What this has to do with the utterly stupid statement that

Biden and other Western leaders understand that there's no appetite for a decades long war in order just to keep Russia bleeding. — ssu

Is beyond me. Again, still the stupidest statement in this entire 228 page thread. Maybe second only to "NATO is a defensive alliance".

I cannot imagine how stupid one has to be to argue that the US does not have the 'appetite' for more war. They don't not just have an 'appetite'. They have a god damn hunger for it.

First, that's not true. They love asset price inflation. In fact have been running the economy off it. Second, yes, they will generally kill to keep other kinds of inflation down, except their monetary lever is now completely broken - unlike it was in the 70s - and the US is a dying Empire so will do what it takes to prioritize its global reach over what is still seen as short term pain. The fact is, if it comes down to either creating more dead Ukrainians, or keeping inflation down, the US right now will choose - and is choosing - the creation of more dead Ukrainians.

I'll take $33b worth of weapons over your rando opinion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/opinion/biden-ukraine-leaks.html

Even Thomas Friedman, who basically cums every time a non-American dies overseas, is worried about American interventionism in Ukraine.

Sure. But the US has priorities, and one of them is keeping dead Ukrainians dead for their geostrategic peace of mind.

It's causing inflation. That's not good. — frank

Which will be paid for by rate hikes which disproportionately affect the poor. And companies love inflation. They get to price gouge, more.

Biden and other Western leaders understand that there's no appetite for a decades long war in order just to keep Russia bleeding. — ssu

Lmao. What it is like to have been born yesterday? With people like you who cheerlead for the US and run interference for any hint of criticism, they could run this war down to the last Ukrainian and people like you - and Olivier - would still be donning the pom-poms until they take their last breath. They've just conducted the world's most successful propaganda campaign to make people believe they give any shit about Ukraine at all beyond it's capacity to be a bleeding wound for Russia and you think they 'don't have the appetite' to keep this going? Hilarious.

The West is perfectly fine with interminable wars. They are fine with the infinite debasement of Palestinians. they are fine with infinite genocide in Yemen. They are more than happy to let Iraq continue to fester. In fact, they support and actively help all of these things. This is the dumbest, most stupid thing to have been said in this thread yet. The US is on record as wanting to give Russia 'it's own Afghanistan' in Ukraine. It will joyfully let Russia bleed there, along with the Ukrainians upon whom that blood will fall.

Dead Ukrainians are the best thing to have happened to the US on the foreign policy front since planes plowed through its buildings twenty years ago.

I'm well aware.

Seems like a dumb article.

US foreign policy is remarkably consistent: expand the reach of markets for the US, open up new regional zones to capital, destroy or hamper any emerging rival economic systems. Occasionally directly extract resources from a place with America's absurd imperial might, which is not in any way diminished. And the political class, as a whole, could not be more unquestioningly aboard this agenda. Even while idiots got duped that Trump was playing nice with Russia, he never stopped imposing sanctions on it up the wazoo.

But of course, blame the fact that the US is not more culturally homogeneous. What a shit article.

It's kind of a weird thought experiment because it says nothing about the only thing that really matters when thinking about this kind of thing: relations of power. It imagines that 'everything is a service'. Well, services are provided. By who? And what is the relation between these service providers and those who utilize them? It speaks of Robots and AI taking over work, algorithms making decisions, and free deliveries being made efficiently. Who designed and programmed all this, and who is making these deliveries? Who maintains them? Who controls access to them? These are the only things that matter.

Ironically, the story reads to me like the end point of capitalism: the deprivation of ownership recalls the platformization of everything: our phones, movies, music, exercise machines, and so on. More and more we don't own any of this stuff, we 'subscribe' to them, or else have no effective say, rights over repair or modification (any Apple product, some cars). Privacy, well, we know who is destroying the barriers of privacy brick by brick.

So yeah, the whole thing is weird. A kind of techno-utopian dream that sets aside power and social relations. It's a liberal-captialist fantasy.

Your literacy isn't my problem. As you were.

I don't expect NATO to do anything. Was just pointing out your falsehood.

"If slavery is so evil you should enslave your own population to fight back against slavery".

The tens of thousands of dead people in Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia, and Afganistan would disagree with this little piece of blatant untruth.

Says the rapist apologist.

I didn't say that, nor was that implied by anything I did say.

But of course they are.

Any third-rate Euro-perpipheral nothing-burger state like Sweden or Finland pretty much always is.

Catching up on a bunch of Deleuze readings, and other things:

Craig Lundy - History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity
Jay Lampert - Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History
Claire Colebrook - Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
Peter Hallward - Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
Daniel Barber - Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence
Roland Barthes - S/Z
Edmund Husserl - Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
Michael Parenti - The Face of Imperialism
Michael Parenti - Against Empire

What did you think of Smith and Suwandi?

Metaphysical Animals, C.M. Cumhaill & R. Wiseman — 180 Proof

I have heard good things about this.

One day you will stop making relaying excuses for people who are actively trying to fuck you over, and you will feel much better.

Dems don't this, dems can't that. Dems do have excuses for decades of failures and right wing cheerleading.

These kinds of excuses are simply covers for their complete and willing complicity.

If they do nothing they are not fucked in 2024 because they only exist to run interference for their co-rulers in the Republican party.

Bu bu bu bu but UkRaNian 'AgEnCy'.

Ukrainians are pawns who get to die so the US can win their geostrategic fight against Russia.

Or, in case any one has an attention span that lasts more than a couple of minutes:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-lend-lease-act-ukraine-1941-second-world-war

Or else in the New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ukraine-is-now-americas-war-too

The privatization of exploitation is the only thing libertarians care about. They don't want anyone to get in the way of their exploitation.

Yeah I laughed out loud at that one.

Can't wait till the dems do literally nothing about this so they can use the subjection of women as a campaign opportunity.

Every time this NOS wanker pretends to be anti-statist, it pays to remember that he will defend state action until his dying breath so long as that state is headed by his favourite billionare rapist.

He's about as anti-statist as a pair of horse balls.

"It's all Putin's fault" is "nuanced" — Isaac

You wouldn't get it it's too sophisticated for you. I know a couple of bright 5 year olds who think this way though.

I'm being facetious.

Any conversation that doesn't involve simply putting a women in charge of her own body is not to be taken seriously.

Sounds like abdication of responsibility to me.

I can agree with that. Every male child that turns 12 gets a compulsory tube-tie, and if they refuse they face whatever penalties it is misogynists are so keen to impose on women. Jail terms, fines, the lot.

Lula also wants to break free from US dollar hegemony, which is of course the exact rational response to the American abuse of power:

https://multipolarista.com/2022/05/04/brazil-lula-latin-america-currency-us-dollar/

Which means of course, that there will be a coup attempt backed by the US relatively soon after he wins power, if he does.

And this follows China's recent meeting to look into how to detach from the USD as well:

https://www.ft.com/content/45d5fcac-3e6d-420a-ac78-4b439e24b5de

This is the price the US is paying for its renewed transatlantic brotherliness: the fracturing of it's global hegemony. Good news.

--

Also I will never stop laughing at @Christoffer's insistence that everything is 'really nuanced and subtle', which apparently means: NATO and the US are entirely blameless and the only agent which must be punished is Russia and literally anything else means you are an agent of Putin. It's so gloriously stupid.

Nah, I don't think it's Trumpism — Cuthbert

NOS is a die-hard Trumpist. He exists to apologize for him and people like him and nothing more.

@T Clark

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-05/victorian-liberal-bernie-finn-praying-for-abortion-ban/101041168

Additional reasons why American bullshit infects the rest of the world.

For the hundredth time: they OWN THE STATE. — Xtrix

:up:

Those who whine about the state without having anything to say about who controls the state - who will remain when it is abolished - simply want direct, unmediated, overlordship by capitalist rulers. Which not even capitalists want. The state doing their dirty work is good for them. Which is why dupes like NOS are nothing more than tools employed to abolish just those parts of the state the wealthy find most inconvenient, and nothing more. Hence his hilarious dick sucking for alleged billionares like Trump even as he pretends to be anti-statist.

It's quite simple. Insofar as men are 100% responsible for all pregnancies, if a woman falls pregnant and carries to term, the man takes 100% responsibility for the child.

The abortion debate would stop tomorrow.

--

To be fair the murdering is a choice. The mother's choice, specifically. If one is going to be linguistically blackmailed by misogynists, then one tidy solution is to grasp the nettle rather than debate this shit on their terms. Abortion is murder? Fine. But perfectly good murder.

5 pages and no mention of women simply being in charge of their own bodies. Murder all the preborn children. It doesn't and shouldn't matter one bit.

There is no state in the US where overturning Roe has more than 30% support so everything Frank has said over the last two pages is just muck.

And to assert that Americans have a commitment to democracy is laughable trash. Americans have a commitment to being selfish pieces of shit regardless of what the demos might say.

Republican party: plans a coordinated assault on abortion rights for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars with of funding and organization at the highest levels of power.

Democratic party: completely fucking useless and exist only to ensure that there is no left challenge to corporate power, and otherwise happy to advance Republican politics as their own, only with a few more rainbow flags.

Voting and political activism in general: completely de-fanged and also largely useless.

Population at large: supports Roe.

I-Am-Very-Smart Person: "This is the people's fault".

RBG was a spineless coward who, unwilling to abdicate power so as to cling on to it until the last possible moment, condemned women to ever more entrenched misery. She is of course not the only spineless coward among liberal heroes, but she was one nevertheless.

life-long public servant, — 180 Proof

Too long, as it has turned out.

In any case it is true that it is unfair to pin this on a single judge, least it be unclear that the supreme court in general has always been an anti-democratic guarantor of capitalist propagation and should probably be torn down brick by brick anyway.

One hopes, skeptically, that this will physically happen in the next month or so.

Anyway this is why Jan 6 was never, ever a problem except for the fact that the wrong people were doing it.