#proxy war analysis

[narrative-theory]

Richard Wolff on the failure of the Ukraine conflict

Richard Wolff The Ukraine Conflict Is a Costly Failure

Richard Wolff on the failure of the Ukraine conflict.

[apas-95]

i largely agree with your politics but tbqh the way you present your ideas is not really radical, frankly it's worryingly eschatological/messianic. which sucks cuz otherwise you seen like a pretty rational individual

I don't think 'making claims about the future' is inherently messianic or eschatological, though I understand this is often a sticking point regarding Marxism - if we understand dialectical and historical materialism to be genuine scientific knowledge on human society, which we should, then the ability to predict future events with confidence is simply part and parcel of its existence as scientific knowledge.

The claim 'the tendency of the rate of profit to fall drives capital inevitably, through various ways, into cyclical crises of various scales, with the largest-scale examples consisting of global economic crises and world wars, the approach to which can be recognised and quantified prior' should be seen as no more messianic than 'the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere causes runaway heating which, while increasing the general planetary average temperature, alao leads to localised extreme weather events and rising sea levels, which can be recognised and quantified prior'.

Fundamentally, while a lot of people are willing to accept Marxism as providing *empirical* understanding of human society; that is, as a means to understand and decompose present and historical social issues; it is a lot harder for people to accept Marxism as providing genuinely scientific understanding of human society capable of predictive power. The reasons behind this are, generally, due to the nature of enlightenment philosophy and the bourgeois conception of science, wherein bourgeois social 'sciences' are incomplete, piecemeal, and reflexive (since, as Marxism demonstrates, a geneuine scientific analysis of human society, beginning from the political-economic basis of society, is harmful to bourgeois society).

When I say 'revolution in the imperial core is not going to occur today, but is an essential inevitability in the near future' I am saying, essentially, nothing more than the well-proven principle that 'revolution will occur where the chain of imperialism is weakest'. The condition for revolution in the imperial core is widespread revolution in the periphery states, the condition for widespread revolution in the periphery states is worldwide economic crisis and war, and the condition for worldwide economic crisis and war is the decline of imperial profits and the collapse of imperialist alliances. There is a fairly clear chain of events here, each of which has not only turned out in the past (the first world war being predictable before it ever occured) but is currently turning out in the present (look back even on my own blog towards discussions of inter-imperialist war and note that Marxists had predicted a ground war in Europe by 2025 well prior to the actual commencement of the Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, as well as the inevitability of an economic crash circa 2020).

As proletarians, there is, also, largely nothing that can be done to influence these events without the existence of large proletarian political organs capable of leading the proletariat in conscious political action - the existence of which is contingent on historical circumstances. The imperial core does not have serious proletarian organs with a mass basis, and will not have those organs until conditions exist to facilitate them - said conditions being the collapse of imperialist profits and the worsening of domestic repression in core states. This does not mean that the eventual emergence and victory of those organs will not require constant, arduous work from communists to build up and maintain, to whatevee degree is possible, a communist movement until fhat time arrives - but it means that, for instance: Marx in the 1800s was never going to lead a socialist state, leaving that work to a future Lenin.

Almost assuredly, no existing party in the USA will carry out revolution - but the leaders of the revolutionary movement that will emerge under the pressures of war against Russia, China, the EU imperialist bloc; and of climate crisis and economic collapse; will likely be the ones gaining experience in political work at this time. Marxism speaks of classes, not individuals - it is not, really, messianic to say 'the bourgeoisie will go to war when faced with economic crisis, and the proletariat will resist when faced with war', nor is it, I reason, very eschatological to say 'the world is going to get much, much worse in the near future, however, there is a possible way to escape the horrors of war that does not end in nuclear annihilation'.

However, if it's what you'd prefer, I could call myself God-queen of violent benevolence, and emanate a vision of revolutionary salvation - whichever works.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brian Merchant’s “Blood In the Machine”

Tomorrow (September 27), I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

In Blood In the Machine, Brian Merchant delivers the definitive history of the Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable":

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

History is written by the winners, and so you probably think of the Luddites as brainless, terrified, thick-fingered vandals who smashed machines and burned factories because they didn't understand them. Today, "Luddite" is a slur that means "technophobe" – but that's neither fair, nor accurate.

Luddism has been steadily creeping into pro-labor technological criticism, as workers and technology critics reclaim the term and its history, which is a rich and powerful tale of greed versus solidarity, slavery versus freedom.

The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods.

Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles. Factory owners made quiet deals with orphanages to send them very young children who were enslaved to work in their factories, where they were routinely maimed and killed by the new machines. Children who balked at the long hours or attempted escape were viciously beaten (the memoir of one former child slave became a bestseller and inspired Oliver Twist).

The craft guilds begged Parliament to act. They sent delegations, wrote petitions, even got Members of Parliament to draft legislation ordering enforcement of existing laws. Instead, Parliament passed laws criminalizing labor organizing.

The stakes were high. Economic malaise and war had driven up the price of life's essentials. Workers displaced by illegal machines faced starvation – as did their children. Communities were shattered. Workers who had apprenticed for years found themselves graduating into a market that had no jobs for them.

This is the context in which the Luddite uprisings began. Secret cells of workers, working with discipline and tight organization, warned factory owners to uphold the law. They sent letters and posted handbills in which they styled themselves as the army of "King Ludd" or "General Ludd" – Ned Ludd being a mythical figure who had fought back against an abusive boss.

When factory owners ignored these warnings, the Luddites smashed their machines, breaking into factories or intercepting machines en route from the blacksmith shops where they'd been created. They won key victories, with many factory owners backing off from automation plans, but the owners were deep-pocketed and determined.

The ruling Tories had no sympathy for the workers and no interest in upholding the law or punishing the factory owners for violating it. Instead, they dispatched troops to the factory towns, escalating the use of force until England's industrial centers were occupied by literal armies of soldiers. Soldiers who balked at turning their guns on Luddites were publicly flogged to death.

I got very interested in the Luddites in late 2021, when it became clear that everything I thought I knew about the Luddites was wrong. The Luddites weren't anti-technology – rather, they were doing the same thing a science fiction writer does: asking not just what a new technology does, but also who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Unsurprisingly, ever since I started publishing on this subject, I've run into people who have no sympathy for the Luddite cause and who slide into my replies to replicate the 19th Century automation debate. One such person accused the Luddites of using "state violence" to suppress progress.

You couldn't ask for a more perfect example of how the history of the Luddites has been forgotten and replaced with a deliberately misleading account. The "state violence" of the Luddite uprising was entirely on one side. Parliament, under the lackadaisical leadership of "Mad King George," imposed the death penalty on the Luddites. It wasn't just machine-breaking that became a capital crime – "oath taking" (swearing loyalty to the Luddites) also carried the death penalties.

As the Luddites fought on against increasingly well-armed factory owners (one owner bought a cannon to use on workers who threatened his machines), they were subjected to spectacular acts of true state violence. Occupying soldiers rounded up Luddites and suspected Luddites and staged public mass executions, hanging them by the dozen, creating scores widows and fatherless children.

The sf writer Steven Brust says that the test to tell whether someone is on the right or the left is simple: ask whether property rights are more important than human rights. If the person says "property rights are human rights," they are on the right.

The state response to the Luddites crisply illustrates this distinction. The Luddites wanted an orderly and lawful transition to automation, one that brought workers along and created shared prosperity and quality goods. The craft guilds took pride in their products, and saw themselves as guardians of their industry. They were accustomed to enjoying a high degree of bargaining power and autonomy, working from small craft workshops in their homes, which allowed them to set their own work pace, eat with their families, and enjoy modest amounts of leisure.

The factory owners' cause wasn't just increased production – it was increased power. They wanted a workforce that would dance to their tune, work longer hours for less pay. They wanted unilateral control over which products they made and what corners they cut in making those products. They wanted to enrich themselves, even if that meant that thousands starved and their factory floors ran red with the blood of dismembered children.

The Luddites destroyed machines. The factory owners killed Luddites, shooting them at the factory gates, or rounding them up for mass executions. Parliament deputized owners to act as extensions of law enforcement, allowing them to drag suspected Luddites to their own private cells for questioning.

The Luddites viewed property rights as just one instrument for achieving human rights – freedom from hunger and cold – and when property rights conflicted with human rights, they didn't hesitate to smash the machines. For them, human rights trumped property rights.

Their bosses – and their bosses' modern defenders – saw the demands to uphold the laws on automation as demands to bring "state violence" to bear on the wholly private matter of how a rich man should organize his business. On the other hand, literal killing – both on the factory floor and at the gallows – was not "state violence" but rather, a defense of the most important of all the human rights: the rights of property owners.

19th century textile factories were the original Big Tech, and the rhetoric of the factory owners echoes down the ages. When tech barons like Peter Thiel say that "freedom is incompatible with democracy," he means that letting people who work for a living vote will eventually lead to limitations on people who own things for a living, like him.

Then, as now, resistance to Big Tech enjoyed widespread support. The Luddites couldn't have organized in their thousands if their neighbors didn't have their backs. Shelley and Byron wrote widely reproduced paeans to worker uprisings (Byron also defended the Luddites in the House of Lords). The Brontes wrote Luddite novels. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a Luddite novel, in which the monster was a sensitive, intelligent creature who merely demanded a say in the technology that created him.

The erasure of the true history of the Luddites was a deliberate act. Despite the popular and elite support the Luddites enjoyed, the owners and their allies in Parliament were able to crush the uprising, using mass murder and imprisonment to force workers to accept immiseration.

The entire supply chain of the textile revolution was soaked in blood. Merchant devotes multiple chapters to the lives of African slaves in America who produced the cotton that the machines in England wove into cloth. Then – as now – automation served to obscure the violence latent in production of finished goods.

But, as Merchant writes, the Luddites didn't lose outright. Historians who study the uprisings record that the places where the Luddites fought most fiercely were the places where automation came most slowly and workers enjoyed the longest shared prosperity.

The motto of Magpie Killjoy's seminal Steampunk Magazine was: "Love the machine, hate the factory." The workers of the Luddite uprising were skilled technologists themselves.

They performed highly technical tasks to produce extremely high-quality goods. They served in craft workshops and controlled their own time.

The factory increased production, but at the cost of autonomy. Factories and their progeny, like assembly lines, made it possible to make more goods (even goods that eventually rose the quality of the craft goods they replaced), but at the cost of human autonomy. Taylorism and other efficiency cults ended up scripting the motions of workers down to the fingertips, and workers were and are subject to increasing surveillance and discipline from their bosses if they deviate. Take too many pee breaks at the Amazon warehouse and you will be marked down for "time off-task."

Steampunk is a dream of craft production at factory scale: in steampunk fantasies, the worker is a solitary genius who can produce high-tech finished goods in their own laboratory. Steampunk has no "dark, satanic mills," no blood in the factory. It's no coincidence that steampunk gained popularity at the same time as the maker movement, in which individual workers use form digital communities. Makers networked together to provide advice and support in craft projects that turn out the kind of technologically sophisticated goods that we associate with vast, heavily-capitalized assembly lines.

But workers are losing autonomy, not gaining it. The steampunk dream is of a world where we get the benefits of factory production with the life of a craft producer. The gig economy has delivered its opposite: craft workers – Uber drivers, casualized doctors and dog-walkers – who are as surveilled and controlled as factory workers.

Gig workers are dispatched by apps, their faces closely studied by cameras for unauthorized eye-movements, their pay changed from moment to moment by an algorithm that docks them for any infraction. They are "reverse centaurs": workers fused to machines where the machine provides the intelligence and the human does its bidding:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

Craft workers in home workshops are told that they're their own bosses, but in reality they are constantly monitored by bossware that watches out of their computers' cameras and listens through its mic. They have to pay for the privilege of working for their bosses, and pay to quit. If their children make so much as a peep, they can lose their jobs. They don't work from home – they live at work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

Merchant is a master storyteller and a dedicated researcher. The story he weaves in Blood In the Machine is as gripping as any Propublica deep-dive into the miserable working conditions of today's gig economy. Drawing on primary sources and scholarship, Blood is a kind of Nomadland for Luddites.

Today, Merchant is the technology critic for the LA Times. The final chapters of Blood brings the Luddites into the present day, finding parallels in the labor organizing of the Amazon warehouse workers led by Chris Smalls. The liberal reformers who offered patronizing support to the Luddites – but didn't imagine that they could be masters of their own destiny – are echoed in the rhetoric of Andrew Yang.

And of course, the factory owners' rhetoric is easily transposed to the modern tech baron. Then, as now, we're told that all automation is "progress," that regulatory evasion (Uber's unlicensed taxis, Airbnb's unlicensed hotel rooms, Ring's unregulated surveillance, Tesla's unregulated autopilot) is "innovation." Most of all, we're told that every one of these innovations must exist, that there is no way to stop it, because technology is an autonomous force that is independent of human agency. "There is no alternative" – the rallying cry of Margaret Thatcher – has become our inevitablist catechism.

Squeezing the workers' wages conditions and weakening workers' bargaining power isn't "innovation." It's an old, old story, as old as the factory owners who replaced skilled workers with terrified orphans, sending out for more when a child fell into a machine. Then, as now, this was called "job creation."

Then, as now, there was no way to progress as a worker: no matter how skilled and diligent an Uber driver is, they can't buy their medallion and truly become their own boss, getting a say in their working conditions. They certainly can't hope to rise from a blue-collar job on the streets to a white-collar job in the Uber offices.

Then, as now, a worker was hired by the day, not by the year, and might find themselves with no work the next day, depending on the whim of a factory owner or an algorithm.

As Merchant writes: robots aren't coming for your job; bosses are. The dream of a "dark factory," a "fully automated" Tesla production line, is the dream of a boss who doesn't have to answer to workers, who can press a button and manifest their will, without negotiating with mere workers. The point isn't just to reduce the wage-bill for a finished good – it's to reduce the "friction" of having to care about others and take their needs into account.

Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again – in machine learning, in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces – the goal is to turn humans into machines.

There is blood in the machine, Merchant tells us, whether its humans being torn apart by a machine, or humans being transformed into machines.

Brian and I are having a joint book-launch tomorrow night (Sept 27) at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

[mariacallous]

Georgians are in the streets fighting for their democracy. The Georgian Dream party, which is working to align Tbilisi with Moscow’s interests, declared victory in the country’s Oct. 26 election before the votes were even counted. Voters and election observers were harassed by Russian-funded gangs and mobsters; just after the election, protesters holding European Union flags were sprayed with water from high-powered hoses. And the person who has the iron will necessary to lead the charge against Russian-inspired authoritarianism in Georgia? A woman: President Salome Zourabichvili.

This is no accident. Across the world, women have, and are, playing incredible roles as bulwarks against the rise of authoritarianism. Moldovan President Maia Sandu is standing up to a tsunami of Russian disinformation. In Poland, women played a critical role in the effort to oust the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party. In Hong Kong, women continue to be the practical and normative face of resistance to Chinese authoritarian rule.

These are the freedom fighters of the 21st century. And yet, the U.S. national security community tends to view women’s issues as a domestic concern, frivolous, or irrelevant to “hard” security matters. For example, in 2003, discussions of securing Iraq excluded women, with a top U.S. general stating, “When we get the place secure, then we’ll be able to talk about women’s issues.” More recently, the role of women in the military has been reduced to discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, rather than a focus on how women have been vital to solving the United States’ most wicked national security problems—from serving on the front lines in combat to providing essential intelligence analysis. But if the overall aim of U.S. national strategy is to shore up democracy and democratic freedoms, the treatment of women and girls cannot be ignored.

Globally, women’s rights are often eroding in both policy and practice, from the struggles of the Iranian and Afghan women who exist under gender apartheid to the Kenyan women experiencing the harsh backlash of the rise of the manosphere. In tandem, there’s been a sharp rise in reports of online harassment and misogyny worldwide.

National security analysts explore issues and psychologies through any number of prisms, but Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) remains an underutilized one. One of the national security community’s core tasks is discerning signals from noise in the global strategic environment, and regressive ideas on gender and gender equality can be a useful proxy metric for democratic backsliding and authoritarian rise.

The United States’ 2023 Strategy and National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security provides the backbone for the United States to leverage WPS to counter authoritarianism. It highlights that displays of misogyny online are linked to violent action. The plan also points out that formally incorporating gendered perspectives is essential for maintaining democratic institutions at home and modeling them aboard. This includes recognizing misogyny—online or in policy—as an early indicator of authoritarian rise.

Unfortunately, WPS is often misread as simply including more women in the national security workforce. But it is more than that. It offers a framework for understanding why it is useful to take gendered perspectives into account when assessing how the actions of individuals or groups enhance national security, which is especially important at a time when authoritarian regimes are weaponizing gender in ways that strengthen their grip on power domestically and justify their aggression abroad.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has argued that he is the guardian of traditional Christian values, telling women that they should be back at home raising children, and has been rolling back domestic violence laws at the same time. Days before invading Ukraine in February 2022, Putin said, “Like it or don’t like it, it’s your duty, my beauty,” which was widely interpreted within Russia as a reference to martial rape. Russia’s own army is built on a foundation of hierarchical hazing in which “inferior” men are degraded by their comrades. With that kind of rhetoric from the top, is it any wonder that Russian soldiers’ war crimes have included the rapes of women and children?

But Putin isn’t alone. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has consolidated media outlets to censor women’s voices, in the name of protecting traditional values. He has also used coercive financial practices to push women out of the workforce and positions of political power and into more traditional roles of wife and mother. In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko attempted to force the deportation of the most prominent woman opposition leader and imprisoned her after she tore up her passport to prevent it. In China, where women were once told they “hold up half the sky,” President Xi Jinping has worked to undo decades of Chinese Communist Party policy on gender equality. Chinese women are now being encouraged to return home and become mothers, while feminists have been targeted legally and socially.

The WPS agenda provides the U.S. national security community with three opportunities to recognize, understand, and counter early-stage authoritarianism.

First, the United States can do a much better job of supporting women’s groups around the world as a central aspect of its national security strategy. Women’s groups are often a bellwether for authoritarian rise and democratic backsliding—as currently on display in Russia, China, Hungary, Georgia, and Belarus, where women inside and outside their respective regimes have been specifically targeted or attacked.

Women have also found innovative ways to resist the rise of authoritarian norms. In places like Moldova, women have acted as bulwarks against authoritarianism despite vicious disinformation campaigns targeting women leaders. Yet when it comes to formulating and executing strategies on national security, women’s groups are often left in the margins and their concerns dismissed.

Second, gender perspectives are essential to more fulsome intelligence gathering and analysis. The U.S. intelligence community can do a much better job of integrating gender—particularly as it relates to the treatment of the most vulnerable—as an indicator of societal and democratic health. This includes understanding how both masculinities and femininities influence decision-making and how, in turn, lived experiences act as necessary analytical tools. Training collectors and analysts of intelligence to recognize gendered indicators will provide a more robust view of the geopolitical landscape and fill critical holes in national security decision-making.

Finally, the United States must improve the participation of its national security community in WPS and feminist foreign-policy discussions. For too long, the “hard” security sector has distanced itself from more “human” security-focused endeavors and treated women’s rights as something that’s just nice to have.

Yet national security is an essentially human endeavor, and gender is a central component of what it means to be human. This is something that needs to be appreciated to better understand the many dimensions of the conflict—disinformation, online influence campaigns, and lawfare—that authoritarian regimes are waging against the United States and its allies.

[psychotrenny]

In order to develop a useful understanding of any war, it's vital to know the basic class character and social base of the groups involved. Otherwise you're forced to essentially go off intuition and vibes when determining the nature of the conflict and the appropriate response to it. And the vibes based method is not a very accurate one regardless of your professed political beliefs; it's how you get so called "communists" describing the current conflict in Gaza as a pointless proxy war between the US and Iran while the war in Ukraine is apparently a popular resistance to "Russian Imperialism" that it's imperative to support. Ignorance of class analysis is the fastest road to Revisionism and Error

[hainethehero]

Steve Rogers Headcannon- why Steve was so against the Sokovia Accords (trigger warning as this analysis involves SA/r*pe)

I think we can all agree that the MCU absolutely desecrated Steve Rogers' character to the point where people actually believe he's a horrible person- especially after Civil War. But I've had this headcannon about why Steve was so vehemently against the Sokovia Accords and its never been more obvious after She-Hulk.

From the jump (CATFA), we see that the serum is generally regarded as "property of the U.S government/SSR" thus, whoever is injected with it becomes government property by proxy. Ironically, after getting the serum Steve's freedom becomes limited. He has to follow orders and put on a show for the senators because they're the ones who have the power and position to fund the fight against the N*zis. He's their dancing monkey. We even see evidence of this when Steve is made to parade about like a showgirl in this scene 👇

Now, throughout the MCU there's an ongoing interest in Steve's "virginity" and cheap jokes at his perceived lack of sexual proclivities. We see it in CATFA, CATWS, Avengers 1 & 2 etc. Which leads us to She-Hulk. There's this whole reveal in that one episode that Steve lost his virginity to a showgirl on one of the USO tours.

This is where my headcannon comes in.

I don't think he lost his virginity consensually. I think he was forced into sexual acts by powerful men like the senators and military officials who saw Steve as a literal puppet and of no true value as he was not being used in battle or the war yet. Remember, they initially saw him as a failure because the serum was lost and their plans for an entire army of allied supersoldiers were lost after Erskine died. Now, for anyone who knows the comic Steve Rogers, it's not in his character design to have sex with a random girl he just met on tour- a tour which by the way didn't last that long.

We did see, however, that Steve is easily taken advantage of, esp in this scene 👇

Which ultimately leads to my main point, Steve was against the Accords because he knew that giving up their autonomy meant physical, mental and sexual abuse. The government wouldn't just be able to control where they went but also who they worked for and as he said in CACW, "[the UN] is run by people with agendas and agendas change. If we sign the accords we surrender our right to choose."

Steve knows what that much power (over super-powered beings like the Avengers) can lead to and he doesn't want that to happen to them. Add on the very heartbreaking case of how Bucky's autonomy was stripped from him as well and that only strengthens his case.

I just find it hard to believe that Steve would lose his virginity so cheaply and honestly shame on the writers for even insinuating that. He was taken advantage of and assaulted and this is one of the main reasons why he's against giving up his freedom to the very same people who would use and abuse him without a second thought.

[mysharona1987]

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth J. Frantzman

In retrospect, it’s important to look at UNRWA as an organization that was created to thwart the establishment of Israel. The UN approved the Partition Plan for British Mandate Palestine in 1947. Israel declared independence in 1948.

UNRWA was then established and took a significant portion of the Palestinian population under its wing, effectively becoming a state within a state.

Because Egypt and Jordan had taken over the areas of the Arab state that were supposed to be established based on the Partition Plan, UNRWA stepped in as a kind of state in the making for Palestinians. Most people don’t view UNRWA as a proto-state, but in essence, that is what it has become.

UNRWA camps served as the foundation for the majority of Palestinian political – and, later, militant and terrorist – activities. Schools and refugee camps organized spaces for the groups that emerged, ranging from Fatah to the PFLP to Hamas.

For instance, Hamas gained power partly through areas in Gaza, such as Khan Yunis, from which killed leader Yahya Sinwar hailed. Many other refugee camps also became known as bases of various groups and gunmen.

UNRWA would prefer not to take responsibility for the fact that its camps became the main organizing ground for gunmen and terrorism. In fact, the rejection of Israel’s existence comes primarily from the UNRWA camps.

What that means is that the UNRWA state or empire was organized to destroy Israel and use the refugees as the main engine of this destruction. For decades, the number of refugees has grown, and their political aspirations have shifted from supporting two states to supporting one state. October 7 was an outgrowth of this shift.

The concept of UNRWA is to keep Palestinians dependent, living in refugee camps generation after generation, while using its young men as foot soldiers to fight Israel.Winding down the camps and having the people live normal lives and believe in two states and peace could have potentially resulted in peace. However, the UNRWA mandate was never to embrace peace, two states, and coexistence.

One can draw a direct line from the end of the Second World War and the end of the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel and the creation of UNRWA as a weapon in the hands of the international community to try to undermine Israel and use refugees as proxies against Israel.

This line is clear because the UN played a key role in the Partition Plan.  The UN then undermined its own plan by creating UNRWA, which served to perpetuate the conflict.Each succeeding generation has taken up the baton from the UNRWA camps and launched wars against Israel. The first war occurred in the 1950s, when Egypt used “infiltrators” and fedayeen (guerrillas) against Israel.

Then there was the Jordanian Civil War, aka Black September, in the 1970s. The war then moved to Lebanon, where Palestinians upended the Lebanese system, leading to Israel’s invasion in 1982.

Then the movement moved via Tunisia back to Gaza and the West Bank and laid the groundwork for the First Intifada. When the Oslo peace deal emerged, Hamas emerged to upend it.

Since the 1990s, the UNRWA camps have not embraced two states or peace but have instead continued to embrace extremism, thereby becoming a hotbed for radicalism.The road to October 7 was paved from there. In Gaza, when Hamas took over, UNRWA didn’t oppose Hamas but was available to partner with it.

Now, Gaza has been destroyed in another war because of UNRWA’s unwillingness to end this conflict and stop using refugees as a tool against Israel.

[texas-gothic]

Before I begin, please note that this is all ESPN Sports Room-style analysis and that Kamala Harris is every bit the genocidal monster that her boss is. Neither she nor anyone attached to her will be seeing my vote. Not that that matters since I live in a deep red state where my vote would end up going to Donald Trump regardless. Yay deeply undemocratic election system!

I honestly think that Harris has a really decent chance of winning this election with Tim Walz by her side. I was almost dead certain she was going to pick someone like Shapiro or Kelly who would have alienated key voting blocks, but no, she actually did the smart thing.

Walz is smart because he continues to hammer on Trump's biggest weakness while distracting from Harris's own. No matter what she and her allies might have to say about a fresh new start, it remains the case that Kamala Harris is still the other face of the most unpopular administration since 1968. By all means Donald Trump should have been able to coast by on an awful economy and taken the Presidency with ease. But then he went and picked professional pervert weirdo JD Vance as his running mate. A strange little man who can't shut up about how much he hates women at a time where Trump's biggest sore point is women's rights. And while it might not seem possible, Tim Walz makes JD Vance look even worse.

Walz, as governor, is extremely popular with his electorate. He has an especially rare record of actually doing the things he set out to do and has been flagrantly ignoring the Democratic Party line of "Look pretty and do as little as possible." People wanted him to defend public education and the rights of minority groups, and he has done so with flying colors. All while his colleagues in Washington allowed abortion rights and affirmative action to crumble while they were too busy scrounging together trillions of dollars to fan the flames of proxy wars.

Vance, on the other hand, has only been Senator for a little under 2 years. And in that time he has done little besides contribute to the partisan havoc that has largely deadlocked this term of the legislature. He's gone on a lot of bizarre, right wing podcasts, sure, and maybe that's what matters to the core base of Republicans, but I don't imagine the fact that he got to sit down and talk with Tim Poole once will play very well with undecided voters. Then there's the myriad of scandals that has broken out around him only since his nomination as VP. Did Vance fuck a couch? Does Vance want to strip people without children of their right to vote? Why does Vance follow so many people who post about "towel boys"? Why did Vance google dolphin pornography? Why did Vance right the forward to Project 2025, maybe the least popular thing to ever come out of an already unpopular think tank? The questions with this guy never end.

So on one hand, we have a beloved governor whose record of firm, swift action and following through on promises might just cover for the current administration's record of the opposite, and on the other hand, a living embodiment of the kind of weird, extremely-online reactionary nonsense that Trump needs to avoid, whose bizarre behavior keeps pulling in more and more of a negative spotlight on their campaign.

This is still a tight race. Kamala Harris was not that popular to begin with, and Joe Biden has given her a lot of baggage on her way to the White House. But Tim Walz might just be likeable enough with voters that they can look past all of that. Largely because it's hard to look away from the weirdo running opposite of him.

I guess we'll just have to find out.

[thecrazyalchemist]

I got an anonymous ask asking

Are you against Gaza?

Tumblr ate the ask unfortunately, so here's my answer:

What do you mean when you ask if I'm "against" Gaza?

It can mean a lot of things:

• Am I against the existence of Gaza? No. It exists. That's a fact.

• Am I against the existence of Palestinians? No. They are human beings.

I'm guessing this is related to current events and the war against Hamas.

• Am I against Hamas? Yes. Hamas is a terror organization which on Oct 7th 2023 has pillaged, raped, and massacred more 1,200 and taken around 250 hostages. They should be eradicated.

• Am I against the war? For that the answer is more complicated. As I have said before, I believe that Hamas and other Iranian terror groups and proxies (such as Hezbollah) in the middle east should be eradicated. They have started this war and they should be eradicated.

Is the war fought as best as possible? I do not know. I am no expert, I do not have access to the inner workings of the IDF and the Israeli government, and I don't have the military experience and knowledge needed to know for sure.

According to Hamas, there are around 42,000 casualties, and around 10,000 missing. If we say that all those who are missing are dead, we have 52,000 dead. According to the IDF, 17,000 combatants of Hamas have been killed. That makes the civilian to combatant ratio roughly 2:1. (Or 67% civilian casualties). (Data taken from the INSS https://www.inss.org.il/publication/war-data/)

According to CIVIC (https://civiliansinconflict.org/our-work/conflict-trends/urban-warfare/), the current civilian to combatant ratio in modern warfare is 9:1. (Or 90% civilian casualties).

It seems like the IDF does do a lot to minimize civilian casualties, and is succeeding in doing so. Don't get me wrong, 42,000-52,000 dead is a horrific loss of life. Especially with adding the around 100,000 injured (according to Hamas) and 1,900,000 million displaced in Gaza.

However, as I've said before, the IDF does seem to make a lot of effort to minimize civilian casualties while fighting an enemy which embeds itself within the civilian population, uses them as human shields, and overall tries to get as many civilian casualties. There is a lot of evidence to support those claims. (https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/01/hamas-officials-admit-its-strategy-is-to-use-palestinian-civilians-as-human-shields/, those are just two sources I have found from a quick Google search. there are a lot more.)

So, am I against Gaza? Yes and no. What do you mean you ask "Am I against Gaza?

Edit 1: I thought I wrote something about it but it appears I forgot. I also want the hostages to come home, and I think that by now, this should be the top priority. To get them home.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth J. Frantzman

The Iranian-backed Houthis increasingly appear to be alone in the attempts to attack Israel, as Iran and its other proxy groups have been weakened. They have not suffered a major setback since they began their attacks on Israel and on shipping in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

Instead, the terrorist group has generally enjoyed the ability to carry out long-range strikes and then hide out in the mountains around Sanaa, Yemen, waiting for a response.

The US had tried to respond to these strikes, whereas Israel was concentrating on Hamas in Gaza and viewed the Houthi attacks as one front in a seven-front war. Israel eventually did respond with two rounds of airstrikes on the Houthis in July and September.

As for the US, it launched Operation Prosperity Guardian in December 2023 to counter Houthi attacks on commercial ships. The naval operation was only moderately successful. The Israeli strikes did not seem to deter the Houthis either. They continue to attack Israel with drones and missiles.

The Houthi attacks continue even as Hamas continues to face setbacks in Gaza and as Hezbollah has agreed to an Israel-Lebanon 60-day ceasefire that will end in late January. Former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime has fallen. The Iranian-backed militias in Iraq also seem to have stopped their attacks on Israel, for now.

[odinsblog]

Executive summary

Since launching its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian Federation has been locked into a long and costly conflict. Russia has been diplomatically marginalized, subjected to sanctions, and shunned by most of the Western world. Many multinational companies have been forced by international pressure to shutter or sell their Russian operations, and profiting from cooperation with the Russian state is no longer considered acceptable. Russia has found itself in dire need of new allies and resources.

In this environment, the Kremlin-financed Private Military Company Wagner, or Wagner Group, has served as an increasingly important source of revenue for the Russian state. Founded in 2014 to support pro-Russian forces in Donbas, since then Wagner Group has evolved into a complex international network of private military contractors, disinformation campaign infrastruc-ture, and corporate front companies. It has deployed fighters, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and financing as a proxy for the Russian state in numerous conflicts, from Syria and Libya to Mali, Central African Republic, and beyond

Wagner has most often been described as an independent mercenary group. This status has provided Russia with a thin veil of deniability, particularly in relation to the numerous plausible accusations of murder, rape, torture, and war crimes raised against Wagner fighters. But in reality, Wagner has always operated with the political and material backing of the Russian Federation to advance Russian state interests.

In Africa, Wagner has been deployed in a number of countries across the continent since 2017. In each country it enters, Wagner deploys military trainers, mercenary fighters, and propaganda experts to support anti-democratic regimes, drive instability, and commit human rights abuses. The mercenary group's ostensible provision of "security services" creates a framework for lucrative business contracts for the extraction of natural resources including diamonds, oil, timber, and especially gold.

This report focuses on the Kremlin's 'blood gold': Gold extracted from African countries and laundered into international markets that provides billions in revenue to the Russian state, thereby directly and indirectly financing Russia's war on Ukraine and global hybrid warfare infrastructure.

The Blood Gold Report's analysis suggests that Wagner and Russia have earned more than US$2.5 billion from blood gold since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The report focuses on the case studies of Wagner's blood gold operations in the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Mali. In each of these coun-tries, Russia profits from the blood gold trade in different ways:

In CAR, the mercenary group has been granted exclusive extractive rights for the Ndassima mine, the country's largest gold mine, in return for propping up President Touadera's authoritarian regime. Wagner's Ndassima operations are understood to produce US$290 million of gold annually, while local miners have been pushed aside or murdered by the mercenary group.

In Sudan, through control of a major refinery, Wagner has become the dominant buyer of unprocessed Sudanese gold as well as a major smuggler of processed gold. Russian military transporter flights laden with gold have been identified by Sudanese customs officials. While tracking Sudan's unreported gold market is near impossible, estimates suggest that almost Us$2 billion in gold is smuggled out of the country unreported every year, with 'the Russian Company' in prime position to take advantage.

In Mali, Wagner is paid a monthly retainer - estimated at US $10.8 million per month - to prop up a brutal military junta Meanwhile the junta is in turn dependent on a small number of Western mining companies for the revenue it needs to pay Wagner. Mining companies contributed more than 50% of all tax revenues to the Malian state for 2022. Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian listed company and Mali's single biggest tax contributor, paid US$206 million in the first half of 2023 alone.

The junta is increasing its financial demands on gold mining companies. Meanwhile, the four largest gold mining companies (weighted by tax contribution) continue to plan further investments in the country, despite the well-documented abuses of the military junta and growing influence of the Wagner Group.

Wagner's blood gold operations in CAR and Sudan have been subject to sanctions, and the Kremlin-backed mercenaries have developed increasingly complex smuggling routes and corporate subterfuge tactics to move blood gold out of these countries and convert this gold into cash.

In contrast, the Malian blood gold system enables Wagner to remain one degree removed from gold production. Instead, legitimate multinational mining companies convert gold into cash for the Malian military junta without triggering international sanctions.

To secure its position in a target country's political and natural resource extraction landscape, Wagner's African playbook consists of a four-pronged attack on the host country's civic institutions and civilian population - suppressing political opposition, spreading disinformation, silencing free media and terrorising civilians.

The ultimate objective of Wagner's playbook is to increase its clients' dependence on Wagner forces to stay in power, thereby securing a long-term revenue stream for the Kremlin and fostering authoritarianism and instability throughout the region as part of Russia's wider geopolitical strategy to distract and bog down the democratic West.

Since the death of Wagner's leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary group has formally come under the control of the Russian State. Yet the Kremlin's focus on Africa, and its blood gold operations, show no signs of changing.

(continue reading)

[tenebriskukris]

Oshi No Ko Chapter 149 - My Thoughts/Analysis

This was an amazing chapter! Amazingly unnecessary, I mean. Spoilers for Oshi No Ko Ch 149 below. 

Oh, where to begin with this chapter. Instead of getting more information and character depth on Ai and Hikaru during an arc specifically tailor made for them, we are instead treated to the return of this love triangle bullshit. It was acceptable during Tokyo Blade, but it’s overstayed it’s welcome by now.

The “reveal” that Kana’s been eavesdropping on the Akana-Kana conversation is a cheap tactic that dredges out intrigue for Kana during the wait between this chapter and the next one. Would it kill the series to lay things out in chronological order instead of relying on these sorts of flashbacks like a crutch to create the illusion of tension? It’s a half-assed tactic that any competent writer would stay clear of because it’s the equivalent of a sucker punch to the readers’ faces. The movie arc is already shoddily made and we don’t need what little goodwill that the readers have for the series go down the drain even further.

The Akane-Kana conversation is nothing more than air. There’s no substantiality to it. No introspection on Kana’s part. There’s no introspection on Kana’s part. She basically just saw Akane and Aqua talking and immediately jumped to conclusions. While, yes, this is in her character, framing it now, like this, is basically the specter of the dreaded love triangle plotline coming back from the dead. Instead of more necessary insight on Ai and Hikaru we get yet more screentime for Akane and Kana fucking about when it comes to Aqua. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I feel absolutely no sympathy for Kana’s despair in the majority of these scenes. Everything about this situation has been entirely self-inflicted. Despite knowing that her sharp tongue is a problem she hasn’t taken any visible steps to fix that. From the flashforwards her tongue is still something that she can’t control. She hasn’t taken any steps to pursue Aqua throughout the series and is content to hang around him like an annoying mosquito. Both Akane and Ruby have already made their moves on Aqua and she’s basically just sat on her hands the entirety of the series when it comes to him. She even had the gall to say that she doesn’t even think of Aqua as a love interest despite the reader knowing very well that it isn’t true at all. 

I read somewhere online that all the panels of Kana’s crying can be used to fill two whole volumes. While I don’t know how true this is, I can certainly say that I’m starting to get tired of this whole song and dance with her. There comes a point in a narrative that you see someone in the story that’s been continuously kicked down by their own bloody choices or has every opportunity to change but never seems to do anything substantial about their own situation and you have to ask, “Why should I care?”. That’s basically where I am with her at the moment.

“My love for him is like a mother to her child!” Akane, please. I know you can mimic Ai but this comparison might be a bit too far! Not that Aqua would mind Akane acting as Ai in bed but this is a whole new level! 

Even Akane is getting fed up with Kana’s shit. Good for her! Honestly, Akane needs to get past her obsession with Arima Kana because that’s something that’s holding her back from growing as a person and an actor in my opinion.

“If I were a man, I’d definitely choose you.” This has to be some of the lowest hanging yuri bait I’ve ever seen. Get this shit out of my face. You’re going to need a hell of a lot more for me to suddenly start spouting the virtues of the Kana-Akane pairing. This conversation doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test. 

Akane pushing Kana to do something and then Kana running away seems to be the story of their relationship. If she doesn’t even have the initiative to get together with Aqua herself then she doesn’t deserve him. She might as well be the rope between the Akane-Aqua tug of war, a proxy for Akane to try and “fix” Aqua. 

Kana feeling sorry for herself and not doing anything about it. We’ve seen that before. I’m just surprised the author is pulling this stuff some more and expecting people to still have sympathy for her. It’s like beating a dead horse at this point.

Akane jumpscare! It would be creepier if her face was drawn more accurately but the paneling is kind of odd there. Slightly surprising that we’re still on this plotline—I expected a cut a while back because that’s just how this manga has been rolling recently.

I—Wow, Akane. Wow. This is going to be a completely fine plan with no repercussions whatsoever. It’s in-character for her to want to try and save Aqua, but doing it like this is almost certainly the wrong move. I didn’t think that when I said that Kana would be the rope between the Aqua and Akane tug of war that it would actually happen! 

This is going to go horribly. The fact that Akane, someone who we’ve seen is relatively intelligent among the cast, attempt something like this is just—it’s just bad. Bad writing is what it is. As soon as Aqua gets a whiff of this—and he will, because Kana is weak to Aqua in general—that’s the Kana-Aqua relationship going down the drain in the worst case scenario. Does Akane really think that this sort of manipulation is something that Aqua won’t detect when Kana acts so out of character? Her level of manipulation is leagues worse than Aqua’s if this is the best that she can come up with. 

For Kana’s part, I think this is the nail in the coffin for her attempts at actually ending up with Aqua, though I’m more than sure some fans are still hoping and praying for a Kana victory at the Aquabowl. If your waifu is basically being strung along by her rival in to vie for the main character’s hand when she herself doesn’t even have the initiative to go for it—well, it might be a bit of a controversial take, but I don’t think that’s the type of behavior of someone who’s actually going to get together with the main character. Just saying.

We already know for a fact that this plan fails because of the flashforwards. Aqua, at least in public, is still more or less single by the time the movie premieres. It’s just a matter of how bad this fallout is going to be in the meantime.

The elephant in the room is obviously Ruby. We don’t know how Aqua has reacted to the kiss, nor what he thinks about it all about it. His narration has been left in the dark for so long that it’s become quite grating. How much longer are the authors going to tiptoe around this topic? Any discussion with regards to romance is going to be incomplete unless we get Aqua’s thoughts on how Ruby kissed him. And I don’t think he’ll be very conducive to Kana trying to get in his pants while she’s being manipulated by Akane to do so.

[third-arch]

My Trafalgar Law HC’s!! pt.4🥳🥳

This one’s longer and is kinda inspired by some people around me, but most of these I could honestly see for him!!

He doesn’t work at a hospital. He owns a private clinic. If he did, he’d work in the ER. He’d have a scribe. He’d either be very grumpy or very patient to work with.

He doesn’t read Homestuck/doesn’t really like it but if he absolutely had to choose his favorite human would be Dave Strider. I literally have no clue what his favorite troll would be, but I’m guessing maybe like Aradia or Karkat.

His favorite Nintendo series is Star Fox.

He’s more of a Vinesauce guy than a Jerma guy.

If you asked him what the three most recent songs he’s listened to are, he’d probably say:

Madhouse-Matt Maltese

Everyone Here Hates You-Courtney Barnett

Climbing Up The Walls-Radiohead

How they appeared on his playlist or if he even liked them is up to you.

He’s not a Taylor Swift fan, but I could see State of Grace, Red, Sparks Fly, Mine, All Too Well (10 min version) and Love Story being his favorite songs. (I literally can’t explain this one LOL)

He doesn’t mind Lofi.

This one is actually inspired by an old friend of mine, but he doesn’t really watch anime. He watches a lot of analysis videos on YouTube and if it’s interesting enough, he’ll watch it. This was the case for Cardcaptor Sakura, Fruits Basket, and Ergo Proxy.

He’s seen Phoebe Bridgers in concert with Nami. She also introduced him to Mitski.

Radiohead is probably his favorite artist. He also likes Paramore and Mitski

(Note: Before, I thought it was FATM, but a lot of my HC's and fanfic content heavily revolve around Radiohead. So, there's that. He probably still really likes FATM though. Same for Evanescence.)

He loves Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, and stuff like Half Life, Silent Hill, Portal, Overwatch and GMOD.

He likes watching Luffy play Skyrim and would probably be better than him if he played it.

He cried playing Shadow of the Colossus, Deemo, and Yomawari. He’s also cried playing some other games.

He went through an Undertale phase. He also cried playing it. He’d also be the person to spoil the whole route system, and would get annoyed if you don’t do “the good route”.

He really likes Batman. He prefers DC.

His favorite channel is Adult Swim.

If you show him Star Wars I-III he’ll make really funny jokes the entire time. He also really likes Chewbacca, Luke, and Obi Wan. And if you gift him a lightsaber you might find him on the deck late at night doing lightsaber tricks.

He LOVES Pikmin.

He sucks at MarioKart.

He’s really good at Smash Bros but he’ll silently rage quit if he’s doing bad or loses. His main is Cloud.

His favorite Pokémon is Lucario, but he also likes Bulbasaur. His favorite element is electric, so he also likes Espeon and Umbreon.

He does not participate in Secret Santa at the clinic.

This one’s kinda obvious but his favorite AOT character is Levi.

His favorite Demon Slayer characters are Rengoku and Nezuko. He bawled when Rengoku died.

His favorite BTS member is Jungkook.

When Pokémon Go was big, he used to drive Luffy, Chopper, and Nami around. Them and Kid and Killer would be fighting for Poke stops all the time, and leech (MaxMoeFoe reference) off their lures. Things would get so heated LOL

If you ask him to watch a Kdrama with you he’d hate it at first but then get really into it. He'd get so upset at any cliffhangers.

This one’s also obvious but he hates the color pink.

He doesn’t play Minecraft. And he probably wouldn’t in the foreseeable future.

[mariacallous]

A nondescript suite of rooms in an office building in central Oslo hosts activity of the kind one would normally associate with a military headquarters or the CIA. In the central situation room, a monitor displays activity across the world’s oceans, while analysts at neighboring desks update this information around the clock. But this is not an intelligence agency  — it’s DNK, a Norwegian insurer of maritime war risk.

Today, intelligence is no longer just the domain of government agencies — or, rather, it shouldn’t be. Companies are now far more likely to be harmed by geopolitically linked events than ever before outside of full-scale wars. Thus, they need to keep a constant eye on the world. And if they do, they’re likely to see things that would be equally useful for their governments to know. 

DNK (a partner of the Atlantic Council’s Maritime Threats initiative, which I lead) has long insured merchant vessels against serious risks, and in today’s geopolitical climate, such risks are growing — fast. That means the company needs to know precisely what’s taking place in every corner of the maritime world, at all times.

“Intelligence are knowledge-based forecasts derived from verified data tailored to support decision-making. That’s different from what you get in the news,” said Freddy Furulund, who directs the Intelligence and Operations Center.

“To be able to provide such forecasts, you need to not only describe precisely what has happened, but you also need to contextualize it and describe its consequences for future voyages for the shipowner. We get data pointing in different directions, verify it, contextualize it and, most importantly, assess where it points to.” 

Some of this data comes from open sources, some from satellites and other technical means, and some from human sources. All of it is collected legally, and it all helps shipowners decide where to send their ships. “Intelligence providers are often seen as the bringer of bad news,” Furulund observed. “We inform our clients about how dangerous situations are in the days to come, but we also tell them about opportunities,” which can include things like minor changes to a ship’s route or placing armed guards on board.

Staffed by ex-military and intelligence professionals, the Intelligence and Operations Center has been operating since 2016, but intensifying political tensions over the past couple years have made it positively indispensable for both DNK and its clients. “Historically, the war risks insurance market argued that war risks would strike the insureds at random — which meant that loss-prevention activities, such as analysis of threat actors’ intentions and capabilities, weren’t pursued,” explained Svein Ringbakken, DNK’s managing director. But that’s changed dramatically.’

It’s not just that the Houthis are systematically targeting ships linked to Western countries; they also have far better weaponry than pirates ever did — and similar militias could start attacking merchant vessels elsewhere too. Indeed, some countries around the world appear to have decided to disregard global maritime rules altogether. And that makes it imperative for shipowners and insurers — not to mention crews — to understand where misfortune may strike from.

Meanwhile, foreign government officials visiting Norway often schedule a stop at DNK to see the center at work, and Furulund’s team regularly shares information with Western governments. “When we see something that poses an imminent threat to someone, we share that with not only the shipowner but also with the government — if it’s the government of Norway or a friendly country — or with whoever needs to be alerted,” he said. “It’s the ethical thing to do.”

Essentially, if Western countries are to withstand the aggression waged by various rivals and their proxies, sharing insights from the front line is the only way forward. And for Western countries today, it’s businesses rather than soldiers that are on the daily front line. (Should a war break out that would clearly change — but businesses will still face massive geopolitical risks.)

Not every company can operate its own intelligence center, of course, but more and more companies are now discovering they ought to collect threat information more systematically. Businesses simply need to do their best to discern what geopolitically linked risks may face them, not just in the Red Sea but in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea, along the Cape of Good Hope route and other waters too — not to mention on land.

The Houthis recently resumed their campaign against Western shipping in the Red Sea after a couple weeks’ silence. Meanwhile, China’s maritime harassment of civilian vessels in the South China Sea continues. Is Beijing likely to expand its punishment of Western companies as proxies for their home countries? Will nations increasingly close to Russia and China try to harm Western companies operating in their countries? Western companies and governments need to know the answers to these questions — or at least gather enough information to make qualified assessments.

As many Western companies operate in places Western governments don’t, they should then share their insights with their home governments and other friendly states. And governments should return the favor.

We may not be able to clearly predict the acts of hostile states and groups with complete certainty, but making qualified assessments is far superior to sailing into uncharted waters. And that’s why we need a whole-of-society approach to intelligence too.

[gwandas]

it's insane when e/riels claim to like emerie when they only mention her when it's time to hate on nesta and gwyn. they're using that "a boy will be the son of france, but you'll be mine" sound on tiktok and put nesta and gwyn as the fandom favorites (lol) and emerie as "you'll be mine" and like?? and each time it's posted by an e/riel lmao

literally if gwyn had 0 connection to azriel, they would either "like" her or ignore her (just like they do with emerie) until it's time to shit on nesta

too much effort for a character they claim is irrelevant while simultaneously being the next villain whose sole purpose is keeping elain and azriel apart for ? reason

No bc let's talk about it

I don't believe for a single second that #those people gaf about Emerie. They literally only bring her up to chastise Nesta/Valkyrie stans for "sidelining her," call people racist for "ignoring her," etc.

If I'm being honest... yes. Emerie is sidelined by the fandom. Emerie and Gwyn have about the same amount of page time (Valkyrie stans look away for a second), but neither of them have that much character development. The only reason Gwyn gets more attention is because of Gwynr*el.

I like to call the Gwynr*el/Eluc*en vs. Elr*el ship war a thinly veiled proxy war since Elr*els normally hate Nesta and are rabid F*ys@nd stans while Gwynr*els/Eluc*ens... idk are generally more likely to like Nesta and aren't up F*ys@nd's ass. Not entirely an accurate analysis since I avoid the ship war but I say it to make my point that YEAH you are absolutely right about them only bringing Emerie up to shit on Nesta.

Like these people say they have to "save her" from Valkyrie stans (lmfao) and pretend to care about Em0rie as a ship despite them never having a conversation while calling Gwynr*el a crackship. I don't ever see them talk about Emerie outside these contexts.

What I have seen though? Whining about the Blood Rite/Valkyrie plot, calling the Valkyries cringy for the friendship bracelets, saying Nuala and Cerridwen are more interesting than Emerie and Gwyn (have they ever even had spoken lines like ??? be FOR REAL). Like NO y'all clearly do not care about Emerie if you're going to shit on literally everything she's involved in 💀

So they see Emerie getting sidelined (because I'm sorry she absolutely is sidelined by the fandom) but they don't actually care about that. It's just an opportunity for them to start posturing and claim moral superiority in a stupid ship war and also shit on Nesta stans at the same time.