America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire

America First Was Never “Leave the World Alone.” It Was Always “Put America Above Everyone Else.”

People keep saying Trump is “betraying” America First. I think he’s finally saying the quiet part out loud: America First doesn’t mean restraint — it means America's interests come first... including power and (increasingly) resource grabs.

There’s a version of America First that many people want to believe in though. The clean version. The “let’s focus on problems at home” version. The “no more wars, no more regime change” version that works with what America has and focuses on its people's lives.

But that’s not what the slogan actually promises.

America First is not a commitment to non-intervention. It’s a commitment to U.S. interests first - as the priority - and however the government defines those interests, and whatever methods it uses to secure them is up to those currently in power.

That difference matters, because it explains what we’re watching right now: not a betrayal of America First, but a harder, more explicit, and less ethical version of it.

The Key Misread: “America First” ≠ Isolationism

People talk about America First like it’s the opposite of empire: stop meddling abroad, stop forcing our worldview on other societies, stop policing the planet.

But the phrase doesn’t say any of that.

It says: America first. Not “America only.” Not “America stays home.” Not “America minds its business.”

It’s about priority — and in practice, that can easily become dominance, doing whatever is necessary to secure what U.S. leaders claim America “needs.” Security. Minerals. Oil. Strategic geography. A compliant hemisphere. A favorable global order.

If you listen to Trump’s rhetoric, this is exactly how he frames it: America has needs; America has interests; and America - like a bully taking someone's lunch money - will take whatever it requires to feel powerful.

That is not a deviation from America First. That is America First as an imperial doctrine.

The Trump Nuance: Power, Authoritarian Envy, and “The Biggest Stick”

Here’s the nuance Trump brings — not as an abstract ideology, but as temperament and instinct.

Trump has always had a soft spot for authoritarian tactics. He doesn’t seem to respect law so much as power. He watches leaders like Putin, the Saudi leadership, North Korea, China, Viktor Orbán, and a whole range of right-wing strongmen and he doesn’t recoil — he seems to admire the simplicity: the ability to just do what you want, to treat politics as force by dominance, to make the biggest stick into the ultimate moral argument.

So on the campaign trail, America First can sound like restraint — “we’re not going to waste money abroad; we’ll focus on ourselves.”

But Trump’s America First with full institutional control — a compliant Supreme Court, control over Congress, control over the executive — is something else. It’s not “we’re stepping back.” It’s “we finally have the clearance to step forward harder, bigger, bader.”

And that’s where the older American imperial scripts start to reappear without embarrassment: Manifest Destiny, Monroe Doctrine, and now what he calls the 'Donroe' doctrine the idea that borders, norms, and even law are negotiable when the U.S. decides something is in its strategic interest.

In that frame, “America First” becomes a survival-of-the-fittest worldview: I’m going to take what I think is mine, because I can.

Greenland: When “National Security” Becomes Territorial Hunger

Greenland gets talked about like it’s a joke — a weird Trump obsession, a headline generator. But it’s not funny when leaders frame land acquisition as a “security necessity” and treat sovereign territory like an asset on a balance sheet.

Call it strategic positioning. Call it Arctic defense. Call it mineral access. The logic is the same:

We want it, we need it, therefore we should have it.

That’s not a foreign policy of restraint. That’s a foreign policy of entitled domination.

For context and reporting: AP on the White House saying military action is “always an option” in Greenland, and ABC on why Greenland is strategically important.

Ukraine’s Minerals: Transactional Empire in a Suit and Tie

The U.S.–Ukraine minerals deal is often defended as “just economics,” or “reconstruction,” or “investment.” But the way it’s been publicly framed matters: as access to resources, and as a form of payback, and as a strategic guarantee for the U.S. (not just a solidarity guarantee for Ukraine).

Even if you think the deal is defensible, the underlying message is clear:

Support is conditional. Security has a price. Resources are the collateral.

That’s not “we’re staying out of other people’s affairs.” That’s not, this is the moral thing to do. Instead, it's “we’re involved — and we’re getting something concrete out of it.”

Background and structure: U.S. Treasury on the U.S.–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund and CSIS on what the signed minerals deal does.

Venezuela: When the Resource Grab Stops Pretending

And then there’s Venezuela — the country with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.

Whatever label people want to use — “strike,” “operation,” “intervention,” “regime change” — a U.S. military attack on Venezuela resulted in Maduro being captured and removed, and intense debate about legality, escalation, and U.S. motives.

And here’s the core point for me:

When the justification is openly tied to oil, “stability,” and U.S. control over outcomes - even the country itself - we are no longer watching soft-power influence or backroom leverage. We are watching something closer to the old force + resources + power model.

If you want to call that neocolonialism, fine. But the more direct and coercive it becomes, the more it looks like taking the material wealth of another country through direct power, and which isn’t even neocolonialism anymore. It’s OG, the original colonialism — resource extraction logic, backed by force, dressed up as national interest.

Reporting and fallout: AP live updates on the U.S. operation and casualties, Reuters on UN Human Rights Office criticism, and PBS on what we know so far.

“Do You Think Britain Colonized the World Out of Altruism?”

This is the part people don’t want to say plainly. 

Empires always have stories about themselves. They always claim moral purpose:

• We’re civilizing 'them'.
• We’re stabilizing 'them'.
• We’re bringing order.
• We’re protecting the world (and ourselves).
• We’re defending freedom...

Britain had its story. The U.S. has its story. But underneath the moral varnish, the throughline is usually the same:

resource access, strategic dominance, and the megalomania of being “the” global power.

So when people say Trump is “betraying” America First, I think they’re clinging to a comforting fantasy version of it — the fictious version that means humility, restraint, rebuilding at home.

But Trump’s version is brutally coherent:

American domination first — economically, militarily, culturally — because domination is framed as survival.

So What? Stop Laundering the Slogan

Here’s what I think needs to happen if we want to be intellectually honest (and politically serious):

1. Stop confusing “America First” with anti-war politics. They are not the same thing.
2. Name what this is: an imperial doctrine of entitled domination framed as “national interest.”
3. Reject the (fake)moral cover stories. If oil, minerals, and dominance are central motivations, say that out loud.
4. Push the debate onto law and legitimacy: sovereignty, international law, war powers, and the precedent this sets for every other major power watching.
5. Build a real alternative: a foreign policy rooted in restraint, reparative justice, and cooperation — not “dominance with better branding.”

Because if America First can mean “we take what we want because we say we need it and don't care about anyone else,” then it’s not a philosophy of national renewal.

It’s a permission slip for empire.

Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of 'NATO'

Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs its own version of “NATO”

Watching the latest coverage of Venezuela, one thing is impossible to ignore: the United States is no longer even pretending to operate within a rules-based international order. What we are seeing is not Cold War containment, not democracy promotion, not humanitarian concern. It is open imperial aggression—stripped of justification, framed as entitlement, and enforced through raw power.

For Latin America, this is not a rhetorical shift. It is an existential one. If the United States is willing to openly threaten, destabilize, or take control of a sovereign country in the region simply because it can, then no country stands outside that risk. And responding to this country by country—through negotiation, appeasement, or isolated resistance—is no longer viable. Latin America - or perhaps even the BRICS - needs its own defensive version of NATO.

When Legitimacy Collapses, Force Takes Over

We have seen this moment before.

After the Iraq War, governments the U.S. sought to discipline—Syria under Assad is an obvious case—responded by pointing directly back at the United States. You don’t get to lecture us about invasion, stability, or human rights anymore, they said. You invaded a country on false pretenses. You destabilized an entire region. You have riots, racial violence, internal breakdown, repeated cases of police killing innocent people in the streets, and unrest at home. You have lost the moral authority to police the world.

That response mattered because international power isn’t just military—it rests on legitimacy. Once legitimacy collapses, restraint disappears. And when restraint disappears, coercion is unmasked. That is where the United States now stands.

Venezuela as a Sovereignty Test Case

Venezuela is not just another “crisis.” It is a long-running sovereignty test case in the Americas.

Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela became a symbol—messy, contradictory, imperfect—of refusal. Refusal to accept that Latin America exists inside a permanent U.S. sphere of influence. Refusal to treat U.S. capital and U.S. geopolitical priorities as the ultimate arbiters of legitimacy.

Under Nicolás Maduro, that refusal hardened into confrontation: sanctions, economic warfare, diplomatic isolation, regime-change theater, and now the steady insistence that Washington retains the right to decide who governs.

Oil matters, of course. But oil alone doesn’t explain the intensity of the response. What Venezuela represents is more threatening than a resource dispute: a precedent of disobedience.

If a Latin American state can be punished indefinitely for asserting political and economic independence, for siding with China, Iran, Russia, and BRICS members then sovereignty in the region is conditional—not guaranteed.

Trump and the End of the Cover Story

U.S. intervention in Latin America has always relied on narratives—communism, stability, corruption, democracy, drugs, humanitarian concern. These narratives were often cynical, but they functioned as cover. They preserved the appearance of principle.

Under Donald Trump, the cover story collapses.

Trump represents a post-ethics, post-facts style of power. Anyone who watched him operate in New York in the 1980s and 90s recognizes the pattern: he wants something, and the only real question is whether he can get it. If there’s a loophole, he uses it. If there’s leverage (no matter how devious), he applies it. Whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. There is no higher code—only outcome.

In the past, that logic operated within local constraints: zoning boards, courts, regulators, press scrutiny. Now it operates at the level of the state itself, and with the unlimited backing of the world’s largest and most advanced military. This isn’t simply the familiar story of capital capturing the state—capital has always shaped power. What Trump adds is ideological and post-fact state capture: control over perception itself, achieved through media saturation, manufactured consent, and a cult of personality that becomes larger than evidence, institutions, or accountability; while fully exploiting the tools already built into a capitalocentric system.

Trump takes the approach that he doesn’t need to justify action before the fact. He acts, then manufactures consent afterward—through repetition, spectacle, and sheer narrative force (true or not). When that mentality is paired with the world’s most powerful military and information/social media infrastructure, the result is not policy. It is domination. This is not a return to Cold War discipline. It is something even more reckless.

When a Superpower Behaves Like a Rogue State

A rogue state is not defined by rhetoric or elections. It is defined by whether it recognizes restraints—whether it accepts limits on what it is entitled to do simply because it is strong. A state that asserts the right to destabilize governments, strangle economies through sanctions, manipulate internal politics, threaten takeover, or treat territory and resources as commodities when convenient is not behaving as a stabilizer. It is behaving as an aggressor. At that point, the language of “protection” no longer applies.

This is not simply about capital influencing policy—capital has always done that. What we are seeing now is ideological capture of the state; the capture of truth, legitimacy, and narrative authority. A cult-like personalization of power, amplified by media ecosystems that manufacture consent after the fact, not before. That combination is what makes the current moment so dangerous.

The Precedent Problem

Once the United States normalizes the logic that it can take, punish, or control states in its orbit because it wants to, other powers take note. If Russia can invade Ukraine and survive the consequences, why would China restrain itself over Taiwan? Why wouldn't the US go to Cuba, Colombia, and even Greenland next?

And if the U.S. starts treating sovereignty as negotiable—territory as something you can “take” if you’re strong enough—why would any rising power respect boundaries if the existing hegemon abandons restraint? This is how international order collapses—not through ideology, but through example. Venezuela matters because it signals whether sovereignty is real, or conditional on U.S. approval.

A Multipolar Opening—and a Collective Choice

This moment also arrives during a broader structural shift. We no longer live in a unipolar world where U.S. dominance is uncontested. The rise of BRICS, the diversification of trade and financial relations, and the erosion of U.S. moral authority have opened space—real space—for maneuver.

But space alone does not equal security. In a multipolar world, isolated states are easier to coerce, not harder. Independence cannot be exercised individually. It must be defended collectively. That is the central lesson Venezuela forces the region to confront.

Collective Defense Without Becoming the Empire

The conclusion is unavoidable: Latin America needs collective solidarity, collective defense, and collective red lines. Not as ideology. Not as provocation. But as survival.

This does not mean copying existing military alliances or reproducing imperial forms of power. But the logic of NATO—collective defense, where an attack on one is treated as an attack on all—does carry weight (see NATO’s Article 5, and NATO’s own note that for much of the Cold War its “mere existence” functioned as deterrence: a short history of NATO).

This is exacerbated by the complexity of modern “warfare”—ranging from military aggression to sanctions, covert destabilization, economic strangulation, narrative warfare, and the erosion of legitimacy—which makes the current shape of deterrence less obvious.

Still, what matters here is not the blueprint, but the necessity. Without collective capacity—political, economic, and defense—Latin American sovereignty remains theoretical. With it, intervention could become costly, contested, and uncertain.

Those questions—what forms deterrence can take, how sovereignty is defended without mirroring empire, how aggression is resisted beyond the battlefield—are to be worked out. They require sustained debate, regional leadership, and political courage.

But the first step is recognizing the moment for what it is. The mask is off. The threat is real. And standing alone is no longer an option…. as America is now policing the world as it polices at home—especially in racialized communities of color—where force is used first, accountability fabricated later, and facts are inconsequential. Call it a global extension of the logic that produced Derek Chauvin (and for broader documentation of policing and civil-rights concerns, see the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on police use of force).

Further reading on long-run U.S. interventionism in the region: Oxford Research Encyclopedia: U.S. interventions and occupations in Latin America; Brown University: Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs; International Court of Justice: Nicaragua v. United States (case materials).

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Reparations Without Permission: A Reparatory Levy for Regenerative Capacity

Former colonial powers won’t pay reparations voluntarily—nor could they fully admit what they did without opening a legal floodgate. So perhaps its time to stop asking, and realize that they’ll only arrive as an outcome of organized Global South power. For example, a small levy on extractive flows, pooled and used to build capacities that end endless extractive relationships.

Lede: why this matters now

The reparations conversation keeps getting trapped in the same dead end: will Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the U.S., etc.—and the corporations that grew rich from colonialism—ever take full responsibility? Maybe they’ll offer statements. Maybe they’ll fund memorials. But meaningful reparations—real acknowledgement, real money, real repair—runs straight into a problem (beyond the typical racism) they will never openly concede: liability.

If a former colonizing state fully admits that the colonial encounter and slavery were foundational crimes that created enduring wealth for them and enduring underdevelopment for others, it doesn’t just become “history.” It becomes a legal and political cascade. A waterfall of claims. Claims steeped in centuries of racist policies, eugenics, and every other practice used to suppress the black population. That’s why this will never be resolved by waiting for the perpetrators to “do the right thing.”

So the question isn’t: Will they pay?
The question is: How do reparations-seeking countries get what’s owed when the perpetrators refuse?

They take them—not through chaos, but through sovereignty, coordination, and steadfast solidarity. This is the logic of parallel structures: you don’t wait for permission to live the truth. You build infrastructure and enable practices that make your truth materially real.

(If you’re coming to this through recent reporting, here’s a recent Guardian article, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal U.S. framing in “The Case for Reparations”.)

They won’t admit it—so stop waiting

We can say it plainly: the Global North ascended through colonial extraction and slavery. Lives, labor, land, sugar, cotton, rubber, gold, bauxite, uranium, oil—taken, underpriced, coerced, violently secured, then laundered into “development,” “modernity,” and “the rule of law.”

And the same basic pattern is still here, dressed up in contemporary language: “investment,” “stability,” “aid,” “trade,” “structural adjustment,” “risk management,” “good governance.” The names change; the flow often doesn’t, nevermind the exploitative power dynamics.

So the reparations conversation can’t be built on moral hope. It has to be built on material leverage.

The Global South has leverage—if it comes together

Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and other ex-colonies hold an extraordinary share of what the global economy depends on: mineral reserves, strategic inputs, agricultural commodities, biodiversity, key sea routes, and (in the Caribbean especially) tourism flows tied directly to North Atlantic wealth.

The problem isn’t lack of leverage. The problem is fragmentation. Countries get played against each other. Deals get signed in isolation. Elites get rewarded for compliance. And the coalition never forms.

But if a core group of reparations-seeking countries did form—especially those with strategic leverage—then even small policy shifts could become world-shaping.

The most practical starting point is not a dramatic embargo. It’s a small, consistent, legitimate levy that is hard to resist, works, and shows other countries what is possible.

A simple proposal: a 1% Reparatory Justice Levy

Here’s the core idea:

A coalition of reparations-seeking countries—starting with a serious core bloc—implements a 1% levy on designated extractive exports to former colonizer states (and/or to corporations headquartered there). Not everything. Not forever. Start with the obvious: raw materials and extractive industries where colonial patterns are still visible in the ground (think the alliance of Sahel states and uranium to France).

And for the Caribbean, the logic expands naturally: the colonial encounter wasn’t just mines; it was plantations, forced labor, and the extraction of wealth through sugar and rum. Today, beyond sugara dn rum, the closest equivalent “flow” is tourism—especially flights and resort economies tied to North Atlantic income. So the coalition can include micro-levies like a small solidarity fee on flights arriving from Europe and North America, or on high-end tourism transactions. (This isn’t theoretical—there are real precedents for an airline solidarity levy model that funds pooled public goods.)

This is not “asking.” It’s not “begging.” It’s not “guilt.” It’s an assertive policy regime:

• You want access to our resources?
• You pay a small reparatory charge.
• The money goes into a collective fund.
• The fund builds the capacity to stop being exploited.

A 1% levy is not radical. What’s radical is pretending the current arrangement is neutral.

The fund must not become permanent dependency

Even though reparations should be about justice and accountability - with not strings attached - when have you ever met an 'ethical' slavery or colonizer? One that will just give it all back? Thus, the most important part is that the levy cannot just become another social spending stream—important as healthcare and education are. If the levy only patches wounds while the extraction machine keeps running, you institutionalize the very relationship you claim to oppose.

So the fund’s mission has to be regenerative and time-oriented:

The levy exists to build the capacity that makes the levy unnecessary.

That means investing in the exits:

• refining and processing capacity (stop exporting raw cobalt; export refined products)
• regional manufacturing and value chains
• energy sovereignty (grids, renewables, storage)
• ports, shipping, and logistics infrastructure controlled locally
• universities, R&D, and training ecosystems
• ecological remediation in extraction zones
• public institutions that can plan beyond short-term crisis
• sustainable and autonomous food systems
• etc.

This is repair that ends the need for repair.

“But Congo would pay more than Jamaica”—yes, and that’s why the fund needs solidarity rules

A real coalition has to handle internal inequality honestly.

Some countries sit on minerals the world can’t easily substitute. Others were devastated by colonialism in different ways—plantation economies, forced monocrops, debt traps, tourism dependence, climate vulnerability. Jamaica can’t “compete” with the Congo on cobalt. That doesn’t make Jamaica less harmed, less entitled, or less structurally trapped.

So the coalition fund cannot be “you get what you contribute.” That kills unity immediately.

A workable structure is a two-pot system:

Pot A: Solidarity & Repair (formula-based)

• a baseline floor for every member (small states matter)
• weighted by need/vulnerability and historical harm
• designed so plantation/enslavement economies (high value during old colonialism) aren’t punished for not having rare earths (of more value today)

Pot B: Capacity-Building Exits (project-based)

• cooperative funding for refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, regional universities
• preference for multi-country projects that build shared independence
• long-term commitments, not PR grants

This way the extraction of the materials in the Congo isn't just taxed; it gets funded to transform. And Jamaica isn’t sidelined; it gets recognized as central to the colonial story and central to repair.

Governance: if it looks like elite rent, it dies

A reparatory levy fund has one existential risk: it becomes another pot of money for elites and intermediaries. Then it loses moral legitimacy inside the coalition and becomes an easy target for Northern propaganda.

So governance has to be designed as if legitimacy is the whole project—because it is:

• equal regional representation, rotating seats, small-state protection
• public dashboards of inflows/outflows (every euro tracked)
• independent audits
• hard conflict-of-interest rules
• citizen-facing reporting: “this levy built this refinery / this clinic / this training program”
• a legal defense pool (because retaliation and arbitration will come)

This isn’t “good governance” as the typical neoliberal slogan. It’s coalition survival, and to survive the aggrieved countries have to maintain the moral high ground. And it will work because they are right, and people will know it is right. To atone for past expropriations carrying deep repercussions today.  

So what / what now: reparations as collective power, not moral request

Reparations won’t come from conscience. They’ll come from leverage.

Former colonial powers won’t give you the confession you want, because it’s too expensive - both politically (racist constituents) and economically (liability). So stop structuring your politics around their refusal. Build a parallel mechanism that turns Global South material power into a pooled reparatory capacity fund, with a small levy that is easy to explain and hard to dismiss.

Start with a core bloc. Start with 1%. Start with extractive raw material exports and North Atlantic tourism flows. Start with transparency. And use the money to build exits: refineries, grids, ports, manufacturing, universities, sustainable food systems—real capacities that end the colonial logic rather than managing it.

The message isn’t “please acknowledge us.”
The message is: We acknowledge ourselves. We organize. We set the terms. We aren't your lap dogs anymore. 

And if the Global North wants to live in the world it claims to believe in—rules, law, ethics, responsibility—it can start by respecting a modest reparatory levy designed to repair the damage that built its wealth in the first place.

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe loves a story about “catching up.”

Southern Italy must catch up to the North.
East Germany must catch up to the West.
Post-socialist Central Europe must catch up to the “advanced” core of Europe.

This story is presented as neutral description, as if history simply flowed downhill toward modernity and some places got stuck in the mud. But the “catching up” story is not neutral. It is a technology of power: it explains away structural inequity as cultural deficiency, and it justifies a long chain of decisions that relocate sovereignty—over land, over firms, over futures—somewhere else.

If you’ve lived inside these divides, the insult is not only economic. It’s existential. You learn that your region’s ways of living are “not serious,” your social habits are “backward,” your tempo is “lazy,” your reluctance to play the careerist game is “a problem,” and your memories are “false.” The center doesn’t simply take resources; it takes interpretive authority—the right to define what counts as progress.

But here’s the twist that the “catching up” story cannot grasp:

What if these regions aren’t merely lagging?
What if they are holding capacities that the center has actively eroded—capacities for human life that cannot be replaced by GDP?

That’s not a romantic slogan. It’s an empirical claim about what marginal places preserve, practice, and reproduce—often precisely because they were never fully absorbed into the center’s tempo, ideology, and social design.

The politics of “backwardness” is a politics of dispossession

In all three cases—Southern Italy, East Germany, and post-socialist Central Europe—the familiar material pattern is not just “inequality.” It’s something more specific:

• Decisions move outward.
• Ownership moves outward.
• The region becomes a labor reservoir and a managed territory.
• And then a stigma narrative (“backward”) arrives to make this feel natural.

That stigma does real work. It trains people to doubt their own ways of living. It turns structural limits into personal shame. It makes people internalize that they deserve less.

But stigma has another function: it prevents revalorization. If you can convince a place that its strengths are defects, you can strip it of confidence, autonomy, and imagination—then sell it “development” that looks suspiciously like dependence.

So let’s do the opposite for once. Let’s name what these places hold, and why it matters.

Southern Italy: temporal sovereignty and relational wealth

Southern Italy has been framed for generations through deficit talk: laziness, corruption, clientelism, inefficiency—an entire moral vocabulary used to explain economic hierarchy as cultural failure.

Yet anyone who spends real time in the South sees something else: a different theory of life.

Not as an ideology, but as practice:

• Life is organized around relationships, not merely schedules.
• Value is produced through mutual presence, not only through productivity.
• Social time is not a leftover; it’s an infrastructure.
• The household and the neighborhood remain meaningful economic units: food cycles, care cycles, repair cycles.

The South is often described as “slow.” But slowness can also be read as temporal sovereignty: the ability to refuse a world where the clock is the ultimate authority and the self must always perform.

This is not a fantasy; it is a measurable lived difference. The center often has more money, more options, more institutional thickness. But it also produces chronic stress, thin sociality, and a permanent sense of being behind in one’s own life.

Southern Italy shows that another arrangement is possible: where “success” is not only individual mobility upward and outward, but the capacity to remain rooted, embedded, and human.

The center calls this backward because it cannot price it.

Czechia: everyday ecological citizenship (not the performative kind)

Czechia is frequently described as “post-socialist,” as if its defining feature is what it lacks compared to the West. But Czechia also holds a deep cultural competency that many western societies have partly lost: nature as everyday life, not as a weekend brand.

This isn’t just about hiking. It’s about a dense ecology of practices:

• tramping cultures that produce community through shared movement and simple living;
• mushroom hunting and foraging literacies that make the forest legible;
• lesní školka / forest kindergarten logics that treat weather as normal and children as belonging outdoors;
• informal and semi-formal communities of practice that transmit land-knowledge across generations.

None of this needs to be framed as nationalist pride. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a social design: a culture where ecological competence is not reserved for specialists, where “nature” is not consumed as an exotic escape from urban life, but integrated into the baseline of what a life is.

In the West, “sustainability” often becomes a moral performance—an identity, a purchasing strategy, a policy slogan. In Czechia, there’s often something quieter and more durable: habit. Culture doing the work that campaigns cannot.

That’s a serious asset. It’s a living curriculum for a future that will require land-literacy and non-commodified resilience.

East Germany: longing for socialism is not ignorance—it’s comparative memory

Here we have to be honest: people in the former GDR do romanticize aspects of state socialism. Not because they forgot repression or shortage or surveillance, but because systems are not one-dimensional.

And because what followed “unification” was not simply freedom. It was also:

• rapid asset restructuring,
• humiliating cultural pedagogy (“learn how to be modern”),
• externalized ownership,
• and a durable hierarchy of legitimacy.

When East Germans express longing, they often aren’t longing for authoritarianism. They’re longing for social guarantees, collective infrastructures, and forms of solidarity that made life intelligible and secure, even if the political form was deeply compromised.

There is also a deeper point that western moral language tries to avoid: modern liberal-capitalist states maintain strong security and policing apparatuses too—often using techniques that are remarkably continuous across regime change. The West’s story that authoritarianism is uniquely “over there” is convenient; it hides the coercions that make market society run.

So when someone says, “life felt more secure,” or “people were less alone,” or “the West is cold,” they are not necessarily confessing authoritarian desire. They may be making a precise comparative claim:

• that market society produces isolation as a baseline;
• that the West’s friendliness is often performative and transactional;
• that the constant competition for status corrodes community.

East Germany retains—sometimes stubbornly—residual collectivities: habits of association, directness, pragmatic mutuality, and an intuition that the social world can be organized differently than the market’s default settings.

Even if these habits are mixed, contested, and uneven, they exist. And they matter.

What these “margins” actually share

Southern Italy, Czechia, and East Germany are not the same. Their histories differ; their political trajectories differ; their injustices differ.

But they share a structural position: they have been treated as spaces to be managed by external standards, and they have been pressured to exchange their own capacities for acceptance.

And yet they persist as repositories of counter-capacities that the center struggles to reproduce:

1. Relational density
   Social ties as infrastructure, not decoration.
2. Temporal sovereignty
   The refusal of speed as the measure of worth.
3. Land-literacy
   Everyday ecological competence, intergenerationally transmitted.
4. Collective memory of alternative organization
   Not nostalgia as weakness, but memory as evidence that social systems can be different.
5. Low-capital abundance
   The ability to produce meaning and stability without constantly converting life into money.

The center calls these things “backward” because it cannot govern them easily. They reduce dependence on market-mediated solutions. They make people harder to discipline through scarcity narratives. They generate quiet autonomy.

Revalorization: not tourism, not nostalgia—political re-seeing

Revalorizing marginal capacities does not mean turning them into lifestyle content. It does not mean romanticizing poverty. It does not mean claiming these regions are utopias.

It means something more rigorous:

• seeing retained capacities as assets rather than defects;
• building languages that defend them against stigma;
• and treating them as design resources for futures that will demand more than growth.

It also means refusing the center’s epistemic authority. The “modern” world has produced astonishing wealth and also an astonishing thinning of life. The metrics of the center are not neutral. They are the outcome of power.

So the question is not “How can the margins become more like the center?”
The more radical question is: What can the center learn from what it tried to erase?

Because in a century of ecological constraint, social fragmentation, and political exhaustion, the so-called margins may not be behind.

They may be holding what comes next.

War, War, and More War!!

I mean, lets do it!! What are we waiting for?!  A little "limited" strike never really hurt anyone right?!  I mean its a win win for everyone involved.  We get to stick to it to Assad for "provocating with us", our military industrial complex gets to use those shiny weapons it makes billions of dollars off of, the Syrian rebels and all of their unknown and/or undesirable benefactors get a little help in creating government(s) in their own image(s), the 1,000+ dead from the chemical attack get "revenge" for being killed - "Justice" is done!  Those dirty peaceniks get to "feel good" about standing up to tyranny, crying foul for the lack of evidence for invasion.  But the US gets to save face for our little "red line" quip about Syria going too far.  France gets to be called our "oldest ally", the UK gets to say, "hey, we're not actually your lap dogs, we just play one on Iraqi TV."  Both leading to "high fives" in the US's corridors of power at how ingenious we are at manipulating our imbecilic allies and global pubic perceptions.  Not to mention..... FRENCH FRIES RETURN TO THE PENTAGOONS!!  The NSA, while obviously jealous of the fries, contents itself in knowing that attention has been deflected from sitting in our living rooms and getting off on our phone sex, and that Obama's Canadian Bacon styled maintenance of power will keep allowing it to tap that!

Meanwhile, back in the desert.  Egypt gets to keep killing its protesters and tightening its grasp.  Syria gets to retaliate against Israel - and I mean who in the middle east doesn't want an excuse to retaliate against Israel?! Hezbollah of course gets to fire some rockets... and the Palestinians too! (who of course can't see who their shooting at over that giant wall and 400 calorie a day haze).  Iran gets a good sporting show rooting for and training with Hezbollah, while Saudi Arabia gets to keep making money behind the scenes, and Al-Qaeda gets even closer to another lawless enclave to operate from (western Syria anyone?)!!  Given all this "Muslim warmongering," Israel of course can then start blowing shit up throughout the entire region.... never a bad thing there!!

Chaos (oh excuse me, "instability,") reigns, the US and some smattering of the Coalition of the Willing, Part Deux gets to broaden the blank slate its been building in the middle east to bring a more "equitable balance" of power, and eventually set up Burger Kings, oil rigs, and "free" markets for the priceless loot of another ancient museum.  Corporate gain and jobs for all!!  Our alleys can of course share in the riches, both privately and publicly.  We can send them more money for their militaries to keep their own people in line, look the other way when they use cluster munitions on their own people, and get a little extra cash and sport for taking, feeding, and advancing the enhancement of interrogation techniques on those rabble-rousing prisoners soon to be formerly of Guantanamo bay.  The UN then of course gets a little more work out of all this, because they get to go in and do some inspecting.  There Maldivian or Bhutani soldiers of course get "a little something extra" in their blue helmets to use on the ladies.  Doctors get steadier work when cholera breaks out across boarders.  NGO's, not to be despaired, can then run in like superpeople with their willy activist agendas and hugs for all!  Rich people back in the West can feel good about themselves for donating their hard earned inheritances to saving those poor little starving babies with flies on them from dieing of diarrhea and an exploding toy.

Russia of course gets to call the US names.  Vlad gets to go bare chested on horseback again with a giant elephant bazooka talking about how he could single-handedly wrestle a US tank into submission with one handle while beating Obama and a gay guy in a game of spades with the other.  Of course during all this, Edward Snowdon sits by a cozy fireplace in Siberia reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with his new tennis playing model girlfriend - all the while feeling that much more secure that Russia won't give him up as a diplomatic pawn.  China, quietly and pensively sitting and watching this train wreck, gets to go on loaning money to the US, making billions of dollars on the interest payments, and gobbling up all the resources in the rest of Africa.

Back here in the US spirit is amazingly high! The poor, the black, the brown, and the hoorah type all get to go back to war!  The former alleviating their little unemployment issue by going into the army and getting their recently felony convictions for sneezing in a black neighbrhood pardoned and the right to vote back for becoming war heroes while defending our porous boarders from all evils foreign and Mexican!  The later of course, well, they get to kill a-rabs, towel heads, and Muslim jihadi heathens alike!  Hoorah!!  Government spending of course gets to be reallocated with more discretion towards its "rightful" allocations - away from programs for those dirty, lazy, no work wanting free loaders (high school seniors) and back where it belongs: putting those dirty, lazy, no work wanting free loaders into an aMerican ass kicking freedom fighting uniform! Hell yeah!!! But not only that, it stimulates the economy too!! The bumper sticker makers get to sell more "support the troops" and "my son Kicks Ass-ad" stickers! Flag and coffin makers prosper, the media gets to cover it all under a hale of advertising dollars, gas companies profits sore amidst rising prices and Canadian pipeline bliss! Shitty oil for all!! (obviously opposition drops to energy dependency amidst these blatant national security concerns.)  Hydro-Fracking companies obviously see opposition fall as well due to the precariousness of that pesky oil dependency issue. And of course in terms of sustainability this is the ultimate win-win for all involved!!  We get closer to resource independence, companies make billions of dollars (and create six new jobs for people in southeast Azerbaijan) and people in gas regions get free heat in their kitchens and bathrooms (save the cost of a match!).

I just think this is the greatest idea ever.  Let's do it.  Lets go kill more people.  I mean, why would they want to live?  Life sucks.  It was Buddha that said all life is suffering right?  So stop trying to fix it and just end it. We can all go to our chosen denoted parcel of heaven or the like right?  So I don't see any reason why we shouldn't just go ahead, send a couple innocent little strikes over there to the middle east.  Everyone wants it.  Men, women, children, they don't want to live. I mean, its gotta be really hot in those head scarves. Plus, what's a little peace in the middle east without a little spilled milk?  (except in Palestine, where they don't have any milk).  So Fuck it, lets just go kick ass and take money!  Hoorah!!

Oh... wait.  Yeah, I was just thinking about this from a human-centric perspective.  There is of course that whole earth thing to think about as well.  But now that you mention it, all in all, it wins out as well.  There'd end up being LESS PEOPLE, less population to consume it.  I mean, from cancer in Pennsylvania, to those pesky children in Palestine, to the dirty jihadi's in well... geez... everywhere it seems we get to wipe millions of people of the face of the earth.  I mean, yes, some would say it would come at the cost of a little climate change or "pollution" given the massive industrial ramp up to create war, fly around the world marketing it, and then rebuild everything afterwards.  But you know, when you really break that whole climate change thing down, that stuff isn't even really a proven science anyway!  So not so much of a worry after all!  Woo Hoo!!  Let's do it!  Hoorah!!

[beating of drums, beating of drums]

Marriage Equality, The Same as any Equality?

I find this debate over same sex marriage incredible.  That is, that at this point in America's existence - and after all the social struggles we've been through - that we are even having this debate.  Just step back for one second from emotions and the flood of positioned journalism, and you will quickly see the problems with the existence of even having this debate.

If, as a logical foundation, you take each individual person and view them as their own personal and legal entity - which I believe is safe to say we as a country do - then each individual is one person, one human being, one legal entity.  Each one with rights, civil liberties, goals, dreams, aspirations, etc.  With this concept of a person in mind, we should theoretically all be treated in a way that allows us as individuals to interact, communicate, and enter into contracts and such with each other equally, and where one or another person should not be disallowed entrance into any type of interpersonal or legal engagement for whatever reason.

Yes, our laws create limitations to equality of entry on some issues.  But these issues are mostly based on economic grounds both stemming from a capitalist based social system and the creation, usage, and control of money (which is an inherent exclusionary barrier for those without it).  This barrier is however exclusionary in many ways both for haves and have-nots - especially if you look at money in a "value neutral" way.  Everyone can't apply for social services, everyone isn't taxed the same, everyone doesn't use state services like roads and police the same, just as those with money can buy, go places, and do things those without can not.  But capitalism and economics is a different story.  The point of this debate on marriage inequality is along the lines of race, sex, and creed - things the constitution and laws of the United States says we can not discriminate against.

I can not tell you that you can not do something simply because you are a woman, or black, or Asian, or whatever (though unfortunately people still try).  This issue with the marriage equality debate, and what makes it so absurd, is that to be against this type of equality is to try to say that you as a woman can not pick who you want to marry (or get benefits within a marriage) based solely on the sex of that person you marry.  Those against the allowance of marriage equality says that if I as a man marry a woman, not only am I allowed to do this, but I am entitled to certain things, certain legal benefits.  However, they then say that if I marry a man, then I am not entitled to these same benefits.

That inherently states through its inherent and unavoidable action and outcome that men and woman are NOT equal, or at least not legally of equal standing in United States based SOLELY on their gender and relationship to other genders.  The fundamental problem though is that if this were correct, does it not directly juxtapose a United States constitution that states that "all men [and presumably women] are created equal"?  By telling me that I can or can not marry another person based on no other reason than their gender, you are telling me that the sexes are not equal.  But while many people, including myself, may feel that a gross injustice of inequality exists between men and women in this country, especially in terms of outcomes, historical standing, current day power relationships, is it a fundamental and core value of the the United States that men and woman are NOT equal in one-to-one human terms?  Are not capable of entering freely into social and legal engagements with one an other?  Almost everything/one (including morals, ethics, and everything in between) tells us that this unequal stance is not only the wrong way for our country to proceed, but all together wrong on a basic human level of existence.

Marriage Equality is not a gay or straight issue, a sexual preference or what someone's kids call them issue, and it is most definitely not a "states rights" issue, it is a gender equity issue.  That every human being - no matter their gender - is of equal personal and legal standing to the next person and is legally allowed to interact with everyone in the exact same manner.  Of course, this gets tricky though in some senses.  Because I have NO idea what we're going to do moving forward.  God help us once corporations start trying to get married!!