Unfortunately you can’t kill an idea. The West dabbled in white supremacy for most of modern history (see race based caste in America and South Africa, race based chattel slavery, phrenology etc) and still does to some degree so Nazism was inevitable in many ways.

Leopold Amery, the empire’s secretary of state for India appealed Churchill for aid as British engineered famines devestated Bengal (such famines killed 100 million people during the colonial era). The great hero of the West responded by calling Indians a beastly people, blaming them for “breeding like rabbits”, saying the diverted grain was better kept for “sturdy greeks” and wished death upon Gandhi.

Amery wrote in his diary: “Naturally I lost patience, and couldn’t help telling him that I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s, which annoyed him no little.”

If these are the people we venerate and we continue to teach incomplete histories, is killing every Nazi going to be enough?

This is solid geopolitical analysis.

The India blunder cannot be understated. This is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world and its struggles in the past half millennia are more a blip in history than the norm. This similarly applies to China and its century of humiliation.

Multiple US administrations were carefully and measurably courting India over the past several decades which Trump undid essentially overnight.

India has a very strong history of trust with Russia which dates back hundreds of years but more recently the USSR directly supported India when the US sent nuclear armed vessels into the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan during the '71 Indo Pak war (before either India or Pakistan had nukes). Portugal also tried to keep one of it’s Indian colonies (Goa) after the end of WW2 which India took by force. Western nations intended to collude through the UN to force India to give the territory back but the USSR vetoed the vote.

Blunders like this generally come from not knowing history and it feels like Western leaders both in Europe and the US are no longer knowledgeable.

A few months ago Kaja Kallas, the Vice-President of the European Commission said: "I was in ASEAN meeting, and Russia was addressing China, like: ‘Russia and China, we fought the Second World War, we won the Second World War, we won the Nazis…’ And I was like, ‘Okay, that is something new. If you know history, then it raises a lot of question marks in your head… but nowadays, people don’t really read and remember history that much.’

Completely diminishing the obvious sacrifice of both countries, having been the two countries with that suffered the most casualities (25 million in the USSR and 20 million in China).

If these are the top minds in the West then we are absolutely cooked.

You’re absolutely on point about Ukraine and the Istanbul process also. One can only imagine how many peace processes have been undermined by the idea of the West being an ally and the might of the West being a reason not to compromise.

European attempts to freeze Russian assets in Euroclear and use them towards Ukrainian military efforts also seems like an act of desperation and it’s no surprise that Belgium has essentially said they will not comply unless other European powers also take on the liability involved.

At the very least Zelensky has said today that they are no longer going to pursue NATO membership which is a step towards reality based geopolitics.

It’s a very optimistic outlook. I hope you’re right.

What’s uncomfortable for countries in the Western hemisphere is that upon shifting to a multipolar or “spheres of influence” model of the world (which was the norm preglobalization), America will continue its imperialistic tendencies to claim some form of dominion over Canada Mexico and South America. The latest foreign policy strategy document from the Trump administration seems to harken to the Monroe Doctrine (which was a warning that colonization of any further territory in the Western hemisphere by European powers would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security). It seems like Trump sees the Western hemisphere as “belonging” to America on some level.

I also don’t see the US competely discarding neoliberalism when it comes to tech / services, where it still dominates. That requires some type of openness to the world otherwise they won’t be able to continue to enforce their IP rights. When someone makes a Doordash order in Kathmandu, they want some portion of that transaction flowing through both Silicon Valley and their payment processors (Visa, Mastercard etc). How will the US respond when socialism spreads and those countries make their own versions of these services? Hard to imagine they would respond reasonably, especially since their approach to any resistance up until now has been to stage a coup. Old habits die hard.

Settler is too passive of a descriptor. Settlers went to war with and genocided Indigineous peoples to create the America of today. Leaving out the genocide / displacement part of the equation is intentionally reality warping / propagandizing.

Women absolutely have a role to play in toxic masculinity. Not to take accountability away from the social conditions that men ultimately created and propagated.

Stoicism teaches us to focus on what’s in our control by either reframing or accepting our emotions based on rational judgment. The goal is emotional resilience, not emotional suppression. Pop culture has redefined it as you describe.

The goal here is to go back to a world where such racial hieraechies are accepted but without human accountability. This way you are subjugated arbitrarily but hey the computer said so, so what can we do about it?

$1.85 USD per month for 2 GB/day of 5G data is pretty wild. It seems like Meta is the company that’s running away with all the data. I’m all for broader accessibility, its just too bad it happened that way (though I dont blame consumers for taking it since it may just be the most affordable internet access in the world).

Brazil and Korea have less than a fraction of the number of Internet users so they likely don’t meet the threshold to penetrate an algorithm that will generally show Anglosphere users content in English.

India has nearly a billion internet users. Some content will be popular on a global level because of that. Filter by whatever little corner of the world you’re in if that’s a problem for you. There’s enough space here for everyone.

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Yeah he’s at the stage of needing a walker. He must be worried about how that makes him look politically though.

Agreed. I’d add that I don’t think experiencing a diaspora culture in the US is the same as going to another country and experiencing a culture on it’s home turf. The latter requires a sense of humility that I think the vast majority of Americans struggle with (or shy away from for other reasons). Overcoming those holdups leads to oppurtunities to have a more complete sense of the world and self.

I genuinely think many in America (also generally the West and wealthy people) see the world as a commodity that should offer a degree of “user/customer experience” which leads to some problematic world views and is part of why they may treat travel as a checklist. They want to go as far as possible without actually leaving home and wear it as a status symbol.

Its certainly better than nothing. But leaving your home country, especially to see and try to understand a culture different from yours, requires a type of humility that helps make a person more complete. I know many Americans struggle with work life balance which makes it not so feasible so I agree that exploring other cultures at home is a reasonable compromise. But a compromise nonetheless.

You can be exposed to an Americanized version of that culture, absolutely. Its not the same as going to its source.

Being able to explore different geographic landscapes is nice but traveling outside of your country is necessary to broaden one’s worldview.

But even travel alone isn’t enough. You need to have a genuine curiosity about the world. About humanity.

I watched Eat Pray Love with my SO recently. I can’t think of a more narrow minded approach to telling this type of story. Using other nations and their people as a backdrop to one’s own half baked self discovery. It was poorly done and thankfully even the core audience of americans identified its issues.

I can’t imagine a life only seeing one nation’s people, worldview and lifestyle. It seems incomplete to me. I know for many Americans there are financial challenges (and not a lot of PTO) but I agree with you that its often to an individuals benefit to broaden their horizons.

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It seems like ordinary citizens can nominate local delegates that are then screened by a commission run by the party. The elected (party approved) delegates then vote on policy. This system can certainly give an illusion of democracy but ultimately the party is curating all political discourse by only allowing for party approved delegates to become electable in addition to exerting absolute control over local media.

In more ideal circumstances, delegates would not be screened for party loyalty, such that if other (less ruling party favorable) perspectives became popular, a new coalition could eventually accumulate the political power to form an opposition party to the ruling one.

In other words, I think we should be skeptical towards the notion that a one party state can be ‘democratic’.

Cuba is more democratic than the US? By what metric? It has been a one party state since 1959.

Edit: Just read a little history and shame on the US for trying to turn entire nations and their peoples into their vassals. Colonialism never ended, it just got rebranded and communism/socialism has been the only way for people to take power back, particularly when the (predominantly Western) gaze of extractionary greed, dehumanization and exploitation is upon them.

https://streamable.com/m9dshd

The first requirement to file an H1b petition is to show that there is no local talent to fill the role. Companies have been gaming that so the first step should be to fix that process.

But he hasn’t signed anything yet and there’s no chance he follows through on this specifically since he’s in bed with the technocrats.