'Liberal American nationalists' are definitely a thing. These people also wish for unchecked American hegemony over the entire world, and disdain international law. The key difference from MAGA is that they are domestically 'progressive' and oppose white/Christian nationalism

Uncomfortable thing for a lot of the cerebral liberal and left posters here is that you can't have a successful political movement made up entirely of people like you-there's no victory without bringing along a large portion of people whom you consider to be sub-literate dum-dums.

My view right now is that the Trump Admin did this Venezuela op as a means of getting an easy win and getting momentum back for the electoral death spiral they're currently in; but the fact the median American voter doesn't give a shit about foreign policy will ensure this won't work like that

domestic agenda stalling out? start short victorious war in near abroad! pic unrelated

The whole thing is kayfabe

Obviously I’m Mad about this but narrowly: It is objectively very funny how much trump - after doing what may amount to little more than giving a government employee in Venezuela a job promotion - is shitting on the Venezuelan who stole his precious Nobel peace prize even tho she…

It's kinda weird how I feel myself increasingly despising Keir Starmer more than any other world leader

At this point it looks like Starmer is sucking up to Trump for reasons beyond just expediency

This looks like a pretty likely explanation for events so far

I’m sure to Trump this looks like strength but to everyone else calculating their security options this morning it's more confirmation that US power is capricious and the only insurance policy is a nuclear one

you think you’re being more informed or bearing witness, but what you’re doing is just satiating a need to feel information flow

its also why, imho, you should modulate your news consumption. there is a point past which more information won’t give you more than a weak “it depends” answer

The media playbook in the next weeks will be "The Comeback Kid" - an attempt to turn Trump's disastrous poll numbers around on the back of this war

My take was 'Trump was worse for America, Bush was worse for the world as a whole', until the first year of this term.

I think the rapid capture of Maduro bodes very poorly for American democracy and the world. All questions of legality will be swept aside, and it will be treated as vindication for further military adventures If this was as quick and bloodless as it seems, why not solve all their problems this way?

Outright kidnapping the leader of a foreign state, even one with as questionable legitimacy as Maduro has, without so much as a declaration of war or even a fig leaf of legal authority... we're in a new and far more dangerous world now.

If Maduro is paraded at Mar-A-Lago at 11am EST, the Trump administration could be easily re-revitalized and then ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuck.

I sure hope nobody gets any funny ideas now that straight-up kidnapping leaders of sovereign states off their domestic soil is apparently chill

I can't believe the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would do this.

And it may have made sense to do so in 2005 when oil was 100 bucks a barrel, but it does not make sense to do so when oil is 60 bucks a barrel and you can frack light crude all day in the Permian

I know several oil barons, I’ve had the oil and gas industry as clients in a past life: none of them want the Venezuelan oil, it’s dog shit quality and getting the PDVSA fields up to modern standards would take 20 years! It’s just trump being stuck in 1987

The world must boycott the World Cup and the Olympics. It is both the only moral choice and will actually get the attention of these dead-eyed clout demons.

As a creature who believes in a basic right to national sovereignty I would like to congratulate the United States on forcing me to actively support the Chavistas winning a war

shouldn't bari be the one interviewing dj khaled? she loves debate culture and they presumably have one very specific point of contention

Indeed. I would love to pretend I have shifted over here because of my superior virtue, but it's because frankly I would be better off writing my pieces' HTML address on a piece of paper, putting the paper in a bottle, and throwing the bottle in the Thames and hoping it reaches an FT reader.

i have a lot of problems with the implicit political perspective of 'the wall' but when you appreciate that at its core its just roger waters looking at his fellow rock stars at the moment of peak rock excess and going 'wait a second. all of us are full of shit' makes it a lot more comprehensible

The biggest strength and weakness of liberalism is its staunch refusal to try and provide a framework of meaning for people's lives

"When I was 26, we started the FRONASA movement to liberate this country. But for you Gen Z, all I hear is 'vibe, vibe. ' What is your vibe doing ...?" Yoweri Museveni

One of the best novels of the 20th century

In practice, Hitler had left himself three options: 1) Hold pat on his gains and become a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR. 2) Go all-in on U-Boats to push Britain out of the war, end up buried under a tide of American steel. 3) Go all-in against USSR, end up buried in a tide of Russians.

But that's very literally looking at a plan which requires Nazis to not butcher their way through disfavored ethnic groups - it is a plan that could only have worked if Hitler had not been a Nazi and if he hadn't been a Nazi he wouldn't have started the war in the first place.

Jan 1: this is the year of new Me Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital

people are correct that modern nationalism, at least as we'd understand it, didnt exist back then, but loyalty to the king specifically on grounds of his role as symbol of this amorphous body politic called 'the nation' very much was a feature of high/late medieval politics

Lot of articles in the Western press in the 1990s were hyping up Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, and Isaias Afwerki as heralds of the African Renaissance who would sweep away the Big Man dinosaur dictatorships. Partly why they were cool with Kagame taking out Mobutu

Paraguay is one of my favourite Latin American countries to study because its history is just one WTAF moment after another

I've now had several instances where people have self-deprecatingly called themselves a 'nonce', apparently under the impression it's just a quaint Britishism like 'bloody'

One thing learning and taking to heart the Buddhist concept of 'anatta/anatman' (no-self) did for me was freeing me of the idea that 'authenticity' is a worthwhile thing to be pursuing, which was something in hindsight that bedeviled most of my twenties.

Part of the issue with this and similar forms of 'decolonial' ideas of social organisation, whether African socialism, Islamism in its various forms, or the more 'trad' side of Hindu nationalism, is that modernity is a full package. You *can't* square the circle of having modern science and tech 1/

they're gonna just ship 2026 in unplayable condition and hope some community management bullshit will bridge the gap until the first major updates, I can tell

It was the most freedom that a normal average German person who doesnt like killing his neighbours had until 1949 in the West and 1989 in the East, even in the longue duree comparison to all of previous history. It should be mourned, not mocked.

People should genuinely be more willing to say that the German Republic of the interwar years was a great thing and that it is a shame it fell, imo, instead of handwringing about how it probably was inevitable.

18th century-ass racism

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gharib_... Manipur history is a wild rabbit hole, the kingdom was way more engaged with SE Asia (Burma, Thailand etc) than with mainland 'India'. Interesting too that this King took a Persianate title upon converting to Hinduism!

There is literally 0 electoral incentive not to drone strike any given person in the world. Hardly anyone in the US actually cares and those who do are so high on their supply of 'uniparty! both sides same!' that they won't notice

disc horse bot sounding like a 19th century throne-and-altar reactionary who's just read Bonald and de Maistre

despite everything, the US has naturalized more immigrants this year than Japan has. i don't mean "has admitted this year." i mean "has ever admitted in its entire history as a country."

The terrifying part is it looked for a moment that the GOP had cracked a code to creating a durable multiracial coalition in favour of right-wing authoritarianism, but immediately broke it to double down on white nationalism

THE SQUAD