catonkatonk [none/use name]

This is one of the most illuminating posts I’ve seen on here. In the bleakest and most terrifying way.

Our noble child touchers

Democrats can dress atrocity in just enough respectability to placate libs. Sure, there are terrible things happening in the world, but the Leader is so sad about it, so it must be that the terrible things are unavoidable and therefore everything is as okay as they can possibly be.

Trump, enacting the same policies but also revelling in their cruelly would make steam come out of a lib’s ears.

So they’re not even going to bother to defend the oil fields around West Asia, am I understanding this correctly?

IIRC, the architect of UK austerity, George Osbourne, was writing about how we needed to cut government spending well before the financial crisis. Possibly while the government was still posting surpluses (which it has not done since austerity began lollol)

The starvation will continue until the economy fattens.

That’s happening already.

They should ask how that’s going in the UK. (which is currently drowning in sewage and I’m not even referring to the cuisine)

Traffic through the Suez Canal has fallen from around 2,000 transits per month before November 2023 to around 800 in August,

Greece-based Conbulk Shipmanagement Corporation stopped Red Sea voyages after its vessel MV Groton was attacked twice in August.

Torben Kolln, managing director of German-based container shipping group Leonhardt & Blumberg, said the Red Sea and wider Gulf of Aden was a “no go” area for their fleet.

An executive at a third shipping company, which has also received a letter, said they decided to end business with Israel in order to be able to continue to use the Red Sea route.

The Houthis have not stopped all traffic and the majority of Chinese and Russian-owned ships - which they do not see as affiliated with Israel - are able to sail through unhindered with lower insurance costs.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/houthis-warn-shipowners-new-phase-red-sea-campaign-prepare-be-attacked-2024-10-03/

That interview is infuriating. The suggestion at the end that Palestinians are responsible for their own subjugation is genuinely shocking to me.

It’s a good point, but I think we have to be open to the idea that the people running the show are not rational, not intelligent, and perhaps even in the throes of hubris. Perhaps they have an exaggerated sense of their own capability and a mistaken belief in the power of their bombs and drones. Maybe they think they can defeat Iran easily, even if their generals tell them otherwise. And they believe that they need to clear the board before engaging with China, to pick off China’s potential allies ahead of time.

The only evidence I can give for this hypothesis is that they do seem to believe that by giving Ukraine an unlimited number of missiles, that Ukraine can expel Russia from its borders. That is without going into the absurd predictions being made at the onset of the war about Russia’s imminent total economic and industrial collapse. They have not (recently) proven themselves as being able to, uh, calculate.

Every day I wake to the news that Biden hasn’t yet contracted ebola and feel dispair.

That’s a good question. You are right that if we wanted to see the extent of Anne’s vapidity we could just read her book. Speaking for myself, I was never going to do that. While I’m sure most here figured her out a long time ago, seeing her talk at length like this was eye-opening to me at least. And probably the same for a lot of people whose only exposure to her is from the odd piece in the FT or whatever. Honestly, if someone wanted a primer on how and why western hegemony is failing, I think an hour of Anne Applebaum discussing her honestly held views is as good an explanation as any. In this respect, I prefer a guest like Anne Applebaum over a Mehdi Hassan if only because the former embodies the actual values of the state rather than the professed values represented by the latter. It really is something to behold the emperor without any clothes.

But, if it’s telling you something you already know, it IS pointless and counter-productive. There are people who will watch it and think, “Gosh, she’s right, Poland DID do well in its transition to neoliberalism and therefore the system is sound and was implemented with good intentions and Russia is just innately full of bad people who can’t succeed”. Is it acceptable to allow obvious falsehoods like that to be stated without any pushback? Ehhhh…

Bastani never asks tough questions, he just lets his guests speak at length. That’s his style. Applebaum is hard to take at such concentrated doses, but I do think it is an insightful glimpse into the diseased and delusional mind of the imperial elites.

But also, what if he had been a Muslim immigrant? That obviously wouldn’t justify anything that had happened. And so the race, religion and nationality of the attacker are entirely irrelevant.

I wonder why the government is having a difficult time signalling to its population that collective punishment is unacceptable…