Image is from this SCMP article.
Much of the analysis below is sourced from Michael Roberts’ great website.
Japan’s ruling parliamentary coalition, consisting of the LDP (purple) and it’s junior coalition partner Komeito (in light pink) have lost their ruling majority. They have ruled post-war Japan for almost its entire history. The LDP is currently led by Shigeru Ishiba after Kishida stood down due to a corruption scandal, and ties to the Unification Church.
While geopolitical factors (over the cold war between the US and China, etc) may have played a role, by far the biggest reason for this result in the poor economic conditions over the past few years. Inflation has risen and real wages have fallen, with little relief for the working class via things like tax reductions. While inequality in Japan is not as extreme as in America, it is still profound, with the top 10% possessing 60% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% possess just 5%.
Shinzo Abe previously tried to boost economic performance through monetary easing and fiscal deficits, while Kishida ran on a “new capitalism” which rejected Abe’s neoliberalism and promised to reduce inequality. Nothing substantial has resulted from all this, however, other than increasing corporate wealth. Innovation continues to fall, and domestic profitability is low, resulting in decreasing investment at home by Japanese corporations. Labour productivity growth has only slightly picked up since the mid-2000s and is falling again. The rate of profit has fallen by half since the 1960s, and Japan has been in a manufacturing recession - or very close to it - since late 2022. In essence: there is no choice but between stagnation or decline.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I learned it thru EE but I’ve always been aware that it is a much larger field of study. Its so pervasive it seems like it reveals something fundamental about the nature of reality kind of like how probability theory permeates all of the important scientific advances of the 20th century. I’m gonna have to do a deep dive on cybernetics now.
So in EE signals and system analysis you have a system with an input and an output. You smack it with an impulse input and you get an output response. The output can be separated into a transient response and a steady state response. The transient goes away and the ss response remains. You use this info to get characteristic equation of system which can then be used to determine the response of the system to other inputs, determine stability and other useful stuff.
I think about system control every time someone mentions communism doesn’t take human nature into consideration. So your saying in order to control humans greedy resource hoarding nature you are going to control it with a greedy system? Good luck with that positive feedback.
Positive feedback? Ha ha thanks for the compliment bud your lookin pretty good yourself.
No not that kind of positive feedback it means literal positive and negative. If your input to the system is blowing up positive you need to feedback a negative portion of the output back into the input thereby bringing the input to the system down and stabilizing the output or vice versa.
I’m also thinking about systems where the USA is a linear(maybe) system and the inputs are natural and man made events and the American system has a characteristic equation and response to these events. At least since 9/11 the response is to print trillions of $$$ and distribute it top down to the half way point effectively paying half of Americans to murder the other half. 15 trillion print on 9/11, 8 trillion print in 2008 bank crash and recently 8 trillion print for covid and things like BLM, masking or anti-masking etc being the transient response and war in Ukraine and Middle East as part of USA’s characteristic response. I dunno I’m just rambling now none of this answers your question about using control systems for economics I’m gonna have to do some research.
im at the point where i feel like we should be looking for characteristic equations of ‘human nature’ or capital itself (assumption being that it is higher order and highly coupled to extant systems). developing appropriate constraints for a given historical or future context seems to be the biggest issue though, will take an immense amount of work to go through and quantify initial and boundary conditions for a particular scenario and then youd probably have to solve some fucking weird diamat super/substructural closure problem to account for historical turbulence as well…