Comments by "Mighty One" (@mightyone3737) on "Pod Save the World"
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Yeah, worth noting that our own media isn't exactly giving us an accurate picture of reality in NA, before BLM most people weren't very aware of the realities of how policing is used to enforce racism and misogyny, and actively enables rightwing causes whenever possible. Even in Canada our city police in Ottawa refused to deal with the lunatics camped in the city, who were going out of their way to make life horrible for locals, it got so bad that the government had to use emergency measures before authorities felt they could go in, it was a gong show, and 100% because it was rightwingers protesting, OPP had no hesitations about opening fire on Native protesters, even killing them is fine, but who knew that all you have to be is a servant of the establishment for the police to not care if you break the law. Deeply fucked up world we live in is an understatement, so while north korea is not a good place to live, our place isn't as good as the propaganda portrays it, our shows and movies are in part to keep us compliant, keep us going to work. If we're not entertained then we'll have time to recognize how messed up our situations are, and if the entertainment paints a false picture, it's still hard for our brain to see through it, to realize actual life is pretty bad and has been getting consistently worse.
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It's very hard to intervene meaningfully against actions you personally support... this happened to Canada when we had the truck rioters blockading stuff, the police here are also extremely right wing and thus weren't willing to enforce the law against lawbreakers, they supported them too much to do their jobs. The US had issues with this on Jan 6 as well, with the incredibly tepid response that almost certainly got more people killed. Contrast this with how police handle leftwing protests, which is usually brutal violence if the public will tolerate it, in Canada during my lifetime police opened fire on Native Americans protesting, on explicit orders from the province's Premier. The US has zero intention of intervening in this, and the US establishment is quite happy to give israel all the weapons it could ever want in exchange for them keeping the Muslims distracted, so that israel soaks up terrorism that would otherwise end up hitting US targets. The US has never made a secret of the fact that it will happily support truly abominable regimes as long as they are right leaning and friendly to big business, bibi is exactly that, so no matter how many Gazans he murders he'll still have complete US support at the top, disturbing as it I think that is. It's not a secret that after modi (a violent bigot and wanna-be dictator) got really entrenched in india the US started getting extremely friendly with them, while they had governments that leaned left the US had essentially nothing to do with them, it was an economic pariah to US investors, who were way, way more keen on the (arguably right wing by most metrics) authoritarians in china, and it's not like india was great about workers' rights. Anyways, as long as the US is unwilling to actively intervene nothing will change, their just aren't consequences for israel if the US throws their weight behind them.
Hopefully the israeli left is aghast enough by all this to hopefully rise up in some fashion, I've heard some 4k Palestinian children have been killed, a number so insanely high that it's hard to understand how you could ever justify it, yet israel keeps stepping things up. How many dead children will be enough to finally rouse the majority of israelis to throw out their corrupt/power hungry leader?
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Ah, the old 'go on a hunger strike because you raised your son to be an entitled shit and you don't want to deal with your mistakes' technique! All the best people are doing it! If your mom has to go on a hunger strike because you couldn't figure out that you don't forcibly kiss random people without even asking, maybe it's time to reevaluate your positions? How would this jagoff feel is an actual large man decided that he was excited enough to just take a kiss, and he'd be literally powerless to stop it before it happens? There are many man large and strong enough to do it, and I am confident he wouldn't be happy about it being done publicly, yet for some reason women are supposed to put up with it.
BRIC was never an alliance in any sense of the word, BRICS isn't either, and making it even bigger is just going to result in an even less cohesive non-group. Most of them are pretty right wing and hoping to establish a different power center than the US, but again, there is no unity/cohesion between these countries, and many of them have an active history of hating one another (china has historically had terrible relations with both russia and india), that's not a recipe for a strong alliance, and that's not changing just because putin and xi are both desperate for allies, and india has fallen into the right wing populism trap. All three of those big countries want to be in charge of the group, the only one that's actually an international power is china, russia hasn't been a world power since putin came back into power, and india hasn't been a major power since the british bribed their way to victory over a WILDLY richer empire (this is what happens when you have extreme wealth inequality and lack of unity/solidarity because you treat most of the population like it's made a clumped together turds that will perpetually be beneath you *purely because of the caste they were born in*, it leads to your army being for sale, and they'll take very little if they are used to you paying them nothing). None of them is trusted by the other countries that are in BRICS, and the expanded BRICS isn't going to be much better about trusting 'me first' countries like china and russia (and now india under modi), the only country that's stable enough to be a natural choice for leadership is Brazil, and Brazil is the country that's probably the least likely, as it's never been outward-looking and is now run by a relative lefty.
France and Quebec are both using their secular tradition as a way to institute fascist laws against minorities (that are explicitly unconstitutional). It's worth noting that even the hijab is not a Muslim garb per se, it's not in their holy text, it's a pre-existing tradition unrelated to Islam, such that you can't argue in good faith that any of that stuff is 'Muslim religious garb'. Ultimately they're fighting to make a law that says 'you can't wear clothes from certain cultures', something we'd openly be horrified by if they worded it that way. France treats it's non-whites poorly, not sure if you were aware of that, but it's bad enough that there are always thousands of people who are very eager to repay the French public for year after year of shitty treatment with a nice riot. France is in many way a very progressive country, but it's not a fan of anyone who's not a native French speaker, and it's not a fan of non-whites (tbh most white countries are pretty racist, even the nicer ones are just more subtle about it), so non-whites who speak bad (or too foreign sounding) French can expect to be publicly mistreated.
Please don't present the Palestine conflict as one with 'violence on both sides' without having the decency to point out that the israeli reply to a palestinian throwing burning garbage is to shoot them, it's like saying a person with both hands tied behind their back being beaten up is in a fight because he could maybe bite the guy, it's not a 'both sides' issue, the palestinians are being brutally murdered with almost complete impunity while the world watches, cheering israel on. I'm also not sure why we call them 'settlers' and not 'genocidal terrorists', they're extrajudicially murdering people to influence a political situation and are non-state actors, that's a terrorist by the dictionary definition last I checked. I'm not actually sure if there is any difference between what the people of israel did/are doing and how the Europeans dealt with North America/Australia, the natives weren't willing/able to be enslaved (this is why African slaves had to be imported, the locals in the Americas were 'less amenable', in large part because they knew the country better than the Europeans, Africans that escaped could be easily recaptured given a modicum of effort because they had no where to go, hence the Underground Railroad being necessary) so they were deemed worthless and all but exterminated.
The main reason I honestly wonder if putin didn't actually murder him is because of how he's handling it, normally he wants it to be less subtle when he kills someone extrajudicially (I got to use the word twice!), it's not in the same vein as poisoning someone who's irritated you with polonium that cannot be found in nature (other than maybe in one of those naturally occurring reactors? idk), or having someone murdered via umbrella, an old KGB technique that was so overused that it's it's own trope. Blowing up a plane is a bit different, but it's possible he wanted to decapitate the wagner group? If he really felt he needed the whole lot of them dealt with, then this would make sense, it just seems to feel fundamentally different from how putin normally kills 'problem' people.
I think it's safe to declare the Ukraine invasion to be an almost complete shitshow, and we all know how well it went for stalin when he wholesale cleared out the best and brightest from the soviet military, the USSR lost some 18 million in WW2 because of stalin's personal incompetence/fundamental inability to work with others, putin seems to have just crippled his most potent military asset, not sure how this doesn't make russia's position even worse. The russians have huge supply problems (mostly they have nothing left to go around), while the Ukrainians have regular supply drops. If putin plays his hand poorly enough I could see him not only losing this war, but losing territory to Ukraine, to say nothing of russia's loss of standing in the region. It's like russia had it's small success in Georgia and decided to just stop spending money on it's military 'because it's good enough', they still had supplies from a decade before that foray iirc.
I loved how confused trump looked while trying to remember what to say about panama, did he have a few goes at it even and this was the best? He was almost vulnerable, because he was literally seeking approval, like a kid doing a presentation for a teacher.
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I'm more of a paper pusher type myself, but I wouldn't say you're hitting a non-valid target if you target a propagandist, they are usually working very hard to make situations worse, making them often more of a problem than a thousand soldiers, and capable of causing more deaths than those troops as well. It was eventually decided that if you weren't personally shoving people into gas chambers you could still be held personally responsible for those actions if you made the scenario possible in some meaningful way, a propagandist is the same thing IMHO. If you're that big a part of the problem, you're a reasonable target.
I would go so far as to say that functionally no conservatives actually have sufficient empathy to actually care about the Iranian people, they just hold the inexplicably bitter grudge over the overthrow of the Shah. It makes very little sense, but Americans lost a fair bit of money/clout when that happened, so they care about regime change and use the guise of caring about the human rights situation while they give literally no shits about the US's human rights disasters.
I cannot believe that Biden made nice with the saudis, he had literally everything to gain by acting tough with them and making a pivot toward non-saudi oil, a thing the US can just do on a whim, the US depends on Canada much more iirc, and Canada has massive untapped reserves that probably could be made similarly green to the saudi fields (and have less risks from shipping it, since you're not using tankers you'd just use pipelines), all while allowing the US to buy oil from a country that has a much milder human rights record (as long as you don't ask the Natives I suppose). The US depends on the saudis for reasons that are ironically not very clear, they want the saudis to dump oil on the global market, but there is actually no incentive to keep depending on oil period from a national perspective, let alone pretend that only the saudis can dump oil. Anyways, mbs chose putin's hairy butt over Biden's, they very much picked a side and should face consequences for that. Throw a fucking embargo on the saudis for awhile maybe instead of just russia? If you think we'll suffer from a lack of trade with them, they'll literally just die, saying 'we have more leverage' is WILDLY understating the real situation. Let them import russian foodstuff, maybe they can trade them, you know, oil that russia already is desperately dumping on the global market because they can produce probably a magnitude more oil than they actually need/use, that'll be great, maybe mbs can trade some saudi oil to the russians for some of the weapons they are already so short of that they're buying from anyone that will sell to them, including Iran and north korea.
I laughed my ass off when I found out that even pretty conservative economists were openly disgusted by the new British PM's batshit plan to cut taxes on the rich (an action that mostly inflates the stock market we now know, based on what happened in the US, the relative wealth of the rich skyrocketed in large part because of the stock market being vigorously fluffed by money that it's possessors literally had no other use for, and the rich own all the stocks), that was not a good plan and she should be pretty embarrassed by it's reception, even if she honestly doesn't understand why giving the rich more money when the poor are desperate is, technically speaking, the dumbest solution to the problem of wealth inequality. It's having a math problem of adding together two handfuls of peanuts and somehow ending up with a grapefruit, I'm not sure how a human brain manages to get that result to a simple question. It's fundamentally inexplicable, the kind of stupid you'd expect from an American animated comedy show. I feel that she needs to have already resigned somehow, or maybe have just not put her name in the hat?
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The way I put Hu vs Xi is that Hu believed in the power of a committee to reach a useful (and probably better on a consistent enough basis to be statistically significant) conclusion/solution to a problem, while Xi is more interested in centralizing power. I'm pretty sure that Hu was a more successful leader, even if you ignore Covid, Xi just keep centralizing power more so he's more and more free of consequence, but the big reason Hu was a better leader for China was that Hu was better at trade and improving China's standing, Xi is increasingly coming across as a bully and interventionist/supporter of interventions like Ukraine. I think Xi is much more likely to get into a war with India and/or Pakistan, also Taiwan or Japan or Russia (because maybe China doesn't want to keep paying for resources, this would happen very swiftly if the West felt the need to 'intervene' in Ukraine and institute regime change in Russia (which would seem reasonable if Russia got more nuke-happy). Xi just seems so, so much more insecure than Hu, Hu didn't need to posture constantly.
It's openly horrifying how soft even Biden has been with the saudis, they are 100% willing to tank the US economy for their amusement/benefit, as we're witnessing *again*, and once again the response is to kiss butt, not kick butt. There are other sources of energy, boycott saudi oil maybe, like the US does with iran? The US doesn't buy from them directly very much, but they affect the global supply which affects global price. I still say the solution to saudi arabia is a combination of developing Canadian oil as cleanly as possible (...yeah) and use that to develop green infrastructure to truncate future CO2 emissions. If the US used it's clout to discourage allies (the US still has a few that matter) from buying it as well.
Yeah, bolsanaro IIRC also supports just removing (however) any Natives living in that forest they want to replace with soybeans/corn, in addition to the horrors he is all but demanding of his supporters to feed the industrialist overlords that hold his leash.
I'm honestly at a loss at this point how someone can look at someone like thatcher and see that as a big success story, economic or otherwise, it seems rightwing leaders merely have to not kill everyone off to have been 'a pretty great leader', I have no idea how people just unconsciously lower their standards for them, but they certainly do. It makes me think of reagan, who was essentially incompetent (legally speaking, not just colloquially, that standard he likely met when he was first elected) by the time he left office, gets huge passes despite staggering levels of corruption and even war crimes/supporting the commission of war crimes, which should probably be treated similarly, he also didn't have a thriving economy compared to some famous (relatively) leftwing presidents, who get zero credit for their success. Yeah, I just read a smidgen of a summary, it suggests that thatcher was fairly indifferent in regards to the economy, while also keeping suffering high due to things like unemployment, which apparently was high (during a period of high inflation, meaning most workers were making less all the time). I wish we'd all stop huffing chemicals and wake up to the fact that we seem to have a pre-programmed bias to be conservative, it's like becoming a liberal, or god forbid, a progressive, is a process of change and growth, this would obviously explain why conservatives want to tank the education system (and make university 'just for the elites'), as long as their is a heavy conservative leaning propaganda that is most mainstream media in the US the masses will just gravitate towards their doom.
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I'd be shocked if belarus joined this war, the morale for those troops would be painfully low, even russian troops would rather do anything else, I feel like we're not far from mass surrenders if they keep sending troops in without guns, training or supplies, they'll just surrender because Ukraine isn't run by psychopathic monsters that will torture them for the heck of it.
I feel like there might be a difference between 'offensive vs defensive' weapons in this war, but if russia is going to freely target civilians, we have to let the Ukrainians defend themselves better, and part of that defense is probably longer range strikes to russia to further cripple it's war effort. We're at the point where the US is going to have to make clear to russia that use of nukes will result in a military disaster for russia, there would be no impunity for putin, especially with huge swathes of the nukes being outdated if not completely defective, the biggest hassle would be knowing which nukes you need to address from their arsenal, with most likely not working. The putin regime hasn't actually been funding the military in the lead up to this, that's how incompetent the russians are in this conflict, they went into a war of aggression hopelessly unprepared and are being trounced, with the only remaining tools at their disposal when this troop surge does nothing is the nukes that will result in putin being removed from office by force. It's such a shit show, and I can't really see it getting better, you can't really negotiate with a lunatic that murders Ukrainian families to try to boost his bitterly unhappy troops' morale, things are really dark for the russians, they were bad when they were winning, they're horrible now that they're in retreat. I wonder if russia would have dared invade a Ukraine that still had it's nuclear arsenal, I bet Ukraine got some great concessions when they gave those up! Whats that, just some BS? Wow, bad deal!
It was like they found the one person who was actually more incompetent and out of touch than old boris in liz, it is glorious watching the party that chose her because of her big tax cut plans now desperately arguing that these are terrible ideas, it's like a train wreck in slow motion full of people I won't really miss, these ghouls thought it was a good time to cut taxes on the rich when the government was badly strapped for cash, taking even less of the money from people who don't actually notice taxes in terms of lifestyle. It's just astounding the levels of hypocrisy coming out of these conservatives.
As to risking offending the saudis, wake up, they did 9/11, why are you worried about offending your enemy? They literally sided with russia in this conflict, when russia not only invaded a peaceful neighbor, it has committed atrocities while doing it... I suppose the saudis are fine with both of those things, they have no qualms about intervening in their neighbor's business. Also, that moron needs to read some history books, the map of the middle east was pretty much made by Europeans for their own convenience, they put who they wanted in power wherever it was convenient.
Much as I hate to say it, trump was a jackass but he didn't launch two unprovoked invasions of countries that are thousands of miles away (and filled with a very hostile populace), those were blunders that were arguably even worse than anything trump did (either of those is worse than anything he did arguably). The kicker is that bush probably pushed the button on those invasions because of his advisors, in contrast with trump who didn't invade anywhere because people were able to confuse/distract/lie to him until he forgot what he was talking/thinking about, trump would have been much worse but for his advisors (who were also very bad, just not as bad/stupid as trump). I do remember posting on a shithole online forum, arguing with a right winger and she brought up shells of mustard gas as proof that Iraq did in fact have WMDs. Even then they were not arguing in good faith.
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The core nugget keeping peace from coming to pass between the Palestinians and israel is that israel has the upper hand and only makes efforts to gain impunity, and to achieve 'peace' through that impunity (which means giving up nothing, that the Palestinians capitulate further). The israelis listen to the right wing too much, and the only peace a right winger can understand is a terrorized opposition or a dead one, and that doesn't actually work as a strategy in the real world, so it keeps failing. The israelis keep having these 'freak-out' moments when the Palestinians inform them they don't have complete impunity, and can still lose citizens (that said, this conflict is so asymmetrical that wildly more Palestinians will be dying). Their are elements of 2 children who are fighting and each wants to get the last hit in, but one of the kids is 17 and 6 ft tall, and the other is a 4'6 12 year old, it's not a fair fight, and the near-adult party that you'd expect would know better than to keep going just keeps going full steam.
This new mess has huge 'Oh no, now we have to step up the oppression of the Palestinians!' energy, and it honestly makes me extremely suspicious of who exactly was getting anything out of this? It seems to be impossible for israel to have missed this entire operation (seems is a strong word, I'd say it is impossible period), but it does seem really interesting that this happens when the deeply corrupt leader of israel is dealing with bad press/an angry populace, not unlike how bush Jr was only a 2 term president because of 9/11 (he'd have been laughed out of office after one term without the two stupid wars he started to keep power) I suspect this wasn't entirely a surprise to bibi, just like 9/11 wasn't entirely a surprise to the bush admin, and I suspect both were quite willing to let them happen (if they didn't actively contribute) because they would be politically radioactive for the left paradoxically (when you create chaos, it helps right wing parties, meaning right wing parties have immense incentives to cause chaos). Too many brackets, and too many conspiracy theories, but this attack has incredibly bad juju and I worry that 10-20 years later the other shoe will drop. Still, I think the person who had the biggest smile after this attack was bibi himself, he now has carte blanche to react as he sees fit.
I have to say it's a weird angle to say that israel has no responsibility for this, self defense is a thing, if you hit me I have a right to swing back with even more force (assuming I am able), within reason. I think an adult should be able to say that what hamas did was awful, but what israel has been doing for decades was much, much worse. This is very much a 'kick a hornet's nest, get stung' territory at a certain point, they've been inhumanely brutal towards the Palestinians and the US has done everything it can to enable them.
Can somebody give biden a history book about the American Revolution??? You guys were terrorists overthrowing a legitimate government by the standards of the time, you don't get to say 'we weren't terrorists because we won'. Terrorism is bad, but saying it's never okay is pro-establishment horseshit, and it's staggering hypocrisy from a country that funded countless terrorists through the world to overthrow democracies and anything resembling socialism to have it's president say shit like this. Stuff like this is why I argue the US is, in truth, a fascist state that relies on an staggeringly thorough propaganda network that enables the US to commit atrocities as it sees fit, both on it's own citizens (see the police brutality when people tried to argue that Black Lives Matter, apparently the police vociferously disagreed).
I'm really glad you brought up that 1000:1 ratio for a prisoner exchange, the israeli right doesn't really recognize the right of Palestinians to exist, as such they would embrace such an opportunity to insult the Palestinians by publicly showing that hundreds of them aren't worth 1 israeli. This same philosophy plays into the extreme reactions from israeli, as any israeli hurt, killed or even inconvenienced deserves to have Palestinian blood drawn on their behalf, so a response is always needed, and it's always bloody. This is also why they seek out some sort of magical impunity (be it the dome, or a so thoroughly oppressed Palestinian state that it won't keep fighting, or something else), the right promises it over and over because it appeals to the dull among the populace who don't understand how reality works, but those promises only have appeal if the bogeyman can still qualify as a danger.
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I'm not surprised to hear that israel is pretty willing to commit more war crimes, but it is unfortunate. If I was israel, I'd be concerned about the flanks, because when you murder a bunch of Arab civilians, you are going to agitate your Arab neighbors. I think I agree that israel needed to have some manner of reaction to this, but it's hard to see how this served anything. If you ask me the solution (if they wanted good results) was to root out hamas with their vaunted intelligence forced over a decade or so. It isn't a secret that the US military has had remarkably little luck in achieving foreign policy goals, but the cia has an embarrassingly good one for efficiency and effectiveness. Treating hamas like a state's army is insane in the context of what it truly is, you don't tackle a fly with a bazooka, even if it's a malaria mosquito that could ruin your life, it's just not how you deal with the problem for a variety of reasons.
The only good thing about kissinger is the Monty Python song about him. Worth a listen iirc, but I haven't heard it for awhile. I think I have their song book kicking around, it was in there I think.
I wouldn't be shocked if there was an interest in getting iran as irate as possible, hence the double dealing. The deep state still harbors fantasies of violently confronting iran, so it's something that has to be watched out for with republicans somehow remaining (somewhat) electable party, the political arm of the conservative deep state, if they gain power you can expect them to antagonize iran further.
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It's been fascinating watching the US not just drop the ball in regards to African development opportunities, they keep throwing the balls at people, only the balls are bricks. It's insane that any country in Africa would look at the ongoing disaster that is the russians and say 'that's the side we want to be on!', it's giving me serious 'how did the brits ever conquer India if India had more money, soldiers, and was relatively advanced?'. The answer IMHO is that the Indians were too oppressive of their own people, India was so wealthy that if it paid it's poor fairly there would have been zero chance of the British making inroads via bribes and promises, the misery the powerful created resulted in the downfall of their nation (and you could morbidly argue that the oppressed's willingness to be oppressed resulted in them being oppressed truly horrifying ways by the british, if they had fought for better treatment from their native overlords they wouldn't have fallen to the brits). Anyways, the US had the money, power and endless time to make progress in Africa and they instead invaded random countries, and both ended in disaster. Are the coup leaders also asking china for resources? I know they used to dump relatively large amounts of resources (compared to what other countries were spending anyways, not large compared to the needs of the people) in Africa, maybe I missed it? In terms of disposable income, you can't compare russia and china in any sane way, one is a sprawling yet sparsely populated country that depends almost entirely on primary industry, the other has 1/6th of the world's pop roughly, with a huge diaspora, and is either the number one or number economy in the world, the chinese might fluff their numbers, but I'm confident the americans do too.
Seriously, I wish more people would have pointed out that the 'duterte method' was just murder whomever is inconvenient and then make up some shit about drugs. When you have extra-judicial killings that also have no follow up there are going to be endless abuses. The especially messed up part is that the country then elects the son of it's most corrupt leader, not really sure how you fix the effects of colonization's deliberate infantilization of the populace, but I sure hope we do, because we're turning the poor into something closer to colonial subjects, people who have no political power or influence, and who's labor does not benefit them very much, who are deliberately infantilized to make them easier to manipulate. The education system is literally being turned into a right wing indoctrination process by more than half US states, while even in blue states there is staggering corruption in the education system, look at schools in poor areas vs in wealthy ones, neither party seems to want the general public to be able to think critically, and those reasons are certainly not good.
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Ugh, the nazis were terrible and all, but they weren't unique in history in their horrors, just that they had access to modern tech while doing it. The West completely depopulated North America and Australia for example, and for centuries was enslaving wave after wave of African slaves through extreme brutality, in order to feed their backwards economy. Racism is associated with psychopathy for some reason, but racialized nationalism has been a thing since the Renaissance iirc, when we invented the modern concept of racism pretty much whole cloth.
I think it's a very important thing to note that the right makes a habit out of defanging the word nazi, in part by accusing progressives of being 'the real nazis', if you can pretend that the opposite of something is that thing then you've made that word mean nothing IMHO, and the modern right wing really wants to bring back nazism in a huge way.
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The weird thing about Canada's conservative party is that it's run by people who are pretty far right, only to perennially struggle to market leaders that would be right of many presidential candidates in the US, even with your pretty far right window atm. Canada's present conservative loon is actively parroting American conservative talking points, this despite the fact that most conservatives lose elections for being too socially conservative (because we also have the 'cult of the right', where all economic problems are caused by leftists, and all solutions come from right wing 'free thinkers' who are unbound by pesky morality and ethics. It's stupid but it works unfortunately, even a further left country like Canada). I'm not sure if Trudeau wins the next election, but if the conservatives wanted to win they sure didn't show it by putting up a guy who looks like he's a scrawnier nerd cosplaying meatball ron, more noodle than meatball, I think when poilievre has to stand next to Trudeau the staggering charisma deficit of the conservative makes it hard to take him seriously as a candidate, why didn't the conservatives just paint a face on a mop and run that instead? At least it wouldn't put both feet in it's mouth almost daily.
I could be wrong but I don't normally see a bunch of indian people on here? Clearly some real 'roots' on that grass, just out of this world! Everyone who has more than 2 brain cells to rub together can see modi is a fascist and hindu nationalist, neither of those things are good or remotely defensible. If it was left up to him he would be allowed to exterminate all minorities in india, and it's probably only a matter of time before he tries (there are genocides going on in india right now). I read modi for shit when he kept fucking over the farmers, nice to know that I was very right. Also, 'no proof'??? Are you guys on crack? Nobody is going to tell their proof to the public, only a disingenuous turd would make such a bad faith argument.
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You have to give credit to the cons for having figured out that nobody anywhere near 18 is going to vote for them, so they might as well embrace this fact and openly screw over young people to win the vote of the elderly. Also, this idea is literally bringing back the PREVIOUS system of 'paying your taxes', which was generally in goods or services rendered, this is supposedly one of the reasons old rulers used to build lots of monuments/megaprojects, it was hard to find enough stuff for your citizens to do when it wasn't time to farm, and if you didn't keep them REALLY busy they'd revolt and murder you horribly... So yeah, I guess this does seem very apropos for sunak, to bring back ancient pyramid era ideas to avoid making the rich pay taxes (it's just a scam to get free labor because they keep trying to push their stupid austerity). It is pretty rich irony though, the elderly are draining more resources than the system can tolerate (without taxing the rich anyways), and the 'solution' to conservatives is to make the young pay for the difference because young people don't usually vote.
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I'm a little curious if the general/complete lack of respect the US showed Canada (including blaming 9/11 on our border security, without evidence, remember that?) immediately before, during, and after 9/11 played a role in us sitting out iraq? We had no hesitation about invading afghanistan without cause, but iraq, the much easier to invade country, was too big of an ask apparently. It always seemed a bit odd, especially since the US didn't need large troop commitments, they were VERY happy to trumpet tiny contingents as the 'coalition of the willing', everyone knew the overwhelming majority of troops/equipment was American, and that everyone else was there for the symbolic enabling.
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Pretty sure the whole thing is just a scam to distract us from the world dying around us. The US makes up shit about 'other counties aren't going to do their part!' while the US is the richest country and has produced an ungodly amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (and is still dumping more than other countries by leaps and bounds, especially per capita), the US could have solved climate change by itself in the 90s, instead we get the same lines. The US isn't unique on this, most of the world is deeply full of shit when it comes to environment protection, and the more money and power you have the more full of shit you end up being, in part because the people who end up with stupid amounts of money are the greediest and most selfish pieces of shit you can imagine, meaning the people who have the power to change things would rather just condemn our world to uninhabitability 'because someone will solve it later'. Well, it's later and we're no closer to solutions, and the world is past the point of being able to manage climate change due to the great northern bogs and forests finally thawing out and rotting away, even if we literally released no more CO2 as a species the balance has already shifted.
There will never be progress until stuff like COP stops letting oil money in, this includes not letting OPEC and allied countries host. What we have now is a counterproductive game of charades that only keeps us distracted from solving actual problems. Literally doing nothing would actually be better, because then people would know that literally nothing is being done, this misleads people into thinking the issue is being dealt with.
There is no reason to believe that carbon capture via machinery will ever be meaningful, it's another of those distractions from actually solving the problem of releasing too much greenhouse gas. AFAIK all of the attempts to make this into a tech have been unmitigated disasters, wasting both money and usually producing more CO2 than they got rid of, because the idea is fundamentally a bad one.
Heads up, if you have a non-binding commitment from an entity, you have absolutely nothing. Any and all climate 'commitments' mean less than the fart of an single ant, they are ephemeral as wet tissue paper.
Complaining about chinese coal plants when the US is still subsidizing dirty energy as a policy (and actively hindering the adoption of clean energy) is a very bad look, it's like a kid arguing they can't clean their room because their sibling's room is a mess. The US is the world's paramount wasters of resources, the next biggest polluter (or worse, it really depends who you ask, it's like how the US doesn't have a corruption problem if you ask American politicians and media, but it clearly does), china, is more open to green energy than the US. Interestingly enough both the US and china can be the problem together, and both use each other as an excuse to do less (or nothing at all in most cases).
I know Kerry is clearly trying, but for the love of God, the answer isn't 'more capitalism!', it's turning our backs on the entire philosophy the US embraced when it rose up against the brits (when they didn't want to pay their taxes). Selfishness is a terrible tool when you're trying to solve complex problems, and people keep insisting that it's through our selfishness alone that we'll find the Magic Bullet to solve all our climate problems. It's magical thinking, but our species is notorious for this when it runs out of solutions, it just assumes God will solve the problems/they'll just go away. If we don't stop being capitalist our species is doomed, be it now or tomorrow.
Anyone looking to the youth for a solution (to anything other than issues that solely impact youths, ) should be, and I think this is how the youngs say it, 'yeeted' directly into the sun, hopefully while screaming. Don't ask the powerless to solve the problems the powerful are making for their own profit, our masses need to find their pride again (if you doubt people have lost it then you don't know why fascism is resurging everywhere). You're lucky if your kid is remotely useful, I was almost completely useless until I was into my 30s, I played a lot of video games and I managed to be REALLY BAD at them still, I shudder to think what kind of worker I'd have been. Counting on 'the kids' is insane enough that people saying it out loud should be asked if they're off their meds again. It's 100% the people who have power that need to use it to make things better, not just for their own pleasure.
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I'm pretty sure you guys chose to lose the American Revolution, the Brits could have raised an army that would have outnumbered the colony's total population, they didn't because the 13 colonies were almost completely worthless at the time, they were bumpkin country that couldn't grow sugar. The goods it had could be traded for at a considerable advantage because they weren't high demand or high quality. The Canadas were seen as more valuable because of the fur trade fwiw, the US has been enabled from day 1 Nish, the US has won a shockingly small number of wars without foreign assistance (read basically none? I mean, Spain after it was already done in by massive corruption maybe?), and lost an embarrassingly large number of them even WITH that assistance. It's been noted that trump is the poster child of American entitlement, but you could also argue that no president has better represented how that country actually works, where those born rich rule, and it doesn't matter how dumb or useless the rich moron is, he's still celebrated.
Conservatives indeed want the situation to get worse almost everywhere, that's because people who are stressed become more paranoid, and paranoid people vote for conservative populists. Screwing up the country is an easy button for the far right.
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When I've accidentally stepped on my cat they always run away for awhile, but tend to quickly forgive, same with sitting on them. I think I feel worse than they do, especially since cats seem to want to be underfoot (at least if they haven't been stepped on for a bit). I find cats are more bothered by self-destructive behavior in their human, I think it's the same reason they try to stand right where you're about to step, they have a stronger connection to their person than a dog does. The only time I really worry about cats is if they are kittens (and stepping on them would be pretty bad!), but I was worried I'd kill my cat when the hammock I was on (with the small cat on my chest) flipped, fortunately I could catch myself and didn't squish the poor guy! As an adult, I would like to point out that your cat is, if healthy and strong, probably quite a bit tougher than you, I've had to remove wolf worms from kittens, and even kittens are pretty calm while you're working, and all but one recovered quite quickly and well (the first one we didn't know what was going on and caught it too late I think). Obviously be careful with your cat (they have vulnerabilities for sure, and need to be in great shape to survive), but they are tough critters in my experience. Part of why cats are so athletic is their high pain tolerance, they can exert their muscles much more severely than humans, so if your cat isn't very athletic, keep in mind it's probably not as durable.
If you want to hear a crazy cat story, when my dad was very young, his family had a cat that liked him, and eventually the cat got pregnant (and somehow nobody really noticed). When the cat's time came, she had her kittens on his bed, while he was sleeping. My oma wasn't happy to have to deal with the remaining mess, but it's an awful cute story.
My two siblings (and my mother) are very musical, and we lived in a townhouse in the city while growing up (so my siblings could attend a much better funded school, we moved after they were done), and after our long time next-door neighbor moved out, we kept having new neighbors move in... something about having an upright grand piano on the attached wall (with 3 people who played pretty much daily), a baritone player (almost daily), and a trombone player who probably practiced ~3 hours a day made people move out! Go figure. I suspect you could hear the trombone in the house next to our neighbor (if you think a saxophone is loud, a trombone is much, much louder). Oh, and when they weren't practicing, they would listen to loud classical music on decent stereos! Can't leave that out...
It will never not bother me when we don't treat awful people openly horribly. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity I think, if someone is a violent offender you are not ever going to get them to stop by just telling them not to. If there aren't really horrible consequences for actual evil people they will just 'do what feels right', which is to commit crimes. My issue is actually that the people who deserve to face consequences the most face the least (the rich who commit crimes with impunity by and large), and that increasing consequences will not cause their to be consequences for the actual bad actors; in our society consequences are for the poor/minorities, not for rich people who want to have fun abusing poor. In my experience, the only people who learn from receiving kindness are people who are kind deep down. It never ceases to amaze me when progressives argue 'their aren't evil people', because holy shit we're ALL BORN EVIL... Kids are fucking horrors, and it's consequences that cause them to grow up and stop being trump-esque (yep, I'm saying that if trump's cooler older brother had been encouraged to dump more stuff on his stupid little head he'd have grown up smarter and better, you get someone as useless as trump when they don't have consequences for wrong choices). Ultimately I don't know what the solution is, which I think means I've probably gotten a decent grasp on the problem, such that I don't think there is an easy, simple solution, and that's because society has made this into a paradox in order to protect the establishment... we need punishment/re-education/to isolate dangerous people from society, yet any attempt to use these results in all of these consequences falling on scapegoats instead of the those who deserve them, short of changing society into one that believes everyone is equal... take a look at how well having consequences for celebrities has gone, about 1/3 of the world's population is approaching 'eat their own face to 'treat' their insanity' as their conservative brains require them to defend awful people without admitting that the only reason they support those individuals is because they are abusers. It doesn't help that almost all media is owned by conservative assholes, which is why conservative politicians have their scandals ignored or quickly swept under the rug. Their was a shitty clip of that dipshit newt on Pod Save America, and in it he (hypocritically) argued that it wasn't appropriate to ask him about cheating on his wife after he made a huge circus out of the clintons (bill is awful and always was, but newt is a true bottom feeder), and when the moderator had this fae pushback to his reasonable question he just folds like a chump, the whole thing is 100% a question newt was warned about and prepared for, that's why he had a snappy (and stupid) answer ready, and that's why the mod didn't push back, because that was what his job was, set up a t-ball so newt didn't have to look bad because he's a feckless roach. Conservative controlled media is a dumpster fire, that's why I still get endless (obvious scam btw) gambling ads whenever I watch your vids, this isn't what youtube wants me to watch apparently. I cannot wait until we have some laws about these gambling ads, but that won't affect the web.
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We almost always boil eggs by the dozen, if I'm working hard I'll often eat several for lunch. I used to boil 3 at a time when I lived alone, so I could bring them to eat, boiling one seems like going for a hair cut and only trimming 1/12th of your hair!
I usually like to carry some cash, but you shouldn't carry more than a small % of your total cash assets, unless you're a pimp, they need to carry a bill roll iirc. Wait, is Coco a pimp!?
It's a bit of a moot/dumb point, but I think it's worth remembering that the colonial powers did not need explicit slavery to exploit a local economy completely, the real issue was that they restricted those countries ability to invest in their own infrastructure/future, as well as restrict very heavily all trade that wasn't with the parent country. I suppose I shouldn't leave out that the colonial powers also made a point of playing the subgroups of their colonies against one another, not unlike how the modern right uses racism among the poor to further empower the wealthy, borders were deliberately set up so the locals would always have an 'other' to hate, as well as the horrific brutality designed to traumatize whole cultures for centuries. Those things resulted in brutally stunted economies that by definition cannot ever catch up to their former colonial oppressors. People seem to forget that one of the reasons we got rid of slavery was that it's an economic depressant, mostly because you have a large number of workers who aren't consumers (that you have to provide for btw, you can literally pay people sub-starvation wages under post-slavery capitalism because it's the workers problem that they're too hungry to work, the capitalist can just find newer, more desperate workers), with that extra wealth being piled into the coffers of the already wealthy, were it is never used for consumption, meaning it's economically non-existent. Ironically, as capitalism got more and more exploitative, the workers couldn't continue to consume without going into debt, hence the massive debt crisis as workers struggle to maintain their standard of living. As wealth continues to disappear into the coffers of the ultra-wealthy it is happening again, the solution the right in the US has is to move back towards slavery step by step, ignoring that doing so has been killing their economy since the 60s, when it was unthreatened in it's global hegemony. Arguably the US economy has never recovered from the incompetence of regan's 'feed the rich/starve the poor' policies, it's infrastructure is now badly outdated/crumbling and the government is simply too poor to rebuild because of tax cuts to the rich. I remember hearing about the spongey concrete issue in the UK, so I guess you guys have similar concerns, since you also don't tax your ultra-wealthy enough.
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