The ambush led to the First Battle of Fallujah, a U.S.-led operation to retake control of the city. However, the battle was halted mid-way for political reasons, an outcome which commentators have described as insurgent victory.

“W-we would’ve won if we weren’t stabbed in the back! They didn’t win, that’s the lying fake news media!”

The Chinese Nationalists thought that military power should decide that they were in charge of China, right up until the People’s Liberation Army fucking bodied them and they fled to their little island with their tails between their legs (and then conducted massacres against the native population and anyone remotely leftist).

This “”“independence dispute”“” would have been resolved seventy years ago had the US Navy not stuck their fucking imperial beak in and stopped the communists chasing down these fascist war criminals and finishing the job.

Missed opportunity at the end of that story: instead of falling to his “child-friendly, nonspecific final comeuppance”, Gaston should’ve become the new Beast and been trapped in the castle until he learned his lesson

But no, the freshly redeemed noble gotta have his estates - after all, the real “beauty” was inside him all along all the land and money that Belle is about to marry into!

One of the comments:

One of the things that I hate about korean reality talk shows, is that they act comedic about serious topics. Like they just refuse to be negative, as if they are scared that it will make the audience go away or smth.

“In bad Korea, the people are forced to pretend they’re happy all the time even while talking about horrible things!”

How I Met My Comrades

Everything that exists takes its shape from a balance of opposing forces internal to its structure, and everything that exists is either coming into existence or fading from it.

For the first point, imagine a suspension bridge. The shape of the bridge is formed from the opposing forces of its wires pulling in opposite directions, but instead of cancelling out or one force winning over the other, the two opposed forces result in a synthesis - the structure of the bridge holding up against gravity.

For the second point, consider a mountain range. It is either rising up due to tectonic shifts or it is weathering away from wind, rain and frost. Either it’s rising up faster (as the Himalayas are today), or it’s weathering away faster (as most other places) - if the two rates happen to be exactly equal for a time then you have a moment of equilibrium, which are very rare in nature and only ever exist as a dynamic equilibrium. This is the complete opposite conclusion to the kind of ‘mechanistic’ materialism that underpins liberalism, where stasis and stillness are assumed to be the natural state of any system. With a dialectical understanding we can see that change is the natural state of a system, while equilibrium is fleeting and even the most seemingly ageless mountains will inevitably become dust in the wind, indeed are already becoming dust.

Consider also the suspension bridge again. While it’s being built, it’s coming into being, but the instant that construction is finished it begins to suffer the decay of entropy. It starts to rust and crumble away, and will fade out of existence unless it is actively maintained - unless energy is expended ‘bringing it into being’ once more and restoring the balance of the opposed forces that make it up. Otherwise, if one force begins to weaken (one side of the cables begin to rust) the forces may become so unbalanced that the structure disintegrates.

Now to combine these two points, think of fire. Fire is a particularly good illustration of a dialectical process, because it is a process that abolishes itself. Fire has to consume fuel to exist, in fact its existence is nothing but the consumption of fuel, but once it has consumed the fuel it disappears: its existence inevitably destroys the very conditions that allow it to exist. It spreads, rapidly bringing more and more of itself into existence, until all available fuel is being burned and it starts dwindling away. And this happens not because of “conscious will” (neither God reaching down to snuff it out, nor the fire ‘choosing’ to burn to ash), but because of its internal structure and the resolution of its internal contradictions.

Another such example would be yeast turning sugar into alcohol, inevitably poisoning itself to death… and a further example would be capitalist society creating the conditions for a socialist revolution. The capitalists cannot do away with the workers, their labor is the only thing that allows capital to be expanded. But competing in the market obliges the capitalists to drive their workers into such miserable conditions that they inevitably ask things like “Why is this happening to me? What has caused this situation? And how can I stop it?”

And in answering those questions, they are brought face-to-face with stark reality, they are driven by necessity to seek a true understanding of the world’s historical development. They are forced to learn how the currently existing society rose out of the previous social structure, which, due to its internal contradictions, caused its own abolishment - the workers with the greatest understanding discover dialectical materialism, and thus finally they are able to understand the process by which they were inevitably forced into discovering dialectical materialism. So the process of capitalist society’s development leads, inevitably, to the existence of the communist workers that will overthrow it.

Yeah, clearly they just post any kind of Russian propaganda over at the… checks notes Kyiv Independent

These are both from the same year (I forget when):

“You can be the next Stalin” vs “Dab on your wife with the ugliest fucking tie ever conceived”

Why are you defending the rump state of a fascist dictatorship?

I hope the “Republic of China” can someday be peacefully dissolved and the province of Taipei reunited under the mainland government.

No, you’re right, the US keeps delivering longer-ranged missiles so the nazi terrorism can continue.

In 2014 a bunch of Ukrainian nazis couped the democratically elected government and started ethnically cleansing the Russian population in the Donbas. Some sections of the Ukrainian military rebelled and formed militia units to protect the population from being murdered by nazis, leading to a low level civil war stretching on for years. Ukrainian nazi paramilitaries continued persecuting ethnic Russian Ukrainians civilians as well as shelling Donetsk and Lugansk

During this time Russia tried repeatedly to conduct diplomacy with the nazis western handlers, the US and the UK, as well as interested third parties such as Germany and France. However, it was pointless as the US never intended to back down and continuously goaded the Ukrainian nazis into attacks on the Donbas, all the while supplying them with money and weapons. When the war seemed to be escalating to the point NATO forces might join in, Russia - understanding that any actual direct combat between Russian and NATO soldiers would lead to a global nuclear holocaust - jumped in with its troops first… after spending three days voting to formally recognize the independence of the DPR and LPR, of course, because Putin is a bureaucrat to the core and these things must be done properly.

And now, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk can live quietly without fear of nazi missiles blowing up their city centers for no reason.

I question the US’s claims over a certain region (the whole of it)

They joined a civil war in progress on the morally correct side

Chinese people both feel that their country is more democratic and that democracy is more important than USians do

Can’t be populists without people!

Just a reasonable man promoting a reasonable nuclear holocaust

Plaito

Oh man, what did the US and UK have that the USSR didn’t? That’s right, a giant fucking empire grinding hundreds of millions of third world slaves into the dirt.

And yet, even without that the USSR was growing so much faster it would have caught up to and surpassed them eventually - until they couped it, destroyed it and ravaged its people and economy.

One would be Chai Ling

She was smuggled out along with various other protest leaders and dissidents through Operation Yellowbird, a CIA-MI6 joint venture. Again, even the NATOpedia page has to grudgingly admit the CIA had been providing training, funding, even typewriters and fax machines to these people - who it must be kept in mind were a small fraction of the protesters. Though the page does manage to avoid mentioning the NED, which had opened its offices in China for the first time in 1988,