Kiev is a metonymy, and the headline is a clarification for previous ones, where it was questioned whether the F-16s would be stationed in a NATO country, which has obvious dangers.

Huh. Must be a day that ends with y.

No one can really make an argument that  the Iranians don’t know about the unit. Iran’s intelligence doesn’t need a public webpage to know about U.S. forces operating in Israel. So the only ones who are kept in the dark are  the American people, who don’t have the luxury of an intelligence service (or a functional and informative news media) to tell them what’s going on. Americans who, poll after poll demonstrates, care deeply about what’s happening in Israel and their government’s role in it.

Propaganda isn’t for the enemies, it’s domestic. You keep Rome stable so you can fight your imperialistic wars in peace. It’s hard to fill your coffers under scrutiny.

They’re hoping for another Khrushchev or Gorbachev, someone who’ll just make shit up about the previous regime and satiate western lust for vindication pending a shred of evidence.

Doesn’t fight to the death imply, ya know, death? How’re they going to make a cup of coffee dead? Also running for one’s life doesn’t have an age cutoff, older people can still run like hell when they come under fire.

What sort of depraved lunatic would derive some sort of enjoyment or comfort from the notion that the Ukrainian soldiers cannot fight and therefore have to fight to the death? This looks like the hellish mix of denial and bargaining. About as healthy a mix as benzos and heroin.

List of periphery/colony countries that had a war involving imperialists, the imperialists won and the country went on to become an industrial hub:

…

List of countries privatised to shreds only to produce more than ever:

…

On the other hand, if we lay down and file all the westerners coping about how they haven’t destroyed the Ukraine, we could go around the world 20 times over.

No doubt about it. A lot of my favourites are near broken as they’re distributed and need fixes, others can use a bit of flavour regardless.

How about yourself? You said you were from the PCMR crowd so you must’ve modded the hell out of some games.

I don’t believe either candidate is doing a bad job gutting the US on the inside, though as an outsider my perspective is limited.

On the diplomatic front, absolutely. During Trump’s term, most usian “allies” took the dumb shit he did as the temporary acts of some man-child. The corpse of Joe Biden is disproving the myth of the adults in charge in real time. He started a losing war in the Ukraine and now he’s practically overseeing a genocide. What’s more, he could’ve let Trump have sinophobia, but he chose to reveal that democrats could be just as sabre-rattling.

At this point anyone who isn’t as dignified as Obama is fine though. It’s all a race to the bottom with the bourgeois dictatorships and only an articulate, pretty face can mask that, and even that not for long.

Consoles are perfectly fine. They’re cheaper than PCs that will perform as well, a lot of people don’t care about modding all that much and like playing with a controller. For these reasons (not the price one) they’re just not for me. The games I play the most are the ones I mod the heaviest. I absolutely abhor using controllers, I never managed to get used to them.

That said if the main issue is convenience a tablet or just the phone might be better suited for many genres.

The range of opinions in Usia:

• Bad things don’t happen here, proof doesn’t exist if I close my eyes
• Bad things are ok when we do it
• Bad things aren’t ok when we do it but it’s far more important to fight the commies, someone insinuated they do bad things w/o proof

This is what they fought 72 world wars and a dozen galactic invasions folks, freeze peach baby.

At great cost I presume, this sort of thing can’t be cheap

I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don’t lead me to believe this guy’s well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they’re not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.

Parenti’s work speaks vaguely about “less inequality”, “public ownership of the means of production”, and “priority placed on human services”, but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was “public ownership” of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It’s a “socialist” history of the USSR with the working class’ real, material experiences written out.

I know this feels right to people who haven’t got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won’t become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn’t have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren’t immaterial, but they are only ancillary.

Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.

The poster has to know this ain’t true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn’t have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they’re studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?

… In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker’s “class interests”, inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.

I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn’t exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We’re who we are here, we’ve at least skimmed Capital, we’re better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.

Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how “socialist” the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR “was” for excuses about “why”. Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR’s existence. …

And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question “Why didn’t the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?” is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it’s filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.

Why would anyone do that? It’s a useless level of abstraction. I’ve never seen scientists looking into the composition and structure of the sun say “Why don’t we apply the ideal gas law?” Because the answer is obvious, the myriad axioms the ideal gas law comes with aren’t applicable in a gigantic ball of plasma. The only reason one would even attempt such an oversimplification is if they don’t see the candidates serving the same interests structurally, and hilariously the exact same in some cases.

I will regardless offer you a simplified approach, so that you may use it to synthesise your own. It consists of 3 questions regarding policy differences: (1) how has the issue come to this [under Biden for stuff that happened in the last 4 years], (2) how do I really know the other guy will be that much worse, and (3) if there definitely is a difference, is it significant? Let’s use 3 issues to look how it turns out.

Palestinian genocide: (1) Although the zionist entity has been murdering Palestinians for decades with impunity, the massacre that’s been going on is unprecedented. 35k dead, 11k of which are children, and fuck knows how many more indirectly, as a result of conditions imposed by the zionist entity. (2) Amy argument that Trump supports the zionist entity and it’ll get worse is moot. Biden called himself zionist on multiple occasions, and the most he’s done is to not sell arms to be used in Rafah, not even s stop the sake of assume altogether.

Abortion: (1) Roe v Wade was undone under Biden. He didn’t have Dep. of Health policies changed to safeguard it, he didn’t withhold funds from states that criminalised abortion, he didn’t stack the courts. (2) What’s he going to do, double ban it?

Cannabis: (3) Biden regime sent out a note unofficially saying they’ll reclassify cannabis. Not only is that gesture miniscule when they could work to declassify it altogether, it’s done when he doesn’t have congressional support so likely won’t happen anyway.

Between the schools of thought “best lies have a hint of truth” and “the big lie” this one definitely subscribes to the latter. Literally every sentence is the opposite of reality.

I go to Iran 4 times a year

Since they say Iran and IR are separate entities, I’m guessing they mean they visit the home of their Shah-loving parents 4 times a year.

deleted by creator

I’m going to make 2 different cases for you never making this comment and if neither have an effect I’m going to ask you to gently fuck off.

1. The FBI has a history of bullying people into all sorts of things, including suicide. We know from Snowden’s leaks that NSA agents use what’s at their disposal to look up people they know for petty reasons. Finally, OP only described minor changes in their PC, not books on shelves being switched around, which can be accomplished with a lot of software. Put all this together, and the scenarios where this is all quite possible are plain to see.

2. Even if you don’t believe it, as is your right, this is without doubt the worst way of making that known. This is just one step above hurling slurs and unhelpful to a distressing point. Mockery never got anyone better.

As a staunch [sports team] fan, I know beyond fact that [sports team] is the best. When they win, it’s because they were better prepared, smarter, more talented; when they lose it’s that the other team got lucky.

I thought this statistic could simply mean that a lot of people get illegal entity citizenship without intending to move there, but clearly there’s more.

“Seventy per cent of those polled reported that they have significantly changed their behaviour in public since 7 October,” said the survey report. “They are more reluctant to display Jewish symbols or speak in Hebrew, they remove the mezuzahs from their doorposts, they tend to go out less and meet less frequently in city centres.”

It added that 44 per cent of respondents considered enhancing their self-defence capabilities. “They cited the purchase of a firearm, carrying pepper spray or tear gas, installing security cameras in their homes or taking Krav Maga [martial art] lessons as the preferred means for achieving this goal.”

“I’m worried I’ll be attacked due to my religion/ethnicity. On an unrelated note, those 13000 Palestinian kids deserved what they got.” -Zionist fucks, as always

If they were literate enough to read books they wouldn’t be whatever the hell it is they are

Pasty ass crackkkers can’t even handle being called by their self-proclaimed “colour” smh