As for the concern about markets, I think it’s exaggerated. Nobody in their right mind is expecting to keep their assets in foreign banks if they pursue a war of agression.

Glances at the US and Venezuela

Glances at Israel and… everyone else

Oh cool, you’re a real person under here

Chinese businesses in the textile district have long operated within what investigators call the “Prato system”, marked by corruption and irregular practices, including labour and safety abuses as well as tax and customs fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Italy#Largest_crime_groups

Real “I’m shocked to discover there’s gambling going on in the casino!” energy in these allegations.

Mafia families have a long and storied history of partnering with state police and prosecutors to rub out rival gangs and cartels. And given Meloni’s own mafia connections, combined with regular press criticism of the same, I can’t say I’m surprised to see her government rediscovering religion on anti-mafia policing as her polling numbers sag.

Without the mafia designation or Chinese cooperation, Tescaroli’s case in the China Truck trial relies on the fragile scaffolding of Italian procedure, and the willingness of translators to show up.

Who do they have running this investigation? Kash Patel?

Sino-Soviet split is over, bro. You aren’t going to wish it back by shitposting.

Are we talking about the same Indonesia where the USA funded and installed a Pro-US puppet government who basically sold out the country to US property development?

The Very Same!

I guess that’s better than the country being torn apart by war, but it got torn apart none-the-less.

It is nearly non-existent in US History textbooks, which is a big fat “W” from the perspective of the capitalist-friendly intelligence services.

One reason why Buenos Aires didn’t make the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War

Read through that and tell me what we missed.

The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.

Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.

But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.

Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.

That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.

I can think of a few reasons why the US Navy wouldn’t want to fire high explosives into a contain full of flammable materials, depending on the range of their artillery.

Also definitely possible they’re just doing Privateer shit with Navy assets. I do wonder whether the vessel gets impounded or just escorted to a friendly port in El Salvador or Honduras and quietly re-flagged and titled.

Never loud enough such that they can hear you from an artillery battery.

Sort of half the joke. Some natives sued for peace. Other natives fought to the last man. None of them won in the end, because they were outgunned, outnumbered, and outflanked. The survivors were just the ones who were best at survival, not the most committed to a particular ideology or position.

Billions of poor people are giving their money

Well… their labor

Great idea in theory.

Curious to know how we implement it in practice

Boomers hit that sweet spot.

American boomers, maybe. The 60s/70s was real shit for most of the Third World.

Much of our modern Economic Anxiety driving MAGA and the reactionary insanity of our foreign policy is these same Boomers being forced to live in a world that isn’t just the car dealerships in Detroit commanding the global economy.

For the 90s Kids, life outside the US hasn’t been this good in a century or more. Whether you’re in Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, or Bankok, it’s a time of unprecedented plenty.

The fact that America isn’t this shining city on a hill anymore is what Trumpsters find so galling.

Ukraine seems to finally be able to strike the Russian economy.

I’ve been hearing this line since 2022. For all the sanctions and sabotage, Russia still seems pegged to the Petrodollar and continues to chug along as well as any OPEC state.

Meanwhile, there’s no introspection on the Ukrainian economy or how another year of war will affect them.

Germany lost WW1 without a hostile soldier on its original territory for example.

And famously never recovered, leaving the UK and France to command Europe uncontested for the next century.

:-/

Listen, I want a Winter Palace Coup as much as any NAFO-head, but you can only claim you’re winning at the Somme for so long before people start learning to count the body bags.

That’s like saying BRICS is an aggressive organisation because of what Russia is currently doing…

I’ve heard more than a few NAFO heads repeat exactly that

Americans are bankrolling the Ukrainian defense and extracting enormous concessions from Zelensky as a result.

The longer the war drags on, and the more debt Ukraine assumes in the process, the less sovereignty they’ll maintain in the aftermath.

The stupidest kids in the room right now are the folks at the Russia/Ukraine border who traded in their sovereignty (and often their lives) over an ethnic pissing contest. American investors are going to come out of this flush. Taxpayers are eating the same shit sandwich as everyone else in NATO.

This reads better in the original Navajo

Ukraine still officially contests Crimea. It hasn’t been surrendered.

But there’s also no real expectation Ukraine can retake the territory in their current position. And the longer the war drags on, the more territory they’re in a position to lose.

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for a Glorious New War we can all watch on the TV.

Russia is right at our doorsteps

That hasn’t been true in over 40 years. And even when it was true, Europeans suffered far more under the paranoid police states of their own governments than any cross border conflict.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Not like any of us have a material say, but enjoy conscription I guess.

Biggest global rearming since WW1 and people are cheering about it like they don’t understand what happens next.