The Chinese embassy in Kabul signalled on Sunday that it had been contact with the Taliban and would be staying put. Russia said it saw no need to evacuate its embassy for the time being. Turkey said its embassy would continue operations. -South China Morning Post, 16 / 8 / 2021: Afghanistan: US lowers flag at Kabul embassy as Taliban seize power
"You can't buy an Arab, but you can rent one." -Israeli proverb.
I think the Taliban are going to sell out.
The entire country of Afghanistan is one massive Lithium mine. Lithium is the wonder metal in Lithium batteries - Lithium is the reason electric cars do 200 miles rather than 50 (if that), and the reason phones are slim, lightweight devices rather than the "bricks" people of a certain age remember having in the late 90s. They're also the reason laptop computers are portable rather than transportable, and the reason the kids all have little speakers that fit in a coat pocket instead of massive ghetto blasters you carry on your shoulder.
Enough Gen-Xing now. Lithium is a vital part of the modern world, and the growth in demand for electric vehicles means that lithium will likely be the new oil... and Afghanistan is its' Saudi Arabia. The people that run Saudi Arabia hate everyone as well, they are also primitivist fascists, but while they might hate us, they just love our money......
So it is with Afghanistan. The Turks, Chinese and Russians are forming a loose alliance, a counterpoint to NATO which defends *their* "way of life". They need Afghanistan for the same reason we've needed Saudi Arabia - and I don't think they'll take kindly to dope pushers and terrorists setting up shop there. But they know how much the Taliban shit up the West, and having a well-muzzled attack dog on hand does tend to make negotiating with hostile others a lot less... difficult.
But anyway - that war is over, America lost already - the Taliban have no need to fight it all over again and risk everything they've gained.
Besides, the '80s-era Mujihadeen must be getting on in years now. Bin Laden was in his 20s when he went to Afghanistan, and would be in his sixties now. So are his confederates. When you're young, you're radical, you want to defeat superpowers, topple skyscrapers and defy the West from your mountain lair - but when you reach a certain age, you want to chill out, relax, have a bit of fun, repress your own people for a change! And a Lithium deal would allow them to do that. China and Russia don't need to guarantee security, but I know for a fact the Turks could sell them some lovely drones that would make short work of any interlopers - and the Chinese electronics industry will pay handsomely for all that lovely lith under their feet.
They'll do business, and before you know it, the country will be turned into a billion phones for Chinese teenage girls to watch their favourite K-Pop bands on, and a billion cars for their Dads to drive to work in.
It occurs to me that we live in a post-imperial age.
It's not just any specific empire that is obsolete, but imperialism generally. Technology has made military imperialism completely impossible to sustain.
The Americans and Russians both tried it and were slapped down by the same technological forces. Essentially, nuclear bombs and automatic wepaons have rendered imperialism obsolete.
The Mongol Empire was one of the largest empires even known, and the only one to ever encompass the territories in China, mid-Eurasia, the Middle East, AND Europe.
If you tried that now, you'd have about four sets of nuclear weapons headed your way along with about a billion people ready to shoot holes in you.
Nuclear bombs make it impossible to attack well-armed countries, and automatic weapons have made it impossible to conquer poorly armed countries. You can still take territory, but as the USA and the USSR found out, you can't keep it.
In the days of the Mongol Empire, before firearms, the basic infantry unit was a swordsman and the basic cavalry unit was a horseman. You generally had to be male (because they were all male-dominated cultures), you had to be young and fit, and you had to undergo years of training. This made it a simple matter of numbers, you spam the enemy with superior manpower, and you win because all the military units have to be so well trained, there are no partisans in the woods waiting to strike. Even historically difficult regions such as the Middle East and Afghanistan were easily subdued by the literal hordes commanded by the Mongols.
Today, anyone can be a soldier. You could easily raise a company-strength unit from my tower block alone - you just take someone between the age of 15 and 60, give them an automatic rifle, and you've got a soldier. This makes retaining territory impossible- the Mongols would have been constantly harassed by guerillas until they collapsed economically.
The Drone Age
I wonder what drones will do to upset this? Today it is possible for a single infantryman to deploy a weapon which can fly off and intelligently, autonomously attack a target consisting of up to a small platoon, definitely something at squad level - or perhaps a single lightly armoured vehicle. Air assets can also be attacked by a lone infantry soldier (and have been this vulnerable since the 1980s), but perhaps not intelligently - drones are good for fighting enemies on the ground, at least so far.
Drones are cheap, but unlike automatic rifles require access to some sort of high tech manufacturing - the main powers doing interesting things with drones today are Turkey, Israel, and Iran (and their clients). So we'll see a resurgence of mid-sized powers jumping up and making gains.
What do drones do against guerillas? Do they upset the current balance of power? I think we'll find out in the next few years; if someone takes over Afghanistan, Iraq calms down, and the Palestinians sue for peace, we'll know that drones have effetively decimated their guerilla armies. Drones could prove quiet devastating to morale; imagine the scene, you're a militant, you're dug in to some well defended area in Sadr City, Gaza, or Tora Bora, quite happily sitting there on a big pile of weapons and supplies, and then one day, BANG - everything explodes. You don't see it coming, and if you survive the attack you have no idea what's happening. Perhaps you think there's been an air attack - a missile has struck you, it's bad, but it appears to be over now.
Then your enemies, the bastards, stroll in with rifles and shoot all of the survivors. A hasty defence is mounted, but even if it's effective for a short time, all your foes have to do is trot over to their supply vehicles, grab more quadcopters, toss them into the air, and you get blown up all over again. Repeat until you are all dead.
So what might a post-drone world look like?
* The endless, miserable Israel / Palestine conflict would finally be over. Some sort of humiliating peace will be imposed, which will suck for the Palestinians, but at least the rest of us won't have to put up with their whining.
* Afghanistan will finally be opened up for development, probably by the Chinese. They're already making diplomatic inroads, and the people there are desperate for the Taliban to fuck off and die. So if someone turns up and kills them all with drones (and I'm talking about modern ones, not the stupid barbaric sledgehammers the Americans used to ruin so many weddings), there will be much gratitude among the populace towards any conquerers - especially if they're not Western or Russian.
* Iraq will finally stabilize. They might even get some sort of remotely functional democracy going. They may ally with the Iranians, or they may go Western, or even hang out with the Chinese or the Turks - it depends on who successfully markets their drones to them first.
* Geopolitically, the beneficiaries of this are likely to be states which do not have the same sort of moral compunction about using autonomous wepaons to kill. In the West there is a bit of a taboo about this, it comes from the experience of landmines, which persisted in the environment for decades after WWI and WWII, and the successful campaigns against cluster bombs, which can act as mine-laying devices. But drones are not landmines; drones open up areas to conquest while landmines are an "area denial" weapon, which act to close regions off.
So we'll see a rise of mid-size military powers and non-Western actors. Russia may win, but it may lose huge if it doesn't get its shit together fast. I can see the Ukreanians pushing them out successfully, leading to a Cuban Missile Crisis type situation when Ukreanian troops reach the Russian border.
Drones VS Nukes
Nuclear wepaons are interesting. They're the only kind of weapon whereby you can only win a war by NOT using them. Seen that way, there have been several nuclear wars, we just don't notice them because the bombs never actually get dropped, someone somewhere climbs down. The most recent one I'm aware of is North Korea VS the USA, which the North Koreans effectively won - they printed a lot of bluster, threatened everyone, *someone* set off that air raid warning system in Hawaii, and the next thing you knew, Trump and Kim are the best of friends!
Drones don't effect nuclear weapons, but the only way to defeat a drone swarm, other than impossibly superior numbers (perhaps a drone swarm of your own) is to pop a nuke a few miles up. The electromagnetic pulse would effectively disable their electronics, and as long as the detonation was high up enough, it wouldn't even have to kill anyone.
Imagine the Ukranian Army scores a whole load of good shit from the Turks or someone. They rush off into battle, chase those Russian assholes back accross the border, and... keep coming. The Russians panic, Dead Hand is hastily switched off, then on, then off again, and a Rockechiki somewhere goes "I know what to do!" presses the button, and seveal tens of miles above Western Russia, there's a flash of light and all the drones fall from the sky.
This would cause a lot of hot air and talk, but little could actually be done. After all, Russia would have nuked itsself, in self defence, and nobody would be directly killed by the bomb. But it would obviously lower the bar for the use of nukes, and, until cheap, workable electromagnetic pulse weapons are developed, after such an event there's a risk nuclear weapons would be seen as part of the armoury, rather than a tool for politicians.
EMP bombs VS Drones
However, we're more likely to see EMP and directed-energy weapons turned against drones. A microwave device that sits on a Humvee has already been developed, all it needs to fight drones is the requisite AI.
People in the know probably know there is a window of time in which mid-level powers can use drones effectively, before the real big spenders learn how to blast them out of the sky, probably with microwave weapons or possibly E-Bombs.
Scenario: Falklands War II
I wouldn't be at all surprised, for instance, if a second Falklands War took place. I can see a situation arising where Argentina falls to the far Right, as have so many other nations, and they decide to grab the islands with a surprise attack. Drones are cheap - the Azerbaijani military budget is on the same scale (3 billion or so) as Argentine spending; it is not at all economically inconceivable.
The military garrison would be overwhelmed by a surprise drone attack - Drones are too small to be targeted by radar and too numerous to shoot down. It would be a horribly one-sided battle; even if the British military garrison saw it coming there would be little they could do. Yes, we have all sorts of amazing American weapons, but these weapons are obsolete, useless against the new technology which allows a soldier to take out a squad, a squad to take out a platoon, a platoon to take out a company... and so on.
Without an answer to the drones, any reconquest attempt would be doomed to failure. The only conventional attack that might have any chance of success would be a full-on carpet bombing of the area, which would tend to kill the very people we're trying to save (ie, the islanders). Argentine troops would garrison themselves in a civilian area, making such an attack unlikely; if it did take place we'd win, but at the cost of turning Port Stanley into a pile of rubble. I don't think that would happen.
So we try to take the islands back with a ground invasion a la 1982. And the Argentinians would simply throw their quadcopters into the air and wait for our guys to die. And that would be that; the end of Anglo military superiority, a fitting footnote to the fall of Afghanistan.
I'm not a military expert; I'm just a dickhead on the internet, so these ramblings are probably not worth the server they're stored on. But it's a thought; the whole world might be about to turn upside-down - and this is just a lay analysis of military affairs. Who knows what else will emerge from the rise of AI? A return to planned economies? Endless dictatorship? The manipulation of public opinion has already been more or less perfected, which strongly implies this. Then again, people might wise up and reclaim democracy from our new AI autocrats - and that's what I hope for.
One thing is certain: Things are not going to stay the same.
...I agree wholeheartedly that the government and big business are up to no good and are essentially using the virus as a biological weapon. We have a lot in common, and I genuinely hope you don't take this post too harshly. I don't mean to be insulting, but you have the facts entirely wrong.
All this stuff about the virus being a big load- It's
not true. The virus is very, very real.
I've read the fake documents pushed by Qanon types, and the reason they are so obviously bullshit is that they all seem to adhere to the same supervillain logic.
Fact check: High level criminals, governmental or corporate, do not refer
ominously to "The Plan" and do not gloat openly about the virus being
profitable with arch quotation marks like a fucking supervillain. Nor do
they refer to "The unquestioning nature of the masses" and ominous
"plans" for "Global Finance and Mass Inflation" or whatever.
In
fact, high level criminals are boringly banal. They hide most of their
crimes in plain sight behind a wall of boring text so laden with jargon
and euphemism that it's almost impossible to decrypt what the hell
they're going on about. They talk about
"derogation from the customary workings of market‐based capitalism",
"Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights" and "Certain
Provisions of the TRIPS Agreement", not "mwwaaaahahahahaaaa then we'll
kill everyone and the world will be MINE!"
Also
most of the actual documents that reveal their Eichmann-esque thought
processes are publicly available. And they're horrific enough. They
don't need a leet haxxor to reveal the "troof", people don't bother
reading that stuff because it's so boring! Example:
I don't want to be insulting, but there's no nice way to say this: Stop
watching capeshit movies and get off Facebook, they're rotting your
brain. And if you want a conspiracy, a real one, take a look at this shit:
Now that's a real horror, that's happening in the real world: Millions of people in developing countries - most of the worlds' population, in fact- are being held hostage so that pharma companies can make even more money. The system has begun to feed on death - and if you're an anti-vaxxer, or one of the countless conspiracy buffs making it all about you, you're not resisting - you're an integral part of it.
Have some empathy for others and use a little logic. What do you think has happened to all the people who have died? The death toll is in the millions now - What do you think they died of, if they didn't die of COVID? If they didn't die, where do you think they went? Hillary Clinton can only fit so many people in her sex dungeons.
Again, the truth is boringly banal, and all the more horrific for it: Our leaders don't give a shit about us or anyone else: all they care about is their belief that making money is more important than saving lives. If they can make more money by developing treatments for COVID than by distributing a vaccine, they'll do that.
Have you ever wondered why the anti-vaxx movement is joined at the hip to the far Right? Vaccines are the most efficient form of medicine ever developed, and that's a problem for capitalists: They don't "cure" disease, they stop you getting sick in the first place!
Better for Big Pharma that the disease spreads uncontrollably, then it can be cured using free market techniques like charging people an arm and a leg for medication - like they do in America, only far, far worse.
By trying to keep people from getting vaccinated you're helping the virus spread, and that helps the system because it makes it more likely the vaccine proof mutations will breed, and more "cures" will be needed- and pharama companies make so much more cash from those that it's unbelievable.
As it turns out, however, our fearless leaders can't get away with leaving us in the West unvaccinated (Trump tried it, and look what happened to him) - but they can certainly hold up distribution to poor countries. The fact that this is going to lead to millions more deaths and probably leave COVID endemic is incidental to them - the system of "intellectual property" is more important to them than people, and always will be.
Do you see how self-centred and naive you've been, conspiracy theorists? You've been doing your enemies' work for them all along.
Conspiracy theories are just that - theories. They lack hard evidence and they make no sense. Ask yourself a question: Do you believe this stuff because it sounds good and feels right, or because it makes sense?
Thinking for yourself doesn't mean that you fall for a pack of lies because it makes you feel good - it means that you think before you believe some random made-up stuff off 4chan, every bit as much as you think before you absorb the prattlings of the "mainstream media".
By all means, think for yourself, don't take everything the media says on trust. But for God's sake: Think. Because Social Media and internet posts are also media, and they gets exploited by people with even fewer scruples than mainstream media.
Think about anonymously produced stuff: Anyone can make this content, for any reason. It doens't have to be true - nobody loses their job if an item turns out to be false, there's no scandal, nobody has a reputation to uphold or a career to watch out for - it's a complete free for all.A lot of it is just assholes talking shit for the fun of it. Other stuff is guys farming for clicks. And there's no reason to believe a word of it.
(PS yes this is another ex-Reddit comment, expanded massively for a general audience)
(This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)
It's a year since the Colstonstatue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.
In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers...
And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation
called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human
misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose
crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he
did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify
the bastard?
Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death
- and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags
defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution,
not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to
address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually,
local people took matters into their own hands.
You
can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's
local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long
history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the
powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers
(dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around
to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To
understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a
statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".
Bristol
was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part
of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" -
especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by
Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of
the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements
of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a
mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some
bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!
I
backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for
my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that
had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel
culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried
everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they
did.
This isn't America (thank
God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of
shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He
didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting
him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time.
Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an
incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything
like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and
ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.
(This is another repost of an overly long Reddit comment that was too good to lose. Might put it in a magazine or something later)
Very Short Answer: Resentment.
Short Answer: They want to be like us, but they don't have the guts. It's easier to resent those who have escaped the system than to resent the system itsself.
Long TL;DR Answer: Resentment. Also they just like having someone to dunk on. If you're a wagie it's a bit like being a woman in medieval culture - you're looked up to in theory, but in practice you are treated like dirt. You're essential to society, which literally needs you to reproduce itsself - yet you're society's bitch.
It is a peculiar quirk of the human mind that it likes to take short cuts. The mind concentrates on what appears in front of it, that's how magic tricks work. In a slave society, people see slavery and subjugation as normal - even their own! It's cope - if you can't escape, you make a virtue out of necessity and come to see your own subjugation as not only normal but necessary. (Examples: Black Republicans. Working class Tories. Female ISIS recruits.)
So the system enslaves people, but people don't resent those who enslave them, they admire them - instead, they resent free people, whom they see as "unfairly" escaping the "natural" conditions of bondage.
Thus, if you're a wagie, when someone comes along who is the same as you yet has managed to escape slavery, you're gonna hate those fuckers.
And much like medieval women, who fetishized "purity" and "motherhood" (because they had no choice) and despised "prostitutes" and "witches", wage-slaves fetishize "hard work" and "productivity", and also despise the "lazy" and "antisocial" NEETs.
Because NEETs, like the witches and whores of ye olden times, represent what society's slave class wants yet can never have - freedom.
Look at what they say about us "They don't work yet they got better stuff than what we have!". Of course this isn't true, what they actually resent is that we don't really care about having what they have. We know what's really valuable - our right to choose to do what we want with our lives.
Medieval witches flew around on broomsticks - a powerful symbol of magic and freedom. We're the witches of industrial society, flying away from their prison-world on broomsticks of imagination!
(This is an old Reddit comment with an extra bit at the start for context)
Critical Race Theory is not complicated. It's basically a well-meaning, liberal attempt of American academics and activists to come to terms with the racist atrocities of the past (including the recent past).
It has a lot going for it, sure. However, it probably does have to be taught with some delicacy; in any event, liberal education did exist before it, and it will exist again whether this particular approach gets binned or not. Racism is too big a part of American society to just be ignored, the question is whether it gets taught in this particular way.
In the same way, conservative education (if you can call it that) will continue to exist whatever the outcome of the current controversy. (unfortunately)
Rightwingers want to ban Critical Race Theory because CRT is unpopular, especially with their base.
Banning it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not to come out against it.
Meanwhile liberals like CRT because it is very popular with their base. Promoting it is an easy win - they'd be stupid not be for it.
Rightwingers are into national pride and all that shit, and their base love 'em for it - and it's easier and cheaper than actually doing something useful, like I dunno, cracking down on gangsters or fixing the economy.
In the same way, your leaders don't have the ability to solve your country's systemic and ongoing problems, inculding very serious matters like eco collapse and economic stagnation, partly because they're so corrupt and sclerotic, partly because they're constantly obstructing each other, so they argue about this stuff instead.
So let's do a quick run-down of wot I reckon will happen:
Nobody will be punished for the U.S. coup attempt.
Nobody high-up, that is. Obviously Kyle and Karen Assault-Weapon McTaserBallsare gonna get the book thrown at them. That's what they're for - they're basically cover for the attempted coup.
Trump will get away with it, and so will his confederates. As a result, couping your way to power will be seen as risk-free, and there will be another attempt, either four years from now or eight years from now. It won't end well.
The Coronavirus will probably go on for a good few years.
Not enough people will take the vaccine for it to provide herd immunity. As a result, the virus will mutate until the vaccine is no longer effective. It might even become more deadly, though I think it is as likely to become more transmissible and less deadly.
The post-Coronavirus world will be vicious for Westerners.
Westerners are used to being rich and in charge. This is now over. The post-pandemic world will be divided into the places that handled it well, and the places that didn't.
Those that didn't will become the new "second-world", relegated to developing country status. Our economic ideology means that we will never be able to pull ourselves out of it, because the rich will call in their loans long before we can finish the job of fixing the economy. After all, unrestricted pillage and corruption is working fine for them.
It will be a horrible new world of vicious competition for resources, particularly for ordinary people. I just can't see the rich relaxing their stranglehold on democracy now they have so much power; they are able to brainwash people into going out to work in the middle of a pandemic, hell, they (or more likely, the Russians) even get people to turn down vaccinations! Which brings me to
Politics is over, and so is this blog.
I probably won't be blogging anymore, at least not on this page. The situation is just so utterly fucked, I don't see politics having any power to change anything for the better anymore. Politics is over, it was over as soon as people lost the ability to think for themselves.
Political freedom only means anything if you have free will, and we don't have free will anymore. Instead, we have become a society of meat robots prey to weaponized memes, conspiracy theory bullshit, and out-and-out brainwashing.
