I see how you haven’t responded in any meaningful way to my broader point that your “evil russians” statement about cold war military equipment is dumb as shit. But I get the sense you think there is someone scoring this debate and that you get a point for being a clever boy. Great job. I concede. Later.
How do you not see how gladio ties into this? It was basically the US changing sides in a war in Europe that never really ended. WW2 was about competition between imperial powers, and communism versus capitalism (as that struggle led directly to the rise of fascism). The end of the war resolved the imperialist competition, but not the question of communism. The US immediately turned around and started giving the European fascists guns, money and power after they no longer posed an expansionist threat, because fascists were still the most staunch anti communists. Again, this is why the soviets executed fascist war criminals, and the west didn’t even prosecute most of them. They became allies instead. It foreshadowed the west’s willingness to support the most brutal right wingers elsewhere around the world for the rest of the century to choke out any resistance to western neocolonial domination.
Yeah this is not really what’s happening. QE went on for a long time before inflation really took off and mostly served to inflate asset prices without any meaningful effect on the price of consumer goods. As has been said, this is because that’s where the lion’s share of rich people’s money goes.
I think the key data point here is the increase in profits recently. Which would not be happening if this was all down to bog standard supply and demand throughout supply chains. Parking money in assets like stocks and real estate doesn’t cause consumer price inflation. But if businesses all realized that the talk of supply chain disruptions and COVID causing prices to go up was a good excuse to raise prices further together, that would exacerbate an otherwise minor bout of consumer price inflation. Which is exactly what happened.
And although it’s pretty damn close to collusion/price fixing in many cases, there is no real enforcement against that sort of thing. There is software that is used throughout industries that basically does the price fixing for you using data from other users/firms. Makes it easy and plausibly deniable because it was just an algorithm that told you to do it. Big part of rent inflation in particular. If there’s no competitor willing to undercut you, even though they could, the Econ 101 bullshit doesn’t really apply. It’s basically just class solidarity among capitalists. Circling the wagons because unusual circumstances temporarily drove wages up, and they weren’t having it.
Anyway, the main point is, if profit rates are going up, it’s not money supply causing the inflation.
Lol. Those people were basically brought over at gunpoint as war reparations. You think that’s the same thing as paper clip and gladio?
Definitely did not miss that. Whatever you think about the USSR, you cannot, without grotesque distortions of history, say that they rehabilitated European fascism. They executed nazis while the western powers were giving them citizenship, jobs, money, and weapons. And if you think soviet efforts to support revolutionary movements around the globe were “imperialism,” I’m not sure what to tell you besides please read a book.
“Evil Russians.” Jesus Christ. As if the West did not rehabilitate European fascists immediately after WW2 and end up on the side of imperialism in every conflict around the world for the rest of the century and beyond. Many of which they themselves instigated. Get a fucking grip.
Holy shit. How did people ever get it in their heads that drone strikes are not military incursions? Is it because there’s no humans physically entering the territory? Would you think the same thing if we were lobbing artillery shells over the border?
And how would doing either of those things without the cooperation of the Mexican government be anything other than an act of war?
I mean, I get that there is a difference between sending an armored column to occupy Juarez and a drone strike, and it’s not clear from the title which one we’re talking about, but you can’t really dispute that either of those things would be an act of war under any meaningful definition.
It’s an insane thing to say, regardless, because if you know anything about US Mexico relations you know he’s not talking about some kind of cooperative anti-cartel police action. He is in fact talking about an act of war. And a particularly stupid one at that.
Yeah, was just joking. It was of course never on the table for the soviets, and would be an absurd thing to plan in the first place. I doubt even deng ever thought China was doing anything more than developing their productive forces and buying a modicum of security by opening up. The idea that the west would be stupid enough to deindustrialize itself (by offshoring to a communist country no less) to the extent it has makes sense in hindsight, but I doubt anyone had the foresight to anticipate things turning out quite like this, let alone actually plan it.
They’re after that “peaceful coexistence” the USSR could never achieve because they failed to see that in order to peacefully coexist they first had to absorb most of the west’s manufacturing capacity.
Ukraine is fucked. As others have pointed out, western vultures are already carving it up via mass privatization (though they may be disappointed with what’s left when the war is over). The “counteroffensive” went nowhere and whether Russia marches all the way to Odessa is really just a question of if they want to at this point. The war was lost before it started and Ukraine will be lucky if it doesn’t get annexed to pieces by Poland et al in the coming months. Best case it keeps some manner of territorial integrity and limps along as a failed state. Not sure Zelensky deserves all the blame for this disaster, as the wheels were in motion at least as early as 2014, but they definitely bet on the wrong horse here.
It 100% would be better. There is nothing in modern Chinese history that remotely approaches the level of imperial devastation the US has wrought on the world. This is not up for debate by any serious person. How many countries has China invaded recently? How many coups have they instigated? Is their “foreign aid” designed to help countries develop, or to extract as much wealth as possible while keeping them impoverished, underdeveloped, and dependent on the west for their most basic needs? Has the standard of living in China been going up or down in recent decades? Now ask yourself the same questions about the US.
Well, yes… but what does that have to do with any of this? Is that actually how you would characterize what happened to this guy? Or that the people laughing at the irony of his demise are “liberals cheering on door to door death squads?” That just seems like a deliberate misreading of both the events and the reaction to them.
I don’t know that I would call that fascism. I think leftist governments (which we do not have) killing right wingers (frequently actual fascists) has been an unfortunate but inevitable part of defending revolutions historically. But a right wing government killing right wingers is something else entirely.
We can more or less expect our right wing government to kill leftists, because it has always done that, continues to, and would be doing a lot more of it now if there were actually more leftists wielding any sort of power. You can about count on one hand the number of right wingers the cops have murdered for political reasons, so I’m not sure the “what if they do it to us” hypothetical is all that illuminating. Because again, they always have been doing it to us.
You might find it in poor taste, but I can understand somebody not being too broken up about the shoe being on the other foot for once. Also, if this guy was posting about shooting the “Marxist” joe Brandon, I’m pretty sure he’s exactly the type of person who would happily shoot as many actual marxists as possible given the right opportunity. So I guess I’m not all that broken up about it either.
Though i do wonder if he had dementia. In which case it is in fact somewhat sad.
Yes, it would be cataclysmic. In the longer term though, I would argue that just about everyone on the planet would be a winner if the US empire were finally put down. You can’t really overstate how much of an impediment the US is to global human welfare and development.