December 25th. 9:36 am. The outskirts of Bakhmut. Russia has been blasting away with artillery at Ukrainian positions since 6 in the morning. Russia's advance resembles an asymptote; a Zeno's Paradox, where every day they advance half the distance of the day before. Yesterday they advanced 10 feet. Today it'll be five. Everybody's frustrated, the trenches are awful, the blasts of artillery numbing.

Then, somebody shouts over the din, with a megaphone: "It's Christmas Day! Hold your fire!" The artillery blasts trail away, leaving only confusion. Was that the Russians' commander? Or was it a Ukrainian? Again, the message is repeated, seeming louder now that the artillery has stopped. A minute passes. Then, the first Ukrainian passes over the top of the trench, arms in the air, bearing no weapons. The Russians are confused, trying to figure out what they're meant to do, but do not fire. Then a few more Ukrainians follow, slowly stumbling over the moonscape of no man's land. A brave Russian soldier decides to get up and walk out and meet them halfway. Then a few more. Within 15 minutes, there are over 500 soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian alike, standing around in no man's land. They talk, first haltingly, then more freely. About the weather. About what's back home waiting for them. About the weapons they've been given by their countries.

This continues for another half an hour, until the Ukrainians bring out their phones. The Russians aren't allowed them, of course, but the Ukrainians keep them so they can take pictures for Ukrainian propaganda purposes. They have Starlink connections. A Ukrainian soldier loads up Pokemon Go. A couple others happen to have the app, while the rest start downloading it. They show the cute creatures to their new Russian friends. Laughter is the main sound now, not artillery. Somebody finds a shiny; tens of soldiers gather round to see. In return for this fun, the Russians give the Ukrainians some gifts, of blankets and alcohol.

The soldiers eventually have to go back. It's 12:00 and the commanders have figured out what's happened and are ordering the soldiers back to the trenches. But the impression is lasting. The artillery resumes for the rest of the day, but the soldiers are disgruntled. They talk amongst themselves. Why should we continue to suffer, and make others suffer? For what purpose is this war fought? The murmuring turns into the beginnings of plans.

A week later, a note from the Russians is sent across the no man's land in secret. An affirmative is sent back by the Ukrainians, hours later. At midnight, the soldiers begin slowly, and very quietly, killing their officers. On both sides. The news of what happened on Christmas has spread like wildfire across the front and, more surreptitiously, a plan for a mass mutiny. Within five days, the entire front is in armed revolt; now, instead of two sides crashing into eachother, they're moving outwards, back towards their countries. The Nazi paramilitaries, who shoot the retreating Ukrainians, are killed too. The situation is out of control of both commands.

This revolt spreads throughout both countries. The grievances of the last thirty years of post-Soviet poverty have built up to a crescendo. The masses desire the blood of the oligarchs. Manors are burned; superyachts are sunk by rogue battleships. The revolt spreads even further, throughout eastern Europe. And further still, to the suffering and the cold in central and western Europe. The capitalists who are able to make it away fly to New Zealand, to their bunkers, before either climate change or nuclear war could have done so. The revolution has spread to the Middle East, to Asia, to Africa, to South America. North America is the last to fall, but fall it does. The vents of the bunkers of the rich are covered with dirt, smothering them. The post-capitalist world has arrived, in an inferno of fire and blood. The communists are in control, building workers' soviets and distributing the means of production to all.

The lesson? Marx failed to consider Pokemon Go.

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10-player rounds of Saturn Bomberman.

Orthodoxbros schism: Nature is healing

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Or Yemen, that many European nations are actively aiding and abetting

This fucking sucks, I give it 10 years before the officially recognised narrative is that the Eastern Front was Axis infighting :agony-shivering:

Or the US genocide in Korea

I love the free market

You forgot to mention the best one: :reddit-logo:

Imagine the public outcry if the US government actually banned Reddit because Tencent is a major investor.

"any social media company in or under the influence of China and Russia”

So because Tencent owns 10% of :reddit-logo: does that mean reddit will be banned too?

I feel like this would be pretty damaging for the US too, though? I'm personally curious about to what extent we'll see capitalists (with their short-term profit interests) try and oppose the economic war on China. Lobbying and such.

I wonder what China's response to this would be, if they decide to do one at all (the government hasn't had the best track record of actually responding to American aggression).

Regardless, China is getting decoupled from the West, whether they want to or not. I think Xi to a certain extent saw this coming and has hopefully been spending the last year since the invasion figuring out what to do about it, but we'll see if it's adequate. I could totally see this ending up like the sanctions on Russia have ended up (very unsuccessful depending on your metric) but Putin also seems to be more proactive and willing to fight back, and he's mainly fighting (economically speaking) Europe, which is just America's lapdog - whereas China has to take on America itself going for their jugular.

These numbers do obscure some real pain. Oil and natural gas have surged in terms of GDP meaning a 1.5% decline in GDP means as big as that surge was, it was slightly smaller than the decline in other parts of the economy.

Which matters in that oil and gas is much less labor intensive than almost any other major economic activity. So while overall it’s just a 1.5% drop in GDP, and so the capacity of Russia to wage war is probably close to unaffected, these numbers do imply significant job losses in the economy.

Of course, mobilizing 300,000 working age males probably offset that significantly as well, but still those are some wild economic gyrations for the common people to live with.

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Lula da Silva prefered to remain neutral as he is still only President-Elect. Gabriel Boric accused Castillo of being authoritarian.

Seven demonstrators, all teenagers, are reported to have died and 15 police injured in fierce clashes, mainly in poverty-wracked mountain regions that voted heavily for the 53-year-old former rural teacher and union leader in last year’s presidential contest.

Protesters blockaded the Pan-American highway south of the capital, setting tires ablaze, and the airport in the tourist hub of Cusco, forcing flight cancellations. They attempted to reach the congress building in downtown Lima.

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I believe this maneuver is called ghost riding the whip

Thanks. This was a perfect start to my day.

oh yeah, it's 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall leading to the bourgeoisie instituting increasingly fascistic policies' hours, who tf up

As horrible as this is it is the set up for a perfect storm of material conditions that prep people for radicalization.

The supposedly neutral and politically independent mainstream media can't help themselves drooling over this streaming pile of centrism. The largest news broadcaster talks about "an ambitious plan" and the main government-affiliated broadcaster published an article that was allegedly about the strengths and weaknesses of the new government but somehow they managed to turn everything into a strength. "Disgruntled politicians who didn't get seats in the new cabinet will probably leak shit all the time. This is good as it creates more tnsparency!"

Man so much for the US's statements about not sending long range rocket systems to Ukraine. They are just slowly eroding their prior stance.

In 6 months the US is going to have boots on the ground and a nuke in Ukraine at this rate

I have a feeling that "Russian" attacks on Ukrainian residential buildings are about to increase for some weird reason.

Why Did American Patriot Missiles Fail To Stop the Houthi's Attacks?

It’s possible the attacks involved far-flying drones firing small, guided munitions. The Aramco sites are around 800 miles from the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border. Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Guard Corps in the past has supplied the Houthis with weaponry including drones and components for ballistic missiles.

But one thing is clear. The attack revealed the limits of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly sophisticated air-defense system. Riyadh in recent years has spent billions of dollars building up six battalions of U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles and associated radars. The Patriots didn’t stop the recent attack.

And it wasn’t the first time Saudi Arabia’s Patriots have failed. At least five Patriots apparently missed, malfunctioned or otherwise failed when Saudi forces tried to intercept a barrage of rockets targeting Riyadh on March 25, 2018.

Houthi forces fired at least seven rockets at Saudi Arabia that night. The Saudi military launched Patriot Advanced Capability-2 missiles in an attempt to destroy the Houthi rockets in mid-air. The Saudis claimed seven of the Patriots struck their targets.

One man reportedly died after being struck by metal fragments. It's unclear whether the fragments came from a malfunctioning Patriot, a successful intercept or a Houthi rockets striking the ground.

But amateur videos that appeared online in the aftermath of the missile skirmish indicate that many of the Patriots exploded in mid-air or veered off course. The errant missiles invoked memories of similar failures involving American-operated Patriots during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"It's nothing but an unbroken trail of disasters with this weapon system," said Theodore Postol, an MIT physicist and prominent critic of U.S. missile defenses.

Personally, I think that every day that NATO devotes more of its weapons and stocks of ammo to be destroyed by Russia, but without actually entering the war, is a good day. We're seeing little glimmers here and there of covert NATO involvement (well, covert to us, I imagine the Russians and their intel know all about it) so if it's just another year of NATO never actually going in but both sides pretending that, idk, the pilots or artillery officers that Russia is capturing or killing are totally Ukrainians and definitely not American troops, then that keeps us away from the knife's edge of nuclear war for a while longer. So whatever. Send the Patriots.

Lol, ask Saudi how Patriot performance against Iranian Dorito's