Thomas_Dankara

joined 3 years ago
sorted by: new top controversial old
In honor of the wild success the patsocs have had in converting Republicans to the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism in c/memes@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago

, its all extremely internet shit.

famous last words. the internet is always leaking into real life. a white supremacist radicalized on 4chan published a 100 page manifesto full of pepe the frog and "happy merchant" memes before shooting up a supermarket full of black people just earlier this year.

0
imagine the chutzpah needed to publish this political cartoon in 2001 (hexbear.net)
 
After 33 million Pakistanis displaced, ‘rich nations owe reparations to countries facing climate disaster’, says Pakistan minister in c/news@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

3rd world nations: Give us reparations for climate change

1st world nations: Actually it's China's fault because we leveraged our economic hegemony to make them manufacture all the stuff. :soypoint-1::some-controversy::soypoint-2:

1
It is impossible to understand the current existential threat the US feels from China without first understanding what happened to Japan 37 years ago. (twitter.com)
 

Twitter

Part 1: https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1564267348017938434

Part 2: https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1564268574075940870

Archive

Part 1: https://archive.ph/BqBlW

Part 2: https://archive.ph/fmsQE

Threadreaderapp

Part 1: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1564267348017938434.html

Part 2: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1564268574075940870.html

Text Part 1

It is impossible to understand the current existential threat the US feels from China without first understanding what happened to Japan 37 years ago.

This is the story of the Plaza Accord 🧵

As Japan emerged shattered from WW2, the US was intent on establishing a forward operating base from which to combat communism in Asia. So in the spring of 1949, under allied occupation, Japan joined a US-led system of monetary management known as the Bretton Woods agreement.

The agreement pegged the currencies of the largest economies to the USD, and the USD to gold, establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency. As a concession, the US allowed Japan to peg the yen to dollar at a favorable rate of 360:1, buoying Japan’s export economy.

While initially tolerable, the rapid post-war growth of Japan’s export industry quickly allowed them to outcompete US manufacturing by producing similar quality goods at 1/3rd the price. This led to significant anti-Japan reaction in the US, particularly amongst auto workers. The Bretton Woods Agreement...

As a result of this growth, experts began predicting in the ’70s that Japan could overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by century’s end. This trend only accelerated when the US was hit by the ’73 oil embargo.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/13/archives/the-emerging-japanese-superstate.html

Meanwhile in the US, the costly Vietnam war, high social spending, and growing negative trade balance were all being financed by money printing. But almost as soon as they were printed, these newly minted dollars left the country via the US’s negative balance of trade. As a result of this monetary inflation, it was becoming increasingly clear the USD was overvalued relative to its fixed gold tether and in 1968, this overvaluation manifested as a collapse of the London gold pool, when growing US debts caused a loss of confidence in the dollar.

In 1971, Nixon intervened to address rising inflation by instituting domestic price controls and a blanket 10% import tariff. He also officially ended the direct convertibility of dollars to gold, untethering the dollar and effectively kicking off the fiat currency era.

With the dollar untethered, it could now drift toward its ‘true’ value. In ’73, the USD was again devalued against its official rate as the price of gold continued to rise. Soon after, Japan and the EEC were forced to let their currencies float, ending the Bretton Woods system.

With the USD now in turmoil, the late 70s saw the worst US inflation in decades. When Reagan took office in ’81, inflation had reached a crisis. To get it under control, the Fed increased interest rates to the highest level ever, with the prime rate peaking in Aug ’81 at 20.5%

While this finally brought inflation under control, it came at the expense of dramatic economic slowdown and mass unemployment. What followed was an era of lower interest rates, slashed social spending, regressive taxation, and massive military spending, aka ‘Reaganomics’. Reagan’s policies of military spending while cutting tax revenues resulted in an exploding deficit. This deficit spending combined with the contraction of US exports needed to be financed somehow. And the solution that was chosen was to sell the debt.

As a result of the high interest rates of the early 80s, combined with a flood of new government debt entering the market, demand for USD soared, and between 1980 - 85 the dollar appreciated against the currencies of the next four largest economies by a whopping 50%.

While good news for the cost of imported goods, this strong dollar was disastrous for US exports, and contributed to the further collapse of domestic manufacturing.

But who was buying all this debt?

Japan.

By 1985, capital inflow attracted by these high interest rates meant that Japan owned more US-treasuries than any other country. But why buy only treasuries?

Because after the collapse of Bretton Woods, the US began stipulating that dollars accrued through trade surplus could not be used to buy major American companies, only allowing them to be recycled back into the American economy to purchase debt securities. With this, the USD had finally landed on a foundation seemingly more stable than gold: dollar recycling. This recycling became the way in which the US has been able to maintain both a budget deficit and a balance-of-payments deficit year-over-year, seemingly without consequence.

And while export countries gain a small but stable return from these US securities, they inadvertently finance the cost of surrounding themselves with 800 American military bases, which are then used to break any country that tries to form alternatives to this dollar system. But this system of maintaining the dollar created a new problem: too much indebtedness to one country would pose a strategic threat. And with Japan now the primary debt holder, the US needed to throw a wrench in the engine driving Japan’s growing leverage.

Enter the Plaza Accord Assembling leaders from the top 5 economies in Sept ’85, the Plaza accord was designed to boost US manufacturing and agricultural exports and lower the value of the US Treasury instruments purchased with the trade surpluses held by other countries. At least on paper. But the true aim of the accord was to cripple Japan’s manufacturing-driven economy.

The plan had 2 parts. The 1st part was to decrease the value of the USD, while the 2nd was to deregulate Japan’s economy, loosen monetary policy / liberalize markets, and cut government spending.

To accomplish the first, Germany agreed to dump a massive portion of its USD foreign reserves, flooding markets with USD and driving the relative value downward. The actual USD surplus that entered the market was less impactful than the implied threat of further intervention.

Almost overnight, the higher relative value of the yen made Japanese exports much less competitive. At the same time, Japanese capital was being incentivized by the US-backed deregulation of the Japanese economy into real estate, the stock market, and even more US treasuries.

The deregulation that followed also led to foreign capital flowing into Japan like a firehose. Tokyo’s stock market index rose 49% in the year after the accords. By 1989, it had risen 300% and Japanese stocks comprised almost half the entire world’s equity market cap. As the newly available cheap credit created by the Bank of Japan congealed within Japan’s real estate sector, a massive asset price bubble began to grow.

In 1987, Washington piled on further to break the back of Japan’s manufacturing base by imposing 100% tariffs on $300 million worth of imports from Japan, effectively blocking them from the US market.

Eventually, Japan’s financialized frenzy had to end. On the eve of 1990, the real-estate and stock market bubbles finally popped, resulting in widespread collapse and sustained stagnation of Japan’s economic growth, beginning a period now known as “the lost decades”.

And while Japanese exports became more expensive overnight, productive capital couldn’t shift as quickly. It took another 5 years after the financial bubble popped before the actual productive output of Japan finally began to sputter.

Where did production shift to? In response to the tariffs, some production, such as Japanese auto manufacturers, relocated to the US, while the rest, particularly electronic goods, moved to China. I

Given that this exact outcome was largely predictable at the outset of the accords, why did Japan agree to so thoroughly subordinate their own economy to US interests?

Because the post-WW2 US occupation of Japan never ended.

(End of part 1. Part 2 won't fit in this post)

Dugin's daughter was killed in a car bomb or something (developing story) in c/news@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Pasting from wikipedia here:

He was the main organizer of the National Bolshevik Front, the Eurasia Party and, together with Eduard Limonov, their forerunner, the National Bolshevik Party, which was banned by a Russian court in 2005. He also served as an advisor to the State Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov[20] and a leading member of the ruling United Russia party, Sergey Naryshkin.[21] He was the head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University from 2009 to 2014, losing the position due to backlash over comments regarding Ukrainians.[22] Dugin is the author of more than 30 books, among them Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) and The Fourth Political Theory (2009).

The comments Dugin made were in the wake of this event: https://www.dw.com/en/the-odessa-file-what-happened-on-may-2-2014/a-18425200

Dugin's comments that got him fired (in Russian):

"Вот эти погибшие герои в доме профсоюзов, они уже решение своё сделали. Они пали за свободу Юго-Востока Украины от неонацисткой киевской мрази. Я думаю что Украинцем сегодня быть, честно говоря, после этого, я сам украинец, вы знаете? У меня есть… У меня предки из Полтавы. Мне стыдно. Просто мне стыдно за ту, но всё же существенную часть своей крови. Я хочу чтоб эта кровь была очищена кровью мрази, киевской хунты, и я на самом деле не могу носить в себе эту украинскую кровь пока я не увижу казнённых ублюдков творивших беззаконие 2-го мая. Это серьёзно.

Фразы "Украинцев нужно убивать, убивать и убивать" на видео нет, это вброс. Реальная стенограмма:"Вот эти погибшие герои в доме профсоюзов, они уже решение своё сделали. Они пали за свободу Юго-Востока Украины от неонацисткой киевской мрази. Я думаю что Украинцем сегодня быть, честно говоря, после этого, я сам украинец, вы знаете? У меня есть… У меня предки из Полтавы. Мне стыдно. Просто мне стыдно за ту, но всё же существенную часть своей крови. Я хочу чтоб эта кровь была очищена кровью мрази, киевской хунты, и я на самом деле не могу носить в себе эту украинскую кровь пока я не увижу казнённых ублюдков творивших беззаконие 2-го мая. Это серьёзно.

Это голос крови. На самом деле я бы не шутил с такими вещами. И я полагаю что никакого права эта гадина на какую-то западную украинскую государственность с центром Киевом. Я понимаю что Юго-Восток не будет никогда в этом ублюдочном государстве. Но никакого права эти люди контролировать даже западную Украину не имеют. И им, пока они на земле, пока всё зло что мы видим творится, никто спокойно спать не будет. Поэтому на самом деле только нормальные люди должны править эти прекрасным, на самом деле, некогда прекрасным украинским народом, это замечательной страной, с которой нас связывает всё. Просто пока Киев, пока в Киеве гниды, на самом деле, русский человек, человек который родом из киевской Руси, это наши корни, спокойно существовать не может. Либо действительно надо стереть с лица земли и заново построить, либо на самом деле люди должны придти в себя. Я думаю что в Украине, необходимо тотальное, на всех её территориях, на всех её областях, народное восстание.

Вооружённое восстание против хунты. Не только на Юго-Востоке. Иначе, ведь тоже самое может произойти в Ужгороде, а русинов уже оккупировали такие же молодцы, оккупировали русинский дом где они собрались для решения своих совершенно спокойных проблем. Тоже самое уже нависло над венграми, в Подкарпатской Руси, над русскими, над всеми, на самом деле. Так и над Украинцами. Помните ведь над кем издевался Саня Билый, покойный? Над такими же украинцами как он, на самом деле это совершенно не какие-то инородцы. И что он начал творить? Его остановили. Но сейчас пришли ещё более страшные люди, — мы не видели зверств Сани Билого, он просто за галстук потаскал какого-то, очень безобразная была сцена. Но то что мы видим 2-го мая, это уже выходит за все пределы. И я думаю убивать, убивать и убивать. Больше разговоров никаких не должно быть. Как профессор я так считаю.

--

AI Translation:

"These fallen heroes in the house of trade unions, they have already made their decision. They fell for the freedom of the South-East of Ukraine from the neo-Nazi Kiev scum. I think that Ukrainian today to be, frankly, after that, I myself am Ukrainian, you know? I have… I have ancestors from Poltava. I'm ashamed. I'm just ashamed of that, but still a significant part of my blood. I want this blood to be purified of the blood of the scum, the Kiev junta, and I really cannot carry this Ukrainian blood in me until I see the executed bastards who committed lawlessness on May 2nd. This is serious.

It's the voice of blood. In fact, I wouldn't joke with such things. And I believe that these bastards have no right to some western Ukrainian statehood with the center of Kiev. I understand that the South-East will never be in this bastard state. But these people have no right to control even western Ukraine. And for them, as long as they are on the ground, as long as all the evil that we see is happening, no one will sleep peacefully. Therefore, in fact, only normal people should rule these beautiful, in fact, once beautiful Ukrainian people, this is a wonderful country with which everything connects us. It's just that as long as Kiev, while there are nits in Kiev, in fact, a Russian person, a person who comes from Kievan Rus, these are our roots, cannot exist peacefully. Either it really needs to be wiped off the face of the earth and rebuilt, or in fact people have to come to their senses. I think that in Ukraine, a total popular uprising is needed in all its territories, in all its regions.

An armed uprising against the junta. Not just in the Southeast. Otherwise, because the same thing can happen in Uzhgorod, and the Rusyns have already been occupied by the same young people, occupied the Ruthenian house where they gathered to solve their completely calm problems. The same thing is already hanging over the Hungarians, in Subcarpathian Rus, over the Russians, over everyone, in fact. So it is with ukrainians. Remember who Sanya Bily, the late, mocked? Over Ukrainians like him, in fact, these are not some foreigners at all. And what did he start doing? He was stopped. But now even more terrible people have come – we did not see the atrocities of Sani Bilogo, he just dragged some kind of tie, it was a very ugly scene. But what we're seeing on May 2nd is beyond the pale. And I think to kill, kill and kill. There should be no more talk. As a professor, I think so.

0
Dugin's daughter was killed in a car bomb or something (developing story) (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net
5 comments fedilink
 

https://twitter.com/AmichaiStein1/status/1561101820520448001

he was at the scene and saw it happen (see link below)

https://i.ibb.co/phz1BsZ/image.png

I'm no fan of Dugin or National Bolshevik Party or whatever the heck his ideology is these days, but I do think the extent to which he's called "Putin's Brain" is really exaggerated. I wonder if the car bomb was meant for him.

Wtf I love Putin now in c/memes@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I think on a long enough timeline it could be said Gorbachev killed more people than WW2. Because what he really did was he dismantled the nation best equipped to handle climate change, and to help others handle climate change. :doomjak:

Wtf I love Putin now in c/memes@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 0 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (3 children)

Gorbachev said in an interview in Turkey in 2000 "My ambition was to liquidate Communism." and establish a "Union of Independent Sovereign Republics" and to basically help America fight China. So he wanted a return of bourgeois nationalism, and a fully capitalist mode of production, but without dissolving the USSR, and with the addition of social democracy, which would rely on imperialism. It was a very naive in my opinion.

Lenin's brought back to life and instantly caught up on everything he's missed, what's the first thing he says? in c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago

um.. lenin, that's a little too low to be xi's arm :hyperflush:

James Cameron on why T-1000 was a cop in c/movies@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago

july 2020

I would have been more impressed if he said this when the movie came out

Pain in c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

:last-sight: :shapiro-gavel: :last-sight:

So true in c/anime@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago

tucker voice

:confusion: Women used to be asukacore femcels, now they're not, because shinjipilled incel smith fans are oppressed. What is happening?

0
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (leftypol.org)
 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA:agony

0
CW: Nazi shit - this is fucking pathetic; is that really all it takes for these losers to go berserk? 2 fucking years on 4klan? (hexbear.net)
 
It's crazy that we don't have staple foods just delivered to everyone in c/urbanism@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

not only do we not guarantee staple foods for all, but supermarkets throw out millions of tons of (barely expired) foods every year and deliberately lock the dumpsters so the homeless can't loot them. There are several foods, like plain yogurt, which have artificially low expiration dates and get thrown out long before they truly expire.

I'll never forget when I worked for a supermarket when I was 20 and was made to throw out an entire garbage bag full of cookies that had been only slightly overcooked by the bakery. They tasted great and were NOT burned. I ate as many as I could on the way to the garbage disposal. Had I not been under the direct eye of management I would have found a way to sneak it to the homeless outside.

Donald Duck Comics 1997 in c/memes@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago

the bin was laden with some kind of mysterious energy :kelly:

Why American Culture is So Disturbing ❧ Current Affairs in c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
[–] Thomas_Dankara@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I liked the meditations on empathy, etc. I have no objections to the vast majority of the article... until it talks about current events, stripped of context. The article was perfectly good until it started talking about the present war in ukraine in a totally amaterial and unexamined way.

Quote:

The brutal British empire, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current Russian invasion of Ukraine—in each case, the perpetrators think of themselves as acting rightly against an evil enemy.

This is how the soldiers might be taught to think of themselves, but this is not how the leadership thinks of themselves. The leadership does not trouble themselves with morality, only strategy. Putin does not believe he is acting "rightly" against an "evil" enemy. He believes he is defending the Russian border from NATO expansion. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.

we are just as reluctant to apply serious self-scrutiny as Vladimir Putin is to question his bizarre fantasies about the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.

denazification of Ukraine might be a cynical rhetorical justification for Putin's broader strategic goal of preventing NATO expansion.... But the need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the people DPR/LPR when the USA has been in bed with Ukrainian nazis since WW2, and has been overtly using them as pawns in their geopolitical games since 2014. The need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the LGBTQ+, the Roma, the Jews, and the Proletarians of Ukraine, who are victims of far right violence just as much as the breakaway republics. Even Zelensky preferred peace to the present situation, but has had US-backed fascist guns to his head this whole time, preventing him from pursuing this the way he may have wanted to.

1
how could this have happened (hexbear.net)
 

https://reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/t97uz9/the_situation_at_large/

obligatory good post deconstructing the otherwise-funny meme:

This kinda shit obfuscates the direct nazi parentage of NATO and the Gladio militants in Ukraine, as well as the Banderite parentage of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement at large.

It's kinda the same with the laser focus on Azov when Banderism is much more pervasive and influential than this one battalion.

Ukraine doesn't just have a handful of fascists mercenaries they work with, the entire conception of Ukrainian nationalism as it exists is wrought with fascism and descended from the movements of literal collaborators in the holocaust. It's also part of a long history of NATO supporting and fostering nazi movements to do its bidding, or being staffed by literal Nazi generals.

view more: next ›