BUCKMAN, THESE CANS EXPIRED IN KOREA

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No, he did not.

You’re right that the country would almost certainly be better off if the French and Spanish hadn’t colonized it in the first place. That almost goes without saying.

The Haitian people can and should challenge their leaders and strengthen their governance, but everyone else can either apologize and look for ways to be supportive or shut up.

That’s the thing. Haiti doesn’t have political leaders or effective governance to challenge. And telling people who recognize that fact to shut up won’t change it.

Haiti has agency. Haitians have agency. They have been free of foreign control since the end of the US occupation, almost a century ago. They have been free of onerous forced foreign debt payments since 1947. Haiti is a country situated right by one of the largest import consumers in the world and has enjoyed favorable trade and investment terms and incentives with the US for decades.

But foreign investment doesn’t flow into the country. Why? Because it is a failed state with no effective leadership, corrupt beyond measure. The Duvaliers and the following dictators are the ones most responsible for making the country that way, and they weren’t Western puppets. They were domestic.

The point of the interest rate hikes was to take money out of circulation to reduce inflation. A side effect of that is cooling wage increases.

Ideally, we would handle inflation by raising taxes. But good luck passing that without a Senate that has a supermajority of non-Republicans

There’s plenty of left wing echo chambers, but they’re leftist, not liberal. r/wayofthebern, for instance, or one of the various communist subreddits are good examples.

The difference here is that leftists extreme enough to fall into those echo chambers are far less common than conservatives. And, of course, they represent a very small subset of the left when compared to conservatives who accept misinformation.

No, he’s right. It’s not a matter of opinion, either, study after study shows that conservatives are far more accepting of misinformation and far more likely to spread it.

In my experience, they’re also far less tolerant of dissenting views. I mean, they’re the kings of culture war boycotts and cancel crusades, moral panics, and their latest thing is to call anyone who steps outside of their sexuality box a pedophile.

I don’t think Haiti can be just blamed on the West. The stablest it’s been during its entire history was when it was a French colony with monstrous slavery practices and when it was under American occupation. For a decade or two, they got some decent leaders, but since then, it’s been several decades of robbers and despots, all pulled from the people of Haiti, none of whom were Western puppets.

Oh, sure, if the US and France had treated Haiti better, that would have helped. But the West didn’t cause the current problems of Haiti. They’re domestic.

No matter how much aid is pumped into Haiti, you can’t solve the problem of a country which has degenerated so far that it is essentially a nation of gangs and bandits.

I’ve asked Haitian emigres about it. They don’t have hope. What they’ve told me is that there isn’t any hope, that the country is doomed and hardly even a country any more.

I don’t know what the solution is, if there even is one.