CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]

British Labour, Bernard!

I contend that most Americans do not have an improved quality of life even with the imperialism: that value and wealth is retained by the PMC and bourgeoisie.

I think it is self evident that the lion’s share of value is retained by the bourgeoisie, another much smaller share is afforded to the PMC and that the vast majority of americans benefit much less than they would had they any political sense. Americans, by and large, are exploited by a series of monopolies and rentier schemes.

But however unequal the US is compared to France, there is a difference between being an exploited worker in the US and an exploited worker in Brazil. To put it simply: americans are now complaining that their treats (say, eating fast food) are becoming unaffordable as anything more than something that you eat once in a while for a birthday or another special event. That has always been the case in the global south. Anecdotal to be sure, I’m upper middle class in Brazil and that was always the case for me.

To give you numbers, the average credit card interest charged in the US seems to be around 20 to 30 percent. In Brazil its above 400%.

The american elites might have given people crumbs in the form of, say, fuel and food subsidies and whatnot. They are still crumbs, and yet those crumbs would be unaffordable if the US was a normal, unequal nation like those in the global south.

the corollary to surveillance is that its useless if everybody needs to be surveilled

americans are simply becoming ungovernable

said something about Olivença being portuguese and Portugal not abdicating sovereignty over it

moreover the state of lisbon is illegal under international law and is sovereign brazilian territory

‘a big republican guy is gonna endorse kamala’

‘reagan’s staffers invoke the spirit of reagan and say he’d be pro cop’

“Putin is doing scorched earth tactics purely out of vindictive national hatred of the Ukrainian people”

ask him which country hosts the most refugees from Ukraine

It’s weird to imagine that there were people who were once shocked at the Challenger Explosion, or cried at JFK’s assassination. If anything, Trump dodging a bullet a month provides reassurance: even the orange cheeto himself gets to partake.

‘it is extremely important for the show that i get breast implants. temporarily of course.’

wish i could monetize that side of mine too

I could see this making any kind of analysis of outcomes from arbitrary cohort extremely complex. This is outside my area of expertise and I’m definitely not a scientist (though I use it constantly). Perhaps I’m looking at this from the wrong perspective? It just seems that for any cohort the amount of variance would be so high that if you were to draw a conclusion from data it could already be wrong.

These would be two distinct yet connected sorts of data. The qualitative and the quantitative. One can disprove or question theories defined by the other, which is one reason why social sciences are in a permanent state of revision. Another reason is because your understanding of society is contingent on the very questions and framing devices you utilize.

Let’s say you are investigating the birth of a city from an economic standpoint. Meaning that you wish to know what sort of trade or productive activity jumpstarted those first few cycles of capital accumulation. In the Americas you have cities like Rio de Janeiro which are so new that the documentation goes back to when there were only a few hundred families in the urban center + surrounding hinterland. So you have both the potential to realize patterns and variance, or the quantitative and the qualitative sides of your analysis.

You can look at specific families, what they did for a living, how they did well for themselves, what happened to their estates, what economic role mothers and fathers played, etc. And you can look at all families at once to find patterns. The quantitative analysis might help you make blanket statements such as ‘the first and most primary form of capital accumulation for Rio de Janeiro was slavery, specifically the enslavement of native groups as part of allied wars and enslavement campaigns’. But if you go on to make another blanket statement such as, say, ‘social mores in the wealthier sectors of colonial society followed a rigid patriarchical structure’, then you’ll find numerous examples of families where sometimes 3 full generations were outright led by the mothers and wives rather than the fathers and husbands. Sometimes because they appear to just be better at it than the men, sometimes because there were no men.

I’m framing it like this because that’s how it works. We write our sociological narratives, and then someone else re-frames things a little differently and comes up with new and interesting inputs. It’s not often that we completely disprove old, well supported theories. Rather, we end up refining them as scholars argue forever to the smallest detail.

I think a good point can probably be made here about not mixing different pairs of socks. One thing is talking about class or category, and acknowledge that there’s some tendencies here and there. Another is individuals, and individuals are up to their personal history. So the real punchline here is neither (which does not prevent me from having a certain… experience with taxi drivers in particular).

almost the same material conditions can still include the guy who works in a supermarket for a living and the guy who became a taxi driver for a living

In addition, the US wasn’t even really trying to statebuild. That was their bullshit cover story.

Definitely true. Even so, the interesting thing about the situation is that what little state-building the Americans did in Afghanistan was in itself disruptive of tribal society. And sowed the seeds for Afghanistan’s rapid collapse thereafter.

For an example, imagine a mountain valley shared by a number of tribes. They use the valley in different ways at different times of the year. Informal agreements define ownership of said valley, even if in theory it belongs to a given group. Except now there’s a judge in Kabul and he’s made a ruling. The new Afghan state must enforce property rights. Whichever group does not own the deed to the valley suddenly finds itself fighting for its livelihood, probably against the people they had working agreements with. Multiply that times a million and that is how the taliban went from deeply unpopular in Afghanistan to the only option to oppose a careless government.

There is an important difference between the US’s campaigns in the middle east and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And that is the kind of societies and terrain we are talking about.

The United States invaded, sought to occupy, and also fundamentally change tribal societies where things like justice were issued on a grassroots basis (moreso in Afghanistan than Iraq).

Ukraine meanwhile is a post industrial society where social cohesion depends on the State. Simply put, Afghans can self mobilize for government and resistance. Ukrainians - like most people today - can only self mobilize as far as calling the local police force.

If the Ukrainian State collapses, it will have no basis by which to mount an armed resistance (even more so given how said resistance would occur in the open steppe or in cities that Russia re-built from the ground up). While it was easy for the Americans to collapse the Iraqi or Afghan states, convincing everyone to accept the american occupation governments was something else entirely.

Edit: this is why even early in the war a lot of people in Europe started talking about arming a resistance in Ukraine. It would have to be like the French Resistance in WW2. Something that relied on foreign state power for organization, direction, recruiting, and supplies. As opposed to, say, the northern vietnam army which benefitted from chinese supplies and soviet (later chinese) instructors, but which was self organized at the grassroots.

gets turned into “AmErIcA wIlL cOlLaPsE iN sIx MoNtHs! BuY gOlD nOw!”

and then china did buy gold, just to spite me

definitely. a lot of BRICS grifting in places like youtube is pushed by gold sellers after all.

plus, even in today’s money I don’t think the marshall plan would cut it. the US isn’t gonna spend hundreds of billions in investments on itself, much less the EU.

but should they