Tootfinder

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

You guys know what to do: report and block this genocide-complicit zionist hasbara account.
#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing

Price Responses of Rwandan Tungsten Exports under Conflict Minerals Regulation
Haruka Nagamori, Kazuhiko Nishimura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08690 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.08690 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.08690
arXiv:2608.08690v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Section 1502 of the Dodd--Frank Act, enacted in 2010, requires U.S.-listed companies using tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold (3TG) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and adjoining countries to disclose information on the minerals' origins. Concerns have been raised that the regulation may have induced a de facto embargo through avoidance of sourcing from the covered region. However, how the price responsiveness of mineral exports evolved under changing institutional and market conditions remains insufficiently understood. Since tungsten production in the covered region is concentrated almost entirely in Rwanda, this study examines the price responsiveness of Rwandan tungsten exports from January 2009 to December 2023.
Because missing export quantity data prevent continuous observation of export unit values, we apply the identification approach of Nakano and Nishimura (2025), combining monthly mirror trade data from UN Comtrade with exchange rates and a world average price. An importer fixed-effects model is estimated using export value as the dependent variable, with the sample divided into four periods according to changes in the institutional and market environment.
The results reveal substantial temporal variation in price responsiveness. A statistically significant negative price response is observed in Period 1 ($\eta=-20.814$, $p<0.01$), disappears in Period 2 ($\eta=1.814$, $p>0.10$), reappears in Period 3 ($\eta=-5.277$, $p<0.01$), and disappears again in Period 4 ($\eta=0.440$, $p>0.10$). Coefficient-difference tests confirm significant changes between Periods 1 and 2 ($p=0.0021$) and between Periods 3 and 4 ($p=0.0006$). These findings suggest that the price responsiveness of Rwandan tungsten exports varied substantially over time rather than following a uniform trajectory after the regulation.
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