The lack of imagination among the rich never fails to amaze me, with 80 million I'd fund biomedical research that would transform me into a Space Marine
At the very least you'd think he'd have a small army of nurses and med students constantly monitoring his every bowel movement
There has to be a term for this phenomenon that makes the rich allergic to actually utilizing their wealth intelligently
I maintain a firm stance on the Mercator Map theory to explain this strange obsession of his
I literally believe one day he hyper-focused on a mercator map of North America and was annoyed at how big Canada and Greenland appeared relative to the 48 states
After which he started asking a series of half-relavent questions about these territories (How big is their population? How big is their army? What resources do they have? Are they white?etc)
The answers to which solidified his initial annoyance into a genuine conquerors drive
The military dictatorship lost the right to wield overt political power, but to this day they still maintain enormous influence over Argentina's poltical system
Also a cruise ship is not the military, that was kinda my point, civilians lost more than either side's fascist militaries
If China wants to survive climate change and the fall of the American empire, this kind of 80s bullshit neoclassical liberal utopianism needs to be purged from Chinese politics
Overwhelming price controls, capital controls, adjusted real wages, nationalization of any industry that even gives the appearance of suffering from an investor strike, forced employee buyouts of any enterprise that can't be bothered to actually do capitalism, debt jubilee for every local government and anyone who isn't a western educated liberal shithead
Honestly, price controls and stimulus checks would solve most of these supposed issues surrounding consumption, but the "confidence" fairy is still rattling around in the heads of Chinese liberals
I've been saying Canadians aren't serious about opposing US revanchism, Trump is rattling the handle to an unlocked door, if US elites played their cards with a baseline level of imperial competence they would actually pull off an annexation
Year-on-year since 2020 polls about GenZ has shown they're pretty much culturally and socially identical to millennials, with the exceptions of being way more queer and atheistic
By and large they're slightly more progressive (compared to millennials) when only talking about POC GenZers and slightly more conservative (racist) when dealing with white GenZers
As aways the only REAL generation is the boomers, but that's only because they're literally all lead poisoned and as a result cognitively disabled
My take is largely an elaboration on Matt's old take about "online posting styles" and how most of it is the result of demographic priors, the majority of these people are immature white suburban teenagers who either grew up with or are surrounded by conservatives, and because of the reality of de facto racial social segregation in the US many of these kids have next to zero experience with people who are not white
Their retreat into weird ancapism is an attempt to square the uncomfortable tension between their minority progressive views (free healthcare, fuck the state) and a lifetime of continuously reinforced racist assumptions (Sinophobia, Islamophobia, anti-blackness)
This creates the western chauvinism that strikes many of us as contradictory when paired with these people's supposed radical ideology, but in reality it's just an unfortunate example of path-dependency that these suburban teens either grow out of thru education and experience or they get worse
The same can be said for socialism in general, particularly in the west
If ad populam is not a good argument when liberals use it against us, then why use it in this case?
In fact it's actaully a worse form of the argument in this specific instance because in 97% of countries on earth there is no 79% support for socialism
Also I didn't claim Pan-Arabism exists primarily as a real socialist movement, I literally said the most common conception is the liberal version of an "Arab EU" definitionly not socialism, but certainly a step in the right direction considering the general fuckin chaos of the region
My point is that arguably outside of Nassar there is no pan-Arabism as socialists talk about it in practice
Yeah that's kinda the crux of the region's problem, like how there's "no such thing as a left in the west", they're not in power and every Arab government is geared towards further Balkanization, MEANWHILE 79% of Arabs you meet in the street who don't have pan-Islamist or nationalist brainworms are one flavor of Pan-Arabist or another, that's the nature of the famous Arab political dilemma, welcome to the desert of the real
Also Nasser was a national liberationist liberal of a similar vein as Jawaharlal Nehru and played to pan-Arabist sentiment popular in the region, Nasser's project failed because the contradictions of liberal nationalism clashed with the realities of an under-developed and agriculturally based region that was still dominated by foreign imperial powers, even if he was a socialist of the caliber of Lenin it still wouldn't have worked, not when resources were so scarce and the array of forces levied against the project was so overwhelming....the thing is history moves on and Pan-Arabist sentiment among the populace has only increased since then with a correlated increase in repression to contain it
This issue goes back to 1821 inside the Ottoman empire itself. You're essentially skipping over people such as Jurji Zaydan and the Hashemites
Nobody gives a fuck about 1821, and if you think modern Hashemites are remotely Pan-Arabist I don't know to what to say to such a bizarre claim, does King Abdullah strike you as someone who wants to dismantle imperial enforced borders? You think that dopey-faced Habsburg is dreaming about an Arab EU? Pan-Islamists believe Pan-Arabism is a secularist deviation of their theocratic project, the monarchists and balkanized nation-statists believe in the borders and want to see the status quo preserved
Obviously you'll find political illiterates and weirdos who incoherently overlap with all of it, but the lines are drawn clearly, not by popular will but by the regimes themselves who extoll the borders and the Islamists who's center of mass is pointed towards Istanbul and the gulf states
You literally just described why Arab Nationalism is a misnomer for Pan-Arabism and why the comprador regimes represent the right-wing deviation and naked power-ideology we typically associate with right-wing nationalism, hence the distinction I outlined and me pointing out their "anti-pan-Arabist" evolution, your comment is just rehashing my comment but instead of two sentences it's four paragraphs, sometimes I'm not in the mood to write to a whole-ass essay just to correct a minor mistake someone made in a post, conciseness is not "intellectual dishonesty"
Pan-Arabism is typically ideologically complex and has often been explicitly an attempt to recreate a contemporary power that is a fuck you to Sykes Picot, essentially a non-Turkish led Ottoman Empire.
You're treading dangerously close to orientalism with this line, there are typically two mainstream conceptions of pan-Arabism on the Arab street, the older socialist version which envisions a Soviet Union-like state and the more common modern liberal version which is essentially just an Arab EU; Ottomanism as you alluded to is the almost exclusive domain of pan-Islamists who (Arab or not) deride pan-Arabism as a failure of the secular world and bastard child of socialism
Arab nationalism which is the misnomer term for pan-Arabism has never been a right-wing ideology and has always been the defining feature of Arab secularism and Arab socialist movements
Unless you're talking about the "Arab Nationalist" comprador regimes that are explicitly anti-pan-Arabist and push a traditional balkanized nation-statehood conception of the individual countries they rule; late-stage Baathists and gulf monarchists being a prime example
Does he even name these so-called "great enlightenment thinkers", Adam Smith? John Stuart Mill? David Ricardo?
Or is he such an idealist daydreamer that he thinks Voltaire or Montesquieu have some relevance to modern contemporary politics, as if he even reads those people in the first place
Revolutionary defeatism for both sides
Literally nobody on the entire planet under the age of 27 remembers 9/11
I'm not even being hyperbolic, this statement is literally true