It's perfectly plausible of course, but i'm still gonna need some evidence. At this point i don't trust anything coming from western media until i see it independently confirmed.

It would be great if they hadn't passed a law making it illegal to negotiate with Russia.

Done.

I wish i could be as optimistic but i still think this will go well into next year. Would love to be wrong about this though.

It's also a very quick descent which saves time (which, i am told, is equivalent to money), and you don't need to keep the engines running anymore for the descent so you can save on fuel too. Always look on the bright side.

SCMP is very liberal and quite pro-Western. It's not even aligned with the views of the CPC let alone controlled by it. I wouldn't call it a rag as it does sometimes put out serious and important articles - it's not CNN or BBC level propaganda trash - but its bias is unmistakeable.

Stop using the term "philanthropist", there is no such thing, that's a PR term invented by billionaires in an attempt to whitewash their image when they give out occasional crumbs out of the massive amount of wealth they have stolen from the working class.

This is still probably just a limited hangout. The intelligence services sometimes allow the selective release of some information on already compromised/burned or used up assets. This is essentially that. I strongly suspect it's meant to give the impression that this is clearing the air once and for all about the whole Epstein affair but in reality it's meant to protect the deeper underlying networks while throwing a bone to the masses to pacify them. They are ok with sacrificing a few end nodes that are no longer useful, and embarrassing some people who they know are too powerful to ever be held accountable anyway, like Clinton and that old inbred British degenerate.

And i don't know if this is true but there were rumors at some point that DPRK construction crews might be called in to help with the rebuilding in the new Russian territories. At the time they were talking Mariupol but i'm sure there will be plenty of that sort of work available in the other cities as well.

Democrats are just as bad and as fascist as the GOP.

We're not encouraging anyone to either vote or not vote, we're just pointing out the truth about the corporate uniparty that rules the US.

Also, there are such things as third parties, just saying... you don't have to vote for the blue fascists just because you don't like the red fascists.

The whole "voice" thing even being a debate is so strange to me.

Why is there even a referendum about this? Why give people the option to say no? Would it have been ok to put slavery up to a referendum? Not that this is anywhere near as radical a step as abolishing slavery, in fact it's mostly performative/symbolic. I just don't care what the majority of a settler nation thinks on this issue. Why do white people get to decide whether indigenous people even have a "voice"?

And as i said it's not even that much of a step forward, it's just more liberal incrementalism. Indigenous people don't just need a "voice" in the settler system, they need real political power. They don't need a consultative, borderline ceremonial role through which they can express their opinion, they need their fucking land back! They need independence as a nation!

At the very least they should get a veto on all laws passed and all political appointments in the government.

There are a ton of genuine and principled communist parties around the world especially in the global south which hold on to at least some social conservative lines. We need to accept that contradictions like this are a fact of life, it is to be expected that many communist parties, at least those that are not astroturfed from the outside, will in some way reflect the dominant social mores and attitudes of their country. After all, their members come from the general population, they are not above them but part of the people and will share some of the same prejudices inculcated in them by their upbringing.

Of course we would like to see their attitude change in a more progressive direction but this is not something that we have the power to enforce on them, and to attempt to do so would be viewed as cultural imperialism. They need to come to the right conclusions on their own. In the meantime we must not allow such secondary contradictions to be exploited to break our international solidarity with them, or indeed with most other forces that share our principled opposition to imperialism. Imperialism and not social conservatism is the primary contradiction of our time and the main obstacle to socialism.