• @Urist
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            27 months ago

            Many would rate the USSR as an imperial core country, while I guess you and I maybe won’t. Stop assuming privilege of those you talk to and demean them with willful ignorance. There is always something more that may be learned about an issue and people should not be vilified if their attempts to learn more are genuine (and I think you can not determine it was not from this interaction, comrade).

              • @Urist
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                27 months ago

                I think your response was unwarranted. Hardly makes me a “concern troll” (had to look it up because I’ve never seen the term before). I am obviously an alt for calling you out though. Made this account 5 months ago and interacted with myself for the first time in this post just because you are so fucking special.

                Calling people pos is also uncool, even if they invade other people’s safe spaces. Their comments on the post you linked didn’t even seem aimed to be hurtful or invalidate anyone else’s experience, though ill placed for sure.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
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                  7 months ago

                  “Speaking on behalf of Team Me, I think hostility toward Team Me and anyone I assign to Team Me, no matter how transphobic or otherwise blatantly ignorant, is unwarranted.” ok

                  just because you are so fucking special

                  Go on, go the full length and conjure up a mental illness that you believe I must have which would invalidate anything I said, Reddit style. You clearly want to.

                  • @Urist
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                    27 months ago

                    No, I said fucking special with regards to how much time I would spend talking to you. Almost didn’t even bother responding, hence your “theory” about alt being ridiculous.

      • @Urist
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        37 months ago

        Can you explain why some of the nordic countries, i.e. Norway, Sweden, Denmark are part of the imperial core while Finland, Iceland, Greenland are not? I can put color on a white map too, doesn’t mean it portrays a real issue adequately. Also wtf, why is Portugal not part of the imperial core?

        • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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          37 months ago

          The map is a reference to the one you see whenever just about any international issue comes up and the same crew are all in agreement, I’m not actually positive what specific issue this map was taken from.

          The website has a more serious explainer (with a couple versions of the map) but I’m with you, Iceland and Portugal and Finland are core countries probably. The real answer is that it’s fluid and historically contingent, not set in stone. It’s a question of how your economy develops and how it relates to ‘peripheral’ countries that are primarily extracted from, not a literal list pulled off an emoji.

          • @Urist
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            7 months ago

            I looked through that article and found it somewhat problematic. Especially the description of core countries as:

            They have strong state institutions, a powerful military and powerful global political alliances.

            For example, Iceland does not even have a military, but can still be part of capitalist neo-colonialism as part of the “imperial core”. Even so, one should also keep in mind that Iceland historically had been under Denmark’s dominion and it is wrong to say that it has been a primary benefactor of classic colonialism leading to the rise of western powers in modern history. On the other hand, Portugal has been a strong colonial power historically. Still, the development index of Iceland is way higher and I would argue there are lots of factors in play as to why, and one cannot say that there is a direct equivalence between development index and imperialism. Both Norway, Iceland and Finland gained independence in the 20th century, never had proper colonies and are part of the economic elite. Norway is still in large an economy based around export of natural resources, which is atypical for being an imperial core member. I often feel that many facts like these are overlooked in discussions of imperial cores in favor of simplistic ideas such as equivocating HDI and imperialism. Can we not have better discussions around the mechanics of modern imperialism than throwing around a map and calling out people for not being intimate with the idea of an imperial core, an idea whose simplicity makes itself highly flawed?

            • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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              47 months ago

              I agree that I gave a simplistic answer, you can read literal books about it. But Iceland, as an example, does actually have a history of being closely tied to the military of the US and the UK voluntarily, I think Greenland is actually a better candidate for peripheral than Iceland. And realistically it’s going to be more of a spectrum than a binary, you’re usually going to fall somewhere in the middle rather than being on the extreme end like the US and Israel.

              And even then you might have internal dynamics that complicate it. Parts of the US (Appalachia, “Indian Country”) are clearly peripheral within the US economy and subject to exploitation that other areas are not. So agreed, it’s complicated.

              Dialectics as a method warns us against assumptions that “the state of things” is static, these things are always changing. But I think there’s value in the basic observation that world economic systems work in tension, where opposed interests are not equally met in a mutually beneficial exchange a la neoliberal dogma. Even if you have to acknowledge that it is much more complicated than “it’s the same map every time” I think the concept is useful.

              What would you say is a better way of talking about this sort of thing?

              • @Urist
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                37 months ago

                I think what bugs me (generally, not you so much specifically) is what I perceive to be so many ideas conflated into one. One can talk about a lot of different issues under the “imperial core” label, but I think one should be careful about considering who one talks about as imperial core according in context of the issue in question, since the imperial core is not a homogeneous group in a lot of matters, much like any other collection of countries. In particular, I think it is important to allow for some more varied terms of imperial core, else risking falling into a false dichotomy. I see that it might look pretty similar from a global south perspective, but I believe it is helpful to be more nuanced in the approach about who are imperial core to better analyze and understand the mechanics of the imperialism in play.

                • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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                  37 months ago

                  I think you’re probably right, at least when the participants are all familiar with the concept and prepared to get more detailed. On a forum post where someone is ostensibly being introduced to the idea for the first time I worry that trying to get into all of the nuance might be overwhelming when the other person most likely just needs ‘the basic idea’ to get what someone means. Given that the left is full of nuanced jargon I feel like this is a perennial problem of balancing accessibility and thoroughness.

                  • @Urist
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                    37 months ago

                    Totally get that. I was probably just being a little bit of an ass because I had seen some similar things earlier that I thought missed the mark.

        • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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          127 months ago

          Unironically yes. The development in the imperial core came at the expense of the rest of the world, that’s what the term is referring to, the part of the world economy that is accumulating through imperialism the wealth and resources of the whole planet.