ThanksObama5223 [he/him]

I love how our foreign policy is never mentioned when talking about immigration. 7.7m Venezuelans have left Venezuela since the sanctions under the trump admin. Want to reduce the number of asylum seekers? Lift the sanctions

Absolutely heartbreaking. Couldn’t get through a single section without tearing up. Death to Israel

My wife’s a hopeless radlib, maybe demsoc. I am very open about my politics and she doesn’t care for the most part. I have tried to convert her but she’s got somelib hangups and can’t accept the historical necessity of violence. so we mostly agree until i say some shit, then she just sighs and calls me crazy. love her

Good post

I think you’ve got the right idea. A lot of the people I know that are into golf just like hanging out outside with friends. Sure a few of them are well off, but I think the appeal as you age and have kids has more to do with being the ‘third place’.

there are comments in this very thread that are doing that lol

My wife is a lib, and won’t convert despite my best efforts. Her opinions are mostly good, but there are some real dogshit ones. I think it’s a good reminder that people don’t always agree, and you have to find a way to live with that

We are so happy, she’s the best partner I’ve ever had. I shudder to think what my life would be like if I disqualified her for not being ml

At current interest rates, 5% down, and an 800 credit score, you’re monthly piti is still like 2,700. Assuming you make that 92k/yr, and are traded at 22%, you’re monthly take home is 5900. That’s 45 percent of your monthly income. “Affordability” is for dinner heavy lifting here

im curious if anyone’s met the call to condemn hamas with a simple ‘no’. how did it turn out for you?

Could you make an argument for why the war merely accelerated de-dollarization? What evidence is there that countries were turning away from holding USD reserves or moving towards international trade not denominated in dollars? Factionalism in the US government, led mostly by a trump administration, might have lowered confidence in US generally, but how has that impacted US economic hegemony?

Quoting this pro-western piece in TabletMag:

This is a more devastating moment of clarity than it might seem at first glance. The promise of economic sanctions was never that they would punish people and corporations in authoritarian countries in order to provide vicarious emotional satisfaction for Western voters; the hope was that sanctions could simultaneously strengthen diplomacy while more or less replacing military force as an instrument of coercion. Western domination of key technologies, banking, trade routes, and international institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the Paris Club—so the thinking went—would allow us to impose our desired outcomes not only on irritant regimes like Cuba, Venezuela, and Myanmar, but also on peer-competitors like Iran, China, and Russia. And we could do it all without having to fire a shot.

The success of the Russian economy at resisting the sanctions regime is directly related to the emerging multipolar world. Those peer-competitors like China, but also “irritant regimes” like Cuba are all watching things develop with great interest.

As an aside, I don’t think anyone here is doing math with human lives and saying that the blood spilled is “worth it”. That’s un-charitable, at best. It’s more of a material analysis - history, international relations, expanding russian economic influence on the EU, and politics has wrought war. Many on this site, myself included, wish for the war to end in a way that doesn’t result in the complete collapse or subjugation of the russian state because it would be net negative for anti-imperialism and the global south. But importantly they still want the war to end.

The de-dollarization is happening because of the war. America signaled to the globe that holding usd reserves is unsafe as they can seize those funds on a whim, as they did with Afghanistan and now Russia. Furthermore, Russia’s resilience to economic sanctions is an important signal to the rest of the world that it can be done, and you have a network of countries unwilling to join the western sanctions regime. That network is growing. Were trending to a multipolar world, and not one led by russia, but chiefly by china

The global south benefits from multipolarity. Not just as a counterweight to us military hegemony, but economic sanctions regimes as well. It’s undeniable that the global south benefited when the ussr was still around, that would certainly be the case in a world where a Chinese led bloc is the other pole