Haha, that sounds about right and actually similar in composition to this private QQ chat group I’m in with a bunch of Chinese boomer leftists.

The admins probably have to do their 15 min interviews with 19 year old kids to justify why Hexbear should be saved from the restructure.

That’s Russian flag, no?

They finally realized how many chuds there are in the comment section lol.

To be honest it’s one of the best comment sections I’ve seen in a site, and I’ve learned a lot from the boomers there over time. Will miss the place for sure.

DOGE cut off funding, now we have to fund ourselves. Thousands of unemployed USAID posters right now.

Are you sure this is not DOGE cutting the funding off like they did with USAID?

Unfortunately many people in China see him as some kind of visionary genius (he’s an engineer!) who’s going to fix America with his genius optimization plan to weed out inefficiency in the government bureaucracy lol. I’ve even seen people wrote that maybe China should have its own DOGE lmao.

Also his Tesla factory in Shanghai actually pays twice as well in terms of salary and benefits (including medical insurance, pension plans and annual leave) compared to the other Chinese EV competitors, so it’s has quite a reputation there because many people hate the long working hours very commonly found in Chinese factory jobs. Foreign multinational corporations usually pay much better and less demand for overtime work. It’s all relative it seems.

We are fast approaching a new era when people no longer have to learn anything or to make any important decision when they can simply ask a word prediction black box what to do.

Funny that so much of science fiction had predicted that humans created super sentient artificial intelligence being and got destroyed, when reality is much more farcical than that: humans start worshipping an autocomplete algorithm that sounded like a real human, and just like in the superstitious past when oracles were consulted, now we let a word prediction algorithm trained on internet garbage to rule our lives.

Let’s cut through the bullshit and say it for what it is:

The Democrats won’t “resist” this time because the role of fascism is to discipline labor/voters - here, the goal is to discipline the voters who think they can just sit out of an election because of various reasons like Palestine and refuse to follow the system and vote for Kamala.

Jeffries has already said it as clear as he could have: “what can we do? they control the senate, house and presidency” = “you didn’t vote for us”

They’re not going to put up a fight this time, at least not until the voters have been sufficiently disciplined.

In their view, the voters were children throwing tantrum, and so they’re gonna punish the children by letting them see for themselves “what happens when you choose to defy the rules we set and don’t want to let the Adults in the Room to be in charge. let’s see how long you’d last”.

If enough voters are scared enough by Trump to start voting for the Democrats again, then the system is merely functioning as intended: fascism as a disciplinary tool.

Preparations underway for visits by Xi to Moscow, by Putin to Beijing — Kremlin

MOSCOW, February 10. /TASS/. Mutual visits by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to Moscow and Beijing, respectively, are being arranged to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Victory in World War II, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has told the media.

A celebration will be held in Moscow on May 9 to mark the anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, while Beijing will host a celebration in September to honor the anniversary of the end of World War II.

“Yes, such visits are in preparation. We attach great importance to the symbolism of these dates, both in remembering those significant events and recognizing the contributions of our countries to the fight against Nazism, as well as to our bilateral relations. This is why we are actively working on these visits,” Peskov stated.

Russia’s ambassador to China Igor Morgulov said earlier that Xi Jinping accepted an invitation to take part in celebrations in Moscow on May 9 marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War and in turn invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to China for the celebrations due in early September.

Well for anything like this to work, the securities issued by this new fund will have to be backed by the Fed itself, just like how it guarantees the treasury bills/notes/bonds issued by the US Treasury Department, since US treasuries are the safest long-term investment one can make as long as you bet that the US won’t default.

Otherwise investors might as well choose to gamble in the stock and bond markets that offer potentially much higher yields.

To be fair, we don’t even know what Trump is going to do, and for all we know it could be one of his stupid ideas about using tariffs (how??) to finance the SWF.

I’m just saying that this could potentially be used to reframe the negative perception about “debt and deficit” without having to educate the masses about why the national debt and the deficits aren’t necessarily bad.

If we’re being honest, it really is lol. If someone invents a time machine in the future, one of the missions will be to stop Hudson from publishing his book.

According to Hudson himself, the US establishment fell into panic mode when Nixon abruptly ended the Bretton Woods in 1971, and presses reported that the American century is about to be over (amidst the other crises like Vietnam War, civil rights movement, trade union movements, the international isolation of the US that would follow in the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the oil price shock and stagflation from 1973 onwards etc…)

If you read the Foreword from the 2nd edition onward, Hudson wrote that the State Department bought two thousand copies of the book to study how to get out of the empire’s own contradictions. Super imperialism allows the US to export its industries to the rest of the world while crushing the domestic working class movements at home, and real wages began to stagnate since.

This book was published on January 1st, 1972.

I saw someone asked about Trump’s sovereign wealth fund a few days ago, and here are some very superficial thoughts about it.

Of course, as Stephenie Kelton already wrote in her blog, SWF is completely non-sensical for the US, who is the one who runs huge trade deficits such that other countries can accumulate the dollars the US spent (by exporting their own goods to earn the dollars) to store in their wealth funds.

In other words, the US can simply print the money it needs to spend, and storing “wealth” in a fund while you are not running a surplus is a completely ridiculous idea.

However, let’s get a bit creative about it. From The Class Politics of the Dollar System by Feygin and Leusder, an interesting paragraph stood out near the end:

Thirdly, the United States should begin to view its deficit not as a problem but as a public resource, and to manage it like energy exporters use sovereign wealth funds to avoid Dutch Disease. To administer this public good, the US should establish a series of public banks to fund specific economic investment initiatives. The Federal Reserve would guarantee the debt of these institutions by discounting it at a penalty rate for reserves or United States Treasury debt or dollar reserves. These securities could thus trade at a slightly higher yield than treasuries and provide investors with an alternative product to general purpose treasuries. The liabilities of these investment vehicles would provide global collateral and promote financial stability while also offsetting the effects of dollar hegemony on domestic industry via permanent, active investment.

So, in theory, here’s what the US can do: Trump’s SWF can offer its debt (guaranteed by the Federal Reserve) at a slightly higher yield than US treasuries. So when the US spends its money as usual, and when the surplus dollars are absorbed back to the US government, instead of buying treasuries, investors could choose and even prefer to purchase the SWF debt offering a slightly better return. Then, the US government can use these new “wealth” from the SWF to fund active investment in domestic industries, thereby circumventing the “national debt” problem.

Notice that nothing has really changed here, what changed is merely the re-framing of US deficit spending from the federal government “racking up national debt” (bad! scary!) into “investing them in wealth fund” (good! prudent!) with extra steps. There is absolutely no need to do anything like this but this roundabout way might play better for the media and the people’s perception of how the government manages its budget.

Again it all depends on the mechanisms of the proposed SWF (no details yet, and I also haven’t double checked the logic of the flow yet), whether the US financial infrastructure actually allows this (I’m not an expert) and whether it is in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to do so.

I think the accepted narrative now is that Mao tried to speedrun the revolutions and ended up with a tragedy.

In any case, from a historical point of view, the Cultural Revolution led to the rise of liberal reformers and was a deeply traumatic event for many people including many of the post-Mao era leaders.

That’s why it’s such a sensitive topic that nobody wants to discuss, and many of the Red Guards are still alive today.

No they won’t, these are in fact further evidence that the millions of voters who sat out of the election were AT FAULT for refusing to vote for Kamala. They were the ones who RUINED the pristine functioning of the American democracy.

Expect maximum smugness from the libs when minorities are threatened by fascist gangs, when immigrants are getting deported (“Latinos voted for Trump! Let’s see how they like it now!”), when Gaza is going to fare much worse under Trump’s plan etc.

In fact, the more suffering there are, the more vindicated they will feel about themselves - a self-reinforcing loop that will make them double down on voting for the Democrats and bullying the people who refused to do so.

I have commented the other day that these are looking more and more like the early phase of Cultural Revolution, but with an American “twist” (someone suggested I should just call it “Cultural Revolution with American characteristics” lol): from the anti-intellectualism, to the appointment of young kids to smash up the establishment, the obsession with accusations of “DEI” and “Marxist” elements within academia and federal bureaucracies, Elon Musk acting more and more like Lin Biao, the establishment of DOGE (committee) that disrupts and intervenes with the functioning of governmental bodies, potential fracturing of MAGA factions into infighting etc.

If we follow the historical progression, we should see Elon leading his Bazinga Guards disrupting and smashing up the old system, the banishing of Federal Bureaucrats and “DEI” Academics into the “countryside”, then when the pandemonium reaches its height, Trump will lead the Movement to Criticize Elon Musk and start reining in the commotion, paving the way for the return of formerly exiled Bureaucrats to take charge of the reform process and completing the transition of the ruling party into a New Republican Party with Democratic characteristics that will go on to win in a landslide in the 2028 election.

Obviously the context is different so it won’t play out exactly like this (consider this a fictional imagining of the future), but from the perspective of an objective historical process, it is interesting to see the American political system instituting its own revolution to resolve the heightened contradictions (or to redirect the contradictions) that had led to the rise of the MAGA movement, and perhaps this is a necessary process for American capitalism to fully transition into the next stage of Fascism and for the rewiring of the role of the traditional two-party system.

What you need to understand about ICE is that its role is to set up barriers such that only young able-bodied men can end up across the border, while filtering out the weak, the sick and the disabled.

If you think the bourgeoisie is going to give up its slave labor, then you don’t understand how the American economy works. They simply don’t want to take in refugees and immigrants who do not have the capacity to perform their function as slave labor.

The ICE raids are to appease the chuds, while making sure the barriers are well set up such that only the most “valuable” labor will brave crossing the borders.

At least the kid who won the Vesuvius Challenge prize by using AI to reveal the letters from unopened ancient Roman scrolls seems like he’s doing some interesting stuff.