Exactly.

Yeah, though i’m expecting major sabotage efforts by the usual three letter agencies of the US and UK in regards to that project. Wouldn’t even put it past NASA to get involved in trying to make sure that the mission fails.

It’s completely ridiculous and if this is at all accurate this is a damning indictment of that party. I mean if mutual aid is supposedly so “ineffective” and “not worth it" (even though it has a proven track record of success) then what the hell do you call telling people to vote for the Democrats which has proven over and over to be an abject failure of a “strategy”, if you can even call it that? I can think of nothing that is more ineffective and not worth it, in fact i’d say it’s downright counterproductive.

Exactly. I don’t buy into the pessimism because China has been building its own alternatives to Amazon and Google for precisely such a scenario. And yes, the West may not adopt them but the world is bigger than just this increasingly insular and self-isolated West, and the rest of the world will get the best of both worlds. The global south will have no issues using Chinese platforms in parallel with Western platforms, and eventually, hopefully, even making their own. That is just one of the many benefits of multipolarity.

They can’t until they can. Nothing stays the same forever.

Assuming this is true

Yes, assuming this is not some stunt to try and make Biden look like he also survived a near death experience like Trump, which i wouldn’t put past the DNC to think they have to do to even the playing field now.

Probably for German re-armament if the Greens have any say.

First Trump dodges a bullet by a couple of centimeters and then the universe smites Biden with the plague? Can you imagine how insufferable evangelicals will become if that happens?

Good. You can’t negotiate with the Great Satan. The Soviet Union became too naive and trusting and its communists had to learn that lesson the hard way. I hope China avoids making the same mistakes. “Detente” doesn’t work when it’s with a country that will always regard it as its holy mission to eradicate you as a state and an economic system.

Up until now i had always operated under the impression that CPUSA is like the unions: bad leadership, good rank and file and worth for revolutionaries to work inside as Lenin advised. But as you point out even unions don’t go this far in enforcing pro-liberal discipline so i’m beginning to question the usefulness of staying in the party if it means you have to bend the knee to these horrendous lines that the party has adopted. At this point why not just go over to PSL or one of the other smaller but more genuinely revolutionary, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist groups.

Inshallah 🤞

Unless his base become so overconfident in their victory that they don’t even bother to go out and vote. I am not excluding any possibility at the moment, but it certainly seems like the odds are in his favor. And a lot can happen between now and election day.

Great comment, that is much needed context, thank you!

This is a good point to remember. Just because it’s a statistic doesn’t mean it’s reliable.

Economic indexes are especially biased due to the assumptions that go in to the way they collect and interpret data. They operate on a fundamentally capitalist paradigm so they will often measure the wrong things.

As for whether this one is any good, well i personally don’t trust any statistic that puts the UK anywhere near the top 5 of anything, except perhaps levels of aristocratic inbreeding and delusions of grandeur.

Maybe they will reduce the number of flights, and it is definitely doable to ban very short distance flights, but i doubt they would be able to completely stop air travel to and from the more difficult to access regions such as Xizang/Tibet any time soon even if they wanted to. I think what we are more likely to see is the eventual development of hybrid and electric airplanes.

Then again, i’m only extrapolating from what i am observing at the moment, but things can always change rapidly and much more drastically than current trends indicate.

One should never say that something is impossible or not doable especially for a socialist society. A socialist superpower can achieve virtually anything, and no project is too ambitious when you have a government that can marshall the collective forces and creativity of a whole society toward a common goal. It just takes political will.

what’s the artillery ratio between the two sides again?

At least 5 to 1, which is also around the same ratio we see in the casualty numbers. This is completely unsurprising as artillery has always been responsible for most of the casualties in a war of this kind. And on top of that Russia is using a huge amount of glide bombs and cruise/ballistic missiles that Ukraine doesn’t even have. So they can break any fortified position and target logistics and C&C nodes pretty much at will. Hence why the “attacker always suffers more casualties than the defender” cliché does not apply here.

Not to mention that it’s not even that cut and dry who is attacking and who is defending. The Ukrainians take a lot of losses in counter-attacks because they are very unwilling to give up ground (the Kiev regime is very dependent on optics for whenever it goes begging for money and weapons, it has to appear like it’s holding on and that it still has a chance to regain lost territories) and they will often send wave after wave of men trying to regain lost positions even after they have been taken and the Russians have entrenched themselves there.

I hate article or video titles posed as a question. The answer is clear so just say it directly from the start instead of playing this game.

And the US clown show kicks into overdrive. The trapeze artists are flying doing all sorts of backflips while the jugglers are on a unicycle riding the high wire. It’s going to be an entertaining rest of the year if nothing else.

But why tho? Why would they do that? It’s not like they would be any more of a pariah in the eyes of the liberal West if they were openly fascist, in fact they probably would be less shunned. This is what i’ve never understood whenever ultras make claims like this. It’s not like the West has any problems doing business and being allied with despotic monarchies and reactionary dictatorships.

Like when it comes to China for instance, when ultras say that the CPC are actually capitalists pretending to be communist… What would be the point of that? If they really were capitalist wouldn’t they stand to gain more from openly embracing capitalism and going full neoliberal like Russia did in the 90s? What is there to gain from such a masquerade in a post-1990 world dominated by capitalism? It’s not like we live in a world where being communist is something that benefits your image and relationships with most other countries.

When have capitalists ever bothered to go to such extreme lengths just to keep up such a charade for so long? Wouldn’t they take the first opportunity they got (late 80s, early 90s) to openly restore bourgeois rule rather than keep pretending and constantly talking about socialism and Marxism-Leninism? There is far, far more money to be made becoming a comprador for the US empire and looting your own country like the Russian oligarchs did rather than being a member of a communist ruling party.

These conspiracy theories just don’t make any sense even on the most basic level.

From my experience no, they think the DPRK is at best revisionist. No one is ever communist enough for ultras.