Frosted Flake posted:

Alright, so here’s the hope spot. As American capitalism dissolves all social structures, all elements of social life, in the pursuit of profit, a situation that is not only unpopular but the ultimate expression of which is as much of an impossibility as total religious conformity, they’re trapped too. See, total atomization fundamentally goes against human nature. People will resist it, and organize alternatives - even if they don’t see this as resistance against the state. The state isn’t offering alternatives, it has to defend atomized neoliberal hell, so what’s perceived as a threat, as neoliberalism progresses, would seem to extend to nearly all social life.

Well if they turn people who “want food” and “want to have families” into enemies of the state to defend neoliberalism, they’re going to face the same ultimate problem where people’s loyalties will shift to an alternative. As much as Americans still shake in their boots at Chinese Communism, when they see that people living under the CCP can have kids, and have employment, pensions, whatever, and trying to have those things in America unleashes state violence on them, they are eventually going to realize that their lives are better under the alternative, and since the state has tied itself to a system they hate, their loyalty to the state disappears too.

Halser posted:

thanks for the effortpost again. I wonder how good the media machine is/will be at hiding how bad the life of the average american(or westerner I guess) compared to the rising standards of the average chinese citizen.

Vomik posted:

it’s already worse except for maybe 10% of Americans

actually it’s probably only better for the top 1% tbh

Al-Saqr posted:

I just looked it up and Algeria alone has a bigger military and military budget than all of the current ECOWAS members put together lol.

if they seriously back the four countries promising to respond to an invasion of Niger with force, ECOWAS is hosed.

Starsfan posted:

may not be the best point of comparison, the arsenal of democracy has like 30x the military budget of the Russian federation and yet here we are 18 months later with the entire western world being out of shells. Any comparisons like that kind of depend on just how much grifting is going on in each of the countries being compared.

Starsfan posted:

may not be the best point of comparison, the arsenal of democracy has like 30x the military budget of the Russian federation and yet here we are 18 months later with the entire western world being out of shells. Any comparisons like that kind of depend on just how much grifting is going on in each of the countries being compared.

**like that kind of comparison was the sole justification being offered time and again by the NAFO freaks and other slightly more serious people on why it was literally impossible for Russia to win. You just plug the numbers into a spreadsheet and you see that NATO has dozens of times more of everything that matters than Russia so if NATO is funding Ukraine's war effort and Ukraine doesn't just immediately surrender then Russia can not possibly win in the long run when the weapons start arriving.

Blockade posted:

Isentropy posted:

based on who they’re being supplied by I trust the effectiveness of the Algerian dollar compared to say the Nigerian defense budget, the other large country that’s talked about intervening

Al-Saqr posted:

yeah you might be right, i looked up the GDP of alegeria and it's 160 billion with the military taking up 23 billion, and Nigeria has a GDP of 440 BILLION but their military is only 5-6 billion that's really strange and probably means the military of algeria is corrupt as poo poo and sucking the blood out of the algerian economy.

Military regimes, they're bad folks!

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Al-Saqr posted:

yeah you might be right, i looked up the GDP of alegeria and it's 160 billion with the military taking up 23 billion, and Nigeria has a GDP of 440 BILLION but their military is only 5-6 billion that's really strange and probably means the military of algeria is corrupt as poo poo and sucking the blood out of the algerian economy.

Military regimes, they're bad folks!

Al-Saqr posted:

I just looked it up and Algeria alone has a bigger military and military budget than all of the current ECOWAS members put together lol.

if they seriously back the four countries promising to respond to an invasion of Niger with force, ECOWAS is hosed.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Nigeria is a petrostate, most of that GDP is from Shell sucking out the oil and polluting the coast beyond human habitation.

They also have the largest population in Africa, but I don't think that is something that can be leveraged in a situation like this.

Slavvy posted:

I disagree, Ukraine is leveraging their population quite effectively

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Nigeria is a petrostate, most of that GDP is from Shell sucking out the oil and polluting the coast beyond human habitation.

They also have the largest population in Africa, but I don't think that is something that can be leveraged in a situation like this.

Frosted Flake posted:

Well if they turn people who “want food” and “want to have families” into enemies of the state to defend neoliberalism, they’re going to face the same ultimate problem where people’s loyalties will shift to an alternative. As much as Americans still shake in their boots at Chinese Communism, when they see that people living under the CCP can have kids, and have employment, pensions, whatever, and trying to have those things in America unleashes state violence on them, they are eventually going to realize that their lives are better under the alternative, and since the state has tied itself to a system they hate, their loyalty to the state disappears too.

Frosted Flake posted:

The Algerian Land Forces are where all the cool Russian equipment the Russian government couldn't afford before 2008 ended up.

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Nigeria is already at war with part of the Sahelian population and they're not really winning. Though I think people are jumping ahead of themselves on Algeria, I don't know what "Intel Kirby" is but the Algerian government hasn't said anything yet

https://twitter.com/Africa_Archives/status/1686290495545454592

It does seem a bit weird if every country the French wrangled into policing the Sahel decided to do a 180 at the same time.

Not So Fast posted:

remember what they took from you

https://twitter.com/Africa_Archives/status/1685651322043842560?t=FnRKh1AzqhJKq2_TKpPfvA&s=19

Frosted Flake posted:

Algeria gave some of their T-72s to Ukraine, even as Russian deliveries of T-90s continues, is that right?

Frosted Flake posted:

The reason is that nationality, race, even religion, took on concrete meanings in the Enlightenment and are central to liberalism and how liberals see the polity.They then project that backwards. That's why I want to blow a gasket at people milking university administrators, the media and publishers by talking about "People of Colour in Antiquity", "Blackness in the Roman Empire". They didn't see it in those terms and you're not learning or explaining anything if you try to frame it in those terms. Quite literally, you're ignoring everything we know about their lived experience to talk about Rome as if it was 21st century America, exactly what we criticize Old White Men for doing in the 19th and 20th centuries. To link it to that news item a while back, even if you think Cleopatra VII Ptolemy was "Black" however you want to define that - but let's be real, in terms of race as understood in contemporary America (she wasn't) - neither she, nor anyone around her would have seen her or interacted with her in those terms. Which means it has no explanatory value.

Lostconfused posted:

We have this thread because a bunch of people whined and mods kicked us out of the eurasia thread.

Al-Saqr posted:

the military of algeria is corrupt as poo poo and sucking the blood out of the algerian economy

Hatebag posted:

Commit 3 holodomors labelled 1, 3, and 4,

Some Guy TT posted:

this is what i find so fascinating and frustrating about so much allegedly intersectionalist thought in the last ten years everyone takes it for granted that the way old white men used to do things in academic historiography was bad but hardly anyone seems to know why it was bad and when pressed on the topic what they generally come up with is that since old white men were doing the historiography that meant that they were supporting predominantly old white and male viewpoints

this isnt wrong of course but this just begs the question of what an old white and male viewpoint is and thats not too hard to quantify a viewpoint that presupposes unjustified nostalgia for past eras and presumed white supremacy and generally assumes that only the things men did were important all of these are clear flaws in the historiography that can be easily corrected by just checking the privilege involved in making these kinds of statements

the problem we have now is that this privilege is only very narrowly checked based on to what extent the person making the statement is old white and male someone who isnt any of those three things is simply assumed to be immune to any of these criticisms and lo and behold the most important pop historian of our era is nikole hannah jones a youngish black woman whose work is loaded with unjustified nostalgia and presumed white supremacy and assumptions that only the things men did were important literally the only thing not making her a reactionary is that the thesis of her work is explicitly that racism is bad and hardly anyone bothers to examine it in any more detail than that

this is my real issue with a lot of woke rhetoric is that its just the ultimate popular shorthand of lazier halfassed third wave feminist style historiography where making the message easily understood is considered more important than making that message coherent and no one even seems to grasp the irony of the fact that the entire reason why gibbons style historiography was so popular for so long is that it functions as great imperial apologism for this exact reason you can shitpost about how rome fell because they were having all this gay sex and while its not wrong its so far removed from a useful context that you can repurpose nearly any vaguely true pithy statement to push whatever stupid policy position you want without having any idea to what extent such an analogy is at all reasonable

given all this it shouldnt surprise anyone that the new improved easily accessible woke rhetoric of the 20s is so much more amenable to permanent war in ukraine than the old less well broadcast leftist rhetoric of the 00s was to the iraq war because easily understood rhetoric has weaker structural support and can be more easily molded to fit whatever it is the empire wants to say hence why were now expected to be stoked and excited for better awareness when better awareness on its own is useless weve been better aware that cops love shooting black people for a decade now and gently caress all has happened to actually do anything about it

Frosted Flake posted:

Political Science is not a real science:



From The Democratizer Army Paradox: The Role of the Algerian Army in Impeded Democratization

e: Where Gunnery plainly is,