Yep. Threaten everyone, only actually hit one or two non-cooperative parties at a time, not enough to create a bloc out of them, make an example and get the rest in line. That is the way of the clever bully.

Probably. On the other hand they do like radicalizing people so they can use them as an excuse to outlaw or further surveil or attack organizations so it's not impossible they were really hoping to paint MLK with the communist brush and if they had to literally turn people into communists around him to get that to work they were quite willing to do so. Hoover in particular was desperate for it so absolutely wouldn't have been beyond trying to create some communists if it meant giving him more ammo to take down the civil rights movement and MLK.

Third guess they're literally quaking in their boots in fear of Iranian terrorists and figure by posting their sympathies they might be spared the tidal wave of sleeper cells awakening in the US and murdering every other cop which they are positive is a real thing that will happen.

It's a very good question and one I don't have a good answer.

Thinking aloud I'll admit in Stalin's case there was definitely some pragmatism to not going off on the west. The USSR was still behind developmentally and especially after the great war and losing so many people, so much industry, farmland, etc there might have been real fears of collapse or being overrun and so there might have been a really strong attempt to offer an olive branch, to do the utmost to be conciliatory and non-threatening to buy time to grow, recover, develop. Though after a certain point this does make less sense.

The capitalists and liberal-roaders during late (Gorbachev) and after the fall of the USSR make far more sense given they strongly believed that the difference between west and Russia wasn't that the west was a club of aristocratic old racists and colonialists intent on dominating and exploiting everyone not a member of the club but that it was all shared values and that the communism was the threatening thing instead of the whole Russian bourgeoisie being minor outsiders who were not desired to grow to the heights of the western capitalists and aristocracy as Russia was slated for plunder. Besides that the planners of empire of course, the US and UK specifically knew a country as large, diverse, rich in resources as Russia could not be allowed to rise and join the club as it would inevitably seize a large amount of power from their factions for itself and its interests.

When talking of Russian reluctance to confront the west over e.g. Ukraine it is also important to remember material interests. Russia has been slapped with massive sanctions, their economy has been partially decoupled from by the west and the west is gearing up for war with Russia within the next 10 years and calling them a threat which must be destroyed. All because Russia had the audacity to swat away the dagger being positioned under its heart in Ukraine. Putin was definitely suckered by the west for a while but it was an inconvenient reality to face the need to confront the west. The result has been painful. Right now Russia is staring down a likelihood of years of devastating and spectacular western intelligence service aided terrorist attacks like those recently seen on two passenger trains where bridges were blown up and the attacks on their strategic bombers. They've had top generals assassinated in Moscow. They are enduring a horrible pain and knew to some extent they'd get things like this for challenging the west so were inclined to try diplomacy past the point of foolishness just in some vague hope they could work this out. As you I'm not convinced Russia won't drop many of its critical demands or moderate them and make concessions to end the Ukraine war. I hope they don't. I think it'd be foolish and selling the future for the present but they might and the west thinks they might which is why they're doing all this.

I suppose I'd have to guess it may be the whiteness, the lack of experience with the full brutality of extended colonization (though I'll note fascism is really just colonialism used on white people and over 1940-1944 the USSR experienced a great deal of pain inflicted in a short period by that though admittedly the end of that did have some help from the west who were portrayed as allies against it).

Thinking about the DPRK they were never really courted in the way the west has courted and tried to deceive and charm Russia/USSR and its leadership. Thinking of Iran they likewise were saddled with dictatorship and never really courted by the west but imposed with isolation and sanctions for their revolution. China has somewhat warmer relations but pragmatism and that comes from the west courting them for the Sino-Soviet split and because they exploited the west's hunger to profit from their population. Many smaller socialist states like Cuba, etc have been subject to crushing sanctions, coup attempts, color revolutions, etc perhaps because they're seen as small enough to easily crush while larger powers like the USSR and China are seen as better dealt with through courting and deception. I think the role of diplomacy and messaging may play a role as the west has certainly fostered a certain kind of attitude towards some nations and not others.

It was definitely a shift. But a stark one. I'd like to point out that there was another shift but a more subtle one that occurred with the collapse (via illegal dissolution) of the USSR and the end of the cold war with capitalist victory and end of history.

I'd say collectively the two shifts dealt a death blow to ST as a franchise. I lost interest in ENT very early on by the second season. There's really no coming back from that kind of liberal restoration.

Pretty much my thinking. The Vatican isn't going to paint a target on themselves, the chic thing of corporations (and Vatican is just one big child abusing, criminal corporation in a sense) trying to pretend to be woke and progressive has been tossed aside. Some parts of Europe are still clinging to a veneer of it but the far right is rising rapidly even in France and I think that within 5-8 years at most you have much more reactionary governments in power across Europe and the Vatican won't want a pope that's out of step on that.

The fact also is the idea that Francis vetted these people and made sure they were ideologically committed to his way of thinking seems a bit spurious, it is so like the rad-lib to want to have variety, to accept reactionary people to the right of your position because they're with you on one particular thing or they seem on a personal level to be likeable and not horribly corrupt and a true believer at least. So I would not be surprised if even without the shifting global trends that happened.

Francis was notably picked in 2013, that was in Obama's second term, world-wide there was this propaganda feeling that America had made a decidedly progressive permanent turn by electing a black man not once but twice and so they wanted to follow on with that. Now with Trump, with the rise of "trad" among the incel-o-sphere and man-o-sphere among young guys, with the alignment of the big corporations with Trump with the big tech bourgeoisie literally lining up behind him it would make sense to put in someone more appropriate for that setting.

Probably a pope that's more outspoken on calling trans people evil because that's a popular thing now unfortunately. And maybe even one who is willing to be openly anti-China and help lead the religious proles on a crusade against the Asiatic communist power. Because let's be honest, with all the secret society shit, the ties between the Vatican and European aristocracy and bourgeoisie it's hard to believe there aren't powerful people not at all affiliated with the church weighing in on the choice and what they NEED to see in who the next pick is with the electors before they go into seclusion.

But they have to let their master and owner use them for those purposes. That's why it bought them. Certainly Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait derive their legitimacy from US propping them up is my understanding. And Turkey is literally a member of NATO.

No reason not to do this but at the same time no reason to expect it will work. If the US attacks Iran it will be through one or multiples of these countries not from the gulf.

Think of it this way: if they are 1% of the population that's 3.4 million in the US, 4.9 million in the EU. So easily several tens of millions globally assuming that and the internet is global and this site we can assume didn't have but a fraction of all pedophiles as users.

(As a depressing aside I would guess the number of people but especially adult men who are not interested in pre-pubescent children but would absolutely have sex with a 15 year old if given the opportunity is much, much higher than 1% of the population.)

The idea of protecting children in of itself is a recent idea (in capitalism, pre-capitalist societies being a bit different) brought about by labor rights movements. After all 125 years ago children were commonly found in work-houses and factories doing dangerous jobs for long brutal hours and in that situation well if you think that's okay or have accepted it you're not likely to raise a fuss about sexual exploitation involving them either. Even as short a time ago as immediately post WW2 tons of children worked very long hours on farms.

As has been said before this service is either going to kick out westerners (either to their own siloed version based on geo-location and phone number location) because it's letting in all these horrible reactionaries and propaganda that 1) annoys Chinese users 2) the great firewall exists to prevent -OR- the US will ban it within months, probably sooner than later given they at least had US defense contractor companies holding US Tiktok data whereas this stuff may be held somewhere in Asia or even China itself. It is even probable that the heights of the US propaganda apparatus have noticed this and are using an opening to carpet bomb propaganda on audiences they can't usually reach with the plausible deniability of "just being regular Americans".

Otherwise I'd definitely sign up.

2040s at the absolute earliest assuming a catastrophic collapse of the empire that leads to widespread economic misery spreading even to the PMC class. Dedollarization must occur. Empire must fail to expand and turn inward, the material conditions must deteriorate enough and people in the core must overcome their inculcated atomization to organize enough.

Most likely much later than that, latter half of this century. Right now we're turning solidly towards more reactionary politics, sacrificing trans people, doing racism against Russians and Asians, pushing back on the notion that women are people, etc and this has been a trend going on before Trump's win by the way though obviously that gives liberals an excuse to continue and accelerate it. Assuming they fail to contain China, fail to subjugate Russia, and China achieves its own goals in the late 2040s or 2050 for a modern socialist society and a rejuvenated nation then as much as they try Americans will begin to learn of how much better things are in China and though the brainworms of individualism, the hyper-atomization of society and so on will keep things in check for a while if living conditions continue to deteriorate for enough people it has to happen eventually.

Non-zero even substantial risk that nuclear war happens first and they end the world rather than allowing their hegemony to slip and socialists to win.

Also exists a risk that climate change comes to bat and does the US empire a solid by hitting most of the world in the latter half of this century so much harder that the US can continue on entirely off importing the most desperate climate refugees in the world and exploiting them as an underclass while using its relative insulation between two oceans and its good farmland and other natural resources to thrive while other nations suffer and capitalism could continue into next century easily while China struggles on regardless.

Fact is though we're in a life or death struggle here. The west knows it and will do everything. If they can create some sort of technology that allows them to adequately suppress Chinese nuclear response they'll launch on China and wipe them out without hesitation to usher in barbarism. So let us hope China in fact gets the technology to check-mate and neutralize US nukes much sooner and either wipes the floor with the US in a war or prevents it ever coming to that as even in a conventional war lots of good Chinese comrades would die.

The problem with that is western Europe, Canada, Australia and the like are just as likely to be dangerous in this regard and if one thinks he's in danger of intelligence action then moving to some third world/global south country with less developed security and police forces makes it even easier to do something like an assassination or assault without much premeditation or risk it goes wrong and your operation gets blown like you have to work around in much of the west.

Basically the only safe places that comes to mind would be Russia, China, Iran, Cuba but moving to any of those would immediately allow them to paint him as a foreign agent and apply even harsher propaganda and deplatforming techniques as well as probably more dangerous things like arrest warrants, sanctions, being on no-fly-list type of things.

I don't think they want to do anything but silence him at this point.

I can't claim I've watched any amount of his content. I find his history on women's rights problematic to say the least (incredibly liberal-brained) but he's unambiguously doing good work in the anti-imperialist sphere and as with Russia our bedfellows may not always be people we find beacons of morality and uprightness.

Well I should point out I could easily see between high hundreds of thousands and over a million Trump people simply dying because A) a lot of them are old B) Covid which they deny and had 4 years to die from it.

I could also see a million or so being disillusioned with Trump, either Q people who thought he'd do different or people who saw something else in him that he didn't live up in his new campaigning. Also a lot easier to just check the box to re-elect the president for a certain amount of Americans who may not even be consistent Republicans but just people who thought he did a good enough job giving them free money during Covid and deserved to continue. So those numbers are if anything low and suggest IMO he probably gained some voters as well between losing people to dying and disillusionment and such.

So then the discussion must go towards those Democratic voters, they must have really alienated them, they must have really lost the enthusiasm and angered them. Sure we can discount a couple million as racists who voted for Biden because he was a white man with ties to anti-busing and crime legislation and KKK leadership but not nearly all of them. There's still a significant chunk, millions and millions you have to account for.