> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
There is certainly a lot of bad in the world but The Atlantic stance seems over the top.
The Conversation and Rest of World are two much more even magazines in my opinion.
Also, it is high time for the US Coastal Elites to realise that they're losing the game, and they're losing the game globally, so unless they change their strategy they're going to be in for a hard time in 10-15-20 years, because at some point the money will stop flowing in.
Frum took an accurate view IMHO.
Unless you think that property rights (and window incidents) in Russia are not a problem, or that China already has good transparency in their economy… Do you think those things?
So over the last couple of years they’ve started decoupling from China/Russia and their entirely export oriented economies will collapse.
India will eventually have to stop fence sitting and either choose a side or have a side chosen for them. I don’t expect India to do the smart thing here either. They haven’t for the past half century.
I find it hilarious that the RIC of BRICS are all battling each other for territory. Chinese maps since Russia’s war on Ukraine have started renaming Eastern Russian territories to Chinese. India and China are battling for territory and fighting each other. If you’re in India importing anything from China is extremely difficult. The U.S. is currently trying to get a TikTok ban through but India banned TikTok and every other Chinese website years ago.
This is apparently the wonderfully strong hegemon that’s gonna threaten the west.
What a joke.
There’s both bad news and good news about climate change in the future.
The bad news is that as long as we keep burning carbon, it will continue to get hotter and hotter.
The good news is that we can substitute clean energy, like solar and wind power, instead of burning carbon, to power the products and services of modern life.
This is something I’d expect to see written in a 6th grade textbook trying to get past Texas’ textbook adoption committee. They pretend to give a nod to the climate change deniers by writing, “there’s good news and bad news..” with the good news being a non sequitor. One can use clean energy and strive for that regardless of whether or not climate change is real.
The website did seem much less alarmist than Fox News, CNN, etc.
Again, which claim is incorrect?
> Brazil's history of monetary stability
Does Brazil have a history of monetary stability?
> Russia's respect for property rights
Does Russia have respect for property rights?
> India's domestic tranquility
Is India’s domestic affairs tranquil?
> China's financial transparency
Are Chinese finances transparent?
> South Africa's investment opportunities
Does South Africa have great investment opportunities?
One could argue much of this really matters when it comes to economic growth for individual countries. But all these properties certainly matter when it comes to forming an economic alliance across nations.
Which is why BRICS has been almost completely worthless and to the extent these countries have had any effect together it’s through bilateral agreements.
The individual countries should be taken seriously. Which western countries finally have started doing over the last couple of years. The watershed moment was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It finally dispensed with the neocon idea that they could spread free market democracies in Russia and China by simply trading with them.
One can also take the countries seriously but the 'BRICS project' not-seriously.
It does, now that its in BRICS.
>Does Russia have respect for property rights?
It does, now that its in BRICS. (ahem sanctions are a crime against humanity, yo.)
>Are India’s domestic affairs tranquil?
They certainly will get better, now that they're in BRICS and their people stand to gain a lot from the economic growth that involves, outside of the Western control that has put India in the position its in, in the first place.
>Are Chinese finances transparent?
Well, ask the other BRICS members: they are the ones who can say, definitely, yes. To Americans? No, of course not.
>Does South Africa have great investment opportunities?
They certainly do, now that they're in BRICS.
>Which is why BRICS has been almost completely worthless ..
.. to the Western Empire.
We can do it for America, too: a union with Mississippi’s economy, California’s taxes, Alabama’s services and Kansas’s natural beauty.
This form is good for jokes but bad for analysis. BRICS could have worked if its members agreed on anything. They don’t, and there are better multilateral forums that don’t rely on the West that could be constructed in its place. (Starting with continental organisation.)
Perhaps the people who said those things thought Putin was bluffing, or that the response was going to be weak… kind of like it was in 2014.
> And yet by all accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been shrugging off threats of new sanctions if he attacks Ukraine. Maybe Putin is bluffing. But if so, he has taken his bluff very far, keeping more than 100,000 Russian troops in battle-ready positions through mid-winter.
> Maybe, however, Putin has assessed that Western democracies’ threat to issue sanctions “like none he’s ever seen” is a bluff? He has some good basis to doubt European resolve.
* https://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-rus...
Of course if one understood Putin and his world view, it is hardly surprising:
> Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.
* https://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...
But after Russia attacked there were several Neocon interviews where they acted surprised and did frame it as "We did not think it would happen" in a very casual way.
What they think or intend in private is another issue.
That doesn't mean BRICS has achieved lots. It does mean that his snide comment has no merit with respect to saying anything about BRICS whatsoever.
I couldn't find a reference for this. I could find a reference to a single island at their border that has been disputed for 30 years. All of these disputes have been ongoing for a long time.
The west has its fractures. US caught spying on Merkel. France's Macron has stated that he wants to diversify his ties to keep China included in trade relations. The west has been more unified in the last couple years because of the Ukraine War.
US and company are equally reliant on BRICS. Small shifts in balance can have ripple effects in the economies.
I guess one simply needs to live on the ground floor or not have any windows in their high-rise apartment:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_notable_R...
What they most likely said is that it's an endorsement of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian culture.
That's what seems to be their position. You can make of it what you want. But there's no reason to spin what that they're saying into something exponentially and categorically different ("the Zionist agenda to take over the world"), with the clearly implied charge of antisemitism that goes along with it.
I'm not saying that's your intent -- but the phrasing is clear there, in your words. I suspect it's far more likely you just slung the phrase "Zionist agenda to take over the world" in there for the nifty emotive effect it seems to bring, without regard to whether it had any logical connection to what you were talking about.
Especially the pro Palestine crowd
Vaguely lashing out at some unspecified target here. Seriously, what is this supposed to mean? The hardcore social media addicts who grab the most attention -- mostly by pushing people's buttons, in this case obviously yours? Are they the "pro-Palestine crowd"? Is therefore everything they say representative of everyone who considers themselves "pro-Palestine" in some form?
BRICS is a solution, not a problem. Its a solution to the 'situations' listed, but its also a solution to the fact that the USA has weaponized the petrodollar while committing heinous atrocities across the landscape.
When it snows, all you see is a sea of snow everywhere, and in the spring it's a sea of prairie grass in the rural areas.
The cities are like Chicago and San Francisco had a baby in terms of the architecture and layout.
Our taxes are also higher than California if you are going by percentage (for property taxes and sales taxes, but not income taxes, except for food). California is "okay" I guess. They could do some tax reform, but it's a large state with some large programs and initiatives, so considering that, it's not bad. Additionally, Alabama has less than stellar in person services, but great online services. Mississippi is often troped as having not the greatest economy, but their economy is based on oil, and chemical processing, and fishing. They are also located in a hurricane zone. That means that they get hit hard all the time, and have to keep rebuilding infrastructure. That's not easy. They also get hit economically every time there is a chemical spill or an oil spill, cause the plant will shut down, and they cannot fish there either. We should probably open datacenters there.