Only found out the r/cth community in exile moved here, looks like a cool site
Corner Späti is a podcast about the dumb Asian peninsula posing as a continent, Europe. Are you an American sick of hearing that if you become Sweden all your problems will be solved? Are you a European sick of listening to people only complain about the USA? Well, have we got the podcast for you!
Listen at our totally normally named website https://www.operationglad.io/ or all the other pod places and we're on the bird site https://twitter.com/cornerspaeti and twitch https://www.twitch.tv/cornerspaeti
BUT CIARÁN (ME) WHAT ARE GOOD EPISODES TO START WITH?
Personal fave is the episode where I got drunk while we were talking about Germany's left party Die Linke but People like the episode we did on Nazi infiltration in the German Military
DO YOU HAVE ANY EPISODES WHERE OTHER PODCASTERS I MIGHT KNOW WERE ON
Of course
- We had Alex Ptak of Pod Damn America and Ballin out Super to talk Berlusconi
- We had Jeremy Hammond of Ballin Out Super and Generation Loss on to talk Zwarte Piet
- We had Riley of Trash Future on to talk the Ischgl covid outbreak that doomed Europe
- We had Millo of Trash Future to talk Golden Dawn, the Libdems, Russia and that time a Lord proposed moving the people of Hong Kong to Northern Ireland
- We had Alice of Trash Future/Well There's Your Problem on with Riley and Milo to talk about Italian politics in general
Self-promotion done, I hope you like the pod, how's things with everyone else?
It does seem like more right wing parties are stealing a page from him, especially Boris. I hate him with a passion but he plays the EU like a fiddle, it's amazing to watch (I hate the EU too, lol).
Maybe this article could help, it talks about how in Spain Aznar pumped up a national bourgeoisie through football and construction (basically the same as Orbán does), since i read this i'm trying to get my hands on IBEX 35.
To be fair, the understanding we've come to is that the EU doesn't mind Hungary as much as they let on and they're basically the EU's contingency for if China achieves their short to medium term foreign policy goals, since China wants a multipolar world (the EU being one of those poles) and China and Hungary have very good relations (the first Chinese college campus outside of China is being built in Budapest as the most recent example).
It's a weird contradiction in European foreign policy at the moment where Europe depends a lot on the US militarily but can clearly see which way the wind is blowing and would benefit greatly in the multi polar world China envisions, the bulk of the population also don't view China as the bogeyman the atlanticists want them to (they're still aligned on Russia though) and NATO is very unpopular with the populations of France and Germany.
Yeah, sometimes (like when the refugee crisis happened) it's even better for Germany and the northern countries that there's someone who can play bad cop so they can wash their hands. Didn't think a lot about that but now that you say it's pretty suspicious that while they speak very ill on China they're letting them increasingly take part in the european markets. Like the demagogue way people describe this is "China is invading Europe" but it's not, they're making good offers and the EU lets them in.
It will be pretty fucking interesting to see how the rabid anticommunist Orbán explains the pivoting to communist China, it just started so there's not much talk about it yet though. In the most unlikely scenario it turns out he was just playing all along and is actually a communist sleeper cell.
Europe has such a good deal ripping off the US for defense, they have no idea. Military might is incredibly expensive and to have an idiot pay for you has got to be the best position in the world. If European governments decided to increase defense spending they would be voted out of office by their own constituencies.
China has no such compulsions and views Europe as a weak, old continent ready and willing to be bribed away. European anti-Americanism is enough to get them to go along with it, too. The Atlanticists in DC won't let Europe go easily, though. We could see US base sieges in the coming decade.
This is such a tired right wing trope. The US isn't Paying For Europe. The US spends militarily because post WW2 a faction realized that they could control their own society and the wider world through the military industrial complex.
They are not paying for anybody. They are paying for their ongoing control.