Lula is up four points in a week according to a new poll out today, on the eve of Brazil's official campaign season launch.

Lula: 45%

Bolsonaro: 34%

Lula tied, in the margin of error, with the sum of all other candidates (45% to 46%), which could guarantee his victory in the first round. The result reverses the trend towards Bolsonaro, who had been showing growth in recent polls.

I know he's a socdem, but i hope he wins :lula-bars:

Latvia has proposed a bill to officially discriminate against Russian speakers in the country. This is definitely ethnic cleansing.

It's kinda bonkers that pride parades had ukraine flags, and that some libs somewhere thought that a gay marriage vote would fly in Ukraine. No idea what's happened with that.

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Receiving, distributing Russian humanitarian aid in occupied territories to be considered collaborationism. The law on collaborationism came into force on Aug. 16. According to it, acts of collaborationism will be punished by up to 15 years in jail.

The mask keeps slipping each day. Muhajideen 2.0 vibe from this bunch

Well I tried sharing with some liberals the statement by Zelensky that Ukrainian forces will target anyone firing from the ZPP, and got told 'obviously he means Ukrainian operators will perform targeted assassinations on the individual troops, nothing as unsophisticated as shelling'.

Presumably these high speed low drag operators were too busy doing REDACTED shit to have stopped Russia anywhere else until now. A totally invented reality.

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y’all see this shit?

the Kyiv Independent tweet was bad enough. but now the NYT is gloating about extrajudicial civilian killings. i get that this stuff happens in war, but i never expected a full-throated endorsement by “the paper of record”.

here’s the link to the actual article. grabbed a screenshot in case they mess with the sub-title (although they might have already).

This is gonna be a text wall, but this essentially sums up the last six months of analysis in these threads, so it's a worthy wall.

How Russia thwarted US imperial plans in Ukraine and beyond Multipolarista, by Antonio Camacho Negrón.

History testifies, time and time again, that the United States and Europe have always viewed Russia as coveted prey, and more so as a powerful opponent to their expansionist pretensions. Without a doubt, for various reasons that we will detail later, Russia has today become the top geopolitical-military threat to Western hegemonic aspirations.

Since 1904, with the publication of the “Heartland Theory” by English geographer Halford Mackinder, Russia has acquired great importance in the geopolitical conception of the world. In fact, Mackinder is considered the father of geopolitics. His theory states that the world is a big island, and that in the center of that island, as the pivot where the other countries balance, is Russia:

“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

The land area of ​​the Russian Federation is almost twice the size of the United States. In addition to its privileged strategic position, its neighbors, China and India, are among the most populous on the planet and the fastest growing. Russia has a very well-educated, relatively united population and a low population density – a favorable condition that allows it to meet the basic needs of its people without great difficulty. It also has immense natural resources, many still to be discovered.

After 1991, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Western countries were convinced that Russia was defeated.

They had a fifth column in the Russian government that responded unconditionally to their interests; they controlled a large part of its natural resources and banking; and, according to their ideologues, all they had to do was put a little more pressure and the social situation would implode, the Russian Federation would dissolve, and Russia could be divided into several states.

These Western pretensions were thwarted by the resignation of Boris Yeltsin in 1999 and the rise of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer. Putin reversed the appeasement policies of his predecessor. He set in motion all of the national forces based on the idea that, in order to protect itself from Western adventurism, it was necessary to implement an accelerated plan for agricultural, industrial, technical and military development.

Putin reversed the appeasement policies of his predecessor. He set in motion all of the national forces based on the idea that, in order to protect itself from Western adventurism, it was necessary to implement an accelerated plan for agricultural, industrial, technical and military development. In two decades, he brought Russia out of the backwardness that previous governments had plunged it into, and turned the country into the second great military power after the United States.

Under the presidential mandates of Vladimir Putin, the following changes occurred:

1. Russia in 10 to 20 years surpassed state-of-the-art Western technology in its military development. Russian hypersonic missiles, nuclear-powered missiles, electronic warfare missiles, anti-satellite missiles, super-fast torpedoes, nuclear icebreakers, among other technologies, have no equivalent.

2. With the production of state-of-the-art weapons, Russia has become the main competitor in the most profitable industry of the United States, the war industry, attracting among its buyers former clients of US arms such as India, China, Pakistan, Turkey, and others.

3. Russia has built a series of nuclear icebreakers with the main objective of opening an Arctic route – a route that, by shortening distances for merchant ships, makes Russian products more competitive. In terms of military logistics, the Russian fleet, having greater access to the Atlantic Ocean, and therefore to the east of Canada and the United States, would have an additional tactical advantage over its rivals in terms of maneuverability.

4. The close relationship between the military power of Russia and the economic power of China, which has been consolidating, is of extreme concern to the West – a feeling that increases with the implementation of megaprojects such as the New Silk Road that extends through the five continents, and which begins in China, but its main ramifications cross through Russia.

5. Russia’s military support for Syria, in opposition to the strategic objectives of the United States, has been a major headache for NATO in its attempts to change the government in Syria.

6. Moscow’s close political, economic, cultural, and military relations with Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Bolivia have, to a large extent, rendered the sanctions imposed by the United States ineffective.

7. Russia is the main supplier of fossil energy to Europe, which gives it great bargaining power and affects the competitive capacity of the US hydrocarbon industry.

8. The great economic and geopolitical advances that Russia has made in the last decade in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa are not well seen by the West.

9. Russia, by drastically reducing its holdings of dollars and treasury bonds, and by promoting the use of its own currencies among its trading partners, has become a major threat to the privileged power of the dollar as an international currency. The rapid increase in its gold reserves is also of great concern to the West.

10. Russia, with its accelerated agricultural development, has taken the leadership in wheat exports from the United States and has put North American farmers in a bind.

As we can deduce from all of the above, in the short and medium term, the real threat to a declining United States is Russia. Glen VanHerck, head of the US Northern Command, pointed this out in September 2021 when he said that Russia is the main threat to the United States today, whereas China is a long-term threat.

The empire, hidden in NATO, acts in fear of Russia’s strategic positioning, its energy self-sufficiency, economic growth, expansion of sea lanes, military power, geopolitical influence and, fundamentally, its anti-establishment attitude towards policies and imperial initiatives. US political scientist Graham T. Allison popularized the concept of the Thucydides Trap to describe how the contradictions between one hegemonic power and another rising power drag them to war.

The US empire cannot engage in a conventional war with Russia, an emerging power that challenges its hegemony, without condemning itself to its own destruction – which is why it resorts to hybrid warfare, or unrestricted warfare, in the hope that the economic, political, and social attacks on its adversary are so devastating that they stop its agricultural and technological-military advance, that they reduce the production of hydrocarbons, that they destroy the strong alliance with China, and more than compensate for the self-inflicted damage by the sanctions. But it is inevitable that the effect on its own economy will be a boomerang.

Through hybrid warfare, with the aim of continuing to impose its hegemony, the United States incites Ukrainian extremists without caring that they are bringing Ukraine to total ruin in a conflict of attrition against Russia.

In unrestricted war, without any shame, the United States demonizes its adversary, creates a media dictatorship, and uses sanctions, censorship, propaganda, lies, and slander to stupefy its audience so it can no longer think clearly.

In 2019, a powerful US think tank sponsored by the Pentagon, the RAND Corporation, published a report entitled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options.”

This research document explores in minute detail the options that can be used to exploit Russia’s vulnerabilities in order to destabilize it. All the measures, supposedly in the name of containment, that the United States has imposed on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine are reflected in that document.

Nordic socialism moment: A survey among members aged 40 to 59 of the Danish union 3F that organises "unskilled" workers have shown that 67,5% of members are taking painkillers to be able to go to work.

Meanwhile the same union is heavily supportive of and involved in the social democratic party that is responsible for making Danish retirement age one of the highest in the world and who is right now campaigning with slogans about "responsible economic policy so we can afford the future".

Oh, and by the way, that responsible economic policy that requires people to work full time until they're 72 doesn't prevent the social democrats from increasing military expenditure to 2% of GDP, including a replacing the entire navy with new ships

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The cryptofash(very light emphasis on crypto) party in Sweden is suggesting that the department that handles prisons and jails be renamed, I'm struggling to translate it perfectly but basically the current name is phrased in a way that suggests the purpose of the department is to take care of and "treat" criminals in the way that healthcare treats patients, "criminal-care" or "crimecare" basically in a literal translation.

Well the cryptofascists think this is liberal coddling and bullshit(note that in all modern history the phrasing of the department name has included the word that translates to "care" even if it started as prisoner-care) and instead thinks the department should be renamed as to focus on the punishment part, basically wanting it named the office of punishment, or "punishment-works" in the same way you have steelworks or steel mills. Extremely cool things going on in Sweden.

Also the "moderate" controlled public transit in Stockholm have loosened restrictions on advertising to the point where the cryptofascist party has painted trains on the subway with their color scheme for 2 weeks, including text that says "Welcome aboard the victory train!" and "SD 2022" and party figures have tweeted out shit like "Welcome to the return migration train, you have a one way ticket, next stop, Kabul!". Very cool.

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