i blame you, personally, for this loss. Fucking Miami sleeper agents in my news thread

after initially thinking that this seemed like a good idea, isn’t the point of a megathread to contain a bunch of people talking about one topic? if and when we experience “100 comment hours” or “1000 comment days”, we are all on the same page, and sharing/ commiserating/ celebrating/ insulting the current moment. i think encouraging substantive main comments is good, but we don’t need strict rules

i don’t see censorship as inherently good or bad, and i believe some of the stuff facebook took down was of the “ivermectin covid cure” sort. Noticing censorship for the first time because of Covid is fine, as long as they can see how Covid censorship is of the same feather as the media blackout on CIA torture and the current chief. Just based on living near some cranks (some well-meaning and some not), i feel like jumping on Covid specifically points to a ‘plandemic’ sort of worldview.

i fully agree with your point about media control. i think future changes will use that reputation, as experts and arbiters of public opinion, as the basis for their legitimacy

there’s a theory out in the world, I think mostly among radlib economists, that the recession of 2008 has never ended, and we are in a decade-plus “long recession”. the core of the argument for this is that the solution for the recession, quantitative easing, was not only a band-aid that can only be used once, but also essentially putting the foundations of the economy on a sand pit that the federal reserve promised to keep filling forever.

quantitative easing is the printing of money to provide constant liquidity. liquidity is important because one consequence/ aspect of USamerican financial imperialism is denominating debts in US dollars. this means that most every country needs constant dollars to even service debt, let alone pay it off. one possible crisis of ‘08 was a massive, international run on the dollar because everyone needed to pay their debts. that’s why a lot of banks were affected by the crisis even if they didn’t actually own mortgage backed securities. this was avoided by printing a lot of money forever. this manifests in 0% interest loans, created from whole cloth by a central bank.

the Japanese central bank followed suit in policy, and the relative difference in value between the yen and the dollar has allowed for the ‘carry trade’. this is buying Japanese bonds at 0% interest, and then buying US Treasury bonds for the profit and the dollars. treasury bonds are separate from the federal reserve, so they aren’t a part of the 0% interest thing. so it’s true that some people, as you said, were scheming with this to make a profit, but many countries and foreign companies used the carry trade to generate dollars. the elimination of the carry trade is of some global significance, because dollars are that much harder to get if a country has a debt crisis. does this mean quantitative easing is over, or even under threat? no. but the system can’t last forever, and in the past the fed has shown that sometimes they make decisions for the stock market instead of long term financial imperialism.

nvidia announced that the next best AI chip was delayed for production snags, which led to some tech companies sliding. the intel stuff is worse than just a bad quarterly. they don’t make any AI chips, because they didn’t get involved in design a decade ago. the fabs they’re building in USamerica are all behind schedule or failing. every 13th and 14th generation CPU has a chance of having a computer ruining defect (i think they melt at certain temperatures/ length of use), and intel has chosen not offer a recall or a solution. arm holdings now makes better laptop and data center chips. they also laid off 15k people last week. the long and short of it is that they spent something like $150 billion on share buybacks in the last 30 years, and a lot less on research and factories. there’s a good chance intel gets splintered up and bought by various competitors or simply catastrophically fails in the next two years.

This is a brief roster of my impressions of the current main groups within the mono-party. It goes without saying that only people above a certain net worth get their opinions heard. The categories do overlap a bit. The red team historically has more bourgeoisie at its back (at least in public), and the blue team historically has the ability to mobilize more “mass” support. I put mass in scare quotes because not only does bourgeois democracy provide false choices to the people, anywhere from half to a third of voting age USamericans don’t vote for president at all. The centrality of abortion in the Harris messaging and the chance for the first woman president will likely give them the grassroots edge, for whatever that matters.

Blue Team

Bidenists: People materially, ideologically, or opportunistically committed to Ukraine or “israel”. This includes a number of defense contractors, investment firms, and intelligence people.

Silicon Valley: The contradiction of tech’s desired reputation (change, progress, etc) with the excess and corruption of the tech boom resolves itself in massive donations to the democratic party, at least from the usual CEO’s (Alphabet, Microsoft, etc).

Deep Party: Obama keeps decently quiet about who he pulls which strings for, but Kamala did not kick out Joe. She’s an unpopular but available figurehead, and I don’t really know enough about who’s behind that beyond vaguely saying something about the Clinton Foundation.

Finance Capital: Biden has led a great intensification of wealth away from poor and middle class minorities and to the financial bourgeois. Many of them are smart enough to see that.

Hollywood: They are louder then they are significant, but they do have some amount of money and some amount of soft power/ voter appeal. As a Californian from the area, I’d say most of them are just excited Biden is gone. Kamala was a bad AG, and most of us hate Sacramento people by default. Kamala could mess this one up in a number of ways.

Red Team

Small Industry Capital: The jetski dealership owners, the ranchers, the farmers, and the small factory owners are still kicking around USamerica, and they control a lot of local jobs and clout. These people have been locked in with Trump since ‘16, because racism, tariffs, and tax cuts are exactly what they all want.

Crypto Valley: Silicon Valley is not cleanly sticking to Kamala; this is especially the case in newer and more speculative industries. AI, crypto, and some venture capitalists want Trump. Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk, and the Bitcoin conference all have shown support for Trump, I believe in hopes that he will deregulate crypto. Kamala is making similar promises though, and these people haven’t wavered in their support for Trump.

Thielites: Thiel represents both the recent trend of the Valley and the MIC working hand in glove and also spending a lot of money on elections. A chunk of Republican bourgeois greatly support both. This is distinct from the Crypto people because Thiel owns the VP and Palantir.

Finance Capital: Trump cut a lot of taxes, and he’s smart/ dumb enough to guarantee rate cuts if he wins. Some bolder/ dumber finance capital people want even more than what Biden is offering.

Resource Extraction Capital: The shale oil boom accelerated massively under Trump. This is especially worth thinking about if geopolitics causes the price of oil to spike. Additionally, Shell and Chevron were set for coal and gas exploitation in Ukraine before the war, so they count as part of the people “left out” of the Ukraine cash cow.

Christian Nuts: These people have so much money it’s unreal. The dog that caught the car with abortion, now it has too much influence and no target. In my opinion, this is the main source of “weird” messaging that dips into white/ Christian nationalist stuff too much. The hogs must be sated.

the recent NATO summit asserted that Ukrainian membership was inevitable. i believe they added the caveat that they would only get in once they were not under threat. while he is a problematic favorite, i think simplicius has rightly articulated that putin wants a brand new/ re-defined security architecture, in europe if not the world, in order to get peace in the Ukraine. the west has lied too many times for anything else. so there can’t be a real peace with the current version of NATO policy.

i think it turns on who is it that you think is speaking there when NATO says ukrainian membership is inevitable. if it’s Joe Biden/ Bidenist Americans, then he’s toast in 6 months, and you can keep up the current level of pressure on the hopes of a better negotiation with a new president (winner doesn’t really matter). if it’s the European Council or NATO/ US military speaking here, then either they or their public facing statements are delusional, and russia has every incentive to maintain the slow and steady screw turning until they realize. never interrupt your enemy while making a mistake and all that.

i agree that your description is the inevitable outcome of the actual war in ukraine, but you and i have known most of that since 2022. i think the slow war/ fast war thing has an impact on how involved NATO is in the conflict, not the actual military result against the UA. if you go too fast, then NATO goes nuclear (bad) or sees it as a lost cause and stops sending free equipment to burn (bad). i’d be happy to be proven wrong by either someone else or reality, but i don’t see any benefit to accelerating the war. more dead russians, minimal change in western posture (they’ve been rattling sabres at defcon 1 for 2.5 years), and possible nuclear conflict in exchange for potentially fewer dead ukrainians is not a good deal, cruel as it might be.

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To paraphrase Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, if we know the odds of one missile hitting a ship is something like 30% and that it would take 5 such missiles to sink it, there’s only a little bit of probability math to show that it would take 38 such missiles to have a better than 90% chance to sink the ship. I think the real missiles being used here are both more accurate and more potent than that hypothetical. Hypersonic missiles are uniquely threatening to US power (at least in theory, I don’t want to call anything until we see the first carrier reef) because it is a global hegemon that sees itself as rival to regional powers. The US is always the aggressor, and the defender can usually only project force outside their borders so far. The maximum range of your enemies’ anti-ship missiles is a no-go line for an intelligently run fleet, and hypersonic missiles can push that range out to a 1000 miles.

Is the first section after the foreword accurate? It seems that assigning so much significance to two drones is almost a bizarro version of liberals and Ukros claiming that Russia was totally done for after the submarine got hit, or whenever the magical regenerating AWAC gets shot down again. My interpretation of “World War 3” so far has been the impacts that will echo the longest are financial, industrial, and diplomatic, most especially in regards to the dollar, oil prices, and global currency reserves. While the West isn’t automatically getting everything it wants right now, it’s still causing millions of casualties in service of its aims. Ansarallah’s efforts so far have been incredible. From a macro perspective, I think the US has been stalemating counterinsurgency operations at tremendous civilian cost for longer than I have been alive without losing hegemon status.