darkcalling

I'd ensure Spartacus's slave revolt succeeded, resulting in Rome falling to a grand slave revolt, smothering in the cradle the pro-debtor/creditor government and empire. ~~Probably just delay it emerging later down the line but who knows.~~ But best part is this stops a lot of follow-on bad happenings such as Christianity being proclaimed the official religion of Rome, certain unifications don't occur under wartime conditions against Rome. Maybe they even implement a kind of early universal suffrage and it ends up failing but it means that 17th century enlightenment thinkers have more to chew on which means they and the French revolution see certain flaws in liberal thinking and advocate a more radical course of action leading to the US founding fathers being a bunch of, republican, class traitors and hardcore abolitionists which leads to a crumbling of the capitalist world order over time that means the German revolution succeeds and European capital is murdered off in a bloody series of revolutions ending by the year 1980. While simultaneously anti-colonial sentiment creates uprisings across the globe that further weaken capital. Thus global communism by 2040.

(Yes I know there are problems with this but let me dream)

Well obviously. But I didn't feel like writing for hours. Any geopolitical analysis of this scale that is only two paragraphs is going to be simplified.

Whether it's overly simple, I don't think so. I think I captured the gist of how things seem to be going. Of course I can't know the future, there are twists and turns and happenings no one expects.

But I do know this. Europe is bound to the US by the bonds of white supremacy and settler-colonialist legacy and the threads of neo-colonialist interest they still have. Their interests are one in certain ways and that makes it exceptionally hard for them to truly gain independence from the force that's been occupying them (literally) and bailed out their capitalists at the end of WW2. Like a bunch of evil Captain Planet planeteers through their powers and colonial legacy, tricks, and support combined the US became capitalism's consolidated champion as well as the global defender of the white supremacist world order.

Let's not forget the NSA was spying on Germany's prime minister among many others. It's not just that they have troops in these countries, it's that hey have dirt, leverage, ways of pushing people into or out of power when it comes down to it if they really need to make a change. They haven't used these for decades because they're unseemly and don't fit with their new image so it's a problem if they're caught and because the EU is close enough in interests to them that it's never been a problem. Gladio is a reminder of the tip of the iceberg of how far they'd go. Much as Google keeps Mozilla funded and alive to stave off challenges of monopoly the US allowed Europe some independence to lend legitimacy to their claims of different opinions and the idea that the EU and western Europe and most of NATO aren't just a bunch of vassals for the US.

As Parenti once quipped, if you never go beyond where you're supposed to go you never notice the tug of the leash, it's only when you stray that you feel that and realize the limits imposed on you.

The Nordstream bombings was the tugging of the leash and we saw Europe very obediently heel and they've with a whimper accepted the US narrative lie about it being Ukraine that did it.

That's not happening. This is meaningless talk.

They're still withholding the machines and maintenance to the top end processes from China on national security grounds. They've already committed economic suicide. Germany is blaming Ukraine for the Nordstream attacks.

They lost their chance for independence this decade with the blowing up of Nordstream and when they all jumped onboard with anti-Russia sanctions and supplying weapons. The US has an interest in keeping the war in Ukraine burning or ending in a Korea type situation without a clear winner to keep Europe off Russian gas and reliant on US gas. Meanwhile the US poaches their talent, empties their industry into its pockets (some goes to China but that's the way the cookie crumbles), and so on.

The idea of an independent Europe is laughable, it was happening but in too weak a way to ever succeed and the us sabotaged it easily and will again. After Ukraine the US is going to use Taiwan as an issue, there will be a big thing about it declaring independence, Europe will of course have to "stand with European values and democracy" and antagonize China and commit more economic suicide in decoupling from China to abide by US suggested sanctions, and so on. Europe is cooked. They're going to go to the hard right parties after that happens since the left is not allowed at which point they'll either start doing imperialism with the US while brutalizing migrants or they might actually take a more skeptical stance against the US and adopt a more mercenary position under the banner of white supremacy and reaction. Either way I'm sorry to say I don't see socialism in Europe this decade or probably even the 2030s.

It's not practical. I looked into it once on a related matter and unless you're a US state dept employee or member of the military, the fees and taxes on importing and registering a car bought outside the US are astronomically high, like the cost of the car all over again, tens of thousands of dollars. The US has very specific and nit-picky safety standards. It's not a matter of meet or exceed, it's a matter of meet and don't exceed the limits imposed by law or regulation so you can't buy and bring over a European car that has better safety features if they don't meet US standards, so in that case you have to pay a specialty mechanic to adapt your car to US standards. And even if the standards are met exactly there are huge taxes and fees on it to discourage people importing cheaper cars. This is not the first US rodeo with protectionism for US car companies, they did this whole thing with Japan in the 90s and the Japanese eventually just did bulk importing and then later set up US plants for making the cars to get even lower costs.

Those for whom it might be practical would represent a few hundred thousand, maybe a million or two people who live very close to the Mexico border and don't just not registering in the US and dealing with the Mexican paperwork regularly.

Also, the better example is the SuperMicro accusations.

I dunno why the feds targeted a Taiwanese company. Maybe they didn't play ball and they got the stick.

Possible but the US is a gangster state. They've done shake-downs and disruption of French companies, Japanese companies, etc. It may be they were just trying to injure it to benefit US based competitors who would for example allow them to put their own spy-chips in server hardware bound for China or Japan or France or Germany. But as you say they may have been trying to get something and they wouldn't cooperate, perhaps the US tried to bully them into moving some production to India or the US or some place further afield from China's grasp and they refused and that would be enough. Heck the US has targeted and ruined US companies for not playing ball. There was a telecom called Qwest or something with a Q, they wouldn't cooperate with the NSA bulk gathering illegal wiretap program and the government pulled all contracts from them and ruined them. So simply refusing a request with these gangsters is enough for them to at the least fire a shot across your bow as a threat if not try to take you out entirely.

the KMT doesn't represent Taiwan so calling Taiwan fake-China is absurd.

I was doing a thing since, you know the territorial claims and anti-China liberals like to talk nonsense. Fact is they were to much of the world "real China" for years at the UN and elsewhere until getting unrecognized so they kind of are now the fake one, the pretender in every way. I think I see what you mean though.

Lots of people saying that Oct 7, Palestine, the genocide kicked this off.

I disagree. It kicked it into over-gear but what made it palatable for liberals was the Russiagate hoax and the concept of disinformation they've been so successfully sold from 2016 onward. That there is this cartoon villain or villains like Putin and China and so on who just have these armies of bots and trolls who conjure out of thin air as if evil sorcerers the dread disinformation which creates people (again out of thin air) who want to vote for Trump or who hate the covid vaccine, or who deny modern medicine, or who reject the imperialist narrative on Ukraine. And on and on. It broke enough brains to really get things moving. These liberals are in total denial that anything is wrong in the US, it can't be that we're in an atomized society with many left behind, with corporate lies all over, with an inconsistent, hypocritical political/economic system that breeds conspiratorial thinking or that we're founded on white supremacy and structural racism, it must be those dastardly outsiders and their false narratives and propaganda that have created all this trouble and if we get rid of them we can go back to brunch and the problems will be normal problems again like they were before.

And this is not new. I think James Baldwin was the one who said "when the south has trouble with their [black people] they blame the north, when the nation has trouble with them, they blame Russia" it's just that back then the information control was simply controlling the TV news and newspapers and there was nothing they could practically do about word of mouth campaigns, about discussions between people happening on college campuses and in various public places. But now with most discourse online and centralized behind gatekeepers the opportunity presents itself to actually institute some control.

So they were already moving this direction with the Russiagate hoax narrative and the anger and accusations towards social media for not censoring enough, it's just that Oct 7th and the loss of control of the Palestine narrative has not only panicked them but it's gotten the GOP zionists who were of course skeptical if not outright derisive of this campaign when it was just an anti-Trump thing onboard now with the need for control and a crackdown. The loss of control of the narrative on Ukraine in the global south has also significantly propelled this as we see as these arch imperialists are very frustrated with RT as Russia hasn't collapsed or been as isolated as they'd like and the war is going south in Ukraine so now it's time for blame and power-grabs.

Governments in practice enjoy immunity from private lawsuits.

The only way for this to have any meaning would be if his government sued them on their behalf, won, then seized some of those government assets from the zionist state under their jurisdiction or moved to have them frozen by friendly nations who complied and handed them over or to arrest relevant officials and extradite them. Needless to say the west will NEVER do this to isn'treal or its intelligence agents, certainly not for fake-China which is only kept around for use as fodder and unsinkable aircraft carrier against real China.

This company is fucked (well maybe, they'll probably just rebrand) but this won't be the end of western fuckery. Let's not forget the hardware spy implants the NSA put in Cisco gear shipped to China in the early 2000s to mid 2010s (and potentially elsewhere as they were spying on Germany and other "allies"), Cisco protested, might have even launched a lawsuit but there was nothing they could do to stop it or to get compensation from it.

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.