SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
“Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back.”
Genuinely an incredible comment, I love it. It’s the first time that I remember that a lemmitor has come in, guns ablazing, to the news megathread.
Now that it turns out that Iran won’t, actually, be wiping Israel off the map and is in fact moving in the opposite direction
Nobody said that Iran would wipe Israel off the map. We discussed that Iran does in fact possess the ability to do this via targetting Israeli infrastructure and especially nuclear power plants to cause Israel to become unlivable, as the successful strikes on Israeli airfields months ago proved, but that Iran would probably not do this and would allow Hezbollah and Yemen to do so instead so as to not risk millions of Iranians dying in nuclear strikes (as Israel can’t really nuke southern Lebanon without also irradiating themselves, and besides, Hezbollah has tunnel networks). Iran gaining a reformist presidential candidate does not meaningfully shift this outlook, because Hezbollah, by itself, can make Israel unlivable. It does not require Iran’s help in that regard, and that’s implying that the Iranian President will turn into a total comprador and give up on Palestine (which would be untenable and self-destructive for Iran).
First it was Hamas that was going to destroy Israel
This is a wild misrepresentation of the argument. Hamas, by itself does not have the capacity to destroy the Israeli military. The whole Resistance, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, and various Iraqi and Syrian groups, do actually have that ability. Hezbollah has hundreds of thousands of missiles and Ansarallah can blockade Israeli ports (source: the last 7 months). It is also extremely ahistorical to claim that Hamas, and indeed also Hezbollah, should have been able to destroy Israel in 9-10 months, considering that, if you study history, you would know that anti-colonial wars last for several years, and Israel has the full support of the global military hegemon which spends trillions on weaponry every year. Claiming that Hamas has lost already is like being in 1967 and claiming that North Vietnam has already lost and that they should surrender, and that thinking they could possibly beat the almighty United States is utter copium.
Now you’re all stuck doing mental gymnastics trying to rationalize taking potshots at soldiers in a bombed out shithole as a “victory” and the successful occupation of half of Gaza and the further seizure of territory in the West Bank as a “crushing defeat”.
Here’s a quick quiz for all the Hexbears and lemmitors who may visit this thread. Where are tunnels located? Are they a) on the surface; b) in the sky; or c) under the ground? Second question: where are Israeli soldiers located in Gaza when they have “successfully occupied” it? If your answer to the first and second questions are different, consider what the implication of that is.
Hamas’ strategy from day 1 was to lure Israel into Gaza and then attrit them via tunnel warfare. This is profoundly obvious. The commanders of Hamas carried out a bombastic, exceptionally humiliating mission against Israel on October 7th, and then captured hostages and brought them back into Gaza to force Israel to come in and try and take them back. Why did Hamas spend years digging tunnels under Gaza if not for this purpose? Even the US admits that Hamas is still mostly intact (I’ve heard upwards of 70% of Hamas remains undestroyed) and hundreds of Israeli vehicles have been destroyed and hundreds more soldiers have been killed. Thousands have been injured, either physically or mentally.
And then Yemen was going to destroy the US Navy, and then that didn’t happen and you repeated your gaslighting trick to pretend you didn’t say that and smugly proclaiming “of course that wasn’t going to happen”, as you redefine victory yet again, this time to mean sinking random cargo ships.
Nobody on Hexbear actually believed that Yemen was going to destroy the US Navy, though we hoped they might sink a ship or two. What did happen is that many Westerners online were like “Haha! Yemen is about to find out why we don’t have healthcare when we bomb them to shreds!” and now, Yemen is still perfectly intact and maintaining the blockade. Maintaining that blockade involves “sinking random cargo ships” if they violate sanctions on Israel. Westerners, not Hexbear, shifted the goalposts of victory after Operation Prosperity Guardian collapsed. They are the ones who convinced themselves that actually Yemen wanted to destroy the US Navy and not just enforce a blockade, so they could save face in their defeat, just like how they convince themselves that Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine and not just save the Donbass from Ukraine’s genocide, as well as other Russia-friendly border regions.
Now it’s Hezbollah that’s going to destroy Israel. When that doesn’t happen you’ll all be back on your bullshit with your lying and gaslighting.
Israel is the one who keeps delaying their offensives against Hezbollah. Once it was going to be in spring; then mid-June; now late July. I wonder why that is? By the way, Hezbollah has forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers to retreat away from the border, and has wiped out Israeli border infrastructure. The true Israel-Lebanon border now lies several kilometers into Israel. There is no possible definition by which Israel is currently winning against Hezbollah.
this time claiming you meant that Israel would gradually collapse from “contradictions” - a term constantly used but never defined.
On Contradiction, by Mao Tse-tung, 1937. Hope this helps.
Why do settler-colonial states not exist anymore (aside from Israel) despite their commonality a century or two ago? Weird question, huh? Maybe the contradictions unique to settler states has something to do with it, and authors like Fanon have explored these interactions in detail when he took part in the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted… 8 years. Not 9 months. And the Algerians experienced over a million deaths, while Palestine has so far experienced hundreds of thousands (the figure will probably be over a million by the time this is all over) And the oppressed people still won?! Huh!? How is that possible? Algeria was a “bombed out shithole” and they still, somehow, won?! North Korea had every single above-ground structure destroyed - American warplanes ran out of targets and had to dump their bombs in the sea to land - and they still survived as a state?!?! What the fuck?!
See you all in 10 years when America is still the global hegemon, Israel still exists, and the global socialist revolution hasn’t started.
America will indeed still be the global hegemon in 10 years, and the global socialist revolution probably won’t have started by then. We are talking about geopolitical changes on the scale of decades, not months or years. The tiny attention span of liberals is not our fault, and claiming that these massive changes will take place so quickly is, once again, ahistorical and idiotic. It required the 1914-1945 Crisis for the USA to unseat the UK as global hegemon, so it’ll probably take at least 30 years for China to unseat the US. I am currently in my 20s, and I expect to be in my 40s or 50s by the time that the dollar has fallen. Dedollarization will be a painstakingly slow process involving several leaders rotating in and out in Russia, China, Iran, the US, and several other important countries, with changes in strategy, victories and defeats, color revolutions and socialist ones, and definitely a couple financial crashes. Xi, Putin, and Biden will have been dead for decades by the time the American Empire has collapsed. I know liberals can only think short term, but you must widen your politics to the medium and long term too if you wish to be as correct as Hexbear consistently is.
I do think that Israel won’t exist by then, though. I think this is their terminal crisis, though they might hold on for a year or two while their society disintegrates and people are unwilling to move there due to lack of safety; we’re already seeing internal disagreements and contradictions heighten among the Zionists. Short-term changes in the West Bank are them rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, in order to temporarily appease scared settlers who will not or cannot return to their homes near Gaza or near the Lebanon border. Israel could not exist without the propaganda to support its existence, and “plans to settle Gaza after the war” is like Hitler’s daydreams inside his Berlin bunker of one day making a lovely set of cities for the ubermensch inside eastern Europe, while the bangs of Soviet artillery approach closer and closer.
It’s good entertainment watching a group of people who continually, unceasingly eat shit day in and day out make nonstop pronouncements about the inevitability of their global revenge.
An interesting description of the people over on reddit, but I have to agree. Has Russia collapsed from the 11th, or 12th, or whichever sanctions package we’re on? Have Western weapons caused the collapse of the Russian army, which has experienced 100 million dead soldiers due to human wave attacks? Has the Chinese government fallen from the economic changes ongoing there, as they consistently claim will happen imminently? Has Hamas and Hezbollah been defeated yet, with armed resistance stopping, as Israel, the “second best military on the planet” promised this operation would only take a few months? Has the DPRK, or Venezuela, or Cuba fallen? Has Yemen’s blockade been stopped, with Red Sea traffic returning to normal yet? How’s Biden doing? Have the walls finally closed in on Trump?
folks, we can’t stop winning. I told everybody in this megathread that they’d be tired of being right all the time, and look where we are now.
now we have lemmitors trying to convince us that we’re wrong. the same people who said “well well well, I guess Yemen is gonna find out why we don’t have healthcare! we’re gonna bomb them back into the stone age and break their blockade!” and we replied “no, the US is incapable of doing this” are now like “oh, well, TECHNICALLY Yemen didn’t destroy the US Navy, so you have been owned and are wrong” while the blockade remains firmly in place.
“haha! looks like our aircraft carrier HASN’T sunk after all!” as it fled in fear back to the US and away from one of the poorest nations on the planet, the US navy the most embarrassed its been since the end of the Cold War.
“Israel is gonna crush Hamas before Christmas, the IDF is one of the best militaries on the planet!” has its goalposts shifted to “oh yeah, Hexbears? Hamas still hasn’t defeated the IDF despite us being 9 months into the conflict” as if anti-colonial wars of attrition throughout history haven’t lasted for years (Vietnam, Korea, etc)
“you told us dedollarization was going to happen, and the dollar has barely shifted.” while it took decades and two world wars with tens of millions dead for the pound sterling to be overthrown and the dollar put in its place. we aren’t talking about the yuan making up 60% of world trade by 2025, we’re talking about a basket of currencies making up a majority of world trade by maybe 2040, in the optimistic scenario.
I recommend you read theory and study history, and perhaps then you’d be as correct as us and stop having to constantly shift your goalposts. the only major event that many of us have been wrong about is the initial invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and that event has recalibrated many of our expectations and lead us to seek new interpretations and predictions of events so as to prevent further mistakes. in fact, the only times since then that we’ve been meaningfully wrong has been when we went with the mainstream liberal analysis out of a lack of any better ideas (such as when people were predicting that Russia would quickly occupy Ukraine in only a few months at the beginning of the war). once it became clear that Russia was settling in for a slower, attritional conflict, we were in broad agreement that the war would last a while, many months or a few years, merely disagreeing on the exact timeframe of Ukrainian collapse.
the bodies stacked high in Central Park, fallen lanyards crunching underfoot. Biden stares on as the guillotine comes down on the last anti-Bidenist inside the democratic establishment. Harris looks petrified by his side, spared in return for a solemn vow to never try and take his place
If we’re going by “the funniest outcome always happens” rules in the US election, then honestly, I think the funniest thing that could happen now is that Biden continues to run for a second term and then wins against Trump. Can you imagine the internal battles between the people currently doubting Biden and wanting Harris to come along and save them, and the Biden True Believers? “No, no, I never said I thought Biden would lose in my article back in July, I just thought he would have a lower chance than Harris! I’m still good!” Dozens of staffers and journalists fired in the Malarkey Purges.
then Biden probably enacts Project 2025 as a pre-emptive compromise for more money for infrastructure spending, and then that spending is blocked by the Republicans anyway, the libs praise Biden for reaching across the aisle and giving the Supreme Court a 9-0 conservative majority, and then the Heritage Foundation has to invent some even more insidious Project 2029 where Trump is gonna make orange face dye mandatory and makes incursions onto golf courses punishable by execution because they’re running out of ideas about how to make America even more fascist
I mean, for them to stop believing in their ideology, they’d have to find something else to believe in. What would that even be? Most of them are probably innoculated against ideas left of Mussolini due to the constant government programming happening on reddit, so they’d either become anarchobidenists and believe 95% of the same things by saying to themselves “anarchism is when you hate authoritarian governments (read: governments who are resistant to being totally rolled over by American monopolies) and love western democracies. who the fuck is kropotkin? gelderloos? I’m listening to a 3 hour video essay by a breadtuber”
or, I guess, they’d turn even further conservative and/or libertarian and start frothing at the mouth about the federal reserve and age of consent laws
it’s like somebody was challenged to come up with the least democratic system possible that could still just barely qualify as a democracy on the slightest technicality, which makes it even more entertaining to watch the “WE MUST DEFEND DEMOCRACY FROM THE TYRANTS OF THE WORLD” people rave on the media.
even by the very strange standards of western liberals, I genuinely believe that Russia is a more democratic country than the UK.