I think the a major component of the blockade is that one they begin to capture or burn ships, the insurance rate goes way up. Once the ships become even slightly more costly the margins go down. Once it is even possibly unprofitable to use the straight, they will have effectively created a blockade.
One thing that will never seem to leave my head is that I had read that the current mountain tops of the Appalachians are actually the original valleys of the mountain range. The mountains were so old and large that the valleys of todays Appalachian’s were the footprint of what was once maybe the largest mountain range earth has seen
definitely aimed at you, but also edifying for anyone who might think the USA was solidly on the side of good during the war. The US entered the war in 41, but they refused Stalin’s repeated requests to open a second front against Germany. They went to north africa first and then italy, waiting until the German eastern front had nearly collapsed before landing in Normandy. The US was essentially racing against the red army, trying to prevent the soviet union from liberating the entirety of europe under the banner of liberation for humankind. Once the US reached Germany and peace began, the US almost immediately formed NATO and appointed Nazi war criminals into its upper ranks while putting nazi war ciminals in charge of west germany. The yankee government is bad and always has been. throughout all of its history it only has made good choices when it has been dragged kicking and screaming.
There is no moral or legal justification for what Israel is doing right now. And the Palestinian people have a legal and moral right to resist their occupation by whatever means they decide, according to the UN charter and international law. Israel has turned Gaza into an open air concentration camp. It is one of the most densely populated place on earth and half of its population are children. Israel has laid a complete siege to Gaza for 17 years, sniping civilians and paramedics from towers and bombing it every few years. It forcibly relocated people there and it controls nearly everything about Gaza, its water, food and electricity. The conditions that are there are Israel’s fault, and Israel is openly committing an ethnic cleansing with US support. Israel blames Hamas, but Israel literally funded Hamas and tried its best to dismantle every other political organization in the Palestinian resistance. A leaked cabal to the US even said that they prefer Hamas win’s so that they can level collective punishment on all of Gaza by labeling it a hostile state.
I always hear people in the US musing how they couldn’t imagine sitting idly by while the Holocaust happened in WW2, but now I hear those same people doing mental gymnastics to excuse some of the most horrible atrocities live on tv.
Curtis has made some creative narratives in his documentaries that provide a sometimes useful and interesting way to present a critical perspective of history, for liberals who are becoming more radical it can be refreshing and thought-provoking. But the moment Curtis speaks about the left and historical/current examples of socialist projects, it is clear that he has anticommunist boomer baby-brainrot. His analysis of the Soviet Union, China, or even more amorphous left social movements is facile and often factually wrong.
It is clear he feels he knows all about socialism, but has never done the reading. After I became radicalized and started reading and organizing, revisiting his works is painful and irritating. Ultimately, it serves some of the very problems he poses in his critique, where he rejects an alternative to the system as it exists and forms a narrative that offers no solutions and only concludes with, “oh, dear!” He has nothing to offer the left, or working class people and the world generally, because he uses all of his creative energy to ultimately undermine the liberation of mankind.
I have been looking into cryptpad, but I don’t know if it is really secure/private, but it appears to be a privacy-oriented, self-host able google doc alternative: https://cryptpad.org
When the US was founded it excluded about 94% of the people from within its borders from participating. Slavery existed on a mass scale throughout the world’s early, liberal (so-called) democracies, or often their economy was subsidized by slave labor abroad in their colonies. So if slavery didn’t exist within their immediate borders, it existed for the people their political & economic system subjugated. The idea that industrialization or “democracy” (not even sure how you are defining it, really) came into existence suddenly isn’t accurate, although there are revolutionary periods where social change came suddenly or breakthroughs in technology that occurred that reshaped social production. Those didn’t ever occur in a vacuum, and those discoveries were only able to affect the social system in so far as the social system was developed in such a way that they could be utilized… Often those big revolutionary changes in the social system were due to contradictions (compounding antagonistic relationships) within the social system itself becoming untenable. Trying to shoe-horn a somewhat obscure military “law” isn’t really going to explain how those changes occurred in a realistic way, because human society is much more complicated than that. You seem to want to reinvent the wheel here, you should try reading Marx, you might find it quite satisfying.
On your last point, the French Revolution was crushed ultimately, although the new social order retained changes that were beneficial to its new ruling class. But weapons themselves aren’t necessarily going to singularly shape the way in which social conflict resolves. Military technology is important to these developments, but ultimately a part of the larger social system that is always changing to either maintain itself or undergoing revolutionary change.
I think Mexico is the dark horse
It is so interesting because I was engaging with you in a good faith, laying out an argument about why this might be more straightforward then you are letting on. But you called my argument imaginary and then called the instance I am a part of a garbage heap? Who is being uncivil?
I don’t understand how this was an issue of “lack of nuance” or “black and white” thinking… Either the term is racist or it is not? … Is it disparaging a group of people based on racial/cultural/ethnic stereotypes? Yeah. Is it reinforcing and normalizing those stereotypes and upholding an ideal “normal” that is associated with being part of the dominant group? Yeah. Does it seem petty and pedantic? Racism generally does take on a petty and pedantic character… When you go out of your way to deny these things, you are only doing it in service of upholding racist norms. You don’t have to continue to defend it, you can acknowledge that it could cause a community harm and move on with your life by avoiding the harmful behavior. Changing the way you speak might seem annoying or like an imposition, but if you think that racism is harmful and want to challenge it by being anti-racist, ultimately people have to change the way they think, speak, and behave… but it is a good change. Embrace it.
there is no such thing as “brigading” in federation. it is just people commenting you don’t agree with
On your first point: Russia’s argument for why they have gone back on the security exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament is one of the very same arguments NATO uses when claiming that they never promised russia that they wouldn’t expand NATO east of Germany… The US either lies, and denies making the promise (they did) or they say that they promised the soviet union, which is not the same thing as Russia. Ukraine had a discontinuity in government in 2014: this is something they and the EU acknowledged officially during Ukraine’s application to join the EU… So idk if the government of Ukraine today is a distinct entity from the political formation in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but that is what Ukraine and the EU have said as much.
Your first point in your second paragraph is something that could be said of Ukraine/NATO just as well. If anything, Ukraine has completely expended its reserve of weapons and now relies on a dwindling supply of old weapons from NATO… it may have just gone through a 3rd army in this last offensive… if anything a peace agreement would give NATO more time to arm Ukraine for another time when they decide to break the peace agreement… This isn’t based on speculation or a belief that Ukrainians are dishonest (unlike most speculation about Russia) because this is exactly what Angela Merkle said Minsk I & II were for: to use a peace deal to give NATO time to arm Ukraine for war… In order for peace to be achieved, both sides are going to have to accept some sort of good faith. If that can’t be done then more people will continue to have their lives thrown away.
idk, i think you missed the point of the things i linked. Two of them were the president of the US knowingly endorsing Yeltsin’s extralegal seizure of power (the second was his approval of Yeltsin and support after Yeltsin shelled Russian parliament for “going communist” … Those lost two article weren’t just to show the crimes of the USA, it was to show that the United States doesn’t give a fuck about democracy or russia, they gave more evidence of the US purposefully interfering in Soviet/Russian affairs in order to harm the Soviet/Russian people. Russia exists as it does today as a consequence of US foreign policy.
I still stand by what I said. The Soviet Union/Russia and the PRC have never come anywhere close to crimes of the US government. In my lifetime, the US has invaded and committed war crimes, or undermined democracy, in dozens of countries… The same cannot be said of any other country in the same timeframe
nope. sorry, but your motherland hasn’t been responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the USA. You think that having a different president means that there is some sort of functional democratic process that represents the people of the US? That is farcical. Sure, it might suck to be in russia and you could go to jail for the things you have said, but Russia is what it is today because of the US’s antagonism towards the soviet union and russia in particular. Russia as it exists now is a consequence of US involvement.. The US ruling-class doesn’t care about democracy or freedom in Russia. The soviet union had its contradictions and problems, but a lot of the soviet union’s problems were the direct result of US meddling. The US has been quite open about that, from its invasion in 1918 to its arming of right-wing extremists with the goal of killing as many soviets as possible. But working people in the US never really decided any of that, because the US government does not have either the form or the function of a governance body that represents working-peoples interests.
Just because you live in the US now, and your life might be better now, doesn’t mean that the US government isn’t the worlds villain… It is no matter how nice you have it there. You can check in with the millions of dead in southeast asia, or the millions dead and displaced in the middle east.
But wasn’t Pakistan also thoroughly a US puppet at this point?
Its cool that you admitted you just didn’t want anyone from hexbear to be right. That takes a lot of insight. You should consider opening your mind now to the possibility that you could be wrong about much more. You reflexive distaste for hexbear probably has more to do with your own cognitive dissonance than whether our opinions are wrong. Most of the people (bots) on hexbear were (are) libs too, but at some point opened their minds and began to approach history, political-economy, and current events with a more critical eye.
checkmate! it can’t be called a war if we simply lob misiles at a country and arm every lunatic we find, completely destroying it in the process 
I think the NUG has many elements within it that are from the former, US-captured, National League for Democracy, and its formation was a coalition aimed at bringing on board the various oppressed nations that have been struggling for independence for decades, the political elements of the former government, generally representing pro-western liberals and national bourgeoisie types, were essentially left leaderless, because the Aung San Suu Kyi clique had become centered around her personality and almost directly administered by her associates who often times were foreigners or outside of Myanmar until the so-called democratic reforms had come about.
That being said, it is unclear to me, from anything I have read, where leadership truly lies within that coalition. Most of the principle armed groups with experience were from the Shan, Karen, Kachin, Mon and other nations who have been fighting for decades for self-determination, often with a long history of very radical social platforms. The Burmese Communist Party has even re-entered the country from Yunnan and are allegedly fighting in the south, I believe they were armed and trained by the Kachin Independence Army… they are in an area this map labels as the PDF and are often labeled as allies of the PDF… Are they also working at the behest of the CIA? It’s not impossible but seems unlikely…. It also sounds like China’s stance of non-interference, that is often thought of as pro-junta, is sort of out the window. They have likely been arming and providing support to some of the groups on their border, like the Shan, in exchange for combatting illegal human trafficking schemes that have direct toes to the junta. At least that is what we know publicly. I would imagine that there is more going on than China will ever admit to, but this seems to be a signal that China is unhappy with the junta and that China mostly desires a stable political situation across its border.
China has been put in a difficult position by the coup in 2021, which I think was an opportunistic play by the military. They saw the new cold war between the US and China, while also seeing their prospects for their own political leadership dimming, so they took advantage of the moment and seized control. Neither side can play too direct a role in the conflict without risk of it blowing up in their face, although the US does have an advantage because an unstable Myanmar on China’s border is something the US might desire. But the junta is essentially pro western/neoliberal, with almost identical politics as the Aung San Suu Kyi led NLD. It really is difficult to say what the character of the civil war is, in part because there are contradictory elements within it. I agree though, anyone calling for the “international community to step up” which is a phrase i keep hearing verbatim, seems sus. Many of the more left-wing elements in this civil war should be fighting for total victory over the tatmadaw, but a UN brokered agreement would likely just mean restoring the old system or liberal democracy without any promise of political autonomy or national liberation being addressed