darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Interesting but the US could just bully Musk into turning off all the Starlink stuff in a given region half an hour before air operations start. Of course the fact the US military pays for a special version of it complicates things but nothing of theirs relies entirely on it so far and they have existing systems they can use if it’s off.

In their opinion it doesn’t matter.

Firstly because either the US is going to war with China within the next 8 years or it’s not happening because the US would be at such a disadvantage and like all bullies they won’t pick a fight with an evenly matched opponent. Secondly because military drone systems used by the US are not really like those used by other countries. For example, Russia and Ukraine are using near off the shelf kit and standing in a field while US drones are controlled from a bunker or command shack or place on a US navy ship from a system that looks like it’s from a Dave and Busters racing game with the whole big seat, multiple monitors, joy-stick and additional controls. US is just not interested in that kind of drone warfare. They’ve gone all in on the idea of semi-autonomous “AI” systems and swarms controlled by 1-2 trained people per swarm from a great distance. Thirdly the US has long had this image of it’s military as this highly trained, highly disciplined, elite force while simultaneously seeing Russians/Chinese as “hordes” of under-trained, under-motivated, under-equipped canon fodder so they turn up their nose to certain types of tactics as being for those others.

Fourth, the US is worried about domestic insurrection and discontent over worsening economic conditions. The worse thing you want to do in that situation is empower the ordinary people to wage insurrection using the type of tactics and methods (drones) field-proven by unconventional militias and militant groups across the middle east. These types of drones and easy cheap access to them is also a nightmare for operational security of military bases and internal security forces operations.

Unironically the US wants and is working hard on killbots they can fire and forget for attacks and area denial. They know among other things they can’t fight China navy to navy over Taiwan so instead the plan shifts to this idea of naval and aerial drones, semi-autonomous that are basically killbots or self-propelled targeting mines that they’d unleash in the hundreds and thousands in the straits to deny China the ability to send landing craft or support ships near Taiwan and buy them time to hold the island and strike at and destroy China’s navy from beyond the horizon. This is actually not a bad answer to the problem of traditional mining that mine-sweeper ships can just clear an area, mine-sweepers don’t work if the mines actively hone in on and swarm your clearing ship when you get anywhere near any of them.

The US military is not agile in the way the Russian military or the Ukrainian bandits are. It’s a big, expensive, lumbering machine and that’s the way they like it and that’s the way it’s going to be because it produces more profit for Raytheon and because it suits their self-image.

The real losers are local EMS, fire, cops, even the FBI who get hit in the budget much harder acquiring drones now.

These are ATACMS and Stormshadow missiles supplied by the US and UK and France and so on to Ukraine. They are long range. They are made in the west and shipped in regularly. And importantly their launchers are known to be crewed by literal NATO soldiers from those countries. The targeting data and intelligence for their targets is supplied via US intelligence networks from US spy satellites.

The point is to use these weapons to like destroy an apartment building in Moscow and terrorize civilians. The point is to blow up a train station full of civilians. They might also hit some rear line Russian stuff like airfields I guess but mostly soft targets IMO.

They literally have been unable to use them for attacking deep into Russia because the US has said no and they control the missiles, both the supply and the people doing the firing and the people supplying necessary targeting data.

So they kind of are sitting on a cache of weapons, nicer missiles which are harder to intercept, which travel further, which are more evasive, etc. It won’t alter the course of the war but will impose a higher cost on Russia which has been the goal of the US all along, to bleed Russia, to weaken them, to sap their interest in further entanglements and make the Russian public and leadership war-weary and wary of standing up to the west in future.

All this said, a problem with Putin is he’s always talking big then backing down which unfortunately just encourages the west to continue to push these lines. If you’re constantly threatening but not backing it up you start to lack credibility and others look for ways to salami-slice their way to backing you into a corner. Which is inherently dangerous and likely to lead to nuclear war.

He’s really, really not a confrontational guy or a tough guy in these terms. I mean he got played for 8 years with fake peace talks as things continued to escalate before finally acting and even that act was at first just an attempt to intimidate Ukraine into surrender by going for Kiev but not actually trying to take it so much as apply pressure which resulted in an offensive that had to retreat later when the peace talks were predictably sabotaged by the UK.

And they have an advantage in that they own the biggest global media production and distribution houses. They can just pay some Hollywood producer a few million to insert some anti-China lines or propaganda in random movies or TV shows and it goes global just like that (though it’s usually a bit more complex and would involve wining and dining various people via think-tanks paid to to do this and sharing talking points with them). And China has no real power to push back on that outside its borders and given its foreign policy of non-interference they couldn’t if they wanted to without doing a dramatic change there.

Compare to the US reaction if China tried shopping around a TV series or show that had some minor anti-US and pro-China sentiment? US and aligned media across Asia would light up screaming about it being China propaganda, about how it has to be censored, about how weak any given country will be if they allow it to be shown and stirring up a shit-storm over it. So the US is definitely able to actually make use of their dollars here and get good value. China by comparison can spend as much as they want on shoving propaganda into products, the US will handily get a large chunk of it censored or subject to boycott.

People need make no mistake. This will go to think-tanks who will produce slander which is picked up by western and non-western news and ran near verbatim as stories. They will create chains of citations and credibility in academia and in the NGO world about China being up to no good. This will filter into western and non-western media, public consciousness, etc. It will likely end up nearly as complete as the propaganda about the USSR was for Americans and the western world. Just like indoctrinated Americans who can go to the DPRK and see what they want to see instead of the reality, even travel will not dispel this for many and at that point the task is simply to make it impossible to challenge their narrative, for any westerner who speaks truth to be cast as mad, as a bot, as a propagandist, as indoctrinated by China, as fooled by potemkin villages, as gullible, naive fools.

And that’s just the west, their real goal is to propagandize to Africans, to people in Asia, to potential partners of China, to undermine the material goods Chinese projects do with suspicion, lies, and fantasy about what it’s all /really/ about to create space for the US to drive a wedge and to operate, to create terrorists and coups with some amount of popular support to remove China-friendly governments and replace them with US friendly puppets. Such is the problem of short human lives. Though the older generations may remember and know of what the colonizers did, the young may buy the “that was the old us but we’ve changed” routine the US has so perfected. And without class consciousness this can work.

They’re going to plug the NSA/GCHQ/eyes into Telegram and they’re never going to leave. They’re going to start altering content, using their access to arrest anti-imperialist activists, shut down anti-imperialist speech as “Russian disinfo” or whatever, etc, etc.

If you for some reason use Telegram for organizing, or even just for distributing anti-imperialist memes and info please move it elsewhere ASAP or at least prepare and spread info about a backup elsewhere.

Unfortunately this may proceed a very harsh cut-off of info from Russian sources as this was the last readily available in the west tool that also fully functioned in Russia. I don’t know if westerners can sign up for VK or whatever else the Russian replacement is likely to be. With their control of this they can sever a major artery of info from Russian sources (private, amateur, and government) to the west about the truth in Ukraine and elsewhere. It feels increasingly like total information control. The closing of a bubble, the removal of pesky alternative sources of info, the criminalization and harassment of RT employees and anyone else connected with a country like Russia (or China).

And you can bet despite all this talk there will still be plenty of pedos channels on Telegram for without getting booted (they’ll bust a few of the big ones and make a big show of how this was possible thanks to the arrest and compromising Telegram then probably go back to ignoring them in favor of information manipulation, passing info on enemies to western intel for additional targeting with malware, etc). And there will probably be an increase in amounts of tolerated terrorists targeting Russia and China on the app who aren’t taken down despite requests from those countries.

This is what idealism does to you.

Hmm today we will openly, defiantly, and unambiguously break the law.

Hmm we’ve gotten a legal demand to stop and a lawsuit, they say if we stop, apologize and promise never to do it again they’ll settle for a pittance but we are taking a moral stand here and believe our moral philosophical arguments hold more weight than the law as written that clearly places us unambiguously in violation of the law.

Court proceeds to ignore their philosophical arguments and enforce bourgeois law as written

This was beyond obvious as the outcome. Bourgeois courts don’t serve some public interest.

So instead now we stand to lose an invaluable, irreplaceable archive of not just the internet over decades of time but also rare media such as movies, TV shows, music videos, and much more all also archived with them. And for what? Because someone couldn’t back down and thought that courts in the US served the common interest instead of the wealthy. Because someone forgot the golden rule of piracy and breaking IP laws and that’s keep quiet about it.

They are already beginning to plan one for the west. When it goes down theirs will be up in short order. That EARN-IT act is an escalation in the whole ‘disinformation’ censorship saga we have going on, a probable move to outright banning encryption. Once you do that and cut off VPNs the west can very effectively prevent the small amount of people who want to venture beyond its propaganda outlets from doing so without extreme effort as well as just straight up prevent Chinese/Russian/African/LatAm IPs from using social media platforms, etc in the name of “combating disinformation”. At/before that point they of course purge non-western aligned media from social media entirely in the name of that combating disinformation. The west /HAS/ a soft ‘firewall’ for info but it’s becoming harder and will only get more so as the decline accelerates and the reaction turns inwards.

If someone is willing to murder over religious offense, over a depiction of a holy person the issue is theirs. Blaming the victim for doing something that incited them to murder (especially when there is no argument of “fighting words” causing direct escalation, we’re talking premeditated murder planned at a distance in response to hearing about something indirectly and executed after more than enough time to regain a cool head) is disgusting.

As someone brought up in this thread, the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy reminds me of the perennial debate “why would a black person get violent if you call them the n-word, it’s just a word.” Context matters, when you purposely provoke an oppressed minority by shoving the thing they find most offensive in their face, you may get a violent reaction.

Do not act like this disgusting act of murder is some sort of expression of righteous rage on the behalf the oppressed, like it is some blow against imperialism, colonialism, capitalism etc.

The teacher gave warning, allowed Muslims students to leave if they would be offended or to avert their eyes. The student chose not to, chose to demand their religious sensibilities be imposed on everyone else.

Also for point of lazy comparison. It might be different (in minecraft) if the teacher was themselves a racist and using the N-word or showing the class say a racist cartoon with an approving tone. But this is akin to a teacher in the US showing a picture of someone holding a sign saying the n-word in the context of a freedom of speech discussion, which whether you’re a liberal in favor of US freedom of speech or not, is a fact on the ground, but before doing so telling the students it might be triggering and offering to let students of color leave the room if it would be too hurtful for them to view. Let’s not even get into how rare such a show of sensitivity in the US would be for PoC.

It is religious fundamentalism and extremism pure and simple. Now the root causes of that as Marxists we can analyze and discover the connections back to material conditions and so on of course (poverty, alienation, breed extremism and fundamentalism, the effects of colonialism, etc). However, these terrorists and hooligans as China would refer to them would have no qualms butchering a communist who lives in a nation that has never engaged in imperialism for doing the same.

And importantly the n-word was used as a hateful word, as a denigration against enslaved people, to other them and to demean them, it was spat hatefully for decades by white supremacists (often accompanied by actual spit) on black people in the US as part of the systemic brutalization and dehumanization of a people that started with the importation of slaves and the system of slavery, continued formally with Jim Crow, and continues to this day in less up-front ways. It was created and popularized and used as a slur. The comparison to that in this instance is quite offensive.

This is quite literally a result of a teacher within a class showing a cartoon that contains a depiction of a religious figure that some people believe is against the rules of the religion and against the laws of their god. The teacher was attempting to teach liberal secularism and to be sure I of course object to liberalism but not as much to secularism, there was no intent of offensive nor could any reasonable person take enough to cause them to become violent. And importantly as I stressed above the teacher went out of their way to give students who might be offended the chance to not see it.

Whence and where has Muhammad been used as a symbol, signifier, etc to oppress Muslims or colonized peoples? I do not recall the British or French erecting giant statues or paintings of Muhammad to demean and demoralize and other Muslims or colonized peoples. I do not recall instances of it being a thing found closely in association with any structures of oppression. In fact there are a number of depictions, paintings, etc of Muhammad that originate from the middle east of many centuries ago during a different age when it was not quite seen as so forbidden. The depiction of Muhammad on the US Supreme Court for instance was not put there to demean Islam or Muslims but as a show of secularism with other “great law givers”. There has not been much in the way of systemic attempts at destroying Islam by colonizers historically as the culture of black people was destroyed.

If anything colonizers tried to get in the good graces of local religious leaders (or install their own) to keep the populace in line, to use the religion to keep a certain order, to get it interpreted a certain way to benefit them (and before you try and use that last point, Christianity and all other religions have been equally subject to this). Now of course this was not a respectful depiction of Muhammad, this was an incendiary cartoon. The problem with cartoons that satirize is they’re rarely respectful to their subject. Jesus of the Christian religion is often depicted in unflattering ways and by many of the same publications, as are other religious icons from the Buddha to Hindu gods and I would not be surprised if insensitive cartoons of other religious figures were also shown (it wouldn’t probably even bear reporting if an image of Jesus in sado-masochism gear was shown as an example). Unless you’re trying to argue that atheism and religious criticism is itself a western colonizer construct at which point I am going to laugh at you and point derisively given the history of disbelief and the number of Arabs from past centuries who wrote blasphemous works of mocking.

Yes attack France for its blood drenched colonialist history but defending this reaction as some sort of knee-jerk response is inexcusable. These men did not kill for the sake of their community, for the sake of justice, for the sake of a better world, for the sake of punishing someone upholding a historical evil, for the sake of someone upholding bigotry. THEY KILLED FOR HONOR AND GOD Period. Honor is a horrible concept and I’m not even going to get started on the amount of murder done in the name of a god or gods by people.

Now, should society allow such incendiary things that cause tensions? I don’t know. China would say no and they have some solid reasoning and a solid-track-record. What I do know is France as a liberal capitalist state, as a colonizer, as an imperialist nation cannot use the tools that China uses successfully to bring about harmony and peace. And as a result they’re bound to do smooth-brained and foolish things as they are doing.

And you must remember France was once heavily Christian but has a different concept of secularism than the US or most of the west which is enforced secularism, that religion is a private thing, not something to wave around in public, that it must be kept out of schools to prevent division and religious sectarianism and strife, that in public all French persons are basically secular and what they do when they go to the Church, Mosque, Synagogue, etc are separate from what they’re expected to do in school, at work, in public. Of course this is somewhat naive. Religious people who are actually religious cannot just put away their beliefs but anyways that’s their system and the teacher was not being insensitive nor was the lesson as I understand it particularly problematic for a liberal nation.

Good. Now Trump can appoint someone. The libs won’t have any supreme court seats to shame people over to vote Biden over, Biden will hopefully tank and increasing the liberals will realize the institutional processes have failed them and they can either accept what comes as a result and lie down and take it or accept the system needs changes.

The sooner you realize America is fucked and has been fucked for a while court or no court the sooner you accept these things as necessary to awake the sleepy liberals from their lazy stupor. Only once they’ve accepted the institutions are lost, that there is nothing sacred left to defend. Then we can see real change. Maybe not revolutionary but certainly we’ll be seeing new comrades and maybe you lesser evilism folks might even get an angry enough coalition to get that vaunted harm reduction you’re always on about.

It’s likely impossible to get good numbers. There were other things happening including a Typhus epidemic which would skew death numbers. The thing to understand is this is a region that like many regions had for centuries experienced periodic famines that killed from tens of thousands to millions, regularly, without anyone blaming anyone in particular for them. There were no large scale famines which resulted in large scale death after the Soviet Union arose from the great patriotic war (WW2). There were famines, there were problems with weather and shortages, but not the kind of large-scale death you saw before.