Bulletins and News Discussion from April 7th to April 13th, 2025 - Juche With Trumpian Characteristics

Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.

The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America's largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the "true believers"; those that actually believe Trump's every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.

However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he's doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There's even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: "[...] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts."

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We're in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I'm sure we'll debate this for months to come here, though!

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Vargas Llosa has died.
Peruvian writer and politician Mario Vargas Llosa died this Sunday in Lima, where he lived with his family. Since distancing himself from left-wing politics, he has embraced right-wing politics. In 1989, The Washington Post would write that though Vargas Llosa's party appeared center-right, "he has ties with far-right politicians in other countries".
Vargas Llosa has continued to be criticized due to his association with far-right groups and politicians. The Christian Science Monitor would call Vargas Llosa "a right-wing maverick" while Jacobin would plainly describe him as a "far-right novelist".
Vargas Llosa has described himself as a supporter of liberalism and said that the individuals who have had most impact on his political thought have included Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin. According to The Nation, Vargas Llosa would condemn leftist groups entirely due to the controversies of some while minimizing similar actions by neoliberal governments.
He supported right-wing libertarian candidate Javier Milei in the 2023 Argentine general election. Following the arrest of Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity in 1999, Vargas Llosa would write an op-ed in The New York Times asking why left wing dictators were also not being arrested.
During the 2022 Brazilian general election, Vargas Llosa expressed his endorsement for conservative leader Jair Bolsonaro. "The case of Bolsonaro it's a hard question. His jokes are very hard to endorse, for a liberal [...] Now, between Bolsonaro and Lula, I prefer Bolsonaro. Even with jokes from Bolsonaro, Lula no." said Vargas Llosa at a conference
- OMG I was shitting on this dickhead yesterday with my girlfriend

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