is it possible to have a not quite meme electoral system that selects for the guy with the least amount of downvotes?

china doesn’t have any direct trump cards other than maybe physically retaking reddit island, but a provocation large enough to incite direct confrontation (and thus one that is also large enough to directly threaten hegemonic legitimacy) is probably enough to do in the empire. the geopolitical edging we are currently experiencing is a side effect of no one wanting to be the bad guy and flip the table, but it’s not like things are getting any less tense.

Braudel suggests that the withdrawal of the Dutch from commerce around 1740 to become ‘the bankers of Europe’ was typical of a recurrent world systemic tendency. The same process was in evidence in Italy in the fifteenth century, and again around 1560, when the leading groups of the Genoese business diaspora gradually relinquished commerce to exercise for about seventy years… After the Dutch, the British replicated the tendency during and after the Great Depression of 1873-96, when ‘the fantastic venture of the industrial revolution’ created an overabundance of money capital. After the equally ‘fantastic venture’ of Fordism-Keynesianism, we may add, US capital since the 1970s has followed a similar trajectory.

reading between the lines (80 years war, anglo-dutch wars, ww1&2), it’s pretty clear we’re being herded by historical forces towards some conflict of eschatological proportion in the near future. it’s not even in real doubt whether or not the us will lose the conflict, the real question seems to be one of how many of us will be left alive after the us system has been turned to ashes.

on a lighter note, i actually think the current plan of ‘making israel die very very slowly’ is actually pretty good. if there is a direct intervention, the us is toast. if they don’t intervene, you get all kinds of domestic unrest in the ruling class to add to the working class dissatisfaction. basically a lose-lose proposition that is faster than supply chain restructuring and is only solved if the euros decide to fall on their swords and actually do something about russia, and even then is only a temp fix.

im at the point where i feel like we should be looking for characteristic equations of ‘human nature’ or capital itself (assumption being that it is higher order and highly coupled to extant systems). developing appropriate constraints for a given historical or future context seems to be the biggest issue though, will take an immense amount of work to go through and quantify initial and boundary conditions for a particular scenario and then youd probably have to solve some fucking weird diamat super/substructural closure problem to account for historical turbulence as well…

til american procurement really is ass and a single iranian salvo will take out an entire years worth of sm6s lol

edit: this might actually be the wrong link but the point is that theyve been making just 125 of their workhorse antiair missiles per year since 2023…

my guy on douyin has been predicting dprk’s entry into the european theater for over a year now and he is doubling down on the end of the russo-ukrainian proxy war and escalation of russia-nato actual war with belarus as focal point

though he has hedged that trump will try (and fail) to make middle east the primary conflict zone if he gets elected

bruh they got kathleen tyson on the show just to mercilessly body her over and over radhika plz stahp we want repeat guests not heads on pikes

if its existence were at stake, what would stop israel from nuking the us after washington tugs the leash one too many times lol?

if iran russia mutual defense treaty gets through, will be interesting to see s400 peformance

don’t understand why seoul has been so vocal about this whole thing, it had everything to lose and nothing to gain from announcing this.

its october 22nd in asia, kazan summit nothing ever happens gang where we at

lmao i’d be coping this hard too if i also owned t1 property, worked at some private sector ngo mouthpiece and got a nice haircut from the a shares last week

chinese military weebs have noted that the middle east is currently on the anime arc where old mentor characters get killed off and from this the shonen protag is powered up enough to kill off the big bad and avenge the mentors

in reality its just a narrative mediated memetic virus but im convinced tbh lol

apparently just a stray mortar round

crazy he was on the front line at all, what a guy

best place for us to escalate is europe. logistics are easiest, most number of stooges to send to get killed, most politically captured, decent amount of capital to redirect.

second by a wide margin is israel, logistics are bad, iran’s too far away and has already been sanctioned to death, israel is tiny and the opponents that are actually targetable are a bunch of non state actors engaging in protracted people’s war with islamic characteristics.

third is asia. bunch of opportunistic islands all well within range of chinese strategic deterrence. us lost the korean war when it was at its most dominant, unlikely that it and its proxies will win round two.

this is a message intended to deter the dprk from intervening as much as it might in eastern europe when the nato/russia conflict eventually kicks off and the russia/dprk mutual defense treaty is invoked.

dialectics

this is just strategic posturing to prevent dprk forces from intervening in europe, those 1.4 million dudes are all gonna end up in belarus

considering they just set up nato northern land command in finland last month, it seems manifestation of the finno korean hyperwar continues apace

historically, the chinese are always either invading the korean peninsula, or they’re defending it. as of now, north korea is the only country with which china has a mutual defense treaty (of note here is that north korea recently signed a mutual defense treaty with russia back in june). political arrangements aside, it has been and will remain a major geostrategic imperative so long as china retains control of the northeastern provinces, one whose importance is comparable to or likely even exceeds that of taiwan.

i think it’s becoming more and more clear that russia and china have mostly achieved strategic overmatch in northeast asia. obviously, this is in large part due to the complete lack of depth of all the us lackeys in the area, but there are logistical elements to consider, as well as iran’s spectacular showcasing of the ineffectiveness of western air defences in general. additionally, the constituency and elites of japan and samsung are ideologically less captured than america’s european satrapies, if only due to language differences. japan in particular, being the largest and perhaps most loyal running dog, has been very cautiously testing the waters via more extroverted trade policies in asean since the two plaza accords and has engaged in… well, strange and uncharacteristic behavior that could be interpreted as reconciliatory in recent months. as such, it seems unlikely that imperial provocations in the region will be met with as much success as they have in ukraine.

on the contrary, northeast asia at this point is more of a liability than anything. if we generously assume that the imperialists do well in all their efforts elsewhere, then the korean peninsula can serve as an anti-imperialist release valve to divert pressure away from the other fronts. this is amplified by the fact that the imperialists are running a war of optics and narrative, and the bad optics of allowing allies to be categorically abandoned is worse than actually losing men and materiel. conversely, if the imperialists are on the backfoot, then it follows that activation of this theater will only serve to stretch them even further. it goes without saying that the american best case scenario is for both japan and samsung to obediently destroy themselves against the asiatic hordes of the east, but the possibility of this happening really hinges on american successes (that is, successful displays of continuing american dominance and thus legitimacy) in the european and mena theaters.

overall, it feels like america is in a bit of a bind at the moment. the only way it can win is if it can indirectly get its vassals to destroy themselves, but the only way it can for sure get its vassals to destroy themselves completely is through a successful direct intervention.

tldr; no, because the world’s most based millenial will just initiate bakhmut 2: ballistic boogaloo and turn seoul into the moon 10 hours after hostilities commence. also they won’t be able to get him because word on the street is that they had him send his guys to teach the irgc how to build tunnels.

depends on how yappy ishiba ends up being ig

doubt much will come of it, the us is overleveraged in other theatres and will likely be unable to force japan to do things too far outside japanese self interest