I’m going to Prague next year and am so tempted to act like some Americans do in China by telling the locals how poor and misfortunate they are to live in such an authoritarian system with no free speech.

*westerners finally figuring out they don’t live in a democracy

Inb4 the German-Ukrainian partitioning of Poland happens.

Those mountains are arguably a big reason the US hasn’t invaded them yet lol.

Have they considered recycling water? I know desalination plants were already mentioned here, but surely recycling would be a no 1. thing there given their climate and the sanctions kinda making it hard to just keep building more desalination plants given how expensive they are.

Taiwan is like if Palestine managed to liberate itself from Israel completely, but then a civil war occurred between Fatah and the PFLP which the PFLP managed to win and establish a new Palestinian socialist state, but Fatah wasn’t completely defeated and retreated to Cyprus to continue their government for the next 70 odd years while claiming to be the “real” Palestine.

Oh and they also became a military dictatorship for 40 years in order to violently suppress any leftists on the island with America’s full backing, and more recently started to simp for their former Israeli occupiers as a role model to follow.

(this isn’t a completely accurate analogy as Cyprus was never a part of Palestine like Taiwan is for China, but it’s a general jist of Cross-Taiwan Strait history)

The funny thing is I subconsciously learned this as a kid many years ago from playing real time strategy video games. A few dozen expensive units are more powerful and look intimidating but can eventually be beaten by hundreds of cheaper units, especially when your opponent runs out of resources to keep producing those expensive units. War economy is everything.

Also adaptability. Making sure you have a counter/ can quickly counter every unit the enemy can throw at you. In real world present day warfare, the US Air Force is the hardest thing to counter which is why nobody outside of Russia, China, and the brave as f Houthis would ever directly engage the US militarily.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its consequences have been a disaster for the Human race.

Just wanted to tag on to the other comments confirming that yes, it was quite easy to access a VPN in China when I was there in September. I already set one up before I arrived for Hexbear, but wanted to stream some stuff that was still blocked so I bought a Surfshark subscription without any problems.

I know a lot of people are (rightfully) shitting PPB on Dick Cheney finally kicking the bucket, but his death has unfortunately completely overshadowed another prominent politician who coincidentally died on the same day: Kim Yong-nam.

I have yet to see anyone on Hexbear mention this, so I thought I’d bring it up here.

Who was Kim Yong-nam? He was a senior-level DPRK politician who served many positions in the WPK, but most notably was the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, which is basically the DPRK equivalent of their head of state. The latter title in particular, Kim held for two decades until his retirement in 2019. He was considered one of the last OG revolutionary statesmen who served the newly created DPRK in Kim Il-sung’s time, and was old enough to have witnessed the horrors of Japanese colonization, WWII and the Korean War. There are conflicting accounts on his childhood history, but according to his official state biography he was born in Pyongyang back when Korea was still occupied by the Empire of Japan. He often acted as a senior diplomat on behalf of Kim Jong-un and his father Kim Jong-il for various cross-cultural exchanges and multilateral negotiations, most notably he went to the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympic Games in Occupied Korea, and has met three former ROK Presidents.

Kim Yong-nam passed away at the ripe old age of 97. May he rest in power.

As always, Lenin did it first with the Bolsheviks (although they did toss out some socialist factions too).

Guys guys it’s just a harmless SS symbol that young soldiers get tattooed on their bodies create massive banners and put in their meeting rooms, they’re too naive and impressionable to really know what these things mean, stop with the purity testing and vote for a politician that will pay these brave American Ukrainian heroes more!

I find it hilarious that the article interviews a former military advisor to the US Secretary of State who tells us that Australia should start thinking about where our critical minerals are going and put controls on them to stop evil China from using it for missiles and nuclear energy, while just a paragraph before that notes that Australia signed a $13B rare earths deal with America last week like it’s completely fine.

Further down the article it even notes that America bombed an Iranian zirconium production plant back in June without any criticism from the authors, as if such an action was justified because we can’t let the ‘bad’ countries have their own zirconium supply. It’s like reading a script for a comedy skit.

It’s infuriating that the ABC, a state-run Australian media outlet, likes to portray itself as an ‘independent, fair, and transparent media’ when it’s pro-US, pro-neoliberal imperialist biases (which are really just a reflection of what the Australian state itself believes) are so obvious to anyone who has a good grasp of economics and geopolitical history. This is a tangent rant to the topic, but I just absolutely cannot stand reading anything about politics from what is effectively an Australian propaganda outlet like the BBC is, and the mainstream corporate media in the country is even worse in their analysis, or lack of.

Ok and? People like Contrapoints turned me away from the reactionary culture war a decade ago too. Doesn’t change the fact that she like Hasan is a liberal whose only contributions irl are getting people to vote for the democrats and other bourgeois parties.

Online leftists really have to stop thinking parasocial relationships with streamers is somehow praxis and go outside (and also read theory).

Yes for the reasons stated in OP, but also because the actual subscriber count for both is abysmally low and merging would give more exposure.

And if merger occurs, there should be a clear rule that public figures must have their name mentioned in the post title to distinguish from anon posts.

Also just realized if the users per month of both comms were combined it would be the most viewed comm on Hexbear lol.

It’s really just a consequence of the ‘do nothing’ mentality of Chinese foreign policy, but at the same time, the international left really shouldn’t look to some socialist great power to do all the work for them. Change never comes from the top, and the same applies for geopolitics too. The proletariat must work to change the conditions of their respective societies themselves.

Did the Soviet Union create the PRC? No. At most they gave the CPC some leftover weapons and vehicles taken from the Japanese during WW2, but beyond that largely left the Chinese communists to their own devices throughout the civil war. Even the Soviet Union, despite being more proactive in foreign policy, sometimes looked the other way too whenever the US intervened in other countries: the 1953 Iran coup, and the 1973 Chilean coup for example, did not provoke any response from the Soviets.

I feel like an unspoken part of the agreement was that America ignores Taiwan and China looks the other way with Venezuela and Ukraine. Taiwan wasn’t mentioned at all in the talks despite the whole semiconductor trade war going on and Taiwan’s President sucking up hard to Trump and previously Biden, going as far as to allow TSMC to shift some of its manufacturing to the US.

As another user in this thread pointed out, economic development and Taiwan are the primary concerns of China, and they got something for both out of this agreement.

Unfortunately this does mean China will continue to allow the Global South to be Imperialized and will continue to undermine their efforts to develop their economies by being the biggest exporter of goods to America (the ‘mercantilist war’ that Xiaohongshu has brought up many times here). So at least in the short term, we will still be just getting strongly worded letters from Beijing about US aggression around the world.

I see it as a perfect opportunity for radicalization, hope South Korean communists can take advantage of Trump admin’s fuck ups.

a college degree, a mild improvement in the boot’s conditions, escape from an abusive family, etc. are worth any amount of foreign lives to these people

The funny thing is Graham Platner isn’t even from a poor or abusive background, he comes from a multi-millionaire petite bourgeois family and went to private schools.

I know that even if he was poor, doing what he did in the US military is still wrong, but it’s just funny seeing American “leftists” trying to use this argument of “if you’re poor, being a jackboot soldier of the American Reich is fine!” for someone as privileged as Platner.

This whole Graham Platner saga has been such a good litmus test for the western left. The Russia/ Ukraine war was already a good one for 3 years, but that one was harder to use for westerners. This one though? Clear cut war criminal with blatant Nazi symbolism tattooed on his chest running on a social fascist platform, and the best defence these radlibs have is “but he said he was a communist on Le Wholesome Reddit!!!”.