The US administration quite explicitly leaked, in the chat discussion between Gabbard, Hegseth, Vance etc while they were bombing Yemen last year, that they wanted to exit the middle east. They complained that they were policing the strait to keep it open, while not getting paid appropriate amounts by the Gulf states and by European beneficiaries of that trade route. Some of the moves the US made with regards to transferring missile tech etc to places like Saudi Arabia, are part of this plan to try and pull back from the gulf – they want those local players to take on the burden of maintaining order.

The US’s goal in this conflict hasn’t been to liberate the Iranian people, nor has it been to establish any sort of order/function in that region of the world. Its broader goal was more likely to trigger the exit of US military assets from that area, or to gain significant financial contributions from gulf states to remain, either would likely be acceptable. Their goals generally align with Russia’s view of the world, in which there are like 4 major powers each controlling a region – with the States controlling all of the western hemisphere (the greater technate of America that Hegseth likes to go on about).

The humiliation of US forces in the gulf, will likely result in the states’ administration invading Cuba next, is my guess. Cuba is less likely to be able to defend against US aggression, and proximity makes logistics much simpler. Plus its distance from Europe and other regional powers, makes Cuba a target they can, and have been, bullying with general silence from the international community. If/when NATO nations are appalled by the actions, that’ll give the administration justification to seize part of Greenland from Denmark – “They clearly aren’t our allies anymore”. That’ll potentially set Canada up to be blockaded similar to how Cuba is currently, forcing Canada to capitulate due to economic isolation.

Just a guess, obviously, but I imagine that’s the sort of ‘plan’ they’re aiming for. The USA is overtly hostile to democratic principles, their administration members have literally published and endorsed books/strategic plans that praise fascists/fascism. They see things like the French revolution as a lesson that the rich should make sure the poor are never able to rise up again, even if it means butchering poor people… “cause that’s what they’d do to us if they could!”. Attempting to parse the USA’s actions based on the ethics/messaging of the “old” USA is misguided. They’ve clearly announced their new motives, the media should be evaluating their ‘war objectives’ based on those new motives, not the US’s motives under past administrations.

*just an edit to add that the conflict also achieved another broad objective of the administration – by disrupting the oil trade, while simultaneously lifting sanctions on Russian oil, the USA is working to destabilize the European Union, whom the USA views as an enemy now It also helps to bolster Russia/Putin, whom the administration views as an ally. You don’t need to look further than Vance attempting to meddle in Hungary to get the pro-Putin candidate elected, to see other examples of this very blatant, and intentional shift.

I agree to some extent – I kind of look at the socialist democracies that’re around and think of them as a step in the direction of having a ‘functional’ version of a “libertarian socialist” setup. However we’re also witnessing these fail almost in real time as a result of the global turmoil currently on-going, with rights erosion and increase in authoritarian tendencies on both the political left and right.

I do think there’s a fundamental issue that is a nearly impossible hurdle for ‘proper’ anarchist states of any meaningful size to arise, which is somewhat exemplified in that Spain example. In order for a ‘state’ to exist, it basically needs to have a “force” component. People don’t always want to accept it, and it’s often an open debate on what level of force and how that force is structured in democratic setups. In Anarchist setups, it’s nearly impossible to implement, as there’ll always be dissenters from any use of force, which pretty well blocks that whole function of the government in a consensus based decision model. There also needs to be a method to incentivize/organize large groups of people to complete increasingly complex tasks the larger and more complicated/advanced the tech level of the country may be. Anarchism, from what I’ve read at least, tends to work better in smaller community setups, because there’s less need for either of these things, based on those small community goals. Sorta like the old (and horribly flawed) Marxist refrain of apple farmers and orange farmers swapping produce in a system without capital, it doesn’t really translate to something like making computer chips for advanced tech, or trading direct unskilled labour for something like a surgeon’s services.

Like for the force thing – take something like minority rights. Say some minorities decide to protest in a way that shuts down major streets in a city, demanding special treatment. In a democracy, they get given some media attention, can schedule marches etc, but they can’t illegally shut down businesses / regular day to day life, without running the risk of having the state apply force for their illegal behaviour – cops should show up and force a resolution. If those cops could only show up after a consensus is reached by all parties, including the protesting minorities, then a group like MAGA could basically sit there not compromising on their demands, and inflicting pain on their neighbors/others without a care in the world. Spain’s inability to mount a defense against fascists in the 1930s, was basically the result of them not being able to get a consensus in this sort of regard – you couldn’t get them to all agree to defend the country against franco/hitlers invading force, because some were in favour of it, so no action was taken (except by Durruti’s militia). (and yes, that sort of thing clearly happens in failed democracies like the USA still to some extent, so it’s a problem that goes beyond ‘just’ anarchist decision models – but it’s yet to hit them in an existential way)

Yeah – though in all fairness, we haven’t seen too many larger implementations of its principles. Some other guy was whining that I’d missed some regional sub-states/failed revolution attempts for example, but that’s the best he could find to counter my ‘only spain so far has tried it’ note. The sample size is stupid small, so it’s a bit dicey to draw definitive conclusions.

I guess you could argue that things like Durruti’s struggle to get support qualifies as an internal problem – like a government/large group, making decisions on consensus, is much more difficult to motivate in any particular direction even when existentially threatened by an outside force. But ultimately, without that outside force, the CNT likely would’ve continued to meet the basic needs of people in the country in line with the anarchist principles it was based on. Bit of a mixed bag.

Afaik, Ukraine was a failed attempt to setup an Anarchist government. Rojava and Chiapas are not realistically established enough to qualify as a case study so much, they’re also not countries, but general regions/states within countries. As sub-regions protected within and by a state, they benefit from the state while putting on airs of being anti-state: much like a parents-basement dwelling neckbeard sort, who rants online against capitalism, while enjoying the benefits provided by their parents participating in that system, and who’s lifestyle is wholly dependent on the system they oppose. Anarchist principles often function ‘ok’ for smaller communities, but they struggle/fail once attempted as a full government of a country – Spains the only example I know of in that regard.

Spains attempt lasted ‘roughly’ 30 years, with the movement starting in the 1870s, the CNT coming in sometime around 1905 or so, and Franco fucking it all up around 1936-1939, give or take?

I worked in an anarchist bookstore for a few years after uni, where I read books about anarchist history, and the Spanish attempt. That’s what I base my comments on. And, yea, Rojava and Chiapas are so ‘new’ that no one had bothered to write about them at that time. So really, they don’t seem like examples worth mentioning, other than to be a little shite online.

Read up on Spain pre-Franco, which was the only time that an Anarcho-state was seriously attempted. It basically coagulated into an Anarcho-syndicate, but failed miserably at getting many traditional ‘state’ responsibilities covered. When Franco rolled in with the backing of Hitler, Durruti was the only guy that tried to mount a defense, because the “government” couldn’t come to a consensus on whether to defend themselves or not. Durruti had to literally raid government weapons stocks to arm a militia to try and fight back, but that totally failed and then they ended up as a fascist steel production center feeding arms to Nazi germany.

So that’s about how it goes in practice. It’s a style of government that’s good in theory, but it fails when implemented, generally due to ever present outside influences. It’s on the same sort of pedestal as communism really, in that lots of folks look at it on paper and think it sounds great, but reality’s a bitch.

The way I look at it is that cryptocurrency is basically a security with no real use, but it can store ‘value’ in the same way those NFT things stored value for a while. There are more bullshitters for crypto, so they’ll keep that hype train going longer, and you can semi work it to get some profit by buying the security low, and selling it high.

There was a post a while ago about how around something like 2020 or whatever, with billions invested in it, and with huge amounts of power/electricity going towards it, bitcoin had something like less than 10 transactions per minute globally. Like it’s absolute dogshit when ti comes to transactions, in part because it’s not a currency despite its name.

Currencies need to depreciate in value via inflation – crypto tends to just store value and go up / down solely on its isolated demand as a nebulous concept. In fact, one of the bragging points from cryptobros is often this misguided notion that crypto is a hedge against inflation – as that ‘benefit’ basically disqualifies it as a proper currency. If you get $1000, and that $1000 is able to buy you some quantity of goods, you need that money to be able to buy less of those goods in the future in order to encourage people to actually use the fucking thing. If you had $1000, but were almost assured that it would be able to buy twice as many goods in the future if you just held on to it for a bit under your mattress, you wouldn’t spend the money… ever. Sorta like those crazy early crypto experiments where uni students were given like 25 bitcoin to see how they’d spend it – and a bunch did exactly what you said in your opening bit, bought pizzas (you could at the time). Bet they would’ve preferred to buy a bunch of houses and sports cars later on, if they’d realised how popular the fad would get. Bitcoin only tends to go ‘down’ in value when people completely exit the currency, so it’s not a valid currency.

I think you’re generally right in your note about it needing to be exchanged. The whole point of currencies is that you don’t want them to sit idle under someone’s bed. Banks/Credit Unions provide savings accounts that pay interest, though typically slightly less than inflation. This is basically a function where because of inflation, you don’t want to have your money just sit under your bed, you want to invest it in at least a savings account/term deposit – but what’s actually happening there, is that you’re committing your money to the financial institution for a fixed period, and they’re subsequently loaning that out to someone so that person can buy a house (typically) – and then their payments on that house, is what generates your interest earnings (and the banks profits). The house itself is a security, with a general stable/safe valuation, so if that person can’t make their payments on the house, the bank can foreclose, sell it, and still pay you your interest. So your savings are generally very safe – especially, frankly, with simple/smaller financial institutions that aren’t trying to do fancy bullshit / aren’t doing any higher risk wealth management type back end tricks. Main point being though, that because of inflation, even people who have ‘too much’ capital, put it into the market, and it generates economic activity as a result.

Crypto, being a security, doesn’t behave too well in this situation either – in that you can’t realistically hold a security and pay interest on it based on being able to use that security to fund other economic activity. Sorta like if someone hands you 10 shares of a stock (which has a variable price), and you’ve gotta figure out a way to pay that person back 12 shares of stock in a year, buy giving those 10 shares to someone else. What if they don’t want shares of that stock? What if the stock price goes down, or up, significantly? There’s just an absurd amount of risk, that would be considered wildly untenable for something like a person’s core savings vehicle. There are some “interest paying” crypto type accounts these days, but that’s a whole shitload of financial shenanigans and cryptobro bullshit. Cryptocurrencies are basically an economic blackhole.

And speaking of governments, anyone saying that crypto is useful because you can send money globally, is a moron. Banks/Financial institutions have the ability to do global money transfers with ease. The reason they can’t/don’t, is because of LEGAL reasons and regulatory restrictions from governments - it’s not some technical restriction that crypto magically solves. Laws like “You can’t let people fund terrorist groups”. Crypto being able to do those sorts of things quickly is just a matter of them not obeying any of the laws or regulations from governments. That’s not a ‘good’ thing in general. Many of the recent pushes from crypto sorts to get places like the States to recognize them, are basically resulting in banks getting less restrictions – which really isn’t a win. Crypto shows up and is like “We like sending money to north korea, so you gotta remove or neuter that whole know your customer thing for fintechs. Here Mr USA administration, we can pay you by buying millions of dollars of your personal ‘crypto currency’ to help with signing the bill. See, isn’t it so much better to have no regulations/oversight on transactions?! It’s win win!”

And the last negative I’ll note, from my pov at least, is that the core mechanics of most crypto currencies is obfuscated and controlled by cryptobros. Financial industry people make money, but they don’t make the sort of explosive, concentrated wealth that you see occur in crypto for the people who maintain those systems. That’s partly because the financial industry is larger, and involves government components – while crypto currencies are often just some techbro goin “let’s fork bitcoin and stick a dog face on it and sell it to morons for big $$$$ then we can FTX it up fuckin in the bahamas with uggos!”. It’s the sort of obvious conflict of interest that they all try and bullshit their way out of – one that typically doesn’t exist in fiat setups, due to the multiple layers, and the role most govs fill in regulating things.

Rubio literally sent out a memo in december if I remember right saying to aggressively counter any tech sovereignty pushes, as the trump admin wants access to all foreigner data for AI integration and “national security” of the USA. They want to hold/have access to it, cause they like using it as part of their AI surveillance and snooping regime. Again, if I remember right, that was circulated to embassies and lobby firms etc etc.

So any news story about how hard it is, is likely a US influence campaign. Using their oligarch control of media to magnify issues, think tanks publishing unprovoked ‘white papers’ that support the US narrative, and on and on.