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.
Foreign wives have thousands of years of history and have birthed such great nations as Iceland.
Are you referring to the Celtic slaves the Norse brought with them during the settlement period? (My country doesn't get brought up much here, so I feel compelled to talk about this)
This is a hotly contested subject in Iceland. It's definitely true that a lot of Celtic women contributed to the gene pool during the settlement era (estimates as far as percentages go are all over the place), but the flow of Celts to Iceland had pretty much completely stopped by the end of the 10th century and Iceland spent the next ~800 years in desperate squalor that regularly shocked foreign visitors.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
One Anglo-Saxon custom suggests the level of thought about children in earliest times. Thrupp says: “It was customary when it was wished to retain legal testimony of any ceremony, to have it witnessed by children, who then and there were flogged with unusual severity; which it was sup-posed would give additional weight to any evidence of the proceedings.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
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
I would focus my efforts on substantially increasing the country's housing stock and limit immigration to mostly construction workers.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
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.
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
The US blowing up Nordstream has always struck me as an extraordinarily risky gambit. There may be an economic motive, but if it were uncovered that the US is directly responsible for acts of terrorism on critical infrastructure in the heart of Europe, the diplomatic fallout would certainly outweigh whatever the US would make from the added natural gas exports.
Granted, I don't know how risk-tolerant the US covert-operations apparatus is. I also didn't think Putin would invade Ukraine.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
Were coal workers in the UK living it up
This era pulled most of the British population out of the rural subsistence poverty that the rest of the world was mired in, so yes.
Look at what happened with Rome
What typically didn't happen in Rome is their population being killed and enslaved on a massive scale by a stronger neighbor, because there was none. Although later on I'm sure there were complacent Romans talking about how they should just ignore the rest of the world while Attila the Hun was ravaging their borderlands again because there wasn't enough gold in the treasury to bribe him away for the seventh time.
It's absurd on the face of it to argue that being the top dog is somehow "not beneficial" to you.
Yes, being powerful is good. Being weak is bad.
To get into some specifics, even if the US were entirely self-sufficient (it isn't), the amount of inflation the US exports to the rest of the world through the dollar's status as the global reserve currency is hard to overstate. That's one of many things.
The US has limited resources so needs to use them wisely.
Any true threat to US interests in the current geopolitical environment is always going to involve Russia, either directly or indirectly through supporting China. Taking an easy opportunity to weaken the Russian military is not just wise, it's a no-brainer on a silver platter.
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.
she is a traditional third wave feminist
This might be nitpicking, but I've always understood TERFs as being perceived as a second-wave holdout that survived the post-90s intersectionalization of the movement (that being the third wave).
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
The Winter War is in my opinion a very good example of a Pyrrhic victory.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important
There is no way a European country of 40 million people can ever be considered "not particularly important" by the Europeans at the very least. It's also of great importance to the countries outside of Europe that used to import Ukraine's food, nevermind the untapped gas reserves that could go a long way towards replacing Europe's imports from Russia. All the fuzz around Ukraine is very much justified.
It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory'
This invasion is the third domino after Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. What is there to doubt?
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.
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.
No it’s the migrants’ choice.
No it's not. Migrants choose to go to countries (through the asylum route) where they're unlikely to be deported (government policy) and where they're allowed to get into a benefits program and/or the job market (also government policy). It is entirely a government's choice to receive them, and a choice that EU countries are in fact free to not make, i.e. Denmark ever since their Social Democrats took power.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
will have to cope with millions of African/South Asian/Middle Eastern immigrants
Ukraine will? What on Earth are you talking about?
Look up the demographics of any former Iron-Curtain country in the EU and see if you can find even one whose current population born in those region breaches a single percentage point.
This is entirely a choice of national governments, not the EU.
I sometimes wonder to what extent our perceived lack of intelligence in animals is just a communication issue. A feral human raised by orangutans probably wouldn't seem especially smart, but there's a ton of potential locked behind the language barrier.
I don't expect a dolphin could become a nuclear physicist, but I seriously wonder if we could teach it to count to ten thousand if we could figure out a way to expand their vocabulary a little to introduce some new concepts.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
2yr 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.
The fact that these AI models keep getting leaked is giving me a lot of hope for the future. Stable Diffusion was great, now I'm anxiously waiting for an LLM-equivalent that I can run locally.
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