I think you could argue we’ve been in WW3 for quite some time

I was always under the impression that it’s just the narrative they go with to secure funding, the whole points is to: print $$$ --> military spending. There is literally nothing else to it.

As someone who have spent quite some time in the upper echelons of society I can confidently say MOST are very high on liberalism, i.e. ignorant, uninformed, idealist. It is not that they think there is another point or are scheming for some kind of endgame (yea obv, the Palantir CEO might be, but if we are talking everyday elites), it is simply VERY easy to go through your whole life as a liberal if you never are exposed to the contradictions and contrasts of global capitalism (and when you do get exposed, it is nicely wrapped by your media)

If you are born with relative privilege and work hard, make good money, etc and just go about with your life, it is very easy to just…not think about these things. And whenever you might stray away and think a bit more deeply you have a plethora of “political analyists” or other media telling you how you should think about it to feel good about yourself (and superior to many others).

These are the kind of people we need to reach, educate and get on our side. And since October 2023 a less “lib-rotted” conscious has started to form in this group, even if it is tiny, tiny, tiny.

Some of the most fast paced tech developments are those between the Ublock Origin repo and Youtube as well as that between GrapheneOS and anti-privacy actors.

I believe their current system don’t allow “dummie” profiles, i.e. one password to log into a clean, mock version of the OS. But after incidents such as these, they might re-evalutade the need for it.

There is generally no cap on how many layers you can have when it comes to this.

Currently I think you could set it up with Veracrypt and have it boot a dummy version in a way so that there is no way to see that there is anything else hidden away on your drive.

Oh and as an answer to your question, no there is no way to get through the security, if you have done everything correct and not compromised the device prior.

It shows how important is for people to own the datacenters. Running model on bigger hardware for multiple people is much more efficient than running it on personal hardware.

Which also is why the AI companies are panicking a little bit. They don’t necessarily target private consumer anyways, but are trying to expand into the business-licensing space. Thats why they are competing so hard to create the most complete ecosystem of tools, i.e. coding, legal work, picture+movie, defense.

But no reasonably lead company is going to waste $9999999 billions on tokens for ever more expensive models when you can get similar results by expanding your serverhall with a few m^2.

I think I’ve read that the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia) historically was the most lucrative (i.e. highest net-profit) colony by a large margin. I cannot remember the numbers though.

It seems like the US is increasingly trying to isolate southern Iran from the rest of the country. Several bridges have been hit, in addition to railways, tunnels, airports, roads, and hospitals are evacuated. They seem to focus on the destruction of civilian infrastructure trying to limit the movement of people, goods and logistical supplies.

I imagine this is to keep their options open with regards to putting troops on the ground or “taking” southern Iran.

There is a “clear shift in strategic thinking” in Tehran, especially after the killing of the former surpreme leader who had been “cautious about directly confronting” the US, Ali Fathollah-Nejad, director of the Centre for Middle East and Global Order, told Al Jazeera.

“Now we see escalating regional factional infighting within the regime in Iran between the hardline pragmatists on one hand and the ultra hardliners on the other hand,” he said. The latter seem to be “dictating the dynamic”, he said, adding that “this new Iranian strategy of escalation is formed from new strategic considerations of deterrence against a new full-fledged attack” on Iran that could “destabilise the regime”.

There is also a “sense of hubris, as well, from this ultra hardline camp, that … Iran has emerged victorious, plus the costs of confrontation are absorbable, and deep scepticism vis-a-vis the hardline pragmatist camp that has been leading Iranian negotiations”.

Don’t worry guys, previously it was this very real infighting between moderates and hardliners, we have now upgraded to hardliners vs. ultra hardliners. In a few months we will hear that there is a lot of infighting between the super-duper ultra hardliners vs. the ultimato-mega-giga-hardliners. What would we do without these analysts…

memorandums of understanding

The US has a really good history of abiding by these, great job Iraq!

Oh 100%, I wrote this lazily but I didn’t mean that I personally agree with all of these. I am very much for military intervention and the forced destruction of the Zionist state.

I was mostly trying to convey their current M.O of “working & trading with everyone regardless of where they stand”. Obviously Chinese leadership has a different take than many of us…

I know they’re trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that’s very bad.

It is a bad look in the short run yes, in the long run the stability is considered necessary to develop the productive forces and multipolarity. China needs the image of a stable, secure and long-term trading partner. Sabotaging trade or sanctioning others is not consistent with this image, sadly. We must not forget that China is hard-pressed by enemies even at their own doorsteps (US vassal states + US funded terrorists to their east), I have no doubt that as American power projection in the pacific continue to diminish and China reaches higher stages of development, their assessment will be different.

Great firewall…? I know it’s a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?

Probably one of the biggest long-term wins of the CPC. They now have an entirely domestic sovereign tech sector and are immune to american-controlled infrastructure and soft power. VPN is officially forbidden I think, but I’ve never talked with a citizen who didn’t use one (apart from some grannies). State VPNs are mostly for international business I think.

Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?

Lol. This is just silly. The ones that are heavily censured are usually spies/billionaires who collude with western powers and try to coup the government (or in some cases travel to the US and practically beg them of nuking their homeland). Whats not allowed is unathorized organizing for systemic changes or attacking the legitimacy of the central CPC. (These systemic changes if valid are perfectly fine to push for internally; relative small fringes of reactionary groups have historically been used extensively by western powers to weaken or coup countries)

Are they monitoring everyone? “You can’t monitor 1.5 billion people” idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely

Somewhat, they prioritize collective public safety and social stability over western individual privacy norms. But I’d say this narrative probably also stems from westerners thinking that “us being heavily monitored in China” = “everyone in China is heavily monitored”, as a Chinese citizen you’ll also probably be monitored but not to the same degree.

In discussions with liberals who are horrified with this “authoritan reality” I have previously proudly exclaimed that I hope for atleast another 100 years where every westerner who sets their foot in Asia is heavily monitored. After what they’ve done in the region they should be happy to be welcomed at all imo.

Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China’s own capacity.

Short semi-answer: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

Long answer: https://roland-theodore-boer.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/roland-boer-socialism-with-chinese-characteristics-a-concise-guide-2021.pdf

Also you might want to look through https://substack.com/@arnaudbertrand/posts and https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand. Some of your questions are also sourced in the FAQ to the right.

A personal grievance I have is the whole “Three represents” thingy Jiang Zemin was on about – I personally think they could’ve continued their strong development without allowing the national bourgeoisie into the vanguard party. But I am not delusional to think I know better than the Chinese leadership (as some western marxists think of themselves), so this is not really a big issue for me.

Yea people started becoming suspicious when the Gulf states + Israel started throwing people into prison when they filmed even 1 second of any impact.

After they had put the lid on the reports suddenly became – “Interceptor impacts” instead of “missile impacts”.

Bro they are already bombing the bridges and railways. I guess they explicitly mean eletricity and oil…

In general the type of people from Europe who are A. Willing to travel to the US and attend this WC and B. Can afford to do so, are not generally gonna be the same people who hold animosity towards the US. For most it is probably the opposite and they are thrilled to go there.

Now we’re really putting all the cards on the table – interesting to see if they mean close it for everyone or for a select few.

Yea, it is just frustrating. I really threw myself out there during the entry-into-NATO phase, and there was just…nothing; no public discourse, no pushback from “leftists” to liberals alike, everyone just agreed that it was somehow a good thing and that you were stupid if you were against it. They didn’t even need to do a referendum because the political class united so quickly and attenuated every contrary opinion – none of the politically adjacent organizations I was/am involved in wanted to talk about it. It somewhat broke me to be honest.

Now, I am generally optimistic that globally the marxist position will continue to be strengthened and prevail, but I don’t think we will see changes in this

opportunities for the left to provide an alternative vision and narrative if it can manage to finally set aside its Western chauvinism, embrace real anti-imperialism and internationalism, and stop falling for the liberal-imperialist “anti-authoritarian” psyop.

in Europe for a long time. We have generational brain rot, and I am starting to think that wont change until a few generations just die off (either by age or heatwaves). This is not that I think people can’t change and more that I haven’t seen populations capable of this unless there’s a popular revolution, and I don’t think that will ever happen in Europe (at least not in a way similar to previous ones).

That doesn’t mean I disagree with trying though, and I’ll keep doing that. I’m just venting here because IRL I am the one who takes the vehemently optimistic position, so as to not discourage the baby leftists around me.

decaying material conditions will sharpen the contradictions between the chauvinistic outlook and the lived reality to a point where some kind of reckoning must happen.

My skepticism here is that for Europe this usually means Fascism and we see no signs of it being different this time – on the contrary – I think socially the case for socialism is much weaker than it was in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc during the 1900s. At least the labor movement was organized, we had a strong Soviet Union and people were not so entrenched into the narratives of the capital class. The political class itself was much more fragmented than today and if we couldn’t succeed with a socialisation of our institutions during those conditions, I am relatively restrictive in holding out hope for it happening under our current conditions, which I feel are much worse.

The coming decade of post-Ukraine policy will dictate a lot of what happens. As the material conditions continue to degrade, it almost feels like the most optimistic scenario is implosion and a further weakening of european standing in the world, increasingly forcing us to make amends and respect Africa and Asia. As long as we have a strong Russia, China, Iran, Sahel states, etc, there is at least hope that the EU by necessity is forced to acknowledge multipolarity – which in the long run will birth a new political consciousness that isn’t as chauvinist as the current one.

*(By the way, they also briefly address Sweden and its racism toward the end of that linked video discussion, you can check it out if you’re interested.)

Yea the point was spot on. And I don’t even know how this course should be reversed, one of the most pressing issues is that is the same (class of) people still running the countries (in both Germany and Sweden). Denazification in West Germany was a joke, and in Sweden there never was anything of the sort – which just leads to unconditional chauvinism. You start to understand why Lenin just shot people, and why the cultural revolution was necessary.

Ah, I am so done with all of it.

But when it comes to general racism my experience has been that Scandinavian countries are actually the worst and where it’s most insidious, precisely because they pretend to be all progressive but in really they have a massive superiority complex.

Sigh, I’d say that you’re generally right sadly. It is hard to argue against it when around 20% of people vote for a party that is a whitewashed literal Nazi party (and the current leader joined when it was branded as such).

massive superiority complex.

Yes, and I’d also claim that we are among the most propagandized people on the planet. I have a hard time actually thinking of a people more propagandized, possibly the Germans – but I feel like even for them there’ll always be a tiny tiny hint of doubt since they actually DID do the Holocaust once. For swedes there is zero guilt, zero introspection and total belief that your outlook on the world is correct.

The population is also just…ignorant. Our current prime minister literally wrote a book about his ideology a couple years ago where he equaled the Swedish wellfare state to apartheid and stated his life’s purpose to be the destroying of it – but people still vote for this guy and then are chocked when he does just that. Don’t worry, 44% of adults have a university degree, surely this means they can read one book.

I could write a lot about my people but it’ll probably amount to a book (and I fear it’ll be even harder to make them read two books).

Wow, this seems like a real escalation. I wonder if this is a result of Irani-Omani agreement after their technical talks, or disagreement and an even more precarious situation in the region…