Ah yes, the woke gender ideology of Plato that includes things like uh... men are better than women at everything and that men are reincarnated as women as a punishment.
They absolutely cannot, but most of the fascists in the EU already want to normalise with Russia and end the war in Ukraine. Meloni (but not her partner party Lega by Salvini, who are pro-Russia) and the Poles are the exception, but the German AfD, Austrian FPÖ, Hungary's Fidesz, and even the RN in France (who very well might win the next election) are all advocates of ending the war and buying Russian oil again.
I'm not saying it'd be easy, and it's more likely they don't do this, but states are very powerful. If there was a broad coalition within the EU agreed to spend spend spend and bring back industry to Europe, they absolutely could. There is domestic European industry, a lot of it lying idle. And the fascists in Europe (outside of the Baltics) are all advocates of ending the war in Ukraine and rebuying oil from Russia. If the right plays their cards right and can tap into the groundswell of anti-Americanism they could win power and start enacting what I laid out; the bourgeoisie would fall in line because they would still be able to make quite a bit of money from this, mostly in the form of state handouts (look at the German industrial spending on domestic arms already). The current neoliberal leadership are Atlanticists and mostly incompetent, but that is not the case for many of the fascists.
True, they would be doing a lot better without sanctions. Probably more of the reason it's not in this study is because figures from the DPRK are hard to come by and just ignored mostly.
I think you are underestimating the EU's capability towards popular fascism. Anti-American "strong" Europe sentiments are gaining a lot of political currency across the continent. Calls to remove all American companies, set up EU alternatives to both tech and weapons manufacturing, etc. The neoliberal elite of the EU has very little popular support, and leftist movements are pretty much dead in the water, but I really would not be surprised with some kind of popular neo-fascist pro-EU political movement that does want to bring back industry and weapons manufacturing to Europe.
Juche has done a good job with mitigating their effects and still doing poverty eradication. Post collapse of the Soviet Union there were definitely some famines, but I think that's before the major UN sanctions go implemented in 2006. By that time they were pretty much self-sufficient anyway.
As much as I like this, I don't want the Chinese to have Trump; there's nothing he did to them that comes close to Gaza or Yemen or Iran. Switch those Chinese soldiers for Hamas and then we're talking.
If anybody here knew the answer to that they could make millions if not billions of dollars. It's going to crash and burn, it's just a matter of timing. Nobody knows. Could be next month, could be in four years.
I broadly agree, I think yeah we agree on most things, but if China wanted foreign bases it could have foreign bases. They have essentially infinite money (in the form of dollars that they could use to bribe countries to accept bases), and have significant loans to many African states. If they went up to say Kenya, who has $10 billion in loans, and massive commercial Chinese ports, and offered some loan forgiveness in exchange for hosting a Chinese naval base to project power in the Indian Ocean (and thereby protecting Chinese oil shipping routes), do you think Kenya would reject that deal?
Sure, and they're doing good work with purging and things like that in the PLA, but they are distinctly not building any power projection outside of the South China Sea. It wouldn't be very difficult to get a few African states to agree to host Chinese air force bases; that's a diplomacy and will issue, not a "my military isn't strong enough" issue. They've got virtually no foreign naval bases, so despite all their blue water naval building capability there's nowhere for them to resupply outside the immediate area near China. That, again, can be solved easily with will rather than any inherent capabilities they don't have. If China wants to put their military to the test, there are plenty of opportunities to do so. Deploy peacekeepers to the DRC; they'd be more than happy to have them. Intervene in the civil war in Myanmar directly on the border with China. Logistically it's easy, since they border it, and they have by far the most pull on either side in that conflict. China can and should start throwing its weight around to build out its military capabilities, and they can absolutely do so in a way that the United States won't lose its mind and nuke them. They just don't want to.
The PRC cannot guarantee security to its partners because it lacks any real capacity to do so outside of countries it borders like Pakistan.
But that's a problem with the PRC that they can solve. They are the world economic power, they own all the elements of their own arms industry, and if the PRC wanted they could develop the real capacity to protect allies. They just don't want to. They are committed to their stance of non-intervention, for all the "good" that does them.
I imagine they could get missile and warhead designs from Russia rather easily, given their history and BRICS. Still enormously expensive, but Brazil can't be sanctioned and economically isolated like Pakistan was. And Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship like Pakistan for many years, even if it was unpopular if the Brazilian military decides to get nukes they're gonna do it regardless.
Doing this shit to Colombia is real accelerationist hours. Whatever about Venezuela, but if Trump kidnaps Petro then Brazil is getting nukes. They already had a nuclear program, and still retain a lot of that knowledge and infrastructure.
I will post more on this tomorrow, but the hyperreal kayfabe kidnapping of a sovereign really has laid bare this bizarre tension between nothing ever happening and a massive geopolitical shift. Like, will all this blow over and everything continues on the same? Maybe. Cause the rest of Latin America to freak the fuck out and start taking defense seriously? Maybe. The first results of the secret treaty/divvying up of the world into American, Chinese, and Russian spheres? Maybe. The last gasps of a dying empire desparate for military wins but incapable of getting them? Maybe. A genius stroke where you can use the image of war without actual war to force your demands? Maybe. It can be all of these outcomes and more. Truly unbelievable times.
Yeah the zombie walk of Iran's economy has reached some kind of terminus post-12 day war unfortunately. We'll see what happens but unless the "regime" takes lessons from communists and gets a lot less capitalist brained it's not looking good. There's a reason the only siege states left are all communist.
That image of all the admin officials just searching Twitter for reactions in the Situation Room drives this home. We really are in the age of simulacra.
Seeing unconfirmed reports that Black Hawks with special forces are in Caracas. Maybe an attempted decapitation strike during shock and awe? Who knows, still far too early.
I imagine the "speaking in favour of imperialism" claim is probably regarding young Marx's statements about how history is progressive and to get to communism you have to pass through capitalism and the imperial ventures in Africa were therefore "good" because they hoisted capitalism upon Africans. Not an entitely fair reading, and something the more mature Marx would definitely disagree with, but that's how I could see somebody arriving at that statement.
I'd encourage you to read the article, it covers that. He almost certainly wasn't a communist but was sympathetic because he hated "modernity."
Even so, Marxism was an important if oblique influence on Wittgenstein’s later thought. It was Piero Sraffa’s critique of bourgeois economics, one which sought to restore its reified categories to their historical contexts, which helped to inspire what one might call the anthropological turn in his Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought, and which provided the Philosophical Investigations with what Wittgenstein, in the Preface to that work, called its “most consequential ideas.” It was also Sraffa who made the Neapolitan gesture, fingers swept out from under chin, which played a part in transforming Wittgenstein’s conception of language while the two men were traveling together on a train.
Treating a philosophical problem, Wittgenstein remarks in the Investigations, is like treating an illness. “It is possible,” he writes in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, “for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual.” Marx might have said just the same of ideology. For both thinkers, such conceptual problems are symptomatic, rather as the neurotic symptom for Freud marks the site of some pathological disturbance in everyday life—one that, like ideology, it both reveals and conceals. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein are not in the business of treating symptoms. Instead, they seek to tackle the root cause of the disorder, which means approaching its various expressions in a diagnostic spirit. Only through a change of behavior might some of our conceptual snarl-ups be consigned to the ashcan of history. “I am by no means sure,” Wittgenstein comments, “that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous.”
Ah yes, the woke gender ideology of Plato that includes things like uh... men are better than women at everything and that men are reincarnated as women as a punishment.