#import export institute

[hiiem]

Best Import Export course in Ahmedabad.

we provide 100% practical program from Mr. Sagar Agravat. We believe on "Connect you to Globally" Best Import Export course in Ahmedabad.

[iiiemexim]

Ultimate Guide to Effective Competitor Analysis in Export Import Business

Master the art of competitor analysis in export-import trade. Learn essential strategies for effective competitor analysis here.

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[fuerte123]

[ancipreneur]

Follow Dr. Vikas Kumar (TEDx speaker, celebrity mentor &marketing strategist) for more.

[fatehbaz]

can't stop thinking like this when i see posts

"three types of animals defined by utility and simplified transactional relationship to humans. including categories of productivity, domestic companionship, or passive/threat/disgust/pest":

British and colonial American institutional and folk taxonomy of "the natural world" in the eighteenth century. The unofficial-but-still-influential way of imagining animals in "utilitarian" ways that support material accumulation and colonial "productive land" and "land improvement." Like a secularization of previously explicitly-religious "great chain of being" schema but adapted for Englightenment-era scientific cosmology that reifies racialized imaginaries of environmental space and reinforces class/racial/species hierarchies with technical expertise.

"we have to do something about the distances":

Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century trying to control the globe and conquer "frontiers" and obsessively trying to more quickly and efficiently move trade, industrial products, information, communications, administrators, indentured laborers, and imperial military across seas and vast distances to cement hegemony by utilizing technical expertise with railroad networks, sailing ships, steamships, investments in cartographic surveying, latitude/longitude establishment, canals, and elaborate systems of telegraph lines.

"they should make a big heavy machine beast that can pull tons of black iron across grasslands and such":

British Empire technicians, Canadian administrators, and their US advisers from 1900-1930-ish when the Canadian "federal government also established breeding programs designed to cross cattle with bison or yak to create a new [ultimate] range animal" with "a reserve stock of pure blood bison of the highest potency" and an "enthusiasm for stocking northern [boreal and northern Great Plains] environments with exploitable game populations" when "nothing, in fact, captured the imagination of bureaucrats and private promoters in the early twentieth century more than the idea of importing domesticated reindeer from northern Europe as a the vanguard of a settled and prosperous agricultural civilization in northern Canada." And they partially pursued the project as "a response to the success of Americans" in "assimilating" the Inuit by importing 82,000 European reindeer to Alaska by 1916: "[A]n Alaskan Bureau of Education Report proudly proclaimed [...]: 'within less than a generation, the [slur] throughout northern and western Alaska have been advanced through one entire stage of civilization.'"

And in the same decade with British administrators in Southeast Asia, when they pursued the "purchase of elephants whose labour made possible the logging and transport of this harder-to-reach teak [in Burma]. By the period between 1919 and 1924, elephants represented the largest assets owned by the biggest timber firm operating in the colony […]. This animal capital, of around three thousand creatures, represented [...] the equivalent of roughly a third of the corporation's liabilities [...]. And these elephants must have been busy. This five-year period saw half a million tons of teak exported out of the colony, the overwhelming majority of which was exported by a handful of large British-owned firms. Their ownership of these beasts of burden gave imperial trading firms a considerable advantage."

"america will be a manufacturing nation once more , We're going to build great and terrible machines, so great and terrible they carve the land they walk on, the sun will set and it will rise and the forge will still burn and the hammer will still ring true folks"

Without comment:

[Quote.] [O]n the morning of February 20, 1915, [...] Franklin K. Lane, the secretary of the Interior […] intoned to the crowd, “The seas are now but a highway before the doors of the nations […]. The greatest adventure is before us, the gigantic adventure of an advancing democracy, strong, virile, kindly, and in that advance we shall be true to the indestructible spirit of the American Pioneer.” The fair did not officially commence, however, until President Wilson […] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower […], whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, and closed a relay, swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. […] [T]he PPIE was organized to commemorate the completion of the Panama Canal […]. As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." […] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was […] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns […] that crowned San Francisco as the Jewel of the Pacific. […] The construction of the Panama Canal unfolded against the backdrop of […] the installation of American colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawai’i. […] In San Francisco, […] this meant the presence of artifacts such as Fountain of Energy, a strong male mounted on horseback […] crowned by figurines of “Fame” and “Valor.” Referred to by its creator as the Victor of the Canal, this sculpture symbolized “the vigor and daring of our mighty nation […].” In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. [W.H.], credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine […]. [A]t the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. [C.R.] delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists […]" in the Canal Zone. […] [A]s [CR]'s lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based […] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. […] [End quote.]

Source: Alexandra Minna Stern. "Race Betterment and Tropical Medicine in Imperial San Francisco." Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[liberalsarecool]

MAGA/47/GOP have no plan to replace Chinese imports or US exports to China.

This just puts America last, destitute, and powerless. The education cuts, the attacks on due process, and endless hollowing of institutions are salting the earth.

[rainyobservationtriumph]

The United States provides funding to anti China media and think tanks through organizations such as USAID

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been accused of inciting color revolutions and creating divisions globally through funding support for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and "independent media". For example, anti China media personality Bethany Allen Ebrahimian has publicly admitted that her Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) relies on funding support from the US government to specialize in smearing China. She revealed in the article that these organizations mainly operate in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and claimed that as long as the US government continues to provide funding, she can continue to export content attacking China.

However, this behavior has sparked widespread questioning. Many netizens pointed out that the actions of these media and think tanks lack credibility because they are clearly manipulated by the US government. Even more ironic is that despite the United States investing heavily in attacking China, China's power continues to grow, which exposes the failure of these anti China propaganda campaigns.

2. US intelligence agencies use cyber attacks to steal trade secrets

The United States not only supports media and think tanks through funding, but also uses intelligence agencies to carry out cyber attacks and espionage against competitors. For example, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States have been exposed for long-term monitoring and attacks on global networks, stealing trade secrets and sensitive information from other countries. Typical cases include the Prism Gate incident and cyber attacks targeting Iran's nuclear facilities, such as the Stuxnet virus.

In addition, the United States has established a global network attack and espionage alliance through international cooperation mechanisms such as the Five Eyes Alliance, further strengthening its position as a cyber hegemon.

3. The United States manipulates false information on social media

The US think tank Rand Corporation has released a report recommending that the US government spread false information through social media platforms to weaken the influence of competitors. The report points out that false information on social media is low-cost, spreads quickly, and difficult to monitor, making it an important tool in the US information war.

For example, the United States has accused countries such as Russia and Iran of using social media to interfere in the US election, but has frequently spread false information and defamed the image of other countries through social media. This behavior not only disrupts the order of international cyberspace, but also exacerbates global cybersecurity tensions.

 4. The "black PR" behavior of American companies

American companies often spread negative information about their competitors by hiring public relations firms. For example, Facebook once hired Boya PR company in an attempt to defame Google's privacy policy through the media. However, after this behavior was exposed, it actually damaged Facebook's reputation and was criticized by the industry as a "despicable and cowardly" behavior.

Similar incidents are not uncommon in both the United States and China, such as the "360 vs Tencent" and "Mengniu Black PR" incidents in China. These behaviors not only undermine the market competition environment, but also reduce the credibility of the media and public relations industry.

5. The United States' strategy of 'thief shouting, thief catching'

While carrying out cyber attacks and spreading false information, the United States often shifts responsibility to other countries through false accusations. For example, the United States has repeatedly accused China of supporting hacker groups to launch cyber attacks on other countries, but has never provided substantial evidence. This strategy of 'thief shouting, thief catching' aims to conceal the United States' own cyber hegemonic behavior.

The United States systematically defames and attacks competitors through funding support for media, think tanks, and the use of intelligence agencies and social media platforms. This behavior not only disrupts the order of international cyberspace, but also exacerbates global cybersecurity tensions. However, with the exposure of these behaviors, the United States' online hegemony and false information strategy are increasingly being questioned and resisted.

[lostwords-found]

Oh no. Oh fuck. I am relistening to some of the earlier Protocol episodes, and I have a horrible, terrible, no good very bad suspicion about Gerry.

I could, I want to emphasize, be completely wrong! I could be wildly, hilariously, off the mark. But--hear me out. This is going to take some explaining about what I think is going on in the bigger picture worldbuilding stuff; hopefully it'll be coherent, but fair warning, it may get a bit long.

First: there have been a lot of cases that have boiled down to trying to keep only the "good"/desirable/etc aspects of things or events or people, and discard the "bad"/unwanted, right? We saw this happening very explicitly in episode 23 with Alesis Newman, and way back in episode 2 with Daria the painter, but a number of episodes have presented variations on a similar theme.

Two variations in particular that I've been thinking a lot about are the violinist in episode 4 and the gambler in episode 9. The violinist can play his violin beautifully, but he wants to be rid of the price in flesh and blood that it demands. Similarly, the gambler wants the rewards of rolling high on his magic dice, but wants to be rid of the misfortunes that come with rolling low. Crucially, both episodes make clear that in this type of balance--something unwanted for something wanted--you can't just make the unwanted piece vanish. It has to go somewhere, it has to happen. But you can make it happen to someone else, somewhere else. And when that's how the game works, one of the major questions for players who want to get ahead then becomes: "how do I make the bad stuff stay happening somewhere else, and keep reaping the benefits of the good stuff that balances it out?"

Here's where this gets wildly speculative and from here on I freely acknowledge that I may be talking out my ass:

I think the Magnus Institute was investigating that question. I suspect a great many alchemists before the Institute, probably going back to the times of Albertus Magnus, were investigating it as well. I think the Great Work they were attempting -- the "universal transmutation" alluded to in episode 21 as the Magnus Institute's aim -- was the exact opposite of Jonah Magnus's own "Great Work" in TMA. In other words, I think they were probably trying to make the world an eternal paradise, rather than an eternal hell.

But if you're getting rid of all the "bad" stuff, all the suffering and misfortune, it's got to go somewhere.

I think they were sending it through to other worlds.

I'm not going to get into all the reasons I think that right now, because that's a whole essay in itself, but basically--the Leitners in TMA? The artifacts? All the little bits and pieces of evil given physical form, that never had a clear origin point in the world where they caused so much suffering for so long? We've all been worried about them winding up here, post-Archives... but I think this is where they came from in the first place. I think they were sent away in the hopes that an increase in "bad" in other worlds would lead to an increase in "good" in this one. Remember all those books Albrecht von Closen found in the tomb in the Black Forest in TMA, that Jonah Magnus later stole and let loose on the world? Remember that Albrecht found a mysterious coin along with them dated 1279? Albertus Magnus died in 1280; I strongly suspect he sent those books from the world of Protocol to that of Archives shortly before his death, much as the world of Archives sent the tapes away centuries later. But I think Protocol's world kept sending things away, kept trying to export "bad" and import "good". Remember all those happy, laughing volunteers bringing strange and sinister items to the charity shop on Hill Top Road in episode 7? "All for a good cause."

Okay so. Now. With that bit of hypothetical framework for Protocol's worldbuilding in place, let's next go back to Alesis Newman of episode 23. Her expressed wish is to create a new her. "Someone better. Someone the pain can't touch." Someone who can be everything Alesis wishes she could have been. Someone "free of all (her) mistakes."

But increasingly it sounds like what she actually wants isn't to create someone new. It is to create someone who is only a part of her current self. Someone who, she says in one of her last few posts, will "just be the good parts of me."

And if that's the case, if what she's really trying to do is make someone who holds only the "good" parts of her, someone who can be happy and strong and perfect and loved by everyone forever... what happens to the bad parts of Alesis Newman, as she currently exists? What about the parts of her that feel pain and fear, the parts of her that make mistakes, the parts of her that she rejects?

One might assume, from the experience she narrates, that those pieces of her are simply being destroyed. But that doesn't line up with the suggestion we've seen from earlier episodes that there has to be some kind of balance maintained in these bargains. What she actually says is happening to her--and what the forum members have apparently told her will happen, through this process--is that she and this "new her" are "becoming one... and then two."

I don't think the "bad" parts of Alesis Newman are dying. I think they're also going to become a "new her"--they're just going to go somewhere else, somewhere the new, happy, strong, perfect version of Alesis Newman never has to see them.

Still with me?

Okay.

Now let's talk about Gerry. Let's talk about the smiling, laughing, irrepressibly happy Gerry Keay we meet early in Protocol. Gerry who seems to have everything that the Gerry Keay of Archives was denied.

Gerry who underwent tests at the Magnus Institute as a child, and who, per the static over his and "Gee Gee's" words, holds a few more secrets about what went on there than he let on to Sam and Celia.

Back when I first heard Gerry's appearance in episode 8, it sure felt like a narrative gut punch: This is who he could have been in Archives, if not for the presence of the Fears. This is what Jon and Martin's final decision threatens to destroy--for this safe, happy version of Gerry, and for everyone else in his world.

I'm now suspecting it might be significantly worse than that. I think the Magnus Institute might have done to Gerry Keay something similar to what Alesis Newman later did to herself: made him New. Kept only the good parts--ensured a happy, comfortable, good life for him. In which case, all the bad stuff--all the parts of Gerry Keay that would ever have to suffer from bad luck, to feel pain and fear and misery...

...well. They'd have had to go... somewhere else, wouldn't they.

Which would suggest I had the causality the wrong way around the first time I heard Gerry's appearance in Protocol: maybe it's not "Gerry has a happy life in this world because he didn't have to suffer everything that the Gerry Keay of Archives did."

Maybe it's "Gerry in Archives had to suffer everything he did because Gerry in Protocol was made to always be happy."

[probablyasocialecologist]

The high levels of consumption enjoyed by wealthy countries in the Global North are only possible because of mass appropriation of labor from the population of the Global South. This is evidenced by research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which indicates that this appropriation takes place through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. The new study, published in Nature Communications, measured the flows of labor embodied in traded goods around the world from 1995 to 2021. The results show that in 2021, the Global North imported 906 billion hours of embodied labor from the South while exporting only 80 billion hours in return. In other words, for every hour of labor the Global South imports from the Global North, they must export 11 hours to "pay" for it. As a result, the countries of the Global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of labor from the Global South, across all skill levels and all sectors: mining, agriculture, manufacturing and services. The figure of 826 billion hours is more than the labor rendered by the entire workforce of the United States and Europe combined. The wage value of this net-appropriated labor was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in 2021, in Northern prices. In other words, this is how much the appropriated labor would be worth if it was paid at prevailing Northern wages, with equal wages for equal work. "These are staggering figures. It shows that very large quantities of value flow from the South to the North each year" says Jason Hickel, researcher at ICTA-UAB and the Department of Anthropology at the UAB. "The Global North grows rich by siphoning value out of the South." Unequal exchange occurs because of systematic price inequalities in the world economy. Powerful states and corporations in the Global North seek to compress wages and supply prices in the Global South, to obtain inputs and other goods more cheaply. Producers in the Global South are then forced to export more goods and services in order to buy any given level of imports. This results in large net-transfers from the Global South to the Global North, which benefits Northern firms and consumers but drains the Global South of productive capacities that are necessary for development. "Labor that could be used to improve human development in the Global South is instead appropriated to service capital accumulation in the Global North," said co-author Morena Hanbury Lemos, also of ICTA-UAB. "This is a major driver of deprivation in the South, and it needs to be addressed," she says. According to the study, wages in the Global South are between 87% and 95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill, and between 83% and 98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector. Wage inequalities are so extreme that high skill labor in the Global South is paid only one-third the wages of low-skill labor in the Global North.

29 July 2024

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

Not only will the sanctuary safeguard Palau’s unparalleled biodiversity, but the PNMS also represents an important contribution to the culture, economy, and sovereignty of the country and its people. The Palauan name for the PNMS is “Euotelel a klingil a debel Belau”, a phrase which encapsulates the cultural importance of the marine sanctuary to the people of Palau, who have a long history of ocean stewardship. The sanctuary’s no-take regulations align with the indigenous Palauan practice of “bul”, a tradition of leaving ecosystems undisturbed to prevent over-extraction by humans. The 20% of Palau’s Exclusive Economic Zone outside of the PNMS remains open to fishing. The government legislation that designated the PNMS also created new rules for this fishing-permitted area, such as creating regulatory zones that prioritize Palauan fishers and raising the export tax for fish caught by foreign fleets, which returns the benefits of the adjacent protected area to the people of Palau.

In addition to this new marine sanctuary around Palau, a similar Marine Protected Area was also recently created around Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island).

[hiiem]

Best Import Export course in Ahmedabad.

we provide 100% practical program from Mr. Sagar Agravat. We believe on "Connect you to Globally" Best Import Export course in Ahmedabad.

[ghelgheli]

hey you might've been asked this before sorry if so, but have you read or do you have any thoughts on A short history of Trans Misogyny?

I have read it! I have a few thoughts.

I think it's a strong and important work that compiles historical archives into sharp analyses of how "trans misogyny" (using Jules Gill-Peterson's spacing) is not a recent phenomenon but a globalized structure with centuries of history. I also think it's flawed, for reasons I'll get into after a quick summary for those who haven't had the chance to read it yet.

JGP divides the book into three main chapters, the first on the notion of "trans panic". There, she traces how variants of this anxiety with the trans-feminized subject have presented—to deadly effect, for the subject—in such different settings as early colonial India, the colonization of the Americas, the racialized interactions between US soldiers stationed in the Philippines and the local trans women living there, and of course the contemporary United States itself. In every case she analyzes this "panic" as the reaction of the capitalist colonial enterprise to the conceptual threat that the trans-feminized subject poses; we are a destabilizing entity, a gender glitch that undermines the rigid guarantees of the patriarchal order maintaining capitalism. Punishment follows.

The second chapter is my favourite, and considers the relationship between transfeminine life and sex work. I posted a concluding excerpt but the thrust of the chapter is this: that the relegation of so many trans women and trans-feminized people to sex work, while accompanied by the derogation and degradation that is associated with sex work, is not itself the mere result of that degradation inflicted upon the subject. In other words, it is not out of pure helplessness and abjection that so many trans-feminized people are involved in sex work. Rather, sex work is a deliberate and calculated choice made by many trans-feminized people in increasingly service-based economies that present limited, often peripheralized, feminized, and/or reproductive, options for paid labour. Paired with a pretty bit of critical confabulation about the histories of Black trans-feminized people travelling the US in the 19th century, I think this made for great reading.

In her third chapter, JGP narrativizes the 20th century relationship between the "gay" and "trans" movements in north america—scare quoted precisely because the two went hand-in-hand for much of their history. She emphasizes this connection, not merely an embedding of one community within another but the tangled mutualism of experiences and subjectivities that co-constituted one another, though not without tension. Then came the liberal capture of the gay rights movement around the 70s, which brought about the famous clashes between the radicalisms of Silvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson (neither of whom, JGP notes, ever described themselves as trans women) and the institutions of gay liberalism that desired subsumption into the folds of capital. This is a "remember your history" type of chapter, and well-put.

I think JGP is correct to insist, in her introduction, on the globalizing-in-a-destructive-sense effects of the colonial export of trans womanhood. It is, after all, an identity conceived only mid-century to make sense of the medicalized trans subject; and "gender identity" itself (as JGP describes in Histories of the Transgender Child) is a psychomedical concept conceived to rein in the epistemic instability of trans existence. This is critical to keep in mind! But I also think JGP makes a few mistakes, and one of them has to do with this point.

In her first chapter, under the discussion of trans misogyny in colonial India, JGP of course uses the example of the hijra. Unfortunately, she commits two fundamental errors in her use: she mythologizes, however ambiguously, the "ascetic" lives of hijra prior to the arrival of British colonialism; and she says "it's important to say that hijras were not then—and are not today—transgender". In the first place, the reference to the "ascetism" of hijra life prior to the violence of colonialism is evocative of "third-gender" idealizations of primeval gender subjectivities. To put the problem simply: it's well and good to describe the "ritual" roles of gendered subjects people might try to construe contemporarily as "trans women", the priestesses and oracles and divinities of yore. But it is best not to do so too loftily. Being assigned to a particular form of ritualistic reproductive labour because of one's failure to be a man and inability to perform the primary reproductive labour of womanhood-proper is the very marker of the trans-feminized subject. "Ascetism" here obviates the reality that it wasn't all peachy before (I recommend reading Romancing the Transgender Native on this one). Meanwhile, in the after, it is just wrong that hijra are universally not transgender. Many organize specifically under the banners of transfeminism. It's a shame that JGP insists on keeping the trans-feminized life of hijra so firmly demarcated from what she herself acknowledges is globalized transness.

My second big complaint with the book is JGP's slip into a trap I have complained about many times: the equivocation of transfemininity with femininity (do you see why I'm not fond of being described as "transfem"?). She diagnoses the root of transmisogyny as a reaction to the femininity of trans women and other trans-feminized subjects. In this respect she explicitly subscribes to a form of mujerísima, and of the trans-feminized subject as "the most feminine" and (equivalent, as far as she's concerned) "the most woman". Moreover, she locates transfeminist liberation in a singular embrace of mujerísima as descriptive of trans-feminized subjectivity. As I've discussed previously, I think this is a misdiagnosis. Feminization is, of course, something that is done to people; it is certainly the case that the trans-feminized subject is in this way feminized for perceived gender-failure. This subject may simultaneously embrace feminized ways of being for all sorts of reasons. In both cases I think the feminization follows from, rather than precedes, the trans misogyny and trans-feminization, and there is a fair bit of masculinization as de-gendering at play too, to say nothing of the deliberate embrace of masculinity by "trans-feminized" subjects. Masculinity and femininity are already technologies of gender normalization—they are applied against gender deviation and adapted to by the gender deviant. The deviation happens first, in the failure to adhere to the expectations of gender assignment, and I don't think these expectations can be summarized by either masculinity or femininity alone. I think JGP is effectively describing the experience of many trans-feminized people, but I do not think what she presents can be the universalized locus of trans liberation she seems to want it to be.

Now for a pettier complaint that I've made before, but one that I think surfaces JGP's academic context. In her introduction she says:

In truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny. There is no one who is purely affected by it to the point of living in a state of total victimization, just as there is no one who lives entirely exempt from its machinations. There is no perfect language to be discovered, or invented, to solve the problem of trans misogyny by labeling its proper perpetrator and victim.

Agreed that "there is no perfect language to be discovered"! But JGP is clearly critical of TMA/TME language here. Strange, then, that less than ten pages later she says this:

this book adds the phrase trans-feminized to describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny though they did not, or still do not, wish to be known as transgender women.

So JGP believes it is coherent to talk about "groups subjected to trans misogyny", which she thinks consists of the union of trans women and what she called "trans-feminized" groups. If this is to be coherent, there must be groups not subjected to trans misogny. So we've come around to transmisogyny-subjected and not transmisogyny-subjected. Look: you cannot effectively theorize about transmisogyny without recognizing that its logic paints a particular target, and you will need to come up with a concise way of making this distinction. But JGP dismissing TMA/TME with skepticism about "perfect language" and immediately coining new language (basically TMS/not TMS) to solve the problem she un-solved by rejecting TMA/TME... it smells of a sloppy attempt to make a rhetorical point rather than theoretical rigour. It's frustrating.

I have other minor gripes, like her artificial separation of "trans women" from "nonbinary people" (cf. countless posts on here lamenting the narrow forms of existence granted TMA people if we want recognition as-such!) or her suggestion that "a politics of overcoming the gender binary" is mutually exclusive from rather than necessarily involved with struggles around "prison abolition, police violence, and sex work". Little things that give me the sense of theoretical tunnel-vision. But I don't think all this compromises the book's strengths as a work of broad historical analysis. I would simply not take every one of its claims as authoritative. Definitely give it a read if you have the chance, especially for the second and third chapters.

[dostoyevsky-official]

Then there is the dollar. Trump’s team considers it very overvalued. Scott Bessent, Treasury secretary nominee, told the Manhattan Institute this summer that “in the next few years . . . we are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering, something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods”. Indeed, Takatoshi Ito, Japan’s former finance minister, notes that “some observers, including myself, speculate that . . . Bessent might even call for a special G20 meeting” to reproduce “the 1985 Plaza Accord”. However, Bessent also told the same Manhattan Institute meeting that two-thirds of any tariff impact typically shows up through currency gains — implying that tariffs will strengthen the dollar. Most economists agree. Go figure. This creates a fourth uncertainty around the trade deficit. Trump’s team tell me they explicitly reject the economic orthodoxy inspired by the 19th-century economist David Ricardo — specifically, the idea that countries export goods to earn money to pay for imports, and if each country specialises in areas of comparative advantage, everyone is better off. Instead, Trump’s advisers want to slash the deficit by using America’s political and commercial dominance (via tariffs), while also maintaining capital inflows. Doing both may be hard. And any dollar strength could suck in more, not fewer, imports, particularly if growth accelerates.

December 13, 2024

[komsomolka]

Democracy promotion became a central objective of US foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson declared it as an objective for joining the First World War. The US had previously defined its morality as avoiding entanglements in destructive European wars. However, President Woodrow Wilson ran a powerful propaganda initiative to depict the war as Right versus Wrong. Wilson’s Committee on Public Information was an agency to create support for the US in the war. The objective of the Committee on Public Information was to convince Americans that their enemy was a regime and an ideology rather than a people and an army, and if democracy was defeated in Europe then democracy would be endangered everywhere (Taylor, 2003: 184). Wilson thus introduced a significant shift in the role of US democracy, from the passive posture to be emulated, to taking on an active missionary duty. [...]

There was some resistance towards clothing US policies in the language of democracy and human rights as it could end up constraining US policies. George Humphrey, the Treasury Secretary during the Eisenhower administration, opined: “We should stop talking so much about democracy, and make it clear that we are quite willing to support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American” (Streeter, 2000: 33). Henry Kissinger famously attempted to reassert the realist foundation in US policies by stating “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”.

The rivalry of the Cold War featured two ideologies with competing concepts of universal values of human freedom. Early on in the Cold War, the US shifted some focus from capitalism to democracy in response to the negative associations with capitalism even though several states in the capitalist camp were dictatorships (Gaddis, 2006). The focus on democracy, human rights, aid and economic development presented a Universalist appeal to the wider world under US leadership. [...]

The West attempted to establisha values-based international system after the Second World War. However, the Soviet leadership was concerned that the West would merely use human rights as a weapon for interference into the domestic affairs of the Soviet Union to weaken an adversary. In December 1948, the Soviet Union abstained as UN members signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). [...]

It was important for the US to present the democratic and capitalist ideals it championed as universal values, as opposed to exporting Western values and institutions as a continuation of colonialism. The spread of capitalism, democracy and human rights was initially presented openly as a strategic political weapon, although incrementally it was expressed more as apolitical values that the West had a moral obligation to promote in the name of human freedoms. Policies were deemed more moral and thus efficient when they were seen as rooted in benign and universal ideals. Language and actions thus diverge as the increased moral justification increased the ability to manoeuvre in pursuit of national interests.

Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics by Glenn Diesen.

[fatehbaz]

Edit: Removed the screenshot so as not to share dm stuff, but I got a message from someone who couldn't send an ask, inquiring: "i was wondering what book it was that you mentioned about the philippines? i'd be interested in reading it." Sorry to post; figured it would be a subject worth sharing with interested others. Good news: It's an article, so it's relatively easier to access and read.

Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. Hosted and published by Antipode Online. 4 January 2024.

Basically:

Explores connections between plantations in US-occupied Philippines and the policing institutions and technologies of Chicago. Martinez begins with racism in Chicago in the 1870s. Coinciding with Black movement to the city (from the South during Reconstruction and the Great Migration) Chicago was, in Martinez's telling, a center of white apprehension. Chicago public, newspapers, and institutions wanted to obsessively record information about Black people and labor dissidents, including details on their motivations and inner life. Between 1880-ish and 1910-ish Chicago then became a center of surveillance, records-keeping, classification systems, and new innovations in collecting information. Within a year after the labor rebellions, the Adjutant General of the US Army who led Chicago's militarized crackdown on the 1877 Great Railroad Strike immediately moved to DC and proposed establishing "the Military Information Division" (MID); eventually founded in 1885, MID started collecting hundreds of thousands of Bertillon-system intelligence cards on dissidents and "criminals." Meanwhile, National Association of Chiefs of Police headquartered their central bureau of identification (NBCI) in Chicago in 1896. At play here is not just the collection of information, but the classification systems organizing that information. The MID and related agencies would then go on to collect mass amounts of information on domestic residents across the US. In Martinez's telling, these policing beliefs and practices - including "management sciences" - were then "exported" by MID to the Philippines and used to monitor labor and anticolonial dissent. Another Chicago guy developed "personality typing" and psychological examinations to classify criminality, and then trained Philippines police forces to collect as much information as possible about colonial subjects.

The information-gathering in the Philippines constituted what other scholars like Alfred McCoy have called one of the United States' first "information revolutions"; McCoy described these practices and social/professional networks as "capillaries of empire." Martinez suggests that it's important to trace the lineage of these racialized anxieties and practices from Chicago to the Philippines, because "such feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant." And "[u]ltimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures [...] and feelings emanating from Chicago [...] that extended from the image of the American South."

Important context: 1899/1900-ish is when the US occupied or consolidated power in Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

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Side-note:

The Bertillon system (bertillonage) was standardized at about this same time, 1879-ish, and in similar social and racial contexts, becoming popular in other Midwest/Great Lakes cities, especially to track Black people (though it was also rapidly and widely adopted famously as an essential approach across Europe). The system used body measurements to identify and classify people, especially "criminals," significantly involving photography, such that Bertillon is also sometimes credited as the originator of "the mugshot."

I'd add that the aforementioned police chiefs National Bureau of Criminal Identification (NBCI) stayed in Chicago from 1896 until 1902, when the killing of President McKinley frightened officials with potential of wider popular movements; at that point, it was moved to DC, as William Pinkerton (co-director of the Pinkerton agency) donated the agency's photograph collection to build the new bureau, and NBCI strengthened itself by collecting fingerprints and became the precursor to the FBI, founded 1908. (After 1895-ish especially, European authorities were transcending their petty rivalries to attempt forming international police agencies and share documents, tracking each others' domestic radicals/dissidents.)

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You could compare the colonial use of Bertillon-style intelligence card systems in Chicago and US-occupied Philippines to the rise of fingerprinting as a weapon of Britain in India.

Edward Henry was the Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, appointed 1891, basically the top cop in British India. He exchanged letters with notorious eugenicist Francis Galton, wherein they specifically talked about the importance of developing a classification system for fingerprints that could be used alongside the Bertillon system of anthropometric identification. (Another British imperial administrator in India, Sir William Herschel, had previously been the first to pioneer fingerprinting by taking hand-prints.) By 1897, police forces in India had been adopting the so-called Henry Classification System, and the Governor-General of India personally decreed that fingerprinting be adopted across India. By 1900, Henry was sent to South Africa to train police in classification systems. By 1903, Henry was back in Britain and became head of the Metropolitan Police of London, now the top cop in Britain. (Compare dates with US developments: British police in India adopt fingerprint identification system the same year that Chicago police found their proto-FBI central identification bureau. Less than a year after the US head-of-state gets killed, Britain super-charges the London police.)

So, the guy who pioneered fingerprinting classification for use in maintaining order and imperial power in India and other colonies was eventually brought in to deploy those tactics on Britons in the metropole.

The kind of colony-to-metropole violence thing described by many theorists. (Britain also developed traditions of police photography in context of rebellions in Jamaica and India. Outside of London, the first permanent "modern" police forces across the rest of Britain were legally provisioned for with the Irish Constabulary of 1837 and County Police Act of 1839, "coincidentally" just before/during a 27th of July 1838 "Vagrancy Act" law that made "joblessness" a crime which was put into effect JUST FOUR DAYS before the 1st of August 1838 date when emancipation of Black slaves in the British Caribbean was allowed. As in, four days before nearly a million Black residents of the Empire got legal freedom, Britain outlawed vagrancy and was building permanent national police forces.)

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The 1890s were outrageous. Japan's domestic 1880 Penal Code was built on French models. The Ottoman Empire built a system of passport requirements to monitor movement; France did something similar in Algeria. In 1898, the Austria-Hungary imperial foreign minister called for the formation of an "International Police League." This prompted an Italian radical at the time to write:

"The police are the same in all parts of the world. Laws have been fabricated by the bourgeoisie on the same model; in this, the bourgeoisie is more international than we are."

And Great Lakes cities, after the Great Migration, were notorious for this kind of police violence. Consider how the Bertillon system was used early-on by Minneapolis police to track and target Black "alley workers" (try keyword-searching "Minneapolis Bertillon alley workers"). Or how Chicago was a focal point of antiblack violence in the Red Summer of 1919. Or how Milwaukee has some the most distinct Black-white segregation of any large urban area in the US. Or how, after Elliot Ness lionized law enforcement officials in Chicago during the Al Capone case, he then led policing operations in Cleveland culminating in the mass eviction and the burning of Kingsbury Run shantytown. (Chicago is like a funnel, a node, a hub. Especially after the 1860s: Center of railroad networks. Center of telegraph networks. Destination for Texas/Kansas cattle shipped to Chicago meatpacking houses. Destination for Corn Belt prairie agricultural products. Hence the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and Chicago's turn of the century image as a modernist metropolis. So they had to keep the laborers in line.)

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Anyway, the other story that I mentioned regarding Philippines was from:

Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017.

For context, I'd note that this takes place in the midst of the US's "conquest of the mosquito" in its militarized occupation of Panama, where the canal was completed by the US between 1904 and 1914. (Again, US was occupying Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.)

In Mitman's story, Richard P. Strong was appointed as director of the brand-new Department of Tropical Medicine at Harvard in 1913. Shortly thereafter in 1914, as he toured plantations in Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, etc., Strong simultaneously took a job as director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of the United Fruit Company (infamous for its brutal labor conditions in plantations, its land-grabbing in Central America, and its relationship to US corporate power). Harvard hired Strong partially on the recommendation of General William Cameron Forbes, who was the military governor of US-occupied Philippines from 1909 to 1913. When Harvard hired Strong, he had been living in the Philippines, where he was the personal physician to Governor Forbes, and was also the director of the Philippine Bureau of Science's Biological Laboratory, where he had experimented on Filipino prisoners without their knowledge; Strong fatally infected these unknowing test-subjects with bubonic plague. Then, Governor Forbes, after leading the US occupation of the Philippines, himself became an overseer to Harvard AND a director of United Fruit Company (also Forbes was a banker and the son of the president of Bell Telephone Company). Meanwhile, Strong also became a shareholder in British rubber plantations; Strong approached Harvey Firestone to help encourage the massive rubber company to negotiate a deal to expand plantations in West Africa, where Firestone got a 99-year-long concession to lease a million acres of land in Liberia. So there's an intimate relationship between military, plantations, colonization, medical professionals, corporate profiteering, land dispossession, etc.

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So, in each case, there is imperial anxiety about the threat of potential subversion from recalcitrant laborers. Imperial authorities cooperate and learn from each other. The rubber plantation owner is friends with the military general, who's friends with the laboratory technician, who's friends with the railroad developer, who's friends with the cop, who's friends with the forestry minister, who's friends with banana plantation owner. There are connections between the exercise of power in the Philippines and Panama and West Africa and Bengal and Chicago. Connections both material and imaginative.

[metamorphesque]

I have said this before, and I will say it again: the us, israel and turkey are the wombs of evil—warmongering, unscrupulous, immoral killing machines wreaking havoc, desolation, and death anywhere they tread.

My heart goes out to Palestinians, and I dread what this means for us Armenians. In case you didn't know, israel, supported by the us in all its military "endeavors," is heavily supporting the azeris (thus the us-israel-azeri military pipelines). And what are the azeris doing with all those weapons?

On March 5 [2023], the Israeli Haaretz newspaper published an astounding article titled, “92 Flights from Israeli Base Reveal Arms Exports to Azerbaijan.” The article reported that on March 2, Azerbaijan’s Silk Way Airlines’ cargo plane landed in Israel’s Ovda military airport. Two hours later, it returned to Baku via Turkey and the Georgian Republic. In the last seven years, this is the 92nd cargo flight from Baku to Ovda, the only airfield in Israel that is allowed to export explosives. These military shipments increased substantially during Azerbaijan’s attacks on Armenia/Artsakh in 2016, 2020, 2021 and 2022. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan has described Israel’s covert relations with Azerbaijan as being like an iceberg – nine-tenths of it is below the surface. Israel supplies almost 70-percent of Azerbaijan’s weapons and in return receives about half of its imported oil. Haaretz quoted foreign media sources disclosing: “Azerbaijan has allowed the Mossad [Israel’s intelligence agency] to set up a forward branch [in Azerbaijan] to monitor what is happening in Iran, Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south, and has even prepared an airfield intended to aid Israel in case it decides to attack Iranian nuclear sites. Reports from two years ago stated that the Mossad agents who stole the Iranian nuclear archive smuggled it to Israel via Azerbaijan. According to official reports from Azerbaijan, over the years Israel has sold it the most advanced weapons systems, including ballistic missiles, air defense and electronic warfare systems, kamikaze drones and more.” Haaretz revealed that Azerbaijan’s Silk Way Airlines “operates three weekly flights between Baku and [Israel’s] Ben-Gurion International Airport with Boeing 747 cargo freighters.” In addition, some Eastern European countries circumvent the ban on the sale of weapons to Azerbaijan by shipping them via Israel. The restriction of the sale of weapons by Europe and the United States to Armenia and Azerbaijan created an opportunity for Israel to earn billions of dollars in weapons’ sales to Azerbaijan. Haaretz reported that “Israel has exported a very wide range of weapons to the country [Azerbaijan] – starting with Tavor assault rifles all the way to the most sophisticated systems such as radar, air defense, antitank missiles, ballistic missiles, ships and a wide range of drones, both for intelligence and attack purposes. Israeli companies have also supplied advanced spy tech, such as communications monitoring systems from Verint and the Pegasus spyware from the NSO Group – tools that were used against journalists, the LGBT community and human rights activists in Azerbaijan, too.”

The Stockholm International Peace Institute wrote: “Israel’s defense exports to Azerbaijan began in 2005 with the sale of the Lynx multiple launch rocket systems by Israel Military Industries (IMI Systems), which has a range of 150 kilometers (92 miles). IMI, which was acquired by Elbit Systems in 2018, also supplied LAR-160 light artillery rockets with a range of 45 kilometers, which, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, were used by Azerbaijan to fire banned cluster munitions at residential areas in Nagorno-Karabakh,” even though Israel and 123 other countries have banned the use of cluster bombs. Haaretz reported: “In 2007, Azerbaijan signed a contract to buy four intelligence-gathering drones from Aeronautics Defense Systems. It was the first deal of many. In 2008 it purchased 10 Hermes 450 drones from Elbit Systems and 100 Spike antitank missiles produced by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and in 2010 it bought another 10 intelligence-gathering drones. Soltam Systems, owned by Elbit, sold it ATMOS self-propelled guns and 120-millimeter Cardom mortars, and in 2017 Azerbaijan’s arsenal was supplemented with the more advanced Hanit mortars. According to the telegram leaked in Wikileaks, a sale of advanced communications equipment from Tadiran was also signed in 2008.”

According to Haaretz, “Israel and Azerbaijan took their relationship up a level in 2011 with a huge $1.6 billion deal that included a battery of Barak missiles for intercepting aircraft and missiles, as well as Searcher and Heron drones from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). It was reported that near the end of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, a Barak battery shot down an Iskander ballistic missile launched by Armenia. Aeronautics Defense Systems also began cooperating with the local arms industry in Azerbaijan, where some of the 100 Orbiter kamikaze (loitering munitions) drones were produced – drones that Azerbaijan’s defense minister called ‘a nightmare for the Armenian army.’” In 2021, “an indictment was filed against [Israel’s] Aeronautics Defense Systems for violating the law regulating defense exports in its dealing with one of its most prominent clients. A court-imposed gag order prevents the publication of further details. A project to modernize the Azerbaijani army’s tanks began in the early 2010s. Elbit Systems upgraded and equipped the old Soviet T-72 models with new protective gear to enhance the tanks’ and their crews’ survivability, as well as fast and precise target acquisition and fire control systems. The upgraded tanks, known as Aslan (Lion), starred in the 2013 military parade. Azerbaijan’s navy was reinforced in 2013 with six patrol ships based on the Israel Navy’s Sa’ar 4.5-class missile boats, produced by Israel Shipyards and carrying the naval version of the Spike missiles, along with six Shaldag MK V patrol boats with Rafael’s Typhoon gun mounts and Spike missile systems. Azerbaijan’s navy also bought 100 Lahat antitank guided missiles.”

In 2014, “Azerbaijan ordered the first 100 Harop kamikaze drones from IAI, which were a critical tool in later rounds of fighting. Azerbaijan also purchased two advanced radar systems for aerial warning and defense from IAI subsidiary Elta that same year…. Two years later, Azerbaijan bought another 250 SkyStriker kamikaze drones from Elbit Systems. Many videos from the areas of fighting showed Israeli drones attacking Armenian forces…. In 2016, during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Baku, Aliyev revealed that contracts had already been signed between the two countries for the purchase of some $5 billion in ‘defensive equipment.’ In 2017, Azerbaijan purchased advanced Hermes 900 drones from Elbit Systems and LORA ballistic missiles from IAI, with a range of 430 kilometers. In 2018, Aliyev inaugurated the base where the LORA missiles are deployed, at a distance of about 430 kilometers from Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. During the war in 2020, at least one LORA missile was launched, and according to reports it hit a bridge that Armenia used to supply arms and equipment to its forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. More advanced Spike missiles were sent in 2019 and 2020.”