Image is of the Te Pati Maori (Maori Party) cofounders, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. They have 6 of the 123 seats in the New Zealand parliament.
Officially confirming that the Republican primaries were a gigantic waste of time for everybody involved, Trump has massively beat everybody else in Iowa, and will very obviously be the Republican candidate for 2024. Given the abysmal state of the US economy (for everybody who isn’t in the top 1-10%, which is mainly what national statistics reflect when they aren’t telling blatant falsehoods), it’s more plausible than ever that Trump may indeed once again become President - though I personally refuse to predict one way or another due to how volatile politics and geopolitics currently are. Project 2025 is coming, folks - either as the official Republican governance program, or as what the Democrats will do in 2026 after the midterms, stating that they have no other choice and have to reach across the aisle as they are the Adults In The Room™.
In other news…
Late last year, New Zealand voted in a new and very right-wing government, composed of the center-right National Party, the libertarian ACT Party (ACT stands for the “Association of Consumers and Taxpayers”, good lord), and the fascist New Zealand First party. By what I can tell, this was the well-trodden path of “Vaguely center-left party does neoliberal austerity and causes a recession and workers fucking hated it and voted in a different party out of desperation,” though the flooding and cyclones did add challenges to Chris Hipkins’ short reign after Jacinda Ardern resigned.
It’s worth noting that Hipkins was at least fairly China-friendly, meeting up with Xi Jinping on a five-day visit in the summer. They still do the whole “We have concerns about human rights” thing, but of all the countries of the imperial core, New Zealand is - or, perhaps, was - one of the most amicable. In 2021, China was New Zealand’s single largest trading partner, with a third of exports going to China (more than Australia, the US, Japan, and South Korea combined), and they receive 22% of their imports from China too, more than any other single country.
Christopher Luxon, the new Prime Minister and sentient thumb, has said that he is exploring a closer relationship with AUKUS:
Luxon said New Zealand was interested in becoming involved in AUKUS Pillar 2: a commitment between the three partners to develop and share advanced military capabilities, including artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and hypersonics.
“We’ll work our way through that over the course of next year as we understand it more and think about what the opportunities may be for us,” Luxon said. “AUKUS is a very important element in ensuring we’ve got stability and peace in the region.”
This is not to say that Hipkins wanted nothing to do with AUKUS or Western organizations aimed generally against China - in fact, pre election, “he was open to conversations about joining Pillar II of AUKUS”. But the current government is pushing down on the accelerator pedal.
The left-wing Maori party, Te Pati Maori, has stated that they want New Zealand to remain non-aligned, as joining AUKUS would erode the sovereignty of the country:
As Maori we cannot allow our sovereignty to be determined by others, whether they are in Canberra or Washington. Aotearoa should not act as Pacific spy base in the wars of imperial powers. Joining AUKUS will severely undermine our country’s sovereignty, constitution, and ability to remain nuclear free. There is too much at stake for our government to make a commitment of this magnitude without a democratic process.
In general, the party leaders of Te Pati Maori want New Zealand to be the “Switzerland of the Pacific”, which is perhaps not the greatest analogy given all the problems Switzerland had and has, but we understand the intended meaning of desiring neutrality.
The Country of the Week is New Zealand! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
interesting financial analysis of the semiconductor industry showing that AI is a huge hype bubble, especially for Nvidia
I’m ready to not have to hear about these nasty algorithms every day. please burst
Semiconductor sector is seeing a slowdown because all of the traditional growth vectors (gaming, personal computing, data centers) have basically collapsed in favour of AI AI AI AI AI.
There is infinite demand for Nvidia right now, and that’s not because of AGI: it’s because LLMs themselves introduce productivity advantages that are unmatched (mostly because most jobs are useless).
In theory, this demand should grow outside of Nvidia, but Nvidia is the only company that doesn’t really have to deal with the externalities of their other business groups contracting, so in effect Nvidia is a more representative sample of how AI is growing.
Intel, AMD, MU, TI, TSMC, these are all heavily diversified. Nvidia has never been so. Their initial business was entirely centered around gaming, and their new business has just switched that over towards GPGPU for AI. They’re the single most exposed company, which means they see both the highs and the lows.
A lot of jobs at big companies don’t have any justification to exist in the first place, I’m sure AI can do a nothing job just as well
Elaborate on that. I am not even confident C suite can be complete wiped away but idk
I mean, something like 75% of the US economy is service sector now. We successfully automated a lot of physical labor and outsourced the rest to the developing world, but instead of working 15 hours weeks, everyone just does meaningless shit. At least some of that can be done by the shitty AI we have now - customer service, receptionists, telemarketers, etc.
I guess this is basically just the premise of Bullshit Jobs, but now even some of the service sector can be automated. Ideally that would lead to UBI or something similar, but I doubt it.
I was gonna bring up service industry tho bc that’s stuff you often can’t use AI to get rid of, unless it’s just an excuse for layoffs, or maybe call centers could be rly wiped out by ai customer service, I can see it for some management stuff but idk that’s all memes to me (will still redirect to downsized call centers)
I find this lumping together of service industry shit with a lot of the pointless PMC stuff in Graeber’s writings, in Zizek’s writings (who I like the least of these 3 btw lol), and the Infrared guys, and I’m not sure I buy the whole starbucks = labor aristocracy bit.
There is definitely shit that can be replaced with AI just feels like a reach
I’m not trying to do the labor aristocracy thing, or that the entire service industry can be automated, just that a lot of the jobs that only exist to keep people employed can also be done by AI.
I just want to add replacing service industry people with kiosks doesn’t really lower the dependency on cheap labor at all people have to fix & manufacture them 🥷
I will admit I don’t have a head for finance at all & just broadly understand the geopolitics of it by osmosis and separately read whistleblower blogs like Wall Street on Parade but that’s pretty much a key division between the “upper middle classes” of the US who have retirement savings and whatnot that go into bankrupting Argentina
On top of the value of an individual’s labor you have to take into account their financial activity. Are they a debtor? Smalltime real estate and stock market investor cum bankruptee? Creditor?