SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

“Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back.”

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2022

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  • city/country subreddits are the best place to go if you want to know what the popular base of a hypothetical (or existing) national fascist party is/will be and what they’re currently thinking about. densest concentration online of downwardly mobile petit bourgeoisie and their lumpenprole bootlickers. as western hegemony continues its descent into eventual impotence, these will be the exact people calling for blood-and-soil nationalism and labour/concentration camps for undesirables and a tenfold expansion in militarism to crush foreign uprisings.

    even though Israel will soon collapse, it’ll be extremely important to not forget the characteristics and mentality of Zionists because there will be tens of millions more of them throughout the various countries of the West who want the exact same things that Israeli Zionists currently do and will vote the same ways and take the same actions but for their own countries, with various minorities taking the place of the Palestinians. there might well be dozens more Nakbas and Gazas before too long.




  • no worries, I’m sure Europe is in a great place to receive thousands/millions more people and definitely won’t blame immigrants for being forced out of the country because bombs are being dropped on them (by Europe’s closest allies)

    the world of 2050 will be the imperial hinterlands being bombed to smithereens in order to increase the capital accumulation of military corporations and hundreds of millions of refugees desperately trying to escape towards the imperial core and then being gunned down on the border or put in camps. screw climate change, turns out all we needed to induce massive refugee crises was just the logic of endstage neoliberalism in the West, while China is doing actually useful things with their labour and money and resources. they’ll be rocking out with room-temperature superconductors transporting terawatts of power from their desert solar installations and offshore nuclear reactors while our electrical grids have collapsed because nobody knows how to make transformers anymore because all those factories shifted to making either cheese that is 98% sawdust or the most PFAS/microplastic-infested overpriced products ever devised


  • one does wonder how long it takes after saying something like “voting for Harris probably won’t improve anything and genocides and wars abroad will continue at full throttle but at least things won’t get too much worse too quickly” that one then realizes “…huh, I am part of the most weak, babybrained, wimpy voting bloc in all of human history, aren’t I?”

    their liberal libertarian politics (hypothetically) has shit like “rebellion against authority is a duty when it becomes too oppressive” and “the government and politicians should fear the people, not the other way around” and then when it actually comes to the fascists putting people in concentration camps and bombing people in revolutionary uprisings, suddenly we have to debate the finer points of morality and lesser evils and voting strategies

    really just example #5492054329 of how the entire Western and especially American political zeitgeist is this amorphous, free-flowing entity that can take and justify any position on the political spectrum so long as it suits imperial ambition.

    support LGBTQIA rights? well, Hamas hates gay people. do you also hate gay people? well, Israel is a manly highly militarized Sparta-esque state where those goshdang zoomers and millennials have to serve in the military, really straightens them out. like leftist social policies? well, in China, they’re actually capitalist fascists and the netting around the roofs of buildings is there for a reason! hate allowing homeless people to have basic human rights? well, in communist China they have anti-poverty schemes; very much against what God and Darwin intended. fiscally conservative? you gotta support the IMF, they put countries that don’t know economics 101 on the right track by privatizing everything out of the hands of the godless commie bureaucrats. fiscally liberal? no you aren’t, “i’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative” is what the most politically illiterate people in the country say to sound smart on reddit. like foreign interventions? hell yeah, we’re saving Ukraine and Israel! hate foreign interventions? we aren’t invading anything, as Harris said, we have no soldiers in warzones abroad (by our arbitrary definition of “soldier” and “warzone”), we’re actually defending places this time from aggressors!




  • We’re at a point now where Lebanon is being subjected to israel’s Gaza Doctrine, and it seems like most people don’t know or don’t care.

    If not a complete disregard for humanity, is it boredom? It must be more than race-hatred. Does the death and suffering become too much for our brains to make sense of it, so we stop caring?

    Had millions of people not been killed by COVID, would the world be less tolerant to genocide?

    It’s always been a thing to a greater or lesser extent; there’s always a detachment to some degree to mass death/suffering abroad and there’s levels of justification and excuses at every level of the chain. At the top it’s that they genuinely don’t give a shit about large numbers of poor people dying and even when they say they care (e.g. the Uyghur genocide allegations) they don’t actually give a shit and it’s purely for propaganda purposes. For the average soldier or worker invested in the military, it’s “it’s not my fault, my contribution is minimal, I’m just following orders from above, it’s their fault for commanding me to do this.” For the average citizen, the genocides only exist in their nightmare rectangles and they either excuse it (“Hamas shouldn’t have provoked Israel, FAFO”) or denounce it with necessarily pointless actions because useful ones will make you face consequences - sending money directly could get you investigated, public shows of support could get you fired or even a knock on your door from police.

    So everybody’s just trying to survive and forming justifications for their ideology after the fact. There’s almost never an avenue to help people in very difficult situations that wouldn’t a) bankrupt you and your family, b) take up a lot of time that you’re too tired to spend because you’re working, and/or c) make you face punishment, so what’s left is stochastic violence (complete with a manifesto!) that achieves nothing, or extreme acts of individual protest like setting yourself on fire which also achieves nothing (in a vacuum; sometimes it can be effective if there’s an organisation behind you to take advantage of the publicity). This is certainly amplified by the West’s propaganda but propaganda doesn’t work unless you have some other reason to believe it.

    I wouldn’t even call it “acceptance” - nobody would say that they “accept” that tons of people die from cancer every year. That’s not to draw equivalency between relatively random biological phenomena and humans making a decision to drop bombs onto civilians, it’s just that for the average person - even here in this thread! - we can no more miraculously cure a terminally ill person of cancer as stop a bomb from being dropped by an Israeli plane onto a school full of children. It all gets sorted into the same compartment of “terrible things that are happening reasonably far away from me”. There is no democratic input into what is going on in Gaza or Lebanon. The only conceivable possibility would be Jill Stein winning, but everybody’s too caught up in the prisoner’s dilemma to shift their vote from the Democrats to her, and even if they did, Stein would get Kennedy’d by the feds before she could put her signature on the bill to stop weapon shipments to Israel. Inside Israel, there’s literally nobody else to vote for, and the overwhelming majority of Israel is only angry at the current government because the genocide isn’t happening fast enough and they’re confused why there wasn’t a dozen nukes dropped onto Gaza on October 8th - and also, of course, they’re angry that they’re facing consequences for their actions.

    I do think that Westerners are uniquely selfish due to their material position over the rest of the world, but I don’t think coronavirus had anything really to do with it. All it proved is that they’re not even willing to do much of anything even if many of them die, but the “acceptance” - such that it is - of mass death is, in my opinion, a) a phenonemon which dates back centuries, and b) kinda neither here nor there, because Western societies are already profoundly undemocratic and are highly surveilled police states, so there’s little opportunity for genuine, shaking-the-foundations revolutionary anger to go anywhere, as 2020’s BLM protests and the Iraq War protests indicated.


  • I am genuinely fascinated by what exactly Iran will do in response to this, because they clearly went into this situation knowing that they’d face heavy reprisals and yet that hasn’t seemed to dissuade them. They seem pretty confident by directly attacking Israel, whereas Israel’s responses are usually more covert or via proxies (“oh yeah, that terrorist attack DEFINITELY wasn’t linked to us, no sirree”).

    I wonder, for example, if the monarchies currently begging Iran to not hit them and telling Israel that they can’t use their airspaces will actually change Iran’s strategy, or if they’ll just blow everything up anyway.

    If you directly attack a nuclear-armed state backed by another, more powerful state with even more nukes when you yourself do not have nukes, then you’ve clearly got some reason to believe you can win or you’d just keep maintaining semi-plausible deniability by arming your regional allies and attacking Israel that way. Sure, states can and have made counterproductive decisions based on bad intel but Iran knows perfectly well that Israel could drop nukes on the 20 most populated cities in its territory within an hour or so and yet does not seem to be dissuaded.





  • The Country of the Week is Moldova!

    Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to Moldova.

    If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

    spoiler
    • What is the general ideology of the political elite? Do they tend to be protectionist nationalists, or are they more free trade globalists? Are they compradors put there by foreign powers? Are they socialists with wide support by the population?
    • What are the most important domestic political issues that make the country different from other places in the region or world? Are there any peculiar problems that have continued existing despite years or decades with different parties?
    • Is the country generally stable? Are there large daily protests or are things calm on average? Is the ruling party/coalition generally harmonious or are there frequent arguments or even threats?
    • Is there a particular country to which this country has a very impactful relationship over the years, for good or bad reasons? Which one, and why?
    • What are the political factions in the country? What are the major parties, and what segments of the country do they attract?
    • Are there any smaller parties that nonetheless have had significant influence? Are there notable separatist movements?
    • How socially progressive or conservative is the country generally? To what degree is there equality between men and women, as well as different races and ethnic groups? Are LGBTQIA+ rights protected?
    • Give a basic overview of the last 50 or 100 years. What’s the historical trend of politics, the economy, social issues, etc - rise or decline? Were they always independent or were they once occupied, and how have things been since independence if applicable?
    • If you want, go even further back in history. Were there any kingdoms or empires that once governed the area?

    Check out the reading list.




  • If I went out with even a tenth of the courage of Sinwar, I’d be happy.

    I had no idea that he was fighting alongside his soldiers this whole time, or at least on occasion. Makes him surviving a year of war and genocide even more impressive than it already as.

    I think we all knew that Sinwar’s death was inevitable, especially after the death of Nasrallah proved there was no reluctance about killing Resistance leaders (versus trying to capture for intel, propaganda purposes, etc). They were both ageing men in an occupation where you usually die young. The Resistance will not weaken - if anything, it will grow stronger, especially with the video proof that even the leaders are war heroes through-and-through. They’ll probably have to start turning down new fighters in Lebanon and Gaza, they’ll arrive in such large numbers.

    The modern Che Guevara.