There’s been a lot of talk about the production capacity gap between Russia and NATO as it relates to artillery rounds specifically. Russia has retooled its economy and invested heavily in wartime production and is currently seeing it pay dividends both on the battlefield but also in the overall health of their economy. Meanwhile the NATO nations have refused to make the investment in restarting mass production of rounds, a capability liquidated and sold off under the guiding principles of neoliberalism, and instead has solely relied on draining existing stockpiles bits at a time. The result has been catastrophic for the Ukrainians tasked with dying on NATO’s behalf ever since the initial blitz push from the RusFed was repelled and the war has settled into a WWI style trench and artillery game of attrition.

I think though that we shouldn’t confuse an unwillingness with an inability. There’s no reason to believe that the US or Germany are incapable of making the investment to restart the mass production of artillery shells (or any mass produced weapon of war rather than the big ticket, hyper specialized war toys they prefer now). There’s an entire point to be made that in this moment of profitability crisis the only industries that are succeeding are the ones hand chosen by the state to be made so with direct subsidies and funding (re: Brenner & Riley’s Seven Theses in which they attempt to coin “political capitalism” as the new economic model post-neoliberalism). The general consensus seems to be that there’s so far been an unwillingness to commit to the production process because it’s been thought that the Russo-Ukrainian war will end before the investment will be worthwhile and then the general style of combat will return to anti-insurgency missions relying on drones and laser guided munitions rather than mass produced dumb bombs and shells. My fear is that if this calculation changes and there is heavy investment in restarting the NATO war machine it puts us on the path towards another world war. The European nations may see the success of the Russian economy under wartime policies and see the return of a military Keynesianism as an appealing out to their financial woes but, as we know from the start of the previous century, you can only build up your stock of weapons for so long before the imperative to use them arises. I’m worried that the long duree trends of the 21st century see the return of both multipolarity as well as great powers conflicts, but this time we have nukes. Guess there’s nothing to really do about it tho but enjoy the view

The police responding to an active school shooter by bombing the school and then the hospital and orphanage next to it too for good measure

Marxist-Leninists performing bourgeois revolutions better than any bourgeois party ever could

But think of the productive forces

Reject national identities, return to soft border cultural cliques

It sounds like it’s moving left, though it also sounds like this has only been possible due to a mass drop in membership following the failure of the Bernie campaigns. Marxist Unity Group seems like their worth checking out as an internal bloc to the DSA and where it could go

BDS is an existential threat because it threatens to popularize the truth that Israel is an apartheid state. Proponents of the occupation will cite the end of apartheid South Africa as a worst case scenario. Hamas is less so for the inverse reason that the violent opposition (as long as it’s manageable violence) provides reason for the occupation to continue

You can’t explain starfield’s narrative weakness without citing operation paperclip. Not correctly, anyway

The good things never are but oddly the bad things always are

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God the democrats suck so fucking much

Honestly this plus “Skyrim-in-space” make me feel pretty confident that this game is going to have staying power just because we know how good the modding community is for bethesda games. Skyrim was panned up front as genre generic fantasy with a pinch of viking magic but has been played continuously for a decade plus because it made for such a good blank slate to add onto. Also I guarantee every current UI issue already has modders working on it. Starfield script extender just dropped and the game hasn’t even officially been released

Suck off me

To corroborate your point you can just look at life expectancy in rural communities to see that it rose steadily throughout the Maoist period and then froze during the Dengist reforms

Fair point

Deng literally introduced market reforms to do so. This is not the own you think it is

The gigantic ppb is hilarious. Wait how does scale?

Moms for Liberty has heavily promoted trainings for conservative activists on how to take over school boards, which ought to make clear how we should understand stories like this one, which just sound like a racist tantrum in a Texas suburb. These aren’t random or isolated events — they’re part of a large, well-organized and well-financed attack on public education across the country.

I feel like it’s important to keep the eye on the ball here. The right has been incredibly successful at organizing at the local level and has flipped a lot of seats because of it, and not just in the rural south either.

The US funding and arming far right militias as a means of attacking a geopolitical rival has historically always been a good idea and resulted in very few consequences

This is exactly how this conversation would go except he’d be telling the apocalypse children about the wonders of the before times like supercars and hookers, the things he got for all that shareholder value. Kids these days don’t even know what they’re missing out galavanting around with their super mutant buddies