Sadly the US is an old master at front companies and re-routing logistics. They bought all that titanium from the USSR for their SR-71 and other advanced warplane projects through an elaborate network of front companies. So it will mildly increase costs but not stop the US from getting what it wants if any significant amount at all is made available to western companies.

Drugs are bad. Don’t use anything addictive or too mind-altering. I think even regular (daily) consumption of coffee is bad but it’s one of those things that under capitalism I suppose I understand as a kind of necessary evil.

Mind-control MKUltra drugs which encourage frivolous hedonism, individualism, magical/irrational thinking are of course a weapon of the enemy and often directly fund them and their proxies as well. Escapism would not be a needed thing under socialism as well, they are at most a crutch and I am very suspicious of those who advocate their use. This person you speak of is not a Marxist and may well be a fed.

Critical support to him in exposing the empire’s lies. At a time like this I think his role in providing an anti-empire view is far more important than his problems.

Yes, he is problematic to put it mildly as he has patronized prostitutes in Germany and bragged about it. Being proud of r*pe is not a good look but I’d certainly rather he be popular and young people flock to him and his views than any other mainstream view on offer in the US. He is unambiguously a net good at present despite his problematic attitude towards sexual exploitation of women, his ambiguous views towards China, the fact he’s not an ML, etc.

So now is not the time I think to attack him as he’s on the right side of these issues at least usually.

The problem is the zionists also have access to the production capacity of Europe and the US. As well as other vassals like occupied Korea. Combined these are substantial amounts of production.

The war against Iran will be economic, by sea, and by air not by land. So having working anti-air, being able to intercept enemy stealth bombers (including US) before they can deliver big payloads to take out industry or nuclear sites is important.

The big worry is the zionist entity resorting to using nuclear bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear sites, likely with US approval and help and with Europe rushing to justify it as being absolutely necessary and/or cast doubt on the bombs being nuclear and call it Iranian propaganda. At that point Iran’s nuclear program is moot and in the past and the west and the zionists can afford to settle with Iran in exchange for some sanctions relief and an end to direct hostilities. I expect if that approval goes through, the US and the zionists will burn another cyber-weapon and/or electronic warfare to bring down Iran’s air defense long enough to deliver the nuclear weapons.

This will buy the zionists breathing room to complete the genocide and cement hegemony over the middle east/west Asia so sadly I think its very likely they do it especially once this conventional war escalates to stopping shipping and taking out oil refineries and infrastructure (we’re basically there already) they have little to lose at that point. As it is Hezbollah is out of the picture for the time being, Yemen and Iran are the only ones standing aside from the resistance in Palestine which is well only able to do so much and really on the back-foot at this point.

Russia cannot help Iran given its own war with Ukraine and its need to apply its entire arsenal there. Another reason why the west might be okay with the zionists using nuclear bunker busters is their own resources are stretched thin by Ukraine and short of abandoning it and just dropping it right this moment to shift all production to supporting the zionists they can’t do both so may see this as their option to continue Ukraine while also allowing their zionist proxy to win its battles.

I really hope they don’t dare do that but they seem so deranged and probably feel so close to victory and yet also collapse at the same time that they may be pushed to do it.

If the US and Europe get dragged into an extended war here or have to empty their reserves to support the zionists it’ll push back conflict with China by years more. Then again the plan could be all along to do everything to cement hegemony in as many places as possible before confronting China in order to ensure they have few friends, no trade routes, and limited partners.

The US is doing everything in its power to undermine MAD and nuclear deterrence in general. This doesn’t surprise me given how many more nuclear weapons the US has to China that they think they can and should use some in a conventional war. The logic being they afford to, it kills enemies that would weaken their conventional forces, and enemy use of the same would undermine their limited stockpile while US use wouldn’t matter to their deterrent. Still deeply alarming.

The mainland can obviously send far more missiles back and destroy their strike capacity. Russia does this in Ukraine all the time.

These are not rational actors. Neither is Ukraine. Both are and would be in this scenario run by liberal fanatics/fascist fanatics willing to burn their nation to a cinder for the US. Ukraine is illustrative of this point not really mattering per se.

Meanwhile, if the island is under blockade then the US trying to fly things in will be an act of war.

And targeting Russia’s nuclear triad and hitting their bombers with obvious help from NATO intelligence isn’t? The point is the west thinks rules don’t apply to them and given Russia hasn’t hit MI:6 with an oreshnik yet they seem to be right. In that they can do whatever they want and if you hit them back directly as long as they have a cover THEY themselves believe in no matter how flimsy for their actions they will fly off the handle into a genocidal self-righteous indignant rage. Russia seems to know this, China probably does as well.

I’m not saying the US wouldn’t do that, but at that point it’s a direct war with China for them.

Only if China chooses to and given Russia keeps blinking they may think China will as well and that they can unilaterally escalate while their foes will avoid it, giving them the advantage.

Also, the whole US strategy is predicated on China doing a ground invasion. Every naval battle the US simulated against China, they lost horribly.

Is it? I saw a story of the head of JSOC talking of naval drones and basically mining the whole straits, turning into a zone China cannot cross and using that time to do whatever they want including landing forces. I don’t think the US plans to send in their carrier battlegroups and fight on China’s front door. They are not that stupid and even if they were good strategy would call for assuming they’re smarter than that as one should never underestimate one’s enemy. They have island chains and have been building naval drones in secret for some time now so they can do over the horizon type fighting. Their point like with Ukraine is to bleed China, not to triumphantly plant the US flag but to bleed them, to hurt them, to study them and learn their secrets, to demoralize them, to force it to take longer and be costlier and to make it a big spectacle they can use to rally the western world against China around as this big travesty and atrocity.

I maintain given the US advantage, given island chains not just around China but those policing west Asia, Africa, etc and NATO’s combined naval sizes plus all the land bases and air assets they have that most likely they want to bleed China in the SCS, use it to justify decoupling, sanctions and an embargo and blockade and carry out that blockade off the coast of Africa, Diego Garcia, in the various straits using the zionist entity in west Asia, etc, etc. To draw China out, to spread them out, to hit them with combined naval and air assets and use the superior logistics and amounts of bases NATO has. By doing this they cross out the major advantage China has in the SCS with land-based missiles and rocketry and fight from the high-ground.

Just look at how the trade war is destroying the US economy right now. Imagine what happens if China explicitly cuts off exports to the US.

Which is why they’re so desperate to decouple. The bribes didn’t work and were pocketed, Trump is very clumsily trying tariffs. But when it comes down to it they might think they can force decoupling with a conflict when all else has failed. Sure the consumer economy would implode but I’m not sure capitalists and empire planners wouldn’t consider that and forcing the proles to a much lower quality of life as they work to re-shore an acceptable if painful cost of survival and maintaining hegemony.

A coup is not that unlikely either, some retired military people in Taiwan have openly talked about it already.

I really hope that happens but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sure the island is filled with US spies and trained dogs and any coup would face a counter-coup of ferocious proportions with support from US assets in Japan and possibly those US special forces already on the ground.

I just worry most about the nukes flying. I hope this conflict doesn’t start until China has a chance to massively expand their arsenal and proof it against Aegis and ground and orbital interceptors.

I suppose the issue is the puppet regime there would likely respond to a blockade with military force. Not day one, maybe not even week one but eventually.

They have thousands of rockets trained on the mainland which they’d fire and rain down on the military and civilians alike in China to push the issue. Yes they’d eventually run out but the problem is the US would try to fly more in. Ships you can ram and get in the way of and blockades are therefore effective without needing to blow up a carrier, planes you have to shoot down and at that point it becomes a question of whether China would shoot down a US military transport plane and put itself in drawing first blood type of thing at which point you get American chuds hooting and baying for blood in response and liberals declaring we also must respond to “stand with Taiwan”.

Make no mistake the US does not intend to let the Taiwan card be only half played. They won’t let China quietly strangle it into submission with a blockade or sanctions, they will force the government to attack China and start a war no matter how doomed a position it puts them in because it lets them paint China as militarily aggressive and rally Europe and the anglo-sphere and their loyal Asian vassals to decouple from and sanction China in response with a purported cause they can blast to their populations.

Let’s also not forget the US has reserve currency status. They can spend as much as they like. Let’s recall the Berlin airlift where the Soviets cut off truck and land shipments into divided Berlin post-war and the US just responded by using its immense wealth and military and industrial and logistics might to just fly supplies in.

Frankly short of a coup by rational military generals in Taiwan who order the stand-down to save their lives and those of their countrymen I just don’t see a situation where the US doesn’t use Taiwan in a Ukraine style play. They won’t last as long but they really only need to hold out for a week of breathless western propaganda coverage and crying about evil China to get things done. After that it doesn’t really matter if they crumple and China doesn’t need to do a massive invasion because they’ll have drawn the blood they wanted and cast China as the villain and victimized Taiwan to do it.

NATO war-mongering monsters are gearing up for a war of aggression again.

Whether it’s actually with Russia or just a faint and the plans are to use it all against China is the debate to be had I suppose. They’re totally deranged and totally in the thrall of the US, any sense of independence that people felt they were edging towards has been rightly relegated to the trash-bin as they remain committed to white, western supremacy at the expense of all else.

Now is the time for European comrades to agitate against the austerity being imposed to support funding all of this. Anything that even slows this program delays what may be a nuclear war.

https://www.rt.com/russia/618344-lenin-mausoleum-moscow-renovation/

News of a big restoration of Lenin’s tomb has come out in the past week or so. More generally reverence for figures like Lenin or Stalin in capitalist Russia divorced from what they stood for.

I don’t think it’s fair to blame them.

The west colonized the area, the west gave it to these jewish fascists, the west looked the other way or encouraged the genocide as it began, the west papered over it by using the holocaust card as if the Palestinians bore any blame, the west turned it into an outpost, the west armed it, the west defended it, the west kept up the charade of “peace” talks and talks for two states for decades to deceive everyone into thinking there was a way out and blocked international intervention at the UN and elsewhere for 3/4ths of a century. The blood is not on China’s hands, it’s not their fault they were born into a world of western capitalist imperialist hegemony and it’s not their fault that the only way to get ahead was to keep their heads down. And they do not have the strength and power to bring down all the evils of the NATO/US empire.

It’s interesting in itself that they choose to announce it. It’s a soft declaration of war of sorts really and perhaps another step along the line to preparing their populations for open war with China (and perhaps Russia too at this point). They claim they’re “hitting back” despite clearly hitting first but perhaps that’s part of the plan too.

Good to point out that they’ve also publicly announced recruitment of spies from Russia and China with slickly produced, very publicly disseminated videos on social media trying to recruit people from both nations as well as open statements by US intelligence leadership that they’re stepping up recruitment and targeting and claiming they’re not meeting goals (never trust a liar). So they’re very much making this an official cold war at the very least if not paving the way for stepping up to a hot war in future from these open acts of aggression.

Part of it may be messaging, they want the public, they want Hollywood “thriller” writers and such to notice these things and make more anti-China, anti-Russia content and for there to be this undercurrent of a sense of we’re at war with China and Russia.

Once again evidence that Ukraine is being used by the west as a global tool for maintaining its hegemony. Even after the current regime falls I expect the west to move their heavily trained CIA specialists (swastika tattoos and all) to Africa or Asia to continue CIA backed operations aimed at enemy states and disrupting multi-polarity. It’s a real problem because right now they’re contained within Ukraine. Russian forces are unable to kill them in large numbers as they’re used as blocking units and the first to fall back from the front while reluctant conscripts are the ones dying as canon fodder so it’s very likely even in a fall of Berlin type scenario that the west organizes their evacuation and these types are never killed by Russia but moved to be assets elsewhere. As it was with the most heavily trained and raving fascists in other comprador states last century like south Vietnam, so it is today. Only this time thanks to the poor tracking of weapons deliveries to Ukraine they’ve managed to smuggle and set aside quite a dangerous high tech weapons cache for future use.

I agree and feel that at this point the west just wants to buy time for the humiliation and the Ukrainians themselves are Nazi-loving and imitating fanatics and Zelensky is personally done once the war ends because of the disaster he led his people to so like Netanyahu he’s desperate to keep the war burning.

Feel bad for the non-Nazi Ukrainians who are being thrown into the meat grinder. Also badly for Russian troops who are dying grinding them down until we get a fall of Berlin moment and wondering just how bad things will get.

With enough time sadly comes hubris and all kinds of fanciful lies. The west was beaten in Vietnam but it took long enough that they made up all kinds of cope and their populations didn’t receive the shock of a sudden dramatic defeat and reversal but rather a slow decline which left them appearing stronger than they were even in defeat and I think this is the point. The west cannot inflict a strategic defeat on Russia but they want their own defeat to be very costly, very hard-won, and take so long that it doesn’t look so bad and by the end people have forgotten all the propaganda lies about how Russia would be defeated quickly.

A boxer who goes down in overtime doesn’t look nearly as badly as one who goes down at the end of the first round.

Thanks comrade. Hopefully it’s the ideas and not because of my weird writing style though I guess it could be that too. That or the spelling mistakes…

China is trying hard to give the US a slow decline. They’ve taken direct hits themselves because they want to avoid the confrontation. This would result in a hard decoupling of the US. What would really matter is if India stands with Russia as the US can’t afford to attack both. Their supply chains for drugs and electronics would cease to function.

What I worry will happen instead is this passes, the president has authority on how to implement and can grant waivers, they use it very harshly on China, exempt broad swathes of India and use it as a cudgel to beat on Europe further and force them into their orbit and into reliance on their expensive energy imports as well as beating on other countries that want to align with BRICS and Russia and China specifically and thus hastening the formation of a bloc system with increasingly high barriers to trade and India probably allowed to play neutral if they continue to help the west with reshoring from China to India.

So that’s my issue, there’s almost always discretion and waivers so in practice it would likely be used as an attack on China. They might even given individual Chinese companies waivers to attempt to pressure them to ensure they don’t use Russian products or energy and some Chinese firms would absolutely take that deal to keep the US market.

So while I don’t think this would make the US implode overnight from sanctioning everyone I do think it passing would be a real win to the war hawk freaks like Graham (one of the closest human beings to being some sort of demon who gets off only on suffering and pain and war) who are also proponents of a hard decoupling and a dramatic near-term confrontation with China and thus a sign of things to come in terms of US policy and intent towards a hard decoupling with China, formation of bloc system, cold war 2.0, then pick off and attempt to destroy the smaller parties in the China/Russia bloc with coups, direct wars/proxy wars, sanctions, color revolutions, etc to isolate, encircle, turn up the heat and destroy them.

They may also think they can engineer a sino-soviet type split between Russia and China but they’re absolute fools for that. This won’t cause that. If anyone is going to split it will be Russia from China as frankly they have more to gain and as a capitalist nation pushing increasingly reactionary culture on their people means they’ll see some difference between themselves and China.

It’s because China is selling itself as impartial. They are selling themselves as an alternative to the US who is well known for using sanctions against countries who displease them, countries who do things they don’t like, countries run by people they dislike.

China’s idea for peeling the world away from US hegemony is offering a better deal. To do that they feel a need to be consistent so that the US has absolutely no examples it can point to of them violating their policy of being impartial and neutral, of not conditioning trade ties on obeying Chinese edicts on domestic policy, on basically trading with everyone fairly and letting countries set their own policies and leaving it to be their internal business.

This kind of selling point is very attractive to many global south countries, some of which may be run by people who are oppressive, the gulf monarchies for example are a group China would like to at least pull closer to their corner.

The second they break this rule for any reason, people start asking questions about why they won’t break it for reason x or for country C doing bad things and it becomes a hammer to hit China with from two fronts: 1) That they like the US will try and use their might to influence your domestic policy, that you risk becoming a vassal to China like with the US if you side with them 2) they start getting hammered for doing it in this instance but not in another instance and the US does it in that instance and they start comparing themselves and China starts looking badly and can either buckle and risk significant real-politik consequences being lured into a trap of sanctioning whoever the US pleases or having to weather that storm.

This is a consistent position that places them beyond the morality of individual nations. They believe they need to build their strength first and for US hegemony to cease before they can even conceive of using power that way because any early use and they risk people fleeing from them. Let’s remember most nations are capitalist and already have a built-in wariness of siding with or being with a communist power like China over a capitalist one like the US.

Partially accurate username.

Needless to say this is horribly wrong. Reading Parenti would disabuse you of this to say nothing of actually reading Marx and understanding DiaMat.

Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they’d had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.

Russia’s hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that’s what people saying Putin made this worse don’t understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they’ve nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.

Putin’s fault for not allowing a Nazi regime on Russia’s borders which would have been built up military for several more years then used to attack Russia after getting it into NATO and used as a potential springboard for an under 5 minutes nuclear decapitating strike on Moscow or something else equally deranged?

Putin was between a rock and a hard place, the objectively correct thing would have been to invade and subdue Ukraine in 2014 after the coup, to roll in and murder all the Nazis and dismantle their military but Russia foolishly got played into diplomacy stalling. Besides that objectively if Russia had done that in that year the sanctions against Russia at that time would have done far more damage, possibly would have destroyed Russia because at that time they hadn’t had years of time to take steps to prepare and insulate themselves from the shock and pain.

It’s NATO’s fault. It’s the Euro loser vassals’ fault, it is the fault of the US. Russia really didn’t have any good moves to make and every year it waited meant more Russians who would die in the fight against an increasingly more well armed and more well trained by the month military.