Rybar is claiming that Israeli air force hit Hamas convoys transporting settler prisoners. If it's true then the Hannibal Directive is in play. Thats the one where IDF will kill Israeli hostages rather than negotiate with Hamas.

Seized from here

BRICS: An Anti-Imperialist Fantasy and Sub-Imperialist Reality? – Patrick Bond

Well, the most important thing is that you've found a way to keep the pristine and pure Marxist anti-imperialist tendency untainted by minor things like "reality" and "praxis" and - gasp - "difficult questions".

I see this a lot from my Trotskyist sources, like the WSWS and Green Left. They can scarcely go a week without a headline popping up on my feed along the lines of "Sure, the United States is imperialist, but BRICS is no better!" and I do wonder if they just don't understand the absurd mismatch between the mountain and the molehill, or if they have some personal problem with China and they're just trying to insert a bunch of terminology to make the argument appear more cerebral. Either way, very frustrating.

Anyway, moving on to Yves's preamble:

Yours truly has voiced some doubts about the BRICS project, and they have not been well received by those who are understandably keen to have a counterweight to the US geopolitical order. The first is that BRICS is being expanded before having much in the way of governance and institutional structures and its members have not much in common geographically or economically. In the much more homogeneous EU, which also built its institutional framework over time, the UK despite its very good deal though the EU was too demanding, and the EU has separately found it difficult to integrate Eastern European members (oh, a UK pet project to dilute France-German influence). If the EU has centrifugal tendencies, how are the inherently more divergent BRICS members going to find common ground?

I've heard this point a lot before (usually from Naked Capitalism) and I'm increasingly thinking it's not really a good comparison. The EU is an organization designed to funnel wealth from the poorer countries to the richer ones - namely Germany, France, and the UK. It may pretend to be a merely political project of unity and blahblahblah, but it's just a microcosm of global imperialism. If - if - China can maintain its focus on genuinely improving the conditions of foreign countries via the BRI and various banks and so on, then I see no particular reason why BRICS would necessarily have to fracture and fall apart. The contradiction between the interests of poorer and richer countries in the EU don't necessarily have to exist in BRICS+. It might anyway if other contradictions arise, but "The EU's dysfunction suggests BRICS will be too" doesn't seem like a strong argument to me.

Second has been the overhyping of de-dollarization. Many of the parties who want to slip the US sanctions noose are taking the critical step of increasing bi-lateral trade and settling through their own currencies rather than the dollar. However, only 3%-5% of all foreign exchange transactions are trade related. The rest are investment related. And contrary to hype, big foreign investors are not moving out of the dollar in a big way. For instance, China foreign exchange authority has been lightening up on Treasuries…to buy higher-yielding Agency securities. Similarly, even though Saudi Arabia’s SAMA has reduced its dollar holdings, its sovereign wealth fund has increased them significantly.

This is the actual point; nonetheless I still believe that this whole thing is going to be a case of "Before the revolution, it appears impossible; after the revolution, it appears inevitable."

"Of course China can't reduce their dollar dependency meaningfully! Of course the dollar can't be dethroned! Anybody who believes that the current situation could possibly be otherwise needs to read more economics books, because I've explained numerous times all these factors that make the transition virtually imposs-- huh. Well, actually, here's the top ten reasons why the dollar was obviously doomed to failure from the get-go. What a weak currency it was in hindsight!"

Take a two day break from news and (1039 new)

Fuck it, I'm pro Sikh separatism now. Does Gunther have any good India maps?

EDIT: Found a good one.

Thinking about those videos of Buckingham Palace guards kicking a 3 year old for getting in their way during some kind of ceremony. The UK has some of the most thoroughly entrenched class domination of any nation on earth.

i found this video of cool queer chinese zoomers on tumblr and im not sure where to post it. https://www.tumblr.com/rongzhi/729914373666160640?source=share help me pick a comm. could be, fashion, sino, anticisackion ect. all i know is yall will like it.

Somebody, presumably Hezbollah, launched a drone across the Lebanese border towards Israel - it was intercepted (or at least the interception was attempted) via a Patriot missile. Various small incidents on the Lebanon-Israel border but so far, no serious attempt by either side to start battle.

Palestinians returning to their homeland

DEATH TO THE GENOCIDAL STATE OF ISRAEL

Man this decade has been fucking nuts: global pandemic, Russian vs. Nato proxy war, several coups in Africa, and now what is looking to be Palestine’s largest act of resistance ever (and maybe the last one ever if they don’t succeed)

in spectacle news, the opedsphere is going full national sanctimony mode over john kelly "confirming" rumors that our wettest president hates the troops

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

extremely rare trump W tbh. it reminds me of when he ordered troops out of northern syria and msnbc made a whole meal out of his disrespect for the advice of the olive-drab american heroes across the potomac

Blue state republicans are the absolute worst NIMBYs. These small towns and villages are doing everything they can in upstate New York to block green energy projects. All these made up zoning and code regulations that we have to fight in court. Not to mention these local officials are all flunkies who don't know how to write laws so we end up winning after burning a pile of money.

In almost unrelated news, Ben Norton has now moved to China

We were like a couple weeks away from my doomsday WW3 scenario of a NK conflict that draws in Iran and Turkey and Israel-Palestine popping off at the same time, but I guess there is still time.

A tank has fallen off a truck, killing a settler and injuring 3 others.

So lemmy.ml has a Ukraine comm, and it appears that there's just one single user spamming a huge volume of un-commented-on news posts: https://hexbear.net/c/ukraine@lemmy.ml

It's very funny

On the resistance telegram, a fighter claimed in a video message that this offensive has been plotted for years