This is why I just can’t bring myself to vote for him. This. Unpatriotic, inane drivel that repeats what our worst enemies try to convince themselves of.
This is an amazing country. The best place to live in the world. And it has problems. It’s not heaven on Earth. Heaven on Earth is not going to happen. But our problems are pinpricks compared to what other countries are experiencing. I don’t even mean really failed nations like in Africa or, increasingly, Mexico. I mean Canada, UK, rich developed countries that are doing worse than we are.
If we are a failure, then who isn’t? I want to hear the names of those much more successful countries.
Yes, Kamala is just as bad with her libels about how we are “structurally racist” and all that crap.
Can we get a leader who admires this country and doesn’t call it names every two seconds? Is that too much to ask?
Clarissa's Blog 
Trump says America is a failing nation, we are failing at the borders …
The flood of illegal aliens into America represents a National Crisis. The collapse of the US $ as the primary currency of the world. How? Saudi Arabia has withdrawn from the Nixon era petro-dollar monopoly. 35 trillion $ national debt. BRICS economic alliance has introduced a counter currency to challenge the US $ as the primary currency of the Planet. The Pelosi/Biden attempts to include the Ukraine into the NATO alliance an absolute disaster. For these rational logical reasons I trust President Trump.
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This is sheer, arrant lunacy. At no point did the Biden administration try to invite Ukraine to the NATO.
I’ll start banning for such egregious, insane lies.
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“BRICS economic alliance has introduced a counter currency to challenge the US $ as the primary currency of the Planet.”
Oh you mean the amazing group that includes geopolitical enemies China and India?
BRICS is a made up bullshit term created by Goldman Sachs. These countries have almost nothing in common, they are geographically all over the world, speak different languages, different cultures, some are enemies, the list goes on and on.
People who parrot about BRICS have very little understanding of geopolitics.
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BRICS is like the “Global South” with its very Southern leader, Russia. A complete fiction with no relevance in the real world.
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Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the original economic alliance – think EU in 2009-2010. In 2024: Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates became official members. Saudi Arabia is yet to officially join but participates in BRICS activities as an invited nation.
BRICS, conceived as a counterweight to Western dominance in managing the world economy. The population of BRICS – 45% of the global population!
BRICS focuses on political and economic cooperation. Ethiopia and Egypt joined in Jan 1st 2024 along with Argentina & Saudi Arabia. Algeria and Nigeria adds an intriguing dimension to this alliance of BRICS expansion to include African nations.
In 2001, a Goldman Sachs economist named Jim O’Neill had a brilliant idea. He was pondering the future of global economic growth and identified four countries in the Global South that collectively had enormous potential. These countries were Brazil, Russia, India, and China. O’Neill coined the term “BRIC” to encapsulate this quartet of rising economic powers.
Since then, BRICS has become more than just a term—it’s a platform for cooperation, collaboration, and economic muscle-flexing. The group discusses policy issues, shares common challenges, and even established the New Development Bank (NDB) to mobilize resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects. And all of this started with a little acronym cooked up by Goldman Sachs.
BRICS unity was based on the recognition that existing global institutions disproportionately favored Western interests. So, they decided to create their own forum for dialogue and cooperation.
Iran’s inclusion forces us to consider shared security interests that may sometimes run counter to U.S. interests. BRICS members must agree on what that alternative world order should look like. And that’s where the complexities of geopolitics come into play.
So, when people parrot about BRICS, they’re often touching on a fascinating experiment in global governance – Bush’s “New World Order”.
It’s shaping up as a serious challenger to the American-led order? Perhaps. Critics accused early 1990s Bush of political rhetoric and lacking vision. Bush’s “New World Order” aimed at post Cold War stability.
BRICS and the possibility, seeing that Saudi Arabia has abanoned the Nixon era petro-dollar monopoly commodity based oil currency, especially after Biden’s green energy prioritization. Saudi Arabia is gradually moving away from the exclusive use of greenbacks (U.S. dollars) in its oil trade. Instead, it’s exploring alternative markets.
This symbolic win for de-dollarization, the movement seeking to reduce the greenback’s stranglehold on world finance has transformed BRICS as one of the leading voices against the dollar.
The Nixon alliance with OPEC – dead. BRICS works with China on initiatives like mBridge – a cross-border payments system using central bank digital currencies.
President Biden’s focus on green energy and reducing dependence on fossil fuels is reshaping global energy dynamics. It continues the Obama Era downturn of US domination. This Obama/Biden economic strategy has forced Saudi Arabia to recalibrate its economic strategies.
BRICS has a clear oil based currency dominance now with the alliance of Russia with OPEC. The US could counter by returning back to a gold based commodity currency.
If the U.S. were to consider returning to a gold-backed currency system, it would signal a significant shift. A gold-based commodity currency could potentially provide stability and act as an alternative to the current fiat currency system.
The classical gold standard, which prevailed during much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was a system where currencies were directly convertible into a fixed amount of gold. Under this system, the supply of money was inherently tied to the availability of gold reserves. Countries maintained fixed exchange rates relative to gold. Their currencies were pegged to a specific weight of gold.
Governments could only issue additional currency if they had corresponding gold reserves. This limited the expansion of the money supply. The gold standard aimed for price stability by linking money supply growth to gold reserves.
The fixed convertibility of currency into gold restricted policymakers’ ability to adjust money supply rapidly. In times of economic crisis or recession, flexibility restricted and limited.
A gold based commodity currency favors Free Banking policies over a Federal Reserve Central Bank. Closing the Federal Reserve Washington cound negate 90% of all Federal debt in a single day.
Free Banking refers to a system where banks issue their own currency notes without central regulation. These notes are backed by assets (such as gold) held by the bank. Proponents believe that competition among private banks issuing currency can lead to efficient and stable monetary systems.
The Federal Reserve (often called the Fed) is the central banking system established by President Wilson in 1913 which overthrew the free banking economic model established by President Andrew Jackson in 1825.. It controls monetary policy, interest rates, and the money supply.
“Free Banking”, which allowed state-chartered banks to issue their own currency without strict federal regulation. Each bank’s notes were backed by its assets (often including gold or silver reserves). The Free Banking era was characterized by a multitude of banknotes in circulation, varying in value and reliability. Some banks thrived, while others collapsed, leading to financial instability.
The Fed was designed to address the shortcomings of the Free Banking system. It centralized control over monetary policy, interest rates, and the money supply. Free Banking offered flexibility but lacked stability. It allowed for innovation but also led to frequent bank failures. The Fed too has witnessed major to Big to Fail government established Corporate monopoly failures, which includes major Banking monopolies.
Free Banking allowed individual banks to issue their own currency notes without strict federal regulation. This flexibility led to innovation and diversity in banking practices. However, the lack of centralized control meant that some banks were poorly managed or fraudulent. Frequent bank failures and currency fluctuations were common during this era.
The Fed was established in 1913 to address the limitations of Free Banking. It centralized control over monetary policy, interest rates, and the money supply. Post WWI the Reparation Commission set the final bill at 132 billion gold marks. (Appoximately $33 billion at the time.) The purchasing power of modern dollars: about $519 billion today. That’s an increase of inflated Fed fiat currency of $486 billion dollars in about 104 years. Inflation hence exists as a hidden tax upon the people. Which makes it “Taxation without Representation”. By adjusting for inflation concealed taxes $100 in 1920 would equal approximately $1,623! Thank you President Wilson for your IRS and theft of American wealth.
Fed bureaucrats unilateraly, independent of Congressional overview backed up the British and French economies during WWI. Post war, Britain and France imposed war reparations upon defeated Germany to pay back its war debts owed to the Fed. The 1929 Crash of WallStreet Fed stupidity resricted the currency exchange by 1/3rd and caused the Great Depression.
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Very true Clarissa. Soooo many in this country simply do not understand how good we have it here.
We have such terrible choices for president. I’m also not going to vote for Kamala; she is such vapid, fake, and uninspiring person. Another Hillary Clinton.
I’ll vote for any third party candidate, maybe libertarian. This political duopoly that we currently have has got to go.
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Between “the sky is falling” gloominess of one side and fake joy of the other, there’s no real choice.
Let’s wait until the next election. It’s not all hopeless. Canada is about to elect a very worthwhile Prime Minister. If Canadians can scrounge up a good candidate in a population 1/10 ours, we can, as well.
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I’m happy that you’ve rid yourself of the ‘undecided voter’ label and finally came out as a democrat! All those months of indecision must’ve been brutal.
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I’m 100% not voting for Kamala. But I’m still persuadable for Trump, although that’s evaporating, to be honest.
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It’s 3 weeks before the election. Anyone countersignaling Trump at this moment is a democrat.
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I’m voting democrat down ballot. If you’re given a choice between a sandwich and broken glass, you don’t ask what’s in the sandwich.
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Erm.
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Old Reader
“If you’re given a choice between a sandwich and broken glass, you don’t ask what’s in the sandwich.”
What if the filling in the sandwich is broken glass?
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What do you mean “our”, Kemosabe?
In English, failing denotes an ongoing process. A formerly straight A student can be failing school, and still, for the nonce, have Bs and Cs.
Failing to ameliorate those grades will, certainly change her status to failed. There is a deal of ruin in a nation. One hopes not to aid and abet those actively sabotaging her.
For Heaven’s sake, Miss Clarissa, if you are going to play at being an American instead of one of the blue-hive aristos ruling us, pay attention. You have republican obligations now.
You know who locked us up, murdered or attempted to kill our family members, poisoned our children, forced you to bend over and grease up & accept an experimental genetic therapy drug to visit your father funded NGO invasions, tempted Putin into his grand cabinetkrieg, funded a freikorps to burn our cities, a weoponized our state and county prosecutors and federal agencies against us, created a vast government-corporate-academic censorship machine, shuttered uncounted American businesses and are the bane of what free Americans are left.
And that is the short list.
You abuse our hospitality grievously ma’am, making common cause with my countries enemies.
Imagine a bright charming Spanish academic in some as yet barely touched Western Ukranian college, graciously condescending to be persuaded not to vote for a Putin stooge because his opponent wasn’t quite to her taste, and “Really, you know, is not as effective as we require. Too bad silly patriots. You should have done better.”
You grow a pair and support the guy who your countries enemies are moving hell and high water to destroy.
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I’ve spent years patiently explaining to people that Trump is not “a Putin stooge” or an asset or a spy but here you go again.
The rest of the rant is too garbled to understand but God, enough already with the “Putin controls Trump” narrative. It is based on absolutely no evidence and is, frankly, ridiculous.
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You have to admit, though, that there’s something there. While Americans were struggling to have covid tests, he was sending a personal stash to Putin. If it quacks like a duck, even if it’s not a duck, it must be in the same phylum…
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Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk.
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Do you know what Obama did for Putin? Have you noticed the magnitude of Ovama’s gift to him? It’s incomparable with a bunch of COVID tests.
Question: Is Obama a Russian spy?
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Oh, that was sweetly done.
I would admire your skills more purely, were you to exercise them at the University of Barcelona.
They’re impressive.
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I have no idea what Barcelona has to do with anything discussed here but OK.
People will say pretty much anything to avoid the actual point of the post. Which tells us exactly what the problem is.
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Well said.
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Why not simply answer the question? If the US is such a failure, which country isn’t?
Can anybody answer? Or we can keep going in circles about spies and Barcelona.
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Or you could answer the claim that America is fail-ING: borders, Navy, national guards, governors, churches, schools, libraries, neighborhood associations, hospitals, care homes.
Failed. Failing.
One says “Call 911, get help, this man is dying! Another is actively trying to kill the guy. And then there’s you, insisting people compare the sick man to corpses, and insisting how very much more healthy than dead people he is.
There’s a serious argument against electing Trump, btw, which you have made, that is the cities will burn, again. But paying the Danegeld is not our way.
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When I tell a student he’s fail-ING the course, it always means that most everybody else in the class is doing better. If everybody is fail-ING, then my assessment scale is broken. For every student who’s fail-ING, there are dozens who are not.
This is why I ask, if our country is fail-ING, which ones aren’t? Because if everybody is fail-ING, then nobody is because your system of measuring failure and success is broken. We can online know that we are in the process of failing if there’s a list of those who aren’t. You can’t say, for example, that you are failing at sprouting wings and flying if no human has ever been successful at this task. But you can say that you are failing at learning German if there are many people who learned the language successfully.
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When my student’s loaf of bread is inedible, I do not assume my loaf judging metric is substandard, and look around for other bread-makers. Or if her tomatoes rot on the vine, or perhaps her Latin translation is gibberish, or maybe her answer solution for x, plugged back in to the absolute value equation yields 18 = 2…
Even if I cannot find another student who surpasses her, and all the other examples I can find of student work are bad, I do not pretend she is not failing at baking, gardening, Latin, and algebra. But! But! She is better than they are! Yes, but I don’t care.
Because she (and the other students) are my responsibility, and I love them. Also, it is not hard for any of my students to find or remember my praises for their previous accomplishments, or my belief in their capacity, and their ability to recover.
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Clarissa, the correct question is why the hell are both your and my nations failing?
And quit asking for a leader that loves your country, you at least had one, but threw him away because he is sometimes, well, outright rude. Have to say that I have been taught English, French, and Latin, but I also can speak fluent redneck ’cause I are one ;-D
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If pretty much every nation in the west is failing simultaneously, that strongly suggests a single country’s presidential election has got nothing to do with it.
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Good point. But also, if the countries in the West are failing, who’s succeeding in the East, North and South? Again, I’m eagerly waiting for at least a couple of names of countries who are getting things right.
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Why do you need the name of these countries?
For example, I love my friend. If she developed an alcohol problem, and other self destructive behaviors, perhaps as a result of being locked up, terrorized, and injected with a debilitating poison, I would be angry and sad. My beloved friend, once so successful and capable is failing!
I would not be obligated to give names of other people who are doing better or worse.
Someone insisting that to be the case-? I would imagine them to be crazy, stupid, disingenuous, or playing amusing rhetorical games at my friend’s expense.
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Not the election, certainly.
Again, note the verb tense. The question is what,who, and how the failing can be reverse, arrested, or even merely slowed down.
Though I have heard the case made for “fail faster”, I have not heard it made by anyone who has survived a failed-state civil war.
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Can’t think of any. There are a few I keep an eye on because I want to know if their current movement pans out in the long run (Hungary, Bulgaria, Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, Vietnam): we’ll know in a decade or two, right? Vietnam is doing well, but always living under the shadow of China’s imperial ambitions: any time the US stops being actively friendly with them, China starts eyeballing them. That’s precarious. But they’re an interesting case-study, perhaps, in how to gradually divest yourself communism without having any revolution or official change in government. Since 2004, when we made friends there, and we suddenly had a window into the lives and fortunes of ordinary people in VN… things have gotten steadily and remarkably better, in terms of actual freedom (we are not talking about laws, we are talking about life on the ground), economic prosperity, and opportunities for advancement.
Big rich countries, though?
No. I think that’s a sign of resource depletion, on which empire ultimately depends. Empire is extractive. Once the ability to extract resources from the periphery and funnel them to the center wanes, so does the empire. All the weirdness going on among the leadership is just jockeying for the scraps.
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…if the countries in the West are failing…
if Are any of the countries of the West even reproducing? Are any of them financially sound? What proportion of their citizens require drugs to maintain physical, and increasingly on mental, health? Is family stability increasing or declining? Are educational levels increasing or declining? Is violent crime increasing or declining? How many countries are capable of protecting their territorial integrity, and willing to do do?
Perhaps Denmark and increasingly Sweden, maybe Finland are improving, and Germany is apparently finally beginning to wake up. I don’t know enough about the Baltic nations, but Poland and Hungary may have enough historical memory to hold fast. The rest, well, you might want to wonder if Unwin did not actually have a point ;-D
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“Are any of the countries of the West even reproducing?”
Short answer no…. it’s not just low fertility (populations normally have higher and lower periods of fertility) but economic interests are trying to game the system since the only model they know requires a constantly growing population… so they break the cycle with immigration (not so bad if you can get people who will assimilate and work) but in western Europe they mostly go for populations with a proven track record of failure to do either.
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Africa is reproducing. Is anybody interested in moving there if that’s such a sign of a healthy society?
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“Africa is reproducing. Is anybody interested in moving there”
Well to neoliberals we’re all just interchangeable widgets so they encourage mass migration out of Africa with no thought whatsoever about concepts like assimilation, cultural compatibility, economic productivity etc etc
And a few months ago I read that most African countries have passed their fertility peak and it’s rapidly falling (though the population will continue to grow for a decade or two though demographic momentum).
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You’ve convinced me that the situation is imperfect. Paradise has not been achieved?
Who’s doing better, though? People from all over the world are killing themselves to come to the US. This must mean that wherever they are from is much worse.
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This must mean that wherever they are from is much worse.
LOL, your government and mine are both run by increasingly openly corrupt liars with definitive authoritative tendencies. But c’mon, for the moment at least, we are still better off than those from some third world hell hole desperately hoping to syphon our social assistance ;-D
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LOL, authoritarian, damn but I miss the ability to edit…now back to my efforts at making sauerkraut ;-D
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I keep asking, who has a better standard of living than we do? Can anybody point to anything? Let’s forget 3rd world hellholes. What other places are living better than we do?
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Depends on what your priorities are.
If it’s food quality, access to good quality medical care, lack of barriers to starting a business, low crime, or housing affordability…
I suspect there are places we could do better, if we ignored legal barriers to employment/residence.
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That better standard of living was largely created by our ancestors using the large natural resources in both of our countries. And some of us helped. But frankly, the current governments in both your land and my own have largely dissipated not only that inheritance but mortgaged the future. Your election is a binary choice, Harris is mean spirited lying communist and yet you actually worry that Trump or Vance might use some unkind language ;-D
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“Poland … may have enough historical memory to hold fast”
Yes and no. Poland is doing pretty well at the moment but the danger signs are there. When I recently had my residence card removed I was stunned at how large and busy the offices that used to be a single window in a large hall had become. Mostly those there are people from post Soviet countries but also lots of people who are visually identifiable as non-Europeans… I’m pretty sure I heard a couple of Venezuelans on a bus recently (coming from a place were a fair amount of foreigners work).
The good news is that social benefits system is not attractive so foreigners (comme moi) are here to work and not loaf around on the public teat (as happens in Germany) and if they can learn the language (a bitch and a half for non-slavs) they can integrate. On the other hand lots of neoliberal ideas are very popular as Polish people don’t have any natural defenses against arguments like ‘popular in America’ or ‘very European!’ and the few that do tend to be not very savory in other ways (far right in the real meaning of the word which in Poland also means ‘pro-russian’… nuts but…. yeah….).
Hard to say what the future will hold… there’s some indication of some realization that some currently popular western ideas are nuts but…. not as much as I might like especially among the young (as in those I work with).
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cliff arroyo
Personally, I have no problem with immigrants from anywhere as long as they intend to integrate/assimilate and were accepted by the normal immigration system. Everybody in the Americas are immigrants, or descended from them ;-D
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“Hungary, Bulgaria”
The only two I know something of….
Hungary (used to be a favorite place of mine) is run by Orban and despite some rightwing Americans (*cough* *cough* tucker *cough* *cough*) falling in love with him he’s devastated the country…. one of his favorite moves is to use state funds to buy enterprises and then pass them on to his cronies. Corrupt through and through (not even getting into his love affair with putin). He jerrymandered the electoral system (absurd in a country so small) so that he doesn’t even need to win the vote for his party to have a big majority…
Bulgaria usually comes in first place in ‘most corrupt’ rankings in the EU. Individually many Bulgarians are lovely people but they don’t really understand non-dysfunctional politics. I’m not sure about the current government but the tourism sector for decades catered to russia and it was very hard hit when the war began and that ended). I love to vacation there but at present there are deep political divisions of the non-productive kind (and russia keeps trying to destabilize it).
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Thanks for the info. I don’t have a deep knowledge of any of those countries, tbh, it’s simply that each of them (Peru excepted) has some interesting recent developments that are different from what everybody around them is doing, and I have no idea how those things will pan out in the long run, or what they indicate about the culture and government of the country in question… but I’d certainly like to find out.
Hungary, of course, is in the news for resisting the Great Migration and trying to deliberately increase birthrates. But also having a corrupt autocratic government.
VN has been quietly sloughing off communism in all but names and titles for probably the last thirty years, and has slowly achieved a shocking increase in prosperity for a large portion of the population.
Bulgaria, for reasons I don’t understand at all, had some of the highest death rates in the initial COVID wave, followed by the lowest vax uptake of any EU country. I’m so curious how that will turn out for them, and what, if anything, it indicates about their culture. If the worldwide medical experiment goes as wrong as some of the more alarmist conspiracymongers would like it to go… that puts Bulgaria in the role of: control group?
Peru, despite its habit of electing total bastards to be presidente, and then arresting them for corruption… seems to be doing OK? We are getting massive migration from Venezuela, and several centroamerican countries, but not from Peru apparently. When journos go down to the border crossings and start asking people where they’re from, I keep listening for Peru, and… it is remarkable for its absence. I conclude from this very sketchy piece of non-information, that life is OK enough there, still, that it is mostly not worth leaving family and home behind to go risk it in Las Estados Unidas. I love the place and I’m rooting for them.
Argentina, of course, is conducting the Milei experiment. I’m dying to know how that turns out. Aren’t you?
And similarly, El Salvador has Bukele. What on earth does that look like in 20 years?
I feel like in each case, there’s been some departure, a change of trajectory out of sync with the surrounding world (which seems locked into slow nihilistic decline), that could go very badly, or might surprise everybody by being the best possible option (maybe that doesn’t look like anything special, in a world where all the options are lousy– perhaps it’s just hanging in there, where the other 9 out of 10 options were different flavors of spectacular failure).
I don’t know anything. But I’m very interested.
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