I doubt it. Nothing so far has caused the resistance to lash out. I mean we are seeing escalation but it's entirely driven by the zionist need to escalate.
I really doubt Iran is going to get involved, there isn't going to be WW3, just more little people suffering from the genocidal violence of a white supremacist settler state.
Absolutely awful. He was a good man from all I read. I’m angry and frustrated. It shows the Zionists can and will get to anyone who resists them even someone deep in a bunker of vital importance and top security. It shows the area and the world they are strong and will punish those who challenge them and kill them without any doubt due to their extensive intelligence and infiltration. As they have done with indiscriminate terrorism with the pager attacks.
And still the resistance does nothing.
The Zionists have completely decapitated the command structure of Hezbollah and much of Hamas. They’ve murdered top Iranian commanders and still they sit on their hands.
What are they waiting for? What more could the US do other than inflict itself on civilians harder than the Zionists. They keep saying their response will come but who will plan it? As waiting has allowed the Zionists to kill most of the top leadership everywhere but Yemen. Within 6 months they’ll probably kill another high ranking Iranian because they can. And the genocide of Palestinians will continue. And the bombing of Lebanon into submission will continue.
It is disgraceful if this great man dies without being avenged, if all those who’ve died in the resistance are not avenged. If the Palestinian genocide is not answered.
Rest in power. A true hero of the anti-imperialist resistance.
I am so sick of this shit. Lebanon would be devastated in a war with the zionist entity but they are being anyways. Hezbollah should stop turning the other cheek. It's obvious Benny is not going to stop until he gets a war or destroys his enemies because he's going to prison once the crisis is over so he can only escalate. The US meanwhile is putting on a pathetic show chasing after him pretending to beg and plead for peace while having no intention of making them stop and being there to support them with weapons and money 100% of the way and the zionist entity knows it.
Hasan Nasrallah seems an intelligent, reasonable man from what I know of him. Restrained even. But what credibility does the axis of resistance have if they allow this to continue? It's not like the US is going to force "israel" to stop. It's not like they are going to stop on their own. They could just keep on pushing the goalposts until they actually succeed in decapitating and destroying most of the resistance outside of Iran with these attacks (all while the US sobs for calm and promises they're on the right track to peace after a year of this genocide and aggression) or at least put them on such an awful foot that they can't stand up very long in a war.
I increasingly believe it's a question of whether they sit there and let themselves be destroyed to be seen as noble and peaceful victims who liberals can have a high opinion of and hope that somehow translates to a movement to actually isolate and destroy the zionist colony in the long-term (with hopes something happens in the medium-term that means the zionists eventually get tired of bombing after weakening their enemies badly and decide not to do any annexing today) OR to finally realize this isn't going to be resolved peacefully except through their deaths or total submission to the zionist entity and they stand up and strike back hard. Which yes will probably draw the US in but could also (who knows) actually force the US hand and cause them to force the entity to stop and make peace.
I just don't see a way out that doesn't end with the genocide of Palestinians being completed plus most of the axis of resistance being devastated to the point of needing years to recover their operational abilities and all the while being under threat of infiltration and spying and more bombs put in electronics.
This is awful. I feel awful. I wish Russia would give Yemen some long-range weapons. I wish they'd give Lebanon some strong anti-air systems to take down the isn'treali air force which is the only thing allowing them to be terrorists with impunity. Shoot down the planes and they can't do anything but use ground forces which will lose badly. That's the real balance of power here and the real problem is those planes. Someone needs to give the axis of resistance the ability to down them en mass.
It's not thinly veiled. They're pretty open they want decoupling and they intend to isolate and destroy China and anyone who doesn't follow their edicts (aka the rules based order, the only real rule being obey the US).
And frankly I think they're going to get their cold war. They have the strength to set it off and have made strong moves in that direction, decoupling is not something accomplished in a year or 3 but neither was western entanglement with China in the first place. The question is whether they have the strength to endure it for 30 years without succumbing to collapse or revolution and whether for that matter China has the strength, ideological and otherwise to stand up to them. A lot of IFs. Once the cold war is in the open the race to find a way to reliably suppress China's nuclear response begins because that's the only thing preventing the west from nuking their military and a small portion of the country to subdue China to then allow fragmenting it and exploiting its peoples and resources to fuel the capitalist nightmare machine another half century as if they were only so much wood.
There are of course other important factors, whether Russia folds which seems unlikely but they could always do an about-face or have someone more compromised maneuvered into place in Russian leadership after Putin dies or gets too old. And there is the reality that the US has designs to use India as a nuclear-armed Ukraine type proxy against China and would love to goad the two of them into a nuclear exchange, sparing the US and allowing the US to move in and grab prime land and peoples in two destroyed nations.
I'm positive they're going to side with the west enough to matter in the coming struggle. Oh they'll keep their options open, they'll pretend to be "independent" because it makes the west court them more and lets them play both sides but when it comes down to it and the west gives them a knife to plant in China's back for minimal benefit of their own they'll do it in a heartbeat. They see their rise as tied to destroying China, as a zero-sum calculation, either they take industry from China and become a great power or China retains it and they get nothing.
They labor under the same kind of ignorance that the bourgeoisie of Russia had after the USSR was illegally dissolved, namely that they would be let into the big anglo bourgeoisie club and rise to the heights of it as equals. But that moment where they realize otherwise could be decades away, the west has utility in keeping them a country with a vast gulf between the workers and the wealthy and in keeping them thinking its in their own interest to side with the west enough of the time to cause troubles for China, for Russia, for the emerging anti-imperialist world order.
India is IMO a fair-weather enemy for the anti-imperialist bloc. They're not like the US or Europe where there is little in common and a direct threat to their hegemony from the rise of BRICS+ but when the going gets tough they'll assume a neutral pose or do some things to appeal to the anti-imperialist bloc before tacking back again towards sabotaging it.
It depends on what kind of mask. If you're wearing an N95/KN94 mask then you're protecting yourself (and if it doesn't have a valve also others if you happen to have it) by filtering 95/94% of viral particles.
Though I agree it could attract unwanted attention and hassle in some areas. Even in a place like California I've been followed around stores for a minute or so for still masking by employees who I guess thought I was there to shoplift but I've never been seriously confronted about it. I've had a cowardly guy shout from a dozen feet away how I should take it off and some rambling nonsense but I just stared at him and he stormed off, I've had a handful of guys tell me it's a shame I'm wearing it because they'd like to see my "pretty face" (ugh), but most people don't say anything. I'm sure many anti-maskers resent me but given most of the public has joined them in giving up I think they're content to just feel smugly superior and say shit behind my back which I can live with.
Short of the US getting pulled into an extended war elsewhere it cannot extricate itself from until China is too much of a peer power to even risk a fight it is going to fight China as part of the larger push of decoupling, containment, humiliation. Almost certainly over Taiwan, they don't need to win per se, just inflict damage, bleed China and rally the western world and any hangers-on (India probably) to their side for sanctions and cutting economic and cultural ties as they do to China and Chinese people and culture what they did to Russia with the Ukraine war but much worse.
China just needs to be prepared and accept this. They need to prepare for war, they need to prepare for the possibility of cold war, of being completely cut off from the west and make plans for how they'll restructure their economy to survive that if it comes. They need to build out their nuclear deterrent as much as possible to deter the US from a decapitating strike attempt and they need to prepare for a much more hostile and western empowered India on their border.
Somewhat. Russia doesn't produce a lot of the things the US produces. For wheat and certain other things sure, but for soybeans, for fresh green vegetables, for nuts, for fruit? A lot of that stuff Russia doesn't have the right climate for whereas the US has a uniquely diverse climate that allows them to from California to the plains and mid-west to the south to the northeast grow a variety of cultivars spanning everything from cheap corn and wheat to most every type of green vegetables, roots, nuts, fruits, etc. California alone has enough fertile soil and farmland to feed hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, maybe a billion if supplemented with grain staples from elsewhere.
As I said China won't starve thanks to their own work in this area and their friends in Russia but well the Soviet people didn't starve but they also didn't have supermarkets with fresh tropical fruit or often an abundance of typical fruits and certain types of vegetables were not in the fullest supply due to the constraints of what they could grow. Agriculture has advanced somewhat but there are still limits and being cut off from the US and its incredible amount of produce will certainly drive up prices for Chinese people. This is why I think the CPC had that push to reduce food waste. If this comes to pass the Chinese people will need to be a bit more frugal with food.
For China to truly replace the US they need to free from the grips of US hegemony and maintain good trade relations with parts of the global south in Asia and Latin America which is still a work in progress. As I said as long as US controls global finance they can cut off trade or make it very expensive and for perishable goods like food that's a real problem because you can't afford another stop in your supply chain in another intermediate country and routing through shell companies for all of this stuff and even for stuff you can it introduces another point of spoilage and rot.
This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: !covid@hexbear.net
I still wear a mask. I wouldn't necessarily wear one or keep one on if I was walking around a lightly populated park or down the sidewalk but I would before going into a store or a crowd (even outdoors) or any enclosed space with people like a train or station.
I'm not sure how mask wearing compares by country. In most of Asia it seems like it's been normalized for decades for people who are feeling ill or have certain conditions to wear the blue cloth medical masks so I doubt in most of Asia it's a big deal in most situations compared to the west where you have anti-mask reactionary sentiment and ideology that favors individual recklessness rather than responsibility.
Consider that Russia still trades with the west and even sells them vital materials like titanium and winter gas and we’re 2 years in now to the conflict.
I think it depends entirely on whether the US cuts China off first. China needs US food to enjoy a higher quality of living and the US exports a lot to them. If that continues China has reason not to because they want the food supply to continue. They won’t face famine or mass starvation or anything but quality of life would badly dip in that area without US food exports and if the US does that Europe may follow.
If China is cut off anyways from US and European food exports then they have less reason not to act. Sadly even if they act it likely won’t really destroy the west. It’ll hurt the consumer market and drive prices through the roof for electronics among other things and cause some shortages but it’s likely the US will establish alternative supply lines through Indian middlemen (India it turns out is selling ammo to Italy which is handed directly to Ukraine and they know about this and are fine with it) just as Russia has done.
China also doesn’t have alternative markets for goods. Their economy will be in huge trouble if they lose the US and Europe (and if they lose the US they lose their vassal the EU). Africa becoming large enough to buoy them is still a decade away or more.
So China has no way of shutting out the US while remaining open to the rest of the world. The US by contrast has decades of experience doing sanctions and tracking supply chains and as long as they control SWIFT and have dollar hegemony they can force others to comply to enough of a degree that China is probably hurt a bit worse in a vacuum.
Imperialist and colonizer nations are truly sick.
You see when US imperialists scream about China being a threat in our supply chains it's because THEY have put hardware implants targeting others in supply chains they control and as they are good and China is evil China must be willing to do the same to them even more-so. Same with this kind of shit. They look at this and don't think "my goodness are we the baddies?", they instead have a freakout of "what if our enemies do this to us? omg, China is gonna use their products to do terrorism" despite zero evidence the Chinese or Russians, etc would ever sink to their level or have ever done so.
Again and again throughout history westerners do the most reprehensible, terroristic, war-criminal shit to others and despite their enemies having no history of doing that assume they're just waiting to do the same to them the second they get the chance. Projection.
I've heard the axis of resistance is getting fed up with waiting but I'm not sure they'll act even on this.
Oh sure they'll lob some missiles but they're stuck in a situation where there is an unhinged and unstable apartheid colony whose leader faces possible prison, certainly loss of power the moment this "crisis" is over so must keep escalating to keep it going along-with the widespread condemnation of them for carrying out a genocide meaning they want to play the victim, they want a war against them to break out so they can cry for pity and the censorship dial in the west can be turned up even further with ever more hysterical cries of anti-semitism for any criticism of "israel" while "they're fighting for their lives and existence against jew haters who attack them for no reason". So it wants to draw the US into a war, wants a regional war, wants a chance to crush and put down at least one element arrayed against it permanently.
Many feel however if they don't get this war they look increasingly unhinged and become increasingly isolated and the bad PR just keeps on building beyond the ability of the west to tamp down. However there's a real question what the end-game of that waiting play is. The west isn't going to get ashamed soon enough to save the Palestinian people or Gaza, they're really all in on defending the zionist regime and screaming down any criticism as anti-semitism while downplaying it even existing outside of a small group of "extremists" via their media. The US clearly isn't willing to reign in the zionist regime. Trump or Harris neither is going to change things. And the fact is the zionist regime can keep escalating, they can bomb daycares and children's hospitals and just keep upping the ante all the way to using a nuclear weapon if they really want to in order to attempt to provoke a response.
So if they do nothing they invite more attacks and attempts to goad them to draw the US in. If they respond they risk more escalation and war with the US involved. "israel" is doing salami-slicing tactics, they do something that demands a response, perhaps several things and claim they were for self-defense then sit back and wait, let things cool just a little then go back in for more, never letting the heat really drop.
The negotiations are a smokescreen for the zionist regime to carry out their genocide under yet it also gives cover for these actors to do nothing, to not escalate to war, to claim they need to wait and do it this way.
I will say one thing going for the "wait" camp is that unrest in the settler-colony is rising. Mass protests are occurring right now and if that can continue and be magnified it may be possible to collapse it or bring it to its knees and force it to stop the genocide and all other hostilities but that's a big if.
I suppose those who would stand to suffer most from seeing this would be most reluctant to act but to me it's been obvious based off the fact the leader of the zionist regime is very likely headed for prison and disgrace the moment the crisis ends that there are no off-ramps and never were. Add on that the nature of the colony is to do just this and its simply speeding up its long-term goals to exploit a crisis that they probably let happen (Oct 7) on purpose for their own ends and well the picture is pretty clear. We're basically a year in and by the time they started antagonizing Iran it became obvious they were fishing for a larger fight to draw the US in.
So not fighting them is pointless in my opinion. Conserving strength only works if you can actually conserve it. If they start decapitating your leadership structure using unprecedented mass supply-chain interdiction terror attacks it's time to get things into gear because they've declared war on you. You can't conserve your strength against an enemy like this, you can only lie down before them while they murder all your leadership and anyone else they can and are great at identifying sadly as they are a very good hacking regime.
There are basically two choices here in light of the reality and one is to stop any antagonism of the zionist entity, stop firing rockets, stop trying to drive their settlers out, stop trying to tie up their forces in the north to help Hamas in the south and basically take off your militant clothes, bury your weapons and plan to revisit the matter in 4-5 years as otherwise you're just lying down to be slaughtered which makes them stronger while you grow weaker. The other is to acknowledge the reality, acknowledge you're in a life or death struggle, that by attacking them as they engage in a genocide and by virtue of them striking back and decapitating your leadership in a mass terrorist attack and to fully commit. To hunker down, to distribute command structures, to not wait for them but go on the offensive against them and their backers.
Those are the only two logical choices. I can see why Hassan Nasrallah didn't move quickly, he struck me as a thoughtful man. I really can. He had such responsibility but the pager attack should have shown that they were not going to stop or back down or negotiate, that they had good intelligence, that they'd penetrated everything, that they probably knew everything including locations of command bunkers and that it was a now or never. At that point they'd tried to kill him and he and those around him couldn't do enough to keep him alive from their second attack even knowing it was imminent. This is the tactical reality they exist in. But Nasrallah was a good man, a man who didn't want to bring more bloodshed. And for it he was killed in a bunker that wasn't enough to protect him, along with allegedly we are now learning an Iranian official.
I am deeply suspicious that the Iranian official led the zionists to where Nasrallah was, unwittingly of course. But it does raise an interesting if disturbing thought and that is what if there are those highly placed in the Iranian government who want to conspire with the zionist entity to remove their conservative and hard-liners. To sue for a secret peace with the entity as well as their backers by making sure all those who would get in the way of them lying down before the west would be out of the picture beforehand. There is no evidence for this as of yet and we shouldn't really seriously consider it, but the fact is the zionists do have an incredible penetration of Iran on an intelligence level as well as that of the rest of the resistance and it's a damn big problem.
People talk of the zionist entity's fall being imminent, to the contrary I think they've not been stronger in some time. They're butchering their enemies while those enemies stay their hand because the US is near at hand glaring all the while also lying and claiming peace will come soon to keep their hands stayed. Yes it might be the beginning of a shift of public opinion in the west against them but they could care less. And it is a problem for the latter end of this decade or next. The zionist public opinion apparatus is so strong and entrenched I wouldn't be shocked that once the genocide is over their approval numbers go up and there's never a growing movement in the west to boycott, divest, and sanction them. The far right will recruit from those disillusioned by this, spread actual anti-semitism which the zionists will be gleeful to see. It's all going better to plan than it has in a long while for them. Public sentiment against them doesn't matter, it just pulls their people together more cohesively and they see it as a tool to recruit more Jews from abroad to them.