All the western chuds who were salivating for China’s collapse stand to be disappointed once again.

I think the real question is how much longer the AFU can hold its shit together. Once the collapse of the army starts then the war is over.

I think it was this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8XuoX32ml4

Chauvinism is a hell of a drug, a lot of people in the west have convinced themselves they’re superior to Russians and I think the fall of USSR really went to their heads.

I’ve never had any illusions regarding the bloodlust in the west, the utter lack of understanding of what an all out war with Russia would mean has shocked me though. It’s especially wild that Europeans, who will be the first victims of the conflict, are the ones cheering this the most. At least with the US, you can see how they might think that the conflict to be contained to Europe.

I wouldn’t worry too much regarding which one you use because they interop with each other. Also worth noting that with Mastodon there’s no built in support for migrating your account to a different server. Might be the case with Misskey as well, but not as familiar with it.

And I wouldn’t worry too much which instance you sign up for. One of the bigger ones is better because it’s likely more proactively maintained, but you’ll be able to see content from other servers as well, so you’re not limited to the server you’re on.

It’s so incredible to watch this unfold. We’re basically now openly talking about starting WW3, and most people in the west are just going along with it. Pretty much nobody is asking whether maybe we should stop the insanity instead.

Indeed, I can’t really see a path for the US to decouple its economy from China without creating a domestic economic disaster. The question is whether the US leadership understands the repercussions or not. As we saw in Ukraine, rational analysis is largely absent from their behavior.

Absolutely, the narrative is important here as well. When push comes to shove and countries have to choose a side, it will be important for China to be seen as the sensible actor in the conflict. I’d argue that the west has already largely destroyed its credibility with the proxy war in Ukraine and support for genocide in Gaza. Majority of the countries outside the west are now starting to visibly shift towards BRICS, and I expect this will be a self reinforcing trend.

I think everybody realizes where things are going, and China is trying to drag this out as long as possible to give them more time to prepare for the conflict. China is rapidly building up its military strength while cutting its economic dependence on the west. I expect that 3-4 years will make a very big difference in both respects.

The important question is that of relative damage to each side. The US could perhaps cause China’s economy to drop by 3% until China is able to redirect its trade. However, what would be the cost for US to accomplish that. Once the dust settles, will it be in better or worse relative position.

It’s relevant analysis right now since Biden just authorized long range weapons https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/17/politics/biden-authorizes-ukraine-missiles-russian-targets/index.html

I think there’s a fundamental problem with any privately owned platform. We must remember who owns these platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.

This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. For example, a leak from RCMP shows how this kind of information is used to spy on Canadian citizens.

It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

Open source platforms provide an alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

From that perspective I think that Mastodon is the platform that we should focus on using and growing. While Mastodon retains a similar user experience to Twitter, there is one major difference—it is a federated platform. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, there are many Mastodon servers that all talk to each other to create the Mastodon network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own. For example, I set up my own instance using masto.host and I get to decide exactly how it’s run.

Mastodon is built around an open standard allowing other platforms to integrate with it. This led to a number of open platforms being created and joining the network. Collectively these platforms are referred to as the Fediverse. One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Facebook. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

Pixelfed is an alternative to Instagram that caters to artists and photographers. PeerTube is a YouTube alternative, Plume is a blogging platform akin to Medium, and Lemmy is a news aggregator forum inspired by Reddit.

All these platforms are developed in the open, and the developers themselves are often left-wing activists (as is the case with Mastodon and Lemmy). These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and popups.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

narrator voice: they were not

As Putin and Lavrov repeatedly pointed out, these weapons have to be operated by western personnel. so it would be NATO launching missiles into Russia. That’s an act of war.

that’s how I expect things will develop for the foreseeable future

lol yeah these people are clowns

I’m expecting it’s going to be hard to enforce bloc discipline with western economies going into a tailspin now.

On top of that, as we saw with Russian sanctions, it’s very difficult to enforce such things effectively. For example, Chinese could just build factories in Mexico, or sell stuff through third parties. This becomes very difficult to track, especially when trade is being done increasingly outside the dollar. So, the US is guaranteed to lose this game of whack-a-mole trying to enforce their tariffs.

Ultimately, the selection pressures of capitalism favor companies that can generate more profit than their competitors. I also don’t see customers giving a fuck where their stuff is made. Especially given that the economic situation is not looking all that great. People will buy stuff that’s cheapest to save money.

My understanding is that majority of neocons do see China as the main threat. However, there was a debate on whether the US should take on China directly or try to shape the battlefield first by breaking apart Russia. The line of thinking that Russia provides China with a shield in the west and the resources China would need to withstand western blockade is legitimate. The cardinal mistake was underestimating Russian capabilities. The faction that won the debate thought they just had blow hard enough and Russia would collapse. At that point they’d get to Balkanize it and surround China with hostile puppet regimes from the west. That’s now backfiring in a spectacular fashion.