darkcalling

Unfortunately for those military types they're not in charge. The CIA has the ability with State Dept to just start a war. Instruct their pawn in Taiwan to declare independence, ensure the US president who is commander of the military knows they must intervene to defend them or else be seen as weak. President orders it, generals object and facepalm but China is already on the move and there's nothing that can stop it at that point.

So it's not what the generals want. Yes they can probably stop or dissuade the president from launching pre-emptive attacks for no particular reason but it won't go down that way. Instead it will go down as a crisis (an engineered one obviously) that will occur, demand action and the US will feel based on everything that it is that it has no choice but to act and so it will be.

I suppose China could just let them have Taiwan but if they do the US will station tens of thousands of troops and missile systems and probably nukes on Taiwan before long and China won't get it back this century in this case which is a real deal-breaker.

I think that military conflict doesn't need to grow intense.

Like Ukraine it just needs to happen enough that the US government can pull a big lever called "fast decoupling" and force companies out of China quickly by slamming down a wall of sanctions. And like with Ukraine they can drag the EU into this via "defending democracy" and get them to pull their companies out and to do sanctions, divestment, decoupling.

This may be more about re-orienting the world for campism and a new cold war with the west withdrawing and putting up economic walls against China/Russia/BRICS and then trying to draw as much of the world as possible into their sphere while keeping out as much of the world from the BRICS sphere as possible with a strong possibility they can get India to pick up the slack from China and turn their position in BRICS into the kind of Turkish/Hungarian position inside NATO which is a spoiler who restrains the rest of it and takes contrary actions for its own self against the group interests and agenda. It's a modified form of the cold war playbook the US used to success in the first cold war in the 50s through 70s. Strategic coups, destabilization operations (terrorism, separatism in key regions) to disrupt China's supply routes and access to key resources and the belt and road.

This would be a time buying exercise. It would lock down NATO/EU markets for only western companies and non-Chinese/Russian firms and aim to out-compete using cheap labor while betting on crushing China/Russia on high technology leading to growing discontent and shortages as well as them falling behind. What if one of the points of the Ukraine war is to kill enough young men that they can justify importing a ton of desperate migrants to create a cheap factory (deeply destabilized due to the tensions of this situation) on the periphery of the EU to replace Russia/China along with their utilization of India? I wonder sometimes.

There's a real chance the US will just do something like deploy mines or AI-drones and dump them in the straits to try and cut off China's navy and land a bunch of weapons systems and special forces to fight China. The idea of a full confrontation between the US navy and the PLAN may never materialize so the intensity of the conflict will be lower. The US will use their vast air power to airlift in supplies and troops to the island. China can still win if they want to but it increases the costs and draw it out to be enough of a media spectacle that the people in the west are turned against China and the pressure for decoupling succeeds.

It's entirely because of his defense of evolution in debates and pushing back against teaching creationism in schools alongside people like Dawkins (also a biologist by training and who rose to atheism fame in large part by dunking on creationists). This all happened in the 2000s especially under the Bush admin and by 2016 or so was in the rear-view mirror already so they're reaching back for the old hated enemies.

And con-pedia in particular hates these types of people from the 2000s because those were their original enemies that drove them to create that thing. One of their original big fights with wikipedia and later the liberal rationalwiki was over evolution and pushing biblical literalism and there's a lot of drama there.

The west, the imperial core in particular feels so doomed.

It won't be leftist groups that do mutual aid but a bunch of reactionary militia maniacs who between handing out aid to "the good ones" will murder and lynch a few POC and queer folk, and do some gender-violence on women and use their hero status to obfuscate their misdeeds and growing power.

It seems too convenient too, like something the bourgeoisie or the nat-sec state planned as a way to prevent the rise of organic left mutual aid groups who would spread class awareness and threaten the existence of the US and capitalism itself. They can also use the existence of these to claim government is inefficient and they should just give money (and legal murder powers) to these groups instead because they do it better. And when a communist mutual aid org is found all murdered in an area where these people are operating it will be obvious what happened but uncle Sam wanted them dead anyways so you know they'll probably just hand out more guns to them in return and they'll become more popular with cops.

For profit company in capitalist country tries to sell products to different markets including the lavishly funded police state. It does this obviously by highlighting how such products can be used by that particular segment and wining and dining them at conferences with free swag to influence those who hold the purse-strings.

People here for some reason:

This is almost certainly no different than Apple hosting a little thing at a store showing people "hacks" like replacing an alarm clock with the clock app. It's just marketing and with how well the police are funded it makes sense. I mean they're foolish enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Musk's Bazinga-mobile for "outreach" so obviously Apple wants some cash from selling cops half-baked solutions using their products that may not even be as good as purpose-built solutions currently on the market and theoretically might take away business from cop-specific businesses.

I can't say critical support or anything but it's nothing to get worked up about.

I mean I'm not sure what people expect? For Tim Apple to say fuck the police? Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Not to excuse many awful things they do but from a privacy perspective, Google is in much, much, much deeper with the intelligence, police, surveillance state. They own at least one company in "isreal" founded and run by zionist intelligence officers. They regularly collaborate with the zionists and the US military on multiple projects including building purpose-made equipment specifically for them and hold conferences so regular it's not even of note. And Microsoft... they've been in bed with the feds for decades and do great things like automatically back up Windows encryption key to the Microsoft cloud where it can be subject to warrants by default. Apple at least on a surface level seems to do more, even if it's just for its image and marketing.

It's from Season 26, ep 8, "The Curse of Fenric", specifically part 3.

The Doctor reveals that faith or strong belief repels "hemavores" or vampires and repels a bunch by closing his eyes and believing in something. A higher ranking Soviet soldier that landed with a group of such soldiers in England during the second world war (reasons I forget) ends up separated from most of his troops who are still on the beach and instead with the Doctor, his companion Ace, and a priest. He insists he must go back for his men. Ace (the Doctor's present companion) asks him to teach the soldier "the singing" to scare them off. The Doctor states he either really believes in something or he doesn't to which the Soviet soldier replies he believes in the revolution. Some scene-cuts later the soldier, leaving the church is confronted by a group of these creatures and pulls out the pin, focusing on his belief in the revolution and they clutch themselves and start screaming as he walks slowly through them.

Someone made an edit with the Soviet anthem playing layered over it but in the original show it's just dramatic music stings with some ringing noises like those that accompanied the Doctor's actions earlier, no anthem plays.

And as mentioned elsewhere a priest in the episode can't repel them because he lost his faith due to the war.

Seems like Magneto is kind of in the same vein too. He seems like a mutant Malcolm X who does heinous shit to justify opposing his otherwise sensible objections to the slow liberal reformism of the X-Men.

Re-education would be wasted on someone like this. Re-education is for normal people who haven't deeply bought into the hate and propaganda like this. It's for normal people who watch the bourgeois propaganda and passively accept it but don't rejoice or get involved in celebrating the more wicked aspects by calling themselves a neo-liberal or being part of an online warmongering troll farm spreading imperial core propaganda.

Where? Not in the 2 minute segment I saw linked above.

That was just a polite "let me finish and here's what I mean". Not like he spent 2 minutes quickly eviscerating the foundation's of the man's belief. Not like he left them speechless. I've seen people eviscerated in debates or curbstomped if you like and this wasn't it. He wasn't left sputtering or angry or flustered or flailing, he just calmly moved the conversation on after injecting a nice neutralizing "not okay for Jews to have ethno-states what about Muslims" with the pre-supposed, pre-programmed context for that for the viewer being that Hasbara says nearly all Muslim majority states are the same as Israel just for Muslims therefore they're just carving out their own little spot and then they go on this diatribe about Muslims kicking out the Jews and they must give them back their lands and now you're bogged down into this ridiculous historical revisionist conversation with them. He let that go by allowing the assumption it was true and condemning it and going on a "I condemn all death penalty, regardless of reason". So he accepted the premise, he validated it by not throwing it out and staked his argument on liberal ground which is weak and ever-shifting.

Honestly I'm just angry after seeing that clip above because it's the most boring lib-shit objections imaginable and the people on the other side, excuse me the fascist monsters on the other side are just kind of pushing back because they reject the premise, they reject the premise that they should care about apartheid or that these particular Jews don't have a particular special license to break laws and do crimes, they don't feel any shame, they don't feel any reflection, they feel that those people were entitled to that land and fighting back makes the Palestinians the bad guys, you have to hit hard with very eloquently delivered language and metaphors to break through that shameless white supremacist entitlement and he didn't hit hard enough in the clip.

And probably for the best he didn't curbstomp them. If he did and he delivered a shining few nuggets of truth he'd be blacklisted from all western mainstream media quick as snap your fingers. He'd be castigated and slandered and deplatformed and so on just like Finkelstein and no defense, no matter how tight it is would matter. Because the job of these people is to present a false narrative, the idea of balanced discussion that involves "both sides" being represented but one side is only allowed a stunted, abridged, lousy version of its facts and truth while the other is allowed endless lies.

I don't think they were. They wanted an attack. They may not have expected the scope of it, hoped for something less humiliating and problematic that gave them justification to speed up the genocide without angering the domestic population of settlers so much and scaring some off.

Beyond that though there's that IRA quip about those on the defensive needing to get lucky every single day whereas those on the offense need only get lucky once. It's the same thing here. Maybe Hamas got "lucky" just as after many attempts to kill Nasrallah they got lucky and got him (I still think they followed the Iranian he was meeting with or some amount of commanders and concluded he was there). The pager thing is just unfortunately something that Hezbollah didn't account for being a possibility in their operational security. Also it's quite possible it was impossible to spot the small amounts of explosive without opening the batteries which few are going to do. They're going to at most check for bugs or unauthorized hardware.

Now that further attacks succeeding serve no purpose militarily or politically they're going to use their intelligence effectively. Though if they start losing the western crowd I wouldn't put it beyond them to stage an atrocity of some sort happening to get the narrative of victimhood back. So far there's no sign of a need for that.

I'd ensure Spartacus's slave revolt succeeded, resulting in Rome falling to a grand slave revolt, smothering in the cradle the pro-debtor/creditor government and empire. ~~Probably just delay it emerging later down the line but who knows.~~ But best part is this stops a lot of follow-on bad happenings such as Christianity being proclaimed the official religion of Rome, certain unifications don't occur under wartime conditions against Rome. Maybe they even implement a kind of early universal suffrage and it ends up failing but it means that 17th century enlightenment thinkers have more to chew on which means they and the French revolution see certain flaws in liberal thinking and advocate a more radical course of action leading to the US founding fathers being a bunch of, republican, class traitors and hardcore abolitionists which leads to a crumbling of the capitalist world order over time that means the German revolution succeeds and European capital is murdered off in a bloody series of revolutions ending by the year 1980. While simultaneously anti-colonial sentiment creates uprisings across the globe that further weaken capital. Thus global communism by 2040.

(Yes I know there are problems with this but let me dream)

Well obviously. But I didn't feel like writing for hours. Any geopolitical analysis of this scale that is only two paragraphs is going to be simplified.

Whether it's overly simple, I don't think so. I think I captured the gist of how things seem to be going. Of course I can't know the future, there are twists and turns and happenings no one expects.

But I do know this. Europe is bound to the US by the bonds of white supremacy and settler-colonialist legacy and the threads of neo-colonialist interest they still have. Their interests are one in certain ways and that makes it exceptionally hard for them to truly gain independence from the force that's been occupying them (literally) and bailed out their capitalists at the end of WW2. Like a bunch of evil Captain Planet planeteers through their powers and colonial legacy, tricks, and support combined the US became capitalism's consolidated champion as well as the global defender of the white supremacist world order.

Let's not forget the NSA was spying on Germany's prime minister among many others. It's not just that they have troops in these countries, it's that hey have dirt, leverage, ways of pushing people into or out of power when it comes down to it if they really need to make a change. They haven't used these for decades because they're unseemly and don't fit with their new image so it's a problem if they're caught and because the EU is close enough in interests to them that it's never been a problem. Gladio is a reminder of the tip of the iceberg of how far they'd go. Much as Google keeps Mozilla funded and alive to stave off challenges of monopoly the US allowed Europe some independence to lend legitimacy to their claims of different opinions and the idea that the EU and western Europe and most of NATO aren't just a bunch of vassals for the US.

As Parenti once quipped, if you never go beyond where you're supposed to go you never notice the tug of the leash, it's only when you stray that you feel that and realize the limits imposed on you.

The Nordstream bombings was the tugging of the leash and we saw Europe very obediently heel and they've with a whimper accepted the US narrative lie about it being Ukraine that did it.