Admittedly, Europe was being slow to reconfigure until finally forced to do so this year but they've jumped on board now too.
And in typical historical fashion, everybody with less little influence/independence to project their own sphere are now cautiously but attentively jockeying to accumulate the best deals they can gather among those they do.
The world is far from united, even if many do happen to share opinion about the administration.
In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.
You're not wrong, globalism and nationalism go hand in hand. All those Twitter bluechecks glazing Trump and trying to drum up the right-wing controversy of the day were exposed as people from third-world countries shitting up the American infosphere for cash. When British far-right nutters say "We can't import the third world", keep in mind that third-world dictators are saying the exact same shit about other parts of the third-world. Nationalists work in lock-step.
Left-wingers are only globalist in the most literal sense of "well, I'd like it if we got rid of these migration barriers". "Internationalist" would be a better term for them.
Globalist Nationalism is an ideology of contradictions. It purports that, no really, you're the real master race and everyone else's just a stooge that'll get taken out the moment we can get rid of these pesky liberals with their freedoms. They need shittons of spatial partitioning to make that work.
You can't get rid of migration barriers without getting rid of the welfare state. Do left-wingers want to get rid of the welfare state? Do they even want to get rid of the migration barriers that can be done away with freely, namely barriers to movement for highly skilled labor and services?
This wasn't what I was talking about, but for what it's worth I don't think welfare and migration are exclusive. If your concern is free-riding, then you can require a certain number of working years before a migrant is eligible for certain social services; or have a scheme in which free migration is required to be reciprocal and bundled with a minimum standard for welfare programs. I believe the EU does both.
The phrase "left-winger" is also kind of vague; lefties in America are very specifically left-libertarians and it was specifically that strain of leftism I was referring to. A lot of, say, European lefties are far less internationalist and far more authoritarian for my tastes. There's an argument in here that American lefties haven't ironed out the contradictions in their political ideologies yet. A lot of the support for free migration from American lefties and liberals only started because Trump took the opposite position and did so extremely. But I'd rather that than, say, mainstream American politics' obsession with endianness[0].
Additionally, the welfare state is currently being crushed under the weight of a bunch of retiring Baby Boomers. Which isn't a uniquely American problem. Every rich country with a welfare state has too many old people in the system. That's due to demographic collapse, which is itself a consequence of children being too expensive to raise in a world where effective birth control is easy to access. Immigration can actually make this less of a problem, by adding to the tax base. They don't even have to be highly-skilled immigrants, they just have to be generating taxable income that goes into the welfare system.
The Globalist Nationalist argument is that this is bad because Those People™ are criminal or uncivilized in some way. But that begs the question: where do we find more taxpayers to keep our welfare state solvent? The answer is to take away birth control and hope enough horny teenagers get pregnant to fix the shortfall eventually. Except this doesn't solve the affordability problem[1]. So all those kids are going to be in broken homes or no home at all. This creates a crime wave. In fact, this is exactly why Those People™ from Those Countries™ are so damned scary!
tl;dr The integrity of the welfare state is only tangentially related to the openness of its migration programs, because migrants can be both beneficiaries of and contributors to the system.
[0] In the original sense of endianness being a culture war over what side to break eggs on.
[1] The affordability problem is itself a cluster of related cost diseases endemic to urban centers. More people want to live in the city than there is housing available for them, so prices have to rise until somebody loses. And increasing the housing supply creates further demand for land, construction labor, and materials. That raises cost, meaning that housing has to get more expensive to make new units economic. And as housing gets more expensive, there's less children being born, which means less people working to build that housing, which makes the housing more expensive, so there's less children being born...
It's different to expect somebody to write the correct program every time than to expect somebody not to call the "break_my_system" procedure that was warnings all over it telling people it's there for quick learning-to-use examples or other things you'll never run.
No, complete atomicity doesn't require a frozen state, it requires common sense and fail-proof, fool-proof guarantees derived from assurances gained from testing.
There is another name for rolling forward, it's called tripping up.
Or worse, they weren't meant to be portrayed as edgy and misunderstood to lure lonely people into cults of hate.
NB: from what I understand, some cult members joined because they felt part of a community; so, to them, it has a high cost of leaving it because they feel like the other members are friends (kind of like FB/Meta).
The bad idea from Marx that lead him astray into pseudo-science territory wasn't worker alienation. It was the labor theory of value (and the other stuff he created to make it looks like it works).
Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.
But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".
At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?
There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...
Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak).
My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world.
Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.
People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.
> But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile"
Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"
This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.
I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.
Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.
Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...
You mentioned one, which is North Korea, and I'm sure you're going to concoct some story to deflect the fact that China only began moving towards any semblance of prosperity after ditching Mao's fundamentally flawed economic policies, so have at it.
As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.
You ran the usual leftist playbook of bobbing and weaving around the list of atrocities combined with a round or two of no true Scotsman. You skipped the attempts to change the subject with some whataboutisms for some reason, but that's fine.
You said people were flourishing in the East under the opposite of "toxic individualism", which would be the collectivism of the numerous failed attempts to implement socialism.
I pointed to the fact that those nations (past or present) do not allow their citizens to leave freely, including building physical barriers to prevent people from leaving, and you try to argue that I was only talking about the Berlin Wall and that East Germany, a vassal state of a USSR that generally isn't considered part of the traditional western world, is clearly part of the west. I'd say that's wrong, but it's far from the only example so it doesn't matter.
I did mention the iron curtain, but another primary example is North Korea, and you no true Scotsman that away and say you were obviously only talking about China.
The same China that doesn't allow citizens to leave freely, where millions died under idiotic leftist economic policies, and where the rise from abject poverty to a middle income nation is perfectly correlated with the rejection of the path to communism and the adoption of more liberal, individualistic economic policies, and is another great example of my point.
In short, see my comment above, get bent, and go troll elsewhere.
Does it? It's mostly the US pushing against globalism right now. Trump managed to unite almost the entire world.
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