#and you get this logorrhea of jargon that doesn't mean *anything*

[tanadrin]

12:02 behold the world world the most heavily policed and militarized borders in the world and inside of them 12:08 only 14 of the population but 73 of the wealth this isn't a perfect map it 12:14 doesn't show for instance the varied relationships between the countries outside those Borders or how they have different relationships to the countries 12:19 within them it also paints this as pretty black and white countries are either in or out and that's unhelpful 12:25 because of the ways that the boundaries and flows of imperialism can shift and change and also because it can't tell us

okay so you admit this map isn't actually that analytically useful and you gloss over why some countries are included in it and some aren't. you just lump all this together as the "imperial core" (nevermind i think that is a lousy account of why those countries behave the way they do, and better ones exist)

as David Graber put it in direct action and ethnography a 12:48 lot of us were already arguing that the whole point of free trade was in fact to confine most of the world's population 12:55 in impoverished Global ghettos with heavily militarized borders 13:01 in which existing social protections could be removed and the resulting Terror and Desperation fully exploited

ascribing this degree of agency to an ad-hoc system of incentives is really dumb; it obscures far more than it illuminates, IMO, and you will badly misunderstand why decisions are made in the way that they are if you cannot understand what shapes those inventives

there's point in here also about industrialized countries getting rich through colonialism that i think is correct but is buried under a pile of annoying jargon and phrases like "chattel slavery" that are employed, not to disambiguate in the discussion of different kinds of forced labor, but just as, like, weirdly contentless identifiers. i hate that rhetorical tic so much. you can just say "slavery"! everyone watching this agrees slavery is bad!

and all this is followed by an explication of the place of oil in the world economy focused entirely on america, the only country with agency; the author rightly points out that electing the most green president in the world tomorrow wouldn't change much (maybe anything), and attributes this to the clunkiness of imperial power structures that are that way for purely abstract reasons instead of, you know, the fact that a US president isn't the dictator of Earth and shouldn't be, and that the metaphor of a unitary "empire" is a really useless one when trying to describe how individual political platforms of US presidents do or don't translate into, like, green energy policy in Germany!

the diversion into kafka is entertaining, but not really relevant--the structure of international politics is very different on a day-to-day level than that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

like come on. global warming sucks. capitalism sucks! but i don't think you can usefully understand--nevermind tackle--the problems the world faces if you box up every constituent element of your worldview into these little jargon-kissed pieces that admit no closer inspection.

what is it about communists that makes them just uniquely incapable of describing the actual world they live in