Conservatives were calling libs “soy” for a decade and they’re out here trying to stir outrage for shit like this. Everyone is 12 now, everyone is “soy” now.

Stuff like this is why all the move-toward-the-center tripe that the DC donor class likes to peddle is just bullshit. It’s never as simple as projecting the political spectrum to a 1D axis and assuming you need to take the “average” or “median” voter’s positions to achieve maximum popularity. Your “average” person is incoherent, and you need to have a backbone of values that can energize a base of support. Class analysis will always lead you to identify the widest potential base, but they’ll never do that!

It’s especially funny when those same neoliberals have been basking in glory since 1990 when their system “won” and they thought all they had to do was tinker around the edges. One Washington Consensus president after another, and within a generation, we’ve entered The Gilded Age 2. You can’t claim “Not Real Capitalism,” my brother in Christ, this is the globalized hegemony you wanted! Obama’s legacy is Trump, you really think we can just turn back the dial on this shit?

I see, thank you for your insight. I should really just sit down and read Super Imperialism

If I have time soon, I will perhaps write up how Stalin’s economy differed from these liberal economics and how the USSR under Stalin was pretty much unconstrained in its own domestic spending to drive investment and rapid expansion of the economy

I’d be really interested in this!

And even after Stalin’s death, the liberal policies immediately came back. The lesson here is clear: you really have to figure out how to deal with the liberals if you want to have a successful reform.

And what I find baffling is that the United States, the consumer capital of the world, is able to run up this massive deficit, have this massive military, have the rest of the planet pay for it, and it’s like no one in power in the “BRICS” sphere is acting on that. Like, even these anti-western liberals don’t understand that? Idk, like you said, how would a left wing government even deal with this kind of ideological misstep, permanently?

I just don’t get it. Has no one in power since Stalin ever been able to determine that this “fiscal responsibility” stuff is an artificial self-limiter? Like it’s within Russia’s interests to not “balance the budget,” and as a massive, resource rich nation that is somewhat disconnected from a lot of the world’s supply chain they have the capacity to do so. Surely someone in Russia’s government knows this?

Love my team

With a HVDC line there will still be a large static electric field present, but like the study posted by the other user seems to say, it’s not significant enough to pose a threat to human health in and of itself, unless you do some dumb shit. I guess fishing in a pond directly under the line would be a problem if the voltage is high enough and maybe the air is under the right conditions, but in the aggregate cases like that are going to be rare since you don’t need very many of these HV transmission lines.

Hey… wait a minute

See this comment chain from @sodium_nitride@hexbear.net and @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net. I think I have also mischaracterized the AI boom as a bubble. Maybe a better way to frame it is as “AI Keynesianism,” you have a bunch of investors (and the government) flush with cash who are putting it into something that they view as potentially profitable at some time in the future, and perhaps more importantly, are forming the backbone of a massive surveillance network. This isn’t like the subprime loan crisis or the NFT bubble where the assets in question were literally fake and backed by nothing.

The problem of course if that this is so far proving to be a tremendous waste of capital as far as your average person is concerned and is ensuring that in all areas outside of surveillance/data-tech or (“cloud capital” as Yanis Varoufakis calls it), the US is having less and less of a “real” economy. So when some other crisis emerges, all these data centers and AI CapEx are going to be useless in addressing the needs of the population.

I saw the brain-geniuses over on r/neoliberal talking about this and they claimed “oh actually this doesn’t mean anything because if the money wasn’t invested in datacenters it would have been (counterfactually) invested in something else so the economy is still growing just fine”

And it’s like, yeah, no shit. That’s the problem. All this capital is being invested into something that has had practically 0 return in the last three years except make Silicon Valley technocrats richer, and is not increasing productivity at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars. Hmmm, sounds like a bunch of money is being misdirected to a bunch of nonviable companies that don’t actually offer anything meaningful. It’s almost like… a bubble? Idk, the market has spoken though so I’m sure it’s fine.

Thanks for these names! I found this seminar on MMT/“real economics” based research that was hosted at The Levy Institute this past August and it looks like there was a lot of interesting work from folks like Jia Genliang and other heterodox Chinese economists: https://www.levyinstitute.org/blog/seminar-on-modern-monetary-theory-and-launch-of-new-macroeconomics-successfully-held/

Tech Bros failed to consider the conductivity of tap water

Yeah the embassy incident is actually a good counterexample. Basically nothing came out of it, and everyone kinda just forgot it even happened. The thing with Charlie Kirk is that he’s still more visible, as far as I can tell, then say Nick Fuentes, who represents the Nazi faction. Using Kirk as a sacrificial lamb could make sense if his politics were starting to divulge from the “powers that be” while allowing them plausible deniability in being involved. At the end of the day though, my speculation and analysis won’t change the fact that this has ultimately contributed towards tensions amping up. I guess we’ll see what all these Meal Team Six suburbanite treatlers end up doing now.

You make a good point, I guess it would have been very late at night in Isn’treal too. It just seems so odd to me, this whole thing has become such a giant international spectacle. And it serves Israel and the Trump admin incredibly well, giving the right wing base more slop to “agitate” around and ensuring the political class falls into unison as they condemn this. On the other hand, if this hadn’t happened, it’s not like people would have actually been applying more pressure on the Trump admin with respect to Epstein or anything.

Ahh, thanks for pointing that out. Edited the title. But it still begs the question – why would he be commenting on this only half an hour after it happened? Maybe it’s just my conspiracy brain acting up, but this just reeks of psyop.

Based JDPON Don is doing degrowth for us! (except the economic fallout will fall overwhelmingly on the poorest Americans )

First Jolani, now Mayor Pete. Western liberalism is basically just a Zelenskyyification factory at this point, each copy more farcical than the last.

Thanks! I also found a source of my own that I linked above (the article from the Harvard library system) that briefly talks about de-Cossackization, where the Soviet government tried to remove some of the reactionary Cossack settlers who had displaced the local populations in the north Caucasus.

I’m going to use NATOpedia as a source here (I know, I know) since I think it’s a decent barometer for liberal narratives. Of course, tons of [citation needed] everywhere. On Russification: It seems like the policy was varied over the USSR’s lifetime, but I really can’t find any instances here that could be considered settler colonial, certainly not in the sense of the U.S. or Isr*el. Rather, it seems like early on there was more of an encouragement of indigenization (“Korenizatsiia”) to ensure loyalty of the USSR’s many ethnic minorities to the socialist project, but then by the late thirties, Stalin became concerned with bourgeois nationalism and tried to emphasize Russian culture in particular. This led to the persecution and transfer of ethnic minorities that were deemed suspicious and possibly potential collaborators with Nazi Germany (eg. Volga Germans) or Imperial Japan (eg. Koreans). Later on, after WWII, there was still Russification in the sense that the Russian language was emphasized or mandatory in schools across the USSR, but I still can’t find any evidence of Russians being massively settled in a place while the original ethnic population is completely killed or sent to constricted reservations

I thought this was an interesting (again, liberal) article from the Harvard library system, which includes accounts from a British journalist who was apparently in the USSR’s central Asian region during the 1930s. In it, the author talks about how the in the 1920s the USSR would do things like decolonize the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan of Cossack/Slavic settlers, and perhaps overemphasize ethnic nationalism of western Soviet populations like the Finns, Poles, and Germans (to sort of ensure their loyalty to the Soviet cause). The author calls these more decolonial, progessive sorts of actions the “Piedmont principle” and calls the more reactionary population transfer policy an instance of ideological/“national security” driven xenophobia (rather than explicitly racial.)

So my primary takeaway so far, is that no, the USSR was not a settler colonial entity, but a very contradictory place that had to navigate being a multi-ethnic socialist republic after emerging from a feudal, chauvinistic empire. The internal population transfers, while definitionally ethnic cleansing, were not purely driven by a sort of hierarchical racial supremacy/settler colonial mentality but were much more ideologically based in paranoid/xenophobic concerns about foreign collaboration.