thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them] @ thethirdgracchi @hexbear.net

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Joined

5 yr. ago

no

Just discovered the existence of and subsequently devoured a sandwich called the "roti john;" highly recommended.

To be fair to @corgiwithalaptop@hexbear.net if you want a dilapidated house in a tiny coastal town in Ireland you can get it for a reasonable sum.

Sure go on then, what are your beliefs around business owners who operate plants where teenagers lose their hands?

I've no idea either to be honest, from what I can tell Nigeria's politics is largely disfunctional and fragmented. I know the Labour Party, who ran Obi for president and garnered widespread support amongst the urban youth, is a social democracy party but I'm not sure what they've said on the coup in Niger.

The article goes into that; any sort of war of attrition that lasts longer than like a week is guarneteed to be a failure, as ECOWAS cannot support a war that long. Hell, a month or two of conflict with Niger is more likely to push Nigeria into civil war than anything else.

To be fair to AMLO, joining BRICS is about the surest way to guarentee US military intervention. Mexico's got to thread a rather thin line.

Surprise surprise, the coup forces in Niger have widespread popular support.

A key consideration for ECOWAS must surely be whether foreign troops would be welcomed or opposed by Nigeriens themselves. Canvassing by Premise Data, a polling firm, for The Economist in the first survey conducted since the coup found that 78% of respondents support the actions of the junta and that 73% think it should stay in power “for an extended period” or “until new elections are held”. A slim majority of 54% said they were not in favour of an intervention by regional or international organisations. Of those supporting foreign intervention, an alarming 50% said they preferred it to be by Russia, presumably because they think it would support the putschists, as Wagner has done in Mali. Just 16% chose America, 14% the African Union and a paltry 4% preferred ecowas. These findings are not representative of opinion across the country because the poll was conducted quickly with a small sample. In this survey most of the respondents were relatively well-educated men and 62% were in the capital. Even so, the poll provides an indicative snapshot of the prevailing mood.

https://archive.is/KE5Yf

Yeah I wouldn't put it past them, especially with their renewed interest in semiconductor fabrication and reindustrailisation push. I've a plan to flee at least, thankfully I've dual citizenship with the ROI.

There absolutely was bad economic management by an increasingly aged political leadership, none of that can be denied. But again, that circumstance is also present in the (surprise surprise) modern day United States, where our entire political class is mostly made up of boomers and silent generation who can barely form a coherent sentence. Economic policy in the DDR could have been better, but its standard of living (measured by purchasing power, not nominal GDP) was similar to the West, its rate of income inequality far better, and life satisfaction in all aspects outside of being able to criticize the government was far and away better than the West. East Germans had a strong say in how to do their jobs, women in East Germany had far more freedom (so much so they had better sex under communism than their capitalist German peers!), and the DDR was even tolerant of homosexuality, having a state run gay bar. Life in East Germany wasn't like the West, you couldn't get consumer goods in mass quantities, there were coffee shortages, but nobody sent hungry, everybody had a house, everybody got a good education, and when the wall came down and East Germans realised they needed lots of cash to buy the consumer goods they wanted while their rent trebled and they lost their jobs, they by and large regretted the fall of the DDR.

Yeah can't really argue that one, the Wall was a Bad Look.

The DDR failed because the entire Eastern bloc was systematically isolated and its citizens bombarded with Western propoganda that they bought hook, line, and sinker (and later regretted, as most surveys of the post-communist period will show you). If the Stasi were the reason for the DDR's collapse then the United States, whose NSA is more powerful and more invasive by a factor of ten (maybe even a hundred), would've collapsed decades ago.

Difference is, they're coming to us. This is home.