curiosity for what comes next, as we are going to live through what may be the most turbulent times in human history and I wanna see how things go

Russia opening up the conflict to one with NATO makes less than no sense. It would be actively detrimental to their goals in Ukraine. I could see Russia striking some covert NATO forces inside Ukraine in retaliation, but anything major would allow forces from e.g. Poland to enter into the conflict and extend it at a time where Russia is cruising towards inevitable victory, and outright military defeat of NATO would either take decades or result in nuclear war. Neither of which would be sensible.

Russia is boiling Ukraine’s and NATO’s frogs far more effectively than they are boiling Russia’s. There’s a similar dynamic at play with Iran and Israel, where Israel is like Ukraine and Iran is like Russia. Iran has no need to imminently strike Israel and destroy them because Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansarallah are (however unfairly to the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) are boiling Israel’s frog far better than Israel and the US are boiling Iran’s.

Ukraine’s constant attempts to get the US and Europe involved in the war mirror Israel’s constant attempts to get the US involved in the war, and Russia’s willingness to be patient and accede to a degree of humiliation in return for a successful long-term plan also strongly mirror Iran’s patience and somewhat embarrassing moments (trying to make a deal which delayed the strike on Israel a month or two ago). Neither Russia nor Iran can simply put up with countries constantly trampling over their red lines and so have to make big displays occasionally, but otherwise are content with how the geopolitical situation is progressing, I think.

In all: if you have time on your side, then tread carefully. If you do not, then flail wildly and go for million-to-one odds.

It’s taken from Wikipedia. I’m flattered that you think I could have done it though, considering I’ve been in the “badly drawn stick figure” art phase since I was 5

Next thread is up.

Israel is simply following the Ukraine 2023 Counteroffensive Playbook.

1. Prepare the poorly-trained and shattered remnants of your army to try an offensive against an enemy you deem weak.
2. Announce the offensive in advance for months on end, giving time for your enemy to prepare for it.
3. Spend a few weeks making basically no progress.
4. Cope by saying that you’re actually just probing and that progress is indeed being made because you captured a couple small villages and that was the goal all along (we are here).
5. Eventually be forced to stop and retreat due to untenable losses while declaring victory, and then
6. Try even shittier versions of this in the future while your Nazi state disintegrates in a dozen different ways.

when Iran sinks an aircraft carrier, we’re gonna get the Trump version of that Bush photo where he’s being told about the 9/11 attacks, and I cannot fucking wait. it’s probably gonna be a photo of Trump looking shocked in his golf cart next to a 114-year-old guy who owns all the orphan-crushing factories in Kansas

we get like three cosy moments per year when Iran hits Israel or a pro-American candidate eats shit in an election, and we’re so deprived of good news that we’ve adapted to these crushing conditions and now only need those three cosy moments to be energized

Declaring wars has been out of style for decades. Nowadays you just start bombing and everything floats in this quasi-space where everything (and nothing) is possible and everybody writes strongly-worded letters to each other and sets up red lines that exist in quantum superpositions of existence and non-existence, broken and unbroken.

So, with that said, I reckon the US will start bombing West Africa and just not talk about it, ever, because nobody in the media will give a shit. It’ll be like how the US bombed (and/or helped bomb) Yemen for a decade and it was one of those conflicts where once a year, you got a patronizing NYT article headlined like “In This Forgotten War, There is Both Hunger and Hope” (they literally do this with Sudan) and no other coverage. And so everybody was/is baffled why Yemen is so pissed off at the West not knowing that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by Western-backed forces, and so they just start doing body language analysis on Abdul-Malik al-Houthi to try and explain shit, just like Roman haruspexes.

So we’ll have US forces dropping JDAMs on Nigerien government buildings and hospitals but the media will be too busy asking Karoline Leavitt about Trump’s tweets

It is completely unacceptable if Putin should get anything at all out of his adventure. Because then Xi Jinping (China’s president, red.) will conclude: “If Putin can take the Crimean peninsula then I can take Taiwan”. That is why we must make sure Putin is not successful in Ukraine.

I assume that Rasmussen has spoken at length about how Israel must be prevented from trying to annex Gaza, the West Bank, and Southern Lebanon, for the exact same reason as above?

I think it’s possible that Trump’s team is suggesting hilariously awful/unpopular people for certain positions because they’re trying to negotiate it. It’s the art of the deal! You suggest Gaetz as Attorney General, then they refuse, and you go “Well, okay, I’m a mature adult in the room who’s willing to compromise, here’s [the choice I wanted all along].”

globalization really did go from like “This is the TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE FORCE that will ravage through every economy like a behemoth” in the late 1990s, to “Well, we need to cultivate globalization like a delicate flower in the face of adversary” in the 2000s under Bush, and now to “Actually we never liked free trade, all my homies hate free trade, let’s put tariffs and sanctions on everything.” The economic ideology of the imperial core is utterly unchangeable, until it isn’t (because an alternative formulation benefits the capitalists).

Yet another dogshit Krugman article. To summarize in one sentence:

trump bad, trump stupid, china bad, china stupid, china not growing, china failure, trump more stupid than china, trump bad

You can go read the article if you want but I promise you’ll just say “Fuck, I should have just kept to the summary.” It’s article #438742 that says “Here’s some advice to China, a country that has rocketed from utter poverty to the second (and really first) largest economy on the planet in less than a century, from a bunch of Western countries that have been in stagnation and depression since 2008.” There’s nothing of value here.

An interesting piece that tries to answer the question: “Why does everybody in the West think that China’s economy is doing very badly when it demonstrably isn’t?” from a very capitalist Hong Kong research group thinktanky place:

At an investment conference in Kuala Lumpur recently, I caught up with an old friend and Gavekal client. Over coffee between sessions, we talked about one of the most visible changes of the last few years in Asia: the Chinese cars that have so quickly appeared on roads across the continent. This led us to the comments made in September by Ford chief executive officer Jim Farley. Freshly returned from a visit to China, Farley told The Wall Street Journal that the growth of the Chinese auto sector poses an existential threat to his company, and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority.” By any measure, this is an earth-shattering statement.

Making cars is complicated. Not as complicated as making airliners or nuclear power plants. But making cars is still the hallmark of an advanced industrial economy. So, the idea that China is suddenly setting the standards that others must now strive to meet is a sea-change compared with the world we lived in just five years ago.

This led my friend to question how Farley and other auto industry CEOs could have fallen quite so deeply asleep at the wheel. How could China so rapidly leapfrog established industries around the world without all those very well paid Western CEOs realizing what was happening until two minutes ago?

The rest of the piece continues in that more informal style, so I’ll just summarize the rest of the article:

During the pandemic, and especially as the Ukraine War was causing chaos, nobody from the West really bothered to visit China, and so haven’t seen how things have developed. This is in line with a Dengist strategy of keeping a low profile and not flaunting their capabilities, but it wasn’t as if China was stopping them from visiting - CEOs just had other things to worry about with supply chain disruptions.

The author then basically says that China is doing capitalism better than the West, and now the West is (rather hilariously) backing away from jerking off the very concept of globalization and now think tariffs are awesome again.

Next, he talks about how the West has been pretty consistently racist against Asia throughout history, and these racist impulses still very much exist, so they would naturally underestimate China. There’s also the fact that China is a communist state, and everybody in the West is brought up on anti-Soviet propaganda (the author doesn’t use that word, unfortunately).

He moves on to explaining how the West is assuming that China = Japan 30 years ago, with inaccurate similarities drawn between their economic situations. The West is saying to itself that China will need to do massive fiscal stimulus to keep growing and get out of its “rut”, but they don’t seem to be considering if this rut is actually intentional, in order to bring down Chinese real estate and focus on more productive endeavors. This graph says it all:

There’s no real conception that the collapse in real estate might actually be the policy and not the catastrophic consequence of like, communists not understanding Economics 101. The government explicitly said that this was the goal the entire time. Additionally, the property bust has hit the biggest cities the hardest, especially among millennials, but third and fourth tier cities are doing fairly well (the rural situation is complicated but dissatisfaction is concentrated in older people there). As the first and second tier cities are the most often visited by Westerners, their image of China is disproportionally negative. Meanwhile, in the third and fourth tier cities, there has been an industrial and transportation boom, which has gone almost unreported in the West.

Some more explanations for Western negativity include a general tendency to report bad news more than good news (“China is FIVE DAYS from TOTAL COLLAPSE!” gets more clicks than “Things are doing pretty good in China.”) as well as China’s lackluster stock market performance relative to its massive improvements, and Americans hyperfocus on stocks.

And, of course, the final contributing factor: that the US is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to "…raise awareness of and increase transparency regarding the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road Initiative, associated initiatives, other economic initiatives with strategic or political purposes, and coercive economic practices.” via the Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorization Act.

You could at least attempt to argue that Ukraine has been kinda fucked over by the West because they look like they’re not rolling out their tanks and artillery and air defense and ammunition as quickly as they could hypothetically do it, but like, Israel has been dropping massive bombs onto refugee camps and hospitals and schools and using Western intelligence and has been given a blank check by Biden since hour 1 of the conflict, and the Israelis are still like “oh yeah, uh, the reason why we aren’t doing as well as we’d like is because we need another 100 billion dollars and Biden just isn’t giving that to us.” To any serious observer of the conflict this line is obviously ridiculous, but they can’t give the real reason (that the Resistance is fucking their military up) because it would only worsen the perception of the situation and weaken the rhetoric of “our enemies are both utterly weak and we can defeat them in a week but also an existential threat and so we need 10,000 MOABs right now please Mr Trump”, so they just have to pretend that they’re being stabbed in the back.

Third Reich shit. “Our military is awesome, our Tiger tanks definitely work 100% of the time, our soldiers are ubermensch, we’re just being undermined by (insert country/population/ethnicity/political group here). No worries, we’re definitely beating the USSR, there’s no way we’ll be pushed out of France, and our descendents will be attending the finest courses in race science throughout Greater Isr-- the Reich. Just some minor setbacks here and there on the border.”

I’m curious what restrictions the Zionists think exist on them that this would be a meaningful policy change, like, Israel could drop a thermonuclear warhead onto a refugee camp in Gaza and Biden would just be like “As we process and analyze the event that has occurred inside Gaza to see how many millions of Hamas terrorist militants have been killed, we need to remember the horrors of October 7th…”

every single time I’ve seen the Israeli government claim that Biden held them back from doing something, it was so fucking obvious that they needed to scapegoat to the Israeli population why they didn’t perform an action that would have gotten their shit kicked in. Full on like “oh yeah, the reason why we didn’t drop 50 nukes on Iran after that first attack in April is because, uh, Biden forced us not to do it, definitely not because if we did that, the rubble of the depopulated ruins of Tel Aviv would be bouncing from the rain of Iranian ballistic missiles for the next month.”

It is critical that they NEVER suggest they have vulnerabilities or are in some way incapable, and events that so brazenly demonstrate that they are actually in a very vulnerable position (October 7th, both Iranian missile attacks, etc) either have the tragedy aspect of it dialed up to 11 so to as to prevent analysis of the fact that Israel is weak, or they demand that you ignore the evidence of your senses and all the videos of missiles slamming into airbases totally unimpeded by what is supposed to be the most well-defended airspace on the planet with a solid 30 fucking countries all pitching in in various ways and instead write headlines like “184% of Iranian missiles intercepted - what is next for the collapsing Iranian regime?” and “Here’s what’s next for Gaza, the West Bank, and South Lebanon once we’ve defeated the terrorists” as if they will ever defeat the Resistance and get to annex any more land. They’re just inventing comfortable alternative realities about how surely everything will turn out fine and that they’ll be riding ferris wheels in the futuristic city they’ll build over Gaza, while their citizens get ready for the third scramble to the bunkers that day and they get another hourly “difficult event” alert. The delusional daydreams of the final days of empire.

The only certain thing is that wherever we think the next front will be, that is where it won’t in fact be. Many of us dismissed that Russia would invade Ukraine before it happened, and none of us expected October 7th. We got jumpy with Venezuela during their border issue because we’re all waiting to see what the next flashpoint is. We’re all looking at the DPRK and China but it’s gonna turn out that in twelve weeks, a group in fuckin’ Tajikistan or something will hit a secret US base near India and a war will start there. Central America is as good a guess as any.

I understand that it probably isn’t anywhere near this simple but I do wish that Russia would just hand over the blueprints for their S400s or even S500s to China and then China just sets up a dozen factories overnight and in six months, half the countries under threat by the US suddenly possesses top-tier air defence systems. you’d also have to train specialists ideally locally and that would probably take years but the general idea of like, if China is the world-factory now, it should be mass-producing stuff to at least help countries defend themselves against the US

the modern equivalent of the USSR sending military equipment and advisors to colonies trying to overthrow their oppressors should be China sending defense equipment to shoot down American jets and missiles and drones

American politics really is just the same 20 people on a carousel going round and round for their entire 150 year lifespans until somebody finds their phylacteries and smashes them (e.g. Kissinger, Feinstein). There’s never any sense of closure or carthasis. I wanna be glad that Blinken is gone, for example, but I know that he’ll have a high-up position in the government for at LEAST the next 50 fucking years because he’ll live forever so what’s even the point celebrating. Same with Gaetz, he’ll be around forever too.

You know what, fuck it. My official prediction is that Biden will run again in 2028, solely because we live in hell, he’s the only Dem who has won since Obama, and the Dems also wanna join in on the Grover Cleveland action. The carousel must spin.

IIRC, Sri Lanka has been flipflopping between different presidents and parties over the last few years as the same economic hardship is hitting them as everywhere else, but even the “good” presidents are totally unwilling to resist IMF austerity, and even the most principled and well-intentioned communists just cannot get anything done if they aren’t willing to tell the World Bank to fuck off. I’m unsure whether this is a corruption/morality thing or if it’s because Sri Lanka genuinely is in such a shitty place that it would be provably worse for them to stop taking loans (i.e. they might be well and truly debt-trapped and only foreign help from China and friends could save them), because Sri Lanka has had such a complex history that I just haven’t had the time to look deeply into it with ~200 other countries also taking up my attention span.

The Medici? More like the Midici. I’m going to Florence and we’re going to sign a better deal, the best deal that we have ever known