Bolsonaro took Brazil out of the Chavez-founded UNASUR in order to join the US-aligned PROSUR (which excludes Venezuela and Bolivia) as soon as he went into office.

Huh, another one for my list of deeply unserious individuals. The text in the screenshot is so bad, at first I thought it was satire. But turns out it was probably written by a discord teenager from some YouTuber’s fanclub.

Their own page describe themselves pretty well, citing a thousand concepts and authors without elaboration or sources, or ever making clear any of their actual positions from either a theoretical or organizative perspective. Bonus points for calling “leftists” “mentally ill”.

But then you click on the page of the “main representative” and it’s an “autodidact” debatebro.

What purging and murdering proper communists over a century does to a country.

Side note: apparently editing their wiki is open, in case actual queer anarchists comrades from hexbear are feeling bored right now.

Edit: also it’s definitely a “me” thing, but I deeply hate how they overwrite the meaning of the already extant word “leftism” in Marxist theory (in short: unpragmactic idealism) with their own, which is just the “globalism” nonsense all over again.

That it was an EU ship that came to the rescue isn’t surprising. Despite the EU’s scarce naval resources, they are currently the only ones there. There isn’t a Prosperity Guardian ship within 500 miles. Back in May when the carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower was present, the US had 12 warships on station providing a mix of missile picket and escorting duties. Now they have zero. The UK for one brief moment had three. HMS Diamond did some outstanding work as part of OPG but when she left, we left.

There can only be one conclusion: that the US has given up on Operation Prosperity Guardian. It wasn’t deterring the Houthis and it wasn’t reassuring shipping so they might as well go and do something else.

I’m shooting blind as I haven’t looked too deep into how the blockade has impacted global trade, but I think this makes perfect sense for the US.

It isn’t that much further away around the Cape than through the Suez to arrive from the South China Sea to the US east coast, and AFAIK most trade actually happens with the West Coast through the Pacific or through Panama. So higher shipping costs harm Europe much more than they harm the US in this case.

Just like the Ukraine War, sanctions on Russia and China and the Nord Stream, it seems the US is intending using this blockade to cannibalise Europe’s economy even further. Expect another year of negative growth in the EU, specially with China becoming a suitable replacement as a high-tech producer worldwide. They don’t have to go either through Suez or around the Cape in order to ship to a majority of the world’s population.

It seems these European intel agencies are awfully disorganized and disunited. Maybe they should all officially become subsidiaries of the CIA, that’ll help protect Europe. \s

Did some searching, it comes from CIA director William Burns in 2022-03-08, you can see it here. It was actually 2 days.

“His own military’s performance has been largely ineffective,” Burns said of Putin. “Instead of seizing Kyiv within the first two days of the campaign, which is what his plan was premised upon, after nearly two full weeks they still have not been able to fully encircle the city.”

If you go a bit further back, you have “sources” from the CIA already spouting the 2 days line a couple weeks earlier. Here’s an example from the day after the start of the SMO.

US intelligence officials are concerned that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days, according to two sources familiar with the latest intelligence.

It goes like this, US Intel are worried it could happen -> report it as Putin hinging his whole plan on it happening -> if it happens it’s because it was a massive gamble and “unfair” in some way, if it doesn’t happen it was an utter failure and Putin threw away his whole country.

A week later, business insider reports it as though Russia failed in the war and practically lost, and actually, it’s Russian intelligence which is bad for wrongly predicting their victory. Which the US intel also predicted. Go figure.

Narrative created. Consent manufactured. Redditor fooled.

P.S.: is there a Ukrainian civil war megathread I could read and contribute to somewhere? It’s fun to look up these little lies but it’s been 2 years now and there’s just too much stuff to hold on one’s head.

Rising rents coupled with high borrowing costs and low wage growth have hit some especially hard. “Lower income households are not keeping up,” Goldman said. “Everything looks great but when you look beneath the surface, the disparity between the wealthy and nonwealthy is widening dramatically.”

Everything is great, you’re just poor. Have you tried not being poor?

We’re in a “vibecession,” Joyce Chang, JPMorgan’s chair of global research, said at the CNBC Financial Advisor Summit in May.

Apparently somebody is saying that. From JPMorgan. Do with that what you will.

In July Mr Putin doubled the federal bonus for those signing up to fight from 195,000 roubles ($2,200) to 400,000 roubles, which regional authorities are supposed to top up. The government is committing vast sums on compensation to the families of those killed in action. And Russia’s splurge goes beyond war-related spending. Mr Putin is lavishing money on welfare payments: in June he raised pensions for some recipients by close to 10%. The government is also spending big on infrastructure, including a highway from Kazan to Yekaterinburg, two cities 450 miles (729km) apart. Indeed, it is spending on pretty much whatever takes its fancy. Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, recently boasted about a government scheme to pay for children to holiday in Crimea.

“Lavishing” on pensions. Imagine trying to paint that as a bad thing. Wonder how Yankees feel when they find out that the country they’re blowing hundreds of billions on to wage useless wars has free healthcare too.

Not sure about a “smile in your death bed” but there are roles for anyone to play in a revolution. Most people can’t have the energy (or free time) of a Lenin or Mao, but you can still join an union, party or other kind of organisation and do as much work as you’re able to from there.

Thankfully I’m able to help out in minor ways like that, to the best of my limited capabilities.

Although I don’t think this is going to change the result (Trump is still going to win, USA will remain a stagnant imperialist country), it’s going to be very fun watching the chaos unfold within the blue party.

It’s not even clear if Kamala is actually going to be selected candidate. As entertainment, I love it.

Browsing reactionary spaces, seems they’re trying to brew the theory that the secret service purposefully let this happen, or though sheer incompetence. Wait a week and they’ll start saying the secret service was compromised by Biden.

Really funny seeing the in-fighting between the “civility and democracy” libs and the “trump is the worst thing since Hitler” libs right now.

footage of the shot, shots are fired at around 8 minutes.

He looks alright after he gets up, just a little dazed. Doubt he’ll die from this. Could even have been staged, but I recommend waiting for more info before speculating too hard.

To be fair, he looks pretty good for an old man who just got shot. Didn’t even break character. Watching in slow motion it looks like the bullet meant for his head only grazed his ear. He’s gonna be fine.

Talvez seja só birra com o formato (homem sofistando pra chat de twitch), mas não acho que faz muito sentido não.

Se eleitoralismo é inútil, tanto faz competir no executivo ou legislativo. PSoL tá no legislativo em BH faz um tempão e só consegue ficar menos popular.

O exemplo do Leo Péricles é até bom, mas só porque é o mais extremo possível: fundador do partido que já disputou eleição do executivo federal e municipal (detalhe que enfraquece o ponto). O argumento fica muito mais frágil se aplicar por exemplo à Juliete Pantoja do Rio de Janeiro.

Um bom estudo de caso é a Heloísa Helena, que foi de quase 7% presidencial pra não conseguir nem ser vereadora da própria cidade.

E achei bem idealista essa de “se fizer isso eu entro na UP e ajudo”. Porque não entra em um partido e concorre independente disso? Muito fácil agitar por uma posição pra seguidores na internet, mas cadê entrar e fazer debate interno pra que a posição seja tomada dentro da própria UP?

Claro, ele não entra em partido porque não existe partido eleitoral MLM no momento. Pessoalmente, acredito muito útil usar a base e popularidade dele (e da Laura Sabino??) pra uma tática possivelmente pouco efetiva (mas decidida por meio de organização partidária) do que passar mais 4 anos esperando essa organização maoista se manifestar.

link to article.

I don’t think it’s good to normalise images as “news” in this comm. It is true this time, but is less convenient to verify, and could be abused in the future.

Biden has been providing some great quotes lately:

“I convinced myself of two things. I’m the most qualified person to beat him, and I know how to get things done,” he stated.

They never change.

[Tankies’] positioning, further to the left than subreddits like r/communism, r/socialism, and r/Anarchism

Bruh r/communism is unapologetically gonzaloist, they’re even further ‘left’ than we are lol

The figure doesn’t even imply that, that sort of graph has no concept of “intensity” for positioning. The colours being different just means that (assuming it was well done) the red communities are more similar among themselves than the orange communities.

So their “further left” is just either a massive ass-pull or they actually think that their clustering model has an implicit politicalcompass system in the position of plotted clusters.

A few months ago, the search engine expanded its offering by making available data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database. Anna’s Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

Scraping data is now “hacking”. Every single computer science department will have to close its doors and surrender their research datasets to the police.

How long until liberals start saying that the ICJ is controlled by Putin’s ally, South Africa?