Sunday, September 25, 2022

You Do Not Have The Luxury of Ignoring Foreign Affairs

This is your reminder that being a working class pleb in the middle of nowhere doesn't save you from the consequences of events in places you can't find on a map.

In practice, this means that becoming familiar with--and competent in--geopolitics and international affairs is necessary to navigate a globalized world, and required to thrive within it.

Yet there are so many people that refuse to accept this fact, and when something happens overseas that directly impacts their daily lives--supply chain disruptions, food export bans, potash and fertilizer shortages, chip shortages, displacement of entire populations, etc.--they are left wondering why their bills go up, why people they know disappear from their lives, why governments do sudden U-Turns in policy, and other detrimental changes to their circumstances that can only be mitigated or avoided if you see them coming.

This mistake is understandable for those whose entire life is bound up in their locality, at most their nation-state. For those claiming to operate on a global scope or scale, incompetence in geopolitics and international relations is inexcusable.

Most of you have some awareness that there are people who specialize in global investment, international relocation, assisting client through Residency or Citizenship programs, and related services.

Most of these people, as the representative sample on social media reveals, are utterly incompetent on geopolitics and international relations; these are people that sold Ukraine as a place to live and invest right up to the day the Russians invaded. This is despite eight years of constant geopolitical tensions between the two, despite decades of international fuckery of Russia by the West post-Cold War, despite plenty of other signs that all of the cited reasons for Russia's military actions were actually going on and people were warned that what went down in Ukraine was on the table.

Yes, including the "Nomad Capitalist" and "Digital Nomad" set.

You cannot afford to ignore what is going on half-a-world away. You cannot ignore what is going in within the borders of nation-states that provide vital goods and services that you, your neighbors, your employers, your governments rely upon to maintain their--your--way of life.

You cannot afford to dismiss foreign affairs, alien nations, and other things that you do not directly and immediately deal with day-to-day as irrelevant because they are not. You mistake the lag time from when a thing goes down to the impact hitting you as evidence of their being not related, when a facile examination confirms that they are.

You Europeans are going to learn this the hard way in a few weeks when the leaves are off the trees and the snows falls across Europe.

Everyone that deals in Internet-related technology knows about this due to the supply chain issues caused by the Wu Flu disruptions of Chinese exports.

And absolutely everyone is going to feel it when next year's food crop is much smaller than this years is now, again due to war-related supply disruptions.

I've been slapping around the Nomads for months now about this, telling them that their "Plan B" locations are not good options due to internal politics, poor economic stability, the inevitable ethnocentrism that declining economics promotes (that inevitably means pushing outsiders out no matter their legal status), shit-tier governments and infrastructure, and so on.

TLDR: No, Nomad Anon, your pasty ass ain't going to ride out World War 3 in a sex tourism hotspot or a tropical (tourist) paradise or whatever.

If you can see the bad times coming, you stand a far better chance of surviving--and even thriving as a result of--them, so pay attention.

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