You have to admire the wise, open-minded PMC who are willing to consider all viewpoints. This is what democracy is all about. This is what authoritarian leftist regimes keep from you. /s

Where is the video where it finally hits I can’t take this anymore

jellyfish

like, stuck to the ship?

*edit, probably polyps

I think darkcalling was referring to Ekpar Asat, not Adrian Zenz

On the other hand, supplying rare earth elements (REEs) to the US has kept the US dependent on China.

China needs leverage against the US to avoid embargo, but China has limited ability to project power or control governments around the world. What they do have is a massive economy and central planning. The US is nearly the opposite: they can project power and control governments, but they are weak to economic pressure because their political economy makes planning difficult – private capital controls the US government and capital demands short-term profits, they’re less willing to tunnel through temporary costs to reach a stronger position.

The US could have foreseen the threat of a REE bottleneck decades ago and made the strategic decision to build up and maintain their own REE supply chain, but it would have hurt profits. Because China supplied cheap REEs to the US for decades, the US neglected to secure REE autonomy, and now China has that leverage over them.

China gains leverage, in other words, by shaping the incentive structure of US capital. They do this by trading, not withholding trade.

…this is my amateur analysis, anyway.

Maybe he wants to help control the Americas, and/or maybe he thinks the war between NATO and Russia could go nuclear?

38:31 Blumenthal mentions a “withering” analysis of Venezuela’s military preparedness, issued under a pseudonym by a member of the Cuban Five intelligence cell. I have no clue where to find that but I would like to read it.

Solomon’s arrest in February came as Israeli and pro-Israeli mouthpieces raised fears of supposed Iranian chemical or biological attacks on US soil. They attempted to pressure the US into attacking Iran, as it ultimately did. The occupation has a long and confirmed history of ‘false flag’ attacks for political gain.

Are they gonna make a missile with a fucking drill on the front?

It kinda reads like, “the more humiliating it is to live in America, the more intolerable it is that a nonwhite nation is on a better trajectory”

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I appreciate the “dynamism of historical processes” perspective of the fifth article (On ‘Betrayals’).

History is not “ingredients in, results out,” it’s a process in time, with twists and turns. If you want to explain a chess game, you look at the moves, you don’t say “Player A won because they are the kind of person who wins.” Sure, you can talk about how Player A makes their decisions – maybe they have a particularly effective “doctrine” or “style” that helps them win. But that only goes so far to explain the course of any particular game. So I like the “how exactly did we get here” angle of the author of that article.

(I’m not a chess nerd I just think it’s a good analogy)

The article also never once uses a she or her pronoun. Pronouns are scrupulously avoided except for a single “their”

If the US has any sort of plan against Iran, it seems like that plan is to space things out and hope the Iranian people start to get comfortable again, with the idea that the IRGC will start to lose some of their public mandate for big retaliatory strikes?

Or maybe the idea is to just lob shit at Iran every month or two, to keep the conflict barely hot enough to justify the blockade, and then drag this out to somehow hurt China more than they hurt themselves? Can their allies in East Asia wait that long?

If this blockade raises oil prices high enough for long enough, at what point do we start an irreversible shift to renewables, which China dominates? If there’s some way this all makes sense, I want to know it, but to my limited understanding it looks like flailing.

it turns you into a plastic lego person, which is the horrifying, soylent green-type secret of how all lego people are made

Sure, I’d press the “turn him into a good person” button, but that button doesn’t exist, it never has and never will.

I mean, yeah, imagine if you could just “turn people good” in an instant. That’s the ideal solution. We wouldn’t even be in this mess. Just solve capitalism lmao. “God, what the fuck have I been doing? All this wealth, from other people’s labor?? No, no, hit me. I deserve it.”

The low-value jobs you’re talking about are essential to the basic functioning of society. That is your food, water, and sanitation. If they stopped doing those jobs, you would die within days or weeks. What you are saying, essentially, is that you think those jobs should be done but that the people who do them should be poor.

medieval age was more egalitarian.

I’m not sure what you mean, but medieval economies were dominated by unpaid serfdom or slavery, depending on where in the world you looked, so it’s hard to quantify how much wealth most people had. In the case of slaves, it was zero, and in the case of serfs, it depends on how you define wealth, but I would argue it was still close to zero. Although serfs could barter with each other, they had little or no “purchasing power” to go out and buy “consumer goods.” Pretty much everything they owned was hand-made by themselves or other local serfs.

Maybe the least ambiguous metric of inequality back then would be land ownership, which was highly concentrated.

in the end, distribution of power and geopolitical events are more shaped by religious thinking (even if it’s wrapped into modern words like globalism, human rights etc) than by real (i.e. torches and pitchforks) power, i think.

“Real power” can suppress some ideas and boost others. The ruling class owns the news and entertainment industries, they own print, radio, TV, social media, they own academic funding, they own the intelligence agencies that plant stories, they own the political platforms that center some debates and not others. On top of that, the stolen wealth of imperial nations is good marketing. “They must be rich because of their ideas.” And then when they embargo nations like Cuba into poverty, the inverse occurs. “Their ideas led them to poverty.” As Marx put it, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

Potential health effects: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/methyl-methacrylate.pdf

it also veers into anti-marxism further down (but it’s still a great article and I appreciate OP for posting it).

The author compares tech billionaires to Marxists because both want to “sacrifice now for payoff later.” But historical Marxists started tackling poverty immediately, whereas tech billionaires don’t want to tackle it ever. It’s also a false dichotomy. Whether you prioritize short or long-term is a question of how well you can predict the future. When you have robust predictions, like climate change, it can make sense to sacrifice. You just have to be realistic about your ability to predict outcomes in a chaotic world ruled by the butterfly effect.