A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image shows a display of Changjian-1000 missiles, which are hypersonic cruise missiles with high manuverability and quick launch times. The linked archived article has several more images and descriptions of Chinese missile technology.


My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

Aside from the virtually daily Iranian strikes on the Oman route, the main threat that the US is facing in this newest phase of the war is logistics. With Bahrain and the UAE unsafe, the closest safest port in the theater is Diego Garcia, which is over 2000 miles away. Either the aircraft carriers would have to go to Diego Garcia to restock, which would be even less planes and missiles available should hostilities restart suddenly, or goods have to be shuttled to the aircraft carriers from Diego Garcia. This latter option appears to be too much for the US to handle, with widespread reports of dwindling supplies and morale on the USS Abraham Lincoln (and, to a lesser extent, the USS George HW Bush). These reports have culminated in the USS George Washington being sent from the Pacific to replace the Lincoln, which was the sole aircraft carrier in that whole theater. There are six more carriers in maintenance, leaving two carriers left that could even hypothetically be called upon should the USS George HW Bush need replacement; both are currently undergoing training, and of these two, the USS Theodore Roosevelt might be available soon; perhaps even as soon as September. I’m unsure whether the Roosevelt will be sent to the Pacific to replace the Washington, or if it’ll be sent to the Middle East to replace the Bush. Nonetheless, that the situation has deteriorated to the point where we can speculate on how very limited naval vessels are going to be distributed is yet one more indication among many of the decline of US naval power. The symbolism was too much for me to ignore, hence the title: the last aircraft carrier in the Pacific being forced to leave, and not under military pressure in some hypothetical war against China, but to try and relieve logistical burdens elsewhere in a war of the US’s own making.

This joins Trump’s statements that the US will only be taking a very limited part in the South Korean military exercises. This is nominally because of the “great ties” the US shares with the DPRK, but this is an embarrassingly transparent face-saving statement. The DPRK is an increasingly major potential threat to South Korea, a major regional power and economy, but are also helping Russia with both manpower and materiel and getting military experience and data on their missiles’ effectiveness in return.

The US’s Under Secretary of War, Elbridge Colby, recently visited the Philippines. There, he gave a speech that promised to continue the construction of a defensive network that would deny China the possibility of militarily advancing through the Pacific by stationing US forces inside friendly countries. This is the NATO approach: our mere presence will deter the enemy because they would not want to start a direct war with us, and in exchange, you have to hand over billions upon billions of dollars. Colby gave the Philippines that most backhanded of compliments, the “model ally”, and stated that the US was “definitely not disengaging from Asia”. My “We aren’t pivoting away from Asia” shirt has people asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my shirt.

If you’re a US-friendly country in the Pacific and possess even the slightest sense of self-preservation, you are surely feeling nervous. The US is moving its aircraft carrier out of the theater. Overseas, you’ve seen how Iran - a very strong regional country, to be sure, but not as powerful as the industrial juggernaut and nuclear superpower that is China - has nonetheless crippled several undefendable US bases, has exhausted a very large amount of American air defense missiles, is holding the global economy hostage, and the US can seemingly do nothing to stop them. You have to be looking at your own US bases, likely expensive and unpopular, and all the money you’re handing over to the US, and glancing at how the Gulf states are bickering of being betrayed by their ally who promised them protection and immediately retreated. You have to be looking at your economy and its dependence on China. You have to be looking at Ukraine, and the unenviable state of destruction it has been driven to as a puppet of the US. You have to be looking at China itself, and how its military is rapidly developing in all fields, and how it’s even catching up on microchip development. In all, you have to be really hoping that China is serious that they only plan a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, and that the US will not do something incredibly, stupidly reckless in their decline.


Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ 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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

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.


  • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    2 days ago

    Fascists Demand ‘Ethnic Admission Cap’, Forced Handshakes And Ban On ‘Dominance Puffer Jackets’ In Danish High Schools

    What do you do if you are a parliamentary irrelevant far-right opposition party and you want to get attention? You propose something so insane that journalists has to write about it, of course.

    Convicted criminal and leader of the fascist “Denmark Democrats” Inger Støjberg has released a series of proposals, ostensibly targeting “negative social control” in secondary education. The policy paper is titled Expel Islam if anybody still has doubts about what “negative social control” means.

    Read more. ..

    The cover sets the tone. A brown teenage boy looming menacingly over a girl in a headscarf. It has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a mosque window.

    The paper contains several outlandish proposals, inching closer to a set of Nuremberg laws for Danish Muslims. The pretext for these vile and idiotic proposals is a series of media scare campaigns where a few high schools have reported problems with conservative Muslim students bullying students who are less strict in their religious beliefs. The only specific example mentioned in the proposal is the conservative organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir handing out flyers at a single Copenhagen high school. That this — a legal political organisation handing out flyers — is even allowed to happen shows that “dark foreign forces” are trying to “influence our young people and draw them away from the Danish community and the values our secondary education builds on”.

    Now, this proposal has no chance of passing at the moment but it is a good example of what is considered acceptable political speech in the Nordic hermit kingdom. Støjberg isn’t treated like a crank; she’s treated like a serious politician with serious ideas. Although the proposal is not going to pass right now in its current form one ought not to dismiss it as obviously ridiculous. For decades, the far right has been the ideological laboratory of the Danish political mainstream; the lunacy Støjberg spouts today becomes tomorrow’s boring centrist consensus.

    So how would high school look like if Støjberg and her merry band of fascists had their way?

    Students would have to prove themselves sufficiently ideologically pure before even starting school. Støjberg intends to do this through a creepy proposal to force minors to touch adults physically. To be allowed to start school, students will have to shake the hands of both the principal and a school leadership representative “of the opposite sex as the principal”. This, we are told, will “test if students have adopted the Danish values of liberty, including gender equality”, nothing says “gender equality” like forcing teenagers to touch strangers in a ritualized power display. The suffragettes, one imagines, would have wept with joy.

    Støjberg defends the moronic handshake requirement by likening it to a similarly harebrained requirement to shake the mayor’s hand if you want to become a citizen, a requirement that Støjberg herself got pushed through some years ago. “When I introduced the handshake ceremony for citizenship, there was an uproar. I was told that it was both symbolic politics and discriminatory,” the fascist leader says. “But it has been implemented today, and it turns out to work really well.” She does not elaborate on what “working really well” means, what she has established is only that the policy exists, which she offers as its own justification.

    The forced physical contact is not the only requirement to start school though. Parents will be required to attend a mandatory meeting about “Danish culture, equality and education”.

    But wait, there are more hoops to jump through. Students will be required to sign a declaration to follow “Danish values” - apparently self-evident to the pure of heart, though never actually defined for the rest of us - including an explicit affirmation that “the Constitution is above the Qur’an”, a bizarre humiliation ritual that reveals the fascists’ expansive ignorance on the contents of both the Danish constitution and the Qur’an.

    But ideology is not enough. Even if you shake every hand, even if your parents sit through the re-education seminar, even if you swear on whatever vague values the average Danish red-faced Facebook uncle is pretending to have, you can still get rejected for racial impurity. A proposed “ethnic admission cap” would allow schools to reject students with “non-western background” if the school already has more than 25% non-Aryan students. Danish students shouldn’t have to suffer just because they live near brown people. “It shouldn’t be Danish students who for generations have had a tradition to for instance attend a specific high school who have to be transported away,” the proposal wheezes.

    Once inside, the fun doesn’t stop. Anyone practicing “negative social control and culture of dominance” gets expelled. In addition, dress codes will also be introduced “where necessary”. Proposed banned items of clothing are headscarves, caps and puffer jackets. The fascists want to “remove the attitude” of the presumably Muslim “young boys who run around in packs in the hallways, showing dominance behaviour”. During her own election campaign earlier this year, Støjberg posted several videos where she was wearing a puffer jacket herself, but she has helpfully clarified that hers was a “mom pillow,” a wholesome garment worn by many women and entirely distinct from the terrifying “dominance puffer jacket” worn by non-Aryan teenagers.

    Looking the part is not enough; students will also have to be sufficiently well-fed. Under Støjberg’s proposals, fasting would be banned for high schoolers. She openly admits that she wants to ban religiously motivated fasting but that the ban would cover all types of fasting.

    Under the proposal students would get suspended, or expelled in repeat or “aggravated” cases, for speaking any other language than Danish in school, including during recess. What makes a case aggravated is not specified but one can imagine t depends on the language being spoken. How this squares with the far right’s performative devotion to free speech goes unexplained. Nor is it explained how foreign-language classes would function under a ban on speaking foreign languages. The fate of the many English loanwords in constant use by every Danish teenager also remains an open question.

    All of this is transparently designed to expel as many non-white students as possible. This creates a funding problem, since schools are paid per student. Støjberg has a fix: schools keep the funding for any student expelled under the “negative social control and culture of dominance” clause. Cruelty, it turns out, should never be impeded by finances.

    Støjberg begrudingly acknowledges that Danish administrative law requires you to at least pretend to consult the people you are making decisions for. But due process is for cucks and communists so the fascists want to fast-track the administrative process and reduce hearing times to seven days in order to fast-track expulsions. After expulsion, schools and municipalities would be under no obligation to help students enroll elsewhere. The best way to combat regressive social norms, apparently, is to ensure the affected kids remains unemployable, angry and uneducated.

    Students are not the only ones getting punished under these proposals. High school managers sometimes, in their weakness, commit the sin of making Muslim students feel welcome. This must be stopped. To prevent such disgusting outbreaks of human kindness from happening, the fascists want to make it illegal for schools to make “special Islamic accommodations”, for instance by adjusting dinner times at parties to allow Muslim students observing the Ramadan to take part. Offending schools will be fined or punished “in another way” until they stop being so disgustingly inclusive.

    Non-denominational prayer or reflection spaces, known as “Islamic Prayer Rooms” in the far-right lexicon, are a particular bugbear of Danish fascists and have been so for ages. You might assume these would be covered by the general ban on accommodations, but Støjberg wants them banned specifically. Just to be sure. Offending schools will be fined.

    To guarantee sufficient racist paranoia among staff, new teachers will receive mandatory training in spotting “negative social control and culture of dominance.” And to ensure no school slips through the net, the government will conduct systematic inspections. Schools that fail to meet the Islamophobia quota will be fined.

    The Danish far right has long been successful in racialising the political discourse on crime. It has now set its sights on doing the same for bullying, transforming a universal social problem into a racial pathology, a contagion carried exclusively by brown bodies. Støjberg is not shouting into the void. She is speaking to an audience that has been carefully cultivated over decades, an electorate that has been taught to see its Muslim neighbours as an existential threat to be managed, marginalised, and ultimately removed.

    The proposal will not pass today. But the ideas will linger, floating in the political ether like spores, waiting for the moment when the center decides that the time has come to move another notch to the right. And move it will. It always does.