darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Nah. They’ll get rid of them too or roll them into another agency. Instead they’ll just bribe and coerce private package companies like UPS and Fedex to cooperate. I’m pretty sure they already do. At the same level and in the same capacity and best of all because they’re private companies you have no rights against infringements by those companies unlike those you hypothetically have when dealing with the government in terms of due process and amendment protections. You can complain and in theory have rights or claims against a federal agent who overstepped the law to go snooping through things beyond their authority but who ever heard of a private company getting in trouble for that, especially because they can just blame a rogue employee if it gets really bad.

People forget how deep in bed private industry is with the US surveillance state because it pays them and because their cooperation means the state looks the other way on taxes and other white collar law violations from their “friends”.

US government already bypasses tons of legal rules about spying on Americans by simply not doing the spying themselves. They pay third party phone analytics and private spying firms for their data-sets on Americans for instance.

Very normal rule of law country things.

In bad communist country, judges who help victims of the regime by trying to prevent goons from grabbing them during judicial processes are themselves kidnapped and threatened by the state.

Insurance companies would know. They would know because they know diagnoses and track them to approve or deny medications, visits to medical professionals like psychiatrists/psychologists/etc. They can just demand those records from them scarily enough.

Cool. Though still waiting for a good open source, locally runnable (without needing 64GB of RAM for itself alone) speech to text transcribing model that isn’t awful which I can use to generate subtitles for things from less than perfect audio samples. Doesn’t exist apparently as even Youtube’s transcription isn’t great (though Apple podcast’s transcription is actually really good by comparison).

Not that this isn’t them showing who they are in weighing in at all but I do have a little chuckle at the “anti-communist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice” thing as if there is a pope on the menu who isn’t all of those things. The anti-choice thing is AFAIK irrevocable papal doctrine that cannot be superseded or undone by another pope as it’s considered received wisdom from god, likewise with the anti-LGBTQ thing (though a little more flexibility), and the first is well you know.

The US might miraculously find deposits of rare earth metals

Reminder that rare earths are not actually rare, it’s just that China has 85% of world refining capacity for them as it takes some doing. In a full on war footing, pull out all the brakes type situation the US could absolutely spin up some not as efficient, very dangerous for workers, expensive, but workable emergency capacity, it wouldn’t put them on par with China but it would be enough to continue a war with selective strikes (instead of constant, high intensity bombardments hourly for weeks on end) and after that point the US would almost certainly continue to build up that capacity and make it a point to attempt to wean the rest of the world off Chinese rare earths.

It would also result in all kinds of other unforeseen consequences. For example the US may have the capacity to hack and physically damage or destroy Chinese electrical or other infrastructure but obviously isn’t going to do that right now. But if a hot war unfolds and especially one where the US isn’t winning they might break out those offensive state malware toolboxes and start wreaking incredible havoc within China that could cost a lot of money, take a lot of lives and result in a lot of chaos, uncertainty and problems that would take quite some time to sort out. The more electronically connected and “smart” everything is as in China the easier it is to fuck up everything, ironically the US by not being as “advanced” as China in adopting network connectivity to various things is a harder target in this regard. China is well aware of this risk, the US basically compromised everything in China with their shipments of NSA hardware back-door chipped Cisco routers and devices which Snowden revealed and though it’s been more than a decade since they became aware I have to assume they’re still inside many systems lurking and waiting.

Excellent news if true and if he sticks the course and doesn’t reverse in a week.

I can hear it now:

“Folks the Chinese I’ve decided to go easy on them, they’re very weak and in a bad spot and I’m a nice guy, I’m a nice guy. I look at them in this bad spot and I said okay I’ll go easy on you, it’s very sad, very sad what’s going on in China and you know I’m America first but I had to do it, just had to do it. They’re in a very bad spot, it would be a catastrophe if I didn’t and then it would be our problem too. They still have too much of our stuff and I think we need to figure out a way to get it back but it’s going to take some time and some plans. And let me tell you folks I have the best plans, I’m a planning genius. People are constantly coming up to me and telling me how brilliant my plans are. So we’re going to use these wonderful plans and we’re going to win but it’s going to take time. And right now folks let me tell you we need to deal with the radical left lunatics in this country. Did you see what happened just recently? They made Elon into the soyjack, they turned him into the soyjack and humiliated him. It’s disgusting and we can’t allow it. These radical left America-hating universities have got to put a stop to this. We’re not going to allow it anymore folks.”

I don’t necessarily see how this is incompatible with the shift in strategy to something like small yard high fence that Democrats favored. Or really the shift to pushing the line that America is a “trad” nation to attempt to undercut Chinese inroads with Latin America and Africa by shifting from the progressive rhetoric which people either hate because it’s not for killing the gays or hate because they’ve come to understand it’s a disguise for imperialism so now it’s time to change the costume the US wears.

I’m sure once Dems get back in office there will be pressure for them to bring back these progressive offices but they’ll say no and say the reason why is America now has new allies who are “traditional” and keeping them is more important because countering China is of paramount importance and changing it now would alienate these people. Same kind of excuses used in the first cold war. The Dems will instead install a handful of below ambassador level posts who very weakly and softly object to the most openly odious kill the gays bills in other nations and are immediately fired every time a Republican administration retakes power.

The JDPON Don thing is honestly a little thought-terminating, as a meme it was funny but some people seem to be increasingly unwilling to consider that the US is implementing some sort of coherent strategy whose core has persisted in action and thinking through Democratic and Republican administrations, implementation details will vary of course across the parties or people in them. Dems will align on this move to trad by choosing to take the message that their loss to Trump was because they were too far left culturally and thus must move to the right as it has ever been.

US still has the high ground. The commanding heights of international finance. They have a lot of these nations in debt, and they play dirty. They can with sanctions levers crush a country economically by forcing others to not do business with it (and countries know this and this is part of the locking you in a room with China threat). China isn’t going to coup these nations and install a corrupt comprador with military officers that trained in China who they’ve ideologically adjusted and spied on and know who among them will listen to their plea and not report it but the US might and can and has established methods for doing so.

I look at it from a view of human relations as well, the classic case of the abuser and the hostage victim who sticks with them because change is scary and because the abuser has convinced the hostage victim that they’re not strong, that they can’t survive without them and that those trying to help them are actually going to hurt them. The US offers a gradual choice, nothing sharp, just obey a little bit, then a little more, then a little more as they reel you in. With China you have to make the sharp break, you risk painting a big target on your back and being one of only a few who does so and drawing the full might of the empire to repeatedly punch you in the face while others look on. You don’t know how it will all shake out, the prudent, risk averse thing is to take the obeying a little bit choice, is to think you can take that and create wiggle room and strategize and see how things shake out but when everyone else takes the same deal they find themselves in the same place of oh shit no one else small stood up to them we can’t stand up to them at the next demand because again we don’t know if we’ll get repeatedly beat on by this violent, deranged empire using military and economic means. So it’s a kind of ratchet effect. And what’s especially clever about this is they use Trump, a man the US propaganda apparatus casts as an aberration to do this. Many nations will foolishly think that they should make a deal now, give a little and that in 4 years there will be a more reasonable “normal” US president who will reverse this, thus it appears even more wise to capitulate a little now because you believe this is just a passing storm instead of understanding this is bi-partisan consensus and a Democrat in the white house in 2029 won’t roll this back but iterate on it.

And if China is forced into a position of sanctioning/retaliating against dozens and dozens of countries who all take the same deal from the US it acts as a lever pushing those nations further away from China while the US continues to reel them in. It only works if most nations believe China’s threat and find it more credible and fearsome than the US threat. If a large group of nations just accepts it, it further pushes the US point that China wants control over your nation, will not allow you to take actions negatively affecting it, acts only in dangerous self-interest and that it’s better to stick with the trusted abuser you know (USA) than go with China who all US propaganda says is so horrible after all and besides who is after all a communist nation which is naturally scary to all capitalist nations. If they truly believe in the multi-polarity project they might better understand that standing now is for themselves but how many do is the question.

So it’s a calculus that has a risk of being decided based on propaganda assumptions carefully seeded by the US.

I think it’ll be interesting to see who the next Pope is, I think there’s a good chance regardless of any beating on the drums of helping the poor how much that person pushes (which I think was what Francis was after more than any reformism to the way the church views women’s/gay rights) the reactionary culture war, pushes anti-LGBTQ+, pushes anti-trans, pushes “traditional” roles of the sexes with women relegated to an inferior place. Those kinds of things play very well in places like Africa and Latin America where a lot of that red in the top map is and can be used to stir up anti-China sentiment on the basis of casting China as an enemy of traditional values. Because that’s the shift US propaganda outlets themselves have been making under Trump, from trying to portray the US as a beacon of progressive rights to moving to “trad” much in the vein of how Russia pushes its own appeal to reactionaries internationally. This is to say nothing of just having the next pope come out and call China an enemy of Christianity and urge all Christians and believers world-wide to unite against the “atheist communist dictatorship” while playing up Tibet, Xinjiang, etc and insisting that China intends to force your country to allow gay marriage and so on and so forth and use the retaliation China does against countries who agree to US exclusion of China as proof they’re not really for a multi-polar world but for controlling you and that if you’re going to be controlled it should be by a “trad” country like the US who will help you fight the scourge of these scapegoated sexual minorities, of feminists, etc. Is anti-colonialist sentiment strong enough to overcome this? I’m not optimistic in Latin America, in Africa I don’t know.

To be clear there are a lot of places this can go wrong but there are a lot of ways it can go at least partially right for the US and end up with cold war 2.0 bloc situation.

You’re in for a treat with the complete season finale story-line for VB season 3. Definitely one of the best.

It was definitely a shift. But a stark one. I’d like to point out that there was another shift but a more subtle one that occurred with the collapse (via illegal dissolution) of the USSR and the end of the cold war with capitalist victory and end of history.

I’d say collectively the two shifts dealt a death blow to ST as a franchise. I lost interest in ENT very early on by the second season. There’s really no coming back from that kind of liberal restoration.

It’s a matter of collapsing in a Suez crisis moment within the next 10 years or fighting on as a credible if declining power that can really mess things up for decades more to come. I’d prefer the former but the latter seems increasingly likely.

Pretty much my thinking. The Vatican isn’t going to paint a target on themselves, the chic thing of corporations (and Vatican is just one big child abusing, criminal corporation in a sense) trying to pretend to be woke and progressive has been tossed aside. Some parts of Europe are still clinging to a veneer of it but the far right is rising rapidly even in France and I think that within 5-8 years at most you have much more reactionary governments in power across Europe and the Vatican won’t want a pope that’s out of step on that.

The fact also is the idea that Francis vetted these people and made sure they were ideologically committed to his way of thinking seems a bit spurious, it is so like the rad-lib to want to have variety, to accept reactionary people to the right of your position because they’re with you on one particular thing or they seem on a personal level to be likeable and not horribly corrupt and a true believer at least. So I would not be surprised if even without the shifting global trends that happened.

Francis was notably picked in 2013, that was in Obama’s second term, world-wide there was this propaganda feeling that America had made a decidedly progressive permanent turn by electing a black man not once but twice and so they wanted to follow on with that. Now with Trump, with the rise of “trad” among the incel-o-sphere and man-o-sphere among young guys, with the alignment of the big corporations with Trump with the big tech bourgeoisie literally lining up behind him it would make sense to put in someone more appropriate for that setting.

Probably a pope that’s more outspoken on calling trans people evil because that’s a popular thing now unfortunately. And maybe even one who is willing to be openly anti-China and help lead the religious proles on a crusade against the Asiatic communist power. Because let’s be honest, with all the secret society shit, the ties between the Vatican and European aristocracy and bourgeoisie it’s hard to believe there aren’t powerful people not at all affiliated with the church weighing in on the choice and what they NEED to see in who the next pick is with the electors before they go into seclusion.

If you don’t have income the IRS knows about then I’m pretty sure no. Though I’m not sure if they can do things like try and take a car whose title is listed in your name or get a lien against that or a house or other big things you own. They might be able to garnish things like state benefits though, like money for the disabled, they can definitely garnish social security including disability. They can garnish things like unemployment I THINK and they can sue you and try and get a list of your assets and seize them to sell them off to try and pay for part of it.

I very nearly wrote a comment about this long or longer going off on religion in reply to a post here but decided against it.

Christianity is a slave religion. It is not revolutionary. It is for the status quo, it demands slaves obey their masters, masters obey the state (render unto Cesar) and dangles above them all this idea that submitting here and now doesn’t matter because you’re on this plane of existence for 60-100 years and then if you’re a good Christian you go to heaven literally forever and get to live in a paradise so it’s just not worth struggling over. You can sit there as a smug slave, as a smug serf, worker etc as you’re beaten and starved because you know you have a ticket of this, you know you have a reward waiting for you so none of this matters. The Protestant work ethic is the Christian work ethic. It demands false peace instead of justice, says CSA victims must forgive their abuser in their church and says that abuser as long as they repent to god (not even the victim, they don’t matter) they’re golden and their ticket to heaven remains reserved and they can stand up in front of church, forgiven by god and cannot be judged.

You want to be a Christian and push for a better world? Fine I’m not going to go out of my way to make fun of you but I am judging you because you’re a cafeteria Christian, I find it unserious, you’re picking and choosing and ignoring parts of your religion to suit what you want it to say. You’re not an ounce of a more genuine Christian than the reactionary Christians who never do any charity at all who also pick and choose and twist the religion to be what you want it to be to suit your way of thinking.

Additionally Jesus says by the way that the OT is totally valid until he returns. Matthew 5:17-20:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,[a] not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

I get you know being afraid of death. I honestly think it’s the task of a world communist government to create a new religion for people who need this kind of thing, one that’s defanged and harmless, one that cannot be misinterpreted in any charitable way to support bigotry, one with equal rights for women at its core and which is simple and short in tenets and wildly progressive. And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don’t confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you’re forgiven unless it’s a serious crime in which case you’re imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result. The point being not to go out of our way to preach and convert the masses to worshiping the party or anything bizarre like that but having an out, an option for these people so they don’t get drawn into ancient, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary ideologies.

See this type of mentality is why I am not that optimistic about China’s chances of peeling countries away for a big united front against the US on tariffs. We are getting the bloc situation or worse out of these tariffs.

You have the dogs like occupied Korea and probably Japan and a few others who would never turn on their master. You have the fellow white countries that would never sell out white supremacy and their centuries of European colonialism to a communist non-white power (China) in places like Europe, Australia, etc. These disciplined liberals who have shown with Ukraine they’re willing to commit economic suicide to defend liberal capitalism. And you have compradors and wanna-be honorary whites. And you have the schemers and fence-straddlers who are in an abusive relationship with the world hegemon and are afraid to leave it just yet because it’s still so strong and they just fear the world as they think it would be according to the abuser (US) if China rises and would prefer to maintain the status quo if forced to choose, at best to play China and the US off each other for benefits without siding with either which doesn’t help China’s cause.

Now occupied Korea is exceptionally bad in this degree I admit but the more the wind blows in the direction of countries bowing to US tariffs and China being isolated and alone the more countries shy away from joining them and join the pack and the path of what looks like least resistance. As after all though China or Russia can stand up to the US and live, most countries out there aren’t big enough, nor economically strong enough, nor self-sufficient enough, nor nuclear powers or strong enough to resist US military or non-military economic coercion and battering.

Many countries are now presented with a choice “let China rise to a great power and diminish influence of the US: yes/no” and for many who believe they can play China and the US off each other they don’t want to diminish US influence and they certainly don’t want to end up locked into a trading bloc with China and locked out of the west which is the basis of Trump’s threat. That either you throw a stab into China with us, don’t even have to join our bloc, just reduce trade a bit and agree to do more trade with us or you get locked into a room (trading bloc) with China and locked out of the west and that’s alarming to many countries. And the US will tailor their pressure to each country to reel them in while getting maximum extortion benefits up to the point where they might break off and go with China. And I don’t think this will be a sudden demand, it won’t be “decouple with China next year”, it’ll be things like within 18 months you have to have decreased reliance on China by x amount and increased reliance on the US/NATO bloc by x amount and then by 3 years that rises to amount x for both of those.

Now China is pushing back, they’re threatening retaliation against countries that go along with that but it doesn’t help them a lot except with countries who are very deeply economic intertwined with them as those straddling the fence will look at pressure like that with alarm, they will conclude the US was right, that China will use economic pressure to get their way with them regularly and be more inclined to join with the US in its gradualist demands rather than risk a sudden break which is what joining with China represents. This is a very tricky needle to thread and I hope China finds a way but it feels like the deck is somewhat stacked and it’s going to be a matter of time and struggle rather than any master-strokes China can pull off to get the rest of the world on their side or to force the US to back down.

It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma, yes it would be best for all countries if they all stood together against the US on tariffs, it would force the US to back down. BUT because the US can single out countries, can in our prisoner’s dilemma slap them with lesser charges (in this case sanctions) on another crime which it says it will waive if they cooperate there is this fear to break ranks and once people start cooperating everyone rushes to get the plea deal leaving only the hold-outs to then get hit with the full charges.

Now my hope is China’s trade with the US is strong enough, important enough, vital enough that the bourgeoisie force Trump to drop sanctions on China to a level that’s manageable like 25-40% (it’s not going to zero or 10%, Biden alone slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese electric cars, this is a bipartisan project) and that results in a big obvious defeat for the US just like Ukraine. But I won’t underestimate the US, they have a lot of strength, a lot of built up capital, a lot of levers to pull, a lot of leverage from their NSA spying and their Epstein blackmail rings and so on.

Do you think Stalin would’ve liked Star Wars? I think he’d probably be a bit boomerish with liking 4-5-6 over 1-2-3.

That is objectively the correct view (so hardly surprising Stalin would have it).

I think it’s a bit silly at this point to think this is all just for stock manipulation.

Points:

• Trump has been an advocate and believer in tariffs as a magic solution for decades. There are quotes of him saying this. This isn’t something he came up with 6 years ago to make money. Unfortunately (fortunately for us I guess) he doesn’t understand what actual intelligent tariff policy would look like, further because he’s a a Republican and surrounded with neo-liberal Republican types it’s impossible for him to take the steps necessary to actually use tariffs to do what he wants because of the necessity of things like capital controls and state investment and support which are both anathema to his party and advisors and planners.

• US bourgeoisie have been growing increasingly alarmed by China’s rise and the fact it hasn’t succumbed to liberalism and been overthrown by compradors under their control. They want the ability to maneuver, to wage war, to wage economic war (including things like economic blockade, kicking China out from world banking systems, basically using all the power they have as hegemon while it lasts to crush them). They’ve been talking in the open of decoupling for years, over a decade for some but it’s gotten more serious and urgent. There are those, especially empire planners and domestic industrial bourgeoisie (often arms makers or related) who are especially strident in support of some form of re-shoring or friendshoring to India or other places so they can attack China without China being able to gut punch them and stop their arms making ability or crash the US economy.

• At least one announcement about clarification on tariffs was made on the weekend, if this was all about stock manipulation you wouldn’t do something when the markets wouldn’t open for another 48 hours because immediate news releases cause bigger dips/jumps than ones which the traders have stewed on for a few days which are easier to profit off of.

• More broadly the bourgeoisie realize it’s not good to not have control of the means of production, so as with the second point there is a real feeling that somehow or other we need to move production to countries we can trust or at least play against China like India. The talk of domestic manufacturing is just slop for the hogs, they might move some back but it’ll either be automated or they plan to so crash the wage and living conditions for people in the US first that it won’t be the kind of boon some people here think it will be.

• That and you have a lot of fail-sons and daughters who have fully bought into the propaganda and don’t understand how the world works who think they can change things in a way that aligns with their propagandized view of the world.

• China has retaliated and Trump is arrogant and very proud. He has no real outs, no way to back down without losing a ton of face and making the US look weak. Especially after the Ukraine humiliation can the US afford being owned again? Now maybe he’ll make some sort of deal with China when things get bad but they’re tired of playing games with the US and especially of the US stirring up hatred for them and gearing up for war. So there’s a good chance there’s just no way out of this, at least not before prices have hit sky high and the economy crashed.

• Disciplining the proles is seen as an unambiguous good by many at the top. They see the idea of people being forced to sign up for payment plans for an iPhone that last 5 years as a great thing, after all if the phone gets smashed in two years they’re now underwater on it and may go into debt. I’m not sure how far away from debtors prisons we are but the bourgeoisie definitely feel that rentierism is a great idea.

We are seeing major movements, changes in the economic and global geopolitical order. The US is making changes, it knows the old path leads to defeat and ruin so it’s gambling and lashing out.

Under communism this will be the only allowed format of super hero cape-shit movie. Just a series of movies where Magneto is right and vindicated and eventually wins in the series with the help of his human communist comrades and a broad group of mutants. And it ends with him visiting his friend Professor X in a comfortable low security re-education facility (actually located in the professor’s mansion for some reason) and playing chess with him in a homage to the old movies where Magneto is imprisoned and Xavier visits him to play chess. Then as the credits roll Magneto appears for a short message to remind the audience that in real life hundreds of thousands of ordinary people risked it all, sacrificed greatly and gave their lives to overthrow capitalism and that they are the true super heroes.

It’s interesting how the US guards developments anything like this yet China just releases them to the public. I get they’re trying to deter the US by showing they have technology knowledge to deter and intimidate defense/military people to prevent/delay war but I have to wonder if part of the reasoning they do this is because their spies have revealed the US already has everything they reveal like this and so it’s not any advantage to the US to have a paper on how to do this new thing, more just a show “hey we have this too now”.