darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

Interesting but the US could just bully Musk into turning off all the Starlink stuff in a given region half an hour before air operations start. Of course the fact the US military pays for a special version of it complicates things but nothing of theirs relies entirely on it so far and they have existing systems they can use if it’s off.

In their opinion it doesn’t matter.

Firstly because either the US is going to war with China within the next 8 years or it’s not happening because the US would be at such a disadvantage and like all bullies they won’t pick a fight with an evenly matched opponent. Secondly because military drone systems used by the US are not really like those used by other countries. For example, Russia and Ukraine are using near off the shelf kit and standing in a field while US drones are controlled from a bunker or command shack or place on a US navy ship from a system that looks like it’s from a Dave and Busters racing game with the whole big seat, multiple monitors, joy-stick and additional controls. US is just not interested in that kind of drone warfare. They’ve gone all in on the idea of semi-autonomous “AI” systems and swarms controlled by 1-2 trained people per swarm from a great distance. Thirdly the US has long had this image of it’s military as this highly trained, highly disciplined, elite force while simultaneously seeing Russians/Chinese as “hordes” of under-trained, under-motivated, under-equipped canon fodder so they turn up their nose to certain types of tactics as being for those others.

Fourth, the US is worried about domestic insurrection and discontent over worsening economic conditions. The worse thing you want to do in that situation is empower the ordinary people to wage insurrection using the type of tactics and methods (drones) field-proven by unconventional militias and militant groups across the middle east. These types of drones and easy cheap access to them is also a nightmare for operational security of military bases and internal security forces operations.

Unironically the US wants and is working hard on killbots they can fire and forget for attacks and area denial. They know among other things they can’t fight China navy to navy over Taiwan so instead the plan shifts to this idea of naval and aerial drones, semi-autonomous that are basically killbots or self-propelled targeting mines that they’d unleash in the hundreds and thousands in the straits to deny China the ability to send landing craft or support ships near Taiwan and buy them time to hold the island and strike at and destroy China’s navy from beyond the horizon. This is actually not a bad answer to the problem of traditional mining that mine-sweeper ships can just clear an area, mine-sweepers don’t work if the mines actively hone in on and swarm your clearing ship when you get anywhere near any of them.

The US military is not agile in the way the Russian military or the Ukrainian bandits are. It’s a big, expensive, lumbering machine and that’s the way they like it and that’s the way it’s going to be because it produces more profit for Raytheon and because it suits their self-image.

The real losers are local EMS, fire, cops, even the FBI who get hit in the budget much harder acquiring drones now.

These are ATACMS and Stormshadow missiles supplied by the US and UK and France and so on to Ukraine. They are long range. They are made in the west and shipped in regularly. And importantly their launchers are known to be crewed by literal NATO soldiers from those countries. The targeting data and intelligence for their targets is supplied via US intelligence networks from US spy satellites.

The point is to use these weapons to like destroy an apartment building in Moscow and terrorize civilians. The point is to blow up a train station full of civilians. They might also hit some rear line Russian stuff like airfields I guess but mostly soft targets IMO.

They literally have been unable to use them for attacking deep into Russia because the US has said no and they control the missiles, both the supply and the people doing the firing and the people supplying necessary targeting data.

So they kind of are sitting on a cache of weapons, nicer missiles which are harder to intercept, which travel further, which are more evasive, etc. It won’t alter the course of the war but will impose a higher cost on Russia which has been the goal of the US all along, to bleed Russia, to weaken them, to sap their interest in further entanglements and make the Russian public and leadership war-weary and wary of standing up to the west in future.

All this said, a problem with Putin is he’s always talking big then backing down which unfortunately just encourages the west to continue to push these lines. If you’re constantly threatening but not backing it up you start to lack credibility and others look for ways to salami-slice their way to backing you into a corner. Which is inherently dangerous and likely to lead to nuclear war.

He’s really, really not a confrontational guy or a tough guy in these terms. I mean he got played for 8 years with fake peace talks as things continued to escalate before finally acting and even that act was at first just an attempt to intimidate Ukraine into surrender by going for Kiev but not actually trying to take it so much as apply pressure which resulted in an offensive that had to retreat later when the peace talks were predictably sabotaged by the UK.

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.

They’re going to plug the NSA/GCHQ/eyes into Telegram and they’re never going to leave. They’re going to start altering content, using their access to arrest anti-imperialist activists, shut down anti-imperialist speech as “Russian disinfo” or whatever, etc, etc.

If you for some reason use Telegram for organizing, or even just for distributing anti-imperialist memes and info please move it elsewhere ASAP or at least prepare and spread info about a backup elsewhere.

Unfortunately this may proceed a very harsh cut-off of info from Russian sources as this was the last readily available in the west tool that also fully functioned in Russia. I don’t know if westerners can sign up for VK or whatever else the Russian replacement is likely to be. With their control of this they can sever a major artery of info from Russian sources (private, amateur, and government) to the west about the truth in Ukraine and elsewhere. It feels increasingly like total information control. The closing of a bubble, the removal of pesky alternative sources of info, the criminalization and harassment of RT employees and anyone else connected with a country like Russia (or China).

And you can bet despite all this talk there will still be plenty of pedos channels on Telegram for without getting booted (they’ll bust a few of the big ones and make a big show of how this was possible thanks to the arrest and compromising Telegram then probably go back to ignoring them in favor of information manipulation, passing info on enemies to western intel for additional targeting with malware, etc). And there will probably be an increase in amounts of tolerated terrorists targeting Russia and China on the app who aren’t taken down despite requests from those countries.

This is what idealism does to you.

Hmm today we will openly, defiantly, and unambiguously break the law.

Hmm we’ve gotten a legal demand to stop and a lawsuit, they say if we stop, apologize and promise never to do it again they’ll settle for a pittance but we are taking a moral stand here and believe our moral philosophical arguments hold more weight than the law as written that clearly places us unambiguously in violation of the law.

Court proceeds to ignore their philosophical arguments and enforce bourgeois law as written

This was beyond obvious as the outcome. Bourgeois courts don’t serve some public interest.

So instead now we stand to lose an invaluable, irreplaceable archive of not just the internet over decades of time but also rare media such as movies, TV shows, music videos, and much more all also archived with them. And for what? Because someone couldn’t back down and thought that courts in the US served the common interest instead of the wealthy. Because someone forgot the golden rule of piracy and breaking IP laws and that’s keep quiet about it.