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lollontee posted:Hey if you wanna go and deny that the Congolese retain a national identity and a state older than their conquest by the colonialist powers, you do you mate.
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Jun 30, 2017 14:04
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R. Mute posted:I haven't really been following the discussion and I probably don't agree with kwarezm's position, but Cerebral Bore use of Congo as an example is disingenuous and your posts about Congolese history are incredibly wrong.
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Jun 30, 2017 14:11
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lollontee posted:Hey if you wanna go and deny that the Congolese retain a national identity and a state older than their conquest by the colonialist powers, you do you mate. It's probably worth pointing out the Kongo people are only 12% of the population of the DRC. Also their State dissolved over a hundred years before the Belgians occupied the territory.
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Jun 30, 2017 14:52
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Squalid posted:It's probably worth pointing out the Kongo people are only 12% of the population of the DRC. Also their State dissolved over a hundred years before the Belgians occupied the territory. When did the Belgae last rule Belgium?
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Jun 30, 2017 15:45
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Kurtofan posted:When did the Belgae last rule Belgium? This is a good comparison because the historical Belgae people have nothing to do with whatever sense of national identity currently prevails in Belgium, probably much less than the modern Kongo people have to do with national identity in DRC.
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Jun 30, 2017 16:29
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I'm interrupting this dumb conversation to ask if there's a possibility of Kurz reaching out to the greens and the liberals in Austria should there be the seats for it.
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Jun 30, 2017 16:34
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khwarezm posted:It irks me because this Congo comparison is loving terrible, and I think you know that, that country is a colonial construct that was carved out by the Belgian King to vamp the place of its wealth with little to unify the country that wasn't a result of that colonial venture. Additionally it didn't actually have a particularly large population in the time period we're talking about (an important point, that restricts its internal market) and was working from a much lower industrial base even compared to Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, not even talking about the fact that it was an actual, literal colony with all that entails until 1960. Russia has far more in common with the other European nation states and has existed as a powerful country in its own right for centuries longer than Congo with a large economy and significant ability to project power overseas as something like, say, the 1878 Turkish war shows, the country was dominated by the ethnic group of the Russian people who made up almost half the population and have a pretty well defined region they dominate who's central government have been able to project their authority for four centuries. This all meant that authority tended to re-coalesce pretty quickly which we can see for, like, centuries, and that governments for all of their faults were powerful enough that they could push forward industrialization programs and infrastructure developments which, again, we see under both Tsarist Russia and Communist Russia. Would all of that have just stopped? You don't get to be irked because somebody points out a counterexample to your very dumb claim. Also you still keep piling on more and more qualifiers to try to salvage your original very dumb claim, and the worst thing is that you can't even provide good ones. Like, the idea that Russia being able to beat up the sick man of Europe in 1878 is an example of a significant power projection capability is pretty funny when the Russian army got its rear end handed to it against Japan in 1904 and then folded completely when going up against Germany's B-team in 1914. Motherfuckers couldn't even project power into their own backyard when faced with an actual industrialized country. In any case this is super dumb, and frankly I'm not very interested in your desperate scrambling when your original claim is still completely unsupported. Maybe you should work on that instead? khwarezm posted:Don't talk about Japan, its very awkward. In any event I didn't rule out the possibility that Oil and Gas wouldn't have still been too big a part of a prospective non-communist Russia in fact I mentioned that would be a pretty obvious avenue in that post you quoted and you're acting like I said the opposite but OK whatever. Overall point still stands, for Russia was starting to industrialize at the beginning of the twentieth century and already making its presence felt in a modern industrialized world, massive investment in infrastructure, especially railways, considerable growth in fossil fuels, steelworking, chemicals and various other sectors. I feel that making rigid assumptions about its inability to continue to industrialize is questionable and involves becoming an increasingly convoluted hypothetical where the roles or very existence of events like the First World War or Great Depression become very hazy, those events being extremely important in their effect on the world economy. Additionally, unlike somewhere like say Brazil, there was an extremely strong incentive for Russia to continue to industrialize rapidly if it wanted to remain a great European power. The Germans, and British, would have still been a serious threat and Russia remaining an industrially backward country was obviously an increasing liability. That was already a major consideration that helped spur the initial wave of industrialization under the Tsar and Japan had taken a similar view which was one of the key reasons that country industrialized so quickly too. And it had a gigantic potential internal market as a result of its population, only America (very industrialized by then), India (British colony) and China (completely incoherent) could really compare, with the latter two also being way less developed of course. You're the one pushing a convoluted hypothetical, buddy. I'm saying that the historical trend would have held, which is backed up by both the economic data and all of recorded history. You're saying that wanting to industrialize very hard somehow causes factories to spring out of the ground, as if the laws of economics can be rewritten by some monomaniacal act of will. R. Mute posted:I haven't really been following the discussion and I probably don't agree with kwarezm's position, but Cerebral Bore use of Congo as an example is disingenuous and your posts about Congolese history are incredibly wrong. What exactly is disingenious about using the Congo as a counterexample to the idea that a countries with a large population, vast natural resources and a huge amount of land can always industrialize super easily?
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Jun 30, 2017 16:43
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Cerebral Bore posted:What exactly is disingenious about using the Congo as a counterexample to the idea that a countries with a large population, vast natural resources and a huge amount of land can always industrialize super easily? 
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Jun 30, 2017 17:37
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Hambilderberglar posted:Dutch Disease? Easy access to mineral wealth isn't always a blessing. Yes, that's kind of my point.
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Jun 30, 2017 17:46
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Cerebral Bore posted:Yes, that's kind of my point.
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Jun 30, 2017 18:26
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Hambilderberglar posted:What would one read on Congolese history? I don't know enough about that area of the world to know who's wrong and would like to change this. (Mainly to yell at someone for being wrong) Cerebral Bore posted:What exactly is disingenious about using the Congo as a counterexample to the idea that a countries with a large population, vast natural resources and a huge amount of land can always industrialize super easily?
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Jun 30, 2017 20:09
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Speaking of Belgium, a recent poll was leaked that shows the fallout of several corruption affairs in Brussels and Wallonia. The Parti Socialiste which was at the center of them loses big and the voters are going hard left. The PTB (extreme left) would be the biggest party with 24,9%, where in the last election they got 5. If true, this is the nightmare scenario for the right wing parties in Flanders and we can all watch as we Belgians break our own record in government formation.
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Jul 1, 2017 08:01
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MR is still the second largest party in Wallonia so I'm sure they can wring out some neolib deal across the borders.
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Jul 1, 2017 08:26
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Deltasquid posted:MR is still the second largest party in Wallonia so I'm sure they can wring out some neolib deal across the borders. The N-VA is going to make some demands for more regional powers, because they just spent 5 years forgetting the main reason they're a party at all. Next election is going to be fun.
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Jul 1, 2017 10:48
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Hambilderberglar posted:What would one read on Congolese history? I don't know enough about that area of the world to know who's wrong and would like to change this. (Mainly to yell at someone for being wrong) I am not incredibly well-read, but Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is very much about how the Congo Free State (and by extension, the modern Democratic Republic of Congo) came to be, and thus pretty good with regards to answering the question "why is this giant state what it is". The other book I've read which I would also strongly recommend is Prunier's Africa's World War, which is a very detailed account of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the Congo war (covers 1994-2007), giving a really good picture of what kind of states have come to be in post-colonial central/southern Africa. I recommend both of those, with the caveat that they leave pretty significant blind spots on the history of the region pre-colonisation and post-Leopold/pre-Congo War (King Leopold's Ghost does talk about pre-colonial entities to some depth, but ultimately that's in the context of European colonisation and subjugation of those states so that's a rather limiting scope).
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Jul 1, 2017 11:24
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nimby posted:If true, this is the nightmare scenario for the right wing parties in Flanders and we can all watch as we Belgians break our own record in government formation. Good. Things seem to run best when there is no government*. *There's a 'current affairs' government really.
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Jul 1, 2017 12:23
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The irony is that oil production in Baku was actually largely stagnating after 1905, and part of the massive amount of unrest that happened was far too many workers fighting for too few jobs. This eventually spilled over into political then ethnic conflict. Russia was obviously a still a threating great power even after 1905 and mobilized much quicker than expected. In addition, arms production during the war was sustainable as was oil/coal production. The issue was simply a lack of leadership and non-existent moral among Russian troops especially after 1916. Tsarist/White Russia might have had some growth and industrialization during the 1920s, but I don't see a reason for them doing so much better than the NEP and by 1929 the collapse in global trade would have completely kicked their teeth in. I could talk more about the subject, to be honest. (Yeah I don't know if a comparison to the Congo Free State is necessarily valid, but certainly the Tsarist state was focused around internal colonization and didn't treat its ethnically Russian peasants than anyone else. However, there are multiple points where the comparison falls apart especially since the Congo Free State was an occupation force that could only control fragments of the territory it claimed.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jul 1, 2017 |
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Jul 1, 2017 12:29
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R. Mute posted:I don't agree with the statement that countries with a large population, vast natural resources and huge amounts of land industrialise super easily, but comparing two countries so wildly different in time frame (late 19th c/early 20th c vs late 20th c) and in context (eastern european serf state vs ex-colony) is comparing apples and oranges. Doesn't negate your point, but still. I don't want to belabour the obvious, but the whole point to a counterexample is to pick an object of comparison that shares the characteristics of the object under disussion that are claimed to be decisive, yet differs from it in some significant way that demonstrates that the characteristics in question were in fact not the decisive ones. So I'm afraid to say thay your objection makes no goddamn sense whatsoever.
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Jul 1, 2017 12:46
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Sorry the  update is late, I've been busy.Second-round voting for local elections was last Sunday. (Runoff voting for mayorship in cities with >15000 population, between the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round.) The centre-right parties won almost all of the contests. Renzi took to Facebook and posted "WELL ACTUALLY if you consider both first-round and second-round results the centre-left won more mayorships than the centre-right!  p.s. I'm not owned"Now Renzi is facing a strong opposition from inside his own party, especially from old-guard people (Bersani, Prodi, D'Alema) who see him as "an ineffectual leader". Guess that's what he gets for going Third Way in a traditionally leftist party ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Meanwhile, right-wing parties are celebrating the results, since based on this they think they can win the next parliamentary elections. In other news, the Italian Government has lodged a formal complaint with the EU because of the migrant situation, to wit: "we're literally getting TENS OF THOUSANDS of people coming from across the sea, and we've seen nothing from the EU besides lots of talking and promises of migrant relocation which are routinely broken. Do something, or else we might have to close our ports to all migrant-carrying, non-Italian ships." (Which would basically force most of the fleet saving migrants at sea to go somewhere else... Where, exactly?  , but at least it's a start. Let's hope something comes out of this.)Polls! I'll drop this link here: http://www.demos.it/a01406.php?ref=RHPPLF-BH-I0-C8-P2-S1.8-T1 Translations:  "If you were to vote right now, who would you vote for?" (Results from several months, compared with results from European Parliament elections in 2014.) (Notably: "not telling" and "I don't even loving know at this point" combined are about 30% of answers.)  "How would your rate the government right now?" (Results in percentage of those who'd vote six or above out of ten, the latest results from June are also split according to the party the interviewed people intend to vote for in the next elections.)  "How would you rate these political leaders?" (Results as above, numbers between brackets on the right are "Wait who the gently caress is this?" answers.)  "How would you rate these left-wing people?" (Results as above, asked only to left-wing voters, colour coded: dark red overall left-wing voters, red PD voters, pink other left-wing parties voters.)  "If your party were to ally with someone in the next elections, would you like it?" (According to the various hypothetical alliances, percentage of people who want to vote the involved parties who said yes.) That's all for now, see you next time!
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Jul 1, 2017 13:43
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nimby posted:Speaking of Belgium, a recent poll was leaked that shows the fallout of several corruption affairs in Brussels and Wallonia. The Parti Socialiste which was at the center of them loses big and the voters are going hard left. The PTB (extreme left) would be the biggest party with 24,9%, where in the last election they got 5. Cerebral Bore posted:I don't want to belabour the obvious, but the whole point to a counterexample is to pick an object of comparison that shares the characteristics of the object under disussion that are claimed to be decisive, yet differs from it in some significant way that demonstrates that the characteristics in question were in fact not the decisive ones.
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Jul 1, 2017 13:45
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Here are the polls, by the way. Upper figure is the 2014 result, lower is current poll figures. Wallonia:  Flanders:  Hmm, yeah! Only downside I see is VB making a bit of a comeback. R. Mute fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Jul 1, 2017 |
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Jul 1, 2017 13:49
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Mikl posted:~italy stuff~ You forgot about the banks that were rescued with taxpayer money because Italy found a way to circumvent European regulations.
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Jul 1, 2017 14:28
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R. Mute posted:Here are the polls, by the way. Upper figure is the 2014 result, lower is current poll figures. wallonia rules as usual, shame the french flanders are turning fash french and dutch flanders bad imo Kurtofan fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jul 1, 2017 |
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Jul 1, 2017 14:44
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Cerebral Bore posted:You don't get to be irked because somebody points out a counterexample to your very dumb claim. Also you still keep piling on more and more qualifiers to try to salvage your original very dumb claim, and the worst thing is that you can't even provide good ones. Like, the idea that Russia being able to beat up the sick man of Europe in 1878 is an example of a significant power projection capability is pretty funny when the Russian army got its rear end handed to it against Japan in 1904 and then folded completely when going up against Germany's B-team in 1914. Motherfuckers couldn't even project power into their own backyard when faced with an actual industrialized country. Qualifiers? Yeah no poo poo, I'm trying to detail to you the numerous ways how a ramshackle Belgian colony was not the same as the Russian empire. If you want to die on this hill then go ahead, but even the people who agree with you overall disagree with you on this excruciatingly dumb point. Like I say one thing, and you read something entirely different, in this case I said 'Russia had the capability of power projection' and its like you think I said 'Russia was the most powerful country in the world and dominated all of its foes'. Also, god, please read more on WW1, Russia crapped out against Germany but first of all it wasn't against the 'B-team', whatever that means, unless people like August von Mackensen and Erich Ludendorff were the German equivalents of Zapp Brannigan and the Eastern Front ended up demanding innovative and novel tactics from the Germans that evolved into what became the Stormtrooper tactics that were famous at the end of the war, this was adapted from some of the Russian tactics they had to deal with. The Russian army mobilized a lot faster than expected which had massive ramifications on the early months of the war and when given good leadership and supplies could much more effective than the popular stereotype suggests, particularly the Brusilov Offensive that absolutely mauled the Austro-Hungarians and rendered them almost non-entity outside of the Alps. They also had significant success in the little-known Caucasus front (an exceptionally difficult place to fight) and overall were fighting along what, at the time, was one of the longest fronts in human history against the most powerful country in Europe that the combined forces of Britain and France took four years to wear down in the west. quote:You're the one pushing a convoluted hypothetical, buddy. I'm saying that the historical trend would have held, which is backed up by both the economic data and all of recorded history. You're saying that wanting to industrialize very hard somehow causes factories to spring out of the ground, as if the laws of economics can be rewritten by some monomaniacal act of will. They weren't springing from the ground, they were built throughout this period we're talking about  , they had every incentive to keep going!Ah, I'm tired of talking about this and I'm sure everyone else is equally tired of reading it. I'm done.
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Jul 1, 2017 14:46
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GaussianCopula posted:You forgot about the banks that were rescued with taxpayer money because Italy found a way to circumvent European regulations. we all know it's far more important to stick unceasingly to agreements made by third way liberals a decade ago than to make sure poor italians aren't forced to starve by billionaire german creditors
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Jul 1, 2017 14:46
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The more I look at that Flanders poll, the more I hate this shithole region.
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Jul 1, 2017 14:49
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Fiction posted:we all know it's far more important to stick unceasingly to agreements made by third way liberals a decade ago than to make sure poor italians aren't forced to starve by billionaire german creditors Actually it's Italian taxpayers that are going to pay for greedy people who invested in risky products and the agreement was made after the Euro crisis.
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Jul 1, 2017 14:52
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GaussianCopula posted:You forgot about the banks that were rescued with taxpayer money because Italy found a way to circumvent European regulations. Oh yeah, that happened too. Sort of. Two failing banks were bought by a third bank for one euro, and in exchange the government agreed to invest in the resulting bank. Fiction posted:we all know it's far more important to stick unceasingly to agreements made by third way liberals a decade ago than to make sure poor italians aren't forced to starve by billionaire german creditors This too, and this was the debate in politics for a while: either the state put some money into the thing, or tens of thousands of people would see their life savings go up in smoke. It's not like it's because of bad management either, the owners of the two failing banks are literally subject to a criminal investigation because they did Very Bad Things that are against the law.
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Jul 1, 2017 14:56
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GaussianCopula posted:Actually it's Italian taxpayers that are going to pay for greedy people who invested in risky products and the agreement was made after the Euro crisis. Ok, it's not quite like that. It's not "greedy people who invested in risky products", it's "the bank owners that forced small business owners to invest in risky products as a condition to get a loan" and "the bank owners that literally wrote false numbers down in account books to make it seem everything was fine even though it wasn't."
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Jul 1, 2017 14:58
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R. Mute posted:Hmm, yeah! Only downside I see is VB making a bit of a comeback. The disillusioned N-VA voters gotta go somewhere. Gotta say I'm a much bigger fan of Peter Mertens than I'm of John Crombez. The Flemish socialists have been fighting a defensive battle since forever, it seems, even while in the opposition they can't go on the offensive, especially with the PS being continuously mired with corruption scandals.
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Jul 1, 2017 15:15
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John Crombez is some sort of fake sci-fi name, you're not fooling me
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Jul 1, 2017 15:49
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nimby posted:The disillusioned N-VA voters gotta go somewhere. Gotta say I'm a much bigger fan of Peter Mertens than I'm of John Crombez. The Flemish socialists have been fighting a defensive battle since forever, it seems, even while in the opposition they can't go on the offensive, especially with the PS being continuously mired with corruption scandals. Peter Mertens and the PVDA+, on the other hand, are looking great. Even if they fall short of those poll numbers, they're still making headway. They've always been the ideal of the whole 'act locally, think globally' ideal with things like Geneeskunde voor het Volk, but now that they're getting out there, they'll be able to keep expanding on that front as well. Their current impact, even with just two national seats, is already impressive - what with the Turtletaks, the healthcare campaigns and the fight against corruption/"graaien." More of that, imo. It's refreshing to have a leftist party with actual ideals they're not afraid to push. I remember having a conversation with some Scandinavian bloke in UKMT half a decade ago about the future of leftism, as you do. His argument back then was that leftists needed to come out with actual ideas - instead of anxiously holding on to what we have while it's slowly being chipped away. Said we needed to go forward and go on the offensive. Looking at the current situation, turns out he had the right idea.
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Jul 1, 2017 16:05
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I'd like to congratulate France on electing an authoritarian despite claiming not to have made the same mistake as the U.S.
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Jul 1, 2017 23:44
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The better comparison for Russia is with the second rank american powers like Mexico and Brazil imo, since their economies in 1900 were largely comparable. Maybe Turkey too but mapping the transition from the Ottoman Empire to Turkey is harder because of oil and the clusterfuck of post WW1 colonialism.
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Jul 2, 2017 00:44
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turkey wasn't colonized though, it genocided 3+ million people instead. it also doesn't have any oil, and russia does? also japan, in 1914 japan was as poor as russia. that's the comparison that cold war american liberal economists generally made. funny because postwar Japan was about as close to a state-planned economy as you got anywhere outside of the Eastern Bloc icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Jul 2, 2017 |
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Jul 2, 2017 01:20
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icantfindaname posted:turkey wasn't colonized though, it genocided 3+ million people instead. it also doesn't have any oil, and russia does? I meant that the Ottoman Empire and Russia had comparable economics but that you can't really map the post Ottoman Middle East on it because of colonialism after WW1, not specifically about Turkey itself (also "it collapsed and genocided a couple problem groups" is a pretty accurate description of late tsarist russia too tbh)
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Jul 2, 2017 01:23
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Not Syria or Iraq no, but Turkey itself is a perfectly appropriate comparison with Russia. Also Russia didn't genocide anyone during WW1 or the Civil War. Crimeans and Circassians are much before and after that, and not really related
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Jul 2, 2017 01:26
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R. Mute posted:Here are the polls, by the way. Upper figure is the 2014 result, lower is current poll figures. Groen overtaking Spa is pretty lol. Now we just need Pvda akso overtaking Spa, that would be extremely good and cool. EDIT: One thing that needs to go better is Open VLD needs to fail harder though. The Belgian fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jul 2, 2017 |
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Jul 2, 2017 01:39
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whomupclicklike posted:I'd like to congratulate France on electing an authoritarian despite claiming not to have made the same mistake as the U.S. The measured, conciliatory style of leadership pioneered by leaders like Obama and Hollande has worked out so well, can't see why Macron isn't emulating them more.
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Jul 2, 2017 02:16
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whomupclicklike posted:I'd like to congratulate France on electing an authoritarian despite claiming not to have made the same mistake as the U.S. France jumped past the fascism stage of the collapse of liberal democracy and went straight back to monarchy
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Jul 2, 2017 02:42
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