“Russia is a country and not a one-mission kamikaze drone” - perfect description of the difference between Russia and Ukraine.

I guess the evil Chinese authoritarian school teachers even infiltrated the IMF and told them Taiwan is a province of China.

Thomas Sankara slammed as a Marxist-Leninist

True, but we all know the general western reaction to amending the law to extend the term limits in any way.

But here we arrive at another unspoken assumption of western democracy, namely that whatever idiosyncratic procedures a particular liberal democracy might have, they are more or less set in stone and any proposed reform will easily be portrayed as anti-democratic.

The mental gymnastics to support this one are on an Olympic level of stupid.

Well, yes, but so were the mental gymnastics to support all the previous interventions.

Always reminds me of this masterpiece quote:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it.

— Aimé Césaire Discourse on Colonialism (Please read it, it’s short)

Spot on.

This is also why to liberals term limits are one of the most important of those “rituals”. In the US they were specifically instituted because FDR just kept winning elections on account of people believing their lives were improving because of his policies.

Jokes on you, they would just say that this graph is a sign of Chinese economy collapsing!

Incidentally due to the Maduro situation no one paid attention, but Burkina Faso foiled a planned coup literally on the night of January 3rd.

Bottom left is the classic “those authoritarian dictators are only doing things that are good for the people in order to trick people into believing that they are working for the people”.

Also I feel obliged to insert this classic:

The Venezuelan elections were monitored by 800 international observers and the vast vast majority of them saw nothing suspicious (the few that did were coincidentally on US State Department payroll). Venezuela also has one of the most well safeguarded electoral process in the world.

Also the opposition literally cries electoral fraud in every single election they lose, but had no issues in the two instances they won.

And they don’t really do that for the domestic audience, it’s purely for the western media. Case in point, after establishing multiple (contradicting) websites supposedly demonstrating the electoral fraud, they didn’t even bother showing up for a commission set up in Venezuela were they were to present their “evidence”.

I’m so tired of liberals saying “what Trump has done is bad because now China will do the same to Taiwan!”

A man can dream.

If not for Venezuela’s oil, you wouldn’t know who Maduro is.

but that article smells like a steamy pile of progressive-washed dung.

Why would you say so? What’s the problem with it?

The Chinese people sure feel oppressed by “elites beyond democratic control”:

And no, people aren’t just “too afraid to share their real thoughts”, there are studies specifically designed to counter that potential tendency and they find the same results.

If you’re willing to understand WHY the Chinese people hold those opinions, I can recommend this article: Building Whole-Process People’s Democracy in China.

They seem to ban communism about once a year there.

While China sees AI as another tool for controlling its populace, the United States is rushing to create AI that will give it global economic dominance.

Erm… If you insist on framing it in those terms, it’s precisely the opposite: China is using AI to massively increase industrial productivity and outputs, whereas USA is all about deep fakes and grok providing copium and distraction.

If someone is skeptical of this claim or thinks it’s an exaggeration, please read Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History.

2026 - the Year of the Linux Desktop US Anti-Monopoly Revolt