SeventyTwoTrillion

SeventyTwoTrillion, 17 days ago

I demand less explicit metaphors of US imperial collapse, it’s getting way too easy to analyze it now and I want to go back to feeling like a very smart and special boy for seeing the obscure signs.

used to be that you had to write a fully-sourced, ten-paragraph piece suggesting that the US military is secretly falling apart, but now you can just point to the two or three disasters that Western militaries have experienced this week and shrug your shoulders

SeventyTwoTrillion, 17 days ago

“China, Iran, North Korea, and various other countries providing weaponry to Russia makes them fully complicit in the war against Ukraine. Hell, even if they only supply components that could be manufactured into weapons, we have to stop that trade by any means necessary.”

“…no, Biden directly giving and boasting about supplying tens of billions of dollars worth of bombs to Israel doesn’t make him even remotely complicit in what Israel is doing, what the hell are you talking about?”

SeventyTwoTrillion, 18 days ago

it’s more fun to have your own, very specialized definition and conception of communism and socialism and repeat them for a few decades than to read boring books for a few weeks and have your misconceptions cleared up.

“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge”, but not in a bad stupid American way, but in a good virteous down-to-earth proletarian who doesn’t need the work of fancy shmancy professors way

SeventyTwoTrillion, 22 days ago

To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

SeventyTwoTrillion, 25 days ago

there is a fair amount of state purchasing of private industry going on and Russian workers are, relative to the 1990s and also to Europeans in manufacturing losing their jobs right now, doing fairly well for themselves. this doesn’t, of course, mean that any socialism is happening but it is two interesting trends.

my personal prediction for the next few decades of Russian history is something along the lines of:

1. Russia wins war relatively soon, possibly not this year depending on how exactly things shake out but very probably by 2025-2026
2. the break with neoliberal policy, such that it is (there’s still plenty of neoliberalism going on) also ends and there’s a return to the almighty god-given authority of the Central Bank
3. this necessarily means that Russian workers, who were previously in an alright spot, start suffering as neoliberals enact austerity to beat down the working class again so they don’t start getting any ideas
4. this austerity goes through without much organized resistance, but Russian workers are able to draw the conclusion that when the state was more involved, things were good, and when the state retreated, things got bad. Putin is probably dead by this point due to his age which further complicates things
5. who even knows what happens after that, it’s way too underdetermined and the decline of the US empire will have had even more impacts by then that make analysis and predictions not very helpful, but drawing on the couple years after WW1 in Italy and England (which Mattei’s The Capital Order nicely analyzes), we either get a new USSR rising, a successful beatdown of the working class without too much violence like what happened in England, or we get Italian-style fascism in retaliation for socialist revolutionaries trying and failing to take power. though how fascism would even work in a multipolar context is kinda fuzzy to me, especially as China would, hopefully, act as a counterbalancing force ideologically for that kind of thing.

SeventyTwoTrillion, 30 days ago

it’s really an unbearable experience.

before 2022 I was well aware on an intellectual level that the media was bad and misrepresenting things and had strongly ingrained most of the more lib-accepted critiques about how it spreads negativity and panic for views and profit, etc. but nowadays when I’m exposed to it, it’s a much more visceral dislike and disgust. not sure if I’ve just changed and it’s been the same the whole time, or if it’s also gotten much worse as well, but it feels like they’ve perfectly triangulated the perfect way to deliver information that is simultaneously devoid of substance, meaning, and accuracy. it’s like watching paint dry, but if the paint was in the shape of a swastika

SeventyTwoTrillion, 1 month ago

holy shit lmao, the Zionists released images like this as proof that their airbase is fine:

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/ebecb55f-8e23-407d-ae1e-398cd0fcc851.jpeg

extremely obvious that they quickly dug a hole in a ground and they’re so stupid that they forgot to not include the mound of material that they unearthed. I guess this is indirect proof that the airbase truly has been fucked or they’d release something of substance instead

SeventyTwoTrillion, 3 months ago

According to a new study by University of California Riverside researchers, roughly two weeks of training for GPT-3 consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater. The global AI demand is projected by 2027 to account for 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.

Much of the water to cool the cloud is lost in steam emissions “where the water will evaporate and remove the heat from the data center to the environment,” according to one of the authors of the study, Shaolei Ren.

Other research has pointed out the growing carbon footprint of AI. For example, in 2019, researchers found that training one of the larger AI models can emit as much greenhouse gas as five average American cars over their entire lifetimes.

SeventyTwoTrillion, 3 months ago

The Country of the Week is Indonesia!

As mentioned in the preamble, feel free to post or recommend any material related to Indonesia, whether from a thousand years ago or yesterday. You can post it anywhere in the thread, but you can also reply to this comment if you wish.

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious and want homework, you could take on any or all of these questions (no reward, but I’ll be very proud of you):

• Who are the main political actors? Are they compradors, nationalists, international socialists, something else?
• What are the most salient domestic political issues; those issues that repeatedly shape elections over the last 10, 20 years. Every country has its quirks that complicate analysis - for example, Brexit in the UK.
• What is the country’s history? You don’t have to go back a thousand years if that’s not relevant, and I’m counting “history” as basically anything that has happened over a year ago.
• What factions exist, historically and currently? If there is an electoral system, what are the major parties and their demographic bases? Are there any minor parties with large amounts of influence? Independence movements? Religious groups?
• How socially progressive or conservative are they? Is there equality for different ethnic groups, or are some persecuted? Do they have LGBTQIA+ rights? Have they improved over time, or gotten worse?
• What role do foreign powers play in the country’s politics and economy? Is there a particular country nearby or far away that is nearly inseparable from them, for good or bad reasons? Is their trade dominated by exports/imports to one place? Are they exploited, exploiters, or something in between?
• If applicable, what is the influence of former colonial relationships on the modern economy and politics?
• Is the country generally stable? Do you think there will be a coup at some point in the future, and if so, what faction might replace them?

The previous country was Brazil.

The Geopolitical Reading List is still evolving…