CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]

Is there an argument to be made about this helping countries sanctions proof themselves? Still using dollars, just not clearing systems hosted in the EU.

translation: for the love of christ stop watching AI videos of me

The issue at hand is of manufacturing consent. The brazilian far right is pushing for terrorist designation and the US is more than happy to see it done. The brazilian left believes this is opening a precedent for US intervention in Brazil and, well, the far right is outright calling for boats to be blown up in Guanabara Bay. The brazilian center points out the entire things is just theater and doesn’t enable any further state powers to face organized crime. The center-left argument is unsustainable long term unless the current government takes on a tough on crime agenda of its own - criminal factions in Brazil might not be political terrorists but they have supplanted the power of the state in too many territories across the country. There is a real demand for retaliation, security and revenge by the population at large, which rightwing necropolitics has an easy time catering to.

Often times, within the core territories of the complexes, there just is no legal landlord. People have the possession of the houses they and their families live in (sometimes having built it themselves over time). As generations pass and families become smaller it becomes interesting to rent those spaces out to the people who need them, especially in favelas close to affluent neighborhoods in Rio’s South and Southwest Zone, as well as some pockets in the North. But these informal agreements are subject to the power politics of faction rivalry and coalition building. Someone can be forced to pay rent in the form of a protection racket, which is part of the whole package of ‘gifts’ that they receive from the para-state nature of factions. Someone else might be forced out of their home with death threats due to a perceived (or real) alignment with the old faction or the old leader that controlled territory.

The first point where things start to blur is when complexes form. Control over a critical mass of slums next to each other allows a faction to exert control over its environs, eventually assimilating small neighborhoods and habitational complexes into the ‘Favela Complex’. These places have legal owners who may or may not have to pay a protection tax to the faction but may find other ways to benefit from illegality. Consumer good stores within a faction’s territory can become highly lucrative, either because they don’t have to pay any taxes to the government that doesn’t protect them or because they end up helping launder money for the factions. The protection tax I mentioned isn’t always in the form of money either, it is not uncommon for a select group of people from a favela to have the rights to extract goods from, say, a supermarket chain, from food to electronics. It is all very fluid and varies from community to community but the long term effect is rather clear, businesses close, real estate depreciates and tax revenue decreases over time - not just because of loss of population and business but because the bourgeois State finds itself unable to justify charging property taxes over a region it only barely guarantees the right to property. In these cases, the legal house owner will often just sell off what they own to whoever buys it from them and just move on. That is, if they can sell it at all.

As a final note, think back to how I’ve talked about how criminal organizations have changed in Rio. With the drug trade now a minority portion of revenues, factions have professionalized in a way where they’ve become para-state organizations. The first Tropa de Elite movie is mostly bloodbath porn and hero worship material but it does represent something that is true. When Milícias where formed in the late 90s and early 00s they came to the realization that there is a lot of power within impoverished communities. 20% or so of Greater Rio’s population lives in favelas, all these people have to work, consume, worship, vote and have a roof over their heads. One good symbol of how factions like the Milícias (criminal orgs drawn from cops/ex-cops/soldiery/their families) exploit that is the collapse of a habitational complex that they themselves built in the Muzema/Rio das Pedras from a few years back. We aren’t talking about shacks or substandard housing all the time. In that case we have a faction playing at real estate speculation, construction and landlordship all at once, actually charging rent, condominium taxes and selling lots/apartments that turned out to be too cheap to be reliable. This tragedy is emblematic of an entire sector of real estate speculation under the control of the Milícias and there’s probably no State org that has a full understanding of how big this is.

Not 4 days before the 28th there was an interview online (portuguese) with the bureaucrat in charge of the whole massacre, a federal police officer and current Secretário de Segurança (Security) of the Rio State government. The interview follows the logic of the state, the primary means of solving violence in Rio is to estabilish the State’s monopoly over violence. And yet the discourse on display kinda shocks with how candid it is that military occupation doesn’t work, military incursions work even less and that a full programme of reintegration is needed.

The secretary proposes, amongst other things, that police intervention needs to be recalibrated to ensure the provision of public services, that communities need to be heard and understood according to their specific needs, that the working poorest need to be given rights of property over their houses and land (which, in turn, should cut criminal opportunities to extract rent or expel people for speculation), and that competitive social tariffs be levied on people - instead of paying the full cost of electricity, they should pay something closer to the protection racket charged by the factions to keep their refrigerators running. The only thing he doesn’t propose is reurbanizing the slums and the impression I’m left with is that the only reason he didn’t is because the interviewers didn’t bring it up. More importantly the guy is almost hostile to the sort of operation that he commanded yesterday. The idea that if you lock up the bandit you solve banditry, what he really wants to do is attack crime as an enterprise. Prophetically, in response to the political side of things he says that ‘we tell politicians what can work and what can’t, but I’m not a politician myself’. Hell, the guy outright says reintegration cannot start with the regions subject to police action yesterday because faction power there is too well estabilished.

This interview was weird to me because it shows a state bureaucrat (again, the guy in charge of the 28th’s megaoperation) cutting through the entire political discourse that polarized this massacre right afterward. You see, the Governor of Rio State Cláudio Castro is a member of the PL (Bolsonaro’s Party), and once the breakdown of law and order spread through the city he was quick to blame Lula’s Federal Government for not providing the state with enough aid. This is nothing new, its the oldest tactics in the Rio electoral playbook, something the Garotinho political dynasty used a lot (mostly to their loss). Only this was done in a very, let’s say, opportune moment. The President is returning from meetings in Malaysia and, coincidentially, he wasn’t using the presidential plane. He was using an airforce plane which, on the one hand, was meant to make his journey quicker, but on the other left the President incommunicado for 20 hours. There are already conspiracy theories tied to this fact.

So even in the best case scenario, where the intellectual consensus that military confrontation doesn’t solve shit, that necropolitics doesn’t solve anything, that the war on drugs is neither winnable nor even the war being fought nowadays has reached the state bureaucracy (and I don’t doubt it has, I mean, police officers probably don’t like dying for useless causes either) the fact is that the political cadres don’t care. We are faced with elections next year. This megaoperation - 1 year of intelligence gathering in the making, from what was reported - was just a pawn in the electoral agenda of one man and his party.

Moreover, there’s a larger context in place here. The brazilian far right enjoys talking about how it is under a judicial dictatorship (dictatorship by the Supreme Court), the same Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage and condemned Bolsonaro, as well as barring the most flagrantly illegal things that the far right Congress and Bolsonaro’s government tried to pull. As part of this claim, the far right information networks claim that ADPF 635 (a Supreme Court demand that Rio State fully follows the Constitution when doing police ops) is the reason criminal territory grew across Rio and in Brazil. It is an actual difficult discussion to be had, where both sides have points to make. For an example, the Supreme Court originally stipulated that schools and clinics should be avoided during a police op and never used by police as a base of operations. No brainer right? Well that stipulation only caused the factions to then invade schools and clinics themselves, as they were converted into safe zones for factional soldiers - at which point the Supreme Court relented. Problem is, in the far right parallel reality this extremely complex situation is all distilled into ‘the leftist communist Supreme Court and its President Lula is doing the utmost to protect crime and banditry’.

Governor Cláudio Castro played into that politics with early claims that he requested loans of armoured cars from the federal government in order to carry this police op. Turns out he didn’t, because such loans would have to be done under a GLO (Garantia de Lei e Ordem, Guarantee of Law and Order) a constitutional tool by which the state government claims itself unable to provide security services and places its forces under the control of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Government. This was never requested and, plain to see, if one is to claim that yesterday’s operation was a success because ‘it killed lots of bandits’ then its clear that Rio State still has the werewithal to act mostly alone. Which it isn’t, soldiers of the Força Nacional (National Forces) are already in Rio and have been for quite a few years. From what I understand, without a GLO there can only be a full Federal Intervention (which has happened before) and which nobody wants to see done because it fully paralyzes the federal government. Congress can’t really make vote on important reforms as long as one state is saturated with federal troops.

But the play has been done. Pro Bolsonaro networks have already circulated ‘documents’ which prove Lula and the Federal Government denied aid. None of them will mention Castro’s mea culpa ‘my words were misinterpreted, I never intended to criticize the Federal Government’. A massacre was done within the context of a city grasping with civil war-like conditions all across its peripheric and middle class regions. I do not expect this to have been an electoral misplay by anybody in particular, be it an eventual play by the Federal Government or this massacre by the Rio State government. I do not expect the people by and large to reject the paradigm of killing bandits being a good thing. On the contrary, for those who don’t live in the favelas there is only the demand that more operations of this kind be done until the factions are erradicated. Especially once Comando Vermelho decided to retaliate against a full third of the city of Rio, as people even outside their zone of control remain cowed and fearful today.

A final note of political context is the far right push to declare the factions Terrorist Organizations. The center left will argue that this is a means of legitimizing political violence by the United States against Brazil, like it is happening in Venezuela and Colombia right now. The center and the judicial system will argue that this doesn’t actually change anything. The current legal situation already allows for operations like the August 28th’s Federal Operation in Av. Faria Lima (Brazil’s Wall Street, in São Paulo) against the financial side of the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, Brazil’s most comprehensive faction and hegemon of São Paulo state, controllers of the international drug trade into West Africa and Europe but that’s the least of things). But I’m not going to lie: this may not be politically sustainable. As someone who lives rather close to the war and massacres that happened yesterday I cannot blame anyone who wants to see something, anything done. The Brazilian Left has to create its own ‘tough on crime discourse’ capable of outmaneuvering the necropolitics of the right. Not on a Clintonian sense of full capitulation to the right, but as part of its sovereigntist discourse. Otherwise sovereignty starts ringing hollow to people’s ears.

Wether things stabilize where they are or the cogs of the state move yet again, that’s something to be seen.

To fully understand the scale of what happened in Rio de Janeiro on the 28th I’d like to refer to the following public utility. It is a map of the territories in the Rio Metro Area that are under control of criminal factions - which is the word used by brazilians to refer to organized crime on the ground, as opposed to gangs, mafias and so on.

This is a zoomed in portion of the map, centered around Rio city’s North Zone or more specifically the Zona da Leopoldina - which is a mixed use, middle to lower class dormitory continuum connecting the international Galeão Airport with the City Center and the affluent South Zone of Rio, where most of tourism lies. The northern black circle is the Penha Complex, the southern black circle refers to the Alemão Complex. Complexes are agglomerations of slums, older housing complexes and the occasional neighborhood which are fully under the control of a criminal faction. The Penha Complex has a population of around 100.000 people, the Alemão Complex is almost 60.000. If you look closely there’s one thing between both complexes which is a forested region. That is where most of the extra bodies were found today.

If you look at the full utility I linked above you’ll see a bunch of colors and abbreviations. CV stands for Comando Vermelho or Red Command, which is an older faction originally focused on drug trafficking. TCP and ADA are schisms from Red Command, which follow more or less the same logic only more extreme and less pragmatic in its governance of the occupied populations. The blue colors with the CL and 5M abbreviations refer to Milícias (Militias), criminal groups formed out of police and military personnel and their families in the 90s and early 00s. Each of these factions often go to war with each other for territory and this war has been accelerating over time with the frontier moving from one part of the metro area to the next. Moreover, the leadership of every faction has become relatively young and unstable, increasingly paranoid and more aggressive over time - likely due to the fact that the traditional heads of the factions moved on from the coastal cities and took over the drug trade at the border after the FARC disarmed and the Paraguayan syndicates lost ground.

I mentioned criminal governance beforehand and I meant it. When you look at the revenues of criminal factions on the ground nowadays the drug trade can reach up to 11% of the money being made. Most of the money comes from taxes extracted from the working poorest: water, electricity, internet, television, natural gas, rent, protection rackets and so on. There are even bootleg transportation apps in some communities of Rio. All in all, this sort of ad-hoc state organization of crime adds up to more than 70 billion dollars a year which for Brazil’s economy is massive.

Where does that leave the Brazilian State in all this? More than 15 years ago when Rio became the centerpiece of a number of international events such as the World Cup and the Olympic games, the State found itself in a pickle. The old modus vivendi it built with the criminal factions was intolerable for capital. The risk was too great. So the state delivered an ultimatum to the factions: we are going to move in, we aren’t going to rock the boat all that hard we’ll just built police barracks within your territory and you aren’t supposed to do anything - hell, you’ll probably sell drugs anyways we don’t care, we just can’t let any of this spill into the touristy areas of Rio. For the most part the factions of Rio complied. There was only one real rebellion in the Vila Cruzeiro, which was immediately met with armoured cars from the marine corps and its interesting to note that Vila Cruzeiro is within the Penha Complex from yesterday’s events.

The problem arises from how the factions complied. It would have been one thing if they stayed in place and things were business as usual, just with fewer robberies and turf wars and such. But naturally they branched off. First they moved into the municipalities of the Metro area, which are even poorer than Rio’s periphery. Then they moved into Rio State’s interior. After that they started making more concerted moves into the peripheries of Brazil as a whole. A few years later, once the imperative to keep things under control for the Olympics was gone the occupation programme was met with a return of the faction wars only now with a vengeance. Now the factions don’t just hold territory, they manage and extract resources from its people to fund real military campaigns across the greater Rio Area.

Fast-forward to this year, 4 months ago the government of Rio State tried to do a megaop against the Israel Complex - controlled by the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP). Megaops are not that uncommon. They are part of the modus vivendi between the state and the criminal elements because, let’s face it, the people at the top who launder all the money are tied to politicians, religious leaders and financiers. A Megaop is supposed to kill a handful of people - thereby satisfying the public’s need for revenge - arrest a few others but not rock the boat too hard. It was not uncommon for such and such tons of drugs to be apprehended while local leaders somehow escaped. The old leaders of Rio’s factions understood this fact and, sure, sometimes they were caught but its not like they lost control over their domains. They still called the shots from prison. But you’ll remember that I said the new leaders are young, unstable and increasingly paranoid. It’s not just that they’ll see you making a vague gesture with your hand and immediately execute you for making ‘gang signs’ of a rival faction. This also affects how they treat the state.

So what happened 4 months ago in Israel Complex? The Terceiro Comando Puro of the region is led by religious pentecostal fundamentalists. Its in the name Israel Complex. The moment military police was poised to enter they didn’t bother shooting at the police officers. Instead they shot at Avenida Brasil, the main thoroughfare of the city. Thousands were in effect kept hostage in a massive traffic jam and the state couldn’t even enter the territory. This was a humiliation to the police and the state government both. And humiliations like these need to be avenged. Today’s op mobilized 2,500 civil and military police, moved against two Complexes at the same time and actually managed to capture some of Comando Vermelho’s middle managers, arrest dozens and kill hundreds (the latest toll at this moment being 168). Needless to say, by the very nature of this lashout many executions were summary and many innocent people died along the way. But it didn’t stop there.

Comando Vermelho is big, like all factions today it is a para-statal organization and its unity is always at stake. For the past 5 years Comando Vermelho has been fighting wars against ADA and TCP, schisms from it. And Comando Vermelho is not a centralized entity, it is quasi-feudal in structure. As such, it needs to answer humiliation with humiliation. That retaliation is partly in the form of killing power: they set fires across the city and used makeshift drones to throw grenades at police officers. But for the most part, the relatiation took the form of disrupting activities everywhere from Rio’s North Zone, to the Center and to certain cities of the Metro Area.

This is a map of the main thoroughfares that Comando Vermelho ordered closed via barricades - makeshift blockades with torched buses and cars, often also used to delay police action into their territories. This map is meant to be illustrative of their reach because it goes beyond just this action. Threats and rumours online of Comando Vermelho authorizing petty robbery within its territory (often done in order to fund its war operations, now done as retaliation against the state), sackings and killings were enough to force the closure of schools, hospitals, clinics and commerce all across the city.

I cite this retaliation by Comando Vermelho because what we have is a full display of necropolitics, of death and killing as a solution to life’s problems. Only it is also part of an old, outdated paradigm of dealing with crime. The assumption in the War on Drugs always that if you can arrest the Dealer, then crime Disappears. It was harder to argue otherwise in the past, when so much of crime hinged on the drug trade. But nowadays the real drug money lies in retail (controlling supply across the country) or international drug routes into Europe. As mentioned, things have changed, drugs are a minimal portion of the revenue of these political entities, which now act and extract revenues from people as though they are the state. They do not necessarily provide public services, but increasingly do. This is the new war that places not only Rio de Janeiro but much of Brazil’s peripheric states at a crossroads. And that crossroads is well known.

(continued)

at least it does fly in the face of ‘argentinean economic miracle’ propaganda

Then there’s the punchline to said narrative: the golden throne of Ankh-Morpork is rotting from within. It looks pefectly fine from afar, glistening and tempting enough to motivate the villain with nostalgia and glamour. But pageantry does not define a state. What Vetinari clears up in that final scene is that the feeble wooden foundations of the throne symbollize the lack of sustenance that a fairy tale kingship would entail. Carrot would not be an able ruler to the city, nevermind a ruler as able as Vetinari himself is.

I think this is a parallel with the way british democracy works and, I assume, Terry’s own feelings about it. Ankh-Morpork and Britain are both easily able to shed dipshit prime ministers and do so regularly. Ask Charles to do some actual governing and the country will collapse in 4 years - mostly because the way things are people don’t actually have to confront the shittiness of the royal family. They can latch onto the royals to little consequence. Likewise, the way things are in Ankh-Morpork means that people can wax poetically about the throne because there’s nobody sitting on it. Ankh-Morpork is not a monarchy, but it still has a nobility of sorts, a class system and the throne still sits upon the city, bereft of a king but still standing as a symbol of history. If Carrot sits on the throne it could quite literally fall apart and that symbollizes what’s ahead for Ankh then.

I always say Britain should abolish the royal family but not the monarchy. Let a LizzieGPT ‘rule’ eternally and nationalize the palaces. Win-win.

I think that it was long time coming as it appears that certain reforms made by Francis already caused the Opus Dei to lose part of their power. This is something where current cultural discourse that becomes orthogonal to the Catholic Church. It is a conservative institution in an ancestral meaning of the term as a sense of continuity is not just paramount, its a precondition to its existence. The decisions the catholics arrive at are implemented slowly, over time and in an almost cowardly fashion. The flipside of that is that the current Pope won’t break with the previous Pope on most things. If Francis was big on certain reforms, then Leo won’t buckle every trend almost by definition. So all those bets on wether Leo was Woke or NotWoke are missing the point. Before Leo the person there’s Leo the last medieval monarch in Europe who has to actually lead a State.

I don’t know to what extent this is actually true for all kinds of rare earth minerals, but I once watched as a guy in the industry talked about how you don’t really have a mine of Rare Earth Type A. What you have is some sort of huge fuck off iron mine in Inner Mongolia that happens to have trace amounts of Rare Earth Types A B and C. You wouldn’t exploit said iron mine if you didn’t also have a huge steel industry. So the lack of mineral exploitation in this case is actually the flipside to western deindustrialization and financialization.

It makes financial sense to exploit these mines in China because of their massive industrial demand, it might make sense to exploit these mines in poorer commodity exporters but one wonders about the infrastructure and the financing involved. And though rich neoliberal countries have the capital and the infrastructure, they lack state planning necessary to keep middle income industries like steel in place. So it’s become an East Asia game as those are the 3 countries with infrastructure, technology, capital and state planning all at once.

I think they left all of their options open as long as possible. They went hard into trying to convince the Israeli axis that they were on their side. It’s just that the US/Israel just don’t care, a dysfunctional Syria is what they want. This shuts off Iran while Europe was never an independent actor to begin with. Turkey has been a natural sponsor so far, but it’s unclear that the turks would double down and secure all of Syria once their border is secured - not to mention that relying on Turkey that hard would just diminish Al-Sharaa/Golani’s power anyways. China is very careful about exporting equipment, so nevermind the kind of military support Syria needs. At the end of the day Russia is the only player left and that’s because the United States is a horrible winner.

I wonder if not being able to holiday in China will be what causes the second American civil war

not that americans actually would, its just the principle of the thing

Several breeds of hunting dogs were developed by and for the working class — hell the entire German breeding program was designed specifically for the working class hunter. The Russian Spaniel was developed specially to be a hunting dogs adapted to urban apartment life. The fucking Epagneul Breton traces its roots to French peasants who bred and kept small, less conspicuous dogs for the purpose of poaching game from the estates of the French nonility. Hunting and hunting dogs are inexorably linked with the working class.

You know who cares about the historical pedigree of the ‘working class dogs’? Real leftists who, in true american fashion, live a well equipped suburban lifestyle while cosplaying as medieval poachers.

Unlike you I am not going to claim to be rural myself but I did live in a sparsely populated town for a third of my life. Half of our residents - around 30k people at the time - engaged in subsistence farming and hunting. They grew and processed manioc artisanally, which means they were dirt poor and could make use of the undeclared commons all around us to round out their diets.

The idea that hunting isn’t extractive is an alien one to me, given that our people engaged in it in order to survive. Hunting wasn’t a sport to them - and they sure as shit don’t know anything about the Epagneul Breton. Nor was it even a tradition (another concern of true leftists), as the moment things improved financially they became more focused on farming than on passing their hunting skills to their kids.

None of South America’s countries have even regional tier capacity to project power. Hell, we don’t even have power projection across all of our territories.

What has historically happened in the past is that neighboring countries try to help economies stay afloat via contraband and transshipment. It’s what Brazil’s dictatorship did to keep Argentina from collapsing during the Falklands War and its the best you can hope from even from an ideologically committed government in Brasília or Bogotá.

This is doomerist but had anybody gone to bat for Iraq in the early 2000s then all it would have meant is that countries like Libya, Syria, Lebanon and so on would have been destroyed earlier than projected. Its inhumane, it is cruel but even if all 400 million south americans saluted the courage of the Yemeni people, they’d still rather live in Saudi or UAE than Sanaa.

Nevermind the afterglow of the Jakarta Method as applied to South America - we have comprador elites in Brazil, but even those understand that their bottomline at this point requires a tough stance towards the USA and a concilliatory stance towards China. No, none of us can actually fight an invasion of Venezuela without being bombed into statehood failure ourselves. And that’s assuming we can even deploy there.

yeah but imagine the economic growth that will happen if it turns out the data centers need replacements earlier than expected

They just want to say its vaccines but are too cowardly to do it so they have flail around for anything but vaccines. The point is to pathologize the neurodivergent population and play into a magical thinking when it comes to health. It is a strain of american anti intellectual thought that is faced with the existential dread of things that people cannot control: your child being born autistic, you getting cancer, getting old and sundowning and so on.

immortality is at hand

guess how we can prove this? that’s right, bloodletting

and the kid got better because he had all of his blood?

lets not jump to conclusions here. correlation is not causation

I think the state of western capitalism is not so much ‘no strings attached on infinite government money’, its becoming ‘strings attached: spend it horribly’.