United States of America are at risk of becoming mafia state. Very obvious and very significant, with fewer and fewer possibilities of reversal remaining each day.
What’s happening in South Africa is a phenomenon that happens around the third world. And it’s an enormous tax on half of the human population, even in relatively affluent countries like Mexico. Even in many of the countries that don’t suffer from internal destabilization by non-state actors, the solution has been dictators like Saddam Hussain in Iraq or El-Sisi in Egypt. It’s a subject that warrants thoughtful analysis and problem solving by people in the first world. We need you guys to think about how you overcame those problems so those lessons can be applied to countries that desperately need the help.
This is incorrect, bordering on flat-earthism. It's also impossible if you think about it for more than two seconds. If the "third world" had possessed "obscene amounts of wealth" to begin with, the first world never would have been able to "extract" it.
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism
[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...
[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/
[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...
What you describe as feudalism- a czar/emperor/king/absolute ruler at the top with some people under him to carry on orders - applies to any dictatorship.
Feudalism includes (among other things) complete lack of population movement: serfs were not allowed to leave their villages. In Russia today people can (still) leave the country.
The ideological and demographic makeup of certain internet communities makes them incapable of understanding what you mean by this.
in Italy, there are deep ties to governments, esp. in the south, and they've had their fingers all the way into national leadership before; see also: bunga bunga
I’ve seen enough white Christian men shoot up schools and mosques in my lifetime to roll my eyes at this statement.
Americans are still getting lynched.
We have studied this problem ad nauseum. The West knew the answer until about a century ago. Europe became orderly through shame culture, executing criminals and destruction of clan culture.
El Salvador is a modern example.
The remedy is violent, unkind, and not communist so we get indefinite unbounded suffering instead.
That also describes European monarchs during the period when modern states were forming. So maybe crushing competitors to the state’s monopoly on violence is just a necessary milestone on the path to liberal democracy?