TheOubliette
Reminder that USAID is used cynically as a form of leverage for US interests, it largely funnels money back to private industry in the US, and it is heavily involved in absurd propaganda that calls (US-supported) military coup governments democratic and (US-opposed) governments the usual series of adversarial clichés (hand-picked successor authoritarian strong man etc etc). The US State Department has its own positions on the war and groups in Ethiopia and you would have a good chance at being right if you guessed this was targeted to undermine the groups they do not want in charge.
Really though this just warrants skepticism, we can’t definitively tell the exact strategy yet.
Most signs indicate that UA is taking heavy losses while RUS occasionally cedes (and then often takes back) territory. This has been the pattern of the war. In addition, UA military statements are not generally credible, so always take a skeptical eye to these things - particularly from an English-language tabloid uncritically repeating MoD propaganda.
That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors, but it is, as to be expected, based on an uncritical acceptance of numbers and stories from untrustworthy sources, sources with an obvious interest in keeping support for the sending weapons and other military support to UA. This post, for example, coming from Pravda UA and just passing along the message from the MoD. No critical look at any of it from liberals, just cheerleading based on vibes.
Kherson and Kharkiv are both examples of Russia giving up territory with minimal losses. Kherson was a very famous preemptive withdrawal, with Russia going back on its statements that it would protect the people there. I feel bad for the people there who believed it and tried to build back a functioning society, as they were then subjected to UA’s fascistic extremist militants that have wide berth to determine a very low bar for being a “collaborator”.
Control maps don’t mean much by themselves. A party taking a large strip of mud gets very different media treatment depending on who you read and which party gained it.
An area amounting to about 6 km by 6 km. Still an excuse for cheerleading and manufacturing consent for escalation. One of the villages is like 6 houses.
Aid trucks remain stranded at the Southern entry points, with Raremoved closed over Israel crossing Biden’s supposed red line. Israeli citizens - not IOF - routinely block the trucks and destroy their contents while the IOF watches. Israel maintains its blockade of Gaza that it has imposed since 2007 that prevents aid from entering any other way and used pressure campaigns on Turkey and Guinnea-Bissau to hamstring the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
It’s important to remember that the oppression of Gaza and Palestinians is a central project of Zionism that spans multiple leaders and requires the active consent of several coordinating parties, with the US imperial apparatus at the top and the Israeli Zionist project just below. If Netanyahu died today virtually all of Zionists’ policies would remain in place. Netanyahu was not in power when most of them were instituted.
Opinion polls now show increased support for Netanyahu since October and if you dig just a little deeper you’ll find that the primary complaint of Israelis is that he’s not even more militaristic, more brutal, and “protecting” Israelis in this fashion. In other words, the illusion of immunity was broken and they are lashing out. Imagine who would have power if Netanyahu died.
Biden provides unconditional support to this genocidal project and this is more or less in line with decades of US policy, although he is even to the right of Reagan in that he won’t pick up a phone and actually draw a line. A return to the status quo, which was still horrible for Palestinians, is a bridge too far for the Biden administration. And as you can see, that administration enjoys wide cover from tired and bad faith talking points from a media apparatus that equates the humanization of Palestinians with antisemitism.
If you oppose genocide and consider Palestinians human, then our shared enemies include but also go beyond the current leaders of the United States and Israel. The deeper underlying forces are political economic. They’re why when students demand divestment the University administrations would rather sic cops on them than lose a little cash. They’re why military contractors nearly always get their way. They’re why people like Biden and Netanyahu receive support in the first place, including the tired and politically incompetent lesser evil vote nagging. Political power is not to be a sheep following the orders of wolves, but to become educated and work together.
High drug prices are the result of monopoly capital. There are actually very few pharmaceutical companies. They have dominant control over the industry and careers for relevant STEM majors and applying university research. They charge exorbitant prices through market domination and the US government gladly support this, as it is largely just a proxy for business interests. The temporary monopoly of IP is protected at all costs (it was even used to weaponize COVID vaccine access!).
However, this is not something that will be solved by simply asking politicians to regulate the market. Monopolization is a core outcome of capitalism, it increases the overall volume of profit that a company can make and therefore destroy the competition. And capture of the political system the default, it’s an expression of the dominant economic forces. Both parties are capitalist and do the bidding of their business factions, often the same factions at the same time. Expecting a capitalist politician to act against the interests of their donors, their party, and the complicit media apparatus that keeps them in their position is absurd.
Instead, you will only see some PR attempts at the margins, like specifically capping the price of insulin. Access to insulin without impoverishing yourself is of course a dramatically good thing, but it is also a drop in the bucket compared to the overall grift that will remain firmly in place.
A question to ask yourself is: if I cannot reasonably expect capitalist politicians to address this and it’s a core feature of the economic system, what should I do instead?
Any online service into which you enter information has the capability to save that information for its own purposes. This includes all the people entering personal or identifying or really any information into “AI” products.
Given that it’s not even particularly useful, I recommend just not using “AI” if you’re not sure how to protect yourself.