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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15079 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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“Less reliable partner”

Argentinians voted the right way and then they got unlimited dollar swaps basically. America had regime change. If your politics still back the old regime then you are not in the new system. If Canada elected the conservative then they would get better terms. It’s normal politics. Friends rewarded.

It is not normal politics. It is bad for America's long term ability to negotiate agreements if other countries come to believe that every President is going to tear up every agreement of their predecessor. Why make any deal that will last longer than the current administration? The reason other presidents have honored agreements previous presidents made, even when they disagreed with them, is because there is value in being a country that honors it's agreements.

Regime not administration. Bush and Clintons were both neoliberals who had different views on tax rates. Regimes rarely change.

The thing about being a vassal state is you are a vassal state and need to do what your master tells you to do. Otherwise you are not a useful vassal.

I do not think either we or our allies have conceived of our relationship as vassalage and attempts at converting our relationship to vassalage will be harmful to those relationships.

Are you joking or you actually believe this?

I feel like this is one of those things we dress up in nice words “you are not a vassal” and avoiding saying the quiet part out loud, but everyone knows the real truth - you are a vassal.

Sometimes I feel like leftists forgot the real truth and start to think the lie we tell ourselves is the real truth to disastrous consequences.

The EU and Canada are not vassal states

Should every country on earth switch government everytime a new American president is elected? Milei was elected under Biden and yet he faced no shrill demands for regime change, in the way that Brazil and Germany has under Trump.

No, they should just never elect commies in the first place. That will do better for them regardless of who the American president is.

What commies? Merz? Macron? Starmer? Even Lula is stretching it.

Argentine governance has been very very bad historically, although ‘communist’ is probably not a good word.

Sure, but why? Since 1945 doctrinaire Peronism (and so not Menem) has been in power for what? 30 years? I would put Peron himself, the Kirchners and Fernandez under the label of doctrinaire Peronism. The rest of the time has been spent under various anti Peronist juntas or neoliberal administrations. Argentina has certainly not been deprived of free market experiments and it is hard to chalk up all of it’s long term developmental problems to one set of policies.

I am not particularly interested in defending Peronism, but a central assumption in the anti peronist narrative is that Argentina has some kind of neglected potential that was robbed from it by statist economics. That is, it should be notably richer than the rest of Latin America, as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900 Argentina was a massive country full of good land with a very small population. It had among the top 10 highest GDP per capita on the planet. Today Argentina is a country of 40 million in a world where no country whose primary industry is agriculture will ever rank very high among the top economies. Let us remember that in 1900 there was only a small club of highly industrialized countries.

Argentina is a dysfunctional middle income country with regular crisis and high inflation. It alternates between free market reforms and left wing populism at regular intervals. It is a fairly normal Latin American country.

Notably the Western European leaders actively picked a side in the internal American political contest. You can’t do that and then be shocked when your opponent disrespects you.

When?

Generally trying to censor social media largely but not exclusively thru NGO. There was the time Theirry (sp?) threatened Elon for interviewing Trump on X while Trump was running for president.

The EU can only regulate American social media companies insofar as American social media companies want to do business in the EU. These companies themselves function as tools for American influence, and they are implicated in the toppling of two dozen governments around the world, so if any party is being influenced here it is certainly not america.

When they went along with the J6 narrative, or the narrative that US election are organised in a trustworthy manner?

Well Biden won, January 6 was treason but more importantly it was a pathetic failure. In international politics you must sometimes side with the party that is in the wrong, but why on earth should you side with the party that is both in the wrong and utterly defeated? What, should they have recognized Trump as the real president? To do so would effectively be to destroy Europes relations with America for the sake of a man who never expressed anything but seething contempt for Europe. Europe certainly never did anything to make Biden president however, and if Trump had somehow stolen the election as planned the EU would obviously have worked with him.

Specifically? Christopher Steele was MI6 though a few year out of official titles when he created his Russia Hoax dossier.

And yet he was not an MI6 agent in 2016 and he did not prepare the dossier on behalf of the UK government.

Really hope the US doesn’t have people in the CIA who will going rogue the second they lose official titles and work against our interests.

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