Bulletins and News Discussion from May 12th to May 18th, 2025 - Nuclear War Averted (Hopefully)!

Image is from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' recent article on Kashmir.

It looks like the spat between India and Pakistan could be dying down, due to a new ceasefire. As of the time of me writing this paragraph, it seems both sides want to maintain it (despite some reports of violations here and there).

Both sides have declared victory, which is completely expected given their mutual political parties and nationalist histories. It's a little harder to say which side has actually won, as both sides seem to have managed to shoot down aircraft and hit military bases. India has, in my opinion, had the more embarrassing moments, but international conflicts aren't cringe compilations. I feel no good-will towards Pakistan's comprador government, but it is at least nice to see Modi knocked down a few pegs. Regardless of the final technical victor, it's obvious that - if the ceasefire is maintained - who won are the hundreds of millions of people who won't have to live in fear of dying in nuclear hellfire.

This conflict is a good example of what multipolarity will truly entail. Countries that have been previously limited in their nationalist ambitions by American pressure will now take opportunities to revolt, sometimes against America itself, and sometimes against other countries in their regional neighbourhood. It's also why, as communists, our goals do not stop at multipolarity; it is merely the establishing act of a new era of agitation against peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalist countries that are forming powerful national bourgeoisie classes as the international American capitalists are forced away.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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936 comments

Latest propaganda attack on China seems to be that they have "kill switches" in all solar panels
https://www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/kill-switches-solar-panels-sold-china-sparking-fears-energy-grid-attack/
- This shit is so fake. Solar panels are simple as hell, you couldn't hide this shit from a novice installer.
  
  After speaking with a solar panel installer I know their take is that it's not the panels it's the inverters which is different, and also that all of these inverters have the functionality to turn them off via an app, it's pretty standard. They're posing this as something sinister secreted into the features when it's not.
  
  Yeah in that way it's no different from any Internet-connected piece of electrical equipment. You can do a lot of diagnosing and mitigating entirely through a web portal. This is just sinophonic bullshit to justify further crackdown on renewables.
  
  Yeah this could be the case for any internet connected device regardless of where it's manufactured, they could all have "kill switches". Signalling out China for this is weird for sure. If anything it's a case against the internet of things (IoT and smart home devices/automation) more than anything else. Install say a software like pihole or adguard home for DNS on a raspberry Pi and you can see all the DNS calls/"rouge communication" from your average smart device, be it a TV or inverter. Phoning home all the time.
- Saw this in Spanish "news" too, only that the claim is that there are "rogue communication devices" inside power inverters, not in the panels themselves.
  In case anybody is interested, this is extreme bullshit. I'm a photovoltaics nerd and I consistently watch videos of teardowns and reviews of Chinese photovoltaic power inverters (consumer-grade though, not industry stuff. If anyone's interested, a good source in Spanish is "DIY Baterías LiFePo4", a Murcia or Almería-based battery nerd carrying out reviews). The components are all easy to understand by a novice electronical engineer, and there's no way to hide any communication protocol in these devices because, you know, antennas and radio modules have a physical size and need to be positioned in clearly visible places. It's simply not a thing. The biggest claim one could reasonably make without evidence is "they've hidden a software backdoor in the Bluetooth part of the IoT-integrated inverters", but that's just made up at this point. Just the usual China hatemongering
- pushing the big red "destroy the us power grid" button
  
  I can find zero evidence to support this for the record and I've tried. At the moment it appears to just be claims by the US.
  
  "destroy the us power grid" button
  The button pressing in question:
- America so far has consistently accused their rivals of what they've been doing under shadows. I wonder what's the implication here
  
  I mean Trump already said the fighter jets they sell all have kill switches and are deliberately 10% worse than their own fighters.
- I remember when they talked about kill switches in Chinese phones so you should buy an overpriced Apple product instead! I remember them saying similar things about 5G being a "Chinese plot" to take over the west!
  I sure am glad this propaganda is so blatant and openly racist that anyone could immediately spot it for what it is and not fall for it, right?
  
  so you should buy an overpriced Apple product instead!
  Which is literally manufactured by the Chinese anyway so if they wanted they could do it to that too. They don't, because it's not good business sense, but they could!
  I sure am glad this propaganda is so blatant and openly racist that anyone could immediately spot it for what it is and not fall for it, right?
  Someone on a (non marxist) server I'm on brought it up when I mentioned China. Fortunately 100% of the other people online all saw through it immediately and I think they also started to see it as sus also. The issue is that people simply trust news outlets, they do not think they would print something untrue or something that is blatant propaganda. People are deeply naive and gullible, most generally good people think society is running sensibly and fairly. Being critical of new outlets is not normalised.
  Fortunately at the current moment China is actually getting widespread popular support because of Trump. The current atmosphere is very good for us.
  
  Yeah, I joke, but I have actually noticed a bit of a shift in the libs in my life towards China. While previously much more reluctant to discuss it, there's a lot more positive talk and a lot less pushback when I call them out for things like "Chinesium" I asked a buddy to travel to China with me last year, he didn't want to (though it was much more financial issues than any-anti China stuff) but now I feel like he'd be much more positive about a trip like that.
  
  With the crowd on this server I literally couldn't say a word about China before without getting winnie the pooh authoritarian bazinga shit in response. I would have been crucified then if I said the things I now say about China openly. Exactly the same people, the only thing that has changed is their own attitudes and behaviours. They are definitely shifting.
  Lgbt people that are currently experiencing regression in the west and have no hope for the future are extremely open to hearing that lgbt issues are progressive over there and that the Chinese community will likely be a leader on these issues eventually.
  Climate change people are extremely easy to pull around to "China good", probably the easiest.
  American Liberals like China standing up to US.
  European Liberals like China standing up to US and repeatedly say "we need to be closer and trade more".
  China is winning the propaganda war on every single front. The west has zero positive ground to stand on anymore and it's so easy.
  Even Chinaphile nationalist content can get upvotes in baby-left leaning spaces. Won't be number one in those spaces but it won't be sent to oblivion either.
  Don't get me started on tiktok, while comment sections are generally mixed (i do not understand how comment section algo even works) the videos themselves are being massively liked and spread very far.
  
  Yeah, the tide is definitely turning. To the point that I'm wondering if the US will try to push out new versions of USAID and RFA and similar to try and reign in the narrative. They just seem to be using the same tired old rehashed stories they've been using since the 90s. Though that could be an example of the decay in our modern neoliberal system, the people coming up with the anti-China propaganda are all True Believers in the system and so can't actually make shit up the way their forebears could 30-40 years earlier.
  
  the people coming up with the anti-China propaganda are all True Believers in the system and so can't actually make shit up the way their forebears could 30-40 years earlier.
  Most likely true. Many of them do not recognise that they are lies, they actually believe the propaganda.
  If you actually believe the propaganda and don't realise it's made up then you don't realise that you need to make up new propaganda.
  They were much better off creating well educated true believers in capitalist ideology, when they destroyed education and used media to turn everyone into believing in nothing they set this path in motion.
  
  Had someone tell me literally a couple weeks ago that China was installing backdoors into surveillance cameras, so they could sneakily surveil us in the West. This person has a PhD
- please, President xi, my people cry out for freedom

936 comments