/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

From a current unrest happening in Georgia, never mind the local politics, no idea what that is about, just examine the bribery controle mechanisms

>Foreign aid agencies and their local NGO contractors have long colonized most areas of public policy and services—education, healthcare, court reform, rural development, infrastructure, etc.

>The Georgian NGOs that are given grants to implement this work may be local, but they hold considerable power over the Georgian population. This power comes from their access to Western embassies and resources and the legitimacy this conveys rather than from grassroots support. In a functional democracy, the people elect lawmakers and the executive to serve them and represent their interests. In Georgia, unelected NGOs get their mandate from international bodies, which draw up and pay for to-do lists of policy reforms for Georgia. Local NGOs lack an incentive to consider the impact of the projects they implement because they are not accountable to the citizens in whose lives they play such an intrusive role.

>In this ecosystem, it is rare to find someone who genuinely cares about people and their well-being. The local NGO landscape is a deeply competitive sector that incentivizes sharp elbows, self-promotion, and duplication rather than collaboration, let alone solidarity. For many industry professionals, working in an NGO is a fast track to high incomes, perks like foreign travel and embassy receptions, and being part of the elite.
https://lefteast.org/unrest-georgia-foreign-influence-transparency-law/

This sounds very complicated, don't focus on the technical terminology like NGO, it's a word that just means an organization of people, and it's not what this is about. I'm sure there's lots of NGOs that do good.

The underlying thing is just a mechanism of gaining controle via bribes, that stuff is ancient and doesn't care about political forms.

I always wondered why people aren't gaming the bribe mechanism ?
Like take the bribes and use it for something else.
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New Global Capitalism update
Sempai talks about how the world is moving on from the US dollar.

https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=WcI4XQA5nzA

EVERYBODY GET IN HERE

President Raisi’s helicopter crashes in Iran: What we know so far
A helicopter carrying Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and the foreign minister crashed while travelling back from East Azerbaijan.

The world is watching as Iran mobilises emergency crews to search for President Ebrahim Raisi, whose helicopter – which was travelling in a convoy – went down in a remote area near Jolfa in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province.

He was returning from Iran’s border with Azerbaijan, where he and the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had inaugurated a cooperative dam project, the latest sign of warming relations between the two countries. Twenty rescue teams and drones have been sent to the area where the helicopter came down.

Information is slowly emerging on this incident, but here is what we know so far.

…

Travelling with Ebrahim Raisi were Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province Governor Malek Rahmati, and Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, the representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to East Azerbaijan, according to state media.

Did all three helicopters disappear?
No, two of the three helicopters in the president’s convoy made it back safely to the city of Tabriz.
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I'm trying to find a scale to measure the "power tug". I'm analyzing the recent conflict in Ukraine in order to do that:

<The imperial bourgeoisie in the US won Round 1 in the ukro-war, because they managed to manufacture a war right on Russia's door-step that Russia didn't want and failed to prevent.

<The Russian Federation however won Round 2, they proved that Russia still is a super power that can destroy a sizable country without major consequences to it self, and that the US can neither cripple their economy via econ-war, nor exhaust their military resources via proxy-war.
Ukraine is now more or less a destroyed country, that's what loosing a war means, Russia basically is undamaged (bar a few scuffs in some border towns) just in case anybody is confused.

<The US has, on balance, lost this geopolitical battle because it did not achieve it's primary goal of imposing another 1990s neo-liberal shock doctrine on Russia or outright balkanizing the Russian federation into subservient ethno-nationalist vassal-states.

<However the US still has to be considered more powerful because Russia wasn't able to frustrate US attempts at manufacturing this war.
If you're a glowy or a nato-media-brain and want to complain about my framing of the Ukraine war please do so in the Ukraine thread

If we apply this scale for the next power tug in Asia.

The question becomes whether China is powerful enough to frustrate US attempts at creating a Taiwan-war with a similar pattern. China is certainly more powerful than Russia, but is it powerful enough ?
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A Boeing 737-300, attempting to take off from Blaise Diagne International Airport in Dakar, Senegal, caught fire and skidded off the runway on Wednesday evening. Of the 85 passengers and crew on the Air Sénégal Flight HC301, 10 were injured, including the pilot, according to the Transport Minister El Malick Ndiaye.

All were immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, with four in critical condition.

The flight was operated by TransAir, a regional airline based in Senegal that provides service from Senegal’s capital of Dakar to as far south as Brazzaville, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. HC301 was headed to Bamako, the capital of Mali.

TransAir’s fleet consists of Embraer ERJ-145, Embraer EMB-120, Beechcraft 1900C jetliners, in addition to the Boeing 737-300. The 737-300 “Classic” is one of Boeing’s oldest operating planes. Its development began in 1979 and first began operations in 1984. The aerospace giant made 1,113 of the planes during its production run, which lasted from 1981-1999.

While no further information has been released from the Senegalese government as to the immediate cause of the fire, it is likely that the sheer age of the aircraft played a role. The 737-300, -400 and -500 aircraft have also some of the company’s most accident-prone designs. Boeing’s own data in a report from September 2023 shows that the aircraft series has suffered 62 “hull losses,” where the plane was unrecoverable, of which 20 resulted in fatalities.

The older 737 models stand alongside the 737 MAX as among the most deadly commercial airplanes currently flown. Two crashes of the 737 MAX-8 in October 2018 and March 2019 killed a combined total of 346 passengers and crew, the direct result of Boeing executives pushing for a new aircraft to bring to market while ignoring numerous known safety issues. To date, no executives or senior leadership have been charged for the deaths.

The same day of the fire in Senegal, another Boeing plane, a 767 model, was forced to land without its landing gear in Istanbul, Turkey. The plane was a freight variant operated by FedEx that was coming from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. The pilot reported to air traffic control that the landing gear had not deployed and was instructed to land without them while emergency vehicles stood by.

There were no reported injuries, though the pilot was forced to leave the plane via the cockpit’s window.
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I keep running into a particularly insidious type of revisionism. The "Think of the Children!" revisionism. It is stated repeatedly by disguised fascists, royalists, and liberals larping as communists on our board and misusing the concept of empathy that ruling class children can be reeducated, and, failing that, sent to a labor camp. Let me be perfectly clear. The brats of the petit bourgeoisie, of the bourgeoisie, and of the aristocracy cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reeducated" under any circumstances. They must all be liquidated alongside their inbred pedophile worker-hating parents. It is not the duty of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to waste precious and limited resources attempting to coddle and reeducate children who in 99.9…% of circumstances will grow up to be precisely like their parents, to secretly harbor counter-revolutionary opinions, and collaborate amongst themselves to foment bourgeois counter-revolution. I don't care if they're in diapers. You put a bullet in their fucking head. Morality is not real. It is a theistic bourgeois construct regarding property relations. It does not matter if this is "good" or "bad." You put the bullet in the bourgeois baby's brain or he will grow up to kill you and everyone you love and destroy everything you fought for. Do you understand? If not, you are a liberal, a fascist, a royalist, and you ought to be hung by your genitals from the nearest lamp post. You are not a comrade, you are a coward, and vermin, to be exterminated alongside the ruling class, their children, their pets, and their lickspittle servants. This isn't a question of "nurture vs nature" either. This is a question of risk mitigation and victory maximization. I am not "weird" or a "freak" or "hate children" for understanding this. Take heed this quote from Mark Twain (Who, despite being a feckless bourgeois 19th century liberal, was perfectly capable of understanding the need for Revolutionary Terror):

>“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, coldPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

An article on NC that is chronicling the new methods of repression for the purpose of silencing criticism.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/stasi-in-the-west.html
Give it a read if you can stomach some more existential dread and can forgive mild anti-soviet rhetoric.

<The governments across the West are increasingly turning to systems in efforts to silence criticism of the ruling class policies – from unpopular wars and climate change inaction to plunder and eugenic public health policies.
<A few quick notes before the rundown of the new laws and reporting systems. A neat trick by making it appear as if these laws are anti-hate is that opposition to them can be dismissed as pro-hate. In reality, the issue really has nothing to do with hate, but is more a question of free speech.
<The problem is that the definition of bias or hate is incredibly slippery and is often just any speech that the powers that be don’t want to hear. It can range from an “offensive” joke to criticism of Israeli policy. We now have concrete examples of exactly how it could be abused as Canada works to enact a precrime law that would punish individuals accused of hate incidents before they (in theory) commit a hate crime.
<What to make of all this?
<One possibility is that Western governments are aware that the moment of their relative decline is here, and they plan to revert to more overt forms of colonialism wherever possible around the world. At the same time, the Western ruling class plans to double down on its plunder at home. In both cases, more authoritarian measures will be necessary to silence critics.

Where the article falls short is a material analysis. I get the impression that this is some kind of end-stage imperialism. And the mad dash towards implementing all those draconian anti democratic population bully mechanisms, is the upper echelons of the imperial bourgeoisie trying to convert western societies into a blunt instrument to hold on to their imperial super-profits that benefit them first and foremost.

For context Ben Norton has made a video where he describes the effects of De-Dollarisation.
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Continued from >>477700

Updates since the start of the last thread:
The (largely civilian) Palestinian death toll has now passed 31,000.

The US Senate, with Biden's support, passed a bill to authorize more than $14,000,000,000 in military aid to Israel.

The International Court of Justice made an interim ruling in South Africa's favor in their case accusing Israel of genocidal acts in Gaza, deeming it plausible, Nicaragua signed on to the case.

Houthi rebels in Yemen have attacked cargo ships in the Red Sea in an attempt to disrupt the supply line of Israel's ongoing carpet bombing campaign against Gaza, resulting in the sinking of the Rubymar. The Biden admin has responded to the Houthis with a retaliatory bombing campaign, killing multiple fighters and at least one civilian. An attack on the True Confidence in March then yielded the first 3 civilian casualties of Houthi attacks.

Trade unionists in Scotland and England have blockaded major UK arms factories.

Canada, Australia, and the EU have started to resume funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugee aid. Members of the agency have stated that Israel employed torture when interrogating them.

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Mass shootings are passè. Self-immolation is vogue. Just stop being a retard. people like to watch stuff burn

It's so crazy how there has been such a paradigm shift to where the GOP is anti-imperialist.
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HHP_Apr2024_Crosstabs.pdf