"It's like if someone took over New Zealand and named it "Middle Earth" and started calling all the Kiwis "hobbits", and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked..."

The most successful propaganda operation in American history was convincing American workers that they were middle class. Not working class. Not employees. Not people whose survival depends on selling their labor to people who own capital. Middle class. The word does enormous work. It places the speaker in the center: not at the bottom, not at the top, but in the reasonable, stable, neither-extreme middle. It produces identification with the system rather than critique of it, because middle-class people are not dispossessed. They are participants. It severs solidarity with the people below, because if you are middle class, you are not working class, and the interests of working-class people are not automatically your interests. And it produces aspiration upward rather than organization horizontally. The middle-class person is always potentially on their way to wealth, never actually on their way to collective power. The word "middle class" dissolved the American labor movement more effectively than the Pinkertons ever did. And people use it about themselves voluntarily. Without any prompting. That is how you know it worked.

These trashy monarchists posted up at the entrance of my talk to protest and harass me. They are the same freaks who celebrated and danced in the streets of Georgetown literally the day after the US murdered 168 school kids and teachers in Minab. And you can hear them justify bombing that school - the crime of the century - as a legitimate target. I might have just ignored them under normal circumstances, but I had just spent the week in the rubble of homes of ordinary Iranians who they lobbied my government to bomb. In the ruins of one destroyed Tehran apartment where an entire family of 12 was slaughtered in a US strike, I found clothes belonging to young children about the same age as mine. So it was impossible to pass by these accessories to murder without venting my disgust at them. Actually, the whole experience was cathartic. God damn these deranged Persian gusanos and their Clown Prince too.

𝘾𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙩𝙖𝙡 𝙬𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙬𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙙𝙢𝙞𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙩𝙮 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙮'𝙧𝙚 𝙗𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙨 𝙞𝙣𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣.

@nxt888 The dream that the internet would transcend borders, connect all peoples and be a forum for peace and enlightenment has been an absolute failure. Exactly what conclusions we should draw from that about empire, etc. is up for debate.

I have an issue with the "China Shock 2.0" narrative. The narrative, championed mainly in Western countries, portrays China's export-led model as one built on unfair competition — due to China's industrial policy instruments — and as contributing to overcapacity and global imbalances. The narrative heavily glosses over the double standards of these accusations: the US and Europe were heavy users of industrial policy during their periods of economic development, and still are. The US CHIPS and Science Act is, in fact, the largest industrial subsidy bill in human history. Perhaps most egregiously, the China Shock narrative conveniently overlooks the fact that the West welcomed China's export-led model with open arms — even encouraged it — for decades. Why? Because it benefited them enormously. It lowered prices for Western consumers, enhanced the structural power of Western-based corporations, kept inflation in the West in check, and subsidised wage growth in Western domestic service sectors. China's export-led model only became a problem when China climbed the value chain and threatened Western hegemony. This, rather than China's trade surplus, is the real motivation behind the China Shock narrative. JD Vance captured this hegemonic anxiety well when he said that "the idea of globalisation was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things." The China Shock narrative has even found a way to spin China's clean energy exports as problematic because they are producing too much, too cheaply. Yes, China is apparently making too many solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs in the middle of a climate emergency. The real China Shock is that China continued to develop its economy rather than sticking to producing t-shirts and toys.

The media will tell you the Global South is poor because of corruption. Because of poor governance. Because of cultural factors. Because of geography. Because of a tragic cycle of instability that well-meaning international institutions are working tirelessly to address. What the media will mention less: The Democratic Republic of Congo contains an estimated $24 trillion in mineral wealth. Its people have a life expectancy of 62 years. It has been extracted from, colonized, had its democratically elected leader assassinated by a CIA-backed operation in 1961, subjected to proxy wars funded by foreign powers, had its resources removed by multinational corporations operating under agreements signed by governments that did not represent the people living above those resources. For over a century. And the explanation offered is corruption. Local corruption. Not the transnational corporate structures that move money through shell companies in jurisdictions that exist specifically to make money disappear before it can be taxed. Not the arms sales that fund the militias that create the instability that justifies the peacekeeping missions that provide cover for the continued extraction. Local. Corruption. The simplicity of that explanation is not accidental. The simplicity serves a purpose. The purpose is to keep you from following the money. The money goes somewhere. It goes to the same place money from poor countries has always gone.