Just read through it, it’s cute that the BBC thinks it’s doing journalism lol

Sure, probably. As per the reference sheet for the rules/laws of dialectical materialism: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Elementary_principles_of_philosophy#The_laws_of_dialectics

As a mnemonic:

1. Unity & Struggle of Opposites (The Engine)
2. Quantity into Quality (The Leap)
3. Negation of the Negation (The Spiral)
4. Primacy of Matter (The Substance)
5. Social Being Determines Consciousness (The Method)

You have a unity of opposites between the two players and their armies. Neither white nor black can exist without the other (it’s not a game of chess if there’s only one side in it), but they are diametrically opposed - by definition the existence of one must be ended. This is not a rule of diamat by itself (that one must be destroyed), just that you have to resolve the contradiction somehow, and as long as even one black or white piece remains, the contradiction will continue to exist (excluding checkmate rules and other 'no more than 5 of the same movement consecutively rules to break locked states at the end-game).

Maybe this is where Clausewitz’s conception of war also plays a part (he was resolutely dialectical, not materialist though). He views war as a duel on a large scale - also showing that we go from the particular to the totality. When pawn takes pawn, you resolve the contradiction of the duel (pawn against pawn, where both players can equally take the other’s pawn if they decide to) by making your move and capturing the pawn. But this creates further contradictions, either in your possible moves or the adversary’s.

Quantitative change leads to qualitative change and vice versa. You can see this on different levels, taking enough pieces lets you win the game (qualitative). You can also see it in the ‘duel’ - if you secure a nice position with say bishop and knight threatening a single piece, then you have a quantitative difference which makes the capture pretty sure on the next move (take with knight and knight will be protected by bishop). You accumulate (in most cases) quantitative change until it leads to qualitative change (excluding that sometimes people just miss the obvious and expose their king in like turn 3 or 4).

The negation of the negation means that, well, the negation contains its own negation. For example the bourgeoisie was the negation to the aristocracy, but the bourgeoisie created its own negation in the proletariat. It is “contained” within the negation. Moving a piece is usually done to put you in a favorable position but can also expose you. Taking a piece may lead to your own piece being taken right away in the next turn. You might give a bishop to a pawn so that the pawn moves, negating the king’s safety in the process and leaving him exposed.

And of course materially speaking you have to play the board you are given with the rules of chess (rules being more akin to laws which are part of the superstructure which diamat does not discard). Moves act in the material world but only the moment they are actually carried out – you may plan 50 moves in advance in your head, but if the adversary makes a move that wasn’t in your calculations, all of that planning did not materialize and you are forced to change your plans.

The way we play chess today is itself inherited from the centuries of social labor of previous players who advanced and perfected strategies. The default opening used to be pawns in the center for decades, but was replaced in the 1920s by the fianchettoed Bishops. This was a direct negation of the classical doctrine of occupying the center with pawns.

This is a brief overview, the important points however are:

1. To look at it in its totality, not in its particular. It is not enough to look at a duel (pawn vs pawn) and make broad sweeping rules, just like the laws of dialectics are not a checklist that you compare to. This was just a quick starting base.
2. This is because diamat is a living science meant to change the world and not just analyze it.

Whether you could use these rules to perfect your game of chess, I’m not sure. I think over the centuries players have basically perfected strategies, which are themselves a material reflection. If we hold that diamat is the objective truth of the universe, then it makes sense that eventually some principles will be reached without people necessarily knowing about diamat.

In Germany men aged 18-45 apparently can’t leave the country for more than 3 months without submitting documents. It’s a new law.

Shortly before (in 2025) they apparently approved a ‘hybrid’ system where 18 year olds are pre-drafted. Prior to that they had a fully volunteer force since 2011. There is also a mechanism in that law that the federal gov can introduce conscription if enlistment targets are not met.

It’s getting really dire. they’re preparing for WW3, I’m not sure how else to interpret it. But this time it’ll be against anti-imperialism.

If it starts getting too real skip the country and never ever come back tbh. Tell them you’ll come back in 3 months lol.

Do you think they will also celebrate the 1488th male left alive in Ukraine before it ticks down to 0?

lol we are going to convert the entire instance to Clausewitz and Politzer

“Israel” only attacks because they know the US will be there to save their ass. The iron dome itself is almost 100% USian, the tech, the funding, the interceptors are all USA. If they didn’t have that they would not commit 90% of the crimes they do.

You’re right, I was imagining GPT generating a timer with python (since they pioneered the AI generating and running code on the web interface) but making tools the llm can call is probably much simpler in terms of compute.

Which brings me to the next step, OAI seems to be doing so bad recently that I imagine they have much more pressing matters to attend to before adding a timer for the probably <5% of the users who need one.

They also have to reckon with the fact that people are using GPT in these types of way. Like yeah you could just open your own timer app on your phone, but what people want is live chatting while on their run. we can speculate as to why and if it’s good or not but regardless this is a strain on OAI’s servers that doesn’t make them any money. Frankly I’ve said this for a while now but I don’t see OAI surviving for much longer, especially when Claude is the best of the best for coding and agentic which is where the providers are headed, and GPT has been lagging behind that lazily.

I myself have deleted my chatGPT account some time ago, it’s all deepseek for me from here on out lol

edit: instead of buying 40% of the world’s wafers and driving up memory prices they should invest some of that taxpayer money into rebuilding their model from the ground up with new innovations but what do I know I’m not a sociopathic tech CEO

oh damn i finally get why he said praise be to allah. he’s trying to get back at the IRGC spokes for saying “thank you for your attention to this matter”, mocking trump

Under the terms of the self-defense force, are they not technically barred from doing exactly this?

(first time I’ve hit character limit on lemmygrad I think lol)

continued:

This is more complicated for me to answer, I’m not too deep into the operational side. But operationality is dwindling down year after year in the US army, probably because it’s expensive and they can’t justify the cost. At any time, they might have only 40-50% of their plane arsenal ready to depart. This is not huge, though you would rarely have 100% operationality. But again, they have not needed 80% operationality from their planes for a long time. Nobody in Libya was opposing their air superiority, they could fly freely. Nobody was opposing it in Afghanistan, they could fly freely.

As for rust, it’s deprioritized for other things. The US Army is clearly stretching thin. It can still attack and destroy, absolutely, but it’s being stretched. The Navy’s director of Ship Integrity and Performance Engineering has publicly admitted, “We know what to do, but we choose not to do it,” because corrosion is perpetually deprioritized for other problems.

Part of the operational problem is the MIC again. The Army buys new systems over upgrading/maintaining older ones, because that’s where the money is for the contractors. It’s possible to extend the life of a helicopter by 25 years after depot-level overhaul, but they buy a brand new one instead. Public depots get shafted in favor of new procurements from private contractors, and professionals leave and take their expertise with them. This is solved by policy, which the US technically has, but it’s not enough to fix it. They would need to really reign in the contractors and the army’s reliance on them. It’s a long, long process even if you made a law today.

Iran though has been building a fully or mostly domestic defense industry under the sanctions, so they have stuff that can target planes and helicopters. So they don’t fly freely over Iran. They have also, as others pointed out, studied how the US fights - and so have Russia and China (and perhaps this starts to explain why Russia is taking its time in Ukraine instead of trying to be faster than the US doctrines of blitzkrieg).

In terms of logistics, we could look at how they ship all of this stuff around the world (this is where a big navy necessarily comes in), but we also have to state the obvious, now, after 12 paragraphs: the US has stopped producing anything. They outsourced everything to China.

On the ground, this means Lockheed Martin only delivers 50-96 THAAD interceptor missiles (long-range interception) per year. You would use at least 2 per interception. You might say “but if this is their lifeline in terms of defense, wouldn’t you want to make 500 per year instead?” Yes, you would, and the US has contracted lockheed to ramp that up to I think 250 per year… by 2030. But they literally can’t. They don’t have the raw resources or the workforce for it. China controls most rare earths – rare earths themselves are not rare, what’s rare is extracting them from the soil.

China handles most rare earths processing - 70-90% of the world’s; the US and other countries might mine their own earths, but they send them to China for processing. And it’s not easy to scale up and increase yield of a given load of soil. And now, they have enacted export controls on rare earths to the US, so double whammy. China makes 90% of the world’s magnets, which are used in missiles and other target-seeking payloads.

With outsourced production, the US doesn’t even always have the knowledge to scale these things up. There’s entire methods of manufacturing we forgot because we’ve outsourced them for over 20, 30 years. You can see it right now not just in interceptors, but a LOT of stuff for the US defense contractors gets sourced from China. It’s short-sighted, but then again what else is capitalism but the chasing of short-term profits to ensure you continue to operate tomorrow?

edit: oh yeah I should add, we’re also working on ‘just in time’ logistics in the west, because storage is expensive. So it’s better for companies, not just in defense, to get rid of stock as quickly as possible and prevent storage build-up. This is why everything takes 2 weeks to ship to you, either as a consumer or a business buyer, and you can’t just walk out with specialized parts (you used to like with car parts, but not anymore). They need to order it, which means it needs to be made in the next batch that will be made and then shipped to them. 2 weeks.

this is why we are only ever 2 weeks away from crisis. we saw it in strikes, we saw it during covid, and we see it again in this war with fuel.

So tl;dr: US is fucked because it got too big, and it got too big because it needed to expand. many empires died the same way.

For over 30 years the US has only fought let’s say sub-peer militaries. Vietnam was a factor that prompted them to innovate briefly - we often think of Vietnamese soldiers as ‘farmers’ but no, it was a comprehensive, exhaustive, and almost peer military. They shot down planes all the time and led a two-prong strategy of guerilla and conventional (with the army in the north alongside what is referred to as the Viet Cong which was a mass front, i.e. federating all vietnamese into it regardless of affiliation, though under the command of the communist party). They were geniuses, you don’t win on grit alone.

The M16 and M4 were introduced in Vietnam for example (M4 after the war but based on Vietnam experience), and of course the extensive use of napalm and agent orange and new helicopters made for the theater. It might also very well have been the first US “forever war”.

But I would position Vietnam as a turning point because after that, the US never really fought the same wars again. There was the Iran invasion by Saddam that was financed and armed by the US, then after that the hostage crisis, the grenada invasion, invasion of Panama, first Gulf War for Kuwait, destruction of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, second invasion of Iraq, Libya in 2011… frankly the list goes on, I’ll just put it in a spoiler. It’s huge, and frankly I’m not even sure it’s exhaustive.

But we can see that after Vietnam, maybe even after World Ward 2 (!), they just stopped fighting against peer militaries. There was Iraq in 1991, armed by the US of course, but in my research I learned about the ‘Powell Doctrine’ and the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA), used against Iraq and others, which were about using overwhelming technological advantage to achieve swift, decisive victories. So this is how the US wants to fight in the first place. If you can prevent that blitz, then you can completely disarm them.

So that’s the first factor. As they stopped fighting against peer militaries that could take their planes down easily, that could bomb their bases, that could force their ships away from the theater, even someone who could bomb US territory like the Soviet Union could, they necessarily focused on different strategies. You need to find out guerilla troops for example, right? Their entire point is they try to hide, sometimes even in civilian populations (aside: in terms of para-military you also have the guerilla, and the resistance. The resistant has a day job, he looks and acts like a normal civilian, but he runs operations for the resistance). That’s why you see stuff like the Anduril helmet that ‘sees’ through walls (https://x.com/0xmitsurii/status/2039201367294955707). The way it works if you watch the video is soldiers and drones deployed in an area communicate together with this helmet and assets are marked for everyone as long as one of the devices can see it. So it doesn’t do X-ray vision, it’s more like a minimap with a tag mechanic. But regardless, that’s great for anti-guerilla operations! Not so much useful when your bases are being bombed by hypersonic missiles, or when you can bomb the data center that coordinates and computes all this tech. Too little too late as always.

Regardless, you still have a defense industry. The defense industry in the US was created for world war 2, because they needed to arm themselves quickly, so private contractors emerged and were strengthened. Eiseinhower was apparently the one who coined the term military industrial complex in 1961. These ‘contractors’, i.e. private businesses, still need to exist after the war though, because otherwise you have no real army capacity anymore. Especially as the US emerged as the imperial hegemon after the war over the world, they needed to expand this military to enforce their order, so that means more spending.

This leads to bloated spending. Yes the companies want to make money, but they also need to stay alive. You see this in construction in some places (I’m sure the US does it too), where the government hires them to fix stuff that doesn’t need fixing because we don’t need them that much, but they still want them to exist. Of course, this makes them a lot of money.

A company like Anduril doesn’t care about saving soldier lives. Not directly at least. They care about selling their product over the competition and making billions off of it.

And I don’t know if you saw that scandal, but the US military pays something like 30$ for a philipps-head screw that costs 50 cents at home depot. It’s the same screw, it’s just that contractors can charge a lot more because, again, the US has decided they need to exist and can’t be dismantled.

So spending bloats up, and the state stops fighting peer enemies and switches strategy to handling insurgency, guerilla tactics, etc. They take air superiority as a given, they take the defense of their bases as a given (they were never in any real danger in Iraq and Afghanistan), they take their ‘freedom’ of navigation as a given, being able to deploy their ships wherever they want, and build an entire system based on that. Aircraft carriers are now sitting ducks, though still heavily protected by an escort. A hypersonic would make short work of it if it can penetrate the envelope of defense at hyper speeds. Likewise the US doesn’t need hypersonics because they don’t normally fight adversaries that can intercept any missile - interception is really hard, I’ll give them that, and the US excels there compared to other militaries. We can point to Russia as a peer military but even they don’t have amazing interception capabilities.

But then we get into the operational and logistical question.

Have you seen the pictures of rusty US ships?

continued below

This was originally my personal list: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:ProleWiki_absolute_beginner_reading_list, for total beginners. not sure they’ll be able to find everything though in libraries.

6 months is a bit much, maybe that’s assuming they will not go through it too quickly i.e. that people will not be eating rice for breakfast lunch and dinner. If they did though it would last well over a month for every person on the island, including the newborns (see my other comment for the math)

that’s even bigger than I last heard at 60k tons! It’s about a third of the yearly rice production in China.

Reminder that China is not an oil exporting nation and has never been, they are a net importer (11m barrels imported vs 4m domestic production per day). There is no sense in China buying oil to try and send to Cuba, they would just be slapping a Chinese sticker on Russian oil that they already buy (China is Russia’s biggest buyer of oil and LNG).

It’s better if they focus on providing what they do actually own and produce, such as solar panels and rice.

Napkin math is easy enough, a portion of dry rice for one person is around 60g when used as a side dish. There are 11 million people living in Cuba, and I’m assuming that’s 90k metric tons, not imperial.

At two portions a day, this is enough rice to feed the entire country for ~68 days. At three portions a day (or assuming slightly higher portions), this would last 45 days. And it’s not just rice of course; 60g is good for a side dish or if you’re really, really stretching it. A “full” portion if you eat only rice and nothing else might be 100-120g (around 360kcal in 100g of dry rice).

I find that I usually start reading half-focused, but then settle into it if I push through, after enough pages. So now I accept it, I treat the first minutes reading as the warmup, and then once I settle in and find my rhythm that’s when the real reading begins.

you might very well register things even if you feel like you’re not reading. Though it’s more important to be assiduous when reading theory than when reading novels, but it doesn’t mean it’s all wasted.

A ruler type tool to help keep your eyes focused on the line you’re reading might be helpful too. We have one if you read online on prolewiki (totally not self-promo lol), if you press 0 on keyboard or the eye icon in the sidebar. Only works on desktop though. Otherwise for physical books you can find any ruler.

I don’t know about ADHD but I think the first step is not being hard on yourself for losing focus and just accepting it as part of your reading experience.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:On_War I actually uploaded it onto PW a while back lol, there’s a link to the good PDF in the foreword. I uploaded the gutenberg edition bc it was easier at the time :(

Turning it into an antenna of the CPC like they do in rural China first and foremost 🫡 lol

Anything is possible, but whether they will actually go through with it is another thing. I err on the side that they won’t have the balls to send a nuke.

Project Gutenberg has a copy but it’s an older translation/edition. There’s a newer edition that flows much better imo, you can find it by just looking for a pdf, though it remains a dense read. I recommend the first book (maybe even reading it twice if needed), and the second book. First book is still required reading in modern military academies. I think I stopped at book two, I don’t remember what the third book is about right now but the fourth is probably not that interesting anymore since it deals with tactics in certain situations (like attacking or defending a river). I’m sure that was fire in the 1800s but today somehow I don’t think it applies as much lol. Although you never know.

It’s ridiculous. You don’t have to agree with everything she says (I certainly don’t) but she keeps getting arrested every 5 minutes for social media posts meanwhile brits that served in the IOF come back and live their lives free.

UK is the next fash country we’ll have to beat back atp. You’ll see, it’ll emerge from there.