying what was done to them is wrong? Do those suffering today from the western military/intelligence actions who you will say you feel sorry about in 10 years care that in 10 years you will be sad and acknowledge the wrong or do they care about you understanding the wrong, spotting it now and speaking up to stop it NOW. Not to deflect, not to “but China worse” their suffering.

Look no further than many of those mindlessly defending “isreal” and their genocide. There are many among them who understand the holocaust, who know the history all too well. Yet they didn’t take away the right lessons, they took away that it was bad it happened to Jews but it’s good when it happens to Palestinians who are deserving. They take away something that’s frozen, disconnected, it gives them no analytical power to prevent the next atrocity unless it’s exactly like the last.

This kind of thinking is never accompanied by an honest assessment that one can’t really impact the process in China, the problems in China. All one can do is assist aggression by powers that have historically, time and again done bad things (often to the very same countries these accusations are against).

Is it not proper to clean one’s own yard first before screaming at your neighbor and going to knock down their fence to try and force them to fix their yard? Yet the priority is always on their yard, on the soothing balm, the salve that at least you live in a less bad place than those savages in China, Russia, wherever. A complacency, a smugness, a racially tinged feeling that for all the problems in your land, it has many upsides while their land has few. A feeling that their problems would justify violence, revolution, uprising, but your problems should be solved by working within a system that has never done anything but appropriate the memories of its victims while continuing the victimization and has been happy to brutally crush any real dissent and threats to it time and again.

Minimization of real western atrocities in favor of playing up, laser-focusing on accusations against others.

The problem with threats like this is the west hasn’t and never will face the plethora of well armed and trained, organized, and intel supplied insurgencies that Russia and others in the axis of resistance face because the west are the ones who have spent years, decades cultivating them.

I’ve often thought of this but let’s say you want to hit the US. There are no groups you could give it to. The cartels in Mexico would never provoke the US like that and they’re the closest to a non-west affiliated armed organization (with greater than a few dozen members who could easily be killed) operating within 3000 miles of the US. Same in Europe. Most Russia could do without starting a war by handing them to a group not currently fighting and telling them to start would be to target the Zionist occupation of Palestine by handing such weapons over to groups in that region.

So it’s an empty threat without years of groundwork and millions of dollars. The only real options Russia has are to put more weapons into the Middle East that will stay and be used there or to directly strike without hope of denial or obfuscation at the west or their client states directly which looks like escalation.

Meh. I would have respected them more for at least trying to finish the trilogy of Prometheus and Covenant. Problematic as they were they were at least more interesting from a lore perspective than inserting other random Alien encounters magically retconned into existence between the existing films which is kind of a low effort, low risk, low pay-out thing to do. And one that I might add seriously risks adding retcons or changes to the magic and feeling of the original trilogy.

They’ll never come close to touching the quality of the first two films (3 if you count the Assembly cut which really made 3 a much better film) and if you just want jump-scares and gore and horror certainly continuing the Prometheus storyline could give you some of that.

No.

The grievances and gripes people have are mostly smokescreen culture war bullshit that exist for media spectacle and politicking.

The media and parties and grifters stir up mild tension for profit and distraction but have little real interest in it coming to an actual protracted fight. Sure reactionaries wouldn’t and don’t mind killing some progressives or leftists now and again but the left isn’t large enough, organized enough, etc to actually fight back nor the citizenry informed enough outside the bourgeois press propaganda bubble to get involved after an outrage.

The mythos of the holy American institutions, the holy government, the holy constitution and system still holds strong. As long as that is the alter at which all Americans worship at I don’t think a civil war can happen.

Only when a significant part of the population make a sustained break from that might something happen. There are cracks, the Republican resistance to Ukraine and increasing skepticism of neo-cons (which probably won’t last beyond the day Trump is elected), the crushing of Palestinian student protests and the disenchantment that has. But neither I see as things that can grow in the short term.

If there is a civil war it will be decades from now when the contradictions have heightened, the empire has visibly fallen and Americans can only bicker among themselves and fight over increasingly limited spoils and take from each other. But it will take a severe split in the bourgeoisie or genuine anti-capitalist sentiment that rocks the youth of that time. Frankly with how atomized the population is, with technology, with the surveillance state, it’s going to get really, really, really bad before it gets even a little bit better in terms of people pushing back.

Frankly I feel that one of two things will happen. Either the divide between blue states and red states will grow, red states will continue to be allowed to do whatever they want and become increasingly awful places while blue states follow a dozen steps behind but this divide won’t cause any kind of crumbling in the near term. Or the reactionaries will seize power at the federal level and push an unified reactionary vision on all the states. This could be a Republican thing or it could be a Biden type person in the Democratic party who calls it law and order Bill Clinton style. The Supreme court will probably do most of the battering down of progressive achievement and the white house will simply crush protestors, fund the police more, and tack right. Fact is the reactionaries including agents of state and black hundreds analogues who simply are too socially bigoted to ever be on our side have most of the weapons, an incredible amount of weapons.

If anything I think all the mainstream talk of civil war is yet another sign we’re not headed there soon. It’s a kind of outlet, to let the public collectively explore the idea, enjoy it, hate it, fear it, whatever rather than actually experiencing it. It’s part of the broader attempts at controlling the narrative too. There is this idea being pushed that the reason we’re at risk for civil war is not any of the real problems like fascists, bigotry, support of genocide, living in a genocidal violent empire, BUT that people are seeing outside agitator “propaganda” from Russia, China, etc. It’s part and parcel of the push to ban Tiktok, to crack down on anyone spreading views counter to the state department line, to label them a real enemy. Because by tying it to that they’re no longer just a “kook” with a weird conspiracy opinion but a danger to the precious and holy American institutions and a threat of causing civil war if we don’t crack down on them and crack down on those giving them those ideas. So it’s really part of a push to control information, to control it online in social media, to block foreign media and perspectives. And to censor and deplatform anyone deviating from the “bipartisan” imperialist consensus as a foreign agent, as a chaos actor, as someone trying to destroy the US. It really all started with Trump and the liberal derangement and Russiagate hoax around him.

I’m not sure it’s pathetic so much as part of a calculated water testing strategy. It lessens the upset and shock from the public because it’s already been hashed out a bit so it’s less surprising and it also forewarns and lets the Russians toss it around before pushing forward anyways and pretending they’re doing so with great reluctance so the escalation seems less obvious/bad. The truly sad part is Germans buying this show thinking they have any independence in all this.

State charges though right? Don’t think they can send him to serve it out of state in a federal prison for those. Not sure if states have comfy prisons as I think most white collar more bourgeois criminals tend to commit federal crimes or at least get nailed for them first.

We’re not anywhere near a revolutionary moment. 30% of the country is convinced Russian influence operations control a lot of the country and installed Trump and are trying to destroy the US entirely. 40% of the country (overlapping with above somewhat) is convinced China is trying to destroy and control us with tik-tok and the rest are mostly too tired, too beat down by bad labor conditions and life to care to think on it one way or the other.

US civil war is a meme. It’s not happening anytime soon, even the strongest moments of BLM were minor and the US is far too good at managing things at home and distracting the masses. We’re decades out from discontent and economic conditions getting bad enough that there’s anything resembling an insurrection and it won’t be red states vs blue states but uprisings in cities that grow and grow and refuse to be extinguished as they get more intense.

World war it is then if you’re right. And likely nuclear because Russia can’t win against US and NATO without devastating losses and a huge mandatory mobilization. China won’t intervene because that’s against their foreign policy. The DPRK could I suppose decide letting the US host nuclear weapons in the occupied south is unacceptable and launch an attack to retake the south and catch the US with their pants down but I’m skeptical they will either.

Though I suppose Russia could blink at the last moment and decide they’ll tolerate a heavily armed, NATO-ified rump state on their border rather than go to nuclear war. Russia’s reluctance all along has worsened things for them and I’m not entirely convinced they’re over it. The amount of times they talk about wanting talks comes off as almost pleading really which signals weakness to the vicious west and I’m afraid probably could lead to escalation from the west mis-analyzing all this as a sign that if they just push them a bit more they’ll sue for peace or give up. Then again this all could also just be western bluff and bluster and they could be out of ideas other than playing Nixon’s “madman” card against Russia and hoping they back down.

Related digression: I really don’t understand why so many people here and on hexbear have this idea that it’s impossible for him to go to prison, when no it’s impossible for him to face consequences for doing things presidents are supposed to do like imperialism, it’s very possible for them to destroy him and ruin his life to permanently remove him from the picture because he’s an annoyance to the deep institutions of state and imperial power.

They simply pretend the issue is he acted in some way differently than other presidents, pearl-clutch about institutions and rules of how you’re supposed to do corruption with all your I’s dotted and T’s crossed. It doesn’t matter if Biden and his son are corrupt as fuck, it doesn’t matter if the next person is as well. Consistency has never been a necessity so long as they can pretend there is some difference. And at the end of the day as much as reactionaries will hoot and holler, all the actually violent fascist militias are on a short FBI leash and none of them are going to do any meaningful violence against institutional liberals or the state in response if he’s sent up the river for the rest of his natural life.

It’ll just become another gripe, another issue in their culture war ranting and it’ll become a plank of the party and candidates to try and secure his release. Fact is Democrats are competent administrators of empire and I think honestly there’s a decent chance CIA, the deep parts of the state and intelligence apparatus have decided to go with them for a while and make an example out of Trump for trying to do petty gangsterism with their sophisticated empire and generally making them look as bad as they are with silly things like saluting generals in the DPRK which really rubs these kind of institutional American greatness mytho weirdos the wrong way. It’ll in a way get the reactionaries plenty worked up and perfect for unleashing on the growing left as a result of the Palestinian genocide and other situations unfold. They’ll be let to vent their anger beating up and killing anti-genocide protestors, antifa, communist meetings, and anyone left of the State Dept on China.

I don’t think Trump is smart enough to have some reasonable memory of classified secrets or some way to leak them to punish the US state and threaten it if it tries to send him to prison.

Best case he gets out after spending a little time in prison, wins the election and begins brutal recriminations against the Democratic party and Biden’s administration. Real let them fight hours. Worst case he goes to prison, stays there, rots there, liberals clink their champagne classes, declare the institutions have won, America is back, brunch is on and continue with the whole charade of calling all dissent against the DNC and US foreign policy “Russian propaganda”. I just find smug liberals so annoying so naturally I want them to suffer and honestly the more they do the more the illusion crumbles I think.