DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
Can someone explain to me why this has turned into such a legal issue?
The state issued these loans that Biden is attempting to forgive, did it not? I would've thought it would go without saying that the state would then also have the power to forgive them. It's not like debt forgiveness isn't something countries don't routinely engage in, so this whole thing has left me perplexed.
The "extreme" way to read this slogan is that the extremely rich should be killed, in which case your indignation would be justified.
The reading that extremely rich people should have their wealth "forcefully expropriated" (AKA taxed) is a position I would consider moderate, and perfectly reasonable in societies with a high enough level of economic inequality.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Yes, thank you!
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If we end up like the Greeks in Turkey or the Greeks in Lebanon, there is no recovering.
Or like the Germans in Königsberg? Russia is one of the worst offenders in this respect.
This is nonsense and you completely lack perspective. I've never owned a car in my life, which is completely normal here, coming from a small European city.
If Russian resources sustain China for a long war or open up a second front in Europe, we have only ourselves to blame.
This comment read very much like something a committed offensive realist would write until you got to this point. All states allegedly are by their nature ruthless actors that will stop and nothing to advocate their own interests, but you, America, you have been a naughty boy and must get on your knees and welcome the whip to atone for your sins.
This is a masochistic perversion of offensive realism.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The only true pathway to peace for Ukraine is NATO accession, which requires defeating the Russians.
From this perspective, the US is absolutely seeking peace.
IIRC around 50k new comers
It's a good example because they're overwhelmingly not from those regions you thought Ukraine would have to cope with. Which is what I thought was your issue.
Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?
I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.
I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.
What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?
I see them as perhaps the most ideologically confused people on the spectrum today. They wear the cloak of socialism while extolling authoritarian dictatorships, their words are like those I'd expect from Soviet career-bureaucrats with the KGB breathing down their necks. Because what else could possibly keep all these self-contradictions together?
It's not just that I disagree with them, I don't get them. I get why a dedicated right-wing culture warrior in the US today might support Russia's invasion, their reasoning is at least coherent. The only way I can make sense of tankies doing the same is if their fundamental moral axiom is just "USA bad", but that seems excessively uncharitable.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Someone once wrote a post about sales being a bullshit job that spawned a lot of interesting economic discussion, which would be my pick. I'd appreciate if someone has a link to that, actually. It might have been KulakRevolt, although I'm not sure.
I wouldn't. When I was a kid and my parents took me to buy school accessories, I always went out of my way to find the least colorful and most boring-looking stuff on the shelf to avoid attention from my classmates.
Still today, my smartphone case is transparent-gray, and my keyboard RGB is off at all times.
Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.
There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.
Has peak oil come about yet?
This is only a half tongue-in-cheek response. I haven't been able to find exact numbers for 2022. Though I did find this, suggesting the 2019 peak is still unsurpassed.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
This reads to me like a nation-scale version of the broken window fallacy.
The Bulgarian perspective is that North Macedonia to them is a lot like what Moldova is to Romania, that is that it's an identity constructed in the past by a bigger power to strengthen their hold of the region.
Moldovans in general seem somewhat agreeable or at worst ambivalent towards the claim that they are Romanians, but the people of North Macedonia seem very invested in their new national identity. They've engaged in some weird historical revisionism over the years, and the Bulgarians have viewed this as a kind of erasure of Bulgarian history.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would argue (North) Macedonia. In opposition to Bulgaria rather than Greece.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.
Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.
I've spent some time now looking for the data, and it's quite a lot harder to parse than I expected. There's undeniably been a huge drop in the asylum flow, but the effects of the 2019 socdem crackdown are obscured by the natural drop from the absurd mid-2010s highs, Covid, and now Ukraine. Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.
As for the secret sauce... my pet theory is that when the socdem's focus shifted leading up to 2019, they were uniquely positioned as having neither the ideology nor the monetary incentives (socdems are generally not liked in the circles that benefit from cheap labor) propping up the migration-friendly stance of their government.
The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore.
Not true. Denmark's Social Democrats, of all people, pulled it off.
Talk about channeling Nixon going to China.
In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience).
Many of these are even written by women, with Bocchi the Rock being a recent prime example. Given that, I lean towards ideological distortion in media companies being the big culprit here.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Our ability to throw objects is unmatched in the animal kingdom, and it's not even close.
I don't think so either, I was responding to the poster claiming that "the forceful expropriation of wealth" is an extreme position when that's the expected behavior of every state since the dawn of civilization.
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