If that is true, then what people were saying was cope about Operation True Promise was true, Iran was testing the extent of the ADS systems to repel drones before sending in any large ordinance.
The domestic policy aspect of this trade, particularly for cocaine, is mostly speculation on my part, cobbled together from both historical accounts, anecdotal evidence, and personal experience.
However, my personal hypothesis is that a byproduct of the cocaine trade being illegal domestically is that it technically serves the same purpose as Jeffrey Epstein did, binding together members of an elite class through shared usage and performance of, what would outside of that class, be an illegal activity. Kind of like how people used to smoke weed to prove they were cool, before everyone and their mother got high all the time.
Cocaine usage is rampant among the financial and governmental class, and being ghouls, they have the best and most pure shit. Having a hit of flour with some cocaine in it is completely different than having the shit near raw. Basically isn't even worth it in the Midwest anymore, especially with some fiend's insistence of cutting with fent. But it also speaks to a tightening of access and usage. There used to be enough cocaine around for crack (differently processed cocaine) to be epidemic, but that shit is not nearly as common, to my understanding.
Point is, the systemic policies and policy objectives are the issue, not anything from the production side.
The "cartels" (in reality extremely loosely related production and smuggling operations) are pretty much entirely a product of a combination of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, that serve to control money and drug flows within the Americas, providing the U.S. with convenient scapegoats to destabilize trust in governments that don't exactly toe the U.S. line by providing them with guns and money, while also allowing the U.S. to simultaneously tar states that try to exert control over these actors through their own means as 'narco-states'.
Unless these policies, both acknowledged and secretive, are dealt with, there is very little chance that any product brought to domestic market will have a real impact. Policies will simply be changed to continue these foreign and domestic policy objectives.
It's not as though coca is extremely difficult to grow in these tropical regions. It is an artificial scarcity problem already.
The funniest part about this is that, we have examples of real world communism allowing for free market journalism, and it almost always goes extremely poorly.
Hell, the biggest proponents of liberalization within the Soviet Union were the newly liberalized newspapers, who then complained when they lost subsidies and could not compete with Western outlets who came into the market with far more capital.
If it is to be a market, it has to be a tightly regulated market.
This is the same thing I have been told by someone who has been out for 4 years, like three weeks ago. Apparently the only thing that has gotten slightly better is that you have abit less of a chance of being outright battered.
But they literally had a secret pee hole on the side of the ship, because they weren't allowed to leave their guard posts for any reason for like 6 straight hours.
The Chapo analysis wasn't that Paradox breeds rw ideology, it is that it is attractive to people of all fringe ideologies, and that it has been clearly influential on the current zoomers on the White House Staff.
It's like how people blame the glorification comps of Walter White and Tony Soprano on 'media illiteracy'. Sure, they are media illiterate, but who would have thought that a culture that values selfish power and sadism over effective teamwork and leadership would naturally glorify selfish power-hungry sadists, regardless of the shown consequences of their actions?
I always had people be like "Look how generous these tech companies are giving away free computers to elementary schools." And I was, even as a child like, 'Yeah its real generous to get someone to become familiar with your product when they are young, so when they buy things or ask their parents to buy things, they naturally gravitate to your product."
I have genuinely had a conversation with one of my friends who simultaneously believes that the U.S. is run by pedophilic sadists, but also that Ukraine is UwU smol bean who is just protecting themselves against Russian aggression.
Literally unable to put two and two together. Many such cases.
Why would Trump throw A.G. Sulzberger in prison? It's not like he is actually supporting doing any kind of reporting that doesn't just lead back to the Democrats, who will do nothing to hold him accountable. That's why this administration is the way it is, they realized that no one is actually going to hold them accountable.
In China, people actually, on occasion, are held accountable for their actions. What a concept.
I had to read half of 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' for my Metaphysics II class. And I read the other half on a combo of Adderall and Acid.
And other people interprete that section differently, I am only going off of what the class consensus was about what the fuck he was talking about.
It's basically a retread of the old Ship of Thesius problem. If your mind can change, and ideas can change, are you still really you? And by what mechanism can these ideas of self change, when you are dealing with a paradigm of Platonic ideals? After all, previously Kant proved that even if they do exist, we can only have limited access to them through logic, but if we assume they do exist in a platonic form, then how do they appear to change?
Marx just turns the whole thing upside down and says, this is silly, ideas clearly change over time and do not exist in some platonic vacuum somewhere, and they change because they are directly influenced by the material conditions that we, as the makers and keepers of ideas, experience. It is extremely refreshing to read Marx after Hegel, because he is extremely clear-cut in comparison.
It also doesn't help that because he was writing in German, there are these kind of compound phrase-words that are extremely hard to translate into English (because he is essentially making up new words in German). The closest English equivalent is kind of how I do it which is to just put dashs between things (such as phrase-word) but even that isn't an exact representation, at least according to my friend who is fluent in German and has read Hegel.
He also deliberately engages in using these phrase-words for a long time in a purely metaphorical sense, before going 'actually I meant all of this literally, now go back and read the last 100 pages with that in mind, despite me giving you no indication that that was the case prior in the text.' And then in the next section he will use something extremely literally before going, 'lol jk it was a metaphor the whole time.'
And it is extremely easy to miss that change if your eyes have glazed over from reading Hegel too long. Which is why you can kind of argue about it forever.
Aside from the idea that every moment destroys our consciousness and then it reforms slightly changed only to instantly be destroyed again (and that is how we are able to consciously perceive time passing and change), I think that part is my favorite, because there is so much build up to it, only for it to fall flat on it's ass.
The hat is such a weird choice. It makes him look extremely sick.