Last October, Afghanistan's acting commerce minister told Reuters the Taliban wanted to formally join Xi's flagship "Belt and Road" infrastructure initiative.

This could be a game changer, as the progress of the BRI in the region (especially China-Pakisthan economic corridor) has been slowed down due to militant activity in the region.

Maybe I am just not American enough but McDonald's doesn't taste good even when warm.

The deep state is actually just the state. There are close to 23 million us government employees, and who knows how many more private consultants and government contractors working for the government. Anyone who has ever managed a group of people knows that making people what you want to do is a herculean task, even if you are just managing 5 people.

Class societies obsessed with great man theory attribute super natural creative abilities to leaders and "geniuses".

Her tactics did work for her. Her base has become immensely cult like and she did have a lot of voters. The actual problem was inflation + Palestine.

You cannot get by with an incoherent narrative on those issues because when people feel things with their wallet or have dead family members, they will pay a lot closer attention.

Funny part is that the term "middle class" originated from feudal times to describe people who were neither aristocrats/landed gentry (aka upper class) nor peasantry/proles (aka lower class). So basically, the bourgeoise and highly educated bureaucracy.

Jan 6th did not succeed ... because Mike pence and the secretaries of states of PA and GA stopped it

And how the fuck is this an argument for linking up with Liz cheney exactly? Did Liz Cheney stop Jan 6th?

Settlers applies to POC as much as it does white people.

Eyo? It really does not.

I've heard self-described neo-liberals praise neocons by saying "neocons fight wars to make the world safe for neoliberalism". The difference between the 2 does not exist and even the neolibs/neocons don't think it meaningfully exists. As best, they could be said to have different immediate priorities.

The labour theory of value would predict that higher wages don't increase prices, but reduce the rate of surplus value.

The labour theory of value says that prices are most strongly correlated with the labor time needed to produce the commodity regardless of the wage rate.

The theory that prices would increase based on wages is called the prices of production theory, in which price = (1+rate of profit)*(material cost + labor cost). It conflicts with the LTV and this conflict was actually something that troubled marx quite a bit.

Yes, because historical materialism is now racism.

It is also racist to consider that the history of power structures in a country/region will impact future power structures.

That isn't what you said. You said, and I quote

My whole point on the Xinjiang topic was that you all chose to ignore chinese history that goes pretty much as far as we have written history of it, explaining the whole way of dealing with minorities by forced assimilation, coming from the clanic and dynastic organization of Chinese provinces for millenias.

Which is pure bullshit and completely flies in the face of historical materialism. Not only have you failed to explain how "clanic and dynastic organisation of chinese provinces" is relevant to the forced assimilation of minorities, but you have also failed to explain how this "impacts future power structures". Are you saying that the PRC is organised on clan and dynastic lines?

And furthermore, the idea that thousands of years of forced assimilation of minorities would be continued despite the transition of the mode of production from slavery all the way to primitive socialism is completely absurd and flies in the face of historical materialism. You have not posited a historically contingent/transient process, you have posited a static unchanging constant of Chinese culture, which is apparently to genocide minorities.

You chose to ignore the whole area of study about sinicization, which is pretty much that subject, and you also chose to ignore how similar the situation is between the PRC and provinces that want to be independant, to what Israel is doing with Palestine, which stems from the same imperialistic logic. You chose to ignore that the acceleration in the settlement and ethnic erasure of the Xinjiang province is strangely close to the acceleration of the BRI project.

You have not even considered that the so called "sinicization" occuring today in China amongst minorities is simply the natural result of economic integration. Any nation is constituted of community of people united by language, territory and economic life. When underdeveloped minority regions are integrated into the broader national economy, they gradually loose their minority character. How do you think France came to be? Did the French nation simply exist from the beginning of time? Or did it form after various minority groups were brought under the same government under one market?

Furthermore, that you would compare palestine to xinjang betrays your lack of understand of either region's history and utterly privileged position as an imperialist, who cannot tell the difference between live streamed mass murder and economic development where God forbid, a people's culture is changing in ways you don't like.

even if they claim to “disagree” with the methods.

Nah, they don't even pretend. Just watch them talk about "terrorists". Liberals unsurprisingly have a full on statist view of violence. Their violence to protect property is legitimate and all other violence is illegitimate.

Don't tell him about WW2

The US government is putting the boot on your necks too. The empire isn't run for your benefit, it is run at your expense.

Virtually any geo-engineering solution will have horrific side effects. It's a matter of how systems work. You can easily control a linear system with a feedback loop. We know all of the math and the equations are easy (if sometimes tedious) to solve by hand or by computer. For some non-linear systems, you can approximate them as linear and control them that way. For other non-linear systems like the climate, which are chaotically non-linear, only god can help you.

Hell, even if the climate did respond linearly (enough), controlling it would still be very difficult. For an N-order linear system (that is, there are N number of states, or energy storing "devices" in the system), you need to continuously provide N inputs in a precisely calculated way to control it. You also need at least N sensors to be able to keep track of the N states, whether directly or indirectly. On top of that, we would still need massive amounts of energy and materials to actually provide the control inputs.

If you did all that, then geo-engineers could control the climate in a predictable way. But the thing is, in political consciousness, very few people actually know what it would take to control the climate. Most people think of geo-engineering as a cheap and quick way of solving climate change. It is not.

To use an analogy, imagine you are driving your car off a cliff. You could press the brakes (reduce emissions), or you could build a paraglider, attach it to your car and then fly off the cliff (geo-engineering).

Probably depends heavily on where you live and field.

A lot of engineers are actually sympathetic towards implementing a planned economy to reduce emissions. They just don't make it to the news or are promoted by social media algorithms.

The Chinese never found a way to make profit in spite of radically lower prices

Source? Your dreams?

Real late reply, but Kamala is a direct fascist.

States are not rational actors. They are composed of a massive sum of parts, whatever seeming intelligence (in the biological sense of a creature reacting to its environment) that emerges is not necessarily the result of "rationality" (which is itself a fraught concept).

I don't think it is wise to assume that the Israeli high command is incompetent. Certainly, if any of us were placed in their situation, we wouldn't know how to do their jobs at all. Their actions may also be rational from their personal perspective. Deescalation of the war may even cost them their jobs. I don't know.

But the actions of the Israeli high command are certainly not "rational" from the perspective of the state. They are effectively playing chicken with their whole country. Their military is constantly eating losses and getting spread thin from all of these fronts. America refuses to directly intervene. And the Israeli economy is in taters.

Sooner or later the us regime is going to collapse. It's fundamental tally unsustainable and just a good few crises away from imploding. And the best part is, you're looking right at the face of pretty much every kind of crisis imaginable. We've got climate crises, disastrous weather events, fascist coups, exploding inequality, de-dollarisation, the defeat of american imperialism in west and east Asia, mass immigration and so on.

So the violent overthrow of the American government is actually more realistic than trying to improve the Democrat party from the inside. Certainly the former will happen way before the latter.

Trump openly

This is the real problem that libs have with trump. He represents and fulfills all of their ideals, but without the pompadour.