Capital city of Idaho
Political power grows out of sticks of dynamite:
https://xcancel.com/Ollie_Vargas_/status/2003025820072477066
Bolivia: 60 buses full of mineworkers are heading towards the capital for the start of the indefinite general strike against austerity measures.
Many of them are carrying dynamite, normally a work tool but often used in protests.
Video from Luna Oi about the ongoing conflict between Cambodia and Thailand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl3tjEBXhLg
She briefly goes over the ceasefire from the previous border conflict. The timeline of the conflict and she explaining the geopolitical stance of Cambodia and Thailand with respect to China and the US starts at 6:44.
https://xcancel.com/Ollie_Vargas_/status/2002166029389267437:
Bolivia’s workers unions announce an indefinite general strike against the neoliberal austerity measures announced this week.
No dialogue or negotiation, all the measures must be repealed first. No honeymoon period for the right-wing govt.
By this standard, virtually nothing outside of breaking out of prison or killing prison guards would work. And being able to pull those two off is orders of magnitude harder than a hunger strike.
A specter is haunting Elbit Systems - the specter of Palestine Action:
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2025/12/19/elbit-shutdown/
A group of protesters have shut down the entrance to a factory belonging to Elbit Systems. The halt of Israel’s weapons supplier is one of the key demands of the anti-genocide activists. Eight prisoners, all being held on remand for allegedly taking action in solidarity with Palestine, have been on open ended hunger strike since the 2 November in British prisons. This is the biggest coordinated prison hunger strike in UK prisons since the 1981 H-block strike in the North of Ireland. Six of the hunger strikers have been hospitalised so far. Despite the enormity of the strike, the media coverage has been minimal, and the government fails to respond.
We don’t conflate Shintoists as an ethnic group even though the vast majority of Shintoists belong to a single ethnic group and most people of that ethnic group perform Shinto rituals at least on a cultural level. Imagine some dude walking around saying they have “Shinto blood.”
Oh piss off Jewish is absolutely an ethnicity, if you want to get super technical you can divide it into several distinct ones but that’s pathological for this convo.
No, it is not. There are various ethnicities which have cultural affinity with Judaism, but this is true for many ethnicities with respect with religion. Armenians and Georgians have traditionally been Christians, Uyghurs and Hui have traditionally been Muslim, Thai and Tibetans have traditionally been Buddhist, etc. Pakistan tried pulling the “we are one big happy South Asian Muslim ummah family” card, but Bangladeshis still fought for and won their independence.
This-could’ve-been-an-email ass speech
Now I know how it feels like to have to fly thousands of miles from my cushy office to hear a drunk rank about how the soldiers under my command are all too fat.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/12/16/israeli-prisonremoveds/
Far-right lawyers acting for four members of a group of Israeli prison guards exposed when footage of them anallyremoved a helpless Palestinian prisoner have announced the legal defence they will be filing if they are prosecuted: theyremovedd in ‘self-defence’.
A poll by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies found that only 21% of Israelis believe soldiers thatremoved Palestinian prisoners should face criminal prosecution.
🚨Urgent: MintPress is being financially censored by Indiegogo who is refusing to provide us with our $50,000 payout for our fundraiser:
https://xcancel.com/MintPressNews/status/2000673878603882702
Dear supporters,
Indiegogo has cancelled our fundraising campaign and will not provide us with our $51,000 payout that we raised through the fundraising platform for our campaign: Help Keep MintPress Alive.
Their reason: our project did not meet their guidelines.
This is an unacceptable reasoning that we were provided with only today, nearly three months after our campaign ended in October.
I have been trying to get our payout from Indiegogo since the campaign ended.
In addition, MintPress has used Indiegogo to raise funds to support our independent journalism projects for nearly a decade.
Indiegogo did say that all donations will be refunded back to donors.
But why now?
We don’t know for sure, however, we suspect that this is part of a coordinated financial attack against MintPress as we were also recently banned from GoFundMe and Paypal for our journalism that exposes the architects of the forever war machine.
In the last year alone, MintPress News has exposed a network of Israeli spies from Unit 8200 working within big tech & media.
Our independent investigative journalism has been at the forefront of exposing the architects of the US forever war machine and Zionist influence over our political system and national security state.
We believe this is a coordinated attack against dissenting journalism that holds the military elite accountable that keep endless wars possible.
MintPress will not back down and ask ask that you stand with us.
MintPress is 100% reader supported and we are STILL AT RISK OF SHUTTING DOWN due to being financially targeted unless we meet our fundraising goals.
We need your support NOW more than ever.
We thank you for standing with us to support our 14 year long legacy of providing independent watchdog journalism and helping us push back against this censorship.
We are organizing and planning the steps we need to take against Indiegogo .
In the meantime we hope you will help us raise awareness against the sanctions regime that is targeting its own citizens and our protected right of journalism.
– Mnar Adley Founder & Director
Baseless trumped up charges against Richard Medhurst dropped:
https://xcancel.com/richimedhurst/status/2000321931153928628
BREAKING: UK Drops Terrorism Case Against Journalist Richard Medhurst
No charges will be filed, and bail cancelled.
However, it is only a partial victory for freedom of the press, as the UK authorities handed Austria all their intel/files for them to continue the persecution.
These Uralics really think Westerners don’t consider them Mongolic half-breeds at best.
Erm… A poor country fought the most advanced military in the world at the time to a stalemate, and protected the DPRK.
Subjectively, it was extraordinary impressive for a country that bore the brunt of fascist extermination for 14 years to push back against an industrial power that didn’t do shit in the two world wars. Objectively, the ultimate goal of the war was to remove US presence from the Korean peninsula, which can only be completely accomplished with the overthrow of the ROK and the expulsion of the US military from the Korean peninsula.
Are you telling me that China today can only competently protect its interest in Eurasia only if it has numerical advantage to the US? And if we’re being honest, China already has that in various aspects of its military.
It’s not about protecting its interests, which is a euphemism anyways, but about projecting military power. And the PRC currently doesn’t have that. The US has over 800 overseas military bases. The PRC has a grand total of 3, 1 of which is in a country that also has a US military base, so it doesn’t even count. It has two overseas bases, one in Cambodia and one in Tajikistan. How are two bases in central Asia and southeast Asia respectively remotely helpful in what’s going on in South America? What’s the Chinese equivalent of Guam? The Chinese equivalent of Guam is the PRC funding Hawaiian separatists to kick out the USians from their islands and making a deal with a once more sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii to build a giant Chinese military base. And the PRC can’t just manufacture their way into 800 overseas military bases, so in order to make up this gap, the PLA has to compensate by being better than the US military in other areas. That’s when the PRC having less nukes and less aircraft carriers starts to become concerning because the overseas military bases gap is far harder to overcome.
By your standards, the US should have steamrolled their enemies in Korea and Vietnam, but they didn’t. And the latter did not win decisively against the US military either. It was the mounting costs that made the US withdrew.
The US losing in Vietnam is tangential to the fact that it can even wage war in Vietnam in the first place. The fact that the US could even wage war halfway across the world killing millions in the process speaks to its logistical capabilities and its ability to project power. This is something a lot of people forget. I am extremely skeptical that the PLA could do the equivalent today. I don’t think the PLA have the means to invade Peru or Bolivia. And I don’t mean a decapitation strike or nuking their capital, but boots on the ground occupying their capital and major cities. At its peak, the US had more than 500000 troops in Vietnam. Most of those troops had stops in Guam, Japan, and the Philippines (going back to the US having hundreds of overseas military bases) before being shipped out to the ROV. They didn’t all get shoved into a boat in California and sailed directly to South Vietnam.
Ignoring the political dimensions or the fact that the US will 100% never allow this to happen, can the PRC militarily invade Guatemala for the sake of overthrowing the current government that recognizes the ROC, install a new provisional government that recognizes the PRC, and wage COIN against a population that presumably will not take kindly to Chinese invaders? Forget whether it can prop up the pro-PRC government, can the PRC even do it?
China in the 1950s fought the Americans and won in the Korean War without owning any nukes at all.
It was a stalemate. If the PRC actually won, there wouldn’t be an ROK unless you’re one of those people who thinks that the PRC actually wants Korea to be forever divided into two countries. And in any case, the Korean War is over 70 years ago. US GIs were still running around with M14s. Much has change since then.
Similarly, the USSR provided extensive military support during the Vietnam War.
Yes, because the SU had a much more dangerous military. Compared with the US/NATO, the SU had more nukes and had a larger standing army among other things. It can make various military alliances through the Warsaw Pact because it had the military muscle to back up those alliances. The only thing worse than not making military alliances is making military alliances but lacking the military muscle to back it up.
Since the reform and opening up, China’s foreign policy in terms of military has taken a drastic turn. Its first major operation was to invade Vietnam.
You mean the same invasion where the PLA got owned by a bunch of Vietnamese border militias and how the PRC pushed for negotiations when the actual Vietnamese army started to march back from Cambodia to Vietnam?
Like I said earlier, a frank evaluation is that the PRC doesn’t have the military muscle. I honestly don’t even think the PRC is a military superpower now. It’s more like a really strong regional power within its sphere of influence within eastern Asia than a military superpower that can project its power throughout the globe like the US. The PRC has nukes, but so does India. So does Pakistan. And France and the UK and the DPRK and the Zionist entity. Like, India technically became a nuclear triad before the PRC.
But of course, the PRC is investing resources in improving its military. The PRC being able to build warships at a much faster pace than the US is the PRC leveraging its economic and manufacturing muscle to improve its military muscle. Everything is interconnected after all, and the good thing about an economic superpower is it can quickly improve its military due to superior procurement and manufacturing.
It has fully exposed that China’s foreign policy that emphasizes economic cooperation is far inferior to the USSR model of military protection when it comes to mitigating Western imperial advance.
China’s economically focused foreign policy has served its purpose thus far since the gap between its military and the US’s was (is?) far wider than between the SU and the US. The SU had more nukes than the US at various points in its history with a peak of 39000+ nukes while the PRC has <700 nukes. The SU by 1965 has more than 10 times the number of nukes the PRC has right now. Now let’s compare navies. The SU had 5 aircraft carriers while the PRC only has 3 (the US has 11). The Red Navy had more ships and more personnel than the PLAN. Until the 2000s, the PLAN wasn’t even a blue water navy.
The frank assessment is that the PRC doesn’t have the military muscle to do what the SU did, so it does what virtually every competitor in any competition does: it leverages its strength, in this case its economy and manufacturing capacity, and it hides its weakness while bidding its time to develop and train itself to patch up that weakness.
Right now we are at a critical transitional period where the PRC has economically surpassed the US but has not militarily surpassed the US, so the US will lean hard on its military might as a form of hard power that is still stronger than the PRC. But the PRC is militarily developing as well, from rapidly increasing its nuclear stockpile to developing its shipbuilding capacity to the point where it has far exceed what the US has right now to being ahead of the US in developing 6th generation fighters. The US is still ahead of the military race, but the PRC is quickly catching up.
The PRC restricting rare earth exports is the PRC leveraging its economic might to hurt the US’s military might while the US using B-2 bombers to blow up Iranian nuclear plants is the US leveraging its military might to hurt the PRC’s economic might. The PRC will flip countries towards them by making itself an economically attractive partner to do business with and the US will push countries away from China by dropping the military hammer on them and exacting a human cost on them for doing business with China.
There’s also a second sea lord and an even faker office called the deputy first sea lord.
Is he one of those “I’m not an Arab, I’m a PhOnEcIaN” freaks?
I don’t think the PRC can even do that. They would basically have to sail 3/4 across the world because there’s 0% chance the US vassal state Panama would allow them passage through the Panama Canal. The PLAN would have to sail across the Indian Ocean past the Cape of Good Hope to get to Venezuela. Sailing past Cape Hope makes no sense owning to the hostility of the weather and waters.
At the end of the day, the SU was a military superpower first and foremost while the PRC is an economic superpower. The US is getting owned on the economic front, so they’re pivoting to the military front where the US still has an edge over the PRC. The PRC will make allies through opportunities for economic development while the US will drop the military hammer to keep them in line. No one wants to do business if their investment is just going to be bombed to shit, after all. Expect countries that sign on to the BRI to be attacked by the US as punishment for signing on to the BRI. The time for a soft power approach is over especially since October 7 has destroyed every ounce of soft power credibility the US has but also exposed that soft power doesn’t mean a rat’s ass compared with hard power.
If the BRI is the modern Silk Road, the US is playing the part of marauders and pirates waylaying Silk Road traders and stealing their shit. To continue this analogy, the PRC needs to play the part of security escorting those trader through hostile roads. This means investing in their military. Right now, the PLAN has a grand total of three (3) aircraft carriers. Two needs to be kept close to the PRC due to Taiwan/the Philippines/Japan/ROK, so the PLAN can actually only use one (1) aircraft carrier for saber-rattling/interventionist/brinksmanship purposes. The USN has 11 carriers and even if you subtract 4 for the two coastlines, that’s still 7 carriers. It’s 7 carriers vs 1 carrier.
By far the biggest gap is the gap in the number of overseas military bases. It’s 800+ vs 3. Much of those 800+ military bases boils down to the US overthrowing leaders with a degree of independence and installing compradors and vassals who then rubberstamp US bases sprouting up in their country where US troops commit SA against the local women. The PRC thus far has marketed itself as a noninterventionist country, which means countries are not exactly falling over themselves to open up military bases for the PRC especially given the aforementioned experience of US troops SA and committing crime in general. Imagine if Venezuela and the PRC had a military alliance. That would mean military cooperation, which means a Chinese military base in Venezuela in practical terms. Chinese troops are not just going to just show up in some random Venezuelan port and sleep at random Venezuelan hotels. But would the people of Venezuela actually agree to this?