CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]

you’re argentinean, so the real answer is sudamerican otters

i am the lorax and i speak for the bears

Support for independence is mostly prevalent in the diaspora.

This is what I have issue understanding. Yeah, I guess if you’re puerto rican diaspora you face discrimination in the mainland and so you develop some feelings towards the colonial status quo. But even so I’d expect that a growing diaspora would just intensify links with the mainland, and ultimately create a strong voting block towards statehood and any form of economic subsidy. Not independence. If anything I’d expect Puerto Rico’s material conditions to suffer with independence.

not specific enough, sent another 20 billion to the afghan national army

Puerto Rico might be peripheric in the economic grand scheme but that has value too. You ask what is the long term plan for a quasi-country with a brain drain problem, but when it comes to outskirt provinces sometimes the plan is to be brain drained forever. I don’t know if Puerto Rico has natural resources or how much of a real estate market it can develop, but at the end of the day we are talking about the US economy here and what matters is how much of that can be used as collateral to generate debt.

That said, you yourself recognize that economic goals don’t necessarily matter. Puerto Rico is territory and states do not let go of those. It’s an island that is close to Cuba (I mean, so is Florida), and its at the mouth and heart of the Caribbean. It’s close by to Venezuela and Suriname. Even if the US didn’t need a base there, at the end of the day Puerto Rico is a part of the world that doesn’t even need to open an US base in order to rule it from afar.

Since you might be from the island, could you explain the whole kerfuffle surrounding statehood? From what I understand is might be less straightforward than an outsider like me thinks.

The US doesn’t need industry. It needs ownership of capital. The EU has the resources, real estate, and consumption markets to revitalize the US economy via the sheer amount of debt that can be issued with Europe and Europeans as collateral.

proactive comdemnation to robert reich’s son, who i don’t know, for having a lib child, who i also don’t know

thank you for your all weatherly good analysis

That’s been the general idea since the leaks came out. But the gulf between the leaked plans and what was done is too much. These attacks seem even more ‘measured’ than Iran’s first attack. I’m of the mind that instead of that, what we have is that Israel and the US were always planning towards a small retaliation, but leaked a doomsday scenario in order to maintain a mirage of escalation dominance.

‘See, this is what we could have done instead!’.

ever heard of the metaverse

this is what that actually meant (outside of the deliriums in zuckerberg’s mind)

News media here reporting that Israel claims their attack against Iran is already over. Is this true and am I right to assume the attack was not comparable to the leaked plans? This makes me believe that the leak was intentional, the worst case scenario, to give off the impression that Israel still holds escalation dominance.

why not all of it

To be clear, no judgement there. I spend DLC money on paradox games, when I can. I’m just too poor for sims.

the saddest, most depressing thing about the sims is that ultimately the community just… laps it up. sims 4 is eternal now because its the most lucrative and popular the sims has ever been.

the upswing is that i like paralives’ artstyle.

as we say in the King’s english: offending the sensibilities of the Gentry is a capital crime

That’s not really correct, because entry into BRICS is on the basis of consensus. Everyone has to agree to extend an invitation, so everyone is a gatekeeper. Brazil is just a likely sponsor for half of South America.

As organizations grow larger, consensus becomes harder and harder to achieve. For an instance, now that Ethiopia and Egypt are part of BRICS, they won’t agree to a joint communiqué where South Africa is the proposed UN security council member for Africa. Something that India, Brazil, Russia, and China had no reason to oppose. You get to a point where farther away friends are more easily acquired than those in your own neighborhood.

There’s an ongoing crossfire of propaganda trying to pin down why this decision was made. Since Lula is to the left of the default position on the right is to assume that he is part of a communist conspiracy to create the Soviet Bolivarian Republics. So now the right wing - and you can see it in responses to that tweet - are making the argument that EVEN LULA is ‘on the right side of history’ by questioning Maduro’s election and so on.

The truth of the matter is much simpler. Brazil and Venezuela never estabilished an all weather relationship, not during Chaves’ government, and not now.

Brazil on the one hand doesn’t want to anger the US too much, and feels as though unlike India it has less room for maneuver to anger the americans. That is more or less self evidently true since the last time we so much dared to invest in the US in order to become more energy self sufficient we got hit by lawfare and a political coup. We aren’t talking about a fully sovereign nation here, but one that is dependent on the US with an aspiring pro US political class that is only being held back by the iron law of trade relations.

On the other hand the Brazilian government does have an ambivalent relationship with Venezuela by default. It’s easy to compromise and deal with countries like Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay because they are more or less in the brazilian sphere of economic influence. Venezuela is both politically and geographically far from Brazil’s stated goal of leading South America. Venezuela is a caribbean facing country that is geared to resist US influence. Therefore it is also geared to resist Brazil’s influence as well. It’s kinda like the relationship between North Korea and China. NK is much closer to a ‘farther away’ ally like Russia than it is with China, because by default if NK becomes closer to China then China’s heft will chip away at its self sufficiency. Far from the propaganda that North Korea and China are have a vassal-master relationship, they aren’t allies or even that close.

So to say all that is to say that, yeah, the sticking point is the elections. But not in the sense that Brazil questions them behind closed doors - which is what liberal media insists inside of Brazil itself. No, it’s because Brazil had a plan to deescalate the situation and Venezuela didn’t follow it to a tee. Plus, with Biden in the White House the brazilians have enough reason to fool themselves and feel like the US isn’t hostile, so there’s no reason to invite further aggression. Finally we are some days away from the second turn of municipal elections and the liberals in Brasília likely don’t want to give fuel to the right wing fire.

any links so i can follow it with a dummy account?

‘The Democrats are the real racists. See? Donald is pro muslim, he’s just anti terrorist!’

Pre 1980s means pre Great Latin American Debt Crisis, ie before the US imposed neoliberalization on what were, all in all, nationalist juntas in places like Brazil. This is a mistake sometimes people make. Not every country was Chile, and Chile itself did not go down the neoliberal well even in the first portion of Pinochet’s rule.

It seems Sheinbaum wants Mexico to have insane things like ‘industrial policy’ or ‘food security policy’.