Palm oil can be bad for deforestation, but so is cattle farming (most forest clearing is for cattle grazing or cattle feed). There is certification around to source palm oil from outside recently cleared forests. In general, plant based diets will almost always beat animal products by a very significant margin.

The people of Iran are generally quite nice. I wouldn’t call the entire country a shithole just because its run by fundamentalists

Well it is nice to realise that despite putting in the work, it is a huge privilege to have the freedom to be born in a time and place where you actually get the chance to realise your potential - instead of having suffered abuse at home, being sent to a farm or factory at 8 years old or simply dieing from diarrhoea. So yeah, sucks if people want to be thankful to god for that, but being thankful for what good exists in the world is a positive thing.

All of those examples are things they know about through the press and social media. So either they chose not to believe the lying press, or they get the content moderated in such a way that it all sounds acceptable. The latter of course takes having sick values, but not as sick as you would expect based on the info you get about what is happening in the world.

Still, I get the sentiment, because for the first time it feels like his support is slipping among the core supporters too.

I think you’re being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there’s a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that “everyone” is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there’s a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of “efficient” capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.

I wish the Democrats would have a clear agenda on that. A few fundamental fixes to the system to prevent another decent into lawlessness (thins like elections on a Sunday, no corporate money in politics, strong demonopolisation, especially in media,…). But I haven’t seen anything “radical” from them yet.

That’s actually a quite condescending thing to say. And also not a surprise at all.

Sheer incompetence? Gives them the chance to propaganda away all the separate instances one at a time, rather than having a single huge pile of evidence once?

I was indeed not talking about the history of quality of life of the people, but about the way hard politics are organised. As far as I can tell, this has become even more centralised under Xi. When it comes to freedom of thought and expression of the people, I see as much reason for pessimism about recent evolution in the West (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), but I don’t see much reason for optimism when it comes to China. E.g. look how they are not even allowed to know their own history, or how independent thought in Hong Kong is being stuffed out. Lifting, what, 800 million people out of poverty is an impressive feat, and certainly holds a few lessons for laissez faire capitalists. Then again, large part of that poverty were self inflicted wounds. And that growth shouldn’t blind one for the immense cost at which it came, and the large challenges ahead to keep things afloat.

Still the same party in control, still the same way folks get selected for power. Not exactly comparable to a country losing a war, getting split in two, one adopting liberal democracy, the other a Soviet style communist system. And then later rejoining into a single country again.

Well it’s been that long that they went full circle again. I guess my age is showing (I’m a geriatric millennial). Until a decade ago, or maybe two, a successful AfD would have been unthinkable. Just goes to show how far off OPs comparison with Germany is.

Interesting comparison to Germany. As you may be aware, there was quite a significant change in government structure right around 1945. While yes - if new evidence from that period were to be released, it would indeed reflect poorly on Germany. But everyone would know it’s news from basically another country. Whereas in China nothing has changed when it comes to the structure of the nation. And they sure as hell did not go through a period of national mourning or apology to reflect on past mistakes.

I’m not behind our prime minister at all, but the core of what he’s saying is “we’ll only do this if we share the risks involved among the whole EU”. Given that no-one seems to be willing to do that, it would appear that he has a point that the risks are significant. I also heard him call the idea “theft”, which sounds crazy in the context we’re in. But then he’s talking about the practice of taking money from countries we’re not at war with, setting a bad precedent if you want to be a financial center for the world. That one’s a little far fetched, even without a formal declaration of war, Russia isn’t just a random country at this point we have a few issues with.

If only someone could invent a system where huge amounts of freight could be moved on something more durable than pavement. We can only dream of such technology of course.

I would assume they were happy to close the door behind them, when it comes to immigration. I think they did not expect their friends and family would be deported.

We’re talking about an Israeli, not a Jew. One who has a prominent role in the cultural life of that country. As a “liberal”, I would not have had an issue with questions being asked if some high profile Saudis were invited to a festival in October 2001.

It’s pretty immoral in the current day and age, but it is something that should be made (near) impossible with better regulation until it can be done with a reasonable carbon cost

General strikes worked in 19th century Europe. I think y’all might have it a little better then they did. More to the point: union memberships are used at the time of strikes exactly to break the cycle of not being able to protest for being too poor.

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