freagle

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 1d ago

Bureaucracy is not a state apparatus. It can be employed by any grouping of humans. Again, bureaucracy is an implementation of governance by rules, process, and formal procedures. This is in contrast to rule by direct vote, rule by representative vote, rule by representative dictate, etc.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 1d ago

Corruption doesn't emerge from bureaucracy. It emerges from resource accumulation.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 1d ago

That has nothing to do with bureaucracy and everything to do with the counter-revolutionaries gaining power starting with Kruschev. China appears to have fixed it through a very rigorous discipline of self-critique. There is STILL the risk in China that those who benefit the most from their proximity to power and the corruption it allows will organize into a counter-revolutionary faction, but that hasn't happened yet and the CPC continuously evaluates and purges people at all levels in all domains when those people act in ways that belie an ideological belief in their own enrichment at the expense of the lives of the masses.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 1d ago

You're not talking about bureaucracy. You're talking about a technocracy. A bureaucracy can be staffed via sortition of that's what we want to do, but it would still be a bureaucracy. Your issue appears to be the idea of appointment to position by expertise and zero public accountability.

Even a technocracy would be improved through the right-to-recall for every position.

But get clearer about what you have a problem with. Is it governance by rules (bureaucracy) or is it governance by appointed unelected experts (technocracy)?

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 2d ago

Explain why you think bureaucracy needs to be avoided. As far as I understand it, bureaucracy is rules-based governance. Bureaucracy is therefore a problem for democracy if the rules are not democratically arrived at or not subject to democratic recall or democratic evolution.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 2d ago

It's such a funny vote because the president has veto powers over the resolution and even if he signed it then he would still be allowed to do the war if he asked Congress for permission and they granted it

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

I feel like this analysis greatly underestimates the substantial US military planning and intelligence capabilities. I agree the US is more and more vulnerable to being pulled into traps. Mich of that is due to the incredible counter-intelligence work that started in the USSR and continued in the PRC and RF and I believe is starting to take root in anti-imperialist projects in West Asia, South America, and Africa.

But I don't think we can rely so heavily on hubris. Desperation maybe, but desperation is the emotional description of what in strategy would be called pacing challenges. The US is getting surprised tactically by counter-intelligence, and they are being surprised strategically by the failure of some of their longer-term embedded covert ops that they were relying on, but the overall trend of industrial capacity winning wars is well known, deeply integrated into strategic analysis, and has been a long term trend, not a surprise.

If we imagine a large military planning bureaucracy, one function is to identify the mainline strategy for neutralizing the top priority threat. But another function is to identify all the contingencies that could disrupt the mainline strategy. Venezuela was literally sending its coast guard to harass ExxonMobile operations off the coast of Guayana. They had vowed a forceful naval intervention. Yes. I do think that military strategists saw that as a contingency that could disrupt strategic resources in the event of a broader conflict that captured the US's attention. Like, of course Maduro wouldn't do it while there's a carrier in the Caribbean. But if the Lincoln is out of commission and the other carriers are in other oceans and their departure would weaken whatever campaign the US was focused on, I could see a disruption of super major production being a contingency that US military planners would have at least identified.

Whether Venezuela would have acted would be based on key factors that do not hold right now. But part of strategic analysis would be projecting what conditions would need to hold for such contingencies to actualize, and it's possible that the US is advancing a campaign that brings the world closer to just those conditions.

It's obviously not something I can know. I'm speculating through the lens of strategic planning at the highest level of the world's dominant hegemon and giving them all the benefits of the doubt possible. Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the spirit.

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

I have similar thoughts, minus the Bruce Lee stuff

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

This is missing the most important aspect of the material analysis - what are the objectives of the imperialists that they expect to achieve by starting this conflict.

I think it's very clear to everyone that martyring a person who wishes to be martyred in a country known for honoring and avenging martyrs with a unifying mythos of martyrdom is not going to lead to outcomes like "the restoration of the Shah" or "the overthrow of the regime by students".

I also think it's very clear that Iran is not a country that can be invaded by ground forces, so it cannot be occupied and extracted from.

Given these sort of "normal" objectives of launching a conflict, what are the objectives of the empire?

I look to other examples of conflicts started by the empire to find a pattern. First, I look at Venezuela. Some have said that the securing Venezuela's oil was a critical hedge against Iran closing Hormuz during a conflict, so it needed to happen first. However, it is Guyana that is producing the most oil, not Venezuela, and that oil is far more readily brought to market in volume. Guyana is also under active investment to grow that capacity immensely. One analysis I've seen of the Venezuela conflict with the US is that it actually intensified when Venezuela showed the ability and willingness to interdict the super majors oil operations in Guyana. Which leads me to a first hypothesis - the US neutralized Venezuela before attacking Iran not to secure Venezuela's oil reserves but to remove the contingency that after an attack on Iran Venezuela would open a new front by interdicting Guyanese production, which would severely complicate an Iranian mission.

Similarly, the war in Ukraine grinds on. The US could end it by pulling all support and forcing Ukraine to the table, but it prefers theatrics in order to keep Russia bogged down. When we look at the US attacking Iran, we see a similar pattern as above - as long as Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, it will be difficult for it to open a new front when the empire extends itself to attack Iran. We already saw that Russia attempted to open new fronts in Africa and much of the first 2 years of the conflict in Ukraine was about both super powers managing the emergence of new conflicts that needed to be managed. That seems to have died down in the last 2 years. Russia did not come to the aid of Venezuela and so far has not come to the aid of Iran, likely because it cannot strategically afford to at this moment. My hypothesis is that this is by imperial design.

So then why strike Iran, why now? I believe it is because Iran is a strategic contingency if the US were to engage China in open conflict. With Iran able to act independently with its full capabilities, it is a massive contingency for any US operation in Asia. So the goal is not regime change, wealth extraction, colonialism (neo- or otherwise). It is to remove Iran from the contingency set. This can be a total collapse of the country, or a civil war, or even a wider regional all out war. All it has to do is deplete reserves, destroy infrastructure, and prevent independent action/reaction to the US making other moves.

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

Iran has the chance of doing multiple funny things now!

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

Yeah, you're just being ahistorical.

The US didn't vote for apartheid. They were an apartheid regime run by minoritarian patriarchal white supremacists to start with. They were not governed by "the people". Then, the property owning slave owning patriarchal white supremacists seceded from the monarchy and maintained the apartheid regime, the oppression of women, and the genocide of the inhabitants of the land.

NONE of that was democratic. None of that was put to vote. And even if it had been put to vote only the oppressors were allowed to vote.

Demos - the people

The people, the vast majority of people were oppressed and not participants in government.

You can argue semantics and say that because the land owning slave owning patriarchal white supremacists were voting among themselves on the best ways to commit genocide, mass murder, mass rape, mass torture, all for their own minority profits that this was a "democracy". But, that's not what the word means. Democracy isn't voting. Democracy is self-governance of the people by the people.

America has never been that.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

You do realize that an apartheid state literally is based on denying democracy to entire populations right? Sure white supremacists get to vote. That's not a democracy. That's rule by an occupying force.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

Yeah, no. This is something you need to work through. Earnestly. I want you to read American history and understand how the country has never been a democracy.

Realize that the US was an apartheid regime until the 1960s. That's 200 years of racial apartheid. You're gonna call that a democracy?

If you think WW2 was the end of Democracy, and that was literally 20 years before the end of apartheid, your definition of democracy is white supremacist.

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

I think it actually might not be that straightforward. Venezuelan production is insufficient to address the impact on the oil trade caused by conflict with Iran.

Instead I think that the US is reliant on the oil from Guyana and Venezuela was displaying willingness and ability to interdict the oil production there, which the strategists probably saw as a risk in the scenario where Iran closed Hormuz.

freagle @lemmygrad.ml 3d ago

I think we need to give them a break. They're exhausted. Let's see this as strategic retreat for now.

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freagle @lemmygrad.ml 4d ago

The US Embassy in Riyadh was hit by two drones resulting in “limited” fire and minor material damage, a statement from the US Defence Ministry says.

freagle

@ freagle @lemmygrad.ml

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freagle

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