Liberal champions of sovereignty are now frothing at the mouth about a Chinese company designing a Chinese smartphone in China because the US didn’t “allow” it.

This is what liberals believe: nobody can do anything without whitey’s permission.

Colonial mentality in action. They need to be reminded that they don’t control China anymore.

Somebody snap me out of it. I’m causing myself psychic harm because libs on nominally left Facebook pages are malding over Musk apparently disabling starlink for a Ukrainian attack, and I can’t stop bullying them for being brainworm riddled seals clapping along to Western MIC cash cow projects.

How do these idiots not realize the bloodlust for Russia is exactly the same as it was for Iraq? How the fuck do you learn that literally every foreign intervention the US has been involved in during the last 150 years has been naked imperialism or proven lies to mask that imperialism, and go “yeah, no, THIS time it’s legit. Surely the State Department/Pentagon wouldn’t fool us again…”

Seriously, these fucking Blue MAGA morons don’t see the parallel between their “oh, you’re anti-war? Great job supporting fascist Putler ” and the rhetoric warhawks used for years against the anti-war movement during the Iraq war? This is an anti-billionaire Facebook page! How do these people think the problem here is that the Billionaire didn’t use his property to kill people for a change?

convincing people there was ebola at burning man was the bit of the year.

Unrelated to anything but last weekend I went to the portuguese communist party’s Avante Festival where, besides a whole lot of cool fucking stuff, several communist/progressive parties are represented, some of them have restaurants others have stands and stuff.

The CPC stand, as usual, had some high tech gadjets as well as traditional chinese products at very good prices, how good? I walked away with a 250€ Xiaomi headset for 40€. Also got Cuban cigars and rum.

But yeah I encourage everyone to come every year it’s a lot of fun, here’s some photos and a video from last year, this was when the attacks on the party for our position on ukraine were the fiercest and this year even MORE people showed up which meant longer lines (which is very socialist) but also was very nice to see

I love how we still get called putinists even though a bunch of us would love to see putin strung up alongside zelensky

If I read another “actually the voters are stupid and the media isn’t giving them the real facts about how good Brandonomics is” OpEd, I am going to pay a visit to the Minecraft version of the NYT office.

People have real, powerful economic indicators of how the economy is doing that they interact with everyday: their bank accounts. Money goes up? Economy good. Money goes down? Economy bad.

It’s funny how these neoliberal hacks who wax poetic about the beauty of individualism are suddenly really big fans of “collective” measures of economic performance, like GDP, when it’s only the rich who are profiting from GDP increase.

Every day I check the news and play a little game called “where is the CIA today?”

its mexico they’re in mexico

Relevant to both current events and our COTW, here’s somebody in the Western media who does not have goldfish brain, an extremely remarkable achievement.

Niger’s crisis began in Libya

The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.

The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.

The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.

The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.

There was little dissent at the time. As Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s forces battled anti-government rebels, politicians, the press and anti-Gaddafi Libyans painted an overly simplistic picture of unarmed protesters and other civilians facing imminent if not already unfolding genocide. Only years later would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were “not supported by the available evidence” and that “the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element” that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military … but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.” (Despite Gaddafi’s ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).

Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where “even a small deployment could have stopped the killing,” and insisted U.S. intervention would “change the image of the United States overnight.”

…

Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts … will be long remembered”).

NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”

After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.

The episode was considered a triumph. “We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the “success.” “As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done,” wrote then-U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis in October 2011. “Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.” That same month, Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared “Libya’s victory” as she flashed a peace sign.

…

“Libya has given [the mandate of ‘responsibility to protect’] a bad name,” complained Indian UN Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, echoing the sentiments of other diplomats angry that a UN mandate for protecting civilians had been stretched to regime change.

It soon became clear why. Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.

Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.

Things are scarcely better in “liberated” Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton’s pre-intervention fear of Libya “becoming a giant Somalia.” By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading.

Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.

Only five years later, Clinton, once eager to claim credit, distanced herself from the decision to intervene. “It didn’t work,” Obama admitted bluntly as he prepared to leave office, publicly deeming the country “a mess” and, privately, “a shit show.” The New York Timescollected the damning verdicts of those involved: “We made it worse”; “Gaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave”; “by God, if we can’t succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts.”

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT HELPING! YOU OPPOSED QADDAFI BECAUSE HE OPPOSED YOUR IMPERIALISM! YOU SUPPORT ACTUAL DICTATORS ALL OVER THE WORLD WHO CREATE APPALING CONDITIONS FOR THEIR PEOPLE! LIBYA WAS THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN AFRICA AT ONE POINT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

claims to be anti NATO

Hasn’t converted to Russian eastern orthodox Christianity

Typical western “leftists”

So the British media and police has been on a non-stop manhunt for “terror suspect” Daniel Khalife for the last week, who escaped from prison by clinging to the bottom of a truck in a chef’s outfit.

Anyone know anything about what Khalife is or did? The media have been exceptionally cagey about it, all they’ve said is that at some point he allegedly planted fake bombs in a military base and supplied classified information to a “enemy of the UK”.

Apparently they finally caught him roughly an hour ago. I don’t know what to make of it because I have no idea what he’s done, what country he gave info to and what his goals were.

I’ve noticed that it’s mostly office workers that spend hours and years of their life obsessing over Ukraine on Reddit. I work in trades and most of our conversations are about videogames, trips, personal life, and topics related to what we do. I hang out with a bunch of office workers every now and then. They talk about politics a lot more and geopolitical shit as well. Must be nice to have that much free time simping for a country you probably made fun of less than a decade ago.

So Guatemala actually succeeded in getting a center- leftist (which is as radical as our candidates ever get like Arbenz) elected and our corrupt America worshipping congress has pulled the CIA playbook of crying voter fraud and delegitimizing the party. Surprisingly, the US has sanctioned one of the prosecutors pulling this bullshit. The supreme court is packed with right-wing Evangelicals pleasing their gringo masters, so we’ll see if this election victory goes anywhere.

Bolivia, Ecuador, and Honduras under Zelaya should have been lessons that a more militant approach is absolutely necessary because the right-wing will pull out everything to secure their dominance.

Edit: Should add that he’s like that dumbass Boric in Chile by badmouthing Nicaragua and Venezuela, also pulling the “Russia bad” card and suspending deals with them. This could be why the US is willing to support him. He’s promising some stuff that’s radical by our standards but unfortunately lacking the teeth that a country like Honduras is currently offering.

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Cuba Arrests People Linked to Russian-Based Mercenary Network

Fourteen of them joined the operation by individual decision in exchange for residence in Russia.

On Thursday, Cuban authorities arrested 17 people related to a network that recruited mercenaries to fight for Russia.

Three of these people belonged to the recruitment scheme within the island, while the other fourteen have confessed to having joined the operation by individual decision in exchange for residence in Russia and a substantial monetary remuneration.

The Cuban Foreign Affairs Ministry announced the dismantling of the network after several media reported the presence of Cuban mercenaries fighting on the Russian side in the Ukrainian conflict.

Based on confessions from those arrested and wiretapping, Cuban authorities determined that the network’s recruiters were looking for individuals with criminal records and from dysfunctional families.

Although at the moment the crimes for which the detainees are being investigated have not been revealed, the digital media Cubadebate highlighted that the new penal code establishes severe penalties for crimes related to human trafficking and mercenarism.

Jose Luis Reyes, the chief prosecutor of the Supervision Department of the Directorate of Criminal Proceedings of the Attorney General’s Office, explained that “in the investigations the attributable crime will be determined for each case, in correspondence with the actions and will of those involved.”

The Foreign Ministry stressed that “Cuba is not part of the war conflict in Ukraine,” and that Cuba “is acting and will act vigorously” against anyone who “participates in any form of human trafficking for purposes of recruitment or mercenarism so that Cuban citizens do use of weapons against any country”.

BREAKING: New US election polling data shows run away victory for surprise candidate