To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

I really liked Horizon Zero Dawn but the story hook of the game is way too far in IMO, and the story is probably the only reason I finished it. Like, I was trying to find reasons to like the game and failing and about to give up before you encounter the big metal door, and then I was like “Huh, maybe this is actually an interesting game after all.” It just starts off really slow unless you’re really into quasi father-daughter dynamics, which I can’t say I particularly am. It is fundamentally a Ubisoft towers skinner box game with a Gamer Vision scanning thing and “Hm, guess I should go into that cave!” murmurs, and some of the enemies being metal versions of real-life creatures is really interesting for… a few hours, and then it just kinda isn’t, and some of them are too tanky for no particular reason.

Horizon Forbidden West kinda just felt like the same game as the first but in a different setting and with different metal creatures. It similarly takes a little while to get to the actual story hook - finding HADES - and once again I really liked the story, but once again it’s a Ubisoft towers skinner box with Gamer Vision. It’s actually really embarrassing for the game that the main gameplay hook (at least, as I saw it), being able to ride flying monsters and fly around the map, was introduced virtually at the end of the game and has very few uses in the game. I mean, I guess you have a… glider… that is really just a parachute. And underwater sections, sometimes.

The end of Forbidden West actually pissed me off. Like, I was planning on finishing up the rest of the game’s map and doing the rest of the quests and collectibles and stuff, just to get my money’s worth I suppose, but I finished the main quest and decided that I couldn’t really be assed. I really hate when game endings aren’t self-contained. It was just “Oh, we’re DEFINITELY getting a sequel to this, so we’re leaving you on a cliffhanger and not actually giving you any closure at all.” This kinda happened in the first game but like, the series could have ended there and you would have felt 95% satisfied. For this game, it was like 10% satisfied.

I’ll… probably play the third game simply because I’m invested in the game’s story at this point, but the gameplay loop simply isn’t going to get better and I’m not looking forward to once again climbing up those towers and once again entering Gamer Vision and once again firing dozens of arrows into machines while in Slow Motion Aiming Gamer Mode.

Wrong about the beginning of events, but correct about their trajectory once they have begun

But often only because we go “No, that won’t happen, that would be stupid and counterproductive for the West” but then they just do the thing anyway and so we just go “…okay, well, they’re gonna lose then”

“we shifted from directly airstriking Gaza every day multiple times, each time killing tens or even hundreds of civilians, to airstriking a little less. also, we’re totally content to let half a million of them slowly starve to death, but if you really think about it, that’s not really our fault. they could go farming or fishing or something. in winter. well, they’d have to fix the fields that we’ve burned and bombed and trampled over… and, uh, hope for rain, because we’ve poured concrete into every well we can find…”

Putin has been stopped and his military is in shambles with 500,000 soldiers dead. Also if we don’t give hundreds of billions of dollars to the military (in times of desperate living conditions) then Putin is mere hours away from annexing Europe all the way to the Atlantic. Yes, both of these can be true if you’re not a loony leftist who can’t use logic.

endlessly entertaining when a group of people who assume themselves to be the Bestest Most Intelligent Politics And Geopolitics Understanders And The Adults In The Room run headfirst into a brick wall (literally reading a single page of a book ever in their entire lives, including the books of the people who they claim to be their patron saints, like Adam Smith)

I cannot stress enough that the average redditor has literally no idea what they are talking about. Drill them about literally ANYTHING and within 30 seconds, they find themselves unable to describe or explain anything, because they don’t know anything beyond the facts and ideas that they’ve been given by other commenters who are just as moronic. 100% vibes-based. They might as well be ants following pheromone trails, except the pheromone trails are US state propaganda. Their desire to learn and retain new information about the world at large was extinguished halfway through middle school when they saw their first “but what if the curtains are just blue??!?” meme.

He purchased the hammer on Amazon, which is a magical dimension from which you merely have to imagine an object for it to come into existence and then click the Purchase button, and then a happy little elf will deliver it to your front door

I absolutely fucked this thing as soon as I got the chance

“Oh yeah? Well, the Houthis are gonna find the fuck out why we don’t have free healthcare! It’s because we need to spend millions of dollars per missile, and that missile doesn’t even do what it’s meant to do most of the time, and is vulnerable to missiles/drones that are either too good (hypersonic), or not good individually but can be made in the thousands, which is what all our enemies use! Take that, terrorists!”

Here’s a pro tip: when a US media outlet says “This action did have an effect, but it achieved considerably less than expected,” this is code for “It achieved fucking nothing. Actually, it probably weakened us more than it weakened them.”

Prime example is all the articles over the last couple years talking about how sanctions on Russia are definitely doing something! They’re not working as well as we want, but they are working! Meanwhile, Russia is essentially the best performing major economy in the European region, is distinctly not in a recession unlike, say, Germany, had its oil sold significantly above the oil price cap for half of 2023 (with a recent fall to “just” the price cap of $60 per barrel), with manufacturing and services PMIs doing great, record low unemployment (…well, you know what I mean…), and basically everybody who isn’t a bot on Reddit is admitting is winning the war in Ukraine despite the combined military deliveries of dozens of countries throughout NATO.

Another example is of sanctions on China, perhaps best summed up by this:

(from January 2024 in CGTN)

Ah, well, nevertheless.

Simply put, if I didn’t want Ansarallah in Yemen to become a battle-hardened, militant force in the region which has found ways to mitigate the impacts of western bombing campaigns, and is totally unwilling to even briefly consider US demands to stop blockading the Red Sea, I would have simply not fucking bombed them and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians for nine fucking years. Actions have consequences.

Propaganda cannot feed an army. It cannot fuel a battleship. It cannot be fired out of a missile launcher. But other than magically-conjured trillions of dollars, it’s about the only thing that America can still make.

I’m generally okay with Trots but my god, the articles they put out can be really grating sometimes. Keep them on track and they can tell you a dozen interesting things about current-day struggles and labour movements. But let them stray a little and they’ll just talk about how workers need to form their own rank-and-file movements free of collaborationist union leadership (which like, sure I guess, but union membership and vibrancy isn’t exactly thriving throughout the world right now and I just don’t think unions can have the same degree of power under financial capitalism that has exported industry to other countries so there’s less means of production to even seize), and how Stalinists are destroying every good thing on the planet, and how China is secretly an even worse imperialist than America. I’ve spent nearly two years reading the stuff they put out and I feel like it would be pretty easy to set up an AI script to just write a solid third of their articles for them, so I hope they’re getting in on that to save themselves some effort on the weekly China Bad article so they can focus on the better stuff that I know they can and do regularly write.

I appreciate that the online versions of most left-wing ideologies tend to spend a lot of time in the past for a variety of reasons - things seemed much more dynamic and changeable back then; the world is very difficult to understand and predict right now in anything but general trajectories; arguing online about past events is easier than going outside and actually doing stuff; most of the OG thinkers that you have to read to understand their works happened to be about a century or so ago and there’s not a ton of big English-language communist works nowadays; etc - but of all the major left ideologies, Trots seem to be the ones who spend the most time in the past, and with ways of organizing and disseminating information that are built on the assumptions of a world that no longer really exists. They’re kind of like the grandpas of the left. I can’t really hate or even really dislike them that much, but you’re not expecting a lot of energy and movement in that sphere compared to say, the still-surviving ML countries, or the vibrant and energetic anarchist sphere.

The less evidence there is of a genocide, the more likely it is that there is a genocide going on. Israel could videotape themselves putting every single Gazan into a gas chamber and it would prove that they actually haven’t committed genocide. Meanwhile, we must immediately convict Xi Jinping of his genocide of the Martians. Yeah, there aren’t any Martians on Mars - why do you think that is?

#Tradle #678 3/6
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https://oec.world/en/tradle

god fucking damn it

If anybody tries to tell you that a geopolitical situation is “too complicated” to understand, in 99.9% of situations they’re some combination of a) trying to make you stop caring about it because they know it counters their ideology, or b) they don’t understand it themselves and don’t want to embarrass themselves trying to explain it. The vast majority of people on planet Earth have the capacity to understand what is going on in Palestine.

There’s certainly a good amount of history there, but most history can be adequately simplified, and this conflict is no exception: it began with the British Empire giving away their Middle Eastern colony to fledgling Zionists, and the Palestinians who were native to the land were forcibly driven off in the late 1940s. The land that the Palestinians occupy shrank over time due to continued oppression and wars until the present day. The Zionists fought wars with neighbouring countries like Egypt and Lebanon over the decades, with both victories and defeats, and have conducted sabotage and economic sanctions across various countries in the region with the help of the United States to crush states that would not bend the knee to them (Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran) and install Zionism-friendly leaders in other countries (Egypt, Jordan, the various gulf monarchies outside of Qatar). Zionism, by definition, relies on settlers to come along and take land that was once owned by Palestinians, and their explicitly stated, proud goal is to expand their settler-colony across a wide swathe of the Middle East, into Iraq and Egypt.

Not a single word of that was remotely opinionated. I could give that summary to a Zionist and they could think I was being pro-Zionist, and I could give that summary to a Palestinian and they could think I was being pro-Palestinian. Many (I would hope most) people would agree that settler-colonies that drive people off the land are an anachronism that belongs to, like, the 19th century, and not the 21st. Zionists think that doing all that is fine because they believe that the Palestinians are subhuman; I know this because - beyond all the ones you can find online telling you that that is what they believe and being proud of it - believing a certain type of people to be subhuman is a prerequisite for approving and conducting bombing raids that kill tens of thousands of civilians with only a very minor military advantage to be gained.

With all that out of the way, I also expect this person believes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is extremely simple (Putin = very bad evil man, Ukraine = epic good guys Avengers), despite, again, there being significant history there that MUST be understood. It’s not a difficult history to learn if you have about half an hour of free time and, most importantly, an actual willingness to learn that information.

I generally dislike basically everybody in the “Youtube Smart Person Who Tells You Information For 10-30 Minutes” sphere for various reasons (Tom Scott and 3Blue1Brown are the least aggravating for me as they’re pretty good at staying in their lane), but by far the funniest (and most aggravating) part of their whole project is when they get onto China or the USSR in the middle of a video that doesn’t immediately seem like it would be about that, and it just turns into a whole spiel like: “The totalitarian regime of China/USSR is well-known for their extensive censorship and the iron hand they have on the media, with many human rights abuses. According to recent estimates, the gulag system murdered 50 quintillion people under Stalin’s terror alone, and not a single person was allowed to speak their mind. If you were the first to stop clapping during a Stalin speech, you would be executed. Anyway, as I was saying, this new flavour of ice cream was invented in the USSR in 1976…”

Like, wow, you’re really doing a great job with that Bill Gates grant money.

Even the “left-wing” of the 2016-2020 period was literally just “Hmm, what if we combined both capitalism and socialism in a big pot to get the best of both!” It was that level of just having absolutely no fucking clue about anything in politics, political theory, economics, etc, you just wanted free healthcare and reasonable rent/housing prices.

It must be very strange having a reasonably large section of Lemmy (by posting power if nothing else) that explicitly rejects the entire capitalist neoliberal paradigm and way of thinking which is the only thing that they’ve been exposed to in their entire lives, aside from the spooky bedtime stories that the government has told them about the USSR or China hiding in their closet, ready to pounce out and eat them. If you’re exposed to an entirely different system of thinking and are unable to even really comprehend it because you refuse to read, then what else are you meant to do other than accusing them of trolling, or of simply being Evil People?

The best you can do is use the talismans that the government and media have bestowed upon you, the good old “But human nature…” charm, the “Works on paper, doesn’t in practice” amulet, and the “100 trillion dead in gulags” enchanted ring. You don’t even really know why you’re saying this stuff, it’s just an automatic response programmed into you, and receiving an effortpost in response which debunks those things just leads you to spew out more talismanic responses. You’re a defender of an ideology that you aren’t even aware that you have, so when somebody comes at you with a different ideology, all you can do is just say shit like “Oh, yeah, those people over there are horrific genocide apologists. Yeah, they aren’t even really trans, it’s just a whole site that’s trolling the rest of lemmy. They’re so idiotic that they can’t even see that competition and markets and democracy (as we conceive it) obviously get the best results - don’t they know that the USSR’s fall totally demolishes the argument of central planning? Just don’t even engage with them.”

all the while, we’re over here debating the finer points of Chinese economic policy in the Deng era and how it compares to the USSR under Lenin and Stalin; the foundations of neoclassical economics and the people who invented the idea of austerity; various obscure countries and conflicts around the world; and, well, having struggle sessions about sillier things too.

My son failed to beat Iudex Gundyr and is now dead because he didn’t use his estus flask in time. This is the 8th time this has happened to me. Natural selection is taking a while to kick in but soon enough, my sons will be parrying Pontiff Sulvayhn with the best of them. Thank you, Darwin!

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Georgia isn’t in NATO, they’re a close partner