Around 4:30 a.m. on 24 June 2016, the news organisations called the Brexit vote in favour of the Leave campaign. Joy was unconfined:
The eventual count would be 52–48% in favour, with leave voters overwhelmingly concentrated in just two of the UK’s nations: England and Wales. I remember encountering dazed Remain voters in the days after the vote (as a non-citizen, I wasn’t able to participate). One told me that it was like waking up and realising half the people around you are zombies. (I remember commiserating with them—having lived through G.W. Bush’s re-election, I thought I understood what that felt like, but whooaaaaaaaa Nelly, I really understand it now.)
Leavers were triumphant. Daniel Hannan, a eurosceptic Member of the European Parliament (and somehow considered the “intellectual” of the Leave campaign; he has, of course, since been elevated to the House of Lords), predicted at the time that Britain would forever mark 24 June as a holiday:
I’m afraid I can’t endorse Baron Hannan’s predictive powers: I am sitting in Britain and there are no fireworks streaming through the summer sky, even though it is a fine and dry evening. Since the actual leaving happened in 2020, economists’ predictions that leaving the EU would slice 4% off the GDP have been borne out: an article from over the weekend in The Times (archive.is link, no paywall) puts the price tag at £40 billion, and adds:
The 4 per cent productivity loss translates to an approximate £40 billion tax loss for the exchequer between 2019 and 2024, a period in which the government raised taxes by £100 billion. “A large chunk of [the tax rises] would not have been necessary if the UK had voted to remain in the EU or chosen a softer form of Brexit,” Springford said.
So we pay more tax, we’re less attractive to investment, and we’re also still bitterly divided—in no large part due to the same foreign influencers that may have pushed Brexit over the line in the first place—and we still have to endure Nigel Farage, one of the faces of the Leave campaign, as a major force in national politics.
And yet, somehow, choosing to Brexit is only the second dumbest thing an electorate has done to itself during this century. Small mercies, I guess.
I realise there’s an awful lot going on, but if you would like to get the UK a ninth anniversary gift, research suggests the traditional present is pottery. I recommend smashed, heavily used chamber pots.
Open thread.
NotMax
Harry Pottery?
//
Jeffro
It was a real harbinger of things to come, and a warning to democracies everywhere.
Powerful interests (the rich, hostile foreign powers, etc) are always out there, waiting for you to not take them seriously. Democratic governments must be relentless in putting out the truth, in touting their achievements, and demonizing the enemies of liberty & prosperity.
Rose Judson
@NotMax: No, because chamberpots are all-gender toilets.
Professor Bigfoot
I think Brexit only qualifies as the third dumbest thing an electorate has done to itself.
The Americans have both of the top spots with Trump I at number 2 and Trump II-Electric Chair Boogaloo as the single dumbest thing any electorate has done to itself this century, I daresay for the last half century at least.
lowtechcyclist
Wasn’t the 2016 referendum supposed to be non-binding? Either way, it just seems crazy to me to make such a monumental change on the basis of such a narrow margin. It would be like passing Constitutional amendments in the U.S. on the basis of a national majority vote.
And since it took four years to actually leave, just as I was assuming that Britain would be in a perpetual state of ‘about to leave,’ thereby avoiding the consequences of actually leaving, sure enough y’all left. Bizarre.
mrmoshpotato
Hey now. He was once on the cover of Punchable Face magazine. Show some respect – like John Oliver did.
lowtechcyclist
@mrmoshpotato:
If I could wish that magazine into existence, it would already be in checkout counter racks all across America.
Steve LaBonne
@lowtechcyclist: The first issue has to feature Mike Johnson.
Steve LaBonne
Democracy is hard to sustain when the primary division in the electorate is between people who pay attention and those who are proud of their ignorance.
Unknown known
To be fair that is two OUT OF FOUR – Scotland and Northern Ireland (which is only the northernmost fifth of the island) voted remain, but also have relativity few people living in them.
@lowtechcyclist:
Yes, it was non-binding, and even moreso brexit was not defined. People who wanted to think it was leaving the common market believed that. People who thought that it was a much more subtle rift believed that. Britain had no idea what it was actually voting for, and spent the next 3 to 4 years arguing violently over it.
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: Voting for Trump the second time should retire the trophy for eternity.
Rose Judson
@Steve LaBonne: Mike Johnson, Farage, Vance, and then possibly upper-class twit of the century Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s four months.
bbleh
… the traditional present is pottery. I recommend smashed, heavily used chamber pots.
Or perhaps the remains of a piggy bank looted for change.
My distant impression was that Brexit was significantly similar to MAGA in being driven by economically comfortable but also economically illiterate populations motivated by kulturkampf and encouraged in both their illiteracy and hostility by those who stood to gain economically, and who, even as they become less and less economically comfortable thanks to their own choices, will NEVER admit they were wrong.
Kind of a long-term problem, actually…
Layer8Problem
Gee whiz, I can’t imagine how foreign influencers could affect an election. Where could that ever happen?
//
Baud
You should have called it Liberation Day like a stable genius would.
lowtechcyclist
@Steve LaBonne:
And he and JV Dance would be duking it out for the Punchable Face of the Year honors.
Layer8Problem
@Rose Judson: The image of that sleek self-satisfied berk will never not be an irritant. Where is a mob of football hooligans when you really need them?
Steve LaBonne
@lowtechcyclist: Preferably literally duking it out. Maybe on pay per view.
Steve LaBonne
@Layer8Problem: It could only happen where a lot of people get all their “knowledge” of the world from social media influencers. Fortunately we know that could never happen.
pat
Somehow I wonder if that would have happened if they had not been allowed to keep their stupid currency…
Baud
@pat:
Or if the Queen has died sooner and Charles was on the currency, they might have adopted the Euro.
kindness
I don’t know… I think the US electing Donald Trump twice takes the prize.
Omnes Omnibus
@Rose Judson: I always find odd when I remember that Rees-Mogg pere wrote the “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” editorial about Mick Jagger’s drug conviction.
Unknown known
@bbleh: mostly right. Lots of culture war fuelled by posh people who can’t believe that they had to share any kind of decision making power with foreigners when they were rightfully the ones in charge of everything, and rural left behind areas who’d been told that filthy foreigners were the source of all of their many troubles
mrmoshpotato
@Rose Judson: You didn’t have to assault our eyeballs with a picture of that smug, prep school POS.
Omnes Omnibus
@mrmoshpotato: You know what you did to deserve it, so get off Rose’s back. For criminy!
montanareddog
@Professor Bigfoot:
Brexit at #3 and Trump 1 at #2 – fair enough. But Trump II-Electric Chair Boogaloo cannot be measured on the same scale; it’s like comparing The Beatles to The Archies.
Ruckus
@Steve LaBonne:
I think it’s worse than that. I’ve known people with money, not the uber over wealthy type of money but the level of quite a bit of more than enough. None of them acted like their money made them better than everyone else, just that it made living easier. And that can make all the difference. Pompous arrogance is never amusing or funny.
lowtechcyclist
@Steve LaBonne:
I dunno, it took us 26 years, but we did worse than Nixon. Then only eight years after Shrub left office, we did worse than Shrub. Then only four years after the end of Trump’s first term when the damage he could do was limited by his unpreparedness for the moment, we did worse by electing him a second time, when it was clear that his people were fully prepared for this go-around.
I’m really not prepared to say we can’t do worse than Trump 2.0. Our track record says yes, we can.
Ruckus
@bbleh:
Kind of a long-term problem, actually…
Well it is humanity, in it’s good, in all it’s bad and often enough the sometimes middle.
And in all it’s sometimes pompous arrogance.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I appreciate your vote of confidence in me.
AnthroBabe
I remember this day (night). Working at the office late and listening to the BBC online. The presenters were gobsmacked about the initial result, as I was. What a horrible harbinger of things to come (@Jeffro)
I keep being surprised about a chunk of humanity that just will burn everything down because *those* people (wink wink nod nod) are sharing in the spoils. I know I should not be, but I am…
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
There is significant evidence that humans can be a lot worse than most of us think. We have known examples throughout history. Some of them within the lifetime of breathing humans. We have words for some of the rationalities – stupidity, pompous arrogance, greed, and yes hate. I believe that we were/are supposed to understand that while it doesn’t take all kinds, that is what we have.
The good, the decent, the great, the ignorant and the pure, unadulterated, unacceptable pompous, arrogance – which is 5 categories in of itself.
Archon
Voting for Trump in 2016 was irrational and crazy but I can see (if I squint hard enough) how people thought they were voting for a blowhard but a businessman who would get things done. Voting for Trump in 2024 was truly a malevolent decision that augurs a very, very dark road for the United States.
Baud
@Archon:
Agree.
zhena gogolia
@Archon: Yes, well put.
Suzanne
And you have a shitty king and the uglier of the Windsor brothers, the one with the boring wife.
Ruckus
@Archon:
One should be/would be hurting themselves physically if they squinted that hard. To squint that hard one should be afraid of going blind. Hell I’d bet blind people often see better. I have a 99 year old almost blind neighbor who sees better. My mother lived 94 years and 364 days and could see lots better. I’ve worn glasses for 64 years and I can see far better.
George
@Jeffro:
I would add that democratic electorates also need to be vigilant and intelligent. As we’ve seen in the U.S., the forces of fascism just need to flip elections by a few percentage points in order to take control.
Captain C
@lowtechcyclist:
Arguably it only took 6.
BellyCat
Just wanted to see this again.
Trollhattan
We were at a taping for “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” in Portland. During the show Peter Sagal paused the proceedings to announce Brexit had passed. The theater audience had a simultaneous gasp, not even realizing the predictive value re what would happen at home in less than five short months.
They had to rerecord a revised show opening at the evening’s end to incorporate that bit of breaking news.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Captain C:
Yup. So much of what we see today can be traced to election night, 1980.
Trollhattan
@Captain C: Can confirm. Ronny was as treasonous as Nixon but avuncular enough to not be punished for that treason.
Melancholy Jaques
@Archon:
Every once in a while I think about how none of this would have happened if fucking Comey had kept his fucking mouth shut for a couple weeks.
BellyCat
@Trollhattan: Commendations for the most perverse (but accurate) use of the term “avuncular”.
Jeffro
re: “vigilant”…I think that’s what I was getting at. “Intelligent” is a good addition that applies in many ways.
I was thinking of adding “vicious”, because frankly, our enemies will stop at nothing to tear down all the institutions that keep them from obscene profits, environmental destruction, or even corruption from hostile foreign powers. We need to be equally ‘vicious’ in our determination to not let them do it.
Bill
@Rose Judson:
The list has to include Mike Lee and Ted Cruz
Jeffro
@Jeffro: btw I am wondering aloud to myself how democracies can do a better job of being small-c conservative in the sense of…”look at all this incredible progress we made when we worked together and DIDN’T let the orcs back into office…don’t we want to preserve that, at least? even if you think it’s gone about far enough?”
People don’t think nearly enough about what a truly malicious, incompetent, or corrupt government can take away from them. They’re learning that now, the hard way, with trumpov 2.0. But going forward…it ought to be a core mission of every vibrant democracy to put that on full blast, so that people maybe don’t give it all up so easily next time.
Eolirin
@lowtechcyclist: I’m not sure we can survive doing worse than Trump 2.0. Hell I’m not sure we can survive Trump 2.0 to get the chance.
HypersphericalCow
I was working for a commodity trading firm that did a lot of business in currencies at the time Brexit happened. I was in IT, not a trader.
nobody had any fucking idea what was going to happen. How do you place a bet on a coin toss? But we had to be ready for it, which meant I had to make sure the servers were up and ready in the middle of the night, when we normally shut them down at 5:00 PM Central Time.
we did a lot of trading, but didn’t end up making any money. How could we? A coin flip that defined the next century for the UK.
bbleh
@Archon: not if people — specifically Dems and Dem-leaners — are ENGAGED. It bears repeating, the 2024 margin was historically small, and it was in significant (I would say major) part due to Dems and Dem-leaners simply not showing up to vote. Engage those folks — as the Harris campaign tried to do in the “swing states” and which boosted turnout by 1-2 points there, which alas was not enough — and we win.
It REALLY would be good if we didn’t have to suffer a catastrophic economic downturn or massive plague to get people to re-engage. And trends in recent special elections suggest real cause for optimism. But there are many ways to do that, and it’s far from a foregone conclusion that we will take a “dark road.” We just have to stay active — donate, volunteer, organize. (You know: the routine, boring stuff.)
catclub
in 2020 Trump was a little bit unpopular and there was massive vote by mail. Those people too lazy to vote otherwise were not particular fans of Biden.
IN 2024 they were too lazy to vote.
Malevolent, but lazy.
catclub
@Bill: No love for Stephen Miller.
catclub
Millions who voted by mail in 2020 did not bother in 2024. I would call those not even leaners.
catclub
Chicago Cubs won the WS. We was doomed.
schrodingers_cat
Brexit is pretty unsurprising if you consider the history of Britain. They invented racism to justify their empire. Couldn’t deal with their own dissidents who had to go to America and shipped their malcontents to Australia.
Created an intellectual justification for the Empire and pretended that it was liberal. At least the Spanish and the Portuguese did their looting with less pretense
BritinChicago
@lowtechcyclist: No mention of Reagan? I think he’s definitely worse than Nixon, not a worse person, perhaps, but worse consequences.
ETA: scooped by Captain C
Tony Jay
It was a terrible, monumental, epoch-defining blowtorch in the face of the Britain we – thought – we were. A glorious, triumphal, influence-enforcing needle in the veins of the Britain our toxic Media had been poisoning for decades. And yet it’s something that we’re supposed to understand one simply doesn’t talk about anymore. It’s been wiped from our current affairs word-cloud and consigned to the same swear box as ‘Social Conscience’, ‘Wealth Inequality’ and ‘Standards In Public Office’.
Not too surprising. After all, the dewy egg-spawn clustered at the apex of our Governmental system might have (almost all) been platinum-armoured Remain or Die hardliners back in the day, but as their instaflip to rock-hard devotees of the ‘Make Brexit Work’ creed the second they retook control of the Labour Party made clear to everyone, Brexit was always just a factional wedge they could exploit to drive voters away from the Party while they didn’t control it.
And so here we are. Adrift a few miles off the coast of the world’s biggest trading bloc because our Government would rather performatively chase after the votes of Ron and Ronalda Racist than abandon their fever dream of inheriting a Tory voting majority that has already been torn apart by the emergence of an actual fascist alternative.
Governed by idiots? Oh, you flatter us.
hitchhiker
@Ruckus:
Stalin was still alive when many of us right here on this blog were born, including me. His record for horror is hard to beat.
Darkrose
@catclub: I warned everyone. Cubs winning the World Series = Apocalypse. It was foretold.
Anonymous At Work
I propose a one-way solo trip to Scotland for Nigel Farage, with a pre-paid pub crawl. He gets drunk and interacts with drunken Scots. Either we get lucky or he gets humble from the prospect of eating applesauce for the rest of his life.
Barry
@lowtechcyclist:
“Wasn’t the 2016 referendum supposed to be non-binding?”
Yes, but it was right-wing, so it counts.
Jackie
@catclub: Speaking of Miller – he’s even eviler than we thought:
edited for formatting.
laura
Well the hoi polloi got to hate on the immigrants, foreigners and the melanated and the rich got to avoid the oversight and reforms that resulted from the Panama Papers and the Russians got to laugh at all of them from the tippytop floors of their slightly occasionally occupied townhomes in Olde London Town. So everybody got a little sumpin sumpin.
Steve LaBonne
@Jackie: LOL at the quaint notion that there are still lines.
David Collier-Brown
@Steve LaBonne: Plato claimed the usual sequence was
His use of aristocracy is idiosyncratic: I see it as the step after tyranny, not involving philosophers (:-))
YY_Sima Qian
@lowtechcyclist: We absolutely can do worse than Trump 2.0. We can have an authoritarian reactionary that is more ideologically committed, more competent (i.e., keeping the trains running on time) & more strategic, that does not afford the opposition the opportunity to coalesce & form critical mass.
Anonymous At Work
@YY_Sima Qian: JD Bowman, trans-parent name is JD Vance.
YY_Sima Qian
@David Collier-Brown: We (as the human race) are not gaining new wisdom, we are only rediscovering old wisdom. We are not learning from new lessons, we are only re-learning old lessons.
Hyperbole, yes, but not that much of one.
David Collier-Brown
@hitchhiker: Something has to be recent enough your grandfather/grandmother can tell you about it, with all the grisly details.
Stalin died in 1953, so grandpa had to be born around 1933, making them 90-odd years old. That means the recently-born ignorant stay ignorant, to the advantage of the next Stalin.
Splitting Image
@schrodingers_cat:
Old Egyptologist joke:
Do you know why the Great Pyramids are in Egypt?
Because they were too big for the British to put on a boat.
Baud
Sure Lurkalot
@laura: You said it best. Bravo!
Baud
bbleh
@catclub: I use “leaners” in the Bitecofer model sense: people whose political leanings are more in line with Dems and so are more likely to vote Dem IF they vote. The challenge is not convincing them that Dems are better; it’s getting them to “switch” from NOT voting to voting.
It’s ironic that — in my opinion anyway — thanks to the Biden Boom, which was almost unprecedented in its recovery from a serious economic downturn (COVID, made worse by the Orange Guy’s non-response to it) AND the “soft landing” afterward, a LOT of people just … didn’t feel particularly motivated to vote. (And unfortunately, a lot of the ones who DID were committed cultists and … here we are.)
Non-voting Dem-leaners need to understand that it’s important to vote, and that means engaging them and getting them engaged. AKA GOTV. It’s more than just election-day canvassing.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Who’s going to tell Matt Yglesias?
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
That all of our candidates from here on out will be trans?
Not me.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Heh heh, wouldn’t matter. In The Turd’s world (and all those MattY adjacent people like Smith, Stancil, Klein, Atlantic and Vox writers and a host of others) inconvenient facts are ignored or explained away.
@Splitting Image:
Best bathroom grafitti ever in the British Museum…of Thieves:
schrodingers_cat
@Splitting Image: Good one.
schrodingers_cat
What do Juicers know about John Stuart Mill?
bbleh
@Baud: Gotta say I’m heartened by the response of the Dem electorate to the nasty anti-Trans bigotry of the Republicans. Seems to me the Dem “leadership” are the ones trailing here.
Baud
@bbleh:
Who aside from Newsom?
Layer8Problem
@schrodingers_cat: Um, Utilitarianism. And “. . . of his own free will, on a half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.” At least according to Monty Python’s “Philosophers Song”. That’s all I’ve got, I did my college work in biochemistry.
bbleh
@David Collier-Brown: IIRC my Greek, aristos = “(the) best.” It’s a bit different from how we use “aristocracy” today, which is more like “the wealthiest” or “the noble-born,” which I would say is closer to the way he uses oligos = “(the) few.”
(Of course I may be misremembering, and I ain’t gonna look it up right now.)
lowtechcyclist
@BritinChicago:
Nixon extended the Vietnam War for another 4+ years, and extended it into Cambodia. The blood of millions is on his hands. In terms of death toll, he easily wins the Grim Reaper Award over Reagan, either Bush, and Trump 1.0.
bbleh
@Baud: Rahm comes to mind, also some of the purple-district Reps. And I’d also say there has been a non-deafening but still troubling degree of silence.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: What do you want to know?
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: How is he perceived today?
RevRick
@montanareddog: These evaluations are very English-speaking centric. And very much opinions. I mean the world has given us so many options to choose from. Modi. Bolsonaro. Erdogan. Orban. Putin.
Of course, since the US is unquestionaby the most powerful nation in the world, our screw up can do far more damage. The question for us as a nation going forward is how much damage will Trump and his GOP sycophants be able to do? Because there has been growing resistance to them and their agenda.
We are not beyond hope. We never are.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: He was a staple of History of Political Thought Hobbes to Marx when I was an undergraduate.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Was the work he did as a colonial administrator for the East India Company ever discussed?
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Not in political philosophy courses.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: His work was in direct contradiction to the philosophy he espoused. Either that or he didn’t consider Indians human
Its like an SS member being a philosopher of liberal thought and then making explicit recommendations on the best ways to handle the undesirables.
He also made policy recommendations to the East India Company without setting foot in India
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: As an Irish-American I will say, English people gonna English.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: Plenty of Irish people in India too, and Scots were overrepresented. It was a British enterprise not just an English one.
Although there were also Irish people who participated in the Indian struggle for independence and home rule before that.
Lyrebird
@schrodingers_cat: Glad to get a fuller picture, even though the fuller picture is depressing. FWIW I am one of the people who is glad that more people now consider more of what we know of Thomas Jefferson’s life including holding people in slavery, not to throw away his contributions, but to see the complexity.
YY_Sima Qian
@Lyrebird:
@schrodingers_cat:
The liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment (& after) limited the horizons to only certain races & classes of people as befitting membership in the liberal utopia. Many did not see the colonized peoples as fully human, & certainly not the enslaved ones.
It has been only through the struggles & bloodshed in the following centuries that the horizons have expanded to cover more people.
That legacy lived on in “liberal imperialism” of the late 19th & early 20th centuries, & in the “liberal internationalism” & “liberal hegemony” post-WW II.
A common view from among the Western educated “intellectual elite” in the Global South, formerly in full alignment w/ Western liberalism (in the context of Israel-Gaza-Iran), now deeply alienated & disaffected from Western liberalism, reflective of a trend going back to at least the GFC, if not the Iraq War:
YY_Sima Qian
Typical Trump (gift link to FT article below):
Stake out ridiculously maximalist positions, implement ridiculously maximalist policies, then beat a quick retreat under the cover of more bluster when the bluff is called &/or the self-harming consequences become apparent. No policy objective achieved, except in damaging global perceptions of US credibility & power.
Chetan Murthy
@YY_Sima Qian: i got to ask: how does US sanctions on Chinese purchasers of Iranian oil even work? I mean, the most I can see is that it means that China can’t pay Iran in dollars. But geez, You’d think that China would view that as an opportunity! To pay in Yuan instead. I suppose perhaps Iran doesn’t want to get Chinese currency? It’s all ridiculous.
Anastasio Beaverhausen
In the week leading up to the Brexit vote I was hiking the Southwest Coast Path in Cornwall. In village after village I heard about foreigners invading the country, Poles, Romas, Italians! Never saw any, mind you, just heard stories of some friend of some relative in the city who had something bad happen because of them. Brexit, of course, was going to solve everything……according to Nigel Farage. One night I was “rehydratiing” in the pub after a 15 mile day of hiking. A native heard the accent and started a conversation. Brexit came up and since I had had a pint, or three, I finally said, “Look, you don’t mine for copper, build ships, or salt pilchards here anymore for God’s sake. But people like me are willing to come here and spend a hundred pounds a day to walk through your beautiful countryside, buy some groceries, and stay in your B and Bs. Without burdening your schools, roads, or your healthcare. Embrace it!” Deaf ears. That’s when I knew they would Brexit, and Trump would be elected. The vote was the next day and my prediction was borne out. A cheeky publican in the next village on my route had a sign out front, “Brexit results: 48% PRIDE 52% PREJUDICE.”
YY_Sima Qian
@Chetan Murthy: It’s sanctions on USD transactions, & Iranians didn’t want to be paid in Yuan, or at least not that much.
I’ve written before about Iran hedging against closer partnership w/ the PRC. Despite the heavy reliance on oil export to the PRC, Iran preferred to purchase Russian weapons & held out hope for normalization of trade & investment w/ the US & the EU. Perhaps it was distrust of Communist “infidels”, perhaps it was because of the IRGC not wanting competition to its commercial empires, perhaps it was the Western facing orientation of Iran’s overwhelmingly Western educated technocrats. Perhaps it was memory of the PRC selling weapons to both sides during the Iran-Iraq War, knowing that the PRC also has strong economic, technological & geopolitical relations w/ the Gulf States, as well as strong commercial relations w/ Israel, that are perhaps more valuable than ties to Iran, thus the PRC makes for an unreliable patron for an Iran that had regional hegemonic ambitions.
As w/ Putin post-2014, though, the theocratic regime may not have a choice but to turn Eastward going forward.
YY_Sima Qian
@Chetan Murthy: This WSJ article describes the mechanics of the Sino-Iranian oil trade a bit more (gift link below):
90% of Iranian oil exports go to the PRC, carried on a “dark fleet” of tankers, & often using intermediaries, Malaysia is a favorite. Iran is paid in Yuans, the U.S. cannot stop these transactions, but Iran is unhappy about holding so much Yuan because Iran can only purchases PRC manufactured goods with those Yuans. The U.S. sanctions can threaten financing & operations of the Chinese privately owned “teapot” refineries (some of which are in fact gargantuan) that refine Iranian oil, by threatening USD access of Chinese financial institutions that transact w/ them. This is how successive USGs effectively leverage USD dominance to pursue geopolitical ends, although it is a leverage that depreciates more quickly the more it is used.
The article exaggerate the ultimate impact on the PRC, though. There is a financial hit from not being able to purchase discounted Iranian oil, but that hit would have been much bigger when the discount was $15 / barrel in ‘23, than when it is $2 / barrel in ‘25. OPEC+ has enough slack capacity to make up for most of the loss of Iranian production in 6 months, if they choose to do so. To the extent higher oil prices hurts the PRC economy, it will hurt every other economy that is not a huge oil exporter, too. & the PRC’s oil import is in secular decline, due to the rapid electrification of transportation.
YY_Sima Qian
This is interesting:
The usual Falun Gong & Falun Gong adjacent media are engaging in their periodic wish casting disinformation campaigns, suggesting that Xi’s position is jeopardy. More likely that it is a health issue. Brazil is a long trip from the PRC.
If we are going to read tea leaves, I think it is notable that since 2023 or so Xi had dispensed w/ the decades long tradition among CPC leaders (since the Jiang Zemin era in the ’90s) to dye their hair jet black, to minimize signs of aging. Along w/ the growing evidence of Xi delegating to other members of the CPC leadership, perhaps this is an early sign that Xi is preparing for the post-Xi era. He is half way through his 3rd term, so if he plans to retire at the end of this term, a successor will have to be put in position very soon, if the regime is to avoid the disruption & the dangers that emerged during the Hu Jintao-Xi Jinping transition. Alternatively, Xi plans to be much more hands off during his 4th term, & wants to start that pivot now. Pure speculation on my part, of course.
YY_Sima Qian
Real banana republic vibes, but that’s nothing new in the age of Trump 2.0:
Whole sale politicization of intelligence will get people killed, at home & abroad, Americans & foreigners. We’ve seen that movie before.
YY_Sima Qian
Tensions in the Persian Gulf is always to Russia’s benefit (gift link to WSJ article below):
Paul in KY
@Steve LaBonne: It will take some ungodly topping to top that one…
Paul in KY
@Archon: You nailed it.
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: He’s alot better than Randy Andy.
What, again?
@schrodingers_cat:
John Stuart Mill
By a mighty effort of will
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote “Principles of Political Economy.”
Not mine, it’s a clerihew I read once. Also, his relationship with Harriet Taylor is discussed in Phyllis Rose’s “Parallel Lives,” which I cannot recommend too highly.
Paul in KY
@YY_Sima Qian: The best book on Vietnam (IMO) is ‘Street Without Joy’.
Paul in KY
@Anastasio Beaverhausen: Good on ya for trying!
Gloria DryGarden
@Jeffro: I’m days late, just finally checking in here. But i so agree with what you’ve said. Vigilant and intelligent, with clear communication, and some skilled cutthroat spin doctors, for sure.
lf you can advise on how to apply vicious, or ruthlessly competitive, without going “low”…