The US is the one calling the shots. If “Israel” is doing something it’s not because it has power over the US but because the US imperial establishment wants and benefits from “Israel” doing that. Everything else is pretense and excuses. As Genocide Joe himself admitted, if there wasn’t an “Israel” the US would have to invent one. They get to do the things they do because the neocolony serves Western imperialist interests in the Middle East.

Those are allegations, i prefer to talk about facts. Fact is that Russia held normal elections verified by international observers which Putin won by a large margin. Meanwhile narco-führer Zelensky cancelled the elections in Ukraine indefinitely, banned all the opposition parties, and is now illegitimately holding onto power past the end of his term by martial law. The fact that he is also having his neonazi thugs round up every adult male they can find on the street to send to their deaths is just the cherry on top.

I don’t personally have an issue with someone posting Daily Fail articles, they can be good for a laugh but we should probably keep those sorts of posts to the SRS community.

I think it’s a bit strange that an account less than 24 hours old has made over a dozen posts but less than half that amount of comments. I’m not going to jump to the assumption that it’s a bot but i do think it’s a bit rude. When you are new to a community you should maybe first engage with that community for a while as a commenter, maybe even just passively observe for a bit and get to know that community and how it operates before you start spamming posts.

They are just employing the good old Zapp Brannigan strategy.

“You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.”

Okay now overlay China’s line on top of that. Better yet, take China out of the global average and then compare. Because China actually is single-handedly responsible for a good portion of that average increase.

Seems to me they have no idea how China is or was actually run and they just assumed it to be this hyper-centralized top-down system when that could not be further from the truth - local governments and communal councils have far more power over the day to day affairs of a community than the central government does, and in the Mao era this was even more the case simply due to the logistical limitations of the time. The majority of the local party officials in any given locality were and are people from that very same locality.

Leaving that aside i like how their argument is purely theoretical, as in there is zero actual evidence given to support it. In fact we have ample evidence to the contrary, of people dying constantly and in great numbers of malnutrition and preventable diseases caused by living in complete squalor and poverty in so-called “democratic” countries with “free and adversarial media” all across the “third world”. It turns out that when the people dying are the permanent underclass, and so long as the affluent are still doing fine, nobody actually pays attention, including the vaunted free media. And neither are the people living and dying in those conditions able to vote their way out of their misery because that would take changing the entire system.

So which country is actually more democratic? The one where you can’t actually change anything substantial no matter how you vote and where no matter how much you exercise your “free speech” nothing ever changes because the ruling class doesn’t give a shit about you, and the same moneyed interests that the government actually works for also control the media? Or a country where massive and unprecedented changes in human history have occurred in less than the span of one human life and where the government is vastly more responsive to the needs, concerns and frustrations of its people than any “liberal democracy”?

The reason why they can say “India has had no major famine” is because India has been in a state of constant semi-famine for a certain class of people and for certain regions. When poor rural communities and slums are in a state of permanent poverty and as a result have much higher rates of malnutrition and much lower life expectancy they don’t call that a famine, that’s just “the default”, that’s just normal. In China it was noticeable because they made sure that it would not be their normal going forward. It’s easy to not have famines when you don’t call them famines, when a part of the population is still well off and you can pretend that everything is fine even while millions live and die in absolute poverty.

So yeah, the idea that “adversarial democracy” and “free media” prevent famines is nice in theory, that’s how you’d expect these systems to work if you have been sold on liberalism. It’s the idea that these systems are the checks and balances on bad actors, and they ensure that bad policies are automatically corrected. This is exactly like believing that the free market just magically regulates itself to achieve the optimal outcome for society. Sadly, observed reality doesn’t conform to that idealized fairy tale.

Stalin killed every Soviet citizen and then resurrected them all again just so he could win WWII

a mortality crisis during the famine from 1958 to 1961, which was induced by a lack of democracy

How exactly is a famine induced by a lack of democracy?

Ah, i see another location has just become “strategically unimportant”.

It can feel that way because stimulants increase your heart rate. What size was it? I’d strongly advise against drinking an entire large can at once. When it comes to caffeine i find that less is more. I dilute my coffee with plenty of milk and when i do have energy drinks (though i generally try to avoid them) i will water them down in a 50-50 ratio.

The culture war has broken a lot of brains but the key to undoing that is to appeal to people’s class interests. They may not consciously understand those interests but they instinctively feel them. They are looking for validation and explanation, but unfortunately oftentimes they will turn to conspiracy theories, identity politics and other forms of magical thinking for answers. Our task is to provide them a real, materialist explanation, but do so not in a condescending way (the most ineffectual way to do class consciousness raising propaganda is to talk to people in the kind of smug, accusatory, “better-than-you” way that liberals do) but in a way that makes them feel seen and feel that their material woes are being taken seriously.

That is completely understandable. It’s impossible as a normal empathetic person to watch what is happening and not feel deeply affected.

They are incapable of comprehending the concept of two sovereign countries that aren’t in an overlord-vassal relationship and also aren’t enemies, because those are the only ways that the US relates to other countries.

Those same “Maoists” would have denounced Mao himself for the idea of New Democracy and the policies he adopted toward the national bourgeoisie. What all ultras have in common is that they refuse to take real material conditions into account, and this results in their inability to conceive of any sort of tactical flexibility as anything other than “betrayal”, a straying from the purity of the dogma. They live in a world where reality and the constraints it imposes are irrelevant and all that matters is having the perfect ideas; in short they are idealists.

Communism, no, sadly, not yet. The global south, yes. This is the weakest the “West” has been in four centuries, and if the current trajectory holds that decline will only accelerate. That in itself is a very good thing as it makes it much easier for communist movements and socialist societies to emerge and flourish. De-colonization is an absolute pre-requisite for any progress in a world where imperialism is the primary contradiction.

And yet still when the news first broke that this happened there were some communists who insisted that this was an organic event. When will people ever learn that the US (or one of their proxies) is always behind shit like this?

It’s war. There’s going to be death and destruction. Everyone who supports the resistance must steel themselves and understand that there will be sacrifices and suffering, and that the struggle will be long. But it is also important to remember that Palestine and Lebanon are only part of the larger axis of Resistance. The Great Satan could not even subjugate Afghanistan, so their pet neocolony certainly has no chance of subjugating the entire region. They will never again know peace no matter how many innocents they murder.

Finally, those of us who do not live there should not presume to know better than those who have been involved in this struggle for decades what strategy they should employ and how or when they should respond. They are not stupid and they are not blind, they understand at least as well as we do the enemy they are facing.

I just want to say i really appreciate the quality of this discussion and i think very good arguments have been made by both sides, many of which also reflect my thoughts on this matter.

they can’t fully block them without attacking China/Russia which would be considered an act of war

I this this is the essential point here. This is the crucial difference between the old sea routes, where other countries control passage, and this one. Blocking the former would require much less escalation.

Other factors to mention are Russia’s growing superiority in the arctic (US has nothing to rival Russia’s modern nuclear icebreakers), and the capability of shore based hypersonic missiles to interdict a conventional naval presence. The US really only has two options here which is submarines or air sorties from Alaska, both of which involve serious risk of starting a nuclear war…and that’s a threshold I’m not sure the US is willing to cross yet.

Yeah, climate change is a big reason why this route is now much more viable and why it will continue to gain in relevance. In that way this is quite a bleak sign…