I do think that there may be a need for re-evaluation of tactics and strategies in the present and in the imperial core but I don’t think this is it.

That is to say, if the wealth of Communist Parties in the West were a substantial percentage of total privately held wealth, Communist Parties could employ the exact same means bourgeois individuals and entities use to influence the levers of power.

This would allow Communist Parties to gradually manipulate the political system to favor their own firms, allowing further expansion of the co-op / party-owned enterprise model, with a goal of eventually just buying out some of the remaining capitalists and abolishing the rest.

This kind of reminds me of that meme of the academic standing in front of a blackboard with mathematical theorems and for step 2 it has “then a miracle happens” and the other guy standing next to him saying he should elaborate more on what happens there.

Why would the capitalists, having the high-ground, having pre-existing access to power, having built a fortress in terms of superstructure, loyal dogs in the halls of power and violence and so on just allow this to happen instead of using violence, subversive tactics, laws, etc to simply crush the communist led businesses or subvert them in some way either overtly by seizing control or value or through subversion, infiltration, use of the CIA, FBI, etc to poison the movement and turn it against itself, to turn it into a compromised asset of sorts?

They’d murder the true proponents of such thinking and replace them with dishonest businessmen who’d promise the same but keep the keys in their pocket and then pull out the rug on their workers in 10 years time and pocket the value. Which would dispirit others from trying and convince most people it was all just a scam.

They can simply ban the communist parties. Simply ban businesses affiliated with them. Simply take all their assets under a communist control or anti-foreign agents law and then sell them cheaply to competitors at government auction.

Also how would we working within the system be able to out-compete them who have value extracted from the global south via imperialism/neo-colonialism as well as generationally hoarded wealth? By working harder? Exploiting ourselves harder than they can exploit their workers? Than they can exploit desperate climate migrants? I don’t think this is a good plan for privileged westerners under the thumb of a capitalist government. For peoples who’ve lived in absolute poverty, starvation, knowing want and suffering and backwardness for generations sure it’s an easy sell as it was in China when they began industrializing but people tend to want better conditions, not to voluntarily subject themselves to conditions much worse than those of their parents all in the hopes that in some decades not that they’ll be financially secure within capitalism because of work but that they’ll maybe buy it out or overthrow it if they’re not crushed and sabotaged in the meantime. (Hence why they will be sabotaged early and often to dispirit and discourage people)

I mean they could simply levy new huge, punishing taxes across the board then give tax breaks, special exemptions, bail-outs etc to the capitalist controlled enterprises while siphoning the value from the collective enterprises straight to the imperialist machine and handing some of it back to the capitalists while using the rest to continue to fund the global and domestic oppression.

I mean where is the capital for starting to do all this supposed to come from? To start up companies, means of production you need money. People lending a bit of labor and free-time on their weekends isn’t going to create machinery or produce the capital for buildings, staff, etc. When the people who actually have this capital are either PMC type workers who benefit from the continuation of capitalism and would rather not work harder to beat others for an ideological project or the capitalists themselves who’d only fund such a thing to subvert it, pull the rug out and take the profit from all the hard work I just don’t understand how this gets off the ground without foreign interference like China funding it which would get it instantly shut down for foreign communist subversion that’s a threat to national security. Will the liberal compromised unions give us the funds? I think not. The communist parties in the US are either compromised and full of liberals (CPUSA) or still struggling to grow and hardly have the capital and funds for such.

Also I’m pretty sure there’s a law on the books about communist parties owning businesses in the US or at least newspapers but it could be expanded.

Your examples:

Examples to learn from would be the Japanese Communist Party’s influential newspaper, which earns the JCP 110 million USD a year, Mondragon, a European industrial cooperative with more than 60,000 workers, Haier, a Chinese SOE known for its radical organizational structure and exceptional growth, and Huawei, technically a worker’s cooperative but generally so successful that the United States levied sanctions on it.

The JCP is awful, communist in name only. They follow the imperialist line, attack China, are revisionist, liberal, etc. They’re harmless and a false path which is why they’re allowed. They also as you note are powerless and losing steam. Let’s not say being trots is good, your idea is out-competing capitalists but they’re not competing in the communist newspaper market, trots have had that cornered for decades but have gone nowhere.

Mondragon is simply an exception not a rule, it’s allowed to exist and isn’t in any way working towards buying out and overthrowing capitalism and if it was it would probably have been crushed. Contradictions exist under capitalism and they exist under socialism, they are not proof of anything but that fact itself.

Haier and Huawei exist under the coat and wings of an in-power revolutionary communist party in a nation that’s been ideologically communist for over half a century now. And as you note one of them is being blockaded from the west essentially as part of a push to contain China.

Why not? Jets are commonly shot down with missiles. It’s rather hard to kill them spraying them with machine-gun fire. You can do it of course but a missile is the more reliable solution which is why jets made for dog-fights usually carry multiples.

Anyways the rumors seemed to indicate on the ground but with the things that have happened lately I think it seems more plausible that Ukraine shot it down with a patriot given a Ukrainian parliament member has stated as much and given after the head of the air force there threatened her he was sacked probably less for threatening her and more as a way to sacrifice someone for the screw-up and to try and tamp the whole thing down.

Which is needless to say even funnier.

If I had to guess if there were a strategic reason it’s that unfortunately for counties like China/Vietnam late to the party their electronic warfare and hacking capabilities are underdeveloped and years behind those of the west that was first to the game. I don’t like it but there are allegedly rather mercenary isn’treali companies like those that provide iPhone hacking tools that sell to China and Vietnam and allow them to have tools they might not otherwise have of use for counter-espionage, police-work, and perhaps even as a basis for building out state campaigns to strike back at the aggressive west.

For the zionist regime it’s not like the US can necessarily stop them from doing this (though they’ve kind of been trying lately) so playing both sides means they make a bit of extra money and further insulate themselves against being isolated. And like it or hate it and I do hate it, without the west joining any campaign to isolate them Vietnam/China taking a principled stance against the zionist regime isn’t going to do shit. They will only fall when the west’s support is pulled or when the west itself is too weak to matter but that is still something decades away.

Some Russian media sources are claiming that it was destroyed by an Iskander strike and the pilot killed in the same or a similar hit. May or may not have been on the ground at a targeted airfield and Ukraine didn’t want their first loss to be some guy dying on the ground and his plane getting knocked out without even getting in the air.

That said at this point it’s just rumors.

Viewed in light of this it seems likely they wanted to cement control of Telegram and the founder refused their advances.

It’s not enough for the US to be able to utilize a thing for their ends, they desire the ability to deny their enemies the same (which flies in the face of the liberal notion of freedom of speech not just for who you like but those you dislike). As well as probably wanting technical data and backdoors to identify both puppets and pawns as well as enemy groups they can target for surveillance, harassment, arrest, deplatforming, etc.

In light of these kinds of tactics one has to look at something like Tor with a skeptical eye. Maybe it was just made before all this was common practice. But I personally find those whisperings about the idea that 90% of exit nodes and other parts of the network are run by isnt’reali, US, and eyes intelligence agencies to allow de-anonymization on anyone but their people using it.

Anyway you look at it, this, the raid of Scott Ritter as well as the home of another RT host whose last hat was writing for a Nixonian realist conservative policy magazine, among many other actions and it seems the boot is coming down hard and fast. That is that the US firewall is being erected but unlike China’s which seeks merely to control their own information space, the US is clamping down hard on anyone but them speaking or coordinating, organizing, putting forth opinions. They’re no doubt incensed by the amount of conservatives in the US who view Russia sympathetically. The deranged agents of the FBI and so on who fully bought into the de-bunked Russia-gate hoax clearly see any sympathy as evidence of Russian meddling and the larger strategy moving above and beyond them of the state is to crush movements against its interests now.

From crushing Palestinian genocide protestors (and going so far as to punish the proles by banning medical face masks) to this they’re reaching out to crush and achieve total dominance on all fronts for all their narratives from their settler-colonial genocide-state isn’treal to the Russian antagonism, to China and beyond. That’s why we see a resurgence in pushing the Xinjiang genocide lie again as well I think.

And it’s why Tiktok was banned, why Kaspersky was banned (not sharing data with the NSA like US AV firms do), and why they’re now harassing this Telegram guy.

If it is true that Russia’s military is using it, they are very foolish to do so.

It’s doubtful it’s an official practice for field communications so much as soldiers using it on their own in ways that severely compromise operational security. It’s incredibly popular in Russia, much of the news we get on the Ukraine conflict is via official releases done on Telegram or Twitter by Russian state agencies.

That said maybe they’re using it in some semi-official capacity which is bad but at the same time this war kind of came out of nowhere. Russia doesn’t really have a lot of homegrown messaging apps. They can’t trust western stuff like Zuckerbook or Signal for obvious reasons and that leaves out most of the encrypted messaging clients. They could have rolled their own but that’s a vulnerability as any brand new and rushed software you create is more likely to have bugs that intelligence agencies from the west can exploit to take over devices, spy, break encryption, etc than something that’s at least been on the market a while. It does underline they /should/ develop something that can be used for these purposes that they control.

Well yes and no. SMS messages are readable by the carrier (both receiving and sending) and absolutely accessible to the FBI and NSA often without a warrant and they’re stored for 6-18 months or so by the carriers.

Telegram on the other hand to my knowledge still practices encryption in transit. Your connection and data you send to Telegram is over an encrypted connection like HTTPS. That means your carrier/ISP cannot see what you’re saying on Telegram just that you’re using it.

Is it completely secure against third parties, against Telegram itself being compromised? As in end to end encryption. No. And that’s why an arrest like this is particularly problematic as anyone who can coerce the company or someone with sufficient access can just get all this data from them as well as doing other things. But it does reduce the number of parties with easy access and raises the bar to gaining access somewhat. As evidenced by the Snowden leaks we can’t be sure any service that isn’t based entirely in an anti-imperialist core nation like China doesn’t have the NSA in the back siphoning up all the data or even just metadata.

As with many things there are degrees of security and privacy with encryption. SMS I’d consider as safe as shouting something in a public space. This I’d consider as safe as sending a UPS envelope with a message inside to someone. Properly implemented E2E I’d consider sending a UPS envelope but the contents inside are scrambled and unreadable except to your recipient who has a special decoder that UPS isn’t in possession of.

I have to be honest short of uniformed NATO troops (or say 50,000 non-uniformed but clearly NATO troops) marching into the battlefield I just don’t see it happening.

Even if they let Ukraine launch their F-16s from Poland I’m convinced all that would happen would be Russia carefully targeting that portion of the Polish airfield with hypersonic missiles and nothing more. No nuclear, no escalation to wide-spread bombing of Poland. It would all be very contained and obvious tit-for-tat that isn’t even escalation.

I think the west is going to continue salami-slicing their way to do whatever short of direct large-scale NATO troop involvement.

Latest reporting says Ukraine will be allowed to use US ATACMs and other long-range western supplied and operated missiles to strike deep into Russia. I don’t think this will change Russia’s behavior, they’ll continue to try and destroy such things but they don’t have the global massive surveillance network of satellites and other things that the US has so it still takes time to find and destroy these, it won’t be sped up by them doing that. Russia is not going to get suddenly angry and pull a bunch of extra missile production capacity and usage out of nowhere and throw it at Ukraine, I think it looks like they’re already committing their forces to the degree they feel comfortable with given the threat of a wider war necessitating some reserves still be maintained.

So gradually as the situation worsens for Ukraine they’re going to be allowed to inflict worse and worse attacks on Russian civilians which is fine and beloved by western planners as a way they think to undermine support for Putin and terrorize the Russian people into submission or at least punish them enough they and others looking on will never dare rise against them again.

Both Russia and the west have accepted the idea of a long war of attrition. The west’s job in their mind is to make that war as miserable for Russian people as possible, to inflict as much damage on Russia, to bleed them as much as they can before the fighting stops. And the west I still think holds out hope that they will pull more production out and be able to supply Ukraine enough they can force a stalemate which they can count as a win.

More than that though they just can’t back down. The Democratic side and their bourgeoisie have doubled down on attacking Russia, I mean they’re arresting former weapons inspectors and searching the homes of conservative Nixon political magazine acolytes because they’re too close to Russia and they want to slap them with FARA violations. Now if Trump gets into office there is a slim chance he just winds it down because there are other voices who want Iran, who want China and don’t think this war with Russia was the right way to go (for that it’s worth it certainly seems the FBI and the security state have fully thrown themselves behind the Democrat’s plan as opposed to that of Republicans or perhaps the Democrats have chosen the plan they most wanted enacted). There’s also the chance he demands Russia make peace with unacceptable terms and escalates too but I just don’t see anything but at BEST a slow war with the gloves off by the west until Ukraine’s ranks fully break and they are routed under Kamala with the possibility she does her cop act and turns up the heat all the way to direct war.

What could it mean? Who knows. Russia likes to talk big but does balk at actually hitting the west. They draw red lines, the west cross them, they step back and draw some more with vague threats and glances back at their actual red line that results in use of nuclear weapons which is direct, open western troop involvement.

Like China who likes to draw red lines that the US ignores it’s easy to say these things, harder to actually do something severe when you’re staring down an unhinged, amoral, deranged, entitled mad civilization and empire like the US who’s just glaring with a twitching eye at you and an unhinged look on their face who is likely to take any excuse, any affront to their power and sense of superiority and invincibility to react with full force and enter an unescapable escalation spiral that leads to total war. Unfortunately this leads to even more NATO/US western arrogance and boundary pushing, to salami-slice tactics, etc.

So the consequences as usual will be born by Ukrainians. Most likely doing things like taking out more/most of Ukraine’s transport and electricity infrastructure to cripple them and their supply lines.

Otherwise it’s most likely just talk which will be followed by some more strikes against hard military targets. But these kinds of strikes aren’t really meaningful or different because well it’s not like Russia is holding one hand behind their back, it’s not like they know the location of Ukrainian command and control centers and intelligence bunkers run with the CIA and are just choosing not to bomb them until moments like this. So they’ll do a strike they’d do anyways but film it and release that film and say that’s their punishment.

The reason the Russians haven’t just bombed the SBU’s headquarters or other targets like that in Kiev is because they know that’s not where most operations are coordinated from these days (and leaving them intact in the hope they can eventually track someone from there who messes up and leads them somewhere more interesting) but they don’t know where these bunkers that the CIA helped them build under forests are where they actually are coordinating from. For that matter these bunkers could very well be in the far west of Ukraine out of reach of the kind of heavy bombs needed to penetrate them or for that matter in Poland for all we know.

Peace deals don’t matter as they were never going to happen and like the Minsk agreements were just a delaying tactic, an attempt to stall, maybe try and get an armistice to allow Ukraine to regroup. The west wasn’t going to settle for a loss until they’ve used up nearly every Ukrainian as fodder or Ukraine was suffering a complete collapse of their front and even then they want terms that make them look better like holding onto some territory that’s part of Russia now or getting into NATO, not signing neutrality, etc.

But I agree whatever terms Ukraine can get are getting worse and worse. And part of me thinks that’s the point from the west’s point of view, it gives them more motive to fight on which is what the west wants.

I think they had various goals and hopes. I fully believe they hoped and intended to try and take a major Russian city, to do war crimes and use it as leverage to get Russia to cede back some of their land. I also believe they probably would have tried to do nuclear terrorism (and still may with a dirty bomb) if given the chance to permanently contaminate Russian land as a way of showing to the world what happens to those who resist US power and hegemony, a monument of suffering and torment to intimidate Russians and remind the rest of the world of what will be done to you if you resist the US.

And doubtless they hoped that after capturing a city (best case scenario but the Zelensky regime is full of messianic optimists) they would divert Russian forces from the front which would allow them to do a push-back of some sort and regain some initiative and land as well as being a morale boost and and setting the Russian front back.

I think probably they’re killing some civilians, a lot, doing war crimes like SA on others, and probably kidnapping some amount to the back of the lines and into Ukraine to hold as hostages (who will be badly treated and abused sadly) to trade for troops or some concessions from Russia in the negotiations. So this is not without a horrible cost to Russia and the Russian people.

I find the author’s dismissal of the nuclear disaster scenario kind of odd. These are not rational people with a sense of self-preservation or shame. These are fanatics whose strings are being pulled by the US who would almost certainly rather poison and make useless part of Ukraine for a century rather than let Russia have use of it. When looked at from the perspective of these people are nazi-loving fanatics who would shoot of their own foot to spite some Russians (and have done much worse to their country to spite Russians and be used as a battering ram by the west purely to their own detriment already let’s not forget) led by a guy who will probably be killed if he doesn’t appease the nazi fanatics who run the main intelligence agency by the way. And the fact the US is the one benefiting here and all this is for their benefit then long-term land denial in the face of losing seems incredibly on message. Let’s not forget what they did with Agent Orange in Vietnam and here they have the benefit of plausible deniability, it won’t even be the US that the world blames, they can say their puppets became unhinged in the ending days and they didn’t tell them and weren’t able to stop them and oh what a pity this land Russia now occupies that was once useful and valuable farmland is now horribly contaminated and rendered useless to them meaning American produce has less competition.

More like if tomorrow China turned off the US power grid through hacking I’d say it was deserved and I have no sympathy. Or if tomorrow Russia bombed a major US military base and killed a bunch of civilians who serviced and supported it in carrying that out I’d shrug and laugh.

Are you one of those people who gets upset when someone says something like “America deserved 9/11”? Because the US deserves a lot of things, chickens coming home to roost.

So yes Ukraine needs to lose most of their power grid. Sucks but it’s probably necessary to break them, to destroy their country, to bring their war machine to a halt and to get to the point of peace. They’ve tried asking nicely of the Ukrainian puppet regime to surrender, to come to terms, they tried negotiating for years, 8 years without fruit or anything but deliberate delaying tactics.

And I love how you bad faith people come here and put words in my mouth, say I’m suggesting targeting civilians. No I’m suggesting taking out the power grid, not bombing homes with people in them but taking out power generation as well as distribution. Yes that makes life a bit miserable. Yes that kills some people. So does keeping the power on and letting them use it to make weapons to kill Russians. If someone has to die, and it’s clearly the case that that is a FACT. I’d rather it be a Ukrainian civilian than a Russian one. I’d rather neither die but I don’t live in the world of rather, I live in the real world. And in the real world for all their problems Russians aren’t supporting Nazism, historical revisionism and trying to carry out enforcement of the primary contradiction of this age which is US/NATO hegemony, they’re trying to break it while Ukraine is trying to uphold it.

Pure idealism on display, boo-hoos and sobs. Like I said I don’t care, a choice has been made and I choose the Russian lives, the Russian civilians, the Russian right to live in peace free from fear. Just like in a war between China and US I hope Americans are the ones who need more body bags. I’d rather American civilians get killed in a hypothetical war (of American aggression) between China and the US if it means fewer dead Chinese soldiers or civilians. I’m happy to say that and if you aren’t then you’re not serious.

As opposed to the horrors of fascist war criminal squads murdering and committing other crimes against Russian civilians? As opposed to this war dragging on and more Russian soldiers die?

It is the fault of the Ukrainian people for not resisting their government’s coup to fascism, for not resisting the rise of fascist militias. For not resisting the escalation to war with Russia. For being good little liberals who passively let it happen. Just as US-ians passively let their country supply a genocide, passively let their country do all these horrible things.

I don’t have much sympathy for them and more importantly I don’t see a way out. Russia didn’t choose to make them die and suffer the US did. Russia has only the power to choose how quickly they accept this. The US is actively feeding people to the meat grinder. So crying and boo-hooing about the terrorist nazi regime state and its people suffering is just… I don’t care.

I mean maybe you’ll pull out that uh those people were propagandized and of course they were, so no were Nazis, look what the allies did to Nazi Germany and the civilians there. They surely did not have a fun time but it was necessary to fight that way. Just as it’s necessary I think for Russia to take the gloves off. Power is not a civilian thing. It’s dual use. Power is being used to manufacture drones to attack and kill Russian civilians, to damage and attempt to destroy civilian infrastructure. Power is being used to power their war machine, their repair facilities, their modern military conveniences. Take it out and they have to truck in more fuel and burn more fuel and then you can cut those fuel supplies and cause shortages.

Russia didn’t choose total war. They went out of their way to avoid it. The US chose that. The path is before us. The question is not will Ukrainian civilians suffer. They have, they will, they should have stood up in 2014 and done something and you know I feel bad for the individuals who know this is fucked up and can’t escape but not worse than I feel for the Russian civilians who are being murdered, sexually assaulted, tortured, used as human shields, living in fear, suffering from this war. So the question is how many more Russian civilians will suffer with them before the foot is put down and Ukraine is beaten to a bloody pulp such that it cannot fight or resist anymore. Because that’s what it’s likely to take. The west refuses to give up, refuses to accept reasonable conditions for Russia and the Ukrainian regime will not give up. They’re doing total war, fall of Berlin levels of fanatacism and it will likely take fall of Berlin level destruction of their country to operate to smash their state, their ability to wage war and neutralize them and bring peace not only to the Russians suffering because of Ukrainians who didn’t stand up but to those same Ukrainians.

The only path is through.

I have no doubt they’re doing Nazi terror shit. Pointless from a strategic point of view but not from the view of Kiev’s Nazi lovers or of the US which has long loved vicious terror tactics and torture.

Russia should really just destroy their power grid entirely, just bring the country to its knees, bomb rail bridges that lead into the countries of western suppliers, bomb road infrastructure.

Sadly propagandized westerners I’m sure even in 10 years will call the video evidence that will eventually reach us “fake” so there is little hope for justice outside of Russia pressing the war all the way.

Which may be why the US wants Ukraine doing this. They want Ukraine to fight to the bitter end and by forcing them to commit atrocities Russia’s government cannot end the war without demanding justice of the very people in power who would have to sign off on any peace. They’re making them put even more skin in the game so to speak.

I don’t know they’re going after RT reporters in the US pretty hard right now.

Strongly agree with most of what you’re saying.

A country must have enough nukes to ensure decently proportional retaliation. If the USA can kill 1 million Chinese, China should be able to immediately do the same ad infinitum. Otherwise, the calculus breaks down in one side’s favor. Let’s assume a nuclear exchange between China and the USA based on Wikipedia’s stockpile numbers for each.

The calculus for China is even more complex. They need the ability not just to take x lives for x lives. They need the ability to suppress US and NATO capabilities globally. It’s not enough to suppress the US mainland when the US stations nukes and has military forces, bases, reserves, pawns all over western Europe, as well as smaller bases in the middle east in places like Jordan, as well as places in Asia itself like Japan, occupied Korea, etc, etc. Nukes could come from anywhere including a pawn which the US disavows.

China needs a nuclear capability that is enough they can wipe out the US in a tit for tat mainland attack but also have enough that if they start with attacking US assets outside the US, they’ll have enough after finishing that to still finish the US and the UK. I’d say 1500 bare minimum. Luckily they are on their way to 1000 though it will take time, time in which they’re under greater threat.

They must also consider interceptor tech or the math that not all warheads will reach their destination if this is in response to a first strike by the US who is now waiting fully prepared to mitigate as much as possible (to say nothing of the possibility of the US actually managing to take out a chunk of their warhead stock in the first strike). So you need to allocate at least 10-20% more warheads than you think you need, maybe as high as 30%. Having reserves never hurts. Of course this is alleviated somewhat by putting such warheads on hypersonic missiles/delivery systems but I don’t think the Chinese have entirely switched their nuclear arsenal over to those yet as they are still kind of a beta product and may not be considered ready for that duty. But even those there’s still the chance the US could launch counter-nukes into the atmosphere in the path of incoming weapons to destroy them and a hypersonic missile if caught close enough would be destroyed just the same as a regular one (though I admit given the plasma around them they probably have an advantage in being able to be closer to such a blast and continue than normal missiles).

And I’ve mentioned this before they need enough to hit all these places plus New Zealand. Why NZ? Because it’s where all the big western bourgeoisie have their bunkers and will likely flee and they need to know they’ll die because China will drop 3 nukes one on top of the other on them and bury them alive in their now tombs.

Just the ability to hold onto US hegemony for another century would be worth the cost of 10% of the proles dying in the US and a few trillion in damages that need to be repaired to the bourgeoisie. I mean they stand to make or lose everything if they can’t stop China. If they could nuke China and survive themselves they’re looking at hegemony for the rest of this century and capitalism continuing well into next.

Even better for them and worse for us, as climate change accelerates it will turn the screws on most places that aren’t the US. It will put at a permanent disadvantage all their major competitors/enemies such as India, the whole Asia region, etc. It will create masses of desperate people, empty land, death, and a suffering world whose desperation they can exploit even harder due to the worsened conditions making migration more common and migrants more desperate. The only other country that will sort of benefit like the US is Russia but frankly I don’t see them rising as any kind of real challenge unless they go communist again and if the US takes out China they’ll do their damnedest to prevent or blunt any type of communist revolution in Russia and prefer the status quo at at that point Russia will be encircled anyways waiting for the right moment where they can do a decapitating strike on its government and splinter it into pieces.

It makes sense if that nerve agent plant is on enemy territory, in enemy land and will contaminate it and doing so allows you to claim you had either nothing to do with it and they had an accident or did it to themselves OR that you did do it but by conventional bombing and it’s their fault and therefore a leak and not a violation of international treaties against use of such weapons.

We must also consider this is a Nazi regime. They are losing. They have an intense racial hatred of Russians and the west (the US mainly) has a desire to punish Russia and to drag this on as long as possible. Contaminating Russian land, escalating like this would certainly make peace talks harder which means Zelensky can stay in power and alive longer along with the rest of his regime and they can continue serving the west while saying “look how unreasonable these new Russian demands are since that nuclear incident”.

They don’t need a bigger reason other than it will hurt Russians, it will hurt Russia, and it will the sick Nazis who delight in sending in battalions of child rapist nazi militias into Russian speaking areas to “pacify them”.

Come on. There are videos of these Ukrainians wearing Nazi regalia, speaking German and tormenting an old Russian man. What military or strategic purpose does that advance? If anything it hurts their attempts to pain themselves as wholesome-100 moderate white liberals under attack from the evil slavic barbarians. They just can’t help themselves. The cruelty is the point.

This stuff and their experience, their apparatuses for it is why I’m not cocky that China can just do what it’s currently doing and Africa is guaranteed in its corner next decade. The US has a decent chance of sewing enough terrorism, chaos, military coups, juntas, color revolutions, etc to block them and result in a win condition for the US where China is effectively isolated with Russia and a few others and we end up in a cold war 2.0 situation of camps with the US controlling significant amounts of the global south, either outright or preventing them from getting too close to the anti-US camp. Oh there will be interaction, it won’t be like the US will push out all Chinese brands or investments but they’ll keep the countries hostile, obedient to US sanctions, that kind of thing.

All the US talk about fear of “disinfo” that you also see from Europe is because they are actively doing this shit to shift the ground out from under the feet of China and they’re afraid of their enemies doing the same eventually and preparing their defenses early.

I’m calling it now. The US is going to try something like straight up arresting the Chinese athletes at LA 2028 or threaten them with arrest ahead of time to keep them away to allow the US more medals. They’ll have this whole circus around it, indictments, a grand jury, all somber and shit. They’ll sanction and threaten their athletes, coaches, program directors and all kinds of other people involved and WADA won’t do shit at that point other than complain and allow it to happen because they don’t want to arrested. They’ll either pull it early to hammer on it for 12-24 months or do so after all the planning is done and they can’t possibly move the location or pull out of hosting in LA.

What WADA should do is pressure the Olympic committee to force the US to either repeal their law giving them illegal extra-judicial jurisdiction or strip them of the right to host the Olympics. The US congress would never pass a law repealing it after a threat or demand of course so they’d simply lose the Olympics which is fine. They could also demand the Olympics pass a rule that says if a country (unnamed but US is obvious here) does this kind of extra-judicial shit around WADA they will be barred from participating and barred from collecting or winning any medals that year. That they could do even last moment but again they’d likely never challenge the US that way.