New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?

One reason why Buenos Aires didn’t make the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War

Read through that and tell me what we missed.

The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.

Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.

But the idea that we simply didn’t use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics… that’s all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we’d have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our “all out” invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.

Vietnam lost over a million of its people during the US invasion and occupation. It’s all cutesy and smug to tally this as a Big L for Team USA. But I don’t think anyone in that country values the W/L record over the hundreds of thousands of family members, friends, and other loved ones who died to feed the American war machine’s rapacious appetite.

That’s before we even talk about the ecological damage that haunts Vietnam to this day. Or the deaths in Laos and Cambodia racked up in collateral. Or the tenuous diplomatic relationships between the various South Pacific neighbors based on Cold War grudges, which have re-emerged as a shooting war between Thailand and Cambodia just last month.

I can think of a few reasons why the US Navy wouldn’t want to fire high explosives into a contain full of flammable materials, depending on the range of their artillery.

Also definitely possible they’re just doing Privateer shit with Navy assets. I do wonder whether the vessel gets impounded or just escorted to a friendly port in El Salvador or Honduras and quietly re-flagged and titled.

Never loud enough such that they can hear you from an artillery battery.

Sort of half the joke. Some natives sued for peace. Other natives fought to the last man. None of them won in the end, because they were outgunned, outnumbered, and outflanked. The survivors were just the ones who were best at survival, not the most committed to a particular ideology or position.

Billions of poor people are giving their money

Well… their labor

Great idea in theory.

Curious to know how we implement it in practice

Boomers hit that sweet spot.

American boomers, maybe. The 60s/70s was real shit for most of the Third World.

Much of our modern Economic Anxiety driving MAGA and the reactionary insanity of our foreign policy is these same Boomers being forced to live in a world that isn’t just the car dealerships in Detroit commanding the global economy.

For the 90s Kids, life outside the US hasn’t been this good in a century or more. Whether you’re in Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, or Bankok, it’s a time of unprecedented plenty.

The fact that America isn’t this shining city on a hill anymore is what Trumpsters find so galling.

Ukraine seems to finally be able to strike the Russian economy.

I’ve been hearing this line since 2022. For all the sanctions and sabotage, Russia still seems pegged to the Petrodollar and continues to chug along as well as any OPEC state.

Meanwhile, there’s no introspection on the Ukrainian economy or how another year of war will affect them.

Germany lost WW1 without a hostile soldier on its original territory for example.

And famously never recovered, leaving the UK and France to command Europe uncontested for the next century.

:-/

Listen, I want a Winter Palace Coup as much as any NAFO-head, but you can only claim you’re winning at the Somme for so long before people start learning to count the body bags.

That’s like saying BRICS is an aggressive organisation because of what Russia is currently doing…

I’ve heard more than a few NAFO heads repeat exactly that

Americans are bankrolling the Ukrainian defense and extracting enormous concessions from Zelensky as a result.

The longer the war drags on, and the more debt Ukraine assumes in the process, the less sovereignty they’ll maintain in the aftermath.

The stupidest kids in the room right now are the folks at the Russia/Ukraine border who traded in their sovereignty (and often their lives) over an ethnic pissing contest. American investors are going to come out of this flush. Taxpayers are eating the same shit sandwich as everyone else in NATO.

This reads better in the original Navajo

Ukraine still officially contests Crimea. It hasn’t been surrendered.

But there’s also no real expectation Ukraine can retake the territory in their current position. And the longer the war drags on, the more territory they’re in a position to lose.

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.

Fungible, portable, valuable.

It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.

It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.

It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.

Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.

The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.

The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.

At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.

Did you mean IUDs?

… yes.

If they went after every musician who banged an underage girl on a tour bus, you could put a pro rock band together in every penitentiary.

I would settle for maybe getting every tenth musician and creating some kind of stigma against statutory rape.

But even that seems too much, in a country that wants to spend a trillion dollars bombing Venezuelan fishing boats and lynching legal migrants in concentration camp black sites.

I meant to say, everyone was doing it back then.

They still are. If anything, I’d put money down that its even more common and more industrialized today than it was 30 years ago.