/leftypol_archive/ - Leftypol archive

>>27222
<There were reportedly 15 people in the house, seven of them children, including the man’s mother, a lawful permanent resident of the United States.

<In an effort to rescue the survivors, the family contacted Israeli authorities, providing them with the residential address and GPS coordinates of their home to arrange for the safe passage of an ambulance. However, the Israeli military apparently used that information to bomb the house a second time and then targeted the ambulance as it attempted to rescue the survivors, killing the doctor and several children.
They bombed the house a second time to make sure nobody digs out a US passport out of the rubble, also spite.

The moral of the story is that if you give GPS coordinates to the Israeli and tell them a story about people in need, they will bomb those coordinates. That is a critical operational flaw in the Israeli military. Because it means that some random schmuck can direct where they drop bombs. That includes feeding them bogus targets to just make them waste ammo pounding inert rubble.

Blumenthal was right Zionism makes people stupid.

A sophisticated adversary that can coordinate complex operations might be able to manipulate them to bomb their own soldiers. If they pick a real fight with Iran …

>>27224
You are correct in your historical analysis, but the experience of the last 20 years probably has eliminated the possibility of consent for another middle eastern war.

>>27224
Yeah this.

>>27226
They're 100% about to try it and will go through with it within the next year provided they aren't stopped through direct action & mass organization. Propaganda can be very powerful, there will be a lot of people going war-mad over night. It actually will be ill-advised… like, most people still will not want war with Iran, but most people aren't in command of the US military. We're about to see some more really horrible shit going down.

https://twitter.com/simpleesimi/status/1846107815900778924
Snipers on the roof at Israel vs. Italy game.

New thread: >>484995

>>25599
I think he'll be open to restoring relations with the US. Although not at the expense of Iran's relations with Russia or China. He'll likely pursue an open foreign policy, but only to the extend it excludes foreign impositions. Basically this is an offer towards the US to choose economically beneficial relations rather than block-confrontation.

Everybody in Iran sees Israel the way Europeans saw Nazi Germany at the end of ww2. Evil and weakened. Basically Israel either gives up its malevolent comportment in the region or it chooses to self destruct with a Lebanon war. In the latter event, Iran would emerge as the uncontested regional hegemon. Israel doesn't have the leverage to get concessions from Iran.

Iran has all the components for building nukes, they're offering to remain a non-nuclear power as long as Israel doesn't threaten them with nukes.

From the perspective of the west this is the best deal we'll get. And the price is exceptionally cheap: bully Israel to turn down the belligerency-knob.

The WSWs take:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/08/zvxm-j08.html
(I'm neutral on it)

Didn't Gaddafi increasingly demilitarize toward the end of his life? We saw what happened to Libya.

>>25602
>Didn't Gaddafi increasingly demilitarize toward the end of his life?
Qaddafi gave up on Libya's nuclear weapons program. And that likely did shorten his life.

The golden path would have been to max the pursuit of a Pan African Union, and make Libya the center of an African block, that played all the other power off each other. He'd have gotten nuke-technology and imported industrial development out of that.

>>25557
>The campaign also aimed to discredit masks and test kits made in China. "Within the Pentagon, within Washington, there was this fear that they were going to lose the Philippines" to Chinese influence.

Did it ever occur to these people that what they were doing was going to discredit the US and push the Philippines towards China.

>>25558
No, and tbf they were probably right not to expect that.
When that happens, it'll probably be because of even worse stuff.

>>25559
>No, and tbf they were probably right not to expect that.
why ?
Are they so arrogant that they think that they're above it all, that their manipulations aren't being accounted for by other countries ? Even if they think the Filipino government can't penetrate US psy-ops the Chinese government almost certainly can and is likely to tip off the countries the US fucks with.
>When that happens, it'll probably be because of even worse stuff.
It kinda depends, the Filipino government may ask the question, what if this had been one of those terrible plagues that wipes out half the population unless people get vaxed. At the very least there is now uncertainty about the level of belligerency they ought to expect from the US.

>>25590
>I'd do nothing about the political situation, and would not consider it in any calculation.
Dumb.

>I haven't for a long time, because politics does not work to give people nice things like you seem to believe for these narratives to work.
I don't believe that.

>and they were destroyed by the avarice of the middle class and their desire to kick down to get ahead. You people did more to hurt me than those at the top, who are happy to let you be their hatchetmen.
Does the American middle class even exist?
Picrel. Which part is the middle class? This looks like two classes.

>>25592
🦀🗑️

>>25594
The middle class kept doing it to themselves, and weren't allowed to say no. They cling to some distinction to say "at least we're not retarded", and that's all they will have. You will own nothing - not less, nothing. That's always been the goal, and it's right in front of your face. Why does anyone pretend it is anything else?

That's why you faggots make me so sick.

>left
>right

stfu uygha, should take this chance and become king. it's every man for him self.

>>25597
Apes together stronk

Again?

And how come a government/president doesn't have control over its military?

>>26220
>Again?
Might just be a flash in the pan. Telesur says it's already "neutralized"

https://twitter.com/BTnewsroom/status/1806088019549557005
Pro-coup troops chased out by protestors.

>>26222
Yeah the hole thing was basically a reminder to the MAS coalition that they have a common enemy.

Interesting TrueAnon episode on the coup attempt.

>>25541
Proofs?

>>25539
>thinking he will be safe in Australia
They didn't drop the charges he admitted guilt in exchange for getting out of jail. They could haul him right back in as soon as the election is over.

>>25540
>he should probably just apply for citizenship in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc.
Well not North Korea he will starve in a communist country. I bet staying in Australia is probably part of the deal though.

>>25543
The famine in the DPRK ended a long time ago, and their economic outlook is positive now that they've re-established diplomatic relations with Russia.

Kevin Gosztola made an interesting point on a journalist panel today: He and likely other peers have been spending all their time the last several days listening to each other, the sources they actually trust to cover Assange honestly and fairly. Conversely, they have spent very little time assessing the corporate mass media's reaction to it. I sure hope someone has been cataloging all the recent libel and slander slung at Assange, these propaganda outlets and propagandists need to be held to account for the immensely destructive things they've done to the journalist profession.

Link to stream:

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/29/watch-revisiting-the-assange-case/

>>25545
>the corporate mass media
>the immensely destructive things they've done to the journalist profession.

There used to be journalistic activities within that structure, but is that still the case ? Before we yell at these people for failing at journalism, we have to ask our self whether we're not complaining about how spoons are terrible shovels.

Maybe we should consider whether they are more like PR companies now.

>>25511
True! But spending a bunch on basic infrastructure maintenance and expansion is, like, expensive!

>>25512
Waterlines and sewers is the type of infrastructure that works nearly flawlessly in non-failed states. The US is supremely rich, it's a faulty priority problem, not one of expense.

>>25513
True!

>>25510
its made for phones so the paragraphs are small

Atlanta water seems to be back on after 5 days. We'll see.

>>26407
>that's the economic system socialists try to build
No it's not. Under socialism the product of my labor doesn't belong to me it belongs to Bob because Bob "needs" it more than me. It's a good deal if you're Bob which is why socialism only attracts losers who want to leech from others.

>but it's not like that now
It's not like that now because of taxes. If you are self employed then all the product of your labor belongs to you except what the state steals.

>you mean like the bail-outs for wallstreet
Yes. Free stuff at the top to keep the rich rich and free stuff at the bottom to keep the plebs voting and the middle class has to pay for it all. It's not your ideal version of socialism but it is a type of socialism.

>Those were capitalists not socialists
Nope. The government is the one giving the bailouts and when the government does stuff that's socialism. In a free market when banks go broke they go broke and if the CEOs owes money to the people then we throw they/them out of a helicopter.

>Can't have a working theory of economics without that
You are deliberately evading the question
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26409
>See picrel.
I distinctly remember Blair abolishing hereditary peers, stuffing the house of lords with his own people and gratuitously banning fox hunting just to wind up the Tories but sure everyone you don't like is a secret Tory.

>Corporate deregulation
You're saying there are fewer regulations now than 40 years ago? Calling a big old bullshit on that one. The point of regulations is for corporations to use the government to screw over competitors so of course they are only going to pile up.

>outsourcing
<refuse to work
<cry when jobs move overseas
Also this has nothing to do with government policy.

>union busting
Unions are the ones who destroyed your economy in the first place but ok.
Unions only exist because the government protects them anyway.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26410
Work in a primitive society, like ancient hunter gatherers, work is directly social, all the work is for survival. In a more complex society that has better tools, not all of the work goes into survival, that is what becomes surplus. In capitalism this surplus is mostly captured by capitalists as profits. The state also gets some of the surplus via taxes or state-run enterprises. A big chunk of the surplus that the states gets flows to capitalists, like with wall-street bailouts and arms spending. Only a small part is going into public well-fare. And keep in mind that most well-fare recipients only need it because capitalism denies employment to a section of society, because they want to have a reserve army of labor on stand-by. So try not to be a worm that kicks down.

You're right that socialism isn't 100% efficient either, it'll have overhead as well, but you'll get a much bigger part of your surplus back than in capitalism. Btw socialism isn't synonymous with when the government does stuff

The relations in capitalism aren't really voluntary because You can't choose another economic system.

Given how much damage the financial crash caused, you're idea with aviation based disciplinary measures, is understandable. However I would like an economic system where the accounting and transactions system is stable and doesn't operate like a casino.

Nazis used gas as a weapon of mass destruction in the extermination camps. They didn't use it on the battle field against advanced military because it was obsolete. That is not a display of morality it's just basic grasp of military tactics. The use of chemical weapons in later wars was just stupid, it doesn't prove effectiveness.

The Soviets failed to ensure food security and that led to starvation, the narrative that it was done on purpose, was propaganda by the Nazis that was later re-used in the cold-war. It's wrong please stop repeating this.

Some of Mao's polices were indeed retarded and backfired catastrophically, however China did industrialize under Mao. Live expectancy doubled. And yes most of China's early woes can be attributed to the decade of colonial subjugation, the Communists inherited a huge mess. China's introduction of market elements into it's economy are indeed responsible for a chunk of China's economic rise. However you aPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>26412
>outsourcing
<refuse to pay decent wages
<cry when the low wage periphery uses the outsourced industrial power to dismantles your empire

>The only reason a government would burn votes like this is because they are broke
They're broke because they blew it on pointless militaristic schemes.

>>25439
Iran is a large country, and the heli went down in a mountainous region, so that is not particularly surprising. What is surprising however is that they apparently didn't pack a satellite phone. Or at least a beacon.

>>25440
Nah the Israeli likely don't have that capability.
The last time one of their Generals was assassinated, it was the US, and the Iranians retaliated by wrecking a few US military bases. They certainly aren't shy. In the extremely unlikely event that Israel tried to take out political leaders in Iran, it would be open hunting season on Iran-unfriendly Israeli political leadership. Unless we see Israeli figureheads dropping like flies, we can assume they weren't involved in this. Atm. it looks like malfunctioning equipment.

>>25441
Politics would be a lot more fun if they were.

>>25437
Minor correction, East Azerbaijan is part of Iran. It's near Azerbaijan, but it's not actually Azerbaijanian territory.

>>25438
I think it looks very suspicious myself. You know, 2-out-of-3 of the helicopters seem to have done fine, it's just the one with the president and foreign minister which went down.

Azerbaijan has also had close relations with Israel from what I understand, and this trip was supposed to be a sign of warming relations between Azerbaijan and Iran. It's not impossible that there was an act of sabotage performed by someone within the Azerbaijanian government.

Confirmed dead.

>>25444
>It's not impossible that there was an act of sabotage performed by someone within the Azerbaijanian government.
What you are saying makes sense but, lets hope it's not true, because the guy is dead, and we want countries to have warming relations.

>>25502
In theory, sure. My belief is that, in practice, neoliberalism is effectively a sneaky way of reintroducing fascism. It's only "small government" in rhetoric, because it inevitably reaches the same contradiction that ancap does: large-scale corporate capitalism, rentierism, etc. rely entirely on a state to define & protect certain property rights & monopolies against those who are harmed by these things. Neoliberalism is when the state does the work to define and protect the rights of capitalists, but removes checks from corporate power and sells off infrastructure which was publicly funded, and then, in practice, socializes the damage with a kind of periodic mock-Keynesian crisis capitalism. This inevitably was paired with massive union busting, because there isn't any other way to actually achieve this - the state is absolutely necessary in all this, and it plainly used its power to enrich and favor one group while suppressing another.

While this didn't generate fascist conditions (in first world countries) immediately, it's inevitably crept towards that. Privatizing the organs of state, while they still essentially operate as organs of state, essentially just functions to remove them from democratic accountability. It was only about 20-something years after the rise of neoliberalism in America that the same country was passing the PATRIOT Act, and now we're at a point where even many of the modern, socially liberal rights which existed back then have actually been scaled back.

I think, and maybe I'm mistaken, that a lot of the neoliberal "thinkers" probably don't believe the shit they say to make it sound palatable. Even early proponents of capitalism understood that corporate power would act like states' power if unchecked.

>>25502
QUICK SHUT IT DOWN STEER BACK TO APPROVED HARBARA NARRATIVES!

>>25501
Fascism implied a level of cooperation and lack of division that the coming setup no longer needs nor wants. Basically, everyone who wanted fascism would be told that the only way to the "light" is to embrace what appears to be fascist ideology, and it will be switched out with this new thing - and has been. The Rightoid has already been primed to accept anything, any self-abasement. Trump and the Eurotrash Right are proof of how retarded they are.

The fascist idea was purely about running into the ground any country's institutions and replacing them with screaming faggotry. What they're bringing in is the result of fascism not really being answered in the past 100 years, except by people fighting for their lives and refusing to die any more. The fascist ideas were rehabilitated after they became so unpopular that overt fascism in most of the world would have led to the rulers and their front groups being lynched. The true believers got to work as soon as the war ended, but it wasn't until the 1960s that it started to "work" - almost entirely on people who were too young to remember the war and what it really was. A law against serious discussion about the war events produced enough chilling effect in the academy, all of whom were exempt from the death cull that the world wars brought - just as they planned for the world. They laugh at you for lying to yourself about what fascism was. Laugh at you. Laugh at anyone who believes in this fag pablum sold to them, because they've been too afraid to even name their enemies, too eager to lick boot. Fags, pure fags.

>>25503
Why do you believe there is such a thing as "small government"? The very idea of capitalism will tell you the state and commanding heights will regulate economic life for the first time, in a way that was not known in the past nor workable. The idea that the government would be small is tripe sold to the dumber of the proprietors with a wink that they'll keep getting payola as their rivals are killed first for not being Nazi enough. There's some more fags for you, the "small governmPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

If you look at the actually non-retarded neolibearals, they are not under any illusion that their government is small. They stripped down bureaucratic largesse and replaced it with private, imperial largesse, because one liability of the liberal order was its reliance on very large bureaucracies to maintain private property in a world where the conditions of socialism were met and became too obvious. So much wealth and effort was spent destroying anything that worked, because they simply did not want the people to live, and would pay exorbitant energy to uphold elitism - an elite that long ago ceased to have any justification, that has grown more incompetent at actually doing anything. They only need to poison the people faster than they succumb to their own crapulence, and that is the "safe" and "smart" strategy for elites. Aristocracies go far out of their way to not produce anything as a rule, because this puts them in a situation where they will have to keep producing and find a way to destroy any product so it doesn't reach the hands of commoners. Any product or value aristocracy wants is little more than the value of human suffering itself. Its chief commodities are opium, pornography, and all forms of rot that accelerate the death rate. That IS value now. That is what will replace capitalism, what will replace the remnants of the liberal order, and already has to a large extent. There is no "off button" for this. We're locked into it for at least 40 years, probably 50.

>>25504
>A law against serious discussion about the war events produced enough chilling effect in the academy
Interesting, elaborate?

>>25502
>neoliberalism is absolutely not to be conflated with fascism.
There are similarities tho, like both fascists and neoliberals steal from the public via privatization. They both serve the most reactionary chauvinistic imperial finance bourgoisie.

>fascism on the other hand is bringing a state in to resuscitate a domestic economy by forcefully suppressing revolutionary fervor and workers' movements.
Marget thatcher ordered death squats to break up miners strikes so…

Fascism distinguishes it self by committing national suicide on behalf of capital. That certainly is what Nazi Germany did in ww2.

>Neoliberalism at its core is about getting the government out of the way of capitalists so that idealized market forces can allow the formation of monopolies
Some neo-liberals are genuine free marketeers, but many neo-libs are not principled, they just side with monopolies, they toot the free market when it benefits monopolies, but they will seek government intervention to uphold monopolies when the market forces don't go their way.