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Beckles combines black with British. For some reason, PMC Americans have a hard-on for British accents, assuming competence, sophistication and intelligence when they otherwise should not.

This allows the PMC audience to virtue-signal and scrape before Brits, at the same time.

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On time and cheerful as usual.

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Never understood how US sanctions could be blamed for Cuba's terrible economy. There are numerous countries that don't sanction Cuba.

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Logic or fairness has no role in foreign policy. Those inclined to do so will always blame Washington.

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Only interest.

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Sanctions can be blamed for propping up that regime. They should have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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That's because you don't understand global economics and the power of the petrodollar. Getting sanctioned by the US is different to getting sanctioned by, say Greece. It cuts you off from access to the dollar, to global lending mechanisms, financing options, other countries will limit trade for fear of secondary sanctions. Being sanctioned by the US can be devastating for any country that isn't self-sufficient. Particularly when it's the superpower literally on your doorstep and has been orchestrating not just an economic war against you, but a 70 year long terrorist campaign and is constantly trying to sow social and political discord in any way that it can- and it has lots of ways.

The reality is, Cuba, for all of it's undoubted problems and corruption is a way better place to live than similar sized capitalist countries that operate within the orbit of the US- Haiti, for example.

I'm not pretending Cuba is a communist utopia- far from it- but it could be much worse.

This says much about the legacy of US influence in the Americas.

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So . . . being outside the US orbit causes Cuba's failures, but being inside the US orbit causes Haiti's?

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and capitalist Haiti? lmao

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Would you describe Haiti as communist? Lmao.

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no, it's as close to gang anarchy as any country I can think of

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And who's fault is that? Surely nothing to do with decades of CIA funded death squads and coups...

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Precisely. The common denominator here being the US. And now you're starting to grasp the catch-22 facing any leader in the Americas since the Monroe doctrine. Do you allow the US to exploit your country and its citizens, or do you set yourself up as an enemy of the world's no.1 superpower?

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During the mid-20th century Cuba was a mid income country compared to other Latin American countries, despite the advantages of being close to the U.S., while Haiti was already a basket case.

70 years later Cuba is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and Haiti continues to be a basket case. The only way Cuba could be worse is if they continue pushing the few enterprising and smart people still left in Cuba to migrate until there's literally no one who can make the basic infrastructure of the country work.

Also, when you mention US influence in the Americas, particularly in regards to Cuba, do you mean before the revolution or after the revolution?

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Oh sure, it was a land of milk and honey under General Batista... That's why they had a revolution. Because everyone was so darned HAPPY.

Both.

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I didn't say that. Latin America is poor in general, so when I say Cuba was a mid income country within the region, that's not great.

But moving from (potentially) mid to very low seems to me like a pretty bad outcome.

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Both => I forgot to reply to this in my previous comment. The reason I asked is because I mostly agree about US influence after the revolution, but I don't agree about US influence before the revolution.

The only way I can think of to attribute responsibility to the US for Cuba's problems before the revolution would be to consider the US's role in these factors:

- You assume that the left-leaning and nationalistic Cuban governments from before the revolution were a reaction to US influence, and so the US is to blame for their stupid policies.

- Cuban independence was achieved through US intervention, in the Spanish-American war, and independence was pretty bad for Cubans from an economic point of view.

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yes and.. NO.

Cuba can perfectly trade with Russia, UK, Germany, China...

the real elephant in the room is,,,,

What does Cuba produce/offer?

besides beaches ( tourism) and sugarcane, the place is stuck in 1960 with few things to offer.

And even for tourism, it needs a much more modern infrastructure ( hotels etc) to fully exploit it.

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I love your handle. Pretty subtle word (name) play.

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True. I think Cuba became far too reliant on the USSR to prop up it's economy and suffered badly when it collapsed. But it's also just not a very resource rich country, and its nearest logical trading partner waging all-out economic war against it certainly doesn't help. Also, in order to invest in infrastructure and industry, you need to be able to borrow, which means access to financial markets...

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We invested in Cuba.

We were then nationalized.

Hell we freed Cuba from Spain.

We greenlit Castro via the media (which means State Department).

He wanted actively to have the nuclear war in 1962, as he admitted later.

There’s decades of mischief coming from Cuba.

That it’s petered out is not a change of heart.

We don’t owe any foreigner a dollar or any trade.

My own view of foreigners mirrors that of nearly the entire human race; they are natural enemies, if not now then later.

I would actually let the world go its own way in peace. I’d also make America a hermit Republic cut off from the rest, we have everything we need including markets. There’d be a wall North and South and zero immigration.

Truly, Cuba Libre. The rest of you as well.

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🤣

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That Culture article was interesting. One thing I noticed was that family-focus entertainment was moved back in the American tv industry and more individual orientend content was produced in 1996-98.

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Also, any Cuban leader that squirrels his assets away in the US is a fool. American vengefulness towards surrendered enemies is legendary, as shown by Libya and Syria, to name two.

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I'll go out on a limb here. Assuming this is a money laundering operation and a sophisticated one at that - the kind that requires from the assistance of several middlemen who the money launderers can trust - then carrying the money to Florida makes perfect sense to me. Florida has the largest community of Cubans outside of Cuba, and it's the place where they should be able to find middlemen with the profile they are looking for.

The only other place I could think of that may be as convenient as Florida is Spain (or maybe Ecuador, but Ecuador seems to have changed its welcoming stance towards Cubans lately).

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If I were in any way connected with the Cuban government, the last people on earth I would trust are the Miami Cubans.

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You may be thinking of the Miami Cubans as a community, and particularly of the upstanding and honest Cubans who lead that community. There's all sorts of Cubans.

I have to confess that I have more experience with Venezuelans migrants than with Cuban migrants. Many of those Venezuelans were rabid Chavistas a few years ago, and now they'll do whatever it takes to avoid conversations about their former ideological leanings. They migrated because they need money.

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Previously, you could buy Florida (and New York) real estate with, ahem, money lacking provenance. I believe that little loop hole is patched now.

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Yes I hope those Cuban oligarchs are diverging into other currencies, assets etc, lest they be "frozen"!

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Let them collapse in horror when it’s nationalized.

I bet even the Russians were shocked.

Coming attractions; Israeli holdings in the USA are nationalized, er, sanctioned.

😂

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A fool and his money will always be fooled by greed.

And racism. Only Anglos hold private property sacred.

It’s how the English Americans conquered the world.

Money.

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In the aftermath of the plandemic, I have more faith in garage mechanics than doctors. Medicine has bigger problems than DEI. Be responsible for your own health.

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Yes and it's only going to deteriorate further and consume more resources - insurance and hospital system oligopolies have become much more concentrated, bureaucratic costs have skyrocketed, and system is being overrun by Medicaid (which arguably shouldn't exist along with social security disability). Even people with means/benefits in LA crossing the border for treatment. People I know in healthcare have low morale.

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It’s not DEI

It’s not Race

It’s not Females (big give by me)

It’s not socialism

It’s not Ideology

It’s Bureaucracy

And

Bourgeoisie Bureaucracy

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An oil rich country needed to 'save money'. Ridiculous.

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Black and hispanic doctors will most likely serve black and hispanic patients. If DEI supported doctors suck, medical outcomes will vary between ethnic groups thereby requiring more DEI.

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The Asian American women I know would insist on a white male doctor 😂

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As a writer, I disagree that culture is stuck. Even within my own niche of indie SF, there's great stuff coming out, and being read with delight by aficionados. Perhaps SF is something of a special case. We have to move at the speed of technology. But what really makes me happy is to see how many newer authors care about their craft as well as the tropes. Beautiful prose is timeless, and as indies, we're free to ignore the social justice rot.

Something similar is happening in music. Freed from the big labels, newer artists are quietly honing their craft in genres that would never have sold enough in the old days for them to even get picked up.

Writers moan about Amazon, and musicians moan about Spotify, with good reason, but cutting out the middleman has enabled real cultural flourishing--thanks to the technologies that make digital distribution possible.

Is anything similar happening in the visual arts? I don't know enough about that to say either way.

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I don't know enough either to provide an informed comment when it comes to the visual arts.

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I'd say more or less successful visual artists are pretty much controlled by a complex, top-down structure, similar to the classical music industry, and therefore more likely to be captured by the hive mind. Which is kind of funny when you think about it since the popular and traditional image (I think) is of an Independent or eccentric character.

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Funny spying the article you shared on medicine while in the midst of reading Ivan Illich's article, "Disabling Professions." I have a hypothesis for the com box: despite the advances in medicine, the underlying method of professionalism has actually never been based upon meritocracy, but the gaining of a distinct honor/rank among a society at large. I think that this honor/rank was once bestowed roughly meritocratically, but there were still flaws in the system. I think shifting our thinking from "bring me back my meritocracy" to "Oh! I guess merit was never the fundamental ground of the technical professions in the first place" would help us make sense of all the changes so rapidly happening. As a hint to why I have this opinion, note that when the reformer Flexner gained credence at roughly the same time as John Dewey was promoting his "scientific" vision of progress in education. Dewey didn't have science as his basis, but rather he had the of the arc of history at his disposal. In a similar vein, we can say that, despite the fact that Flexner was a good doctor and scientist (i.e., he did win on the scale of merit), the true source of his reforming power was not his knowledge, but his honor.

Again, hypothesis and food for thought. But I sure want it to be true, so that way I don't have to rethink my paradigm.

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Excellent point.

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I was born in Cuba 68 years ago and came at age 9 to the US with grandparents. My parents were given permission to leave about 4 years later and my father was in forced labor camps because that's how the Cuban government met its productivity quota....but in the name of the revolution.

A relative had come over in 1960. He had little assistance and lived for a few years doing this and that jobs and also begging in the streets of NYC. He settled himself eventually. His brother in Cuba rose super high in the Communist party, enough so that he could travel outside Cuba AND take his family with him.

Anyway, the Communist brother in the 1970s came to visit his brother in the US. At one point they went grocery shopping and his Communist brother became enraged and recriminatory. Why? He thought that the American brother had taken him to some sort of showplace American government installation. The Communist brother was simply in disbelief with the material abundance and refused offers to go to another grocery store etc. That anger broke their relationship for many years.

You see, it's one thing, Cuban government style, to have taken visiting journalists and politicians to a Potemkin showplace, and very much another to have done, what the Communist brother thought was being done to him, to your own flesh and blood. Hard lessons in my life at an early age....but great ones.

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Across the street from my parents' house is a man who ended up marrying a Cuban woman that he met in Cuba while on vacation. When he managed to get her into Canada, he took her to the grocery store, and she began to cry when she saw the variety of food on offer for shoppers. This story is such a frequent one that I've heard it about other Cuban women in Canada several times over the years.

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when my father finally left cuba, and came over, we went to a pizza joint and he began to cry. And my mother said to me that he is crying because there is so much in this country and his family in Cuba had nothing.

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I had a similar experience as an Englishman visiting a Whole Foods in Wisconsin in the early 2000s (though I held back the tears).

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Why? Is England that deprived?

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I was overstating for mild comic effect, but my first Whole Foods visit was really quite an eye-opener. So I guess the answer is/was "yes".

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haha

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In the ESPN doc on Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, Vlade remembers with wonder how he went to a store in the US and there were all these different kinds of chocolate

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Back in 1986, we made our visit to the old country since emigrating to Canada. My teen cousins all had one single request: bring us converse sneakers.

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I once knew a Cuban lady in Key West…. 😚🎵🎶

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Russian macroeconomic management has been extremely impressive for some time now. They may have the soundest state finances of any major, developed economy.

It’s one of the things that should have made Western leaders skeptical that Putin had anything but a very firm grip on power: he has throughout his reign resisted the temptation to buy stability today by mortgaging tomorrow. Meanwhile, the US is running a 7% deficit during a period of full employment…

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The general assumption was that the entire financial/banking sector there are liberal opponents of Putin.

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“Math Equity Story of Change” is easily the most unintelligible iteration of Wokism I’ve yet heard. Why do empires destroy themselves so lustfully at the end?

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once everything's been built, the only way to get ahead is to destroy it.

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America will survive.

The Empire was and is unnecessary and unnatural, unsustainable as we’re a Federation that naturally looks inward, or at self improvement.

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Something to mention about the economic blockade organized by the hegemon?

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Yes, I'm hoping to spur some discussion of that here.

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One thing you might want to look into is to is the coming demographic crisis - it is way worse than people realise More Births on twitter has covered this extensively.

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And the other account is Demographics Now & Then

@Aaronal16

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There’s two easy fixes to demographics;

Fucking.

Killing.

It is womanish to think otherwise.

Not manly.

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