Japan is considering dissolving the Moonies
Gotta be one of the most successful adventurists of all time

Liberal champions of sovereignty are now frothing at the mouth about a Chinese company designing a Chinese smartphone in China because the US didn’t “allow” it.

This is what liberals believe: nobody can do anything without whitey’s permission.

Colonial mentality in action. They need to be reminded that they don’t control China anymore.

Greece Weather report with hidden commie W

So right now the Thessaly erea (Center of Greece) is being hit with probably the heaviest rainfall in recent years in Europe. Already at 100-500mm in the last ~12 hours in large ereas and cities and it wiil probably rain ~1000mm in overall till Thursday, maybe even more in places. Naturaly things have started to get fucked up and floods have hit the second largest city in the erea (Volos, 80k population). No one can do anything against such rainfall, its not the politicians fault right?

Well the largest city in the erea is Larisa (200k population) , and it is situated basicaly in a hole and bellow sea level and with a major river going through it. Seems like an apocalypse ready to happen. But it wont. Larisa had regural floods at every other downpour and river surge but it also had a communist mayor from 1980 to 1994. Former ELAS captain, imprisoned tortured and exiled for decades and all. Aristidis Lambroulis. He got his hand on any European and state found he could find, brought over Soviet engineers and technicians and basicaly dug up most of the city for years instaling the largest stormwater drainage system in Greece and also split and redirected the river bed inside the city to decrease volume and make flooding less likely. And Larisa hasnt flooded since and is unbothered even by the heaviest rains. Now this one will be a real test and historicaly big but still. It will pull through thanks to the legacy and struggle of a communist administration

I've been going over reddit data a bit today and roughly a month or so ago every single subreddit on the site lost around 75% of its activity.

A few comments-per-day samples, look at what happened on July 11th on all of these:

In order - /r/mildlyinfuriating /r/whitepeopletwitter /r/gaming /r/Askreddit

What the fuck happened on July 11th? Some sort of delayed aspect of the API closure? Tokens for a major mass botting operator run out?

75% (or more, up to 95%) is an absolutely behemoth drop in overall site commenting activity.

Was this much of reddit literally fake activity? I don't think this is just people that stopped using the site, not all simultaneously, this all happening at once points to some sort of major event with automated commenting all stopping sitewide simultaneously. You can check every single god damn subreddit, the same thing happened everywhere.

I knew reddit was botted, you see it a lot on the mod side of things and you recognise a tonne of sus bots going haywire. But if this is the scale of the fake activity that existed on the site it's wayyyyyyyyyyy bigger than I believed it was and I was among some of the more paranoid people about it.

EDIT: And since it happened, nothing is recovering. Everything is going down, everywhere. The drop in comments is causing a slow drop in comments over time site-wide. This is catastrophic data, worse than what musk has done to twitter in my opinion.

My workplace is having a reading contest this month, so pretty great reason to crack open some books again. Started reading A People's History of the United States, read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and also The Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela's autobiography really slaps hard on par with Blackshirts and Reds.

HR doesn't like me discussing socialist theory probably because I'm objectively right and 95% of the workplace agrees with me, lmao

America deserved 9/11

Random tweet:

Europe would have been better off if there were just forests where Russia is now.

Europe would be owned by the Nazis if there were just forests where Russia is. Although I'm guessing they'd consider that better.

If I read another "actually the voters are stupid and the media isn't giving them the real facts about how good Brandonomics is" OpEd, I am going to pay a visit to the Minecraft version of the NYT office.

People have real, powerful economic indicators of how the economy is doing that they interact with everyday: their bank accounts. Money goes up? Economy good. Money goes down? Economy bad.

It's funny how these neoliberal hacks who wax poetic about the beauty of individualism are suddenly really big fans of "collective" measures of economic performance, like GDP, when it's only the rich who are profiting from GDP increase.

Somebody snap me out of it. I'm causing myself psychic harm because libs on nominally left Facebook pages are malding over Musk apparently disabling starlink for a Ukrainian attack, and I can't stop bullying them for being brainworm riddled seals clapping along to Western MIC cash cow projects.

How do these idiots not realize the bloodlust for Russia is exactly the same as it was for Iraq? How the fuck do you learn that literally every foreign intervention the US has been involved in during the last 150 years has been naked imperialism or proven lies to mask that imperialism, and go "yeah, no, THIS time it's legit. Surely the State Department/Pentagon wouldn't fool us again..."

Seriously, these fucking Blue MAGA morons don't see the parallel between their "oh, you're anti-war? Great job supporting fascist Putler " and the rhetoric warhawks used for years against the anti-war movement during the Iraq war? This is an anti-billionaire Facebook page! How do these people think the problem here is that the Billionaire didn't use his property to kill people for a change?

Whats going on in Mexico? (effortpost)

so you nerds have probably heard of some elections thats happened this week on the country and that they were important, there was fraud, it starts the end of morena/ the opposition, that the presidential election is until next. but dont worry im here to explain them to you.

So last week there was a party election in the Morena Party, Morena is the current ruling party funded by the now president Lopez Obrador, its a social democratic party with some pro-labor views, this party election was important because it decided who out of 6 candidates would become the presidential candidate of the ruling coalition, like a USA primary, except it was decided via surveys instead of normal voting like a popularity rating.

So out of the 6 candidates only 2 were really going to win, which were Marcelo Ebrard and Claudia Sheinbaum

Marcelo Ebrard

He was the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Obrador and was a very active member of the cabinet of the president, He joined the party in 2018 and he used to be member of 3 other parties (MC, PRD, PRI) he has know obrador since 2000 when he backed his campaign for Governor of Mexico city and he became secratary of public security, then on 2006 he became the Gobernor of Mexico city and continue the same policies as Amlo. then for the presidential election of 2012 Obrador became the candidate of the PRD and he promised Ebrard a spot in his cabinet as Foreign relations secretary, but he lost, on those 6 years between 2012 and 2018 Ebrard would leave the PRD and join Movimiento Ciudadano which is a progresive liberal party until 2018 when he joined Obrador's party Morena and became the foreign relatios secretary when Obrador won on 2018

So what are his views? to me he believes in the same social democratic ideals like the president except he has always backed a very internationalist outlook he wants mexico to be more active in international organizations like the UN and on the internacional stage. thats the vibe i get from him

Claudia Sheinbaum

The first party she joined was the PRD were she meet Obrador and when he won the election for Head of goberment of Mexico City she became part of his cabinet and became Secretary of the Environment, she oversaw the introduction of the Public transport proyects like the Metrobus and others, and Obrador added her to his Cabinet for the presidency of 2012 but he lost, then in 2014 She follow Obrador and became a founding member of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) the current ruling party, then on 2018 she would get the candidacy for Governor of Mexico city and would win becoming head of goverment of Mexico city.

During her governorship her main agenda was the introduccion of green policies to control the contamination in Mexico city, like planting tree, ban single use plactis, built new waste separation plants, etc. as well as the expantion and development of the Public transport system in the city, her biggest challenge was the covid-19 pandemic in which she pushed for more lockdown policies that were well recieved.

so her view, to me she is mainly an enviromentalist not only because of her policies during her governorship but also because she has a doctorade in environmental engineering, her administration of the city is seen as tecnocratic, and she is big support of obrador since she left the PRD and joined his party in its infancy so i say she probably has the same social democratic views as him

The Morena election

so yesterday the survey results were revealed, and Shienbaum won with 39% of support to Ebrard 26%, to me it wasnt that surprising Claudia has always been the more famous one even with Ebrard's many apparences with the president, both have been basicaly campaigning since june but really they both started much sooner since like the start of the year, for example in the state i live it isnt governed by Morena yet in the city there is a Big poster with Shienbaum face saying "she supports you".

ok so the drama is that Ebrard is a sore loser and called the survey an error and posible fraud, and in interviews he said that there isnt space in the party for him, etc. so he is probably leaving the party, but the question is to where?

What now?

OK so for the presidential election in 2024 there are 3 main factions that will participate mainly only 2 have a chance to win and will probaly be Morena

• So the first faction is Juntos Hacemos Historia which is a coalition of 3 parties, first is Morena they are socdems, then is Partido del Trabajo which is a small labour party more left than morena you could call them socialists, and finally Partido verde which dont belive their lies its not a green party is just a PRI remnant they are liberals, Its really just Morena and friends only the PT have ever been close ideologically to Morena, Verde is a recent addition in 2018 election it was Morena, PT and a party called Encuentro Social who were christian ultraconservatives, they now go by PES and arent morena's ally anymore, their candidate will be Shienbaum

• 2nd faction is Frente Amplio por México, made up by Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) who are christian conservatives who fun fact ther party was founded by fascists, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) they used to be the only Ruling party of the country for 70 years they used to be called the perfect dictartorship they are neoliberals, and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) they are socdems, in the past if you made a coalition of ths 3 parties you would have gotten more than 90% of the votes, the reason why is that 20 years ago they were pretty much the only 3 viable parties you had the neolibs, the conservatives and the socdems. the reason why this is not the case anymore is that in 20 we saw the collapse of the PRD and PRI alongside the rise and fall of the PAN, the PRD and PRI lost the mayority of their supporters to Morena and the PAN after a terrible presidency of Calderon they have never recovered. FA hasnt picked a candidate for presidency yep but its between 3 people, which are Xóchitl Gálvez (she seems to be the more popular), Santiago Creel and Beatriz Paredes

• 3rd and last is Movimiento Ciudadano, who are a progressive liberal party , they are going at it alone but their objective isnt to win the presidency but to gain enough support to become the main opposition party over the members of Frente amplio, they dont have a candidate yet and this strategy has caused infighting in the party for beign risk but their luck change for the better with the Morena elections, because if Ebrard lefts morena he will probably join MC since he used to be a member and their will get a very popular candidate.

So if the popular theories happen the Presidential Elections of 2024 will be battle between Claudia Shienbaum (Morena), Xóchitl Gálvez (FA) and Marcelo Ebrard (MC) its still very likely that morena wins again, however the important event is from which coalition will MC's candidate pull supporters from, now its posible Sheinbaum will lose some votes to Ebrard because he did got 26% support in the survey but its important to remember that Morena is Obradors party and people voted for them because it had Obrador not anything else so its hard to say if any will vote MC over morena again.

Now the more interesting effect would be if MC's pulls voters from Frente Amplio, this is posible because rembering the views of the member parties of Frente Amplio is that it has no Ideological Cohesion, in the past all 3 parties used to call eachother corrupt, narco supporters, dictators. So from going from that to today its a very sudden, this is really an anti-morena party, MC used have a coalition with PAN and PRD which made more sense than FA but they decided to not continue to ideological diferences, which is good for MC in a way because the FA main problem is that they just look like a bunch of sellouts (which they are) and you could say thats a reason why PRD and PRI lose so many voters and supporters to Morena who has ideological cohesion.

The elections for 2024 are going to be very important for the country in my opinion on one point it will cement Morena's hegemony over the country dependen on by how much they win, and two what will be the future of Oposition parties, will the follow the Frente Amplio's plan of becoming a centrist amorphous blob that has abandon all its ideals or the MC plan of just countinuing the way they have always been like, being a minor party until the big one fucks up.

@JamesConeZone@hexbear.net here is an effort post on mexico nerd

Challenger tanks actually getting destroyed in a peer war is 9/11 for small business owning UK uncles who think that the British military is invincible because they beat the Americans in a war game 3 or 4 years ago

convincing people there was ebola at burning man was the bit of the year.

Elon’s starlink fiasco, where he accidentally did a good thing, has the libs frothing at the mouth about treason like the good, obedient, loyal bootlickers they are.

For all the ranting and raving they do about “authoritarianism”, they sure do seem pretty eager to jail enemies of the state!

They want the People’s Court back so badly so they can live out their Nazi revenge fantasies.

Anyone who spontaneously starts spouting off about the evil anti-American traitors who need to be put behind bars is a violent criminal who needs to be isolated from society.

Don’t be surprised when Red Scare 3 officially swings into full gear and they’re giddily joining firing squads while simultaneously bitching about “North Korea authoritarianism”

Yooooooooooooo

On today's episode on Social Democracy is the Moderate Wing of Fascism: Finnish ex-prime minister Sanna Marin of the succdem party, beloved by all progressives, quits her job in politics and goes to work at the fucking motherfucking Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

What can I even say? Disappointed but not surprised? Given the current state of finnish politics I can't blame her for quitting, but damn girl, Ol' Tony's Warcrime Breakfast club? Really? I mean, I always disliked her politics, but gotta admit I got a little bamboozled by her progressive vibes, because she wasn't a billion years old and seemed kind of down to earth and or a cool person to hang out with or whatever. Ugh, like a god damned liberal. Shame on me. When am I gonna learn? Never ever fucking believe a social democrat. I gotta re-read Rosa Luxemburg's shit.

Article here https://yle.fi/a/74-20049056

Burkina: “we are not enemies” of the “French people”, says Captain Traoré

“We are not enemies with the French people, it is the policy of those who run France which poses a problem in Africa, so as long as a State is not in an imperialist spirit (…) there is no problem,” he said in this interview recorded on August 31.

“We must agree to look at each other as equals” and “we must agree to review all of our cooperation,” he added. Without naming it, he criticized France for having “given independence” and “placed people” at “the head of certain states”.

According to him, "we have led people to sign a lot of agreements (...) which prevent us from developing", adding that "imperialist states are not just France, there are others" he said without quoting them.

Good bit idea: doing "hate the government, not the people" reddit shit, but towards the West.

Following the Ukrainian War on twitter is wild. When there are territorial advances, "military analysis" accounts will post videos of whatever side planting their flag on top of a town's main administrative building, troops walking around newly conquered areas and maps showing arrows and new colors. But when the front barely moves, like it is doing right now, they just post people getting blown apart and drones destroying stuff and obviously killing people, meaning that when there are no developments, people must watch others die for the cameras, for a bunch of likes and retweets, so that these NAFO/Russian Empire freaks get even more horny.

There’s something really amusing to me about this headline I see on the Nytimes website

Ukraine is confronting Russian defenses in the south, but minefields and more enemy troops lie ahead, analysts say.

Like WOW no way MORE enemy troops? Thanks analysts I thought that the defenses they were confronting lacked any troops. Like Jesus who writes this stuff what information is to be gleaned here

Eliminating separatists is not genocide. Azerbaijan has the right to eliminate separatists. - Burningphoenix🇺🇸🇺🇦🇦🇫🇦🇿🇹🇼🇽🇰🇬🇪🇲🇩🇵🇸

🇹🇼🇽🇰

But also, least genocidal NAFO.

Finnish Succdem Queen ends up at capitalist warhawk Institution. How could this have happened?

Unrelated to anything but last weekend I went to the portuguese communist party's Avante Festival where, besides a whole lot of cool fucking stuff, several communist/progressive parties are represented, some of them have restaurants others have stands and stuff.

The CPC stand, as usual, had some high tech gadjets as well as traditional chinese products at very good prices, how good? I walked away with a 250€ Xiaomi headset for 40€. Also got Cuban cigars and rum.

But yeah I encourage everyone to come every year it's a lot of fun, here's some photos and a video from last year, this was when the attacks on the party for our position on ukraine were the fiercest and this year even MORE people showed up which meant longer lines (which is very socialist) but also was very nice to see

Just wanted to share a funny Libya/Gaddafi/Green Book story from my Syrian-Lebanese communist uncle. When my uncle was studying engineering in the USSR in the 80s, his roommate and best friend was an Iraqi guy from a relatively poor family who also got a grant to go study in the USSR. The Iraqi government back under Baathism used to give thousands of grants to young Iraqis to go study in mainly Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. This guy was Shia muslim, from a religious family with secret Persian ancestry that my uncle only found out recently about, when talking to his old friend, who kept it hidden all this time.

Anyway, this guy's family get into a conflict with a local Baath Party office because of some religious incident, which snowballs into this guy's brothers getting arrested. The Baath dudes also cancelled my uncle's friend's grant in the USSR, which was around 200 USD at that time. Suddenly he's dirt poor, with half his family in prison in Iraq. He decided to toughen up and survive the situation, as he needed to stay in the USSR to avoid going back to Iraq without a degree and then drafted for the Iraq-Iran War.

When his situation worsens later and he starts to starve with no money, he comes up with a master plan. Libya had awful relations with Saddam's Iraq in the 80s, so this guy showed up at the Libyan Embassy in Moscow and presented himself as an Iraqi dissenter that likes the Libyan system. A week later they call him and tell him to come to the embassy. They give him nearly $1000 in cash and a whole box full with copies of Gaddafi's Green Book, on the condition that he promotes the book to other Iraqis. He accepts the offer of course and survives excellently on that money until the Iraqis reapprove his grant. He then actually worked in Libya for a few years, and he was directly contacted by his local Libyan embassy because his name had been registered as a "potential engineer" in a list somewhere.

In the spirit of the country of the week discussion, I'll talk a bit about Italian Libya.

Generally when people think about Italian colonialism in Africa they think about the Italian-Ethiopian Wars and the occupation of Ethiopia, but the Italian occupation of Libya lasted much longer, starting in 1911 after Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire and gained control over the area. Something I hear often in revisionist history is that a defining feature of Fascism is not the ethnic cleansing of an out group because Italy wasn't involved in the Holocaust until Germany pushed it. Which obviously is bullshit on its own, but it completely ignores Italy's colonial crimes because those don't count according to liberals.

Under the fascist government, Italy pursued mass scale ethnic cleansing in Libya. This including expelling over 100,000 people in Cyrenaica from their lands to move in Italian settlers and moving these displaced Libyan people into concentration camps between 1930 and 1931, notably this happened before beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Out of the 100,000 Libyans moved to concentration camps, 40,000 of them would be dead by 1933. The Italian government would also undertake large pacification campaigns against the Indigenous Libyan population, one of these included the mass killing of civilians in the Cyrenaica province that led to the deaths of over one quarter of the entire population.

Overall this is a similar story to many colonial ventures in Africa but one that is rarely talked about. After WW2 the colony would be passed to British and French administration and these crimes would never be addressed. Most likely because addressing these crimes would also implicate the British and French governments genocides in their own occupations of Africa.

New cuck n chad ranking. Slimmed international section as things have been slow.

Russia - Ukraine cuck n chad power ranking

International cuck n chad power ranking

So, the AnCap victory in the Argentinian Primaries is showing one of it's main effects: A new paradigm. Let me introduce Javer Milei's running mate: Victoria Villarruel.

So who's this demon? Villarruel is the daughter of a former Admiral, and if there's anything you need to know about the Argentinian Navy is that, on the XX Century it became a literal cesspool of reactionaires of the absolute worst kind. The Navy has always been rabidly anti-Communist but also anti-Peronist, the Armada played a huge role in the fall of the first Peronist government in 1955, first by bombing Plaza de Mayo (in an attempt to kill Perón) which resulted in numerous civilians getting killed, yes, they bombed the city's main square on a very busy day with BOMBS AND MACHINEGUN FIRE FROM NAVY AIRPLANES, and second as Navy warships bombed oil refineries, pro-Peronist Army units and threatened to bomb civilian areas, even with almost-retired battleships armed with 305 mm guns. During the 70s, the Navy also became known for hideous crimes against humanity, the Military Junta had an Admiral in charge of the Government and numerous warships were used as "clandestine detention centres", that is, places were people were brought in, tortured and executed well outside public view. In fact, the biggest concentration camp during the Dirty War period was operated by the Navy.

And why do I say there's a new paradigm being born? Because a few days ago she held a "commemorative" event for the "victims of the guerrillas during the 70s". Okay, the guerrillas did kill innocent people, in truth their goal was to aim for military leaders, officers and businessmen allied to the Military Junta, but that also resulted in random people dying during skirmishes or bomb attacks, and yes, the Peronists, after the fall of the Junta in 1983, did everything to hide the crimes committed by the Triple A (Anti-Communist Alliance, approved by Perón during his last years alive) during the early 70s before the Juntas took power in 1976.

But her intention is not justice or memory, her goals here are: whitewash the Military Juntas, bringing back the old "They were trying to restore order and eliminate subversion" narrative - Place the blame on the Guerrillas, calling them outright terrorists - Claim "the Left" has "politicized" the "humans rights issue" by just going after the military and the police and not the guerrillas - Create an equivalency between a bunch of ragtag guerrillas (which, by the time the Juntas took power, were severely weakened) and the entire State apparatus at the service of the Armed Forces, which carried out extra-judicial killings, arrests, tortures and disappearences, and lastly and I think most importantly, revanchism. The "military families" took big fat Ls during the first years of Kirchnerism, many senior military leaders were investigated, brought into trial by a civilian court and given sentences for crimes against humanity ranging from several decades in prison to life (Some leaders, unfortunately, avoided trial because they died before 2003, when most of the trials began). Kirchnerism also eliminated two controversial laws which prevented senior military and police leaders from being prosecuted, Full Stop Law and Law of Due Obedience, this move allowed for the continued prosecution of criminals.

So this isn't just a bunch of military apologists doing genocide denial, she does believe the Juntas acted in the defense of the nation, and might have "committed some excesses", but also denies 30,000 people were disappeared by the Juntas (A number that shows up in internal armed forces documents, btw). This is flat-out denialism yes, but holding an event that "remembers the soldiers that died in the defense of the nation" sets the scenario for revanchism, they want to get back, they want their people to occupy positions of power again. It is their time now, their chance to counterattack. This is, of course, extremely dangerous. And since her party won the elections, this narrative gained a lot of legitimacy. The media, even the liberal media, has once again began to speak about the "victims of the guerrillas" very openly. The paradigm of shitting on the police and the armed forces for killing up to 30,000 people in just a few years is dying, a new one, containing historial revisionism and revanchism, is being created.

Did I just forgot to tell you Victoria Villarruel studied at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, an institution belonging to the US Department of State? Sus right? We might just have a very clear CIA asset as VP.

I love how we still get called putinists even though a bunch of us would love to see putin strung up alongside zelensky

Every day I check the news and play a little game called "where is the CIA today?"

its mexico they're in mexico

Something exploded in a civilian area in Ukrainian-held Konstantinivka, killing 16 and wounding 30, and of course mainstream western media jumped to say Russia did it (on purpose).

It has already been (CW: video of the explosion) all but proven that it was an accidental Ukrainian strike. Surely the media will issue corrections any minute now, and refrain from doing this again in the future

A summary of today's war news, courtesy of western mainstream media:

• More than 900 civilians has been harmed by Russian cluster munitions during the war
• Kim and Putin will meet in Vladivostok to discuss arms deal
• News that Kim and Putin will meet in Vladivostok might be an American attempt to sabotage the meeting by freaking out Kim who is a crazy paranoid dictator who fears assassinations
• The war has become a war of attrition. This gives Ukraine a huge advantage because of le epic ~~Aryan~~ western aid while Russia is desperate
• Ukraine broke through the Surovikin line! Russia is in trouble now!
• Okay, maybe Ukraine didn't break through the Surovikin line as previously reported but they're really close to it
• Evil Russians are mining positions when they abandon them, thereby scaring the bravest of Ukraine's soldiers
• Picture of burning Challenger tank. No challenger has ever been destroyed in battle.

Relevant to both current events and our COTW, here's somebody in the Western media who does not have goldfish brain, an extremely remarkable achievement.

Niger's crisis began in Libya

The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.

The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.

The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.

The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.

There was little dissent at the time. As Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s forces battled anti-government rebels, politicians, the press and anti-Gaddafi Libyans painted an overly simplistic picture of unarmed protesters and other civilians facing imminent if not already unfolding genocide. Only years later would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were “not supported by the available evidence” and that “the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element” that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.” (Despite Gaddafi’s ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).

Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where “even a small deployment could have stopped the killing,” and insisted U.S. intervention would “change the image of the United States overnight.”

...

Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts ... will be long remembered”).

NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”

After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.

The episode was considered a triumph. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the “success.” “As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done,” wrote then-U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis in October 2011. “Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.” That same month, Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared “Libya’s victory” as she flashed a peace sign.

...

“Libya has given [the mandate of ‘responsibility to protect’] a bad name,” complained Indian UN Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, echoing the sentiments of other diplomats angry that a UN mandate for protecting civilians had been stretched to regime change.

It soon became clear why. Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.

Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.

Things are scarcely better in “liberated” Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton’s pre-intervention fear of Libya “becoming a giant Somalia.” By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading.

Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.

Only five years later, Clinton, once eager to claim credit, distanced herself from the decision to intervene. “It didn’t work,” Obama admitted bluntly as he prepared to leave office, publicly deeming the country “a mess” and, privately, “a shit show.” The New York Timescollected the damning verdicts of those involved: “We made it worse”; “Gaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave”; “by God, if we can’t succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts.”

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT HELPING! YOU OPPOSED QADDAFI BECAUSE HE OPPOSED YOUR IMPERIALISM! YOU SUPPORT ACTUAL DICTATORS ALL OVER THE WORLD WHO CREATE APPALING CONDITIONS FOR THEIR PEOPLE! LIBYA WAS THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN AFRICA AT ONE POINT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Forbes: Ukraine Has Lost Its First Challenger 2 Tank

The soldier praised the Challenger 2 for its long-range firepower and excellent protection compared to Soviet-style tanks. We still haven’t seen footage of the 82nd Brigade’s Challenger 2s firing their 120-millimeter rifled guns in anger in Ukraine, but the Monday video of the burning Challenger 2 ironically does highlight the tanks’ survivability. That’s because the burning Challenger 2’s turret still is attached to its hull.

One of the major weaknesses of a Soviet-designed T-72, T-80 or T-90 is that the three-person tanks—they have autoloaders for their main guns instead of a fourth crewman who manually handles ammunition—stow their ammo in a ring underneath the turret. When a T-72 takes a direct hit and its ammo cooks off, the tank tends to explode like a firework. The turret and its occupants as often as not launch right off the hull. “You’re sent flying somewhere in the fields,” the 82nd Brigade tanker, a former T-80 crewman, mused in his interview. “You don’t stand much of a chance.” By contrast, the Challenger 2 like most Western tanks stows its ammo in special compartments along the turret that explode outward, away from the crew, when struck. “Everything here is designed for the people,” the tanker explained.

We don’t know what misfortune befell the Challenger 2 that burned on that road outside Robotyne. But we do know the 82nd Brigade and its sister unit, the 46th Air Mobile Brigade, steadily are advancing from liberated Robotyne southeast toward Verbove. Their ultimate objective, Russian-occupied Melitopol, lies 50 miles to the south along the T0408/T0401 highway.

...

Take comfort that, three months into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the Ukrainians have lost just six of their 105 Western-made tanks: five of 71 Leopard 2s and one of 14 Challenger 2s. None of the 20 delivered Leopard 1A5s yet have been destroyed. And many more tanks are en route to Ukraine as the counteroffensive grinds on: 14 more Leopard 2s, 31 American-made M-1s and perhaps another 145 Leopard 1A5s. Yes, Ukraine is losing tanks, including some of its best tanks. No, it’s not running out of tanks.

Libs love to bleat about "international law" and "territorial sovereignty" until you mention Kosovo.

Just watched the Geekerwan Review of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro and the Kirin 9000S trashes the Google Tensor G2 LOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCRIFe0uaac

Huawei doesn't fuck around, just a few years and they're already matching the Snapdragon 865 in raw performance. The Tensor G2 is only at 855 perf and it's not subject to any sanctions at all.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has basically caught up to Apple's A-Series so if Huawei can pull this off (still waiting on EUV) they will eventually surpass Apple's once gigantic lead.

It sucks but seeing a market economy actor (a pseudo worker co-op no less) and the Communist Party use the immortal science to trash the capitalist crown jewels is satisfying. Huawei claims 90% of the Mate 60 Pro is domestically produced.

On a side note I never seen an explanation on why the Soviet microchip industry seems to have never taken off.

In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.

Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly

If the canal ain't wet enough, you ain't getting in. No matter what says.

Olaf Scholz does not seem to take his new Power Cuck status well.

He's started to wear an actual eyepatch in what commenters say is a "desperate attempt" to harness any kind of "chad energy" by "trying to look like Dan Crenshaw".

Hexbears remain doubtful if "punished Scholz" will escape ultra cuck territory in the upcoming power rankings.

(apparently he had some kind of accident while jogging, though why you would need a eyepatch for that I have no idea)

The way they emphasize EATS MCDONALD’S FRIES