no, uruguay is communist

just picture the king of saudi arabia as a tech bro billionnaire whose family happens to own a lot of real estate in the middle east. same with all the princes, emirs and so on and so forth

In other news, the socialist party which suffered a historic defeat and tied with the far-right in the last election is back in first place on the polls

ever heard of the concept of eternal return

congressman Priest Sergeant

my beautiful country, stringing words together from the same cloth as warhammer 40k

Well, the second they have to manage their blockades. Ambulances, water as well as medicine. These are all things that have to make it to cities regardless of who is in charge of the police. Food staples too, to a lesser extent, depending on the kind of food we are talking about. Locals need to be able to come and go. All this is a form of local governance that is at odds with the national government, in the context of a political struggle in which the protestors and the government cannot allow the other side to blame them for social disharmony.

Brazil is kinda like Nigeria in that it does not aspire to be subimperial, it already is quasi-imperial in its own right. To make a long story short: Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay are, for all intents and purposes, annexes of Brazil. This is not just because of the relative weight of Brazil, it is policy. The most flagrant expression of this is in regards to energy exports and land acquisitions into all three countries. You asked about a shadow agroconglomerate. Well, remove shadow from that query because the landowning oligarchies and corporate agriculture are the owners of Brazil and that's not a secret to anyone.

With Venezuela I suspect it is a combination of factors. First is that Brazil tried to coordinate with American capital and the Bolivarian government to bridge them and create Brazil's own caribbean oil infrastructure - the result of which was Brazil getting couped, the siege of Venezuela tightening and all assets involved being outright stolen by the americans. So of course Brazil is not going to tango with or even against the americans any more.

The second factor is that Brazil has aspirations of extending their 'leadership' across South America, which Venezuela is (was?) geared towards resisting by default - Venezuela in the BRICS would have been an independent actor, not a partner of Brazil's.

The third factor is that even with the aforementioned setback, Brazil and even the Brazilian social democracy has not been pushed against the wall - not to the extent that Russia, China and Iran were. It is easy to forget at this point, but 15 years ago the BRIC countries feared that China would be the weak point. That the Chinese would choose a G2 enténte with the United States and they might have done so if the americans left them any choice in the matter. Russia, too, would have been happy to become europeans but that was never an option. And Iran too was ready to enter a deténte with the US after the Iraq War, the GWB administration just answered 'no thank you, we'll invade you eventually'.

Right now Brazil is in a comfortable position. It is poor, yes, and its agricultural exports cannot provide enough for its population to prosper. Moreover, that agricultural industry is sustained by high taxes and rents levied on the service sector to sustain a banking system geared entirely towards the needs of landowners. Even so, there is exceptional amounts of money to be made selling soybeans and iron ore to China, Brazil just contracts services from the United States and all in all, this is a win/win for the oligarchies in the US, China and Brazil.

There is always the danger of sectors of the american oligarchy deciding that owning the cake and eating it too is just not good enough. But they have not alienated India yet, somehow, and there are so many juicier targets at home when it comes to low effort imperialism. Venezuela has not yet been fully subjugated or digested into the american system and Cuba is still there. Easy for Brazil to just fall into complacency.

Add all this up and, yeah, more than the Brazilian government under Lula - the Brazilian State just wants stability in Bolivia. Under Evo? Great. Under Paz? Bad, probably, but moreso since so far Paz is proving to be an inherently bad proposition for governability and social stability. It is the same thing with Milei. If the guy was just an ancap idiot then Brazil would have no reason to complain. But Milei can't help himself but vice signal towards hating on Brazil for being social democratic. So Brazil grumbles a bit while making nice profits from all the dollars Milei borrows and inevitably spends across the South Cone.

this is what babel is truly about

The funny thing about the catholic church is that it is Conservative, with a capital C and in an almost primordial sense of the word. It is the inverse of a revolutionary vanguard, which is not to say that it necessarily aligns itself with reactionary forces. It may, in so far as the church is also a local institution and if everyone in charge of the local branch is a reactionary then the church's resources will be marshalled in a reactionary fashion. But that is not a natural alliance, the catholic church shepherds a medieval worldview and, as such, it entered the industrial era with its own brand of neoconservative thought.

Catholic corporativism had a lot to offer to the neo absolutist and arch reactionary regimes of Europe. But there were limits, much in the same way that some neoconservative philosophy is only partially useful to Fascism. Everyone knows about Nietzsche being bastardized by the Nazis, but even an arch elitist like Spengler was persona non grata for a number of reasons. The catholic church is similar, it is useful to the american empire because, by coincidence, the church is inane about contraception. But even if the Pope defends, like, a limited, charity centered paradigm of redistribution then he's portrayed as anti Christ somehow.

This is all to say that, if you are leftist and catholicism is part of your community's superstructure then you are best served by picking your battles and arguing the material reality of things.

It is humorous in many ways, but the same process happened between the EU and Russia. It is not quite on the level of american slavish devotion to its christian zionist ideals, but the russian oligarchies would have been happy to be european. That Iran and Russia are partnered at all did not arise from anti imperialist ideals, it came into being due to US-Israel pushing them into an alliance of inconvenience.

If, at the end of the day, Iran and Oman are in charge of the Strait and Iran is extracting revenues from it, then they have not fumbled anything. That is what matters, especially as every regional power + Russia and China seem to want a general-purpose, local security architecture involving, at the very least, Turkey + KSA + Pakistan. Iran joins that arrangement de facto if they are in charge of a Hormuz Toll Authority.

The only actual dynamo here is just Israel saying 'no' and continuing the war regardless. As long as Israel exists, Iran does not get to retreat or fumble anything. It is all or nothing for an entity that is already agitating for a future war against Turkey while this war with Iran goes sideways.

blue button does too many things. there is no world more dystopian than one where hitler of all nazis was pardoned.

As expected, the transphobic Moon of Alabama is the first 'right wing but anti war' website to make the beautiful argument that just because Trump is gonna appoint even bigger warmongerers and neocons than last time, that doesn't mean he'll listen to them. Looking forward to even more copium along the way.