I’m positive they’re going to side with the west enough to matter in the coming struggle. Oh they’ll keep their options open, they’ll pretend to be “independent” because it makes the west court them more and lets them play both sides but when it comes down to it and the west gives them a knife to plant in China’s back for minimal benefit of their own they’ll do it in a heartbeat. They see their rise as tied to destroying China, as a zero-sum calculation, either they take industry from China and become a great power or China retains it and they get nothing.

They labor under the same kind of ignorance that the bourgeoisie of Russia had after the USSR was illegally dissolved, namely that they would be let into the big anglo bourgeoisie club and rise to the heights of it as equals. But that moment where they realize otherwise could be decades away, the west has utility in keeping them a country with a vast gulf between the workers and the wealthy and in keeping them thinking its in their own interest to side with the west enough of the time to cause troubles for China, for Russia, for the emerging anti-imperialist world order.

India is IMO a fair-weather enemy for the anti-imperialist bloc. They’re not like the US or Europe where there is little in common and a direct threat to their hegemony from the rise of BRICS+ but when the going gets tough they’ll assume a neutral pose or do some things to appeal to the anti-imperialist bloc before tacking back again towards sabotaging it.

It depends on what kind of mask. If you’re wearing an N95/KN94 mask then you’re protecting yourself (and if it doesn’t have a valve also others if you happen to have it) by filtering 95/94% of viral particles.

Though I agree it could attract unwanted attention and hassle in some areas. Even in a place like California I’ve been followed around stores for a minute or so for still masking by employees who I guess thought I was there to shoplift but I’ve never been seriously confronted about it. I’ve had a cowardly guy shout from a dozen feet away how I should take it off and some rambling nonsense but I just stared at him and he stormed off, I’ve had a handful of guys tell me it’s a shame I’m wearing it because they’d like to see my “pretty face” (ugh), but most people don’t say anything. I’m sure many anti-maskers resent me but given most of the public has joined them in giving up I think they’re content to just feel smugly superior and say shit behind my back which I can live with.

Short of the US getting pulled into an extended war elsewhere it cannot extricate itself from until China is too much of a peer power to even risk a fight it is going to fight China as part of the larger push of decoupling, containment, humiliation. Almost certainly over Taiwan, they don’t need to win per se, just inflict damage, bleed China and rally the western world and any hangers-on (India probably) to their side for sanctions and cutting economic and cultural ties as they do to China and Chinese people and culture what they did to Russia with the Ukraine war but much worse.

China just needs to be prepared and accept this. They need to prepare for war, they need to prepare for the possibility of cold war, of being completely cut off from the west and make plans for how they’ll restructure their economy to survive that if it comes. They need to build out their nuclear deterrent as much as possible to deter the US from a decapitating strike attempt and they need to prepare for a much more hostile and western empowered India on their border.

Somewhat. Russia doesn’t produce a lot of the things the US produces. For wheat and certain other things sure, but for soybeans, for fresh green vegetables, for nuts, for fruit? A lot of that stuff Russia doesn’t have the right climate for whereas the US has a uniquely diverse climate that allows them to from California to the plains and mid-west to the south to the northeast grow a variety of cultivars spanning everything from cheap corn and wheat to most every type of green vegetables, roots, nuts, fruits, etc. California alone has enough fertile soil and farmland to feed hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, maybe a billion if supplemented with grain staples from elsewhere.

As I said China won’t starve thanks to their own work in this area and their friends in Russia but well the Soviet people didn’t starve but they also didn’t have supermarkets with fresh tropical fruit or often an abundance of typical fruits and certain types of vegetables were not in the fullest supply due to the constraints of what they could grow. Agriculture has advanced somewhat but there are still limits and being cut off from the US and its incredible amount of produce will certainly drive up prices for Chinese people. This is why I think the CPC had that push to reduce food waste. If this comes to pass the Chinese people will need to be a bit more frugal with food.

For China to truly replace the US they need to free from the grips of US hegemony and maintain good trade relations with parts of the global south in Asia and Latin America which is still a work in progress. As I said as long as US controls global finance they can cut off trade or make it very expensive and for perishable goods like food that’s a real problem because you can’t afford another stop in your supply chain in another intermediate country and routing through shell companies for all of this stuff and even for stuff you can it introduces another point of spoilage and rot.

This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: !covid@hexbear.net

I still wear a mask. I wouldn’t necessarily wear one or keep one on if I was walking around a lightly populated park or down the sidewalk but I would before going into a store or a crowd (even outdoors) or any enclosed space with people like a train or station.

I’m not sure how mask wearing compares by country. In most of Asia it seems like it’s been normalized for decades for people who are feeling ill or have certain conditions to wear the blue cloth medical masks so I doubt in most of Asia it’s a big deal in most situations compared to the west where you have anti-mask reactionary sentiment and ideology that favors individual recklessness rather than responsibility.

Consider that Russia still trades with the west and even sells them vital materials like titanium and winter gas and we’re 2 years in now to the conflict.

I think it depends entirely on whether the US cuts China off first. China needs US food to enjoy a higher quality of living and the US exports a lot to them. If that continues China has reason not to because they want the food supply to continue. They won’t face famine or mass starvation or anything but quality of life would badly dip in that area without US food exports and if the US does that Europe may follow.

If China is cut off anyways from US and European food exports then they have less reason not to act. Sadly even if they act it likely won’t really destroy the west. It’ll hurt the consumer market and drive prices through the roof for electronics among other things and cause some shortages but it’s likely the US will establish alternative supply lines through Indian middlemen (India it turns out is selling ammo to Italy which is handed directly to Ukraine and they know about this and are fine with it) just as Russia has done.

China also doesn’t have alternative markets for goods. Their economy will be in huge trouble if they lose the US and Europe (and if they lose the US they lose their vassal the EU). Africa becoming large enough to buoy them is still a decade away or more.

So China has no way of shutting out the US while remaining open to the rest of the world. The US by contrast has decades of experience doing sanctions and tracking supply chains and as long as they control SWIFT and have dollar hegemony they can force others to comply to enough of a degree that China is probably hurt a bit worse in a vacuum.

Imperialist and colonizer nations are truly sick.

You see when US imperialists scream about China being a threat in our supply chains it’s because THEY have put hardware implants targeting others in supply chains they control and as they are good and China is evil China must be willing to do the same to them even more-so. Same with this kind of shit. They look at this and don’t think “my goodness are we the baddies?”, they instead have a freakout of “what if our enemies do this to us? omg, China is gonna use their products to do terrorism” despite zero evidence the Chinese or Russians, etc would ever sink to their level or have ever done so.

Again and again throughout history westerners do the most reprehensible, terroristic, war-criminal shit to others and despite their enemies having no history of doing that assume they’re just waiting to do the same to them the second they get the chance. Projection.

I’ve heard the axis of resistance is getting fed up with waiting but I’m not sure they’ll act even on this.

Oh sure they’ll lob some missiles but they’re stuck in a situation where there is an unhinged and unstable apartheid colony whose leader faces possible prison, certainly loss of power the moment this “crisis” is over so must keep escalating to keep it going along-with the widespread condemnation of them for carrying out a genocide meaning they want to play the victim, they want a war against them to break out so they can cry for pity and the censorship dial in the west can be turned up even further with ever more hysterical cries of anti-semitism for any criticism of “israel” while “they’re fighting for their lives and existence against jew haters who attack them for no reason”. So it wants to draw the US into a war, wants a regional war, wants a chance to crush and put down at least one element arrayed against it permanently.

Many feel however if they don’t get this war they look increasingly unhinged and become increasingly isolated and the bad PR just keeps on building beyond the ability of the west to tamp down. However there’s a real question what the end-game of that waiting play is. The west isn’t going to get ashamed soon enough to save the Palestinian people or Gaza, they’re really all in on defending the zionist regime and screaming down any criticism as anti-semitism while downplaying it even existing outside of a small group of “extremists” via their media. The US clearly isn’t willing to reign in the zionist regime. Trump or Harris neither is going to change things. And the fact is the zionist regime can keep escalating, they can bomb daycares and children’s hospitals and just keep upping the ante all the way to using a nuclear weapon if they really want to in order to attempt to provoke a response.

So if they do nothing they invite more attacks and attempts to goad them to draw the US in. If they respond they risk more escalation and war with the US involved. “israel” is doing salami-slicing tactics, they do something that demands a response, perhaps several things and claim they were for self-defense then sit back and wait, let things cool just a little then go back in for more, never letting the heat really drop.

The negotiations are a smokescreen for the zionist regime to carry out their genocide under yet it also gives cover for these actors to do nothing, to not escalate to war, to claim they need to wait and do it this way.

I will say one thing going for the “wait” camp is that unrest in the settler-colony is rising. Mass protests are occurring right now and if that can continue and be magnified it may be possible to collapse it or bring it to its knees and force it to stop the genocide and all other hostilities but that’s a big if.

Sorry to say but not great opsec by Hezbollah. I get not opening all of them but they should have opened some at random just to check for the possibility of electronic hardware bugs. Unless it was packed into the lithium cells themselves which might be possible. Heck for all we know they found a way to mix explosive compounds into the lithium itself in a way not visible by physical inspection and only by chemical analysis and perhaps subjecting them to a higher than normal voltage or something triggers the reaction.

Edit I really am going to lean on the idea of either some sort of contaminant introduced into the lithium cells designed to make them more dangerous and likely to explode rather than just burn or some sort of explosive compound mixed in with them that required the battery be overloaded for it to go off.

Lithium batteries can be made to explode under the right conditions.

There’s one of two things going on here:

1. The pagers were perfectly normal off the shelf pagers, maybe with some minor flaw to safety or charging systems but nothing that was intentionally introduced. In this case the zionists found a way to hack the pagers (or potentially cell towers to broadcast something that causes the condition) to induce conditions leading to a battery fire/explosion. I don’t know enough about lithium batteries to say whether it’s suspicious so many of them exploded instead of catching fire though reports say at least some people noticed them getting strangely hot and discarded them which does suggest lithium battery overload.

2. The zionists knew about their use of pagers and in some way intercepted or replaced shipment of the ones they received with a batch that could be triggered to explode. For plausible deniability I’m guessing it was still a battery explosion rather than micro-explosives but we’ll have to see if any more info comes out.

Either one is problematic for Hezbollah’s communications though at least 2 can be addressed by attempting to do more secure sourcing (e.g. getting Iran to get a direct shipment through an intermediary from a Chinese firm and securing that to be shipped directly to Lebanon). If it’s 1 there’s not much they can do other than do an investigation on exactly how it happened and contact the manufacturers and hope one of them responds by offering a fixed model not vulnerable to this technique.

And there it is, the NATO-sexual weirdos come out to defend their precious imperialist war of aggression.

This makes two attempts on heads of state (or potential ones) by NATO loving /r/neoliberal types with the attack on the PM/president of Slovakia just because they expressed skepticism of supporting the Nazis in Ukraine.