What is this? The Red Scare all over again?
Grok must have burned out a few GPUs thinking up this scheme.
Trump will probably see them not filling out the questionnaire as “They are all communists! Every single one of them. UN is communist. They do not answer questions. They are communist.” (in trump’s voice)
Conservatives unironically think this though
Why would they even care, the UN is not Nato, they don’t have to do shit the USA tells them, no?
It’s most likely done as a pretext to attack the UN for having ties to China.
usa putting their soft power through the wood chipper. I’m amazed at how short sighted trump’s team is.
American farmers are going to get screwed. If there is no money for the UN to buy food the market will be over saturated and prices will drop.
I think the effects of an American pull out will be less significant than the funding numbers. So much of that aid money gets funneled back into the us economy. The interim period while prices and funding gets rebalanced will be rough.
American farmers are going to get screwed.
I keep on wondering if this is all part of some grander plan rather than just haphazard ill management and ignorance. I have to assume the bourgeoisie have a plan. It’s all good and fun to imagine they’re all fail-sons running around like chickens with their heads cut off but I think there has to be something. It might be ridiculous but I’m going to be subject to it.
What if it’s a good thing that they get screwed in eyes of the bourgeoisie? Just means more assets that can be bought up by the bourgeoisie to have more direct control and levers over things like food to manipulate prices, availability, to wield power of punishment and reward, to starve or flood an area with abundance. Any of the larger companies can either weather the storm or demand government bail-outs.
Trump and his backers may think they can starve the world as a form of soft power, that they can just inflict famine on those uppity Arabs and kill them off or cull their numbers at least. Bill Gates is obsessed with population control. The climate change hell is coming and with it lots of refugees, what if you were a bourgeoisie and therefore amoral and wanted to thin out the herd of refugees that would soon hit your borders or those of your outposts and climate fortress partners? You might try starving them, cutting medical supplies, hoping for plagues to ravage them and thin their numbers and discipline them to agree to whatever you want in exchange for resumption of aid conditioned on doing exactly what the US demands in writing.
I think it’s just part of a shifting to a strategy of hard imperialism and as usual this kind of transition will hit the domestic proletariat of the imperial core hard as well but the fact is the world was slipping from their grasp.
Here’s a big lesson that the imperialists and bourgeoisie may have learned and we don’t realize they learned it: their propaganda apparatus wasn’t all powerful, it failed in Ukraine when it comes to those in the global south and this may be a re-assessment that it’s therefore not fit to task and must be completely restructured and how better to do so than with their move to no longer appeal as this beacon of “progressive values” to speak to minorities that broadly speaking had consensus for decades but instead to sell themselves as Russia does as a bastion of “traditional values” against “woke” which will be cast as China. China is woke, woke is China, communism, communism, communism! China wants to take your “traditional values”. China wants to gay marry you, China has trans rights, etc, etc, etc. This plays pretty well in parts of the world the US is competing against Russia in such as Africa and well much of the developing world including religious Latin America. All these places full of people who can be whipped up with propaganda against gay and trans people and appealed to embrace a kind of traditional values. Hilariously this could be just imitation of Russia rather than some well-thought out restructuring as part of a grander ideological project I suppose but the effect is basically the same either way.
But they have been speaking in media for some time too as China and the US being in a “grand battle of civilizations” with the US cast by these reactionaries like Thiel and others as this “traditional values Christian civilization which created the modern world and all is good within it” against the “woke” (stand-in for communist and will be used interchangeably) China. They hope to use this I think to get people whose material interests are not with the US to align with it anyways against China, to legitimize strong-men and dictators they plan to place to disrupt and displace Chinese influence and trade.
I have to assume the bourgeoisie have a plan.
It’s been few years from the last big crisis, the one that seen the biggest transfer of wealth up in the history of humanity. They might be hungry for more. Also they might became rotted to the point they don’t even care and will gladly tear the copper wire from their own house (if they even consider it as such, capital have no homeland).
it really is an incredible own goal on the soft power front, I was genuinely and surprisingly asked recently by a close friend, whether it has always been like this
the answer to questions of this type, which many people here should be able to give, should be: yes and
if i listen intently I can actually still hear jaws hitting the floor in europe – the shock is palpable
