thethirdgracchi

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[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 49 points 16 hours ago

Yeah this is a great play imo, best thing Pakistan can do to convince Trump not to strike Iran is this.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 36 points 20 hours ago

Fair point fair point, not saying this is the only egregious case. It's just particularly horrific. I'd push back on Hawaii though. Like obviously Hawaii should be free, what the United States did is horrific, but at least Hawaii still exists, you know? Like, you can go there. A Hawaiian can continue to be a Hawaiian in Hawaii, even if it's incredibly difficult and the American state is attempting to make it no longer possible. That is not the case with Diego Garcia.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 58 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah but Diego Garcia is perhaps the most egregious, awful one because the entire island is now just an American air force base. Their ethnic cleaning of the island was total. They are legally not allowed to return. There are no indigenous islanders left. Their entire past has been quite literally paved over with concrete.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 9 points 22 hours ago

Well this source might be garbage but the analysis is true. We know Israel is running out of interceptors, attested to even in mainstream Western media (both WSJ and NYTimes). We know the production of those interceptors, just like most sensitive electronics, requires many Rare Earth Metals that China has an effective monopoly over. And we know that China currently has an export ban on these REMs because of Trump's tariffs. This source is just connecting the dots.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 13 points 22 hours ago

Imagine trying to start a war against the Factory of the World lol deng-cowboy

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 10 points 22 hours ago

Yeah that's what I mean, Iran surely has the ability to determine how many missiles are getting through. They can clearly see that many are. The only "feint" here is that Israel would have to be intentionally letting missiles through so that Iran makes a bigger launch and then they can intercept all of them which is uh confused.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 13 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I think this list is missing a few. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are most definitely sovereign, no question there. They are allied with the United States, sure, but they play both sides. Saudi Arabia is a member of BRICS and has a very good relationship with China. The UAE has an increasingly independent foreign policy, notably supporting a side in the Sudanese civil war actively opposed by the United States. Indonesia too is sovereign. Their decision to forbid nickel refining outside of Indonesia demonstrates this quite clearly. They're too big to be just a puppet. Finally I'd add Singapore, another "plays both sides" city state that is very savvy at protecting their own independence. You could potentially make a case for Malaysia as well, and Thailand (though these are weaker cases).

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 29 points 23 hours ago

Yeah if they're gonna do it it's going to be soon I think. US intervention two weeks from now won't mean much once Iran has already taken out the bulk of Israel's sensitive sites and they're out of interceptors.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I agree it maybe a little too good to be true, but this has been our contention for a long while now, that the interceptor missiles for blowing up missiles are far more expensive and difficult to produce than the missiles themselves. We've even seen this with Yemen, let alone Iran. Likewise, what would the "misdirection" on the IDF be? We're seeing their interception rates decline. Iran shoots small waves of missiles and achieves lots of direct hits. What exactly is the point of telling Iran that they're running out of interceptors? To bait them into shooting more missiles at Israel that are going to hit more targets?

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I think the only real "sovereign" NATO members (outside the United States) are France (they have their own nukes, have shown independence from NATO before and even left for a bit) and Turkey.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah from what I can tell it's more bloomer by the day. Iran's people are untied, they're standing strong, and slowly whittling down Israel's supply of interceptors, striking even in the day time now. So long as TACO Trump maintains his end of the bargain Iran is in a very good place. Increasingly looking like Israel massively miscalculated. The Chinese strategy will be what it's always been, "never interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake."

 

RIP Ka, unsurpassed in hip hop

 

It's time to continue our Memes with Citations series with my favorite work by everybody's poster child of postmodern literary theory, Jacques Derrida. His entire shtick, in a nutshell, is a continuation of Marxist materialism into the literary sphere that he called "deconstruction." Truth, justice, fact? All hogwash—all that exists is the sign, and signs derive meaning via contrast with other signs. "There is no outside-text," and all meaning must exist in conversation with everything else. This is all great and fun, but we're here to talk about his "political turn" in the 90's, and specifically his Spectres of Marx.

He wrote the book in 1993, after the collapse of actually existing communism with the left in total disarray. It was the "end of history" as Fukuyama declared, and neoliberalism was the "one true" system left. Not so fast, wrote Derrida. As he explains (and this is the meme):

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.

Through this comment, the study of hauntology was born. A ghost from the past, haunting the present with a promised future that never came. It's been applied to all sorts of things, from music (see Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life) to climate change (by yours truly), but the kernel of the study is that Marxism will forever haunt the West, for it can never be truly killed.

The gall that Derrida has to write this book is amazing, for it seemed all was lost for the worldwide left. Destroyed in Europe, in retreat everywhere else, it was truly the end times. And here was this literary theorist, the boogeyman of the culture wars of the 80's and 90's, writing about how communism can never truly be killed.

Want to also share the following passage, which I think is the best arguement against capitalism in the modern era ever formulated. For every chud that screams at you that "poverty has never been lower," just tell them something like the following:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.

 

Thank you person pretending to be a robot for being a robot. We need more robots here. Bring back the Volcel Police bot and give us the equivalent of the N word bot but for doing an electoralism. I want robots talking to robots powered by GPT-3. Thank you for your time and shoutout to our hardworking bots.

EDIT: Downvote me cowards, for I am only a man. Soon you too will become a bot. History will absolve us!

 

This is a truly incredible article that criticizes China's plans to build high speed rail to under-served parts of China by taking the angle that it won't make money, and therefore is stupid. Amazing that infrastructure projects that help rural Chinese gain access to a high speed rail network is criticized from the angle of profit-making when making a profit is never the point with infrastructure projects. The NYC subway system wasn't built to "make a profit," but that doesn't mean it was a bad idea. But China bad so somehow them building a crazy amount of high speed rail is bad.

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