revolut1917
Putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine once the Ukrainian state truly begins to disintegrate and there's a need for a backstop force to be deployed. I reckon the capacity of both sides to avoid direct strikes on one another's territory would hold up, as it has so far even with western missiles and tanks being deployed inside Kursk. I'm thinking UK troops present in a "strictly defensive" or "advisory" capacity such as being stationed along the Belarusian border or along inactive sections of the front, while the Russians continue to avoid strikes outside of Ukraine because as you say there's no interest there in actually hitting the rest of Europe. There's no reason that NATO would involve itself if Ukraine wasn't a NATO state (no legal basis for it), and US unwillingness to back such a move would give enough diplomatic leeway for both sides to say that no fundamental red lines had been crossed.
Of course it would still only be a prelude to a greater escalation, but that seems inevitable anyway if and when Ukraine collapses, and I think there could be a few years of European states putting troops on the ground inside Ukraine to some degree to forestall the next phase of conflict. If Ukraine does just collapse then you can be sure that there will be conscription and a much larger deployment to NATO's eastern border anyway.
UK job market is truly, immensely fucked. Very few jobs around, impossible to get into anything for young people. Older people with established careers also feeling the bite to some degree but largely able to take a step down into the positions that less experienced people would usually be able to take. Absolutely no government acknowledgement of this issue or any plan to fix it, instead forcing more people into the market by cutting the public sector and raising tax on employment (that latter thing is minor but still does have an impact on hiring practices). Rent and commodity prices (especially electricity) higher than ever and strangling smaller businesses, including many that survived previous crises. Fewer people have the money to spend on luxuries or on the high street, which is causing trouble even for sectors that were on a hiring spree post-pandemic, like hospitality. Death spiral which will probably end in war with Russia.
If anyone else is reading the Verso Books version of this (the one that this post has a photo of), are you noticing a bunch of basic spelling errors throughout? It's a little frustrating. Did they not proofread?
Both are witty too. I laughed out loud at "Presumably, the only comment which one can make on that is ‘Amen’ " in the last chapter.
I am halfway through this section right now, and appreciating Rodney's objective approach to the topic of development in Africa prior to European arrival. The treatment of the continent as a monolith is far too common an attitude even amongst those who are approaching the topic in good faith; Rodney reminds us that it's absurd to think of one singular "African civilisation", and that development across the continent varied across time and space as much as anywhere else in the world. His point about the need to break from the dogmatic "Marxist" conception of "Asiatic" and "African" modes of production is an important one.
Another observation I really appreciate is that non-durable evidence of development will mostly appear in the historical record as no evidence, with detailed wooden sculptures and the craftmanship that goes into them being an example he gives. It's vital to remember how our understanding of ancient civilisations is entirely shaped by the archaeological tools at our disposal. As another example, the Indus River Valley civilisation was only really discovered in the 1920s, and its nature is still the subject of intense debate, long after the popular western historical narrative of ancient civilisation based on the Fertile Crescent that continues to dominate today had already been established. That's partially because many scholars can't divorce their thinking from that narrative, that in turn came about only because Mesopotamia is a far more obvious example in archaology and the written record (no written accounts survive, either from the Indus Valley itself or from outsiders). I feel like we must have barely scratched the surface of many societies that existed in the African past with the tools at our disposal and the work that's been done.
keep hearing that marketing is being completely wiped out as a career due to the rise of AI, and tbh, i don't give a shit. useless career that doesn't need to exist anyway.
germany should arrest itself for antisemitism
I'd make a comparison to WW1 and the war propaganda that was spread around at the time - portraying the Germans as vicious apes, theremoved of Belgium, that kind of thing. The German army absolutely engaged in war crimes during their advance - so did basically every army during that war. Does that justify the murder of millions of people and the ruination of entire generations? Of course not, particularly when you consider that every participant in the war was a colonial empire. The same, essentially, is true of the war in Europe today. We should not be sacrificing hundreds of thousands, millions of people to this horrific war just because NATO and Russia, both neoliberal capitalist entities with imperial ambitions, are in a dick-measuring contest where the prize is the right to exploit Ukraine's resources.
one of the many great "up and to the right" graphs that neoliberalism has brought us
TO POWER WHAT? WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING MOONBASE