darkcalling

Hmm big words. Let's see if China in particular follows them with big actions. Russia has nothing to lose at this point and don't give a fuck considering how sanctioned they are so they'll likely follow through but what they can do for Iran is severely limited right now as production of advanced missile/air defense systems is I believe pretty much being taken up by their own needs with regards to Ukraine and previous order commitments to other customers like India so the odds are not great they'll be able to DELIVER to Iran any modern air defense systems in any sizeable quantity in the next year at least if not several years. China on the other hand has a lot of capacity and could manufacture and deliver Iran weapons systems within a fairly short time frame. Probably 12 months or less if they really want to.

What is interesting about this is China has been trying to hold together the UN and the post WW2 order as has Russia because it represented about the best compromise and consensus you were ever going to get with the west involved and any new international system created would have the west demanding much more favorable terms for themselves, scaling back on international justice obligations and international law, etc, etc. So both have been desperate to maintain this flawed but good as it'll get system. This could just be a one-off but it could also represent a realization that there is no salvaging the UN and continuing to work within it is a fool's errand and that they must build alternative global consensus and perhaps law mechanisms which the west will likely spurn and declare invalid. But given the west is trampling over the last scraps of the old order as it is by enabling the zionist genocide of Gaza, unilateral sanctions, illegal military action, unfair trade actions designed to maintain their own supremacy, etc, etc. They hopefully have finally come to the conclusion that it's not worth keeping the thing sacrosanct and abiding by its rules while the west openly flaunts and defies them. To be bound by a system while your enemies are not but are also protected by that system while you are not is a weakness of the western capture of many of these "human rights" institutions and so on.

More evidence the US thirsts for a successful nuclear first strike on China and is desperately looking for ways to neutralize their retaliation.

(Funny because, as a former Evangelical myself before last week I totally clocked Kirk as an insincere grifter who said just the right things to get Evangelical support).

Yeah same. But as we've seen with Trump they don't care. They'll act outraged if you question an obvious grifter-pastor or other type, they'll under duress and after pressing admit Trump is sinful but then fall back on "god works in mysterious ways, god is working through him".

And also I think you've really hit the nail on the head of one of the reasons why this has staying power outside of the media manufactured outrage and it's the Evangelical persecution fetish that has been left untended for a long time. Sure the whole living with abortion being legal was upsetting to them and the satanic temple getting their little displays up was annoying but they've been lacking an actual martyr taken in blood (not by old age or drugs) for decades. They've watched Jewish zionists exploit the holocaust to play the sympathy and shut up and don't question us card and have been intensely jealous. They've watched their enemies, people who have actually suffered persecution at THEIR hands because they're black or LGBTQ+ getting sympathy and it just drives them wild with frustration. Now finally an uno reverse card, a way to flip the script somewhat convincingly and to vicariously through this act which they're willing themselves to be more emotionally injured by than they would be by a black neighbor being gunned down for example they get that certain self-righteous feeling, they're getting a high they haven't tasted in decades and for some of the young ones not at all.

I think because of the Gaza genocide they're desperate to at least both-sides the situation.

The whole world knows they're guilty of enabling the genocide there, of all but orchestrating it by proxy. But they probably hope to use this situation to rile up the Muslim world against China with the feeling that in 4 years assuming the Gaza situation is "resolved" by the zionoists either completing the genocide or stopping partway and declaring victory, that the Muslim world will be ready to forget yesterday's news and hated enemy and embrace their new hated enemy China which unlike the US is 100% sanctioned by the gulf state comprador governments and media. And they could be quite right. At the very least it lets them muddy their own involvement by saying "oh that was those Jews, not us, they tricked us, we love Muslims, it was a mistake, we didn't realize".

Well it would give them potentially powerful forward radar surveillance of part of China. Plus signals intelligence, listening, hacking. Plus let's be honest a forward operating base for spies, "moderate rebel" terrorist collaborators, etc.

Not anytime soon. Because Dems capitulated hard and the bourgeois press got totally onboard with being outraged over this and lionizing Charlie the right is going to ride this as far as they can. They've already collected the scalp of Jimmy Kimmel. They're using it to cost anyone who speaks out against him their job. They plan to use it to hammer social media companies to force them to censor liberals (and anyone left of liberals). They're going to ride the outrage train on this one for months. Short of Democrats for some reason growing a titanium spine and/or big bourgeois press barons standing up to them and shutting it down I see no reason this can't continue through October.

Maybe I’m just dooming but their rank and file seem to support this 100%.

Yeah sorry but Evangelicals are 100% behind this and 100% furious and crying and craving blood. Also I'd bet the debate-lord, rationalist type online-right of younger types is at least somewhat behind this kind of dishonest lionization because it owns the libs and lets them play victim and demand favorable conditions for their own "debates" and for their opponents to be censored and deplatformed, lets them collect scalps. They are salivating at getting Hasan finally for example as a result of this.

About the only people not for this are the respectable buttoned up business Republicans who regard it not so much going too far as a naked person covered in condiments acting like a chicken, it's curious, they don't understand it but they're going to keep walking or go with the flow.

There's of course your average person who isn't terminally online and not a terminal Fox News watcher or Evangelical who shrugs at this and thinks its odd but they're not likely to get in the way of the censorship push either as they don't know who Hasan is or care about all this debate of online fairness that much as to them online is funny grill memes and crime news.

Absolute weak shit.

China not looking good at all. Lots of things can be cast as biding their time or strategy but this is just straight up armed robbery of China that will embolden the US to do this again and again and given China's initial statements against US tariffs there is at some level an understanding of the idea that appeasing bullies only makes the bullying or robbery in this case worse.

The US will just do this again with whatever comes next.

I can't believe they actually sold it. ~~This only encourages the west's robber behavior. Any time China has any success they'll try and bully and strong-arm them into selling to the west with sanctions and threats. Major L move China. Losing a global influence platform just for the sake of making money off of US/western users. Sure if they'd stood fast they might have lost the US, EU, rest of the Anglo-verse but so what? The influence they'd still have in the rest of the world would be worth it.~~

I hope they're only selling US operations and not selling the secret sauce algo. If they're doing that, that's a smart move to get some money and retain global rights and the secret sauce I suppose. Sucks for US users but hey need to fix your government rather than counting on China to resist it into doing good things for you.

The fear of many Ukrainians is that young men between 18 and 22 will now flee in large numbers, leaving the armed forces come 2027 with too few new recruits – and Ukraine, a country with severe demographic deficiencies, with too few people when the war ends. One 25-year-old woman told me that in her brother’s cohort of friends ages 18 to 22, most of them were planning to leave the country. She said the new law was wrongheaded and would hurt the war effort.

I honestly wonder if this wasn't a deliberate decision to try and save lives. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but might Zelensky or some Nazi in his government realize by now the west's plans to demographically destroy them in order to kill Russians and be trying to save some of their next generation with moves like this as they can't stop until they run out of people in the west's eyes but if they send most abroad they'll have something. Maybe even cynically deliberate now that they've press-ganged central and eastern Ukrainians who were more likely to support Russia, an attempt to get western more nationalist and Nazi friendly Ukrainians spared from the meat grinder on the front.

NSA

Fuck.

The facts are he was allegedly bi, dating a trans person, killed Kirk for his hate, his family will corroborate he was a "loony leftist" and blame the internet and college most likely for taking their best attempt at raising a chud and turning him into the person he ended up as who disagreed with them on politics. Given he didn't go on any rants about Jews or anything like that (the only other option being thinking Kirk hated white people for not being against the Jews enough) I think the chances are near zero he wasn't just a liberal or vaguely left type person. Probably didn't really have anything super concrete himself in terms of political ideology other than not wanting to be his parents, not agreeing with his parents and MAGA, etc which is good enough to call him a liberal/leftist unfortunately.

Nothing else really matters. This is the cold, hard, damning evidence the right needs to paint this as an assassination by a leftist. I guess we can be thankful he wasn't a member of a communist party and it seems unlikely he organized with antifa or other groups, and he didn't post a ton of overtly leftist political stuff for them to show around but he'll be painted as antifa anyways (the anti-fascist song inscription on the bullet seals that) and this will be used as an example of liberal/left "intolerance" and violence against the "totally peaceable" right.

All these attempts at nuance are not strong enough and take too much thought and good faith. The right will be able to successfully blast out that he was a radicalized liberal-leftist who hated conservatives, was part of some imagined by the right "violent trans" agenda or movement they're trying to conjure up. The likely interviews from his family where the ridiculous hogs bray about how he was a radical and changed from a good little chudlet into a crazed leftist (as defined by Fox News) will be blasted around likely by all the usual bourgeois press. The liberal conclusion will be we need to tackle "online radicalization no matter what ideology" and the right will take that and run with it to force censorship of the left on major platforms, force major platforms to feed more automated reporting data on anyone talking in too leftist a manner to the police state priority flagged, etc.

Considering what we've already heard of discord pro-actively giving police info on people buying t-shirts and cops calling them in a chilling effects way it's concerning. And explains why they're harping on the online angle so much because that's seemingly the goal here.