And how could anyone seriously disagree? It's so blatantly obviously the truth. The sheer amount of propaganda in Western media is just ridiculous in comparison.

I guess endless conflicts that burn through a lot of equipment as quickly as possible to open up space for more buying is the logical endpoint of a for-profit military force.

Yes exactly. Imperialist wars temporarily alleviate crisis symptoms caused by inherent contradictions. They do the following:

• Destroy lots of value inside the imperialist countries, that flows into building weapons (like dumping it in the ocean, as Marx said). Thereby reducing the problem of the rising mass of capital finding fewer and fewer opportunities for profitable investment. So they remove dead capital that clogs up the arteries of circulation. And lower the crisis of overproduction. That's how they re-enable accumulation by capitalist production. They also destroy value in the attacked countries, creating opportunities for profitable rebuilding. This also helps to give a new kickstart to the aging engine of capital circulation.
• Enable accumulation by dispossession: the government moves value from the people to weapons manufacturers. Critically, this does not threaten anyone's profits since no need is fulfilled. If the government tried doing the above by funding housing, education or health care, the for-profit companies involved in that would lose profits.
• Enable renewed primitive accumulation by opening up markets and access to resources. Similar to colonialism.
• Lenin emphasized, how they also can take out imperialist rivals to allow continued export of (financial) capital and charging of monopoly prices. Thereby reacting to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and to inter imperialist rivalries.

This last reason is the classic one. But the previous three reasons (championed by Harvey and others) help to understand how war is also fueled by internal contradictions. Even if there was only one single big capitalist state on the planet, war would still be necessary and enemies would have to be invented. That's why Russia was denied entry into NATO when they were at their lowest point and ready to become a subservient vassal to the US. The war machine has to go on.

Yay! Go PSL!

China wants the Washington-led neoliberal consensus to persist. Both the US and China have benefited tremendously from such an arrangement at the expense of the entire world.

Hard truths. I'll always defend China against western imperialist propaganda, but your metaphor of a toxic relationship seems quite fitting.

I also don't enjoy reading again and again so many different and partially contradictory variations of the "China is playing the very long game" argument. There might be a lot of truth to that, sure, but we can't really know in every case what the rational is. It's also a very easy way to speculate and pull out of a hat new justifications for almost every concrete action. What a lucky coincidence for Chinese and US capitalist, that all the very different long term strategies China is said to pursue usually favour capital in the mid term.

Also long-term arguments can always be turned around to the past. The US empire wouldn't have survived this long if Nixon hadn't gone to China to make a deal. Global capitalism might not have survived the financial crisis of 2007/2008 without China jumping in with the biggest government spending program ever to prop up demand. Iran is forced to attack the harbor in Haifa, that China built. If rumors about Pakistan drawing a red line and threatening nuclear retaliation in case US/Israel escalate beyond a certain point, can have an effect, than just imagine how effortlessly a single short statement from China could have lessened Palestinian suffering.

Maybe that's because they got hit by defending missiles out of frame of the video and the wreckage parts are burning upon reentry in the atmosphere?

Alhamdulillah! (I'm not a theist, but still really relieved they're online)

You have a point. They waste much more than just the time for finding what you searched for: think about all the time you have to work to afford to buy junk, because you got manipulated by ads. And other people have to work to make the useless products. And to design the ads.

Everyone thinks they're too smart to fall for it, but companies wouldn't pay Google, if advertising didn't work. They conduct A/B tests and can get pretty good estimates on how much more people spend because of the ads. That amount is how much advertising is worth to them and it's how much we waste on them paying more for cheap or useless products. Again, products you would have bought anyway sooner or later don't show up in the A/B test calculation.

Companies spend over a trillion dollars on ads (all ads, not just Google). And from the above, we can estimate, that consumers waste about the same amount because of ads. That's enough to end Poverty, hunger and climate change and have money left.

And most ads don't lead to a purchase, but still waste your time even after watching it. By altering your sense of self worth, they make you waste your time thinking things like "I'm not good enough".

Most fish and indeed most vertebraes on planet earth are Bristlemouths. With numbers in the Quadrillions, they easily outnumber mammals, birds (including owls) and all the others put together. If an alien race just made a quick stop and beamed up one specimen of a vertebrae species, it would likely look like this:

These are the main inhabitants of earth as far as complex life goes. You just never see them, because they are smart enough to stay below 300 meters deep. Just chilling and signaling with their bioluminescent spots. Even when their main food source migrates to the surface daily, they stay down there. In fact, as they get older and their sex changes from male to female(oh yeah, that's a thing), their swim bladder gradually fills with lipids causing them to slowly shift downwards to deeper depths of over 5000 meters (16400 ft). They seem to hear the call of the abyss. What do they know, that we don't?

I don't know about peaceful, but Giovanni Arrighi explains in The Long Twentieth Century , how and why during the history of capitalism, power passed from one Italian city state to another, then to the Dutch empire, to the British empire, to the American empire and is now in the process of passing to China.

There is a newer edition from 2010 and in it, Arrighi writes about China:

accommodating the upward mobility of a state that by itself accounts for about one-fifth of the world population is an altogether different matter. It implies a fundamental subversion of the very pyramidal structure of the hierarchy. Indeed, to the extent that recent research on world income inequality has detected a statistical trend towards declining inter-country inequality since 1980, this is due entirely to the rapid economic growth of China

we pointed out two major obstacles to a non-catastrophic transition to a more equitable world order. The first obstacle was US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. Paraphrasing David Calleo, (1987: 142) we noted that the Dutchand the British-centered world systems had broken down under the impact of two tendencies: the emergence of aggressive new powers, and the attempt of the declining hegemonic power to avoid adjustment and accommodation by cementing its slipping preeminence into an exploitative domination. Writing in 1999, we maintained: there are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the US-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 288-9).

About the US response to the burst of the new economy bubble and the war on terror, Arrighi writes:

Indeed, to a far greater extent than in previous hegemonic transitions, the terminal crisis of US hegemony — if that is what we are observing, as I think we are — has been a case of great power “suicide”

Less immediate but equally important, however, is a second obstacle: the still unverified capacity of the agencies of the East Asian economic expansion to “open up a new path of development for themselves and for the world that departs radically from the one that is now at a dead-end.” This would require a fundamental departure from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western development in which the costs for the reproduction of humans and nature have been largely “externalized” (see figure P1), in important measure by excluding the majority of the world’s population from the benefits of economic development. This is an imposing task whose trajectory will in large part be shaped by pressure from movements of protest and self-protection from below.

The growing economic weight of China in the global political economy does not in itself guarantee the emergence of an East Asia-centered world market society based on the mutual respect of the world’s cultures and civilizations. As noted above, such an outcome presupposes a radically different model of development that, among other things, is socially and ecologically sustainable and that provides the global South with a more equitable alternative to continuing Western domination. All previous hegemonic transitions were characterized by long periods of systemic chaos, and this remains a possible alternative outcome. Which of the alternative future scenarios set out in thee Long Twentieth Century materialize remains an open question whose answer will be determined by our collective human agency.

Seems like China, with belt and road, is on a good path for dealing with this second obstacle, so the task for leftists in the imperial core is to deal with the first one: contain the violent lashing out of the dying empire and focus our organizing efforts against war.

According to the article, they haven't cut the exports yet, just made it legally possible. Hope they do.

If the US went along with NATO

Sadly, NATO doing anything is other countries going along with the US empire. It has never been the other way around. Why should they turn against their own country sized military base?

An afterlife. Might be nice.