zazen

@Raze Horrible. They need the media blackout to cover for what they’re doing. When does it become genocide? Isn’t Gaza currently under siege being starved? Is the West (who has the power to stop this) going to wait for Palestinians to die off slowly through malnutrition and untreated diseases? Does it even register to them what is happening? It seems that when they do, their only way of acknowledging this is by saying whoopsie, we should have done something sooner.

True, the meme logic isn’t technically correct but points at the general truth of it being crazy to fafo with a nation full of nukes.

Interesting and fiery discussion that shows the different perspectives on addressing inequality - which is a core issue of what’s going: Just see the comments and the general sentiment displayed - ironically on a YouTube channel of a entrepreneur named Diary of a CEO. The left generally view taxing the rich as the solution, the right generally view lowering taxes and de-regulation as the solution. As I said above, the issue is systemic and the solution from the left or right isn’t enough to solve it, but merely just tweaks things enough to hasten or slow the inevitable. The problem with taxing the rich is that they have ways to avoid (not evade) tax. And you incentivize them to incorporate in tax havens like Dubai, Singapore etc unless the world implements a global minimum tax rate to prevent it them fleeing to places to stash cash. The reason hustle culture even exists is symptomatic of a broken system. Most people don’t want to be, or aren’t event cut out to be a giga chad bio hacking entrepreneur living lavish in a tier 1 city.

Hopefully 🙏🏻

@integration journey What about the videos of Syrians being killed recently? Who were they and what’s the reason? Is it a extreme faction of HTS doing but that isn’t approved by the government?

@Hatfort Nice summary. Europe simply isn’t understanding Russias core concern. The idea that buffer states must pledge loyalty to one power or another like medieval vassals is a modern distortion, not the historical norm. For most of history, multiple power centers coexisted, and buffer nations functioned as neutral bridges rather than frontline battlegrounds. Not always peaceful, but there were times of peace where power centres knew their red lines. The reason that reality has been forgotten is that for the past two centuries, the world has been shaped by a succession of dominant unipolar hegemons - first the British, and now the US - both imposing a unipolar universalist mindset on world affairs. Under their paradigm, buffer states aren’t independent actors but must pick a side: either adversary or ally. Putin being the modern day Hitler ready to conquer Europe is the present day version of WMD in Iraq.

The accelerationists techno-optimists sold one side of the political aisle the supposed solution to the unsustainable system I outlined above. They know: 1. They no longer have a young enough demographic (demographic dividend) to fuel long term organic economic growth. 2. Their productivity isn’t increasing fast enough to offset the effects of financialization and debt accumulation. 3. The financialized economy is fundamentally unsustainable in the long run, and they need a way out before it collapses. So they want to buy some time and kick the can the can down the road long enough to reach a moment where productivity skyrocket (economic singularity) at which point they hope to use that productivity boom to sort out their debts and economic imbalances. Some of them believe that they should speed up the inevitable technological shift that will supposedly save them. But the way they are trying to get there is designed to benefit only corporations and the ownership class, not the working population. Because when capital no longer needs labour, how does labour gain capital? This is why Musk and his cohort discuss UBI as a solution to their techno feudalism. The irony is that their very base hung ho about liberty and freedom - and economic dependency is very much contrary to their own ideology. China will be able to implement what’s needed because they aren’t idealogical, but pragmatic. Their ideaology is whateverworkism. The techno accelerationist vision is essentially the next step of financialization- except instead of detaching capital from real economic productivity (as financialization did) it detaches productivity from human labor entirely. See the divergence between wages and productivity (that financialization consolidated) in the following chart: Notice when the divergence takes place - 1971. The moment Nixon unpegged the dollar from gold in 1971, financialization was born. That was the big bang of the modern casino economy. That’s when Wall Street and Main Street became two separate realities - introducing an economic apartheid. Notice also how the gap has increased despite the left or right political parties being in power. Once you sign up for this game it’s very hard to get out of it without collapsing the system. The only solution I see is a two pronged approach. 1. Stop the bleeding by stripping away reckless financial excesses that make the system unstable. 2. Seize control and decouple capital from politics and the state. Reorient capital toward serving the economy, not ruling it. This requires being strategic in regulations, it takes a surgeons scalpel not a chainsaw. Trump/Musk should be regulating financialization, speculation, monopolization, and capital flight. Instead, they’re just deregulating industry including financial class by slashing oversight, making it easier for capital to extract even more. It’s about regulating the right things and deregulating the right things. And that’s what they’re failing to do and what Americans will struggle to do due to being ideological rather than pragmatic. Interesting insights from Balaji:

The problem is structural - Trump/Musk are cutting the excesses of the system ie trimming the fat, but aren’t making the systemic changes that will keep the fat off ie dietary and lifestyle habits. They are basically shooting up ozempic, but not changing the root cause that made someone need it. The cause generally is financialization. A financialized system will always serve the financial class because that’s what financialization does. It detaches the economy from real productivity and labor, turning it into a machine that extracts value from workers and funnels it into the hands of asset holders. This is neo-feudalism in a suit and tie. The lords own the land, the assets, and the markets. The peasants work harder for less, trapped in an illusion of mobility while the ownership class pulls the strings. And that’s the problem with the so called populist uprising. Trump, Musk, and the deregulation crowd are right that change is needed - that regulation can throttle productivity, bureaucratic bloat stifles growth, and wages don’t keep up. But their solution doesn’t fix the disease. Deregulation may create more growth, but in a financialized system, that growth doesn’t go to the people who produce it. It gets siphoned off by the same mechanisms that created this mess in the first place. It’s a hamster wheel of exploitation. The distinction is: China HAS a financialized economy, the US IS a financialized economy. In China the state dictates, directs and checks capital - in the US, capital dictates, directs and capitalizes its influence on the state. Until this dynamic and relationship between the state and capital changes, nothing will improve for the everyday person. Cutting debt and expenses (DOGE) doesn’t change the fact that the system is designed to accumulate more debt, due to financialization. It only buys the unsustainable system some more time and breathing room, unless they are so aggressive in their policies as to cause a systemic collapse. The US and China have the ingredients of great powers (raw material, energy, population, industry and tech). In the past Europe had power from colonially extracting what it lacked from beyond its borders, in the present it remained somewhat powerful by being adjacent to a great power (US). The US and China have the ingredients it takes for a great power to exist, mainly within their borders. Russia does too but to a lesser extent (smaller and aging demographics) The flaw with MAGA is thinking that because you have these ingredients = you can be self sufficient = means you are powerful and prosperous. They think they can play the isolation game and come out strong. But no empire is great only due to its ingredients - but in how it uses them in strategic in engagement with the world. Then, it’s about how those gains are domestically used to develop their society, or misused and hoarded amongst the ruling class. Russia as an example engages with the world, with its main resource being energy - but they domestically mismanaged the gains from it due to corruption. Those gains haven’t translated to widespread upliftment of their people compared to how China has used its resources. The US likewise has mismanaged its gains because the system of financialization is designed that way. China is using the same engine (financialization) but without over-revving it. It has financialized aspects of its economy, but it isn’t fully financialized in that finance isn’t in the driving seat itself. Self sufficiency is for survival, but for powers to thrive they need engagement with the world - not the kind of isolation MAGA thinks will make them great.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/18/israel-gaza-live-blog-updates-air-strikes-strip-netanyahu-hamas Bibi deflecting from domestic issues. He seems to be lashing out while he’s still in power and before the country falls into civil unrest. Horrible behaviour from the terrorist state of Israel and the US.

The real economy runs on people and productivity, but the system we’ve got runs on printing and predation. The first two build civilisations and the real economy, last two grow financialized empires on the bones of the working class. The economy is supposed to be made of three P’s - people, productivity, and printing. But only the first two are real. The third is just the duct tape holding together a broken economy. Printing exists because growth doesn’t. But even when growth does happen, it doesn’t even go where it should - due to financialization, thus we have a divergence of Main Street (real economy) and Wall Street (financialized economy). Printing was originally meant to compensate for a lack of people or productivity. If a country had a shrinking workforce or stagnating innovation, monetary expansion could help bridge the gap temporarily by lowering borrowing costs, encouraging investment, and keeping the system running. But when the economy became financialized, printing took on a new role. Instead of being used to fuel real expansion, it became a siphoning mechanism - a way to extract economic gains away from the people actually producing them and toward those who control capital. Even when productivity grows, wages stay stagnant. When workers produce more due to innovations and efficiencies, their share of the economy shrinks. Why? Because financialization changed the way growth is distributed. Instead of rewarding workers with higher wages, corporations use productivity gains to increase profits - and those profits don’t get reinvested in the people who created them. They get funneled into stock buybacks, leveraged asset acquisitions, and financial engineering schemes that boost corporate valuations without actually producing anything new. Printing fuels that process. It doesn’t compensate workers but asset holders. When liquidity is injected, it doesn’t flow into wages or real economic growth but into financial markets. It inflates stock prices, real estate, and corporate assets, making the wealthy wealthier while doing nothing for the real economy. This is why there is a correlation of asset prices and stocks with the printing of money - fed intervention. MAGA and libertarians who believe de-regulation = growth, are partially right. Deregulation can unleash growth, but that growth isn’t distributed in a financialized economy. Deregulation allowed corporations to stop reinvesting in wages and start pumping up stock values instead. Buybacks, asset inflation, and debt leveraged acquisitions is the new growth model. This is why wages have stagnated while the economy has “expanded.” It’s not that growth isn’t happening but that all the benefits are getting funneled upward. And this is why the stock market will never fully collapse. It can dip and crash but it can’t be allowed to die. The system isn’t built on real economic activity anymore but on debt, collateralized against assets that must always go up. If asset prices fall too much, the credit markets seize up, and that’s game over. The financial system is a ponzi scheme in a bulletproof vest - its built to take a hit, but never to hit the ground. They can let stocks take a hit and let small holders take losses, while the big players scoop up assets on the cheap. But once asset prices get affected too much and credit markets freeze, the Fed will step in with liquidity to avoid systemic collapse.

Comments are telling of a vibe: Aussie think tank: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker “ Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains. China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas.1 The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). “

Trump and Putin talking today whilst European leaders meeting on Thursday to discuss putting peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.

Intergalactic saviour complex. He seems to care more about creating his own world than saving the one we all know. @aurum Nice rundown. DOGE should do the cost benefit on the whole endeavour. Imagine if Trump+Musk copy pasted the “wall” and made the Great Wall of peace between Russia and Ukraine, ushering in world peace. Prob better than thrusting a phallic shaped rocket into the dark and towards a uninhabitable rock lol

Interesting post on the Uigurs in China: https://x.com/rnaudbertrand/status/1900811094081630658?s=46&t=DuLUbFRQFGpB8oo7PwRglQ We’ve seen how extremist elements can behave such as Islamists in Syria recently. There were reports of Uighurs as part of the rebellion there also. So how should a country deal with extremism within its borders? It’s a very tricky problem to solve. The West thought it could bomb it’s way to peace, but it just bombed people into pieces. On the point of freedom, perhaps our definitions require distinctions to clarify that not all freedoms are equal - freedoms exist in relation to one another and some require constraint in order for more essential and fundamental freedoms to exists. What good are human rights if a human can’t exist to enjoy them? Because we didn’t care enough about stability or national security ie survival. The essential human right is to exist in the first place to experience further freedoms. - Existential freedoms = essential (ones required for survival, stability, security) - Fundamental freedoms = fairness (a just society with equality in front of the law) - Important freedoms = valuable but secondary (enhances life but isn’t crucial, like consumer choices or artful expression) Existential freedom enables life to exist, fundamental freedoms creates fairness in life, important freedoms enhance life. Enabling life to exist, is the pre-condition to having other freedoms that enhance the conditions of life. The problem in the West is that we mistake important freedoms for existential ones. When other groups or nations act to secure their existential freedom, we take it as an assault on our existential freedom even when it isn’t. It simply threatens convenience, influence, or our ideology and identity of exceptionalism and universalism. As we’re talking about China here’s the example: When China fortifies its own waters, securing its survival against a hostile US, it’s China that is labelled a existential threat..all the way in their waters in the South China Sea. Even though China is the one protecting their existential freedom (national security) while the US is just defending an important freedom (global navigation and influence). The abstraction of rules and laws (fundamental freedoms providing justice) doesn’t negate the reality of survival and security (existential freedoms) which causes one to break those abstractions in the first place.

Europe seems to be drawing up a plan to strengthen itself: Could be just what Europe needed to revive itself. Issue is how it will be financed, which hopefully isn’t anything close to what’s suggested:

Comments indicate a public sentiment that will only cause a further move to the political right. Welfare being spent on warfare / defence will only fuel this.

Just a shenanigan https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/democrats-are-demented-genocidal-war-sluts-4b1a44fd824d

Depending on what your friends definition of unfriendly is, he is right and wrong. Attacking another nation isn't justified just because they are unfriendly diplomatically or don't want to trade with you - it really becomes a problem when that nation becomes hostile to the point it threatens your security and survival - which the Western geopolitical encirclement of Russia was leading to. The abstractness of rules and laws don't negate the reality of survival and security, which causes one to break those rules (abstractions) in the first place. Neo-liberalism’s contradiction is that it denies the reality of survival and power dynamics while simultaneously weaponizing them under a moral veneer. Security and survival pressures will always override legal abstractions when a nation or group is pushed into a corner, just like Hamas doing what it did on October 7th. Imperial expansionism is a threat, whether it was the Soviets in the past or the West today. The issue is that many Westerners can't see it's actions against Russia as being imperialistic, or even China. They mistake the reactions to imperial expansionism for imperialism itself. The piercing question to ask is: who's approaching who's borders and waters? And is this entity (imperial power) coming with cookies and good faith? Or is there a clear track record of this entity globe trotting around the world aggressively intervening in other nations and regions - via coups, wars and economic strangulation in the form of sanctions. If this entity has been very clearly behaving as the latter, why would any one with a single brain cell trust this entity to be at its doorstep? Ukraine aligning with the West doesn't even have to be an issue. Would Ukraine aligning with China be one? The problem with the West is they demand exclusive alignment within a uni-polar framework. They force countries into a binary choice of ally or adversary, with us or against us. Neutrality is treated as hostility - which is why Russia's core demand for it is rejected. Countries are punished simply for pursuing independent policies that aren't exclusively aligned to the West. For example, Pakistan's neighbor Iran has one of the largest gas reserves in the world that could be a lifeline for its energy scarcity and development. Iran could be to Pakistan, what Russia was to Germany. But due to US sanctions and political pressure that Pakistan can't afford to bear, it’s been shelved and not pursued as it should have been for over a decade. A country with 250 million people in much need, can't even fulfill its needs linked to survival and security because that survival and security economically threatened from their luke warm alignment to the West. If Ukraine or Georgia had been allowed to exist as neutral buffer states, Russia wouldn’t have perceived them as a security risk. But the West insists on pulling them into its sphere - turning them into frontline states against Russia.

Musk weaponizing Starlink is the same as the West freezing Russian assets - it creates a precedent that destroys trust and accelerates the search for alternatives. This is what non-Western nations have been dealing with - a Western hegemony that has abused their position Trump, Musk and company seem to understand the importance of the dollar being a reserve currency (as Trump threatened BRICS) as it subsidizes US primacy. But they seem to have forgotten their payment for this privilege was providing security - the very security they’re using as a bargaining chip and not willing to provide. The only reason Musk is able to dictate terms so arrogantly comes from the very security infrastructure the US provides in exchange for dollar dominance - but that he and his boys are undermining.

A good hypothetical me and @Breakingthewall co-created lol. May help lubricate and fire up Westerners empathy neurons to help put yourselves in Russia's shoes, in order to at least understand, not condone Russia's action.

Threats don’t just come from military invasion - they can come from long term geopolitical encirclement, economic strangulation, and regime change efforts. Russia has watched for decades as the US and its allies toppled governments, launched wars, and used economic and military pressure to weaken adversaries - and this same machine is coming to its backyard, that's not paranoia but looking at history and the present situation with that history in mind. Should someone get a mortgage with bad credit? Should the US get to play encirclement and empire? This same machine / establishment blob has think tanks like RAND openly strategize about overextending Russia, pushing it into economic and military exhaustion. NATO expansion, which multiple US officials warned would provoke Russia, kept marching forward anyway. Every diplomatic off-ramp was ignored or rejected. Of course Biden and the West should support Ukraine in defense, the problem is why didn't Bidden or the West at least try go the diplomatic route and speak to Putin in the whole 3 years? Why not try to de-escalate. Escalation isn't just about what you do but refuse to do. Refusing diplomacy and continuing anti-Russia rhetoric is just as bad as escalating when the stakes are supposedly this high ie dealing with a nuclear power the size of Russia at Europe's doorstep. The West is shocked at Russia’s actions, but if you have a rabid dog in the neighborhood destroying gardens, and see it start to get closer to your own - are you expected to do nothing? It’s like poking a bear for years and acting surprised when it mauls you. That doesn’t justify the mauling - but it makes it predictable. The same logic applies to Hamas on October 7th. You can categorically condemn the attack while also recognizing that it didn’t happen in a vacuum. When people are pushed into desperate, impossible situations - a nation facing encirclement or a population under decades of military occupation - eventually, they lash out. That doesn’t make the response right, but it makes it understandable. The problem with the Western narrative is that it only looks at the reaction, never the provocation. And international law doesn't outlaw provocation, only the final reaction to it. Powerful nations can provoke indefinitely, but the moment their target finally reacts, they get to play the victim and rally the world against “aggression.” Provocation isn’t easily quantifiable. It’s not like a single violation you can point to; it’s cumulative, a gradual escalation of pressures, threats, and red lines being crossed over time. It’s death by a thousand cuts, and when the final reaction happens, it looks like the aggressor just snapped without cause. If international law actually wanted to prevent war, it wouldn’t just criminalize the reaction - it would criminalize the path that leads to war. Order can't just be about punishing those who break the rules, but stopping those who engineer the conditions that make rule breaking inevitable. The irony of saying ''Putin is just paranoid of his own corrupt system collapsing'' is that its the West that can't stand any other system existing and challenging its own. They can't stand power sharing and multi-polarity - they feel entitled to being the head of the table, not just merely having a seat at it. Why do we think Donald is threatening the BRICS countries to not create a rival currency? If a country dares to challenge the US dollar, it gets bombed into the stone age - meanwhile the people of that country are painted as barbarics who need civilizing, while the West is the one approaching them with the stone age mentality of might makes right. If a country tries socialism, it gets sanctioned, destabilized, or outright invaded. If a country nationalizes its resources, it gets overthrown. The largest vulture fund BlackRock literally calls ''resource nationalism'' a threat. Even the UK government website does - ''Resource nationalism is defined as anti-competitive behavior designed to restrict the international supply of a natural resource.'' https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/resource-nationalism - imagine that, people wanting their own resources beneath their feet. If a country wants to remain neutral, it gets pressured, bullied, and coerced into picking a side - like Ukraine for example. The idea is that anyone's freedom anywhere, is a threat to the Wests supremacy everywhere. This is the characteristic attitude of Western imperialism, that gets a cosmetic change when Trump walks in after Biden, but no fundamental change. In this superior system, democracy is supported by forceful un-democratic practices abroad and domestic quality of life is subsidized by disqualifying others from using any other currency. Maintaining the privilege of the dollar as the world reserve currency allows them to print money, export inflation, run endless deficits and sanction ''adversaries''. Maybe Russia should try adopt this system too..creating and sustaining a global war economy, using think tanks and policy manipulation to ensure constant war, and systematically destabilizing entire regions for strategic control. This system isn’t self-sustaining or universally superior. It works for the US because it makes sure it doesn’t work for others. It's success is built on its ability to impose itself on others - often at their expense. This is a system that very much doesn't work for many nations because they are on the receiving end of it, not the benefactors of it - which is why they seek alternatives like BRICS. The thing with Western imperialism is that it's not a series of isolated mistakes, or a occasional lapse into brutality - it's a continuous, characteristic, and catastrophic system of domination that no other nation or civilization has ever matched or could even hope to replicate. Other countries commit wrongs, but their wrongs are events that happen in response to crises, conflicts, or shifts in power. Western wrongs are not events - they're just the backdrop against which the modern world operates. The wrongs of China, Russia, or other powers are events bound to specific historical contexts. The wrongs of the West are structural in that this is the civilizational modus operandi.