Soriek
11mo ago
Thanks, maybe it should go in its own post. I worry about people not reading outside the main thread but maybe if it was a regular thing that would be different.
Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male.
Right wing movements came to power without any women voting at all in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, etc. The notable country that went from being a democracy with full women’s suffrage is Germany (and even there women mostly voted along with the male head of the household), and the NSDAP was the only party to not run female candidates because of their open stance that politics was the domain of men; women’s representation dropped from 37 MPs to 0 under them.
In which country did a fascist party come to power with majority support from women, or really any major attempt to cater to women’s preferences? Most mid-twentieth century right wing parties were pretty explicit about wanting to roll back women’s rights and restore traditional gender roles.
Is that not what you’re referring to with this passage?
History is littered not only with incompetent male rulers, but also men who very competently and effectively executed their vision for society, to the immense detriment of everyone involved because their philosophical premises were rotten. The masculine virtues of course have their corrupted forms, and I would dread living under a regime run by men who embodied those corrupted virtues. (Being sent off to get butchered in some pointless war waged merely to satisfy some red-blooded moron’s bloodlust and pig-headed sense of honor would be a nightmare scenario for me personally.)
A discussion of “the more disastrous decisions in the 20th century” and “pointless wars caused by masculine leaders” that didn’t include fascism would be an odd one indeed. We could certainly add other countries, but ie the Soviet Union of course was no more reliant on women’s support than any other dictatorship from that era.
Soriek
11mo ago
It seems there are two separate arguments happening at the same time.
Yeah, I likely blended the two together through reading rushedly both of your comments.
Still, you haven’t yet offered an affirmative defense of feminine governance models. My contention is that most men would be more psychologically comfortable under a macho fascist-adjacent government - even one that led them to fruitless slaughter - than under the soft gynocratic model of governance under which they live now
Imo it's more than enough to argue that modernity (if you consider it to be run by women, which I don't actually) is a lot better than many of the previous societies we can pick from among. All the women-dominant world needs to be is not demonstrably worse than the alternatives for us to take pause before we assume that rolling back women's political representation would improve things. I'm skeptical of the argument that men would be psychologically healthier under a more masculine, authoritarian government, largely because I've lived in a country like that and can't say particularly that men were thriving more than anyone else. I think that kind of thing sounds a lot cooler in theory than in practice. Even assuming it were true, there are lots of things I don't like about society that I consider a fair trade off for overall modern peace and prosperity. I don't much like the psychological experience of going to work and taking orders from my boss either, but I still conclude the modern economy is probably a net win - others are free to disagree.
To loop back though and address broader left wing changes, I'm also skeptical these can be laid at the feet of women either. To take OP's example of mass immigration, America's most restrictive modern anti-immigration bill was passed shortly after all women in America gained the right to vote, and was only reversed in the 60s by Emmanuel Celler, who was many things but not a feminist, and rather than cater to women's preferences ultimately lost re-election because he explicitly did not do so (ie by loudly and publicly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment).
In fact, it's an oft repeated talking point that one of the longest lasting arguments against women's suffrage was that women were on net considered more conservative than men. This held true in the West till pretty recently, with American women more likely to identify Republican than men until the 60s, only noticeably voting significantly more for Democrats by the 80s and the present day gap being a historical anomaly. And keep in mind that crude party preference also obscures things like high women's support for Bill Clinton in the 90s, a candidate who slashed welfare and regulations, passed the strongest anti-crime legislation in a generation and banned federal recognition of same sex couples. Likewise, European women voted for conservative parties more than men until the 70s and in some places later. To take one salient example from our cousin country across the pond, Thatcher would have lost her election if only men were voting, and English women supported conservatives over labor until 2005.
Women are more left wing than men in the past few decades, but a glance at the recent historical record indicates this is in no way fixed. Today's rightist are skeptical of woman's suffrage making everything woke; a century ago liberals were skeptical of women's suffrage because they thought women would restore the Bourbons to the throne.
If your argument is that those same men are stupid to feel that way, and that they ought to be far more willing to give women an honest go at governance for a while, since men fucked it up so badly a century ago, then it’s an argument we can have.
I don't blame all of the world's problems on men either, nor am I really interested in balancing out past wrongs or whatever; I just need an active argument to draw a line from anyone's liberties to societies' problems. My position is that gender just isn't that important till proven otherwise. There are societies both bad and good, liberal and conservative, across all varying degrees of women's enfranchisement, and their ills or successes usually come from elsewhere.
From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again
Tanner Greer’s “Lessons from the Nineteenth Century” is the latest in a series on the decline of American self-governance and institution building.
He offers a comparison between the reaction to the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. In 1918 Americans sprung into action, organized committees on sanitation and medical care, delegated responsibilities, held regular meetings. When the crisis was over these committees had stern handshakes all round and then disbanded, not to burden America with ever more bureaucracy.
In contrast, during the early months of Covid no one seemed to know who was responsible, the major agencies all gave contradictory information that varied week-to-week, grassroots initiative was scattered and weak.
Seemingly we've forgotten how to do what our recent ancestors easily could. Nowadays Americans largely don’t practice addressing problems by creating their own organizations with formal structures and set goals. But back in the day if you were in one of America’s countless settler communities and there was a problem with bandits, or fallen trees covering the road or whatever, there was generally no higher authority to appeal to. If you wanted irrigation, you got together with your friends and you dug some darn ditches.
consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would had been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life—the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and he, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations.
In the last century these self-governed settlers have had their local autonomy worn away by the twin forces of modern bureaucracy and late stage capitalism, rule from the capitol beltway and the corporate boardroom. Greer speaks ably to how bureaucracy's distant web of control weaves through our lives from thousands of miles away. I’m more interested in what capitalism and wage labor have done to the American psyche, taking us from a world of self-employed farmers, builders, artisans, and shopowners, to a nation of people who show up when we’re told, eat during designated breaks, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. I’ll quote one of my favorite passages from T.J. Stiles' biography of Vanderbilt:
Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence ... More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household...But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883...these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”
The collapse of bottom-up institution building into the modern age of subjects-rather-than-citizens is Greer’s answer both to dilemmas raised by the left, but even more by the “New Right” (notice how different the portrayal of the self-actualized American settler is from the reactionary trope of the idealized beach bum-citizen, unconcerned with his distant dictatorial government). No, Greer says, the malaise in modern society didn’t start in 1776, or with the Enlightenment, or with the reformation. It started when people lost the ability to have a say creating their own world and had to turn solipsistically inward to feel any agency at all:
This week I finished listening to an episode titled “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.” The parallels between the Hellenistic trends Metzger describes and the problems of the current moment are worth pondering...
Destroyed: a world of cohesive, tradition bound city states whose citizens were joined together by shared loyalty to a polity whose fate was set by these same citizens’ own sweat. In its place: a tangle of marauding empires whose political outcomes were decided by the machinations of the distant few in the despot’s court or the mercenary’s camp...Men who led small and bounded worlds now found themselves the playthings of inconstant forces operating on imperial scales.
The intellectual response to these developments was to turn inward...New faiths were focused less on public goods than private salvation...No longer did great thinkers squabble over the form of the ideal polity, or ask what political communities must do to foster good character in their citizens. Hellenistic philosophy was not focused on citizens. It was obsessed with individual ethics...Like the new religions, their focus was on the soul within a man, not the community of men outside him...
To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”
The modern obsession with “expressive individualism,” whether it be gender-bending woke idpol, or right wingers joining neo-paganism or contrived versions of internet catholicism, is what happens when people have no influence over the outside world and instead must turn inward to the only place they have control over: their own identities. It's all just a desperate screaming attempt to regain a semblance of control in a world that has taken that from us. Everyone could win their modern culture war wishlist, but you still won’t have addressed the root issue that’s driven us from the real world and inward down endless black holes.
To end on a positive note, I’ve been a tiny cog in other machines my entire life, but I’ve tasted the kind of self-governance Greer describes. A long time ago I helped run a campaign for a local politician; the whole team was me and my friends, if we needed more staff we had to convince people to work for us, if we wanted people to vote we had to meet them face-to-face and make our damn case. It wasn’t an important race or anything, but the giddy feeling of having a tangible influence on the world around you, of creating something from scratch with your own willpower, has stayed with me ever since. Not so long ago this was just American life. America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice. As the shocked Toqueville said of the people he met in the United States:
there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.
No, but it clearly is to my interlocuters. I don't care much about immigration one way or the other. Imo the mass immigration ship sailed in the mid nineteenth century and ended out alright.
Soriek
11mo ago
It's worth pointing out (in case it doesn't come across in my re-telling of his work) that Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism, but rather "rugged communalism." He very much acknowledges and expects us to live "surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations," that's part of the appeal! He just wants the bonds and obligations thick and personal.
His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible. Your local rich guy may always have an outsized influence, and your own impact on any given process will vary, but ideally most of the important institutions you come in contact with, your school board, church, sheriff's department, will be built and ran by people who know you by name and face and understand and care about your concerns in a way that isn't possible on a much larger scale. A world where if you and your friends encounter a problem, the first thought everyone should have is how you can organize and address it, rather than how you can make your cause sympathetic to an institution far away.
Soriek
11mo ago
To some extent, but your average builder is also heavily burdened by restrictions from the state and federal level: environmental reviews, a litany of Executive Orders, design requirements, licensing and permitting processes, stacks of procurement, contracting and hiring regulation, etc. Good high level government would indeed fix construction problems, but it's like saying good local government would solve NIMBYism as well - the problem is getting from here to there.
Soriek
11mo ago
If we're talking about nimbyism as a movement by residents to block local building, then yeah by definition it's a local issue. But state and federal regulations most certainly raise obstacles and costs to building; often they are the very tools that give local NIMBYs their power in the first place. To use your example of Berkley for instance, a federal judge blocked construction of their supercomputer laborotory because the University of California hadn't gone through the nationally required environmental impact assessment. More recently, Berkley's attempt to build more (desparately needed) student housing was blocked under California's state level Environmental Quality Act.
My argument isn't that local roadblocks aren't important, it's just that the solution isn't as simple as shifting authority to higher and higher levels, when you look at their track record thus far.
I think it's important not to over-doomer it, regulations don't necessarily last forever. Part of the value I got out of the comparisons to ancient Greece was that this stuff always rises and falls in major societies over time. Diocletian's taxes and price controls were abolished, the Sassanians abandoned their mass standardizations, in recent history the American progressive movement made significant process cutting red tape and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Reform is always possible. Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?
Insofar as things carry on at a larger scale, it's at least in part because there's little meaningful opposition to this state of affairs. I didn't include it for brevity's sake, but the remainder of the first blog post, and in this piece for Palladium, Greer outlines what he seens as the actual muscles America needs to flex and train to regain our organizational prowess: 1) the importance of public usefulness as a virtue, 2) a commitment to formality, and 3) the proper use of heirarchy and scale:
The benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal:
...First, institutions cultivated a sense of public kinship and brotherhood, sometimes formalized by sacred oaths. Just as citizens took oaths to the republic or upon the Bible, social and political associations took their bonds of loyalty no less seriously. The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. They required earnest oaths that committed their members to a life of charity, public service, brotherhood, and the betterment of their fellow men. Lodge leaders developed these rituals and treated their oaths with great solemnity. This required their culture to have a functional role for solemnity and seriousness at all. When irreverence becomes a universal norm, attempts at seriousness degenerate into performative role-play.
A commitment to formality:
The famously irreverent Boomers were the first generation of Americans born in the shadow of the new managerial society. The “New Left” counterculture of the 1960s was, in turn, the first attempt to break the shackles of bureaucracy and conformity. New Left radicals condemned the “bewildering dependence” of Americans on “inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate” and identified the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” as “the greatest problem of our nation.” Their movement ultimately failed, however, to create viable counter-communities capable of agency.
A central reason for their failure is that for all of their talk about “participatory democracy,” the radicals of the New Left were not interested in the discipline, formality, and commitment to reasoned debate that made the actual participatory democracy function. Associating rationalism and rules with the suffocating bureaucratic structures that they rebelled against, New Left radicals ended up mounting a titanic effort to liberate themselves from the very intellectual and organizational tools that successful institution builders use to assert their agency. The cause of self-liberation ended up in conflict with the cause of self-government….
Self-government meant a deep commitment to an otherwise mundane set of tasks...Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action.
And finally, the usefulness of scale and hierarchy:
The third virtue was, instead, an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems...
Many of the modern institutions which have most successfully retained their nineteenth-century commitment to decentralized local leadership—such as the LDS church or the U.S. Marine Corps—have famously rigid hierarchies. These institutions integrate clear chains of command with a structure and culture that encourages initiative and independent problem-solving by leaders at the lowest level of the hierarchy. The leaders of these institutions understand that the only way to train someone to effectively lead large organizations is to give them practice acting autonomously on a smaller scale. Empowering people down the chain to make mistakes lets their leaders up the chain prevent them from happening at a larger scale.
I'm not sure what Greer would make of the labels, but he pointed out that the movement against bureaucracy was for a long time considered the purview of the New Left, though nowadays it's more popularly associated with the right.
I should probably add that I'm mostly relating the views of someone else, views I'm sypmathetic too and would like to draw some inspiration from, but do not fully endorse. I'm not an anarchist nor a libertarian and I think there are a lot of advantages to modernity, capitalism, and bureaucracy that I would not personally be willing to trade away. But there can be reforms that ideally lead towards a happy medium between some of the advantages of both. I also appreciate his work for a meta-level take on the two different sides of the culture war being an unproductive manifestation of the same root cause, rather than a solution to our actual prolems.
In some ways, but I think in a lot of ways building is way easier now. Anyone who's played around with power tools has to wonder "how the hell did anyone ever get anything built before these?" And I'm not just talking about the difference between a hammer and a nailgun, but literally having ready access to the nails.
Soriek
11mo ago
The glib libertarian answer would probably be that the kind of international trade that facilitates the manufacture and supply of technology is also best maximized by getting the government out of the way. But I'll bite the bullet and say that I think modern states also frequently lower transaction costs for trade, and that the kind of institutions that create power tools are likely to be large scale corporations with bureaucratic management structures themselves. I'm a great enjoyer of modernity and I think the vast, impersonal scale of our institutions is part of what drives prosperity. There's a reason why humanity generally trades off independence and self-reliance for the stultifying comforts of advanced society.
I certainly wouldn't undo that trade myself, but I want to highlight that something important was lost through the trade, something that's partially a choice and can be recovered without sacraficing everything else. The Spanish Flu response that Greer highlights was in the early twentieth century, after both industrial capitalism and modern bureaucracy had been built, and yet we still understood how to achieve wide-scale, grassroots activism and institution building. A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.
Soriek
11mo ago
People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances.
No denials at all that latticeworks of these kinds of building regulations absolutely do exist and weave through American life. But these examples all happened in Miami, Nashville, Atlanta and its suburbs; the smallest polity here is Lancaster Ohio, whereas my comment was about rural areas farther removed from the modern reach of the state. When I say "neighbor" I mean it in the sense of someone you know personally and have a relationship with rather that someone who moved next door but you don't interact with.
I don't doubt that someone could find an isolated example of this kind of behavior in nowheresville, but it's assuredly much less common. As an example, my old boss decided he wanted to build a guest house on his property that he could rent out. When we laid the permanent foundation I asked him if he was supposed to have gotten a permit for it. He replied something like "possibly, I'm not sure." Why would he care? He was building in the middle of the woods and his property was surrounded on either side by his mother and uncle's farms. His isolation was extreme but not that extreme; most people where I grew up lived in areas with low visibility, far from the reach of your local bureaucrat, and flanked by people who cared about them; this is still reality for lots of rural Americans.
Soriek
11mo ago
But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.
Ironically, if I haven't inundated this forum enough with his blog, Greer makes much the same case, arguing that modern victimhood isn't a cultural quirk but a pretty reasonable response to a society where the most effective way to get things done is earning the sympathies of the vast, impersonal powers we all live under.
Soriek
11mo ago
I should clarify he was a career carpenter who had built his own house, not just a mad lad looking for a quick come up.
It's worth noting that Nixon and LBJ were still really exceptional politicians in their own day and age as well, most people were nowhere near that competent. LBJ in particular was a generational talent who completely revitalized the way the Senate was run. Before he took charge as Majority Leader, if you read newspapers at the time the criticisms of the mid-century Senate sound very similar to the way we describe them today: ancient, sclerotic, committees full of people with scant domain experience; an institution overall incapable of getting anything done.
I've wanted to read Nixonland for a long time but I remember Scott saying he would do a review on it, so I held off, but I think that must have been years ago by now. Would be really interested in hearing a review from you.
Soriek
11mo ago
Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match.
Thucydidean Thursdays (International Updates) 3
Are there synonyms for international or global that start with “T”? If people think it’s a good idea I’ll make these their own separate thread. I worry about it getting less engagement than in the main thread, but it would be cool to have a dedicated international relations day.
As before, please feel free to add updates from any countries you're interested in.
Ecuador
A cheeky near-dictator moment was evaded with President Guillermo Lasso, having previously disbanded the National Assembly after being accused of embezzlement, allowing himself to rule by decree, announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election. Coincidentally or not, the US has ben talking about investigating some of his assets in Florida. Surprisingly, his party has said they’re not going to run anyone either. Unfortunately, the nation has also been hit with some nasty floods…
Haiti
…As has Haiti, along with earthquakes. This country can’t catch a break. The US continues its ill fated search to get somebody, anybody else, to lead a regional intervention into Haiti, and is demonstrating its commitment by putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the search. Jamaica will host a meeting of the Caribbean countries next week to plan out further steps.
Colombia
Colombian President Gustavo Petro is in Havana to hopefully sign a peace agreement with his former rebel group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or the ELN. Tensions have been rocky with them throughout his term, and after being buffeted by a series of corruption scandals in his cabinet, this would be a major victory. Other leftists think the supposed crusade against corruption is partisan, and several former and current (ie Lula) Latin American leaders, plus Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon for some reason, have all signed a letter warning of a “soft coup”.
Argentina
Argentina will now formally join the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).This should open up Argentina for more access to financing, mainly via China, who has come to play a larger role funding in Latin America in general. Related: “Taylor Swift Argentina Tickets Are a Bargain With Inflation Over 100%"
The DRC
After the Rwandan genocide a bunch of Hutus fled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where then-strongman Mobutu allowed them to stay and stage attacks on Rwanda. The new leader of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, pursued them to eliminate the threat; the conflict that followed is legendary for its brutality. The Congo Wars have been formerly over since 2003, but the Hutu paramilitaries were never fully defeated, and now-old President Kagame, still in power thirty years later, funds and arms a Tutsi paramilitary called M23 to fight them on Congolese soil. This has been going on forever, but has attracted a flurry of attention lately. Things became especially acute last year when rebels almost sieged the main Eastern City of Goma, and the DRC has formerly accused the M23 and Rwanda of preparing to stage another attack on the city, which has already become flush with over a million refugees from the conflict. Ironically, the United Nations (or at least a relevant spokesperson) has been calling for the UN Peacekeepers to withdraw and for the DRC to step up handling the rebels themselves. The DRC is also doing terribly in general, with recent protests over falling living standards met with mass tear gas a few days ago.
Ethiopia
The Ethiopian Civil War has been formerly over since November. However, Human Rights Watch has accused the government of continuing to ethnically cleanse the Tigray minority, accusations the government of course denies. Some 47,000 refugees are estimated to have fled to Sudan; the number internally displaced is unknown but assuredly much higher. Ethiopia is also now dealing with new border issues, having recently repulsed an attack from the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab on its border (the east of Ethiopia is ethnically Somali and has been a source of tension between the two countries in the past).
Iraq
Foreign Affairs offers a retrospective on the Iranian proxies and their long walk through Iraq’s institutions. The Shia party nominally took a beating in the 2021 election to the anti-Tehran Moqtada al-Sadr. However, the Iranian aligned judiciary intervened, ruling that rather than the historical simple majority standard, the Sadrists needed a two-thirds majority to form a government, and barring his junior coalition partner, the Kurdistan Democratic Party's nominee from the Presidency (which would mark the completion of a formed coalition). Within a year Sadr and most of his faction stepped down, leaving no bloc to oppose the Iranian aligned Coordination Framework parties. They nominated the pliant Al-Sudani to prime minister, ensuring that Iranian-friendly faces have dominated the cabinet, and stretching Iranian influence throughout “The Iraqi National Intelligence Service, Baghdad airport, anticorruption bodies, and customs posts…Iraq’s media regulator, the Communications and Media Commission”. Critics accuse them of attempting to replicate an IRGC style of political patronage via welfare, state backed jobs, and by contracting out state assets controlled by the shia paramilitaries.
Libya
The disparate factions in Libya have said they’ve finally hammered out an agreement for how to proceed with their 2021 election, which has been indefinitely delayed, and the UN has offered to help.
Myanmar
Myanmar, still riven with ethnic secessionist groups, is starting to catch the ire of its neighbors. Borders between Myanmar and the neighboring Indian state of Manipur have historically been open, but ethnic violence is starting to spill over into Manipur itself. Thailand also cut off electricity to two Chinese backed, Karen militia-managed casinos over the border in Myanmar that they accuse of “being centres where people from other nations are tricked into taking jobs and then put into virtual captivity and forced to work in call centres conducting internet scams”. Last month a humanitarian envoy from ASEAN was attacked by the militias as well, rocketing up Myanmar on ASEAN’s list of regional priorities.
Soriek
11mo ago
It was meant to be sarcastic but I guess I didn’t lay it on thick enough.
I've had a sort of secondary theory about the Argentinian economy for a while that he seems to agree with, that Argentinians are so traumatized by past crises that they'll bank run at the slightest sign things are weakening, making their currency way more fragile to any shock than a normal county's would be. Macri did implement reforms after all, he cut quotas, tariffs, currency controls, FDI restrictions, price controls, and subsidies, and things did get better for a while, then everyone freaked out the moment the US raised interest rates and things deteriorated again.
International Updates 2
You can probably tell which region has been holding my interest lately from the length of these, but I tried to give a good spread. As before, feel free to add your own coverage of anywhere.
Haiti
Things in Haiti are still brutal, with more than half the country extremely food insecure and 60% of Port-Au-Prince controlled by gangs. However, Reuters reports that “Violence by armed gangs has fallen 'drastically' since the emergence of a vigilante justice movement that has seen at least 160 suspected criminals killed in the last month, a report by local human rights research group CARDH said on Sunday . . . CARDH said 'almost no' kidnappings had been recorded in the last month and counted 43 gang-linked murders, down from 146 in the first three weeks of April.”
Brazil
Brazil hosted the Summit of Americas on Tuesday, the first summit of its kind in 9 years and featuring every South American country except Peru. Brazilian President Lula, attempting to harness what remains of the Pink Tide, called for a revival of the region’s 2008 Hugo Chavez-led integration, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). This would include a common currency, and projects like a “ ‘Bi-Oceanic Corridor,’ a transportation artery to enable countries to ship goods across the continent overland instead of by sea.” A cool idea but it’s unclear how seriously anyone takes it, and potential partners across the left and right (ie both Chile and Uruguay) are skeptical of Lula’s warming with Venezuelan leader Maduro.
The Chamber of Deputies, the conservative-controlled lower house of Brazilian Congress, also passed a controversial bill which will limit formally recognized indigenous lands. The bill is backed by Brazil’s powerful farm lobby and looks posed to pass the Senate as well. The bill potentially opens up the areas of the Amazon inhabited by “over a million people” for development, which critics denounce as a betrayal of Lula’s promises of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Indigenous groups responded by blocking a highway outside Sao Paolo and cops gave them the tear gas treatment.
Argentina
Argentina’s Peronist/Kirchnerist ruling party, Frente de Todos, has presided over a deteriorating economy, as is custom, and faces a rough election ahead. Astoundingly, Forbes now reports that polls show a three way tie between them, the standard center right opposition party Juntos por el Cambio (who previously also botched the economy), and the previously fringe ultra libertarian Javier Millei who “promises to burn the Central Bank, eliminate the ‘political caste’ and use a ‘chainsaw’ to reduce a bloated state,” and was “initially discarded as a something of a lunatic.” His party, La Libertad Avanza, was only created in 2021 and surprised everyone by receiving 17% of the vote in the last legislative election. There isn’t a clear leader for the ruling party yet, though the Cabinet Chief has announced his candidacy and the Ministers of the Economy and the Interior are expected to announce as well.
Guatemala
Guatemala’s conservative ruling party Vamos has been listing towards autocracy this past year. A lot of attention has focused upon the high profile arrest on of the Director of one of the major newspaper lines for investigating corruption. His lawyers have now been arrested as well, nine other journalists have been placed under investigation for covering the trial, and El Periodico has shut down completely. There are elections on the 25th and Vamos’ current President Giammattei must step down, but the government has barred the three most popular opposition candidates on both the left and the right, and finally decided to just go ahead and release a list of 200 candidates from the Citizen Prosperity party who they won’t allow to run.
The U.S. has expressed its concerns about rule of law in Guatemala but still relies on the government to restrict migration outflows, so there’s likely a limit to how much pressure America will apply.
Senegal
Speaking of which, Senegal also has an election next year and has also imprisoned the political opposition leader Ousmane Sonko on sexual assault charges. Large protests have been held and repressed in turn. The current President Macky Sall is technically done with his two terms but altered the constitution recently and may run again.
Central African Republic
Faustin Archange Touadera, leader of the CAR since 2008, is also holding a referendum that would allow him to stay on past his term limits.
Uganda
Uganda has passed their draconian anti-gay law, despite international criticism. The US and some European countries have suspended aid and there has been some talk of sanctions, but Mosevembi’s hilariously named National Resistance Movement (actually a forty year dictatorship) has said they will hold strong.
Iran
On May 27 the Taliban and the Iranian security forces held a firefight near the Nimroz District in Balochistan province. The dispute is over water access. The “Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought,” and Iranian President Raisi recently forbid the Taliban from accessing the Helmand River, despite a 73 sharing arrangement treaty. [edit: covered more by @hanikrummihundursvin below]
Sri Lanka
You probably remember Sri Lanka’s recent near total economic collapse, culminating in its President Rajapaksa literally fleeing the country. Some rare positive news: the economy has been steadily recovering and inflation going down, leading the government to finally cut interest rates and reduce fuel prices for the first time since the crisis. India has also recently extended another billion dollar credit line.
Pakistan
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party has continued in the months following his arrest, with thousands of supporters arrested, over 80 senior members “forced to leave the party at gunpoint,” and now the arrest of one of Khan’s top allies.
Kosovo / Peru Boots on the Ground Bonus
NATO is deploying more 700 troops to Kosovo after protests from the Serbian minority have grown agressive, and Peru is receiving 1000 American troops to train and advise their security forces as they deal with ongoing protests.
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