Given their practice of restrained and selective targeting away from civilians, and public commitment against further escalation, its nearly impossible for me to imagine Iran approving (even tacitly) of an untargetted mass shooting at a transit station in a neighbourhood that is 1/3rd Arab, as an element in Operation True Promise 2.

To me, this raises the question of how the attack then came to coincide nearly exactly with the operation. It seems extremely unlikely that it was a coincidence. Was Hamas informed of the operation in advance by Iran, and they then planned the shooting to coincide with it without telling?

Absolutely, and while manpower is something which could be remedied in the next few years by throwing money at the problem (which the U.S. has) the Navy’s rotted sealift supply capacity can not. The resources a fleet consumes during war are astronomical, and American currently could not supply most of its ships simultaneously if it wanted to right now, during a relative peace. The Navy has only 33 active duty auxiliary vessels, and the majority of civilian ships in the sea-lift reserve are not currently seaworthy.

The incomparable logistics advantage the PRC would have in the Taiwan strait (because their infrastructure and industrial base is right there instead of across an Ocean) is another reason why America would be virtually guaranteed to lose a protracted naval war there.

I’m usually one to err on the side of caution when it comes to estimating America’s strength, the PLA certainly isn’t relying on wishful thinking when they assess the strength of the U.S. military; so I won’t either. However, practically all signs point to U.S. shipbuilding being extremely cooked. The best comparison of the relative effectiveness of a country’s shipbuilding industrial capacity comes from their share of merchant tonnage. From that, the PRC produces half of global tonnage in civilian ships every year, while the U.S share is 0.2%.

American shipbuilders survive entirely due to military contracts, where their performance is characterized by cost overruns, poor workmanship, and constant delays. On the other hand, the luxury of choices offered to PLANF procurement means China can launch new naval vessels at a rate and price magnitudes better than the U.S. navy. Comparing the difference in production efficiency between the two countries, and it’s like how in WW2 the USSR spent one-one hundredth the man hours to build a single T-34 as the Nazis did for a Tiger tank (not an exaggeration, the costs were 3000 man hours for a T-34 and 300,000 per Tiger). And half the T-34s wouldn’t break down before arriving to the battlefield.

What lingering advantages the United States would have in a naval conflict come down to their inertia and (IMO) still superior air power. Both edges are fading fast, and 2027 may well be what the Pentagon has determined to be their “point of no return” after which PLA dominance in the Taiwan strait will be undisputed.

In other dying empire news, the US Navy’s recently released Navigation Plan has the primary goal of preparing the Navy for war with the PRC by 2027. The plan also reads like a hybrid between marketing speak and a r/worldnews comment

reminder that there’s no such thing as a Nobel prize in economics, and this guy won the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”

Letting the Biden team schedule a debate before the DNC may become an all-time bag fumble

He allowed the Dems to replace the only person in America who was sure to lose against him

no term limits

no constitution, through Parliament the ruling regime can overrule the judiciary at will and ignore human rights treaties

antidemocratic electoral system where a party winning 1/3rd of the vote gets 2/3rds of seats

state media spewing hatred towards refugees and trans people, inciting violent riots

Chairman Xi, my people yearn for freedom

In the final analysis, the state is an organ of class rule. But a class which must rely on the naked power of state coercion to rule in the first analysis as well, is one living in a state of siege, rebellion, war or revolution. As such, the State strives to rule through consent and neutralize the class conflict which would otherwise tear it apart, and does so by appearing to be a power standing above society, which mediates class conflicts and keeps them within the bounds of order.

However, as much as it is an institution for the enforcement of a Capitalist mode of production, the Liberal state cannot appear to be impartial and just, without in on occasion being just by checking the most blatant and hypocritical excesses of unrestrained Capitalists. This is discussed in part by E.P. Thompson:

If the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimize nothing, contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity; indeed, on occasion, by actually being just.

The rhetoric and the rules of a society are something a great deal more than sham. In the same moment they may modify, in profound ways, the behaviour of the powerful, and mystify the powerless. They may disguise the true realities of power, but, at the same time, they may curb that power and check its intrusions

As someone working in a free legal clinic serving low-income clients I see this daily. I fully appreciate the ways in which laws and state institutions -in my jurisdiction- provide real protections to workers against their bosses, tenants against landlords, and consumers against corporations. However, at the same time I cannot lose sight of the fact that in every excess of Capitalism that the state shields the working class from, the state enforces the class-domination from which it arises; class-domination whose other (legal) immiseration are protected by state power.

One of the greatest strengths of neoliberal reformists in Iran is that they are the side less associated with decades of violently enforced moralism, especially the mandatory hijab. For millions of Iranians striking back against the Guidance Patrol at home is a more prescient issue than their country’s policy abroad.

Ideally there’d be a Socialist voice supporting multipolarism, the working class, and freedom from moralistic dictates, but the very forces aligned with Jalili have plenty of responsibility for such a voice not existing.

Sir Keith has delivered a whopping 1.7% higher vote share for Labour than they got in 2019, when Sir Keith intentionally sabotaged Corbyn with his “People’s Vote” maneuver, and 6% less than Corbyn in 2017.

Contrary to Liberal interpretations, this ruling doesn’t change much. If the President was capable of openly assassinating politicians, or launching a military coup to overthrow democracy, they would not be deterred by 9 people in black robes telling them they may be liable to criminal charges in the future for doing so.

Until the Chief Justice gets their own division to command, the Court only has as much power over the Federal Government as they are allowed to, which is invariably determined by their usefulness to politically dominant factions of Capital. See what happened after the Marshall Court made a decision impeding the interests early-American Capital had in forcefully dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their land.

I still believe the most incisive commentary on the Law’s function in society was given by Marx. He succinctly attacks the Liberal idea that all social structures (economics, politics, etc.) arise from the letter of the law. Rather:

Society is not founded upon the law; this is a legal fiction. On the contrary, the law must be founded upon society, it must express the common interests and needs of society — as distinct from the caprice of the individuals — which arise from the material mode of production prevailing at the given time. This Code Napoleon, which I am holding in my hand, has not created modern bourgeois society. On the contrary, bourgeois society, which emerged in the eighteenth century and developed further in the nineteenth, merely finds its legal expression in this Code. As soon as it ceases to fit the social conditions, it becomes simply a bundle of paper.

The ruling is hilarious. An Indiana mayor awarded a $1.1 million dollar contract to a truck dealership, then went to the dealership afterwards and said “I need money.” He asked for $15k in cash, and was given $13k.

According to the SCOTUS this is not bribery because a bribe is an award for pre-agreed actions that is quid pro quo, and maybe the dealer just happened to feel generous to the person responsible for awarding them a lucrative contract after the fact. Only money in burlap sacks with dollar bills on them, with a person handing it over with a contract saying “this is a bribe” count as a bribe. Anything else is just a sparkling gratuity.

A suspended sentence doesn’t mean you get to walk free. It means you’re released into the community but subject to a probation order which if broken will have you sent to prison. The conditions always have a “peace and good behaviour” obligation but can also include onerous restrictions. Anyone who works with offenders knows that the conditions imposed by a suspended sentence can be deeply intrusive and severely curtail people’s privacy and freedom of movement, to the point where they may sometimes be harsher than fines or even imprisonment

Providing for suspended sentences for first offences is consistent with the criminal justice system’s commitment to rehabilitation, even if it arguably is of a lesser deterrent value and doesn’t satisfy the desire for vengeance among much of the public.

I’m unfamiliar with Ireland’s criminal law, and the judge may have been more lenient than they had to be, but its not impossible that there’s enough mitigating factors that the sentence will not get appealed. If Crotty breaks the terms of his suspended sentence, and commits a similar act in the future, his sentence will almost certainly be considerably harsher.

I used to think that one of the worst takeaway of the Nuclear Arms race was that if you do nothing about an existential threat to humanity long enough, it will eventually go away. Now I realize the average Western leader who lived through the Cold War has decided its real meaning is that the risks of nuclear weapons don’t need to be taken seriously because there’s no chance they’ll ever be used.

Did Yemen ever learn why the US doesn’t have free healthcare?

nothing is sacred and everyone is expendable

Except for Israeli genociders, who we must arm and maintain the most steadfast support for. Also if you ever say otherwise I’ll turn into the most racist person in the world

Ukraine’s deindustrialization since the fall of communism is incredible.

In 1992 Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse of the USSR, with manufacturing holding a 45% share of GDP. By 2022 that share declined to just 8%, with Ukraine transformed into an outpost of American agri-business. One whose only remaining industrial policies were to sell off what was left of state enterprises while praying to become the cheap place for Western tech to outsource.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=UA

It speaks to a deeper fault in liberalism, made obvious by the existence of homelessness.

A person is free only to the extent in which they have access to a physical space in which they can exercise that freedom. It would be absurd to say that I have freedom of speech, if they were banned from speaking freely at home, in public, or anywhere but inside my head. Without a place in which a person can go to and enjoy the protections of a right, they do not actually have that right.

A core tenet of classical Liberalism is that the only place in which our government recognizes the sanctity of a person’s ability to exercise their rights, is upon their own land. On public spaces, or the property of others, the exercise of rights may be readily curtailed, and always have been. This fits in nicely with the traditional Liberal notion that only people with property are citizens, whose rights deserve to be safeguarded.

However, for the homeless their ‘freedoms’ are illusory because they have no personal space to physically go to and enjoy it. Instead, the liberty of a homeless person to do anything (ie: sleep and eat) is strictly curtailed to the very limited range of activities permitted on public lands. And their right to protection from certain things (ie: invasions of privacy and involuntary search/seizure) similarly has virtually no guarantees.

This is also something I always emphasize when discussions of banning certain activities from any public spaces comes up. To ban encampments on all public property is to deprive our society’s most vulnerable of any right to shelter themselves from the elements, or sleep undisturbed, as they will no longer have legal access to places in which they can shelter or sleep.

One of the biggest frontline updates this past month, which UA and RU commentators have discussed at length, was the capture of a single restaurant in Avdiivka.

Its like a parody of ww1 battle reports

I completely agree with you, and on a related note the almost uniformly higher rates of transit usage in Canada compared to the US (with the exception of the massive anomaly that is NYC) is an interesting source for discussion, and one which cannot be explained by disparities in urban transit infrastructure alone.

That almost all Canadian cities have a rapid transit system of some kind certainly helps their numbers, but even cities in the US with considerably better systems, by most metrics, tend to underperform their Canadian peers. For instance, in 2016 the Canadian capital of Ottawa (a massive city filled with suburbs and rural towns, which then had no rail system whatsoever, and whose slow, unreliable, and infrequent buses are a constant source of complaint) had a higher transit modal share than Washington DC or Chicago, both mostly dense urban cores with extensive heavy rail metros.

I was about to type up an entire essay on the topic, but to be brief I see the cause of Canada’s relatively more transit oriented populace to come down to the fact that White flight/suburbanization didn’t happen to quite the same extent there (the reasons for which you could write a book on). Something which ensured that downtowns remained hubs of jobs and people, rather than wastelands of parking lots. Simultaneously, because urban centres weren’t imagined as places of a terrifying racialized other, to quite the same extent as in the US, transit was not demonized as much and middle-class Canadians were consequently more willing to allow themselves (and their children) to use it.