Let’s start with the biggest, most momentous update of all. The BRICS summit, which has just ended, ended up in ways surpassing my expectations. The official acceptance of 6 new members was announced, which is more than a doubling of the current size of the BRICS:
Javier Milei seems to be another charismatic bigot. If he doesn't win, then Brazil and Argentina's strengthening ties would interlock with BRICS.
I despise how homophobia has become normalised in support of conservatism which, in turn, is associated with Trump, Putin etc. Extreme reaction to the Democrat's extremities is two wrongs, and not the kind that sums up as right. I'm interested in a multipolar world, not a bipolar one.
Interestingly on that note, Putin in an interview where he was pressed on Russia's putatively "repressive" anti-gay laws, pointed out how the U.S. still has 4 states which have anti-sodomy laws technically making homosexuality illegal, while Russia has no such laws, which means Russia is technically more accepting of homosexuality than the U.S. Of course a supreme court decision has allegedly made those U.S. laws 'unenforceable' but they still remain on the books in those states.
Further, Russia has under 100 anti-gay hate crimes per year while the U.S. has something like 4000-5000, as per official statistics I once researched from each country.
With that said, as I wrote about in a previous report, the whole point of BRICS is to show that multipolarity can sustain multiple pluralities of thought/expression/culture without one "sovereign" dominating them all in the way the U.S. tries to do with its cultural hegemony and enforced repressive culture rules, whether it's on the issues of homosexuality or something else.
In the greater context, reading thousands of articles and more comments, there's this hate vibe which I hope will be removed from the 'alt community'. I don't like people jumping on the bandwagon of bigger geopolitical issues (such as getting rid of NATO). It's akin to Christians thinking that a God who is out of space and time gives a damn when they jerk off to their teacher.
This 'homophobia' as you call it, has been almost 100 % caused by the LGBT movement on their own in last 20 or so years ; before that, nobody cared if you are gay , bi, or what ever. Until LGBT community started forcibly pushing their sex life in our everyday life.
When they started marching every week in the pride marches first with their ass hanging out, and escalating from there to todays disgusting drag performances where genitals are being literally rubbed into underage kids faces, no wonder it creates a backlash.
I still dont care what you do INSIDE YOUR OWN HOME , be gay , trans , or wear furs for all i care, but do not parade your genitals in the main street or force kids to see perverted drag shows.
If opposing people marching constantly at some public venue in sex attire half naked or dangling genitals in front of underage children in 'drag shows' is 'homophobia' , then yes, i'm homophobic...
Well i have been exposed to trannies since the late 70's. They were street walkers in Denver east of the capitol along with the hookers. Everyone was poor nobody cared.
However some lived in the same rat hole as myself and 2 roommates. they used to come down and drink beer. i would say that they are mentally confused individuals. I don't care what they do. Don't expect me to embrace embrace them...
By the way there was a world famous clinic in the southern Colorado town of Trinidad with a general hospital built in the 70's by a doctor after the city agreed to his preforming sex change operations there.
"This 'homophobia' as you call it, has been almost 100 % caused by the LGBT movement on their own in last 20 or so years ; before that, nobody cared if you are gay , bi, or whatever."
I haven't noticed any increase in street level homophobia or homophobia in my family. If anything it lessened over the period and to tell the truth, my more liberal family members are pretty insufferable in how pro-LGBTQIWTF they are. Plus it's all a bit fake. It's more like, "Hey, nobody cares! So don't mention it or bring it up!" LOL not real ok with it.
I'm not so sure that is true. As a straight man, I thank my lucky stars I didn't get wired up gay. That sounds like a nightmare to me. If you pointed a loaded gun at me and said have gay sex or we will shoot you, I would say pull the damned trigger.
For one thing, every one of my friends would probably abandon me were I to turn up gay. Not that I blame them! I grew up in the 1970's, and the straight community was pretty damn homophobic. The 80's were not much different.
I'm in the unfortunate position of being one of those straight men who is at times mistaken for being gay, bisexual, formerly gay, etc. Usually women opt for the last two because any woman has this figured out way better than a man, that is, they're figured out which men like women, and they know those guys aren't gay. Men are much stupider in that regard.
This crap started in high school just a bit, but it got a lot worse in the early 80's and on. I experienced quite a bit of homophobia, so I know how it feels. It's probably one of the worst feelings I've ever experienced. It terrifies you to your very bones. And I got it from all sorts of people, liberal, conservative, you name it. Straight women are some of the wildest homophobes of them all. I never saw this "no one cares" era. I don't think it's true even know, except these young folks ARE different.
I know a couple of gay people and they both say that here in Scotland they felt far more accepted back in the 90's than they do now and they absolutely blame that reduction in acceptance on pride parades where guys go shoving their nearly bare asses in children's faces. As another gay guy on line said in a comment a while back "We spent decades telling heterosexual people that we were just like them and then along came those pride marches where they do things that no decent person would ever do no matter what their sexuality was so these people are screaming out that no we are not at all like you." And the trans crowd that are absolutely grooming very young children are now busily destroying even that reduced level of acceptance.
Why do you call queers 'gay'. Every queer I have ever met has been a wretched miserable creature. Call them what they are. The new age lot are absolute scum, I used to tolerate queers as what they did behind closed doors is none of my business but when as a collective they started to ruin my language and then brainwash children the gloves are off.
I am homo odi and tranny contemptus. I now hate the scum.
Thank you for this. People make a lot of assertions. If I'm not certain I agree with the assertion, I ask for evidence. Which you just provided. Kudos!
It is quite interesting that some report that acceptance of gays has declined in the last two decades.
Spot on. The aggressive actions - especially the attempts at recruitment in schools - have created a lot of animosity towards the homosexual movements. Most homosexuals I know are against this militant propagandizing.
100% agree! Russians don’t really care how adults( only), spend they time in bedroom and don’t think it’s necessary to parade about it. It’s very simple adults view. Thank you for great article, as always!
People always defect, its just MSM blowing it up into something bigger so that they don't have to talk about Ukrainian dead. If there's any further depth, I'm sure Simplicius will discuss it.
I am amazed at the length of this discussion of homophobia. The war is not about the Ukraine; the war is not about homophobia, is it? It doesn't have to be if we don't make it that. Racism is also at an all time low, pretty much because of sports so white men have black heroes. They are trying to create a dialectic to fight for when there really isn't one there. It's just a bunch of whining designed by the Wachowskis Brothers and Pelosi.
"I despise how homophobia has become normalised in support of conservatism which, in turn, is associated with Trump, Putin etc."
LOL when have conservatives not been homophobic? Never. There's nothing new here.
Actually it is not so bad in Russia as you think.
I've read about homosexuality in Russia. Not as bad as you think. For instance, gay men were barred from the army. Around 2012, they got rid of it because too many straight men were claiming to be gay to get out of service. Now all Russian gay men serve in the army. But the army is crazy homophobic. Gay Russian men drafted into the army just keep their mouths shut, and they do all right. If they announce they're gay, they're in a world of hurt.
Yes, Russia is a homophobic society. Putin has to deal with that!
But so is Ukraine. So is Poland, Hungary, Latvia, on and on. LOTS of East European societies are homophobic. They're just very socially conservative is all. The pro-West and anti-West East European societies are both homophobic.
Incidentally, all of those Muslim and Arab states we all root for like Iran are pretty damned homophobic too. Pro-Western? Anti-Western? It matters not.
Russian society is very bad for young gays and lesbians due to the new law. They don't get the help they need at all.
On Quora someone asked about homosexuality in Russia. A number of Russians responded that if you simply never discuss it, nobody much cared. Russian gay men said much the same thing. They just keep it on the down low. They said everyone knew and no one cared as long as they didn't talk about it. St. Petersburg and Moscow are full of gay bars, and nobody much bothers them to my knowledge.
The arts in Russia are full of gays and always have been. It's a cliche in Russian society.
In fact there is a joke that a man goes to the doctor and says he thinks he's a homosexual. The doctor smiles and asks,
Well, are you an actor?
No.
Are you a dancer?
No.
Are you a singer?
No.
Are you a classical musician?
No.
Doctor keeps his smile the whole time.
What are you?
I'm an electrician.
"Well then!" says the doc angrily. "You're not a homosexual, you're a Goddamned faggot!"
Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are homophobic, although the laws may speak otherwise. That's just the nature of Latin American hypermasculine culture. The pro-Western and anti-Western societies are both homophobic, though the latter may have better laws.
Africa? We're all rooting for Black Africa now, right? Well, guess what? Black Africa is crazy homophobic! Probably among the worst on Earth. But we're for them, right? The pro-US Black African societies are homophobic. The anti-US Black African societies are homophobic.
Words don't mean what they literally mean. They mean whatever the people who use them think they mean. However they are used, that is what they mean, in other words. Pot smokers got "paranoid." It was generally just "panic," not actual paranoia. Antisemites are those who hate Jews, not those who hate all Semitic-speaking people. Homophobes are those who hate, dislike homosexuals, not just those who are afraid of them, though a lot of homophobes are also frightened of gay men. Not that I blame them!
I found them to be quite scary, and the idea of me being gay to be terrifying.
Lucky me, I didn't get wired up that way, though on the other hand, it's almost impossible for me to predict how I would have reacted to that because had I been wired up gay, I literally wouldn't even be me! I would have been someone else my whole life.
So what I'm saying is that with my upbringing as a pre-straight masculine boy and straight man, the idea of me being gay is terrifying indeed. But had I grown up an effeminate boy who got raging hardons over men and was bored to tears or grossed out by chicks, there's no saying how I would have handled it. Perhaps I would have cruised it well.
Most of these hypotheticals are like that. We ask someone, "How would you like it if (this alternative reality to the one you had) had occurred!?" It's like asking someone, "What if you were a Martian?" You can't really answer it unless you experienced it.
"Gay Russian men drafted into the army just keep their mouths shut and they do all right. If they announce they're gay, they're in a world of hurt."
Up until 2011 the US military had the "don't ask don't tell" policy. In the military, even more so than in regular society, people should keep their sexual preferences to themselves. Most straight people don't go around telling everyone, or worse yet demonstrating to kids the delights of vanilla or bdsm sex. Some things you just keep to yourself and only share with your intimate partner(s), yet there's a top-down push to turn everything private, taboo, or sacred into a public display of obscenity and profanity. This is not a natural development, but plenty of damaged, confused or misguided people fall for it and go along with the depravity.
Ok, I'm not seeing the bigotry of Milei. Where is it? Clue me.
Of course he's completely anti-human because he's a Libertarian, but so is Simplicius and a lot of his commenters with their incoherent politics.
Mike, you're a rather conservative fellow yourself. What can I say, my man? You lie down with conservative dogs, you wake up with anti-human and homophobic fleas.
there is going to be an extreme reaction to the attempt to undermine the US judicial system to make it a tool of despotism. As for homophobia, perhaps some people would rather not have other people's sexual issues thrown in their faces day after day or dragged into our public schools to influence our kids. There is already too much sexuality in every aspect of American life and it is pushed by "celebrities" and the entertainment industry. I for one do not want a government telling me how I should view anything at all. That's my call as long as it is in my mind and not pushing the other guys' minds around.
Although stereotypes do exist, for a reason, it is worth noting how the social engineering cast has managed to reduce many peoples views of society in two, very narrow and limiting structural frameworks
It is not clear that this is "social engineering" so much as typical "winner take all" dynamics.
"Winner Take All" dynamics are why you always end up with 2 sides in such scenarios because the population winds up splitting into the 2 most powerful messages. The idiocy of the Democrat party today is shifting from Working Class Champions as its previous generation core message to "Diversity" - thus alienating its original power base in favor of its new PMC supplemented by the African Americans.
These morons fail to understand that Bill Clinton doing this was fine because the Democrats were still. more or less, able to count on the working class for support due to historical reasons but that ongoing betrayal of working class interests in favor of their new PMC/bankster/MIC donors was going to lead to erosion of its base. Note this affected the dinosaur Republicans as well: a significant number of PMC/bankster/MIC types switched over; the idiocy of the dinosaur Republicans is that they fail to understand that the role of Working Class Champion is there for the taking.
RFK Jr is trying to bring the Democrats back to their roots, but he is going to fail just as Sanders and Gabbard failed, and for exactly the same reasons (DNCC fuckery).
Exactly right - except the feudal lords of yore knew their power basis rested on force whereas the neofeudal wannabes believe that control over law, major companies, media and the federal/state/local bureaucracies can substitute.
American Republican Party is slowly waking up. With the Left going hard onto the “working class people are homophobic, illiterate scum whom I would never associate with” side, the Republicans are moving to fill the vacuum. Republicans are now the ones who think the FBI and CIA are crooked and should be investigated. Republicans are the ones questioning why we need to be at war with the rest of the damn world all the time. If they could only find a leader without the infinite baggage of their current one...
Yes, it is pretty ironic that the ideological space that used to be occupied by liberal Progressives is now where many conservatives are at.
As for the leader with baggage: agreed but it is also very clear that there is no one else willing to confront the MICIMATT with anywhere near the reach and standing of "45".
DeSantis has demonstrated that he is, at best, lacking in conviction (his Ukraine about face). Pence and Haley and Christie are dinosaur Republicans/neocons. Vivek is more than a little naive on international politics and is clearly angling for a cabinet post under a Republican president a la Andrew Yang.
Yes, it is pretty ironic that the ideological space that used to be occupied by liberal Progressives is now where many conservatives are at.
Except they're not pro-working class. I don't think they can ever be pro-worker. If they were, they wouldn't be Republicans anymore. The whole party would have to change its very orientation.
Good luck ever getting the Republican Party to be a pro-working class party. It is written in the very genes of the party that they are pro-rich, pro-business and anti-working class. Class struggle is a thing. Class consciousness is a think. Class interests are a thing. Have you guys even read one page of Marx? He used to be mandatory reading in Economics classes.
But also agree that activist gays brought on the problems. I remember being appalled when they forcibly turned Boston's St Patrick's Day parade, a clearly family style event, into a Gay Pride event. That, to me, was the start of craziness.
MESSING WITH CHILDREN WAS TANTAMOUNT TO A DECLARATION OF WAR.
I don't care what consenting adults do in privacy. I don't want anyone's sexuality shoved in my face. Goes for tv & movies too.
And they have zero business in education. NONE. NADA. NYET.
I work as a private tutor in a local school and have seen this menace develop in real time over the last few years. With a new head teacher there is now "Gay Pride" month and teachers whom I once respected running bake sales to raise money for "oppressed gays" in Africa - all in full view of junior school kids. This and transgenderism is also woven into every topic - even design and chemistry. It's demonic.
I follow Jeff Childer's substack. It seems every other stack includes arrest news about gays teaching "how to" have gay sex to teens & children, drag queen story hours at libraries, Florida's legal battles to protect children eg woke Disney grooming children, etc.
These days, you always have to define your terms. What do we mean by "homophobia"? If it's being violent and directly insulting to homosexuals, then that is wrong. If it is like me, fighting to make sure that my kids are not exposed to sexual perversion propaganda at school, then, sorry, that is not homophobia.
The “-phobia” suffix is overused to the point of being useless. Opposing genital mutilation for teenagers is not “transphobia”. It’s become a shorthand for “any opposition to any part of our increasingly aggressive and transgressive agenda”. Letting the “T” component get their skin in the game was a mistake. We’re no longer defending what two male accountants do when they are alone together. You’re “phobic” if you don’t want drag queens reading explicit books to third graders.
Exactly. It's a standard tactic of the Left to pin a label on you if you speak out. Just like you are "far right" if you believe that national borders should be guarded and criminals punished.
You are a reactionary, but I am so desperate nowadays that I will ally with on the stuff we agree on at least - Russia, BRICS, US imperialism, the Cultural Left Freakshow, etc. You need to grab every friend you can in life.
We just don't have good "mis-" words for hatred of homosexuals, Muslims, transsexuals. "Mis-" is used for hatred of men or women. Others are just -ists: sexist, racist. So they went to "phobia," which in this case means hatred. It's not completely crazy because fear and aggression (hatred) are often linked.
I've seen lots of men who do. I used to be pretty afraid of them myself, especially large groups of them or whole neighborhoods full of them. I don't feel that way anymore, but I am still not comfortable seeing vast crowds of them in city neighborhoods. I lived in a neighborhood like that once. It's Bizarro Land, like a foreign planet.
The feeling you get as an 18 year old cabbie when you’re offered a glass of wine at the door of a house party while every single man in the room is studiously not looking in your direction.
It’s not fear exactly but a sense that to a certain subset of them you are prey.
JIM G may have said it best with: "I am amazed at the length of this discussion of homophobia." That length proves what I was worried about.
I'd meant to return sooner but only have a Midnight data bundle. Waking at 1.30am and trying to read a gazillion pages and post before 7am has been challenging. But that's good because I've lost my initial reactionary desire here. It's been replaced with disappointment.
Beyond homophobia, and considering history, doubt is a better tool than blind support (because advertising makes someone look like your guy). Milei is using people's conservative anger to fuel his ambition and his corporate supporters. If you support neoliberalism and the dollar, then supporting Milei makes sense e.g. https://www.desmog.com/2023/08/22/javier-milei-argentina-atlas-network/
I'm taking a break from commenting everywhere for a month. Going to focus on research and then some writing. Be well. And may this war end soon!
You're right he's in the libertarian party but has been "characterized" as far right due to what's perceived as dogwhistling or toting a lot of the known "far-right" lines:
"Milei's political positions have sparked controversy and confusion.[24][27] Controversial were his opposition to abortion in rape cases,[28] his rejection of the inclusion of comprehensive sex education in schools,[29] skepticism towards COVID-19 vaccines,[24] civilian firearm ownership support,[30][31] legalization of organ trade,[32] promotion of the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,[33][34] and climate change denialism.[35] Due to those controversies and his radical conservative economic and social policies,[24][36] his victory in the primaries was deemed an upset,[37] and led to his characterization as a far-right populist."
Perhaps he's "right" culturally but libertarian economically/politically?
Yeah this is interesting. I always wondered why Communists hated liberals. Now I get it! Death squads and gay bars! Fascist coups and puberty blockers! Nazis and drag queen story hour!
It's like they combine the worst of the Right with the worst of the Left.
The KPD never forgave the SPD for allying with the Freikorps to suppress the Spartacist revolt and murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Something that liberals are apt to forget when they blame the KPD for being too slow to form an anti-nazi front in the early 1930s. They also forget that the Weimar Republic was assassinated in 1930, the coalition including the NSDAP in 1933 was to prevent its corpse twitching, not to bury it.
"Sparked controversy" is one of those new Woke weasel phrases. It just means the editorial team of the big Lefty papers and a few blue-haired feminists are angry.
The term "far-right" is used by the oligarchs that rule Western Europe and the Anglo world to describe anyone they do not like. If you are opposed to these oligarchs, which I assume that you are, it is probably best not to use the terms of approbrium that they have invented to describe anyone who challenges their power.
Milei is not "far right" in any sense that has meaning. Likewise, he does not have "radical conservative economic and social policies" in any sense that has meaning. He is, what we would call in the modern world a "libertarian" and he shares the political ideology of the founding fathers of the U.S. and the South American republics, which was known, at that time, as "liberalism." "Conservatism," of course, referred to monarchists.
Of course, the meaning of these terms have evolved over time. But any serious definition of "conservative" now would include an emphasis on nationalism, a desire to use the state to preserve cultural norms and morals, and an emphasis on a strong national defense. Milei is interested in none of these things.
Anyone who disagrees with the American Democratic Party on any issue is automatically labeled “Far Right”. There is no middle ground. If you believe that the CIA is a shady organization that might not be trustworthy, you are far right. If you think the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not completely trustworthy and looking out for your interests, you are Far Right. If you don’t believe that the 2016 presidential election was stolen from Hillary via Russian Interference, you are clearly Far Right and should be considered “Putin’s Puppet”.
That's not correct at all. We call lots of people Centrists. Including Joe Biden!
"If you believe that the CIA is a shady organization that might not be trustworthy, you are far right"
Gong! Never mind the Far Left has been saying this for 60 years now.
"If you think the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not completely trustworthy and looking out for your interests, you are Far Right."
LOT of people on the Left don't like cops much period. And personally, I think "feds" as above, are the lowest cops of them all.
"If you don’t believe that the 2016 presidential election was stolen from Hillary via Russian Interference, you are clearly Far Right and should be considered “Putin’s Puppet”."
Most people on the Left say that's BS. You are conflating "Democratic Party partisan idiots" with "the Left."
You are correct that the Democratic Party now LOVES the CIA and especially the feds at the FBI, and it's an article of faith among them that "Russia stole the election" LOL.
This Right, Left, Far Right , Far Left, Democrap, Repugnicant, what wrestling team you cheer for duoply, Unity party, needs to stop among the Citizenery. All it does is divide us against each other on very narrow issues rather than unite us on broad issues like, after 32 trillion Dollars or a hundred thousand Dollar per capita, what do we have to show from all this debt? Does everyone own a home in America? How about busting up other countries instead of building ours? 100 billion to Ukraine and a one time $700 payment for those who's homes burned on Maui. How about Food Inc. and being poisoned by corn syrup and GMOs? How about Big Pharma and their perpetual vaccines aided by bio labs in Ukraine and other places? How about we keep paying the Renters in our own dilapidated country and yet, never have enough money to go to work fixing it?
Stop this girlyman bullshit, wake the fuck up and man up. Don't you get it, you are renting your own country out.
We Americans are pulling ourselves down and the world with us.
I am afraid, we have to hit rock bottom, before we can push up to the water's surface. The question is, will we have enough air to breath again at the surface? Will we have enough men, not just males, to do the heavy lifting. May God help all of Mankind.
Dismantling your state in order to put those functions under control of another state is hardly "libertarian".
And that's pretty much what dollarizing and privatizing would result in. Your monetary policy would be controlled by the Fed and your business by foreign (likely US) owners.
Many observers underestimate the extent to which the Argentinian public (esp. middle and upper classes) has already dollarized. The state is late to the party.
But I agree with your central point, which is that abdicating responsibility for monetary supply - outsourcing it to the US - would leave the central bank without some fundamental tools and there's no guarantee that US monetary policy would coincide with the needs of Argentina. Proposing dollarization would have been a fabulous idea thirty years ago, to be fair, but at this point it's foolishly risky.
In the larger perspective I completely agree. A mature country issues its own currency and controls its economic destiny. That said, Argentina has been, in your words, in a "shit situation" for a few decades now, with a perpetually plummeting currency and an incompetent central bank. That's why those with means have dollarized already, and that's why the dollarization idea isn't considered fringe or extreme. For all practical purposes, it's already happened.
As a european I can tell you that Greece brought about its own downfall. When these countries joined the EU, they immediately plowed an absolute load of money into building new highways, hotels etc, under the guise that it would revitalise tourism. The EU forked out an astonishing amount of money to facilitate this and it resulted in half completed construction. I was on holiday in Spain and witnessed entire roads, double lane highways, completely unused. They led nowhere. Drive down them and you'll find half constructed buildings, with rebar sticking out. The reason they do this is because if a building is unfinished, you don't pay property tax. Unsurprisingly, the locals do the same thing and now live in houses with a 'missing' third floor to escape property tax. All this brought on by the EU.
As if matters couldn't be worse, the EU believes firmly in the common market, which loathes excess. Just look at recent news, France is being paid to scale back wine production. The exact same thing happened in Greece, it was paid to scale back its exports. Things got so bad it aquired immense debt to German banks, which became a compelling reason for Germany to help out during the default Greece was suffering.
The EU are absolute masters at crippling small businesses and in turn, country's economies.
You need 2 parties to have a bad loan but that's not even the main issue here. Having the Euro just facilitated bad loans.
The thing about using a currency you don't issue is that it severely limits what you can do in terms of economic policy.
If Greece had its own currency when they ran into problems they could have responded by devaluing thus making imports decrease and exports increase(including tourism, not necessarily industrial goods). You can also inflate debts away in that way if necessary and do all sort of things that allow a country to deal with structural issues.
You can also do some of those things via tariffs, capital controls, etc. but to add to that the EU doesn't like those either. Thus the only "solution" was a reduction in spending, wages and mass emigration.
The Euro just doesn't work unless every country is the same (or if there are direct fiscal transfers but good luck with that.
As I tried to explain in an earlier thread on this subject, you do not understand what Milei means by "dollarization." Do not feel badly, however. Most people, even here in Argentina, do not. Milei has not intention of making the USD the national currency of Argentina. His plan is to do away with a national currency and allow people to use whatever they wish as money. If you want to use "bitcoin," you will be free to do so. If you want to use Rubles, you will be free to do so.
However, as I stated before and state again. Dollarization is the de facto reality of the situation now. Everyone saves in dollars and all large purchases are already made in dollars. There are hundreds of millions and most likely tens of billions of physical dollars in circulation in the country. I purchased my home with a big stack of $100 dollar bills: physical cash.
So "dollarization" is merely the name that Milei gives to this plan because he knows that the dollar will quickly replace the Peso as the currency used for daily transactions. It does not make the Argentine national currency the USD or any such thing. It is merely a recognition of what is already reality and what will transpire after the Peso is gone.
Whatever the case and whatever your feelings about Milei, the fact of the matter is that the ARS is dead. Prices have more than doubled this year already and will undoubtedly double again before the year if finished. Hyperinflation is weeks or months away. Everyone knows this, and the Peso is dead as a currency. There are no gimmicks or tricks that can save it, and all the other politicians are fools, liars, or both. everyone in Argentina knows it.
"Dollarization," as Milie describes it, is the only proposal on the table for what to do to maintain order and stability while the Peso dies. I do not necessarily agree with the idea and would much prefer that we make use of our extensive silver mines and mining companies to formulate a new national currency, but until such time as someone with a microphone suggests something like this, Milie is the only hope this country has. Most people here know that, and that is why he will win if he is not assassinated by the Western oligarchs or one of the various corrupt political machines here in Argentina.
I don't know the situation enough to tell what the exact results will be, but once you destroy your own currency getting it back is extremely difficult and costly.
We don't have a currency right now in any meaningful sense. The Peso is not a measure of value, because it's value is in constant decline. It serves no purpose in the price-finding mechanism of a market. It is not a store of value... obviously... because it loses significant value daily. Prices now rise weekly in my town for everything. Finally, the rate of inflation is so high right now that it cannot serve as a medium of exchange. How so? Let us say that I purchase a liter of milk from the grocery store. That milk has a shelf-life of 30 days. If the grocery store puchased it 15 days ago, they are already selling it for cost if they have not raised their retail price by 20% in the 2 weeks that it sat on the shelf. The labor to change these prices almost daily costs more than the profit on the product, and if a merchant does not change his prices almost weekly, he will be out of business within 2 months. What is more, the cost to extract, preserve and bottle the milk by the farmer happened 3 or 4 weeks ago. The price that he received from the grocery store and its distribution chain for his milk is already below his cost. So, a currency losing 3% of its value daily cannot even function as a medium of exchange. So... explain to me exactly how Argentina has not already lost its currency. I suspect it is hopeless to try to explain these things to people who can only think in terms of USD=bad, because I hate the U.S. . I am no fan of the U.S. either and do not care for the nation much, but I do not allow my dislike for the nation to scatter my brain into incoherence.
All Libertarians are Far Right with the exception of the Left Libertarian crowd who are almost Commies. Of course the Right and Left Libertarians hate each other.
This whole "Libertarians are neither right nor left" BS is just another one of their lies. Ask anyone left of center where Libertarians are. They'll all say Right or even Far Right.
"libertarian economically/politically"
See that part? That's called RIGHTWING economically and politically.
Are you really this stupid or are you just trolling? Left? Right? What are you talking about? Since you are the expert on this spectrum thing of right and left, why don't you define for us what "right wing" is and what "left wing" is.
Right means conservative! Real simple. It's mostly about economics though.
A better definition is that the Right believes in rule by an aristocratic wealthy elite, and the Left believes in rule by the people, the masses, ordinary people without a lot of money, workers: democracy. In the past, the Right believed in the divine right of kings. Then they switched to supporting feudal and warlord rule.
The Right includes all of the supporters of the Republican Party and the MAGA crowd. They tend to support neoliberalism and hate "big government," taxation, and social programs. They're also often hostile to women and non-Whites nowadays. They have conservative social mores. In the US, the Right represents hardline Christianity such as Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity. They hated gays in the past, but those days may be over.
The Right hates environmentalism everywhere on Earth. They want to destroy everything so people can get more money and stuff. The Right also believes that global warming is fake and that the COVID epidemic was also faked. They opposed masks and COVID shutdowns as a violation of individual rights. In the US, the Right is associated with radical individualism, but this philosophy is hated everywhere else in the world.
In the US, the Right takes a hardline against the tranny cult, anti-White critical race theory, radical homosexuality, and man-hating feminist bitches. They take a harder line on illegal immigration, amnesty for illegals, and asylum seekers. I actually support them on these issues.
In the past they refused to penalize employers for hiring illegals, so the problem was not fixed. This is because the US Right is extremely pro-corporate, pro-rich, and pro-business. They always refused to deal with the Hindu-1B scabs who took White men's IT work because they worked for half the money. Now the Right may be cracking down on this abuse. They are also cracking down on chain immigration, and are thinking about imposing more stringent tests to become a legal immigrant.
The US Right wants as few people as possible to vote, so they make voting as difficult as they cane, especially for Democratic voters. Rightwingers always turn out no matter what, so they're not worried about suppressing their own vote.
Since 2000, the US Right have been stealing elections via those voting machines. This is a problem that is still not fixed. The Right is pushing radical anti-democracy measures all across the land, and they just literally tried to steal an election. The US Right is also extremely corrupt due to its business connections and love of wealth and possessions.
The Republican Party seems committed to the project of a permanent Republican authoritarian state or dictatorship because as an elite party committed to rule by aristocrats, they realize that increasingly they cannot win fair and square.
This is a tendency all over the world, as the Right is antidemocratic in most places. As a movement committed to aristocratic rule and opposed to democratic rule by the people, most populations don't want to vote for rich Rightwing elites. Hence in many places they only way they can get into power is by cutting back on democracy and putting in Rightwing dictatorships and authoritarian states.
The Right recently out and out stole three seats on the US Supreme Court. The Right gutted the Voting Rights Act, so now states are free to discriminate against non-White voters. The Rightwing Supreme Court has also ruled that extreme partisan gerrymanders such as the permanent Republican dictatorship in the Wisconsin Legislature are legal!
The Conservative Party in Australia and Canada is similar but much milder than Republicans.
The Libertarian Party is absolutely conservative or Rightwing. Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema are Rightwing Democrats.
However, the US Republican Party project is despised in most of the world where it has few numerous supporters in any land.
In Latin America, the Right supports the lighter-skinned elite and opposes anything intended to improve the lives of the vast majority darker skinned poor. The Right is also often violent and even murderous. The Right represents latifundios, or large landowners.
The wealth gap is extreme in these societies the rich Right have almost all the money and wealth, and everyone else has next to nothing. The Latin American Right thinks this is just fine!
They often take over the small plots of the poor with the death squads and army. If you don't hand over your land, you get murdered by the Right. The rural poor then flood into urban slums without water, indoor plumbing, paved streets, not to mention access to health care, education, or even employment. The Right likes this just fine! And if they try to protest these conditions, the Right sends people out to kill them!
I should note that the Right owns all of the land in most of these countries. These are large estates. There is not enough land for the rest, so many are reduced to day labor on the estates of the rich Rightwingers. They scream about socialism and communism all the time, but down there, being a communist means you belong to a labor union. Supporting raising the minimum wage is communism. In many of those countries, the penalty for being a communist is death.
I will say that the Right down there has largely stopped killing people. However, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay, in days past, these countries all ran Rightwing death squads and armies that massacred the urban and rural poor for demanding something to eat and a roof over their heads because that was communism! The Right is still murderous in recent years in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Honduras.
The Right was formerly associated with extreme Jim Crow racism in places like Cuba and Ecuador. Rightwing Anti-Indian racism is still extreme in Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile. The Venezuelan Right is very racist. Rightwing anti-black racism is still serious in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.
However, the racism has declined from an earlier level in most of these places.
In the Philippines it is the same thing. A tiny Rightwing elite, mostly Fujian Chinese, has almost all the land, wealth, and money. Everyone else has next to nothing.
Rightwing governments in that sense have vanished from most of the rest of the globe. Rightwing or conservative economics is despised the world over.
There are few economically Right countries in Europe other than the UK under the Tories and Ukraine.
There is also rightwing fascism in the world. It may rule in Haiti. The Latin American Right has fascist tendencies at times, especially in Bolivia where they still wave Nazi flags.
Fascist/Nazi rightwing countries include Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. A fascist Right rules Poland. An odd Rightwing fascist state is in power in Hungary. Rightwing fascists have been ruling Israel for decades now.
Turkey has been a fascist country forever, but the economics are not rightwing. It is similar to Hungary and Israel in this regard. India is also a very fascist country right now, but the economics is still left. Turkey, Hungary, Israel, and India may in a sense be called "left fascism," but the extreme bigotry and racism in India, Israel, and Turkey makes them rightwing.
Many countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Muslim and Arab World, the Caribbean, Eurasia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa are socially conservative but economically leftwing. You can't really call these conservative or Rightwing countries.
Putin's politics is called Rightwing "Russian conservatism." However, this would be considered leftwing in most of the world. This is about the only "rightwing" politics I can support nowadays.
Social conservatism is not considered conservatism or rightwing because the Right mostly has to do with economics.
You are hopelessly confused about any number of things, and it is probably not worth the time to try to correct the innumerable errors in the absurd things that you have written here. Just to give you one example... by your definition of "right-wing" (which you somehow associate with the Republican Party in the U.S. ... despite the fact that it is the other party that controls all the levers of state and receives almost all the money from Wall Street), the Communist Dictatorships of Castro. Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung On, the Khmer Rouge, and so forth were and are all "right-wing" governments? They certainly did not give any power to the "people."
Labels like Left and Right are practically useless these days. I know anarchists (who define anarchism as strict adherence to what they call the Non-Aggression Principle) who say Right is anarchism and Left is everything else. Simples.
It's much better to talk in terms of principals and policies rather than labels; you often end up agreeing with someone on almost everything and only later find out that you each self-describe (if forced) as being at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Aug 26, 2023·edited Aug 26, 2023Liked by Simplicius
The key event was when the West stole $350 billion of bank deposits by Russian citizens. A system that steals all your money whenever it is moved to do so is intolerable. An alternative had to be built, quickly as possible. This task strikes me as much easier than sending a space capsule to the moon.
The EU 42..Medvedev said Russia holds hundreds of billions US in EU UK US assets. One exemple here:
What are we in for?
Here representatives of the market economy have encountered the market economy. And life "by the rules". They were very much frapped.
It turns out that foreign companies that decided to leave our Federation face huge costs, because our Capital requires large discounts on assets that companies are forced to sell. Mm-hmm. R is for market.
Executives say it's getting harder and harder to navigate "the rules". Hmmm... it's a good life when you make the rules. It's bad when you make them. Sudden revelation.
Foreign companies have already suffered more than $80 billion in losses from their operations in Russia due to write-offs and lost profits, according to a Reuters analysis of company documents and statements.
Dutch brewer Heineken said on Friday it had completed its exit from Russia by selling all of its operations to Russia's Arnest Group for a symbolic one euro. We won't be shown all the material to do, of course. But we won't be surprised if there suddenly turns out to be, for example, an option to make back and forth. But the Western reader will be written about such barbaric squeezes. An entire beer company for 1 euro.
Moscow is already demanding a 50% discount on all foreign deals after consultants selected by the Russian government evaluated the business. Wo! Another revelation. It turns out that consultants are sometimes independent not only from our side, but also from yours.
Russia also requires a contribution to the Russian budget of at least 10% of the price. The horror. I see, it is normal to withdraw 10% from Russian depositors in Cypriot banks. Well, this is orthodox and brotherly. But this kind of thing...
The government commission that oversees foreign investment must approve deals involving companies from "unfriendly" countries - those that have imposed sanctions on Russia because of its actions in Ukraine. Banks and energy companies also need President Vladimir Putin's personal approval to sell.
A financial market source working with companies seeking to leave Russia said the commission was sending some deals back, saying the valuation should be 20-30% lower. "An unpredictable black box".
Another person who handles mergers and acquisitions and works with foreign companies said deals exceeding $100 million are at particular risk of being rejected.
What was it the 360° minister said yesterday?
"Actually economic sanctions were supposed to have economic consequences. But they didn't. Because the logic of democracies doesn't work in autocracies."
Although I am barely even thousandaire, it seems to me that theft on a scale so grand would go a long ways toward ensuring that nobody in their right mind would ever do business with you again
What do you make of the various YouTube commentators who are following the conflict? I followed Military Summary (dima) and Weeb Union but I find both to be initially interesting but neither really captures whats really happening
That's roughly my take on all of them. They seem to be fine and even very good for "casual" observers or hobbyists. Particularly because having the video footage of each update gives the casuals an easy way to follow along with towns/places they have no clue about. But as actual "analysis" they don't seem to offer much in the way of that.
With that said, I'm talking about the specific type of commentator you seemed to refer to which is those guys that do the map + commentary + daily summaries.
In terms of pure verbal analysis, i.e. guys like Mercouris, Martyanov, Berletic, etc., there's many good and decent ones in that regard, but they may not have all the whizbang graphics and such.
For me personally I don't have time to follow most of them as I have my own methodologies and simply don't have the time in the day to watch long videos of that sort but have nothing against them. I prefer to follow things I can read and skim rather than videos where you're stuck watching a lot of extraneous fluff or advertising.
Ultimately, there's a big difference between people who can adequately summarize what's happening presently (a skill in itself) and those who can really read between the lines and divine the subtle signals of things under the surface, transferring them into deeper prognosticating analysis, etc.
I'm starting to find the daily updates counterproductive even so I stopped watching. And the introduction of clickbait titles and thumbnails has turned me off. Mercouris is a good listen if I have a long drive but am too busy otherwise. Your battlefield updates are the best summaries at the moment!
That's why I listen to him on 1.25x speed (sometimes 1.5x). He's much better that way.
I don't even remotely listen to everything he says, but I have these "phases" when I'm so busy that I can't follow anything, but because he says everything twice, I sort of get what's happening without focusing much on him.
I often think I've forgotten to speed Mercouris up only to find I've already got him on x1.5. If I try to listen at normal speed, I lose concentration between clauses - sometimes between words. He speaks at a much more bearable pace on the Duran, where Alex's presence makes him less linguistically self-indulgent.
Duran asked me on telegram whether i intended to make the most of their financial advices in those troubled times. But i guess it didnt stem from mercouris. Maybe his bearded pal
I had a similar experience with other unrelated youtube channels. The (seemingly) owner of one channel told me that I won some kind contest for the best commentary, the exchange moved into telegram, and then questions become personal very quickly and I stopped that conversation.
The guy is making 12.000 US a month + Duran, their videos are every day a bit longer (90 minutes 7/7), it is far too long. On YT and other platforms simply activate a good adblocker and no more ads, ever. Since 2012, I did not watch a single ad on both YT and internet in general. Anyway, any company which wants to force me to buy this or that on print or city ads, I simply boycot.
Yep. And there's a world of difference between those that look at one 'bulge' and blat on about how it is a golden opportunity for breakthroughs and penetration here and there and everywhere and then look at another bulge and declare that it is a ripe candidate for being cut off and creating a 'cauldron' - without ever a single word about what make it true this way for this one and that way for the other one. In fact never raising the notion during a whole nigh on two years of reporting.
That sort of thing.
That is the level of reporting we get from our YT channels without exception. There is nothing rises above that level that I've yet seen. Please tell me if there is.
Brian Berletic, for instance - much applauded by such as the Duran - spent a year at least bashing on earnestly like a guru about what the whole state of the conflict was based on the official statistics on supplies from the USA to Kiev. As though there were any reason in the real world to place any credence in those figures at all!!
Childish rubbish is what it is.
They manufacture notional front lines by collating official reports from each side using 'indisputable truths' more or less as they extract them from information that one or the other side would rather you didn't have but can't stop you.
Like this side doesn't want you to know that they've lost this place but the other side claims it and shows pictures. That sort of thing.
Which takes some assiduous work, some attention to detail, some inspired deductions perhaps on occasion.
So we get a fairly true idea of where the front line currently is. Thanks to them for that.
But that is ALL we get. That is all. Nothing more. When they precede their videos with a screenshot of their map showing what they see as the frontline today that's all we need look at. Waste of time listening, watching the whole vid.
Yep.
For the most covered war in the whole history of the world its incredibly opaque, incredibly.
And you go to more 'scholarly' and 'informed', 'educated', 'experienced' sites like perhaps the 'Institute for the Study of War' and they're pure spin, conjecture, polemic, propaganda: crap.
IF anyone knows a decent source of objective and intelligent, knowledgeable reportage please, please do tell.
For its not apparent, wherever it is, and it never gets a mention in any of the couple of dozen or so usual sites we all use today.
neither side has any incentive to tell the truth, and most if not all commentators become emotionally and intellectually invested in their version of the that truth.
At least there are plenty to choose from. A commenter, SaludyRepublica, on Mark Sleboda's Aug 24 Substack post, has a comprehensive list of 37 sources in English, plus more in Spanish.
"BRICS members did verbalize an initiative to begin work on an inter-BRICS settlement payment system and currency.. But even in the meantime, they will increase initiatives towards settling in their own currencies away from the dollar".
Indeed. On September 17, mBridge will be open to all comers, so any country with a CBDC can trade with any other – in its own currency.
Thailand, where I live, has been using mBridge for the past 12 months, buying oil from UAE for Thai baht, while the UAE producer receives payment in dirham 12 ms. later.
mBridge was created by PBOC and is based in Hong Kong, the alternative to Switzerland for safe, offshore banking.
No US$, no 24-48 hour delay, no US oversight.
I expect the developing world to follow Russia's example..
Zoltan Pozsar has been talking about mBridge for well over a year.
mBridge is why UAE is in BRICS, and will be an important part of the correspondent bank buildout to complement/rival the existing Western one. CBDCs are how mBridge works - which is why the BRICS nations are going to have them led by the e-cny.
Electronic money isn't a fad, it's inevitable, whether we like it or not. The government wants to "see" you, and your wealth, and all your spending. We all need to start thinking about wealth differently. Think about which assets they can see and which assets are opaque.
Your point about human capital is immensely important. The US is powered by the intellectual strength of foreigners who come to the US to enrich themselves beyond what is conceivable in their home countries. If and when that changes, the global balance of power will shift.
Electronic money has existed for over a generation; credit cards are electronic money. And before electronics, there were physical letters of credit.
Furthermore, the notion of full observability is made entirely by people who don't know jack squat about the space.
Let me educate you a bit. I do forensic accounting consulting among other things; give the bank and credit card data and I can figure out exactly how any person acts financially. Throw in some lifestyle analysis and dark money pops right out.
The thing is - this analysis IS NOT replicable large scale even with magical AI.
A credit card company can do an SQL/noSQL search of all its transactions, or one person's transactions, to find purchases of specific categories like firearms, for example. But it does not do well when firearms purchases are at Walmart as part of a larger purchase. It does not do well if purchases are labeled as hardware - like porn gets labeled something innocuous.
A bank can list all of its customers' cash withdrawals, or one person's, but it has no idea that transaction 25 out of 522 is one used to buy drugs or guns or whatever unless it is a direct wire transfer or ACH to an appropriately named entity.
The notion that a government can know everything you do is the transplantation of a full forensic accounting analysis to population scale analysis - this ain't gonna happen because it is impossible.
So...I don't really disagree with anything you said, but neither was it a revelation. The only reason I'm responding is to let you know that the way you interact with others is rude and off-putting. It's a safe bet that anyone here, anyone who finds this Substack interesting and stimulating, isn't a complete moron. You have no idea who I am or what I know and nobody asked for you to "educate" them with your facile observations. I'm sure you'll feel compelled to respond - with defensive arrogance and condescension - but this is the last I have to say to you. When someone does you the favor of telling you the truth, you should consider listening.
IQs is a eugenicist construct, I ignore anything involving talk of IQs.
As for CBDCs: people don't seem to understand that the coding required to create a CBDC is extremely simple. There are templates and not from China. the 5000 or so cryptocurrencies are very public example of this; the difficulty was never in creation but in adoption.
The complexity lies in the regulatory/enforcement and observability sides, as well as having non-idiot (i.e. Western trained) economists and bankers working on the problem.
However you characterize IQ, it is almost the only useful predictive biometric we have, as Charles Murray explains in "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America”.
Here's another reality check: the IQ cutoff for a national civil service job in China is 140 and China, by every metric, is the most successful country on earth.
To be eligible for mBridge trading, CBDCs must comply with the template provided by China, which runs the only game in town and, presumably, use its secure terminals.
First of all, IQ is not a biometric. There is no IQ organ that is measured in physical terms - phrenology has long since been disproven.
As for predictive: IQ has some predictive qualities mostly because of education. Richer families can/do spend more on education and so can elevate IQs, but the very fact that these kids are richer is the actual predictive power - not the IQ. There are innumerable examples of dumbfucks who are successful. Charles Murray is a biological chemist talking about shit he knows nothing about; if he talked about DNA formation, fine but going into IQ and race and societal success is so far out of his bailiwick that it isn't even funny.
China civil service: no, there is no IQ cutoff that I am aware of. What they have are tests that people have to pass.
There is certainly some correlation between raw intelligence vs. IQ vs the ability to pass these tests, but again I would bet money that the biggest predictive factor is wealth. Wealth means the ability to hire tutors and take the time/risk to go for the test vs. some other employment strategy.
As for mBridge: I don't know where you are getting your info from. mBridge is executed by the UAE - not the least bit clear how China drives other nation's CBDC requirements into mBridge. Do you have a link?
I ask because mBridge architecture came out of the Bank of International Settlements incubator - NOT China. The incubator is in Hong Kong, but the original driver is BIS, not PBoC or even HKMA. So mBridge is the UAE implementing a BIS project to incorporate the e-dirhan as a bridge between other nation's trading amongst themselves.
Furthermore, the e-cny comes out of the PBoC, not HKMA. Hong Kong didn't even deal with the e-cny until 2022 (last year).
At the time of the Prig coup (just after the start of the UAF counter-attack) he also said that Russian losses were huge, weapons and ammo short, morale low, badly led and betrayed by the high command. All western talking points. All seemed scripted to me. And therefore evidence of treachery.
Great analysis of the Belorussian and African moves. It does seem Prig still thought he was bullet proof. All the evidence points to the dead man walking theory.
The idea that the Russian army is composed entirely of unwilling conscripts press-ganged into service and just sitting around waiting for a chance to surrender is now canonical in NATO circles. People will believe what they need to believe in order to sustain their world view.
I actually think this is not so far from the truth or at least it was. There were a number of comments made to that effect, and articles prior to the June attack that said much the same thing in more "expert" language. At the time I expressed a view (I think!!) that this was pure racism. However there was no chance of anything else than a debacle for the UAF if Ivan decided to fight.
This Gunther Fehlinger is quite the character. Who under heaven does he think he is to propose the breakup of a country that doesn’t comply with his world views? Unbelievable. Question is, will people follow and fulfill his proposals?
My view is that he's just trying to get in front of an already existing Western initiative.
It is no secret that the West wants to take Lula down (again). I'm sure the Broadcast Board of Governors, now the USAGM's near $1 billion budget is devoted to Brazilian regime change.
Well, as the saying goes, metal talks and bullshit walks, he’s welcome to round up a band of merry Germans and head on over to Brazil. I’m sure trudging through the rain forests in order to partition the country will prove a worthy task.
I am worried about the reports that the Allied troops in zaporizhia/Robotyne and other places simply are not being rotated. Have been in action since early June. Surely not? This would be almost criminal conduct by the allies - meaning, I guess, Russian high command, I'm assuming they have the say everywhere along the front?
And that seemed a piss poor attempt to interdict those boats didn't it? Is that the best that can be done?
I agree, not a great way to interdict them. With that said, it wasn't a huge priority because the "oil rig" is derelict and nonfunctional and is very distant from Russian territory. Russia had no real incentive to combat them there and this was probably more of a light deterrence mission. They'd use better interdiction if it was an actual serious or threatening assault. This was more like "hey we're bored and have nothing better to do so let's go use those boats as target practice".
A helicopter could theoretically be better but being far slower than a jet, its response time would be awful having to cross the sea and the boats would likely be gone by then. Same goes for a drone. Though a UCAV is technically not great for fast maneuverable small boats as its guided "gliding" bombs don't do well in hitting targets that can juke and turn on a dime--ideal for stationary or slow targets.
If they had *really* wanted to get rid of the boats they could have sent jets armed with anti-ship missiles with active radars which could be launched from far away and would "lock on" to the boats themselves. But such enterprise missiles are really expensive and probably not even worth wasting on a boat like that. The ideal platform would probably have been a rotary gunship like Ka-52M that can launch Tv-guided LMURS and laser guided Vikhrs as well as 30mm autocannons. It's slow and stationary for manpads but at least it has DIRCMS that might cancel the manpads out, as well as ejection seat worse comes to worse. With an Mi-8 evac stationed not far off behind they could tee-off on the boats and get evac'd in time, if they're hit.
But crossing the 300km+ from closest airbase to the oil rig would take upwards of 2 hours for the choppers.
Rockets, rockets, rockets, s-50s, s-80s, a volley of 40-50 thrown around the boats woulda done the trick. It was probably a Su-30 on CAP that got diverted, so only had one to choice. Plus the pilots gonna assume manpads so hes not gonna want to get to close.
Yep, that's kinda what I'm thinking. Something that at least seemed to be an attempt. Like one imagines that such targets would have a method of attack prescribed for them. If that was it then it wasn't very impressive. (Though apparently it got one anyway).
U.S. Patriot systems are operated by the Army. There are no Army units at Tinker AFB, much less any Patriot ADA units. So it's extremely unlikely that personnel from Tinker were secretly operating Patriots in Ukraine.
We can imagine various reasons that USAF personnel from Tinker might secretly be deployed in Ukraine (and getting killed there) -- but if they are, that's not what they were doing.
I am wondering if their bodies were handed over to the families for burial. If they died from missiles strikes it would be pretty obvious. No amount of undertaker powers/skills could hide the trauma. If they are refusing to hand over the bodies then that is very suspicious.
With the 'World Island' slipping through their hands, I guess South and Central America will be the next US target for 'colour revolutions.' Perhaps that's the reason behind the open border policy? Recruitment of mercenaries to overthrow those governments, no doubt using the Manuel Noriega argument that they're responsible for the drug crisis sweeping across America. Basically, grab what you can of what's left of the non-BRICS world while denying Russian access to them. Can it work, and how do Mexico and the cartels play into it? Maybe I'm hallucinating, but given the history of the region, it seems obvious to me.
There are people who say that Lula's successor was taken down with help from intel agencies.
I am not one of them; I have first hand (well, 1.5 hand) info on the chain of events that led to the Dilma takedown and subsequent Bolsanaro regime (after a caretaker).
Long story short: the Brazilian police were one of the last LE groups to go to Canada to access Blackberry message data for crime prosecution purposes. When they finally did so in pursuit of an alleged drug gang money launderer, what they found was that this guy laundered money for politicians as well.
Here's the thing: corruption is everywhere in Brazil. This guy's client list was everyone, more or less. The scam was in prosecuting mostly Worker's Party people as opposed to everyone in the launderer list.
Is this because of the CIA or just because the PMCs (class, not mercenaries) in Brazil hated Lula?
"There are people who say that Lula's successor was taken down with help from intel agencies."
They are correct. They also put Lula in prison on similar fake charges. In this case, appallingly, it was actual FEDS (as in FBI creeps) who helped take down both via their specialty lawfare. You'd expect this from creepy spooks, but the FBI? Doing nasty CIA-type biz overseas to further US foreign policy. We from back when hated them during the Cointelpro days. We need to keep hating them. They haven't changed one bit.
They framed Sirhan.
They covered up the CIA takedown of JFK.
They were literally involved in the MLK assassination.
But I do know that there are FBI "Legatus" representatives in most/all of the major country embassies around the world. I know because I've worked with some of them on LE type activity.
Whether they advised the Lava Jato vs. your standard NED/CIA/State Dept - impossible for me to say.
Like many nations in Africa, those in south, and central America, may very well have had quite enough of the Monroe doctrine and its offshoot
Add to that the influence of Russia, and perhaps China in that sphere, and it may not come off as planned by the United States and its so-called friends
Mexican cartels seem to be one of the latest msm talking points. Western Standard a "right wing" media page located in Western Canada just had a story **Experts says the government will have a hard time removing Mexican cartels from Alberta** Time to Deflect from "one" of the real reasons "Big Pharma and the production of highly addictive drugs. $$$"
Yes Peru and Ecuador was one of the latest examples. and who can't forget the patsy Ollie North.
The UAF was and is a big military and has absorbed a lot of punishment. But it is looking like this is the beginning of the end. It is short of men, ammo, weapons and now increasingly hope. The RF dynamics are opposite.
This can only go one way and the issue is timing, and how much blood and treasure it takes to get there. Ukraine should immediately enter negotiations to salvage what it can. I doubt it will. Its leadership will sacrifice the nation and its people until the last minute before they flee abroad to enjoy their looted dollars and superstar status. Saigon or Kabul style.
The sickening and now pointless loss of life will continue way past any rational point. The western MSM will continue to report Ukraine is on the verge of victory or would be if its wily generals had not suddenly contracted a dose of stupid.
Imagine sitting in an office with a cappuccino in hand making a decision that will end the lives of 100,000 men. Just another day at the office for Victoria Nuland.
Scott Ritter has an interesting theory about Prigozhin's plane crash. He thinks it could be Prig's bodyguards ammo stash that blew up and trashed the plane. He's referring to an incident with US marines transport plane in which some HE stuff blew up mid-flight because of mismanagement.
To me this theory seems more plausible than idea that Putin/SBU/CIA/whoever rigged the plane with explosives.
This has been promulgated yesterday by some "source", claiming that grenades and ammo was found in the crash site and could have been "improperly stored", etc. However the sheer coincidental serendipity that would take beggars belief. The guy who the entire world was saying is basically a walking dead man, gets "conveniently killed" by misplaced ammo in the exact method known to be the #1 most heavily utilized global assassination method by state services--it's a little too much.
Also, he's said to almost never EVER fly together with the other top leadership of Wagner, particularly Dmitry Utkin.
The ONE time they decided to both be on the flight together is when the plane blows up. The number of improbabilities is just astonishing.
Weirder shit was happening... I read some article about Midway battle in WW2 - Americans won it because of set of coincidences that no one could predict
Nah, there were really weird decisions and happenstances that can't be explained by radio intercept. It's more like Americans were high on HP's "liquid luck" potion or smth. I really can't remember where i read that, but i try to figure it out. It was some 10 years ago i suppose.
Some are coincidences - but the big ones are easily explained by radio intercept.
For example: How did the US Navy find the Japanese to start with?
Then there's the "spotting through clouds" business - who set up the scouting plan and why? The scout may have thought they were lucky, but a scouting plan developed with info from radio intercept would not be known to the scout.
"Parallel development" is well known these days - it was also known to be executed then for the same reason: opsec.
I agree, but personally I think Prigozhin was dead man walking just from not having Russian state protection anymore. Mercouris is right: Prigozhin had all kinds of enemies.
IMO: If your documentation of ~20 Russian airmen killed by Wagner during the "insurrection" is accurate, there are plenty of people angered by that - with social/professional connections to Moscow airport to make it pretty easy to sneak a bomb onto Prigozhin's plane as well as to be sure which one is the right one.
Putting all of Wagner's top people on one plane is exactly the type of amateurish stupidity and/or arrogance I would expect of Prigozhin.
Two months ago I wrote "the hammer will come down." No system can tolerate the murder of its own troops. To remove any doubt in a big speech Putin denounced traitors and said there would be payback. I was however surprised that it took as long as it did.
Putin is very pragmatic - I don't see any point in him potentially disrupting this extremely important BRICS conference with maverick nonsense.
On the other hand, there are lots of Russian air force personnel and families of same who are likely very angry that Russian air force pilots and copilots were killed by Wagner during its insurrection.
Prigozhin no longer being actively protected by the Russian government would be a pre-requisite for a vigilante strike but it seems highly unlikely Putin would have wanted it to happen when it actually did.
One could say the same for the unfortunate conscripts on the Ukrainian side of the war we have read about refusals conflicts with in the armed forces, and actual shoot outs with mercenary forces from nations such as Poland
As per our authors, above documentation of the morale shift and tendency toward surrender on the Ukrainian side, this may be coming to a Head sooner than later
A week ago or so, western media reported about an Ukrainian group that reached the western shore of Crimea and blew up a S-400, and rescued another group of ukranians.
But I have not seen a word about that in non-western media. Is there any truth in this, or is it just figments of western imagination?
I think you may possibly be conflating several different incidents.
There was a rumored landing in the Cossack Camps of Kherson region, not far from Khakovka, where they were claimed to have possibly rescued some POWs and also taken a Russian major as POW. The major at least was in fact real, but taking back POWs was never proven.
The Crimea landing and S-400: this was 2 separate real incidents fakely tied together by Ukrainian propaganda in order to make it seem like the boat landing team carried out the spotting for the hit.
Firstly, it was confirmed that it was an S-300 system hit, not S-400. This is the system I referenced in my report above. It was hit by some kind of missile, no one knows what yet--everything from Neptune anti-ship to a boat-borne British Brimstone has been theorized--though probably something less exotic was used.
As for the landing in Crimea, this happened yesterday and had nothing to do with the S-300 hit which was the day before. A small team landed on the shore of Crimea and were then scared off by a civilian armed with a Saiga shotgun who fired shells into the air. They ran for their life, dropping equipment which was recovered such as a Garmin GPS unit amongst other things.
But like I said, they didn't accomplish anything on that middle-of-the-night shore raid and simply got back in the boat and ran away. The S-300 hit was a separate incident that had nothing to do with that and was in fact fire-corrected by a drone rather than any ground team in Crimea.
If SMO is like a movie, it will be an interesting plot twist if Gonzalo Lira is behind everything. Like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones or Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.
No pressure! but I'd find it useful if you could provide links to all (especially Western) articles (rather than just screenshots as you do with some), as well as Youtube or other linkable versions of your embedded videos.
Thanks! If the headline's included in the excerpt or photo, usually that will be the case. Not so much otherwise! Also, that doesn't apply to videos, including those with many variants, and especially the most annoying case: videos that have subtitles grafted onto them after the fact. I lack the advantage of reading or speaking Russian. :)
Image search is a little flaky but it is always worth a shot. In general, in my OSINT experience, a full pic is usually findable but parts of one are generally not - i.e. an all or nothing search.
However, having said the above, the links pulled in from a image search will frequently reference the actual pic in question but it means going through up to 5 pages of Google search results and reading to find the right one (i.e. accuracy is much lower but info is there somewhere).
For an article pic - you can also use a few words/a sentence from the text. That also will yield the document.
For videos - I have no idea why you would want to see the source since the videos are fully viewable directly, unless you want to see Simplicius' sources. In that case, most of the Russian videos from bloggers have the telegram channels mentioned.
The reason I patronize Simplicius as opposed to others is because he consistently does a fantastic job of curating and has for several years.
If you want to do it all yourself, of course, that's a different story.
I agree with you on Simplicius' curation, but still instinctively want to check. Also I like to find the sources so I can reference my own research if material (or, more typically on the subject of the Ukraine war, rebuttals in the more ignorant antisocial media echo chambers) more convincingly than just "halfway down Simplicius' post on xxx".
What I will note is that for a subject as widely talked about as the SMO - it is very easy to see who is reliable and who is not. Simplicius says what his views are but also posts the direct evidence of it - and lots of it.
Admittedly, I do OSINT professionally so have a a lot of experience in quickly identifying the nonsense from that of value. Every presenter has biases - myself included. It is reality. The key is identifying and understanding what those biases are; and in turn the analysts who are the most aware of their biases and try the hardest to compensate for them, are the ones worth paying attention to.
Dreizin, for example, is a good analyst in some areas but he is so insecure that he cannot tolerate anyone telling him anything that he might learn from - and so is just not worth paying attention to because what he does come up with that is good, is simply not worth wasting the time to dig out from the garbage.
Sigh. Another "Putin killed Prigozhin" from Simplicius, who forgot to put on his thinking cap this time.
Never mind that all the press is running with a theory that the security forces say the main suspect is Prigozhin's pilot who planted a bomb in the landing gear, is now being sought, and has now probably left the country.
Any evidence that Putin, FSB, Shoigu, or other Russian state agents did it? Of course not! So let's all run with that theory!
In terms of motive, it is equal or more likely that this was done by one or more countries (USA, France, UK) who wanted to send a message that Russia/Wagner should stay out of Africa.
It is almost certain that there was a bomb on the plane. Then how did the bomb get past security in Moscow? Likely the bomb was placed while the plane was still in Africa. Either it failed to detonate on the flight back to Russia or the triggering device was set (or reset) while the plane was in Moscow.
FSB thinks it was planted in Moscow. They say the wanted pilot had access to the plane. This mess smells of the SBU. Not sure about the others, but he was last seen on a plane to Kamchatka three days ago, and he's now assumed to be out of the country like Daria's assassin. What's right next to Kamchatka? Alaska, natch. ;)
"In terms of motive, it is equal or more likely that this was done by one or more countries (USA, France, UK) who wanted to send a message that Russia/Wagner should stay out of Africa."
Had not thought of this one yet. Interesting line.
Javier Milei seems to be another charismatic bigot. If he doesn't win, then Brazil and Argentina's strengthening ties would interlock with BRICS.
I despise how homophobia has become normalised in support of conservatism which, in turn, is associated with Trump, Putin etc. Extreme reaction to the Democrat's extremities is two wrongs, and not the kind that sums up as right. I'm interested in a multipolar world, not a bipolar one.
Interestingly on that note, Putin in an interview where he was pressed on Russia's putatively "repressive" anti-gay laws, pointed out how the U.S. still has 4 states which have anti-sodomy laws technically making homosexuality illegal, while Russia has no such laws, which means Russia is technically more accepting of homosexuality than the U.S. Of course a supreme court decision has allegedly made those U.S. laws 'unenforceable' but they still remain on the books in those states.
Further, Russia has under 100 anti-gay hate crimes per year while the U.S. has something like 4000-5000, as per official statistics I once researched from each country.
With that said, as I wrote about in a previous report, the whole point of BRICS is to show that multipolarity can sustain multiple pluralities of thought/expression/culture without one "sovereign" dominating them all in the way the U.S. tries to do with its cultural hegemony and enforced repressive culture rules, whether it's on the issues of homosexuality or something else.
In the greater context, reading thousands of articles and more comments, there's this hate vibe which I hope will be removed from the 'alt community'. I don't like people jumping on the bandwagon of bigger geopolitical issues (such as getting rid of NATO). It's akin to Christians thinking that a God who is out of space and time gives a damn when they jerk off to their teacher.
This 'homophobia' as you call it, has been almost 100 % caused by the LGBT movement on their own in last 20 or so years ; before that, nobody cared if you are gay , bi, or what ever. Until LGBT community started forcibly pushing their sex life in our everyday life.
When they started marching every week in the pride marches first with their ass hanging out, and escalating from there to todays disgusting drag performances where genitals are being literally rubbed into underage kids faces, no wonder it creates a backlash.
I still dont care what you do INSIDE YOUR OWN HOME , be gay , trans , or wear furs for all i care, but do not parade your genitals in the main street or force kids to see perverted drag shows.
If opposing people marching constantly at some public venue in sex attire half naked or dangling genitals in front of underage children in 'drag shows' is 'homophobia' , then yes, i'm homophobic...
That's about one of the two wrongs I mentioned not making a right, but not the main one I was making a point of.
Well i have been exposed to trannies since the late 70's. They were street walkers in Denver east of the capitol along with the hookers. Everyone was poor nobody cared.
However some lived in the same rat hole as myself and 2 roommates. they used to come down and drink beer. i would say that they are mentally confused individuals. I don't care what they do. Don't expect me to embrace embrace them...
By the way there was a world famous clinic in the southern Colorado town of Trinidad with a general hospital built in the 70's by a doctor after the city agreed to his preforming sex change operations there.
"i would say that they are mentally confused individuals."
That last sentence sums up the whole thing, pretty much.
"This 'homophobia' as you call it, has been almost 100 % caused by the LGBT movement on their own in last 20 or so years ; before that, nobody cared if you are gay , bi, or whatever."
I haven't noticed any increase in street level homophobia or homophobia in my family. If anything it lessened over the period and to tell the truth, my more liberal family members are pretty insufferable in how pro-LGBTQIWTF they are. Plus it's all a bit fake. It's more like, "Hey, nobody cares! So don't mention it or bring it up!" LOL not real ok with it.
I'm not so sure that is true. As a straight man, I thank my lucky stars I didn't get wired up gay. That sounds like a nightmare to me. If you pointed a loaded gun at me and said have gay sex or we will shoot you, I would say pull the damned trigger.
For one thing, every one of my friends would probably abandon me were I to turn up gay. Not that I blame them! I grew up in the 1970's, and the straight community was pretty damn homophobic. The 80's were not much different.
I'm in the unfortunate position of being one of those straight men who is at times mistaken for being gay, bisexual, formerly gay, etc. Usually women opt for the last two because any woman has this figured out way better than a man, that is, they're figured out which men like women, and they know those guys aren't gay. Men are much stupider in that regard.
This crap started in high school just a bit, but it got a lot worse in the early 80's and on. I experienced quite a bit of homophobia, so I know how it feels. It's probably one of the worst feelings I've ever experienced. It terrifies you to your very bones. And I got it from all sorts of people, liberal, conservative, you name it. Straight women are some of the wildest homophobes of them all. I never saw this "no one cares" era. I don't think it's true even know, except these young folks ARE different.
I know a couple of gay people and they both say that here in Scotland they felt far more accepted back in the 90's than they do now and they absolutely blame that reduction in acceptance on pride parades where guys go shoving their nearly bare asses in children's faces. As another gay guy on line said in a comment a while back "We spent decades telling heterosexual people that we were just like them and then along came those pride marches where they do things that no decent person would ever do no matter what their sexuality was so these people are screaming out that no we are not at all like you." And the trans crowd that are absolutely grooming very young children are now busily destroying even that reduced level of acceptance.
Why do you call queers 'gay'. Every queer I have ever met has been a wretched miserable creature. Call them what they are. The new age lot are absolute scum, I used to tolerate queers as what they did behind closed doors is none of my business but when as a collective they started to ruin my language and then brainwash children the gloves are off.
I am homo odi and tranny contemptus. I now hate the scum.
Thank you for this. People make a lot of assertions. If I'm not certain I agree with the assertion, I ask for evidence. Which you just provided. Kudos!
It is quite interesting that some report that acceptance of gays has declined in the last two decades.
Spot on. The aggressive actions - especially the attempts at recruitment in schools - have created a lot of animosity towards the homosexual movements. Most homosexuals I know are against this militant propagandizing.
don't forget the gay conversions thing where there converting kids into gays!
Odd, in Britain it's the other way round. I fear that you are blaming the victims.
"denouement" - a helluva word.
Sounds even better in a Monty-Pythonesque French accent.
100% agree! Russians don’t really care how adults( only), spend they time in bedroom and don’t think it’s necessary to parade about it. It’s very simple adults view. Thank you for great article, as always!
I don't think anyone in any country cares, not just just Russia.
Simplicius,Mike, what do you think about this?
MSM says that a Russian pilot defected to Ukraine with his Mi 8.
Is he that stupid to defect to that failing nazi state with its so called counteroink already failed?
Defecting with a multimillion dollar Mi 8 for USD 500 000??
What a moron.
People always defect, its just MSM blowing it up into something bigger so that they don't have to talk about Ukrainian dead. If there's any further depth, I'm sure Simplicius will discuss it.
I am amazed at the length of this discussion of homophobia. The war is not about the Ukraine; the war is not about homophobia, is it? It doesn't have to be if we don't make it that. Racism is also at an all time low, pretty much because of sports so white men have black heroes. They are trying to create a dialectic to fight for when there really isn't one there. It's just a bunch of whining designed by the Wachowskis Brothers and Pelosi.
Let's focus on the BRICS.
"I despise how homophobia has become normalised in support of conservatism which, in turn, is associated with Trump, Putin etc."
LOL when have conservatives not been homophobic? Never. There's nothing new here.
Actually it is not so bad in Russia as you think.
I've read about homosexuality in Russia. Not as bad as you think. For instance, gay men were barred from the army. Around 2012, they got rid of it because too many straight men were claiming to be gay to get out of service. Now all Russian gay men serve in the army. But the army is crazy homophobic. Gay Russian men drafted into the army just keep their mouths shut, and they do all right. If they announce they're gay, they're in a world of hurt.
Yes, Russia is a homophobic society. Putin has to deal with that!
But so is Ukraine. So is Poland, Hungary, Latvia, on and on. LOTS of East European societies are homophobic. They're just very socially conservative is all. The pro-West and anti-West East European societies are both homophobic.
Incidentally, all of those Muslim and Arab states we all root for like Iran are pretty damned homophobic too. Pro-Western? Anti-Western? It matters not.
Russian society is very bad for young gays and lesbians due to the new law. They don't get the help they need at all.
On Quora someone asked about homosexuality in Russia. A number of Russians responded that if you simply never discuss it, nobody much cared. Russian gay men said much the same thing. They just keep it on the down low. They said everyone knew and no one cared as long as they didn't talk about it. St. Petersburg and Moscow are full of gay bars, and nobody much bothers them to my knowledge.
The arts in Russia are full of gays and always have been. It's a cliche in Russian society.
In fact there is a joke that a man goes to the doctor and says he thinks he's a homosexual. The doctor smiles and asks,
Well, are you an actor?
No.
Are you a dancer?
No.
Are you a singer?
No.
Are you a classical musician?
No.
Doctor keeps his smile the whole time.
What are you?
I'm an electrician.
"Well then!" says the doc angrily. "You're not a homosexual, you're a Goddamned faggot!"
Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba are homophobic, although the laws may speak otherwise. That's just the nature of Latin American hypermasculine culture. The pro-Western and anti-Western societies are both homophobic, though the latter may have better laws.
Africa? We're all rooting for Black Africa now, right? Well, guess what? Black Africa is crazy homophobic! Probably among the worst on Earth. But we're for them, right? The pro-US Black African societies are homophobic. The anti-US Black African societies are homophobic.
The very word homophobic means that one is scared of queers. Homo odi is a far better description.
My understanding of the accurate meaning of that term is that it describes the fear of something like one’s self
Thus being afraid of homogeneity
That's not correct. Literal meanings do not = actual meanings.
MA, Linguistics.
Actually, it means "fear of sameness". I know, bizarre: "Hey, keep that sameness away from me!"
Words don't mean what they literally mean. They mean whatever the people who use them think they mean. However they are used, that is what they mean, in other words. Pot smokers got "paranoid." It was generally just "panic," not actual paranoia. Antisemites are those who hate Jews, not those who hate all Semitic-speaking people. Homophobes are those who hate, dislike homosexuals, not just those who are afraid of them, though a lot of homophobes are also frightened of gay men. Not that I blame them!
I found them to be quite scary, and the idea of me being gay to be terrifying.
Lucky me, I didn't get wired up that way, though on the other hand, it's almost impossible for me to predict how I would have reacted to that because had I been wired up gay, I literally wouldn't even be me! I would have been someone else my whole life.
So what I'm saying is that with my upbringing as a pre-straight masculine boy and straight man, the idea of me being gay is terrifying indeed. But had I grown up an effeminate boy who got raging hardons over men and was bored to tears or grossed out by chicks, there's no saying how I would have handled it. Perhaps I would have cruised it well.
Most of these hypotheticals are like that. We ask someone, "How would you like it if (this alternative reality to the one you had) had occurred!?" It's like asking someone, "What if you were a Martian?" You can't really answer it unless you experienced it.
"Gay Russian men drafted into the army just keep their mouths shut and they do all right. If they announce they're gay, they're in a world of hurt."
Up until 2011 the US military had the "don't ask don't tell" policy. In the military, even more so than in regular society, people should keep their sexual preferences to themselves. Most straight people don't go around telling everyone, or worse yet demonstrating to kids the delights of vanilla or bdsm sex. Some things you just keep to yourself and only share with your intimate partner(s), yet there's a top-down push to turn everything private, taboo, or sacred into a public display of obscenity and profanity. This is not a natural development, but plenty of damaged, confused or misguided people fall for it and go along with the depravity.
Ok, I'm not seeing the bigotry of Milei. Where is it? Clue me.
Of course he's completely anti-human because he's a Libertarian, but so is Simplicius and a lot of his commenters with their incoherent politics.
Mike, you're a rather conservative fellow yourself. What can I say, my man? You lie down with conservative dogs, you wake up with anti-human and homophobic fleas.
Not letting comments go to waste. About to go offline but will be back tomorrow.
there is going to be an extreme reaction to the attempt to undermine the US judicial system to make it a tool of despotism. As for homophobia, perhaps some people would rather not have other people's sexual issues thrown in their faces day after day or dragged into our public schools to influence our kids. There is already too much sexuality in every aspect of American life and it is pushed by "celebrities" and the entertainment industry. I for one do not want a government telling me how I should view anything at all. That's my call as long as it is in my mind and not pushing the other guys' minds around.
You are spouting nonsense again.
Yes, there are religious fundamentalists who are against homosexuality.
But there are also tons of conservatives, including lots of public ones like Douglas Murray, Chadwick Moore and Dave Rubin, who are openly gay.
Are you saying these gentlemen are homophobic i.e. hate themselves?
For that matter - Milos Yiannapolous is openly gay as well as being "racist", "misogynistic" and "xenophobic".
Multipolarity has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
Although stereotypes do exist, for a reason, it is worth noting how the social engineering cast has managed to reduce many peoples views of society in two, very narrow and limiting structural frameworks
It is not clear that this is "social engineering" so much as typical "winner take all" dynamics.
"Winner Take All" dynamics are why you always end up with 2 sides in such scenarios because the population winds up splitting into the 2 most powerful messages. The idiocy of the Democrat party today is shifting from Working Class Champions as its previous generation core message to "Diversity" - thus alienating its original power base in favor of its new PMC supplemented by the African Americans.
These morons fail to understand that Bill Clinton doing this was fine because the Democrats were still. more or less, able to count on the working class for support due to historical reasons but that ongoing betrayal of working class interests in favor of their new PMC/bankster/MIC donors was going to lead to erosion of its base. Note this affected the dinosaur Republicans as well: a significant number of PMC/bankster/MIC types switched over; the idiocy of the dinosaur Republicans is that they fail to understand that the role of Working Class Champion is there for the taking.
RFK Jr is trying to bring the Democrats back to their roots, but he is going to fail just as Sanders and Gabbard failed, and for exactly the same reasons (DNCC fuckery).
All excellent points
It looks as though we are entering a NeoFeudal technocracy
Rather than red versus blue, it’s looking more and more like antiestablishment versus pro establishment
Exactly right - except the feudal lords of yore knew their power basis rested on force whereas the neofeudal wannabes believe that control over law, major companies, media and the federal/state/local bureaucracies can substitute.
We will see.
As a Leftist, I think opposition to this Neo-feudal technocracy may be something we could ally with parts of the Right on.
American Republican Party is slowly waking up. With the Left going hard onto the “working class people are homophobic, illiterate scum whom I would never associate with” side, the Republicans are moving to fill the vacuum. Republicans are now the ones who think the FBI and CIA are crooked and should be investigated. Republicans are the ones questioning why we need to be at war with the rest of the damn world all the time. If they could only find a leader without the infinite baggage of their current one...
Yes, it is pretty ironic that the ideological space that used to be occupied by liberal Progressives is now where many conservatives are at.
As for the leader with baggage: agreed but it is also very clear that there is no one else willing to confront the MICIMATT with anywhere near the reach and standing of "45".
DeSantis has demonstrated that he is, at best, lacking in conviction (his Ukraine about face). Pence and Haley and Christie are dinosaur Republicans/neocons. Vivek is more than a little naive on international politics and is clearly angling for a cabinet post under a Republican president a la Andrew Yang.
You have to work with the hand you're dealt.
Yes, it is pretty ironic that the ideological space that used to be occupied by liberal Progressives is now where many conservatives are at.
Except they're not pro-working class. I don't think they can ever be pro-worker. If they were, they wouldn't be Republicans anymore. The whole party would have to change its very orientation.
Good luck ever getting the Republican Party to be a pro-working class party. It is written in the very genes of the party that they are pro-rich, pro-business and anti-working class. Class struggle is a thing. Class consciousness is a think. Class interests are a thing. Have you guys even read one page of Marx? He used to be mandatory reading in Economics classes.
I agree, 2 wrongs don't make a right.
But also agree that activist gays brought on the problems. I remember being appalled when they forcibly turned Boston's St Patrick's Day parade, a clearly family style event, into a Gay Pride event. That, to me, was the start of craziness.
MESSING WITH CHILDREN WAS TANTAMOUNT TO A DECLARATION OF WAR.
I don't care what consenting adults do in privacy. I don't want anyone's sexuality shoved in my face. Goes for tv & movies too.
And they have zero business in education. NONE. NADA. NYET.
I work as a private tutor in a local school and have seen this menace develop in real time over the last few years. With a new head teacher there is now "Gay Pride" month and teachers whom I once respected running bake sales to raise money for "oppressed gays" in Africa - all in full view of junior school kids. This and transgenderism is also woven into every topic - even design and chemistry. It's demonic.
I follow Jeff Childer's substack. It seems every other stack includes arrest news about gays teaching "how to" have gay sex to teens & children, drag queen story hours at libraries, Florida's legal battles to protect children eg woke Disney grooming children, etc.
It is war, largely driven & funded by wef.
Fuck the fags.
Go right ahead, many of them won’t mind a bit.
LOL lot of straight guys do just that. Look at any prison.
Or rather don't
These days, you always have to define your terms. What do we mean by "homophobia"? If it's being violent and directly insulting to homosexuals, then that is wrong. If it is like me, fighting to make sure that my kids are not exposed to sexual perversion propaganda at school, then, sorry, that is not homophobia.
The “-phobia” suffix is overused to the point of being useless. Opposing genital mutilation for teenagers is not “transphobia”. It’s become a shorthand for “any opposition to any part of our increasingly aggressive and transgressive agenda”. Letting the “T” component get their skin in the game was a mistake. We’re no longer defending what two male accountants do when they are alone together. You’re “phobic” if you don’t want drag queens reading explicit books to third graders.
Exactly. It's a standard tactic of the Left to pin a label on you if you speak out. Just like you are "far right" if you believe that national borders should be guarded and criminals punished.
I'm Hard Left, and I agree with both my rightwing colleagues here. But then, I'm Alt Left, so hey...
I should add, Robert, that these terms don't mean much these days. There are only two real labels left: freedom lovers and deep staters.
You are a reactionary, but I am so desperate nowadays that I will ally with on the stuff we agree on at least - Russia, BRICS, US imperialism, the Cultural Left Freakshow, etc. You need to grab every friend you can in life.
“Homophobia” is designed to pathologize any objection to homosexual practice in the public mind; it’s an instance of linguistic engineering.
We just don't have good "mis-" words for hatred of homosexuals, Muslims, transsexuals. "Mis-" is used for hatred of men or women. Others are just -ists: sexist, racist. So they went to "phobia," which in this case means hatred. It's not completely crazy because fear and aggression (hatred) are often linked.
But who fears homosexuals?
I've seen lots of men who do. I used to be pretty afraid of them myself, especially large groups of them or whole neighborhoods full of them. I don't feel that way anymore, but I am still not comfortable seeing vast crowds of them in city neighborhoods. I lived in a neighborhood like that once. It's Bizarro Land, like a foreign planet.
The feeling you get as an 18 year old cabbie when you’re offered a glass of wine at the door of a house party while every single man in the room is studiously not looking in your direction.
It’s not fear exactly but a sense that to a certain subset of them you are prey.
JIM G may have said it best with: "I am amazed at the length of this discussion of homophobia." That length proves what I was worried about.
I'd meant to return sooner but only have a Midnight data bundle. Waking at 1.30am and trying to read a gazillion pages and post before 7am has been challenging. But that's good because I've lost my initial reactionary desire here. It's been replaced with disappointment.
Beyond homophobia, and considering history, doubt is a better tool than blind support (because advertising makes someone look like your guy). Milei is using people's conservative anger to fuel his ambition and his corporate supporters. If you support neoliberalism and the dollar, then supporting Milei makes sense e.g. https://www.desmog.com/2023/08/22/javier-milei-argentina-atlas-network/
I'm taking a break from commenting everywhere for a month. Going to focus on research and then some writing. Be well. And may this war end soon!
Just keep your gay ass in nato countries. You will be fine.
Milei is not far right. Milei is a libertarian who wants to slowly dismantle the state. How could a libertarian be defined “far right”?
You're right he's in the libertarian party but has been "characterized" as far right due to what's perceived as dogwhistling or toting a lot of the known "far-right" lines:
"Milei's political positions have sparked controversy and confusion.[24][27] Controversial were his opposition to abortion in rape cases,[28] his rejection of the inclusion of comprehensive sex education in schools,[29] skepticism towards COVID-19 vaccines,[24] civilian firearm ownership support,[30][31] legalization of organ trade,[32] promotion of the far-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,[33][34] and climate change denialism.[35] Due to those controversies and his radical conservative economic and social policies,[24][36] his victory in the primaries was deemed an upset,[37] and led to his characterization as a far-right populist."
Perhaps he's "right" culturally but libertarian economically/politically?
I confess to not knowing enough about him to judge, and in my article was merely quoting the author of the article I was quoting: https://www.rt.com/news/581775-argentina-presidential-election-brics/
"skepticism towards COVID-19 vaccines"
Well I never, it seems I'm right wing! WTF I had me fooled...
Color me skeptical, but I had pause for thought when they changed the definition of the word vaccine to accommodate the Covid shots
Lot of Hard Left types are too. Horseshoe theory, my friend.
Not sure that we would ever be friends Mr Snide.
The middle of the horseshoe is where you find bourgeois liberalism, fascism in a cardigan.
Yeah this is interesting. I always wondered why Communists hated liberals. Now I get it! Death squads and gay bars! Fascist coups and puberty blockers! Nazis and drag queen story hour!
It's like they combine the worst of the Right with the worst of the Left.
The KPD never forgave the SPD for allying with the Freikorps to suppress the Spartacist revolt and murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Something that liberals are apt to forget when they blame the KPD for being too slow to form an anti-nazi front in the early 1930s. They also forget that the Weimar Republic was assassinated in 1930, the coalition including the NSDAP in 1933 was to prevent its corpse twitching, not to bury it.
"Sparked controversy" is one of those new Woke weasel phrases. It just means the editorial team of the big Lefty papers and a few blue-haired feminists are angry.
It's not new, it's US English; pity really, until the Reagan regime Americans did a lot for the language but since then it's become a McLanguage (TM).
The term "far-right" is used by the oligarchs that rule Western Europe and the Anglo world to describe anyone they do not like. If you are opposed to these oligarchs, which I assume that you are, it is probably best not to use the terms of approbrium that they have invented to describe anyone who challenges their power.
Milei is not "far right" in any sense that has meaning. Likewise, he does not have "radical conservative economic and social policies" in any sense that has meaning. He is, what we would call in the modern world a "libertarian" and he shares the political ideology of the founding fathers of the U.S. and the South American republics, which was known, at that time, as "liberalism." "Conservatism," of course, referred to monarchists.
Of course, the meaning of these terms have evolved over time. But any serious definition of "conservative" now would include an emphasis on nationalism, a desire to use the state to preserve cultural norms and morals, and an emphasis on a strong national defense. Milei is interested in none of these things.
Anyone who disagrees with the American Democratic Party on any issue is automatically labeled “Far Right”. There is no middle ground. If you believe that the CIA is a shady organization that might not be trustworthy, you are far right. If you think the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not completely trustworthy and looking out for your interests, you are Far Right. If you don’t believe that the 2016 presidential election was stolen from Hillary via Russian Interference, you are clearly Far Right and should be considered “Putin’s Puppet”.
That's not correct at all. We call lots of people Centrists. Including Joe Biden!
"If you believe that the CIA is a shady organization that might not be trustworthy, you are far right"
Gong! Never mind the Far Left has been saying this for 60 years now.
"If you think the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not completely trustworthy and looking out for your interests, you are Far Right."
LOT of people on the Left don't like cops much period. And personally, I think "feds" as above, are the lowest cops of them all.
"If you don’t believe that the 2016 presidential election was stolen from Hillary via Russian Interference, you are clearly Far Right and should be considered “Putin’s Puppet”."
Most people on the Left say that's BS. You are conflating "Democratic Party partisan idiots" with "the Left."
You are correct that the Democratic Party now LOVES the CIA and especially the feds at the FBI, and it's an article of faith among them that "Russia stole the election" LOL.
This Right, Left, Far Right , Far Left, Democrap, Repugnicant, what wrestling team you cheer for duoply, Unity party, needs to stop among the Citizenery. All it does is divide us against each other on very narrow issues rather than unite us on broad issues like, after 32 trillion Dollars or a hundred thousand Dollar per capita, what do we have to show from all this debt? Does everyone own a home in America? How about busting up other countries instead of building ours? 100 billion to Ukraine and a one time $700 payment for those who's homes burned on Maui. How about Food Inc. and being poisoned by corn syrup and GMOs? How about Big Pharma and their perpetual vaccines aided by bio labs in Ukraine and other places? How about we keep paying the Renters in our own dilapidated country and yet, never have enough money to go to work fixing it?
Stop this girlyman bullshit, wake the fuck up and man up. Don't you get it, you are renting your own country out.
We Americans are pulling ourselves down and the world with us.
I am afraid, we have to hit rock bottom, before we can push up to the water's surface. The question is, will we have enough air to breath again at the surface? Will we have enough men, not just males, to do the heavy lifting. May God help all of Mankind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPD7_BBpwHQ
Hillary Supporter brought to you by the Jimmy Dore show.
Democrat party
They get really mad when you call them that. It’s “Democratic party” FTW.
It's just partisan crap. "I refuse to call them the Democratic Party. There's nothing democratic about them!" Bob Dole, 1996.
Dismantling your state in order to put those functions under control of another state is hardly "libertarian".
And that's pretty much what dollarizing and privatizing would result in. Your monetary policy would be controlled by the Fed and your business by foreign (likely US) owners.
Many observers underestimate the extent to which the Argentinian public (esp. middle and upper classes) has already dollarized. The state is late to the party.
But I agree with your central point, which is that abdicating responsibility for monetary supply - outsourcing it to the US - would leave the central bank without some fundamental tools and there's no guarantee that US monetary policy would coincide with the needs of Argentina. Proposing dollarization would have been a fabulous idea thirty years ago, to be fair, but at this point it's foolishly risky.
It's a shit situation but the solution isn't to completely abandon monetary sovereignty.
Do whatever you have to, issue a completely new currency and follow the strictest fiscal spending rules, capital controls, etc.
Even peg your currency to gold or whatever you want.
But relying on the currency you don't control is extremely dangerous and will eventually result in never being able to leave such an arrangement.
Even a relatively benign arrangement such as the Euro resulted in an economic disaster for Italy, Greece, etc. and there is no way out.
In the larger perspective I completely agree. A mature country issues its own currency and controls its economic destiny. That said, Argentina has been, in your words, in a "shit situation" for a few decades now, with a perpetually plummeting currency and an incompetent central bank. That's why those with means have dollarized already, and that's why the dollarization idea isn't considered fringe or extreme. For all practical purposes, it's already happened.
As a european I can tell you that Greece brought about its own downfall. When these countries joined the EU, they immediately plowed an absolute load of money into building new highways, hotels etc, under the guise that it would revitalise tourism. The EU forked out an astonishing amount of money to facilitate this and it resulted in half completed construction. I was on holiday in Spain and witnessed entire roads, double lane highways, completely unused. They led nowhere. Drive down them and you'll find half constructed buildings, with rebar sticking out. The reason they do this is because if a building is unfinished, you don't pay property tax. Unsurprisingly, the locals do the same thing and now live in houses with a 'missing' third floor to escape property tax. All this brought on by the EU.
As if matters couldn't be worse, the EU believes firmly in the common market, which loathes excess. Just look at recent news, France is being paid to scale back wine production. The exact same thing happened in Greece, it was paid to scale back its exports. Things got so bad it aquired immense debt to German banks, which became a compelling reason for Germany to help out during the default Greece was suffering.
The EU are absolute masters at crippling small businesses and in turn, country's economies.
You need 2 parties to have a bad loan but that's not even the main issue here. Having the Euro just facilitated bad loans.
The thing about using a currency you don't issue is that it severely limits what you can do in terms of economic policy.
If Greece had its own currency when they ran into problems they could have responded by devaluing thus making imports decrease and exports increase(including tourism, not necessarily industrial goods). You can also inflate debts away in that way if necessary and do all sort of things that allow a country to deal with structural issues.
You can also do some of those things via tariffs, capital controls, etc. but to add to that the EU doesn't like those either. Thus the only "solution" was a reduction in spending, wages and mass emigration.
The Euro just doesn't work unless every country is the same (or if there are direct fiscal transfers but good luck with that.
As I tried to explain in an earlier thread on this subject, you do not understand what Milei means by "dollarization." Do not feel badly, however. Most people, even here in Argentina, do not. Milei has not intention of making the USD the national currency of Argentina. His plan is to do away with a national currency and allow people to use whatever they wish as money. If you want to use "bitcoin," you will be free to do so. If you want to use Rubles, you will be free to do so.
However, as I stated before and state again. Dollarization is the de facto reality of the situation now. Everyone saves in dollars and all large purchases are already made in dollars. There are hundreds of millions and most likely tens of billions of physical dollars in circulation in the country. I purchased my home with a big stack of $100 dollar bills: physical cash.
So "dollarization" is merely the name that Milei gives to this plan because he knows that the dollar will quickly replace the Peso as the currency used for daily transactions. It does not make the Argentine national currency the USD or any such thing. It is merely a recognition of what is already reality and what will transpire after the Peso is gone.
Whatever the case and whatever your feelings about Milei, the fact of the matter is that the ARS is dead. Prices have more than doubled this year already and will undoubtedly double again before the year if finished. Hyperinflation is weeks or months away. Everyone knows this, and the Peso is dead as a currency. There are no gimmicks or tricks that can save it, and all the other politicians are fools, liars, or both. everyone in Argentina knows it.
"Dollarization," as Milie describes it, is the only proposal on the table for what to do to maintain order and stability while the Peso dies. I do not necessarily agree with the idea and would much prefer that we make use of our extensive silver mines and mining companies to formulate a new national currency, but until such time as someone with a microphone suggests something like this, Milie is the only hope this country has. Most people here know that, and that is why he will win if he is not assassinated by the Western oligarchs or one of the various corrupt political machines here in Argentina.
Result is the same.
A country without a currency isn't a country.
I don't know the situation enough to tell what the exact results will be, but once you destroy your own currency getting it back is extremely difficult and costly.
We don't have a currency right now in any meaningful sense. The Peso is not a measure of value, because it's value is in constant decline. It serves no purpose in the price-finding mechanism of a market. It is not a store of value... obviously... because it loses significant value daily. Prices now rise weekly in my town for everything. Finally, the rate of inflation is so high right now that it cannot serve as a medium of exchange. How so? Let us say that I purchase a liter of milk from the grocery store. That milk has a shelf-life of 30 days. If the grocery store puchased it 15 days ago, they are already selling it for cost if they have not raised their retail price by 20% in the 2 weeks that it sat on the shelf. The labor to change these prices almost daily costs more than the profit on the product, and if a merchant does not change his prices almost weekly, he will be out of business within 2 months. What is more, the cost to extract, preserve and bottle the milk by the farmer happened 3 or 4 weeks ago. The price that he received from the grocery store and its distribution chain for his milk is already below his cost. So, a currency losing 3% of its value daily cannot even function as a medium of exchange. So... explain to me exactly how Argentina has not already lost its currency. I suspect it is hopeless to try to explain these things to people who can only think in terms of USD=bad, because I hate the U.S. . I am no fan of the U.S. either and do not care for the nation much, but I do not allow my dislike for the nation to scatter my brain into incoherence.
All Libertarians are Far Right with the exception of the Left Libertarian crowd who are almost Commies. Of course the Right and Left Libertarians hate each other.
This whole "Libertarians are neither right nor left" BS is just another one of their lies. Ask anyone left of center where Libertarians are. They'll all say Right or even Far Right.
"libertarian economically/politically"
See that part? That's called RIGHTWING economically and politically.
No. That’s complete nonsense and bullshit, you know nothing about libertarians
You're either totally lying or you know nothing about this crap politics you support.
Are you really this stupid or are you just trolling? Left? Right? What are you talking about? Since you are the expert on this spectrum thing of right and left, why don't you define for us what "right wing" is and what "left wing" is.
Rightwing:
Right means conservative! Real simple. It's mostly about economics though.
A better definition is that the Right believes in rule by an aristocratic wealthy elite, and the Left believes in rule by the people, the masses, ordinary people without a lot of money, workers: democracy. In the past, the Right believed in the divine right of kings. Then they switched to supporting feudal and warlord rule.
The Right includes all of the supporters of the Republican Party and the MAGA crowd. They tend to support neoliberalism and hate "big government," taxation, and social programs. They're also often hostile to women and non-Whites nowadays. They have conservative social mores. In the US, the Right represents hardline Christianity such as Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity. They hated gays in the past, but those days may be over.
The Right hates environmentalism everywhere on Earth. They want to destroy everything so people can get more money and stuff. The Right also believes that global warming is fake and that the COVID epidemic was also faked. They opposed masks and COVID shutdowns as a violation of individual rights. In the US, the Right is associated with radical individualism, but this philosophy is hated everywhere else in the world.
In the US, the Right takes a hardline against the tranny cult, anti-White critical race theory, radical homosexuality, and man-hating feminist bitches. They take a harder line on illegal immigration, amnesty for illegals, and asylum seekers. I actually support them on these issues.
In the past they refused to penalize employers for hiring illegals, so the problem was not fixed. This is because the US Right is extremely pro-corporate, pro-rich, and pro-business. They always refused to deal with the Hindu-1B scabs who took White men's IT work because they worked for half the money. Now the Right may be cracking down on this abuse. They are also cracking down on chain immigration, and are thinking about imposing more stringent tests to become a legal immigrant.
The US Right wants as few people as possible to vote, so they make voting as difficult as they cane, especially for Democratic voters. Rightwingers always turn out no matter what, so they're not worried about suppressing their own vote.
Since 2000, the US Right have been stealing elections via those voting machines. This is a problem that is still not fixed. The Right is pushing radical anti-democracy measures all across the land, and they just literally tried to steal an election. The US Right is also extremely corrupt due to its business connections and love of wealth and possessions.
The Republican Party seems committed to the project of a permanent Republican authoritarian state or dictatorship because as an elite party committed to rule by aristocrats, they realize that increasingly they cannot win fair and square.
This is a tendency all over the world, as the Right is antidemocratic in most places. As a movement committed to aristocratic rule and opposed to democratic rule by the people, most populations don't want to vote for rich Rightwing elites. Hence in many places they only way they can get into power is by cutting back on democracy and putting in Rightwing dictatorships and authoritarian states.
The Right recently out and out stole three seats on the US Supreme Court. The Right gutted the Voting Rights Act, so now states are free to discriminate against non-White voters. The Rightwing Supreme Court has also ruled that extreme partisan gerrymanders such as the permanent Republican dictatorship in the Wisconsin Legislature are legal!
The Conservative Party in Australia and Canada is similar but much milder than Republicans.
The Libertarian Party is absolutely conservative or Rightwing. Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema are Rightwing Democrats.
However, the US Republican Party project is despised in most of the world where it has few numerous supporters in any land.
In Latin America, the Right supports the lighter-skinned elite and opposes anything intended to improve the lives of the vast majority darker skinned poor. The Right is also often violent and even murderous. The Right represents latifundios, or large landowners.
The wealth gap is extreme in these societies the rich Right have almost all the money and wealth, and everyone else has next to nothing. The Latin American Right thinks this is just fine!
They often take over the small plots of the poor with the death squads and army. If you don't hand over your land, you get murdered by the Right. The rural poor then flood into urban slums without water, indoor plumbing, paved streets, not to mention access to health care, education, or even employment. The Right likes this just fine! And if they try to protest these conditions, the Right sends people out to kill them!
I should note that the Right owns all of the land in most of these countries. These are large estates. There is not enough land for the rest, so many are reduced to day labor on the estates of the rich Rightwingers. They scream about socialism and communism all the time, but down there, being a communist means you belong to a labor union. Supporting raising the minimum wage is communism. In many of those countries, the penalty for being a communist is death.
I will say that the Right down there has largely stopped killing people. However, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay, in days past, these countries all ran Rightwing death squads and armies that massacred the urban and rural poor for demanding something to eat and a roof over their heads because that was communism! The Right is still murderous in recent years in Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Honduras.
The Right was formerly associated with extreme Jim Crow racism in places like Cuba and Ecuador. Rightwing Anti-Indian racism is still extreme in Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile. The Venezuelan Right is very racist. Rightwing anti-black racism is still serious in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.
However, the racism has declined from an earlier level in most of these places.
In the Philippines it is the same thing. A tiny Rightwing elite, mostly Fujian Chinese, has almost all the land, wealth, and money. Everyone else has next to nothing.
Rightwing governments in that sense have vanished from most of the rest of the globe. Rightwing or conservative economics is despised the world over.
There are few economically Right countries in Europe other than the UK under the Tories and Ukraine.
There is also rightwing fascism in the world. It may rule in Haiti. The Latin American Right has fascist tendencies at times, especially in Bolivia where they still wave Nazi flags.
Fascist/Nazi rightwing countries include Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. A fascist Right rules Poland. An odd Rightwing fascist state is in power in Hungary. Rightwing fascists have been ruling Israel for decades now.
Turkey has been a fascist country forever, but the economics are not rightwing. It is similar to Hungary and Israel in this regard. India is also a very fascist country right now, but the economics is still left. Turkey, Hungary, Israel, and India may in a sense be called "left fascism," but the extreme bigotry and racism in India, Israel, and Turkey makes them rightwing.
Many countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Muslim and Arab World, the Caribbean, Eurasia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa are socially conservative but economically leftwing. You can't really call these conservative or Rightwing countries.
Putin's politics is called Rightwing "Russian conservatism." However, this would be considered leftwing in most of the world. This is about the only "rightwing" politics I can support nowadays.
Social conservatism is not considered conservatism or rightwing because the Right mostly has to do with economics.
You are hopelessly confused about any number of things, and it is probably not worth the time to try to correct the innumerable errors in the absurd things that you have written here. Just to give you one example... by your definition of "right-wing" (which you somehow associate with the Republican Party in the U.S. ... despite the fact that it is the other party that controls all the levers of state and receives almost all the money from Wall Street), the Communist Dictatorships of Castro. Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung On, the Khmer Rouge, and so forth were and are all "right-wing" governments? They certainly did not give any power to the "people."
left is anarchism and right is everything else. Simples.
Labels like Left and Right are practically useless these days. I know anarchists (who define anarchism as strict adherence to what they call the Non-Aggression Principle) who say Right is anarchism and Left is everything else. Simples.
It's much better to talk in terms of principals and policies rather than labels; you often end up agreeing with someone on almost everything and only later find out that you each self-describe (if forced) as being at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Where can I find someone "left of center"?
At least Suzanne Vega is left of center:
“If you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Off of the strip
In the outskirts
In the fringes
In the corner
Out of the grip
When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer
"Nothing much" (not much)
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think
I must be out of touch
But I'm only
In the outskirts
And in the fringes
On the edge
And off the avenue
And if you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Wondering about you
I think that somehow
Somewhere inside of us
We must be similar
If not the same
So I continue
To be wanting you
Left of center
Against the grain
If you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Off of the strip
In the outskirts
In the fringes
In the corner
Out of the grip
When they ask me
"What are you looking at?"
I always answer
"Nothing much" (not much)
I think they know that
I'm looking at them
I think they think
I must be out of touch
But I'm only
In the outskirts
And in the fringes
On the edge
And off the avenue
And if you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Wondering about you
Wondering about you”
ROFL 🤣 🤣 🤣
Raises hand.
You're confused.
Your politics is incoherent or dishonest, maybe both. Probably the latter.
You don't know much about political science do you?
Far right is anyone who is not liberal and not supportive of the mainstream Democrat line.
RINOs are not far right because they support the mainstream Democrat line on war.
Progressives are liberal but not supportive of the mainstream Democrat line.
Didn't you get the FBI memo?
They do abuse the phrase.
The key event was when the West stole $350 billion of bank deposits by Russian citizens. A system that steals all your money whenever it is moved to do so is intolerable. An alternative had to be built, quickly as possible. This task strikes me as much easier than sending a space capsule to the moon.
well the swiss do say they only actually found 30 .
The EU 42..Medvedev said Russia holds hundreds of billions US in EU UK US assets. One exemple here:
What are we in for?
Here representatives of the market economy have encountered the market economy. And life "by the rules". They were very much frapped.
It turns out that foreign companies that decided to leave our Federation face huge costs, because our Capital requires large discounts on assets that companies are forced to sell. Mm-hmm. R is for market.
Executives say it's getting harder and harder to navigate "the rules". Hmmm... it's a good life when you make the rules. It's bad when you make them. Sudden revelation.
Foreign companies have already suffered more than $80 billion in losses from their operations in Russia due to write-offs and lost profits, according to a Reuters analysis of company documents and statements.
Dutch brewer Heineken said on Friday it had completed its exit from Russia by selling all of its operations to Russia's Arnest Group for a symbolic one euro. We won't be shown all the material to do, of course. But we won't be surprised if there suddenly turns out to be, for example, an option to make back and forth. But the Western reader will be written about such barbaric squeezes. An entire beer company for 1 euro.
Moscow is already demanding a 50% discount on all foreign deals after consultants selected by the Russian government evaluated the business. Wo! Another revelation. It turns out that consultants are sometimes independent not only from our side, but also from yours.
Russia also requires a contribution to the Russian budget of at least 10% of the price. The horror. I see, it is normal to withdraw 10% from Russian depositors in Cypriot banks. Well, this is orthodox and brotherly. But this kind of thing...
The government commission that oversees foreign investment must approve deals involving companies from "unfriendly" countries - those that have imposed sanctions on Russia because of its actions in Ukraine. Banks and energy companies also need President Vladimir Putin's personal approval to sell.
A financial market source working with companies seeking to leave Russia said the commission was sending some deals back, saying the valuation should be 20-30% lower. "An unpredictable black box".
Another person who handles mergers and acquisitions and works with foreign companies said deals exceeding $100 million are at particular risk of being rejected.
What was it the 360° minister said yesterday?
"Actually economic sanctions were supposed to have economic consequences. But they didn't. Because the logic of democracies doesn't work in autocracies."
Economic sanctions have taken a 180° turn?
source Reuters via slavyangrad tm
"Banks and energy companies also need President Vladimir Putin's personal approval to sell.
Moscow is already demanding a 50% discount on all foreign deals after consultants selected by the Russian government evaluated the business.
Russia also requires a contribution to the Russian budget of at least 10% of the price."
Nationalism.
Although I am barely even thousandaire, it seems to me that theft on a scale so grand would go a long ways toward ensuring that nobody in their right mind would ever do business with you again
I'm lucky when I'm a hundredaire at the end of the month. If I can make it to the end without borrowing even more I can't pay back, I win.
What do you make of the various YouTube commentators who are following the conflict? I followed Military Summary (dima) and Weeb Union but I find both to be initially interesting but neither really captures whats really happening
That's roughly my take on all of them. They seem to be fine and even very good for "casual" observers or hobbyists. Particularly because having the video footage of each update gives the casuals an easy way to follow along with towns/places they have no clue about. But as actual "analysis" they don't seem to offer much in the way of that.
With that said, I'm talking about the specific type of commentator you seemed to refer to which is those guys that do the map + commentary + daily summaries.
In terms of pure verbal analysis, i.e. guys like Mercouris, Martyanov, Berletic, etc., there's many good and decent ones in that regard, but they may not have all the whizbang graphics and such.
For me personally I don't have time to follow most of them as I have my own methodologies and simply don't have the time in the day to watch long videos of that sort but have nothing against them. I prefer to follow things I can read and skim rather than videos where you're stuck watching a lot of extraneous fluff or advertising.
Ultimately, there's a big difference between people who can adequately summarize what's happening presently (a skill in itself) and those who can really read between the lines and divine the subtle signals of things under the surface, transferring them into deeper prognosticating analysis, etc.
I'm starting to find the daily updates counterproductive even so I stopped watching. And the introduction of clickbait titles and thumbnails has turned me off. Mercouris is a good listen if I have a long drive but am too busy otherwise. Your battlefield updates are the best summaries at the moment!
Whilst i enjoy and rate his content, I find his pace a cure for insomnia.
That's why I listen to him on 1.25x speed (sometimes 1.5x). He's much better that way.
I don't even remotely listen to everything he says, but I have these "phases" when I'm so busy that I can't follow anything, but because he says everything twice, I sort of get what's happening without focusing much on him.
Lots of people are better at high speed, and its time saving.
I often think I've forgotten to speed Mercouris up only to find I've already got him on x1.5. If I try to listen at normal speed, I lose concentration between clauses - sometimes between words. He speaks at a much more bearable pace on the Duran, where Alex's presence makes him less linguistically self-indulgent.
Yep. I do commute apprx. twice a week 1 hour one way, and Duran is very good for that. No time otherwise.
Duran asked me on telegram whether i intended to make the most of their financial advices in those troubled times. But i guess it didnt stem from mercouris. Maybe his bearded pal
That would be scammers which the Duran guys have warned about it happens to a lot of youtubers
I had a similar experience with other unrelated youtube channels. The (seemingly) owner of one channel told me that I won some kind contest for the best commentary, the exchange moved into telegram, and then questions become personal very quickly and I stopped that conversation.
The guy is making 12.000 US a month + Duran, their videos are every day a bit longer (90 minutes 7/7), it is far too long. On YT and other platforms simply activate a good adblocker and no more ads, ever. Since 2012, I did not watch a single ad on both YT and internet in general. Anyway, any company which wants to force me to buy this or that on print or city ads, I simply boycot.
Dima (Military Summary) leaves an impression of immaturity and emotionalism, such as
-- glorification of traitor Prigozhin and
-- his own grand military strategy prognostications
Agreed. Dima does a good job of covering events but his analysis is, well....just, whew lad.
His girlfriend is from...Llov...sbu?
Yep. And there's a world of difference between those that look at one 'bulge' and blat on about how it is a golden opportunity for breakthroughs and penetration here and there and everywhere and then look at another bulge and declare that it is a ripe candidate for being cut off and creating a 'cauldron' - without ever a single word about what make it true this way for this one and that way for the other one. In fact never raising the notion during a whole nigh on two years of reporting.
That sort of thing.
That is the level of reporting we get from our YT channels without exception. There is nothing rises above that level that I've yet seen. Please tell me if there is.
Brian Berletic, for instance - much applauded by such as the Duran - spent a year at least bashing on earnestly like a guru about what the whole state of the conflict was based on the official statistics on supplies from the USA to Kiev. As though there were any reason in the real world to place any credence in those figures at all!!
Childish rubbish is what it is.
They manufacture notional front lines by collating official reports from each side using 'indisputable truths' more or less as they extract them from information that one or the other side would rather you didn't have but can't stop you.
Like this side doesn't want you to know that they've lost this place but the other side claims it and shows pictures. That sort of thing.
Which takes some assiduous work, some attention to detail, some inspired deductions perhaps on occasion.
So we get a fairly true idea of where the front line currently is. Thanks to them for that.
But that is ALL we get. That is all. Nothing more. When they precede their videos with a screenshot of their map showing what they see as the frontline today that's all we need look at. Waste of time listening, watching the whole vid.
Yep.
For the most covered war in the whole history of the world its incredibly opaque, incredibly.
And you go to more 'scholarly' and 'informed', 'educated', 'experienced' sites like perhaps the 'Institute for the Study of War' and they're pure spin, conjecture, polemic, propaganda: crap.
IF anyone knows a decent source of objective and intelligent, knowledgeable reportage please, please do tell.
For its not apparent, wherever it is, and it never gets a mention in any of the couple of dozen or so usual sites we all use today.
I feel the need badly. :)
neither side has any incentive to tell the truth, and most if not all commentators become emotionally and intellectually invested in their version of the that truth.
At least there are plenty to choose from. A commenter, SaludyRepublica, on Mark Sleboda's Aug 24 Substack post, has a comprehensive list of 37 sources in English, plus more in Spanish.
Is Brian Berletic not Tony Cartalucci?
Apparently so. I had not known. No reason to hold that against him though, is there? I use a webname myself, don't we all?
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q25268866
Who, me? Did somebody call my name? I could have sworn I heard someone say "nom de plume."
I enjoy Alex and history legends for the regular updates
He has a good sense of humor is not afraid to show his face and maintains a pretty level head
He has also come up with some particularly good insights, based on his own detective work
"BRICS members did verbalize an initiative to begin work on an inter-BRICS settlement payment system and currency.. But even in the meantime, they will increase initiatives towards settling in their own currencies away from the dollar".
Indeed. On September 17, mBridge will be open to all comers, so any country with a CBDC can trade with any other – in its own currency.
Thailand, where I live, has been using mBridge for the past 12 months, buying oil from UAE for Thai baht, while the UAE producer receives payment in dirham 12 ms. later.
mBridge was created by PBOC and is based in Hong Kong, the alternative to Switzerland for safe, offshore banking.
No US$, no 24-48 hour delay, no US oversight.
I expect the developing world to follow Russia's example..
I miss Siam. Lived there for eight years. You are a lucky man Godfree.
Funny, I was thinking that today as I drove around and saw those smiling faces. I love the place.
Me; Ko Pha Ngan three years, Huay Kwang/Suttisan five years. I will go back one day when the scamdemic madness passes.
Zoltan Pozsar has been talking about mBridge for well over a year.
mBridge is why UAE is in BRICS, and will be an important part of the correspondent bank buildout to complement/rival the existing Western one. CBDCs are how mBridge works - which is why the BRICS nations are going to have them led by the e-cny.
Thanks!
I was wondering why so many little countries were going for CBDCs.
It seemed like a fad, beyond their technical capacity to implement or domestic needs.
Clearly, someone handed them a software template and secure terminal and helped them develop their local branding!
One of China's little-appreciated strengths is their reservoir of talent assignable to projects like this.
As Steve Hsu observed, 300,000 of them have 160 IQs, while the West has fewer 30,000.
It's really starting to show.
Electronic money isn't a fad, it's inevitable, whether we like it or not. The government wants to "see" you, and your wealth, and all your spending. We all need to start thinking about wealth differently. Think about which assets they can see and which assets are opaque.
Your point about human capital is immensely important. The US is powered by the intellectual strength of foreigners who come to the US to enrich themselves beyond what is conceivable in their home countries. If and when that changes, the global balance of power will shift.
The government can already do 'see' 99% of us, and with effort, can see the rest.
China, as the leader of this push, has had many public discussions about CBDC confidentiality.
Since 90% of Chinese trust their government, CBDC distrust is not a big issue there.
I suspect that personal use is a red herring to throw the US Treasury off the scent.
It turns out that it's for international trade settlements in native currencies, bypassing Swift and US Treasury oversight.
Bummer.
Electronic money has existed for over a generation; credit cards are electronic money. And before electronics, there were physical letters of credit.
Furthermore, the notion of full observability is made entirely by people who don't know jack squat about the space.
Let me educate you a bit. I do forensic accounting consulting among other things; give the bank and credit card data and I can figure out exactly how any person acts financially. Throw in some lifestyle analysis and dark money pops right out.
The thing is - this analysis IS NOT replicable large scale even with magical AI.
A credit card company can do an SQL/noSQL search of all its transactions, or one person's transactions, to find purchases of specific categories like firearms, for example. But it does not do well when firearms purchases are at Walmart as part of a larger purchase. It does not do well if purchases are labeled as hardware - like porn gets labeled something innocuous.
A bank can list all of its customers' cash withdrawals, or one person's, but it has no idea that transaction 25 out of 522 is one used to buy drugs or guns or whatever unless it is a direct wire transfer or ACH to an appropriately named entity.
The notion that a government can know everything you do is the transplantation of a full forensic accounting analysis to population scale analysis - this ain't gonna happen because it is impossible.
So...I don't really disagree with anything you said, but neither was it a revelation. The only reason I'm responding is to let you know that the way you interact with others is rude and off-putting. It's a safe bet that anyone here, anyone who finds this Substack interesting and stimulating, isn't a complete moron. You have no idea who I am or what I know and nobody asked for you to "educate" them with your facile observations. I'm sure you'll feel compelled to respond - with defensive arrogance and condescension - but this is the last I have to say to you. When someone does you the favor of telling you the truth, you should consider listening.
You don't like my style, don't read my posts.
I am not and have never been interested in being a "personality" or creating a following.
IQs is a eugenicist construct, I ignore anything involving talk of IQs.
As for CBDCs: people don't seem to understand that the coding required to create a CBDC is extremely simple. There are templates and not from China. the 5000 or so cryptocurrencies are very public example of this; the difficulty was never in creation but in adoption.
The complexity lies in the regulatory/enforcement and observability sides, as well as having non-idiot (i.e. Western trained) economists and bankers working on the problem.
However you characterize IQ, it is almost the only useful predictive biometric we have, as Charles Murray explains in "Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America”.
Here's another reality check: the IQ cutoff for a national civil service job in China is 140 and China, by every metric, is the most successful country on earth.
To be eligible for mBridge trading, CBDCs must comply with the template provided by China, which runs the only game in town and, presumably, use its secure terminals.
Many misconceptions and errors in what you wrote.
First of all, IQ is not a biometric. There is no IQ organ that is measured in physical terms - phrenology has long since been disproven.
As for predictive: IQ has some predictive qualities mostly because of education. Richer families can/do spend more on education and so can elevate IQs, but the very fact that these kids are richer is the actual predictive power - not the IQ. There are innumerable examples of dumbfucks who are successful. Charles Murray is a biological chemist talking about shit he knows nothing about; if he talked about DNA formation, fine but going into IQ and race and societal success is so far out of his bailiwick that it isn't even funny.
China civil service: no, there is no IQ cutoff that I am aware of. What they have are tests that people have to pass.
There is certainly some correlation between raw intelligence vs. IQ vs the ability to pass these tests, but again I would bet money that the biggest predictive factor is wealth. Wealth means the ability to hire tutors and take the time/risk to go for the test vs. some other employment strategy.
As for mBridge: I don't know where you are getting your info from. mBridge is executed by the UAE - not the least bit clear how China drives other nation's CBDC requirements into mBridge. Do you have a link?
I ask because mBridge architecture came out of the Bank of International Settlements incubator - NOT China. The incubator is in Hong Kong, but the original driver is BIS, not PBoC or even HKMA. So mBridge is the UAE implementing a BIS project to incorporate the e-dirhan as a bridge between other nation's trading amongst themselves.
Furthermore, the e-cny comes out of the PBoC, not HKMA. Hong Kong didn't even deal with the e-cny until 2022 (last year).
At the time of the Prig coup (just after the start of the UAF counter-attack) he also said that Russian losses were huge, weapons and ammo short, morale low, badly led and betrayed by the high command. All western talking points. All seemed scripted to me. And therefore evidence of treachery.
Great analysis of the Belorussian and African moves. It does seem Prig still thought he was bullet proof. All the evidence points to the dead man walking theory.
The idea that the Russian army is composed entirely of unwilling conscripts press-ganged into service and just sitting around waiting for a chance to surrender is now canonical in NATO circles. People will believe what they need to believe in order to sustain their world view.
Just like Hitler, North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation believes its own lies.
I actually think this is not so far from the truth or at least it was. There were a number of comments made to that effect, and articles prior to the June attack that said much the same thing in more "expert" language. At the time I expressed a view (I think!!) that this was pure racism. However there was no chance of anything else than a debacle for the UAF if Ivan decided to fight.
This Gunther Fehlinger is quite the character. Who under heaven does he think he is to propose the breakup of a country that doesn’t comply with his world views? Unbelievable. Question is, will people follow and fulfill his proposals?
My view is that he's just trying to get in front of an already existing Western initiative.
It is no secret that the West wants to take Lula down (again). I'm sure the Broadcast Board of Governors, now the USAGM's near $1 billion budget is devoted to Brazilian regime change.
Well, as the saying goes, metal talks and bullshit walks, he’s welcome to round up a band of merry Germans and head on over to Brazil. I’m sure trudging through the rain forests in order to partition the country will prove a worthy task.
I am worried about the reports that the Allied troops in zaporizhia/Robotyne and other places simply are not being rotated. Have been in action since early June. Surely not? This would be almost criminal conduct by the allies - meaning, I guess, Russian high command, I'm assuming they have the say everywhere along the front?
And that seemed a piss poor attempt to interdict those boats didn't it? Is that the best that can be done?
I agree, not a great way to interdict them. With that said, it wasn't a huge priority because the "oil rig" is derelict and nonfunctional and is very distant from Russian territory. Russia had no real incentive to combat them there and this was probably more of a light deterrence mission. They'd use better interdiction if it was an actual serious or threatening assault. This was more like "hey we're bored and have nothing better to do so let's go use those boats as target practice".
A helicopter could theoretically be better but being far slower than a jet, its response time would be awful having to cross the sea and the boats would likely be gone by then. Same goes for a drone. Though a UCAV is technically not great for fast maneuverable small boats as its guided "gliding" bombs don't do well in hitting targets that can juke and turn on a dime--ideal for stationary or slow targets.
If they had *really* wanted to get rid of the boats they could have sent jets armed with anti-ship missiles with active radars which could be launched from far away and would "lock on" to the boats themselves. But such enterprise missiles are really expensive and probably not even worth wasting on a boat like that. The ideal platform would probably have been a rotary gunship like Ka-52M that can launch Tv-guided LMURS and laser guided Vikhrs as well as 30mm autocannons. It's slow and stationary for manpads but at least it has DIRCMS that might cancel the manpads out, as well as ejection seat worse comes to worse. With an Mi-8 evac stationed not far off behind they could tee-off on the boats and get evac'd in time, if they're hit.
But crossing the 300km+ from closest airbase to the oil rig would take upwards of 2 hours for the choppers.
Yep, so it's all rational. But it still leaves air defense by jets looking a bit suss doesn't it?
You doom and gloom...again... receive an in depth answer and revert back to sowing doubts, dooming and glooming.
Your trolling is transparent.
On the upside, it helps to refine the old sniffer
Good training.
Rockets, rockets, rockets, s-50s, s-80s, a volley of 40-50 thrown around the boats woulda done the trick. It was probably a Su-30 on CAP that got diverted, so only had one to choice. Plus the pilots gonna assume manpads so hes not gonna want to get to close.
Yep, that's kinda what I'm thinking. Something that at least seemed to be an attempt. Like one imagines that such targets would have a method of attack prescribed for them. If that was it then it wasn't very impressive. (Though apparently it got one anyway).
U.S. Patriot systems are operated by the Army. There are no Army units at Tinker AFB, much less any Patriot ADA units. So it's extremely unlikely that personnel from Tinker were secretly operating Patriots in Ukraine.
We can imagine various reasons that USAF personnel from Tinker might secretly be deployed in Ukraine (and getting killed there) -- but if they are, that's not what they were doing.
I am wondering if their bodies were handed over to the families for burial. If they died from missiles strikes it would be pretty obvious. No amount of undertaker powers/skills could hide the trauma. If they are refusing to hand over the bodies then that is very suspicious.
Maybe they got the kill shot
With the 'World Island' slipping through their hands, I guess South and Central America will be the next US target for 'colour revolutions.' Perhaps that's the reason behind the open border policy? Recruitment of mercenaries to overthrow those governments, no doubt using the Manuel Noriega argument that they're responsible for the drug crisis sweeping across America. Basically, grab what you can of what's left of the non-BRICS world while denying Russian access to them. Can it work, and how do Mexico and the cartels play into it? Maybe I'm hallucinating, but given the history of the region, it seems obvious to me.
Lindsay Graham and others advocated a strike on Mexico after AMLO denounced the United States.
Thanks, I didn't know that.
There are people who say that Lula's successor was taken down with help from intel agencies.
I am not one of them; I have first hand (well, 1.5 hand) info on the chain of events that led to the Dilma takedown and subsequent Bolsanaro regime (after a caretaker).
Long story short: the Brazilian police were one of the last LE groups to go to Canada to access Blackberry message data for crime prosecution purposes. When they finally did so in pursuit of an alleged drug gang money launderer, what they found was that this guy laundered money for politicians as well.
Here's the thing: corruption is everywhere in Brazil. This guy's client list was everyone, more or less. The scam was in prosecuting mostly Worker's Party people as opposed to everyone in the launderer list.
Is this because of the CIA or just because the PMCs (class, not mercenaries) in Brazil hated Lula?
That I cannot say. Could be both.
"There are people who say that Lula's successor was taken down with help from intel agencies."
They are correct. They also put Lula in prison on similar fake charges. In this case, appallingly, it was actual FEDS (as in FBI creeps) who helped take down both via their specialty lawfare. You'd expect this from creepy spooks, but the FBI? Doing nasty CIA-type biz overseas to further US foreign policy. We from back when hated them during the Cointelpro days. We need to keep hating them. They haven't changed one bit.
They framed Sirhan.
They covered up the CIA takedown of JFK.
They were literally involved in the MLK assassination.
They framed Libya for Lockerbie.
Scumbags!
I don't know about that - one way or the other.
But I do know that there are FBI "Legatus" representatives in most/all of the major country embassies around the world. I know because I've worked with some of them on LE type activity.
Whether they advised the Lava Jato vs. your standard NED/CIA/State Dept - impossible for me to say.
Like many nations in Africa, those in south, and central America, may very well have had quite enough of the Monroe doctrine and its offshoot
Add to that the influence of Russia, and perhaps China in that sphere, and it may not come off as planned by the United States and its so-called friends
Mexican cartels seem to be one of the latest msm talking points. Western Standard a "right wing" media page located in Western Canada just had a story **Experts says the government will have a hard time removing Mexican cartels from Alberta** Time to Deflect from "one" of the real reasons "Big Pharma and the production of highly addictive drugs. $$$"
Yes Peru and Ecuador was one of the latest examples. and who can't forget the patsy Ollie North.
The UAF was and is a big military and has absorbed a lot of punishment. But it is looking like this is the beginning of the end. It is short of men, ammo, weapons and now increasingly hope. The RF dynamics are opposite.
This can only go one way and the issue is timing, and how much blood and treasure it takes to get there. Ukraine should immediately enter negotiations to salvage what it can. I doubt it will. Its leadership will sacrifice the nation and its people until the last minute before they flee abroad to enjoy their looted dollars and superstar status. Saigon or Kabul style.
The sickening and now pointless loss of life will continue way past any rational point. The western MSM will continue to report Ukraine is on the verge of victory or would be if its wily generals had not suddenly contracted a dose of stupid.
Or we might have WW3.
"The sickening and now pointless loss of life will continue way past any rational point. " I figure this period began April 2022.
Imagine sitting in an office with a cappuccino in hand making a decision that will end the lives of 100,000 men. Just another day at the office for Victoria Nuland.
Scott Ritter has an interesting theory about Prigozhin's plane crash. He thinks it could be Prig's bodyguards ammo stash that blew up and trashed the plane. He's referring to an incident with US marines transport plane in which some HE stuff blew up mid-flight because of mismanagement.
To me this theory seems more plausible than idea that Putin/SBU/CIA/whoever rigged the plane with explosives.
This has been promulgated yesterday by some "source", claiming that grenades and ammo was found in the crash site and could have been "improperly stored", etc. However the sheer coincidental serendipity that would take beggars belief. The guy who the entire world was saying is basically a walking dead man, gets "conveniently killed" by misplaced ammo in the exact method known to be the #1 most heavily utilized global assassination method by state services--it's a little too much.
Also, he's said to almost never EVER fly together with the other top leadership of Wagner, particularly Dmitry Utkin.
The ONE time they decided to both be on the flight together is when the plane blows up. The number of improbabilities is just astonishing.
Weirder shit was happening... I read some article about Midway battle in WW2 - Americans won it because of set of coincidences that no one could predict
You never know. I personally don't totally discount anything, but the probability is simply low.
It is more than likely that the "coincidences" were an excuse to cover up for the US having broken many (but not all) of the Japanese Navy's codes.
Nah, there were really weird decisions and happenstances that can't be explained by radio intercept. It's more like Americans were high on HP's "liquid luck" potion or smth. I really can't remember where i read that, but i try to figure it out. It was some 10 years ago i suppose.
Some are coincidences - but the big ones are easily explained by radio intercept.
For example: How did the US Navy find the Japanese to start with?
Then there's the "spotting through clouds" business - who set up the scouting plan and why? The scout may have thought they were lucky, but a scouting plan developed with info from radio intercept would not be known to the scout.
"Parallel development" is well known these days - it was also known to be executed then for the same reason: opsec.
I think i found knockoff of the original article. It's in Russian, so google translate is advised :)
http://www.flibusta.is/b/233213/read
Midway is mentioned in the part named "magic as a last and highest stage of technology" :)
I agree, but personally I think Prigozhin was dead man walking just from not having Russian state protection anymore. Mercouris is right: Prigozhin had all kinds of enemies.
IMO: If your documentation of ~20 Russian airmen killed by Wagner during the "insurrection" is accurate, there are plenty of people angered by that - with social/professional connections to Moscow airport to make it pretty easy to sneak a bomb onto Prigozhin's plane as well as to be sure which one is the right one.
Putting all of Wagner's top people on one plane is exactly the type of amateurish stupidity and/or arrogance I would expect of Prigozhin.
Two months ago I wrote "the hammer will come down." No system can tolerate the murder of its own troops. To remove any doubt in a big speech Putin denounced traitors and said there would be payback. I was however surprised that it took as long as it did.
Putin is very pragmatic - I don't see any point in him potentially disrupting this extremely important BRICS conference with maverick nonsense.
On the other hand, there are lots of Russian air force personnel and families of same who are likely very angry that Russian air force pilots and copilots were killed by Wagner during its insurrection.
Prigozhin no longer being actively protected by the Russian government would be a pre-requisite for a vigilante strike but it seems highly unlikely Putin would have wanted it to happen when it actually did.
One could say the same for the unfortunate conscripts on the Ukrainian side of the war we have read about refusals conflicts with in the armed forces, and actual shoot outs with mercenary forces from nations such as Poland
As per our authors, above documentation of the morale shift and tendency toward surrender on the Ukrainian side, this may be coming to a Head sooner than later
A week ago or so, western media reported about an Ukrainian group that reached the western shore of Crimea and blew up a S-400, and rescued another group of ukranians.
But I have not seen a word about that in non-western media. Is there any truth in this, or is it just figments of western imagination?
I think you may possibly be conflating several different incidents.
There was a rumored landing in the Cossack Camps of Kherson region, not far from Khakovka, where they were claimed to have possibly rescued some POWs and also taken a Russian major as POW. The major at least was in fact real, but taking back POWs was never proven.
The Crimea landing and S-400: this was 2 separate real incidents fakely tied together by Ukrainian propaganda in order to make it seem like the boat landing team carried out the spotting for the hit.
Firstly, it was confirmed that it was an S-300 system hit, not S-400. This is the system I referenced in my report above. It was hit by some kind of missile, no one knows what yet--everything from Neptune anti-ship to a boat-borne British Brimstone has been theorized--though probably something less exotic was used.
As for the landing in Crimea, this happened yesterday and had nothing to do with the S-300 hit which was the day before. A small team landed on the shore of Crimea and were then scared off by a civilian armed with a Saiga shotgun who fired shells into the air. They ran for their life, dropping equipment which was recovered such as a Garmin GPS unit amongst other things.
But like I said, they didn't accomplish anything on that middle-of-the-night shore raid and simply got back in the boat and ran away. The S-300 hit was a separate incident that had nothing to do with that and was in fact fire-corrected by a drone rather than any ground team in Crimea.
Thank you for clarifying!
If SMO is like a movie, it will be an interesting plot twist if Gonzalo Lira is behind everything. Like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones or Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.
No pressure! but I'd find it useful if you could provide links to all (especially Western) articles (rather than just screenshots as you do with some), as well as Youtube or other linkable versions of your embedded videos.
You do know that just typing the headline into Google will pop the article right up?
Some love to be spoon fed.
Thanks! If the headline's included in the excerpt or photo, usually that will be the case. Not so much otherwise! Also, that doesn't apply to videos, including those with many variants, and especially the most annoying case: videos that have subtitles grafted onto them after the fact. I lack the advantage of reading or speaking Russian. :)
Photos you can reverse image search, videos are uploaded on Simp's bitchute
+1
Image search is a little flaky but it is always worth a shot. In general, in my OSINT experience, a full pic is usually findable but parts of one are generally not - i.e. an all or nothing search.
However, having said the above, the links pulled in from a image search will frequently reference the actual pic in question but it means going through up to 5 pages of Google search results and reading to find the right one (i.e. accuracy is much lower but info is there somewhere).
Thanks - hadn't heard of bitchute before.
For an article pic - you can also use a few words/a sentence from the text. That also will yield the document.
For videos - I have no idea why you would want to see the source since the videos are fully viewable directly, unless you want to see Simplicius' sources. In that case, most of the Russian videos from bloggers have the telegram channels mentioned.
The reason I patronize Simplicius as opposed to others is because he consistently does a fantastic job of curating and has for several years.
If you want to do it all yourself, of course, that's a different story.
Many thanks for this.
I agree with you on Simplicius' curation, but still instinctively want to check. Also I like to find the sources so I can reference my own research if material (or, more typically on the subject of the Ukraine war, rebuttals in the more ignorant antisocial media echo chambers) more convincingly than just "halfway down Simplicius' post on xxx".
Very reasonable to want to check sources.
What I will note is that for a subject as widely talked about as the SMO - it is very easy to see who is reliable and who is not. Simplicius says what his views are but also posts the direct evidence of it - and lots of it.
Admittedly, I do OSINT professionally so have a a lot of experience in quickly identifying the nonsense from that of value. Every presenter has biases - myself included. It is reality. The key is identifying and understanding what those biases are; and in turn the analysts who are the most aware of their biases and try the hardest to compensate for them, are the ones worth paying attention to.
Dreizin, for example, is a good analyst in some areas but he is so insecure that he cannot tolerate anyone telling him anything that he might learn from - and so is just not worth paying attention to because what he does come up with that is good, is simply not worth wasting the time to dig out from the garbage.
Well said. Thanks again!
Sigh. Another "Putin killed Prigozhin" from Simplicius, who forgot to put on his thinking cap this time.
Never mind that all the press is running with a theory that the security forces say the main suspect is Prigozhin's pilot who planted a bomb in the landing gear, is now being sought, and has now probably left the country.
Any evidence that Putin, FSB, Shoigu, or other Russian state agents did it? Of course not! So let's all run with that theory!
I'm with you on this.
In terms of motive, it is equal or more likely that this was done by one or more countries (USA, France, UK) who wanted to send a message that Russia/Wagner should stay out of Africa.
It is almost certain that there was a bomb on the plane. Then how did the bomb get past security in Moscow? Likely the bomb was placed while the plane was still in Africa. Either it failed to detonate on the flight back to Russia or the triggering device was set (or reset) while the plane was in Moscow.
FSB thinks it was planted in Moscow. They say the wanted pilot had access to the plane. This mess smells of the SBU. Not sure about the others, but he was last seen on a plane to Kamchatka three days ago, and he's now assumed to be out of the country like Daria's assassin. What's right next to Kamchatka? Alaska, natch. ;)
"In terms of motive, it is equal or more likely that this was done by one or more countries (USA, France, UK) who wanted to send a message that Russia/Wagner should stay out of Africa."
Had not thought of this one yet. Interesting line.