I think that some right wingers are closer to “getting it” than a lot of liberals are.

And actually when you think about it it’s not really that surprising, because the biggest determinant of how likely you are to develop class consciousness is your class, your actual material conditions. Poor, working class people are severely brainwashed with reactionary propaganda precisely in order to keep them from developing class consciousness. Racism and bigotry are used to prevent them developing solidarity with other sections of the working class. And yet still, many of these people are closer to seeing through the lies of the capitalist system than the relatively well-off “back-to-brunch” type of liberal, because of their lived experience of being exploited by capital every day.

In many ways right wingers are also incredibly naive of course and they constantly fall for the most obvious of lies when they are packaged in a way that plays on their prejudices, but at least they have an instinctive distrust of the mainstream media, while so many liberals basically worship establishment propaganda outlets.

You also see this in the almost paradoxical phenomenon where instead of being more likely to be critical thinkers, a certain type of university educated people are actually some of the least critical thinking and most group minded people you will ever meet, convinced that they are immune from indoctrination even as they completely uncritically parrot the imperialist line on almost every single geopolitical issue (Palestine being perhaps the one exception where the evidence is so grotesque and so obvious that the liberal establishment is forced to try and co-opt and shift blame rather than outright paint the imperialist proxy as the good guys).

They are definitely not state aligned media if that’s what you’re asking.

Because she is a rabid Nazi obsessed with destroying Russia.

The West sees itself as the continuation of the Nazis. Most of Europe’s elites have Nazi or Nazi collaborator ancestry and they still dream of doing to Russia what their grandfathers couldn’t. The Nazis united Europe to wage a war of annihilation against the USSR. The NATO and the EU are nothing more than the ideological continuation of the Reich, this time under Anglo leadership, and just like the Nazis they see it as their holy mission to unite Europe under their hegemony and marshall its resources to destroy and colonize Russia. They have already succeeded in taking over large parts of the USSR. NATO eastward expansion is simply Operation Barbarossa 2.0.

Never trust a graduate of Cambridge, Oxford or any of the Ivy Leagues. Odds are they got recruited into either MI6 or CIA.

Not enough. Their arsenals are severely depleted from the Ukraine proxy war and their production capabilities limited.

i love you warmongers

ah yes, we “warmongers” who warn against bombing the energy infrastructure of another country because we don’t want a war

a nuclear war caused by China

talks about Russian-Chinese pipelines getting bombed and then claims that the resulting war would have been “caused by China”… 🤡

It’s one thing to bomb the pipeline of a completely cucked and subservient vassal state like Germany that will just meekly take it and say “thank you sir, may i have some more”.

It’s another to do it to a sovereign nuclear superpower like China. At that point you’re declaring war on one and a half billion people who produce one third of the entire world’s manufacturing output.

Good luck and have fun with the consequences.

After Tiananmen they can’t believe in #1

But they did. For a long time they still believed that they could do achieve their goals in China via a slower more subversive approach than the overt 1989 color revolution attempt, via gradual elite corruption and infection with liberal ideology.

This is why up until the “pivot to Asia” happened you still had fairly positive coverage of China in the Western media and cultural sphere. In the 90s and 00s China was portrayed relatively positively in the media. The war propaganda faucet to demonize and dehumanize Chinese people in the eyes of Westerners was only turned on relatively recently.

If they really thought there was no hope of regime change after 1989 they would have started this much earlier when China was much weaker. They didn’t because they didn’t understand China (they still don’t) and they deluded themselves into thinking things were still going their way.

#2 is possible but requires that the elite mistakes money for power

Well, that is how they think. But that’s not the point that was being made. The point is that the logic of capitalism made it impossible for them to resist outsourcing to China, because the profits were too juicy to pass up. China understood this and took full advantage of it.

By the time the western elites noticed their catastrophic strategic mistake it was too late. Now they are panicking and for the last decade or so have been scrambling to try and find a way to reverse what has happened before the window of opportunity permanently closes.

Hence their increasingly reckless and self-harming escalations, with Ukraine, Taiwan, now Iran… They feel they are out of time and nothing is working anymore so they have to constantly take crazier and crazier gambles in hopes of digging themselves out of the hole.

Most likely the latter.

Finally someone saying something sensible and rational. Enough of this emotional overreaction that we’ve been seeing from a few of the comrades! It’s not helping anyone or anything, it’s just a way to make yourself feel better, but it’s selfish and short-sighted. It’s sad because until recently Zei had a track record of very good posts, but unfortunately it seems the stress has gotten to them.

Everyone needs to take a minute to think calmly and soberly about what kind of messaging actually benefits the cause vs what is just doing the work of the enemy for them. If some people can’t control their emotions that’s understandable and human, these are stressful times, but doomposting is not going to achieve anything. But they should do their comrades a favor and sit this one out, take a break from posting and go outside. Take the advice of the OP in the screenshots here, start thinking about how to organize and agitate against the empire’s war. Stop trying to make prophecies and start working to influence the course of events in whatever way you can. Nothing is inevitable. We have agency.

Doesn’t matter. I say this same thing to Trots when they rant about a piece having been written by “Dengist Stalinists”, if it’s not the explicit topic of the article please stick to criticizing the actual content itself. There is a time and place for Stalin vs Trotsky debates but most of the time that is just distraction and a waste of time.

Everyone knows that the WSWS is a Trot publication. Yes it is annoying how often they compulsively insert needless and unrelated anti-Stalin rants into their pieces. This is not one of those. Sometimes they put out genuinely good pieces that deserve to be read and shared. Take good analysis wherever you find it.

Very much agree with this. A valuable resource, but one that should be approached wearing a hazmat suit. They will frequently contaminate their more grounded analysis with some chud nonsense. It’s not ideal but we can’t be squeamish about these things.

I agree with this. The analysis is mostly solid, especially in its discussion of the raw military facts, but the speculative part about political intentionality is dubious at best. Yes it’s an interesting thesis that we should not entirely discount, but we definitely need more evidence before we can start to support this theory over the simpler alternative explanation, which is that casualties are inevitable in a war.

As usual, in lieu of further evidence, Occam’s Razor is the safest bet. Most importantly: don’t jump to unsupported conclusions.

Russia is pretty much self-sufficient too. Perhaps they don’t make the top three at the moment but the capability is definitely there.

The feds can absolutely force California to do whatever the feds want. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell of any of the institutions or the political establishment in California putting up real resistance. The most they will do is what they are already doing which is try to score political points by saying shit that they think makes them sound “tough” to their voters. When push actually comes to shove all of them will fold like Origami.

He’s full of shit. No US politician has the balls to pull something like that, and certainly not a spineless Democrat.

Definitely not the latter and probably neither (i mean, yeah, the internet will be faster in ten years but not necessarily because of this). What this means is more secure encrypted communications which is not just about national security or privacy, it has economic implications because of how electronic financial transfers are conducted.

CIA spies aren’t civilians.

First two points are valid. Third is not. “Junta” or not, Myanmar has a legitimate government and co-operating with them as they would with any other country’s government is absolutely in line with China’s policy of non-interference. Especially since China has a vested interest in maintaining stability in South East Asia, they are definitely not going to be sympathetic to western backed insurgencies. The deposed government before the junta was stacked full of NED graduates by the way. China would be absolutely stupid to actively support a return to power of western puppet compradors who would purposely block regional economic development and co-operation and turn Myanmar into another anti-China proxy instead.