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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-22/brazil-and-argentina-discuss-common-south-american-currency LOL yeah that's not going to happen, and hopefully for Brazil's sake
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Jan 23, 2023 04:08
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https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexican-govt-inks-deal-buy-mexicana-airline-brand-383-mln-union-says-2023-01-06/ AMLO has apparently decided to set more money on fire, after having wasted billions on commercially unviable Santa Lucia Airport (which no airline will fly to without massive subsidies), and halting construction mid way on the new Mexico City Airport from his predecessor.
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Jan 23, 2023 21:39
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i fly airplanes posted:https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexican-govt-inks-deal-buy-mexicana-airline-brand-383-mln-union-says-2023-01-06/ what a way to waste money in pipe dream ideas. AMLO said they will inaugurate the "Maya Train" next december. For this government, that doesn't mean it will start operations.
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Jan 23, 2023 22:47
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most interesting is that it will be run by olmeca-maya-mexica, a company owned by the military
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Jan 23, 2023 22:48
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Things in Haiti do not seem to be getting any better and I don't see there being any form of stability or resolution their within my lifetime. It's going to sit besides Afghanistan and a few other nations like Sri Lanka and Pakistan as a failed state. I wonder what the best kind of policy response we can have to the situation. It's best if we don't intervene, but there will still be thousands if not hundreds of thousands Haitians trying to immigrate to other countries who will likely attempt to use the funds they obtain in said countries to set up more criminal organizations within Haiti - as they did to murder the previous president.
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Jan 27, 2023 22:11
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SL is better off than Haiti and Afghanistan, so that's nice Not that "might recover from the economic apocalypse within a decade or two" is preventing my friends from leaving, understandably so
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Jan 27, 2023 23:37
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CameronisGod posted:Things in Haiti do not seem to be getting any better and I don't see there being any form of stability or resolution their within my lifetime. It's going to sit besides Afghanistan and a few other nations like Sri Lanka and Pakistan as a failed state. The entire US intervention apparatus is not set up for anything more than robbery, brutal reprisals and mindless destruction. There is no nation building, no honest help. It is indeed best to do nothing and get your own poo poo together.
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Jan 28, 2023 08:12
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The entire US intervention apparatus is not set up for anything more than robbery, brutal reprisals and mindless destruction. There is no nation building, no honest help. It is indeed best to do nothing and get your own poo poo together. What do you think The Marshall Plan was?
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Jan 28, 2023 18:07
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i fly airplanes posted:What do you think The Marshall Plan was? a power play
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Jan 28, 2023 18:20
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i say swears online posted:a power play Edit: I retract this post. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 18:38
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cat botherer posted:Yeah, the Marshall plan wasn’t done because we were nice guys, it was done to build up Western Europe against the soviets. If it were done for altruistic reasons, it would have included Eastern Europe. The fact that it helped some people was just a side effect. But the Eastern European countries were involved. At least Czechoslovakia,Poland and Romania were forced to walk back their announced participation by the Soviets.
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Jan 28, 2023 19:11
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steinrokkan posted:But the Eastern European countries were involved. At least Czechoslovakia,Poland and Romania were forced to walk back their announced participation by the Soviets. Yeah everything I've ever read suggests it was offered to all countries in Europe, including the USSR, but Stalin said "no thanks" on behalf of his new sphere.
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Jan 28, 2023 19:38
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Building up Japan after WW2 was also done for self-interested strategic reasons, but that doesn't mean Japan didn't benefit. Any country from the Americas going into Haiti would probably benefit from increased stability there.
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Jan 28, 2023 20:12
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The problem with the Marshall plan is that rebuilding a country is much easier when it recently had a fully functional government and general respect for rule of law than it is to essentially build a new government from scratch after the previous government mostly fell apart There technically is no "do nothing" option when you're in long-term international relations, since even without the prospect of intervention, there's accepting refugees, there's sending international aid, which do you cut if off when it can no longer be used to good purposes, and there's a number of ways that as the problems fester can very easily spill all over the place.
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Jan 28, 2023 20:33
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the marshall plan had a convergene of interests between the US state and the european bourgeois economies, and the investments were good enough that they yielded dividends for everyone involved while winning western europe to the US side in the cold war no obvious such convergence exists in the case of haiti. cuba has been mostly neutralised as an exporter of revolutionary socialism, and there's no other geopolitical rival with the ability to start offering the haitians things. any foreign intervention will thus have as its main goal the prevention of mass immigration to the interventionists' country of origin. this is not obviously going to be in the interests of the people of haiti, given the history of US interventions in haiti
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Jan 28, 2023 23:06
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CameronisGod posted:Things in Haiti do not seem to be getting any better and I don't see there being any form of stability or resolution their within my lifetime. It's going to sit besides Afghanistan and a few other nations like Sri Lanka and Pakistan as a failed state. There's a lot of little weird details feeding into what's making haiti extra haiti these days but it at least offers a handful of guesses into what could help recover the country, and they also have to do with understanding what has kept the good doctor henry from begging his way into a foreign intervention force ... SO FAR i gotta get through his bullshit speech first so yeah i didn't get any confirmation of this yet just some secondhand information but apparently MSF has suspended operation either in the PaP area or in the country as a whole, which is, you know, extra great and super awesome
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Jan 28, 2023 23:19
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Yeah, the obvious thing about Haiti is that the US has no compelling geopolitical threat to build it up against, so any occupation is likely to devolve into simple colonial looting. Plus, Iraq and Afghanistan cast severe doubt on whether the modern US actually has anything resembling nation-building capabilities. I'm not sure whether even with the best of intentions, the US State Department as it exists today could manage anything like the Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Japan without it instantly collapsing into grift and incompetence on a truly heroic scale.
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Jan 29, 2023 00:38
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, the obvious thing about Haiti is that the US has no compelling geopolitical threat to build it up against, so any occupation is likely to devolve into simple colonial looting. I'm not sure they ever really had the capability on their own. Why do you think so many war criminals got away with poo poo? "Hey, you look like you have some experiencing managing poo poo, and I have no memories of things that happened before right now. You're as good a chap as any to take care of this poo poo for me, here's how I expect it to be done, and remember: when people gently caress up, memories start coming back to me really fast, so, just to be on the safe side: don't gently caress up." You can't walk into a place with limited connections and just whip out a Functional-Country-in-a-Box and hope for the best. God knows the US tried and tried in more recent cases, and it never really worked.
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Jan 29, 2023 04:43
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PT6A posted:You can't walk into a place with limited connections and just whip out a Functional-Country-in-a-Box and hope for the best. God knows the US tried and tried in more recent cases, and it never really worked. From what I've read about what the W administration was doing behind the scenes for Iraq, they didn't really try.
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Jan 29, 2023 06:51
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The USA as it is now is institutionally incapable of even building its own infrastructure.
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Jan 29, 2023 07:42
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I think Petro's Presidency is going to end up going down in flames, because much like AMLO, he can't help but try to force everyone to do what he says. This is an issue that was seen during his Mayorship, and the right-wing in Colombia were in a way smart to do what they did back when they unconstitutionally took him out of the Mayorship; because they ended up creating a Martyr and defacto leader of the Colombian left, who at the end of the day, just isn't a very good administrator and has massive personal flaws that tends to lead him towards self destruction. The recent issue at the forefront of his Presidency is the construction of a metro system for the capital city of Bogota. This metro has been in the planning stages for many years. Initially being started by Populist Dictator Rojas Pinilla in the 1950s before he was deposed in a Coup, then restarted in the 1980s before being put on pause due to the very violent period seen internally surrounding the Cartel and internal drug conflict. In the 90s there was a lot of political infighting over how to fund the project, and in the late 90s, Enrique Penalosa, decided to propose a BRT instead. This project received funding and was opened in 2000, gaining Penalosa millions in kickbacks from bus manufacturers. But the Transmilenio BRT could not fulfill the demand needed for transit in the greater Bogota megaregion. It continues to be one of the largest and most densely populated metro areas in South America with 13 million people and continues to see some of the worst traffic in the world. A metro continued to be in the plans for Bogota following the construction of the Transmilenio BRT, but the Mayorship of Samuel Moreno, who embezzled millions in government funds for infrastructure via kickbacks, ended up delaying the process. Petro was elected mayor immediately following Samuel Moreno's Mayorship and at the end of his term delivered initial studies that would allow the completion of the Bogota Metro. The following Mayor that was elected after Petro was none other than Enrique Penalosa, the inventor of the original Transmilenio BRT, who decided to modify the design created during Petro's study (there's quite a bit of controversy on whether or not this study was actually fully complete and ready to go) and have an elevated Metro constructed instead of a underground one. Penalosa and the Colombian President Ivan Duque signed a contract for construction of this elevated Metro system with a Chinese Consortium group in 2019. For the 2020 Elections for Mayorship of Bogota centered around the debate of whether to continue to pursue the construction of this elevated Metro System, or to throw it out and go back to the original underground one that Petro had organized. Petro's endorsed candidate, Hollman Morris, had a very dissapointing showing achieving only 14% of the vote. This probably goes back to his wife accusing him in the middle of the campaign of being physically and psychologically abusive to her and her children, an unfortunate theme that has been seen repeatedly with Petro's political allies and appointees. Claudia Lopez representing the Green Party and Democratic Pole (the party Petro originally represented during his Mayorship) ran a center-left platform that included pursuing the construction of the current elevated Metro and won those elections. She became the first female Mayor of Bogota and the first openly LGBT Mayor of Bogota. The landscape of Colombian politics are not as complex as say, the electoral map of the United States. There aren't as many regions to swing, or major population centers. Bogota with it's massive 13 million people delivers a sizeable percentage of the votes for presidency. It's also the most leftwing city in the country and it swings heavily towards Petro, without Bogota, he would not have gotten elected. This week a major scandal broke out, it's been developing over the past several weeks in fact. See that Elevated Metro has started construction. But Petro personally went to the Chinese Consortium and had them investigate what it would cost to build the Metro underground. They seemed to have responded that it would cost another $4 Billion USD and the delivery of the Metro would be delayed until 2035, currently the timeline places completion at around 2028. Petro has been meeting privately with the current Mayor of Bogota and publically tweeting about how the undeground Metro is the only real solution to Bogota's traffic issues. Yesterday his Secretary of Transportation threatened to withhold all federal transportation financing from Bogota if they do not modify the plan to construct the Metro underground. This alone could potentially sink the Metro. Whether Bogota alone could finance the metro is a big question, as the Colombian state has promised to finance 70% of the cost. Petro also announced he was going to travel to China to try and pressure Xi Jingping personally to modify the plans of the Metro system construction. Generally speaking the man seems willing to damage the process of a critically necessary piece of infrastructure that is being desperately awaited by his most faithful voters just because of his own ego and because he believes only he knows the right way to build a Metro system. Honestly this seems a bit laughable to me and extremely self destructive. I think even people who would prefer underground metro systems know there are examples of plenty of cities in the world with very functional above ground metro systems and many of the most efficient and best Metro systems in the world including Tokyo, New York City, Chicago, Beijing, and others, feature above ground sections as well as underground sections.
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Feb 3, 2023 21:49
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Would different subcontractors, current footprint owners, or similar such parties benefit from the divergent metro layouts?
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Feb 4, 2023 01:16
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The Transmilenio is a major disgrace and absolutely worthless in Bogota, I have used it only once or twice on my visits. Most Colombians do not have nice things to say about it. Reminds me of the Metropolitano in Lima, which is similarly useless. Like Colombia, Peru's metro was also marred with corruption.
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Feb 4, 2023 02:17
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i fly airplanes posted:The Transmilenio is a major disgrace and absolutely worthless in Bogota, I have used it only once or twice on my visits. Most Colombians do not have nice things to say about it. Reminds me of the Metropolitano in Lima, which is similarly useless. Like Colombia, Peru's metro was also marred with corruption. If one hasn't used it, Lima's Metropolitano could seem the same as the metro but it's just a line of buses that has it's own lane and the stops are like stations with turnmills, etc. Off peak hours it can be useful if you want to go to certain places but otherwise can get crowded like sardines in a can. There's also the "corredores" that work in a similar fashion but with regular buses and stops. Lima's metro on the other hand currently has 1 Line that took 20 years to build. Trains go on time, mostly, and of course at peak hours it's so full central stations like la Cultura even have a semaphore outside where they only let groups of people in after trains depart. Corruption is endemic of course but building a public transport system from scratch is something else.
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Feb 4, 2023 09:45
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Thanks for the write-up! I spent the last week in Bogota and, my Spanish being rather basic, I followed the debate without understanding the context. It's a shame that Petro can't get over his ego in this particular case, I'd love for Colombia to get on a similar trajectory as Brazil under Lula (the whole getting millions out of poverty thing) but this does not make it seem like he could get his priorities straight.
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Feb 7, 2023 14:07
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Petro, like AMLO, never showed any management skills while on the job. They are great campaigners though, but as we say in Mexico "it's not the same being a drunk than the bartender".
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Feb 8, 2023 18:27
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Turns out Pablo Neruda was actually murdered via botulinum toxin just after Pinochet's coup. Also he was a rapist (which was apparently common knowledge, but I had no idea). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/14/forensic-study-finds-chilean-poet-pablo-neruda-was-poisoned-says-nephew
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Feb 15, 2023 15:24
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El Chingon posted:Petro, like AMLO, never showed any management skills while on the job. They are great campaigners though, but as we say in Mexico "it's not the same being a drunk than the bartender". https://twitter.com/diazbriseno/status/1628573404390477825 All while AMLO gutting electoral oversight seems to be done very effectively.
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Feb 23, 2023 06:38
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sniper4625 posted:Yeah everything I've ever read suggests it was offered to all countries in Europe, including the USSR, but Stalin said "no thanks" on behalf of his new sphere. The offer to other countries probably wasn't in good faith - even if the USSR had approved, aid to countries in its sphere wouldn't have received congressional approval. And the Marshall Plan wasn't just "giving countries a bunch of money to help them rebuild" - it required policy like the reduction of trade barriers (and generally would have given the US/West influence that the USSR would very obviously not want). (also it's questionable whether the Marshall Plan was even necessary for the recovery, since there apparently isn't a correlation between recovery and amount of aid received)
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Feb 24, 2023 04:21
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snip
Somebody fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 15:22
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what the hell
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Feb 25, 2023 15:28
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That's throwback.
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Feb 25, 2023 15:29
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I dont even think thats tubgirl is it?
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Feb 25, 2023 15:54
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Drone_Fragger posted:I dont even think thats tubgirl is it?
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Feb 25, 2023 16:05
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It was a portrait of the history of American diplomacy in Latin America.
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Feb 28, 2023 00:27
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It was a portrait of the history of American diplomacy in Latin America. Also future!
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Feb 28, 2023 07:42
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When they said I should check out Ballenato, this was not what I was expecting.
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Mar 3, 2023 04:35
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I remember we had a discussion here about which countries are part of latin america I hope this settles it https://twitter.com/shakira/status/1642707164866265089
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Apr 4, 2023 11:56
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Huh, I thought normally Unicode stuck to independent countries. Excluding the English Caribbean makes sense, but then Suriname and Guyana are left in, and then Sint Maarten is counted, but not other Dutch islands like Aruba or Curacao.
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Apr 4, 2023 18:42
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I dont make the rules (Shakira does)
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Apr 5, 2023 15:31
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