I don't even understand what the stakes are from his perspective, he's already banned like a dozen political parties and nobody cares, what do you have to fear holding an election when you're allowed to ban people who oppose you? It's a free rubber stamp basically, you get democracy points and to renew your mandate by being the only legal option, it's a win win.

Pressure to do what?

As someone who lives in a country that's been in more or less continuous conflict since I was born I would be pretty upset if the leadership here decided elections couldn't happen during wartime.

"In their defense westerners love to share a meme about an Asian man being yellow. Maybe it's not racist. "

I think you're probably right, at least when the participants are all familiar with the concept and prepared to get more detailed. On a forum post where someone is ostensibly being introduced to the idea for the first time I worry that trying to get into all of the nuance might be overwhelming when the other person most likely just needs 'the basic idea' to get what someone means. Given that the left is full of nuanced jargon I feel like this is a perennial problem of balancing accessibility and thoroughness.

I agree that I gave a simplistic answer, you can read literal books about it. But Iceland, as an example, does actually have a history of being closely tied to the military of the US and the UK voluntarily, I think Greenland is actually a better candidate for peripheral than Iceland. And realistically it's going to be more of a spectrum than a binary, you're usually going to fall somewhere in the middle rather than being on the extreme end like the US and Israel.

And even then you might have internal dynamics that complicate it. Parts of the US (Appalachia, "Indian Country") are clearly peripheral within the US economy and subject to exploitation that other areas are not. So agreed, it's complicated.

Dialectics as a method warns us against assumptions that "the state of things" is static, these things are always changing. But I think there's value in the basic observation that world economic systems work in tension, where opposed interests are not equally met in a mutually beneficial exchange a la neoliberal dogma. Even if you have to acknowledge that it is much more complicated than "it's the same map every time" I think the concept is useful.

What would you say is a better way of talking about this sort of thing?

The map is a reference to the one you see whenever just about any international issue comes up and the same crew are all in agreement, I'm not actually positive what specific issue this map was taken from.

The website has a more serious explainer (with a couple versions of the map) but I'm with you, Iceland and Portugal and Finland are core countries probably. The real answer is that it's fluid and historically contingent, not set in stone. It's a question of how your economy develops and how it relates to 'peripheral' countries that are primarily extracted from, not a literal list pulled off an emoji.

Unironically yes. The development in the imperial core came at the expense of the rest of the world, that's what the term is referring to, the part of the world economy that is accumulating through imperialism the wealth and resources of the whole planet.

The north didn't invade the south though, no Koreans agreed that the US supported parallel was a permanent division of the country, both North and South fully intended to create a united Korea. Tens of thousands of Koreans were already dead from purges and suppression of uprisings in the south when the operation started. It was literally an ongoing civil war that had momentarily frozen.

It's always the same map.

How are you all default sorting posts now that we've federated? I was leaving it on Hot but now I get a half dozen posts with any engagement and then multiple pages of posts with no upbears or any comments.