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An observation from a little while ago: > Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property

An observation from a little while ago: > 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 * https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792 https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792

eatonphil 2y ago
David Frum being a writer for a US magazine, it seems perhaps worth taking his snickering with a grain of salt.
- keybored 2y ago
  Or just taking it with a grain of salt since it’s David Frum. :)
  - eatonphil 2y ago
    I was resisting criticism of him and The Atlantic this one time. :)
    - defrost 2y ago
      He's the Joe Rogan of Canadian born NeoCon's, former hype man and color commentator for both The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Bush Jr. administration, ... put your hands together for David Frum!!
  - skhunted 2y ago
    I’ve found the opposite to be true of him. Can you point to things he’s said that make you take him with a grain of salt?
    - eatonphil 2y ago
      Personally my gripe is not so much with Frum as with The Atlantic overall which has been consistently fear mongering. 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.
      - skhunted 2y ago
        I’ve never heard of The Conversation before. Just looked at an article. Here’s a snippet from the article 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.
        eatonphil 2y ago
        I'm not sure there is a staff. Post authors are academic researchers and PhD students around the world. I don't mean to say every article is good. I've just been impressed by what I've read so far.
        skhunted 2y ago
        Yeah looking at one article is not a basis for a valid judgment. I did get the impression that it really is “left leaning” in a way to appeal to conservatives by coming across as non partisan. I’m a pseudo socialist so being left leaning is not an issue for me.
- addicted 2y ago
  Is there anything incorrect in what he’s said though? It’s a few hundred character Tweet that has been reproduced fully. You don’t even need to know the author to assess the contents of the tweet.
  - eatonphil 2y ago
    He took a pretty uncharitable view. Maybe BRICS is doomed of course. And I'm not particularly hopeful. But I'd rather hear perspectives either from both sides or from folks who I can trust as more independent.
    - throw0101a 2y ago
      > He took a pretty uncharitable view. 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?
      - eatonphil 2y ago
        No I agree, it's just the attitude that seems concerning. Like it encourages not taking these countries seriously, and not looking hard enough at ourselves to see how we can do better too.
        addicted 2y ago
        It encourages not taking BRICS seriously. Which is absolutely correct. BRICS as an organization is a joke. 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.
        throw0101a 2y ago
        > Like it encourages not taking these countries seriously, and not looking hard enough at ourselves to see how we can do better too. One can also take the countries seriously but the 'BRICS project' not-seriously.
paganel 2y ago
Coming from a very pro-Israel guy like Frum that looks more like endorsement for Malaysia having done the right thing. 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.
- qntmfred 2y ago
  what does pro-Israel have to do with anything? I don't see too many nations out there courting Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, etc as international partners and allies.
  - addicted 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - racional 2y ago
      An agenda "to take over the world", no. 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?
  - paganel 2y ago
mlrdc 2y ago
Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen (when even Zelensky pleaded for more caution at the 2022 Munich "peace" conference!). Then it did happen, which is probably what they wanted.
- addicted 2y ago
  The passive voice is doing a lot of work here.
  - dkalrfew 2y ago
    I think there is no passive voice. If you prefer to replace "Then it did happen" with "Russia attacked", that is of course fine. 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.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen […] 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://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-russia-energy-crisis-natural-gas-problem/621154/ 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://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukraine-democracy/621465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...
FpUser 2y ago
That is one demented way of looking at it.
rldjbpin 2y ago
i wonder what he said about Malaysia then.

eatonphil 2y ago

David Frum being a writer for a US magazine, it seems perhaps worth taking his snickering with a grain of salt.

keybored 2y ago
Or just taking it with a grain of salt since it’s David Frum. :)
- eatonphil 2y ago
  I was resisting criticism of him and The Atlantic this one time. :)
  - defrost 2y ago
    He's the Joe Rogan of Canadian born NeoCon's, former hype man and color commentator for both The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the Bush Jr. administration, ... put your hands together for David Frum!!
- skhunted 2y ago
  I’ve found the opposite to be true of him. Can you point to things he’s said that make you take him with a grain of salt?
  - eatonphil 2y ago
    Personally my gripe is not so much with Frum as with The Atlantic overall which has been consistently fear mongering. 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.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      I’ve never heard of The Conversation before. Just looked at an article. Here’s a snippet from the article 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.
      - eatonphil 2y ago
        I'm not sure there is a staff. Post authors are academic researchers and PhD students around the world. I don't mean to say every article is good. I've just been impressed by what I've read so far.
        skhunted 2y ago
        Yeah looking at one article is not a basis for a valid judgment. I did get the impression that it really is “left leaning” in a way to appeal to conservatives by coming across as non partisan. I’m a pseudo socialist so being left leaning is not an issue for me.
addicted 2y ago
Is there anything incorrect in what he’s said though? It’s a few hundred character Tweet that has been reproduced fully. You don’t even need to know the author to assess the contents of the tweet.
- eatonphil 2y ago
  He took a pretty uncharitable view. Maybe BRICS is doomed of course. And I'm not particularly hopeful. But I'd rather hear perspectives either from both sides or from folks who I can trust as more independent.
  - throw0101a 2y ago
    > He took a pretty uncharitable view. 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?
    - eatonphil 2y ago
      No I agree, it's just the attitude that seems concerning. Like it encourages not taking these countries seriously, and not looking hard enough at ourselves to see how we can do better too.
      - addicted 2y ago
        It encourages not taking BRICS seriously. Which is absolutely correct. BRICS as an organization is a joke. 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.
      - throw0101a 2y ago
        > Like it encourages not taking these countries seriously, and not looking hard enough at ourselves to see how we can do better too. One can also take the countries seriously but the 'BRICS project' not-seriously.

paganel 2y ago

Coming from a very pro-Israel guy like Frum that looks more like endorsement for Malaysia having done the right thing. 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.

qntmfred 2y ago
what does pro-Israel have to do with anything? I don't see too many nations out there courting Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, etc as international partners and allies.
- addicted 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - racional 2y ago
    An agenda "to take over the world", no. 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?
- paganel 2y ago

mlrdc 2y ago

Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen (when even Zelensky pleaded for more caution at the 2022 Munich "peace" conference!). Then it did happen, which is probably what they wanted.

addicted 2y ago
The passive voice is doing a lot of work here.
- dkalrfew 2y ago
  I think there is no passive voice. If you prefer to replace "Then it did happen" with "Russia attacked", that is of course fine. 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.
throw0101a 2y ago
> Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen […] 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://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-russia-energy-crisis-natural-gas-problem/621154/ 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://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukraine-democracy/621465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...

FpUser 2y ago

That is one demented way of looking at it.

rldjbpin 2y ago

i wonder what he said about Malaysia then.