For US electoral news, swing state polling and predictions, and other such things, please head to the containment megathread.

Discussion about the potential worldwide geopolitical impact of Harris/Trump is still fine to discuss here.

We lost an anti-colonial champion in 1924 in Lenin, the architect of the first communist revolution, and a tragic loss for the world, taken at least a decade or two before he should have gone. And then we got Stalin out of it, who did yet greater things, defeating fascism and supporting movements the world over.

A hundred years later, we lose Nasrallah. And the person, or people, who come after may well be the ones who lead us to the defeat of Zionist fascism and the end of Israel.

we're on like the third or fourth round (just off the top of my head) of America creating concentration camps (at home or abroad) in their history

it's just something that white people have to do every generation. such unfathomable violence to millions of people that Himmler himself would be like "...alright, this is going a little far, now..." and then making 50 movies about how it made them sad to carry out genocides and atrocities

one of my liberal brainworms was that during the colonial period when Britain and other European powers were going around the world and murdering and pillaging and looting, that if information about it was more widespread then there would have been more opposition; the lack of knowledge back home meant that there wasn't accountability. now I know that that is false. you can beam footage of a dozen schools full of children being obliterated into Americans' eyeballs, headless children and all, and all you get is the deranged ravings of vote-drunk cowards. there is no level of bloodshed that can sate the white psyche

China’s central government has approved Shanghai’s plan to build 29 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as the city works to cut emissions to meet Beijing’s ambitious climate targets.

Once the deep sea project is complete, the financial and industrial hub will receive about 100 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year, according to local newspaper Xinmin Evening News. That’s more than half of Shanghai’s annual power consumption. The city is also set to receive green power from Inner Mongolia via a state-backed, long-distance grid, the paper reported, without providing details for either project.

China is leading the global push for renewable energy, with its offshore wind capacity set to triple to 129 gigawatts by 2030, according to BloombergNEF. Fierce prices wars between domestic manufacturers have made equipment much cheaper than in the rest of the world, driving market demand for clean energy. The price of offshore wind power even dipped below that of coal-generated electricity last month in another project off Shanghai.

it's pretty funny when China, the "authoritarian communist no food no freedom" country, is doing the whole corporations-competing-driving-down-prices thing better than Western countries whose economies now consist of a grand total of about 6-7 monopoly corporations, which, if anything, do the opposite and conspire to increase prices among themselves

Like China, India and Mexico, Brazil doesn't believe peace negotiations can take place without dialogue between both parties.

we really are at the point where Western diplomatic acumen has atrophied so much that they still believe they can dictate terms despite being in a losing war. like, I guess it's kinda encouraging that state competency has decayed this much, but it does also mean that WW3 is probably inevitable

Global sea surface temperatures have reached an all-time record in February, two months ahead of the March-April biannual peak (when the sea is hottest in the southern hemisphere, because most of the world's water is there)

The orange line was 2023, so already a massively standout year - sea surface temperatures were only very gradually increasing year-on-year before that point. This year may be even toastier.

sir, we strictly followed your orders for the implementation of a tactical incursion as part of the strategic plan to neutralize Gaza and the subterranean nexus within, and in the process, an incident code-named delta bravo charlie two-niner occurred in which a series of islamic-style teenagers launched some anti-tank munitions towards our position. a kinetic event then occurred in my military-grade underwear involving the tactical release of a semi-solid substance. investigations into who committed this act are ongoing with haste; initial findings indicate that the terrorist organization known as Hamas was responsible.

it's literally the exact same playbook as the Kunduz hospital strike by the US. They've just swapped out the names of the hospitals. Laziest propaganda I've seen in my life. Honestly if Mossad (or Shin Bet or whatever the fuck)'s best attempt to make it convincing was that hilariously scripted phone call (even the "intercepted Russian calls" where soldiers admitted to genociding Ukraine and that Putin was a very bad stupid idiot were more convincing) then I can totally see why they failed to catch October 7th

failsonization is bringing down Western intelligence agencies faster than Russia/China/Iran/etc ever could

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible "Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!" analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it's allowed to be the exception is because it's a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world's oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it's also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you're not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there's a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it's extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase "... has a right to exist", it's always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this "right" in the West's eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn't. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it's one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas' victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of "X hates Y and so they're fighting" obfuscates a lot of what's actually going on geopolitically. It's extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn't mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn't to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn't just some inherently religious war.

Incredible to be living through events that, in 50, 70, maybe 100 years from now will be regarded with a similar degree of horror as the Holocaust. People living under communism in 2100 will wonder why we - as in, the mass of humanity living at the time - did nothing about the Palestinian Genocide of 2023. There will be people who get ancestry tests that reveal that they had Israeli settler grandparents and they will feel such intense shame and even try and hide the results. As we describe extremely bad people as "Hitler", they will describe similarly bad people as "Netanyahu", an example of almost superhuman evil. Goebbels and Himmler will have similar comparisons to current Israeli politicians.

The toppling of the Israeli regime is now the reasonable, pragmatic, centrist position. sorry I don't make the rules here