Of course, they’re running out of human sacrifices to lay at the altar of neoliberalism, and Ukraine has to stay in the fight until US election day next November for Biden to have a chance.

Didn’t Ireland already start deporting draft dodging Ukrainians in the early fall?

Then the question can be “are journalists allowed to report on accusations of war crimes”?

The answer is the same: it depends who is being accused. Are they the US empire or vassal state? Expect to be publicly vilified at best. Are they a non-aligned state? Expect cheers and a bunch of primetime cable news interviews.

It’s not “Hamas” reporting these death tolls, it’s the Palestinian health authority, which has a proven track record at very accurate health records. The UN trusts them as a source and western academics have no issues accepting their numbers.

If anything casualties are under reported.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-have-died-gaza-war-how-will-counting-continue-2023-12-06/

It’s an interesting hypocrisy, or dialectic if you will.

As you say, conspiratorial thinking is the basis for myths about the empire’s enemies, but at the same time “conspiracy theories” have been vilified at every opportunity by the very same myth making machine since the Kennedy assassination.

As a personal aside, my partner is concerned that I will fall into a “conspiracy theory” or “cult” bubble due to my ML leanings, and may lose touch with reality.

To put it another way, capitalists do indeed dig their own grave, but we workers need to push them in and bury the casket.

This happened in Canada recently too and I can’t help but think it’s an op in the vein of Russiagate.

Most people have absolutely no basis on which to understand how far right tendencies are inevitable under capitalism. So it’s really easy to sell them stories about foreign interference to both comfort them that far right tendencies aren’t an organic growth from the current conditions and it helps drum up more China/Russia/villain-of-the-week hate to be leveraged later on.

Allies the way that the mob protection racket is allied with local business owners.

There are lots of ways to more accurately describe, whether with statistics or with prose, the state of the world. But that would go against the interests of the ruling capitalist class in portraying capitalism as, at the very least, the least worst option.

I would say it has to do with the Marxist understanding of cultural hegemony. The ruling class determines, based on their class interests, the cultural norms, such as the way we typically frame facts and figures. It doesn’t hurt that media and academia is controlled by the ruling class and used to reproduce the ideology.

National liberation is never a mistake.

I wonder why USian athletes are still allowed to compete under their nation’s flag, seeing as their government will invade or meddle with whoever it damn well likes.

Because the previous 65248 sanctions against Russia and Russians were so effective. /s

Most people’s very liberal understanding of power leads them to think these capital cities and population centers are particularly important.

To put it maybe a bit too simply, MZT is Marxism-Leninism adopted to mid-century Chinese conditions, whereas Maoism is a branch of ultra adventurism. From my understanding of the history, it kicked off around the time Deng became Premier and started to implement the policies that comprised Reform and Opening Up, as an ultra-left reaction against these policies.

Maoists think that Deng took the Capitalist Road. Students of MZT can see the thread connecting classical Marxism, Leninism, MZT, and modern SWCC and recognize that they all play their part in building communism in China.

Shhh, the EU actually wants mass surveillance.

They’re being pragmatic, they actually want to get paid, and they don’t want the US to have to pay for all of these weapons and other material. Not everyone you disagree with is a Russian asset, no matter how hard that narrative is pushed.

All of the “aid” the US has sent to Ukraine has been on credit, a 21st Century lend-lease. The original 20th century lend-lease was a roaring success in terms of subjugating the British empire, and it’s also worth noting that a lot of US representatives of that era were very hesitant to approve the “care packages” in the first place as well. The debt Britain owes the US from WWII has actually never been repaid, but the US got global hegemony out of the deal so they agreed to look the other way.

Ukraine however has no ability to pay off the debt they have already racked up, let alone more. Not just because they’ve lost militarily but also because anything remotely productive in the country (primary farmland and factories) has been parceled off to the highest (US based) bidder, destroyed via the war, or can’t be productive in the foreseeable due to the loss of working people to emigration and war.

You mean to say it doesn’t?

The prededent for this was already set in the 70s and we can only assume it’s standard practice now, especially in the age of 5 Eyes and Counting.

Not surprising, the EU is at its core an imperialist project.

The negative effects of EU regulations on the global south as well as its own internal periphery aren’t discussed enough.

The local division probably had a deportation quota they didn’t have a chance to hit, so they created a situation where they could reach the quota.

IIRC normal cops do the same as a matter of course.

In a way Georgia was Ukraine 0.5 Beta.

After Putin finally realized the western world would stand against him as long as he wouldn’t stoop to being a comprador, he called them out on it. Right after that the Georgian government, under orders from the US, sent troops into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, forcing Russia to take defensive action to save civilian lives.