I have to question what the end-game is for the west here given they can continue striking the zionist entity. Maybe it's a show of power and now they offer them peace if they stop firing now that they have gotten their immediate want and acted all tough.

I get bad vibes from the announced Trump speech thing. Maybe he's just going to yammer on and play up the tough guy act and issue an ultimatum to Iran to totally surrender but maybe he's going to announce we used a tactical nuclear weapon and it was totally justified and good. My guess is either way he'll say the ball is in Iran's court and they can submit or .

Not entirely wrong though.

Soft power comes in handy when you're already the world hegemon or in bed with them but when you're the upstart in every way it's not going to counter the hard power of the enemy until they've lost it or you've smashed it first. Libs criticize that apocryphal Stalin quote about how many divisions the Pope has but he wasn't wrong. The only reason the pope had relevance was because of his buy-in with the people who had hard-power e.g. western Europe.

Fact is US used hard power last century to crush so many communist revolutions and the soft power to paper over it after. China's soft power means nothing if the US can and will roll in and set up moderate rebel terrorists in your lands and topple your government and install some greedy, comprador pig who sells the country to the west and kicks out China and forms up a repressive regime.

Yeah Iran really has problems with the fact that regular fighters can just roll in and bomb them. They needed Russian S-400 systems yesterday. I mean I'm sure the zionists and Americans are doing things to be disruptive like hacking and hitting radar stations with bombs but they knew this was coming. Knew the likely targets and are still just sitting ducks.

Yeah this person could be deeply fucked if the Trump admin decides they were coordinating for an "insurrection" or whatever they decide to charge this as. People need to get on non-US social media yesterday for this type of stuff.

Well 3 things:

1. Americans are media illiterate,
2. Americans revel in being the bad guys as long as they can look/feel cool. Reminds me of that British navy ship that played the imperial march on loudspeakers transiting a port or canal or something,
3. They sell the rebellion toys and such as well so they could always try to push more of those. (Truth be told the empire's stuff for most part looks cooler (not counting pre-Empire galactic Republic stuff some of which looks pretty neat but none of which has any current relevance given the whole new empire thing past the original trilogy Disney is pushing)). But see 1-2 for why they could make an ISB play-set with Doctor Gorst and Star Wars nerds would rush to buy it.

But in the wake of an election that podcasters helped swing in Donald Trump’s favor, he’s fielding interview offers from politicians desperate to connect with disaffected young voters any way they can—even if it means getting trolled on camera by the former co-host of a podcast called “Cum Town"

Yeah Democrats are never going to embrace someone like him. Their job is to move their party right not become a genuine populist vehicle and especially not to get anywhere near even an "irony-poisoned socialist". Well at least at the moment. If some sort of independent and truly popular and thus dangerous left movement sprouts up in this country it's possible the Dems could be called upon to embrace and extinguish it but that would just be using someone like him to sheep-herd people back into the party and then either draw him right or nuke him from orbit.

Still can't help but wonder if this whole scene, Chapo, these people, Belden, isn't some sort of deep-cover CIA operation meant to contain and guide the inevitable re-emergence of a left in this country. I mean Menaker's father being a double-agent, Belden going to Syria to fight with left flavored but CIA sponsored and approved militia, their connections to people like Dasha. It's all just a little suspicious. In a believable kind of way but also in a they people were all put together in an incubator kind of way. They wouldn't even have to be witting assets either if the CIA was trying to merely guide development in a certain direction. I don't know. It's weird here in the imperial core.

completely unnecessary and a waste of time and money...

Not if your plan for keeping your hegemony is nuking China and coming out the other side much less damaged than them.

This shit is scary and dangerous because it's a clear attempt to undermine mutually assured destruction which is what keeps everyone from launching the nukes or otherwise escalating to incredibly devastating wars between major powers. Even if they achieved a system with 50% intercept rate that would mean China and Russia would need to ensure they retained at least twice as many nuclear weapons as America had interceptors and with that amount likely to be classified it would send both on nuke building sprees which would result in the US 1) building even more interceptors and feeding the mil-industrial complex more money and 2) building more nukes because now they have less and have to have at least as many. Eventually, sooner than later some genius maniac puts a bunch of nukes up in space as a doomsday weapon, they automatically launch and attack say China if they don't get the stand-down signal every 20 minutes. Eventually a technical glitch due to this being outsourced to Musk results in the weapons firing anyways because the signal not to fire was broken too long.

I don't disagree though I'd add for a large chunk it's a religious dogma. It's part of a religious dogma, it's part of their very perceived essence as a member of their chosen community (reactionaries) so you're not just threatening them, you're demanding they change their identity and lose all their friendships and church group, and so on.

Speaking of dogma, dogmatic types speak of Chinese re-education of an emperor, totally different conditions, totally different. Marxism-Leninism is about adaptation. He'd already lost everything, long been a puppet anyways of other powers and had no group he risked being excluded from by reforming nor any sizeable group of people likely to follow him nor much in the way of a sense of himself as he was a spoiled brat used to servants and others dealing with the mundane for him and was weak without that structure. Nor did it threaten any religious beliefs on his part. Nor did he rule under or have the deep brainworms of sustained settler-capitalism that exist in the US and in the minds of the reactionaries here. What civic religion did Puyi have that they communists had to undo? Nothing but primitive notions that he was divine to rule, easily disabused stuff like that. The US indoctrination and propaganda is much, much, much stronger and more refined and intertwined with other beliefs and brainworms. The Chinese communists could appeal to a sense of Chinese pride and nationalism, what can Americans do hmm? The identity of the nation for these people is a white-supremacist, settler-colonial-capitalist one based on heavy amounts of atomization and the myth of the frontier and the castle doctrine as their mythos.

The hands of a successful revolution will be full enough re-educating the massive amounts of more reformable types. The order of the day should be to terrorize these into submission. Cut the grass blades that grow taller than the others. But do not waste the stretched and limited resources of the post-revolutionary state unnecessary. Triaging is necessary. Resources are limited. None more-so than the educated, dedicated, ideologically disciplined cadres necessary to oversee re-education who are also those most needed for minding and running the new state and guarding against careerists, the ideologically weak, and those who are corrupt enemies of the people. If you don't use those you use common jailers who start committing abuses and release large numbers of people who underwent no real re-education who go on to foment terrorism and counter-revolution.

I think we need to just dump them on an island somewhere and put them under continuous naval blockade and internet blackout till they revert to a Hunter gather society.

And when they have sex and produce children they raise in these brainworms (and abuse as I guarantee this society becomes very pedophilic to say nothing of other forms of child abuse common to reactionaries) you're just okay with human life being brought into that? Do you organize raids that suffer regular casualties to retrieve the children they produce and acknowledge some will be successfully hidden anyways?

I really think that Trump won't care or bend. I think he's convinced that importing stuff makes us weak and the solution isn't China bending the knee or paying him $500 million or anything like that, it's reshoring American manufacturing to some level that capitalists up until these tariffs have been entirely unwilling to consider and may still refuse to consider given he's not giving them free money and loans/grants to build the factories here. I mean ideally I think he hopes to keep the tariffs on but get some concessions for goods orders from China to factories in the US that help with his reshoring but barring that I think he's just happy to create conditions where it's not economical to buy many Chinese goods.

It's either that or Trump and his advisors are planning on forcing an anti-Nixon as Varoufakis supposes where other countries are forced to appreciate their currency against the dollar to make the US competitive.

So it's good China is not being bullied but I don't think them standing firm is going to get Trump to flinch and drop the tariffs on China. I think those stay on or increase because he thinks its essential to reshore and is willing to tank the economy, destroy the access to treats, etc and has all the hooting chuds lined up behind him. America is self-owning itself but with a purpose and a design and a light at the end of the tunnel they believe.

Given how all the chuds are lined up behind this message of austerity and autarky and have done amazing 180s from crying about eating bugs and pods and taxes to supporting this and bashing whiners as unpatriotic and waxing philosophical about money in uncharacteristic ways for them we must consider that they are quite serious about the long haul here. Maybe in 6 months if the economy has crashed and is burning congress might push through a bill to take the tariffs off and take the power away from Trump but it'll be a bitterly fought matter. As will control of the world be for that matter. China still has to contend with the fact Europeans are racist white supremacists and deeply ideologically committed to the project of liberalism to the point of being more than willing to commit suicide for it so they're not going to be partners with China in resisting the US on this most likely. Other markets are still developing and we see an increasing likelihood of campism returning with the anti-US camp being in a much stronger position admittedly than it was in the first cold war but still likely to face conflict and resource grabs against their weaker non-nuclear partner members.

They will almost certainly ask them questions about biases regarding health insurance during jury selection and somehow manage to find 12 law-loving, boot-licking people who've never been screwed over by insurance, don't have any negative feelings towards insurance companies because of someone they know being screwed over. I mean it would really be as simple as finding a dozen retired boomers who held union jobs with good benefits all their lives, are retired on cushy amounts of retirement funds, and are absolutely law and order freaks.

I would guess it's probably private Russian companies that sold access to the data to anyone including Iranians or Russians sympathetic to the movement who passed it to Iranians and that is being spun as part of the anti-Russia hysteria as the Russian military itself giving such data directly to Iran. It's possible they did that, based as fuck if they did of course but I have serious doubts the Russians were burning bridges with the zionist regime that early given their attempts to maintain ties with anyone not directly part of NATO.

And they have an advantage in that they own the biggest global media production and distribution houses. They can just pay some Hollywood producer a few million to insert some anti-China lines or propaganda in random movies or TV shows and it goes global just like that (though it's usually a bit more complex and would involve wining and dining various people via think-tanks paid to to do this and sharing talking points with them). And China has no real power to push back on that outside its borders and given its foreign policy of non-interference they couldn't if they wanted to without doing a dramatic change there.

Compare to the US reaction if China tried shopping around a TV series or show that had some minor anti-US and pro-China sentiment? US and aligned media across Asia would light up screaming about it being China propaganda, about how it has to be censored, about how weak any given country will be if they allow it to be shown and stirring up a shit-storm over it. So the US is definitely able to actually make use of their dollars here and get good value. China by comparison can spend as much as they want on shoving propaganda into products, the US will handily get a large chunk of it censored or subject to boycott.

People need make no mistake. This will go to think-tanks who will produce slander which is picked up by western and non-western news and ran near verbatim as stories. They will create chains of citations and credibility in academia and in the NGO world about China being up to no good. This will filter into western and non-western media, public consciousness, etc. It will likely end up nearly as complete as the propaganda about the USSR was for Americans and the western world. Just like indoctrinated Americans who can go to the DPRK and see what they want to see instead of the reality, even travel will not dispel this for many and at that point the task is simply to make it impossible to challenge their narrative, for any westerner who speaks truth to be cast as mad, as a bot, as a propagandist, as indoctrinated by China, as fooled by potemkin villages, as gullible, naive fools.

And that's just the west, their real goal is to propagandize to Africans, to people in Asia, to potential partners of China, to undermine the material goods Chinese projects do with suspicion, lies, and fantasy about what it's all /really/ about to create space for the US to drive a wedge and to operate, to create terrorists and coups with some amount of popular support to remove China-friendly governments and replace them with US friendly puppets. Such is the problem of short human lives. Though the older generations may remember and know of what the colonizers did, the young may buy the "that was the old us but we've changed" routine the US has so perfected. And without class consciousness this can work.