Outside places like the US, UK and Canada the whole “lets talk about Identity Politics instead of Wealth Inequality” “liberal” propaganda technique to disguise their authoritarian pro-Oligarch ways didn’t really took hold anywhere as much.

I gotta disagree. This technique is baked into the entire Western political landscape. It’s particularly glaring in France and Germany, where neo-nazi police get to march around pushing the faces of poor immigrants, students, and socialist activists into the dirt in the name of “fighting antisemitism”. But it shows up throughout Latin America, the Philippines, and even West Africa.

State media sponsored tribalization, accusations of foreign infiltration of the opposition parties, and mass arrests of economic dissidents on ostensibly liberal “race neutral” grounds are common strategies globally, and for good reason. Even Russia plays this game when it suits them, with “De-Nazification” as a code word for busting the heads of any United Russia opposition group.

Even though - in my experience - the posh deceit discourse techniques have migrated from the US and UK towards other European countries, even the mainstream old center-left parties (which are now Neoliberal and well to the right of center) haven’t adopted the heavy identitarian discourse you see in their supposed equivalents in the US and UK.

I mean, you have straight-up breakaway regions in Spain, Italy, Greece, and - famously - Ukraine. Hell, nobody swings the identitarian cudgel harder than the liberal Zionists of Israel. Identity politics allows you to pretend at liberal politics while enabling a fascist state, by insisting the fascism is a bullwark against the opposition party’s Bigger Scarier Fascism. So you get guys like Olaf Schultz and Emanual Macron introducing whole new levels of state surveillance, crack downs on immigration, and gutting of educational institutions under the pastiche of some liberal cause (typically LGBTQ or philosemitism). And if you run over a bunch of queer folks and left-jews along the way? All the better.

Outside Europe, you often see the Drug War and violence against indigenous people spun as some kind of beneficent social welfare response or “tough love” effort to reduce poverty. But these guys love to code their behaviors in liberal terms, suggest there’s some kind of White Man’s Burden to step onin and “help”, and be greeted as liberators when you do.

Crackdowns in Hong Kong and the arrests of prodemocracy movements ain’t peaceful, bruv

The “crackdowns” were in response to a riot kicked off by Hong Kong residents protesting China’s extradition of a Taiwanese fugitive back to Taiwan for an alleged murderer. The only people killed in the “crackdowns” were Hong Kong police, at the hands of the rioters. The end result of the riots was to poison the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as an American propaganda campaign and coup attempt.

You liberals got played. Again.

The Chinese play in Taiwan has always been economic. It is the same strategy they employed in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. And the end result has been peaceful transitions of power with steady economic growth and no massive loss of life.

Threatening to bomb Beijing because some Shanghai investors have increased their stacks in FoxCon or TSMC is as absurd as it is toothless.

Me, watching a country not get into any wars for 45 years: “Wow, great job. I wish my country could do that.”

CNN editors, watching the same country: “AAAAAAH! THEY’RE ON THE CUSP OF ATTACKING!”

The dirty secret that nobody wants to tell you is… in the West it’s liberals all the way down.

Some are just more scratched than others.

It’s a literal bonfire of the vanities. The bigotry, the smugness, and the violence are all part of a self-mythologizing narrative used to build support for increasingly awful people. Guys like Ben-Gvir are in power precisely because they’re the biggest assholes the country has to offer. They draw in other assholes like a magnet and build a movement based on that collective awfulness, even as their country self-destructs and takes out every neighbor in a 500 mile radius.

slammed

BlueMAGA energy.

Israel is massacring hundreds of people a day across Lebanon, while the liberal media is fully fixated on whether JD Vance had to listen to On Hold music for a minute in Switzerland.

No coverage of why these negotiations are delayed or what the stakes are. It’s all just optics.

Trying to pay the $300B in TrumpCoin

It’s like the penultimate scene in the old Street Fighter movie, where they find out M. Bison’s bug out safe is just full of his own branded currency

They’re selfishly preventing us from accessing the jet fuel we use to power our bombers.

It’s unsporting, petty, and deeply unchristian. They should be ashamed of themselves.

A phone call, an armada of speed boats, thousands of sea mines, and a mosaic defense strategy that allows for the continuous firing of ballistic missiles after suffering $1T in infrastructure damage.

I’m sure it’ll shock you to discover that the $300B check was not actually in the mail

Reform UK will handle it

Don’t worry, they’ll be pardoned and granted a new slew of sponsors for their Based Trad behaviors

Intended it more directed at Israel than the US.

תפשת מרובה לא תפשת

Good thing the markets are closed, I guess.

The supposedly grass roots, organic rise of far right sentiment

British right wing nationalism has been around for a while

The BBC is a reliable reporter of facts

False

Russia has a pattern of this sort of behaviour

Broadly speaking, spy agencies have been known to operate in this fashion. So it’s a believable allegation.

But was this guy radicalized by the Russian secret service to target Starmer? Or the British secret service, as further agitation against Russia? Or the Americans or Ukrainians, towards similar ends?

Idk. The BBC isn’t exactly above playing it’s own role in the espionage game.

The 22-year-old Ukrainian builder had been weaponised to target the UK’s head of government. But by who?

…

The handler EL, who directed Lavrynovych, offered Russian citizenship in return for other attacks and glorified President Vladimir Putin, messages the BBC has uncovered show.

We have identified evidence suggesting that EL is a young Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow. His name is Evgeny Lyukshin. He is 23 and the son of a senior official.

It’s plausible. Russian intelligence services have adopted the same basic tactics used by the CIA, the FBI, SIS, Mossad, and similar services to cultivate extremists as tools of regime change.

And we’ve got a wealth of evidence to support the theory that these agencies use the Internet as a vector of that radicalization.

Whether you believe the BBC (an organ of state media) when it pins the blame on one spy agency over another? I guess that depends on how much you trust them.