georgioz
14d ago
China doesn’t care about most of the rest of the world.
This is very inaccurate. China has so called Belt and Road initiative which is used to economically influence foreign nations. They have many projects including investing in ports, extraction of natural resources in Africa or influencing South America.
georgioz
14d ago
Depends on what you mean by theocracy.
I also see this term as well as "separation of church and state" as very confusing. After some deliberation looking into constitution of my country to me theocracy means that the power of government rests in religious institutions. As an example, if local archbishop or some religious council has power to unilaterally declare a new religious public holiday or enforce blasphemy laws, then it is theocracy.
However, this does not mean that people any society where religion has sway is automatically a theocracy. If local church preaches blasphemy laws and general public votes in religious leaders who establish such laws via structure like parliament then it is not a theocracy. To me it is sufficient to have differentiation between government and church structure, not that religious people cannot be part of government implementing their religious ideas.
Paradoxically this is often lost on many secular atheists, who deem anything not in line with their own secular ideology as theocracy. It is just a power move where they want to make secular atheism as reigning state religion preventing other ideas from establishing themselves.
georgioz
14d ago
I am not Romanian, but we do have paper ballots in Slovakia. And I theorized with my friends for how to possibly influence elections and it seems impossible to me. Some counterpoints to yours based on my own experience in voting comittee:
If you want to stuff ballot boxes without too many accomplices among election officials, hack the system to see who did not vote, plant a false vote and flip the variable next to non-voter name claiming they voted.
This is impossible. The elections are very decentralized, where election rooms are mostly at schools in specific classrooms with election committee consisting of people from various political parties. All eligible voters are automatically registered against their residency and are assigned their specific voting room. All voting is paper based and ballots are handed out against signature. All voting is limited to one day, often Saturday or Sunday with voting rooms closing at 10PM.
What happens next is that all ballots are manually counted with all voting committee members present and having full access to ballots to check them and count them on their own. Final tally is then phoned to central committee, ballot box is then sealed with signatures of all local voting committee participants and relocated by policemen. All participants can take photo of the final tally and they can find it on official government website after elections to check if there was something shady going on.
I am not sure if you are US citizen, but I cannot stress how fucking ridiculous and unsafe your elections are. I dare you to find some way of how to falsify Slovak parliamentary elections just to understand how stupid the voting in US is. The only thing I thought of was some psyop - like planting some free ballot boxes somewhere or maybe bribing some people to declare their own tally did not match in order to attack trust in the voting mechanism or maybe arson of couple of ballot boxes during election day. But I could not think of much more than that.
All these articles about "cranks" to me are just wordgames. Radical/progressive/woke left believes in their own conspiracy theories, the main one is what I call as universal leftist conspiracy - courtesy of James Lindsay. It is really simple:
There are two groups of people: purple and beige. Purple people have access to some special attribute or property - let's call it purpleness. Purple people use this property to oppress beige group. Purpleness also helps purple group to create and reproduce system of purpleness, which reproduces oppression over to the next generation. Liberation from oppression and true equity will only happen if we dismantle the system of purpleness.
This is the most simple and primitive form of conspiracy theory which you can apply to mainstream ideas that for some reason are not considered as low status conspiracies. Some examples:
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There are men and women. Men have access to male privilege which they use to oppress women. This system is called patriarchy and women will never be free unless we dismantle it.
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There are heterosexual people and the rest such as queer people. The former group has ability to define what is normal, they have access to heteronormativity which they use to oppress nonheterosexual people. We will not have true liberation until we will not dismantle it.
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There are white people and the rest, especially Black people. White people have access to whiteness to oppress other races. There can never be true equality until we will not dismantle white supremacy.
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There are capitalists and workers. Capitalists have access to capital and they exclude workers from access to it, reproducing the system of capitalism. There can never be true equality unless oppressed workers have access to means of production which is the first step to dismantle capitalism.
These are all the simplest and crudest forms of conspiracy theory which if applied to anything else would be identified as some uncouth theory only stupid people believe in. Except these conspiracies are high status so they are fine to utter even in a good society. This universal conspiracy can also be applied to many other popular leftist systematic conspiracies, just define new groups and systems of oppression be it handicapped people or fat people or tans people or many more. This type of "analysis" is in my opinion absolute farce, people who believe in these things can identify racism and sexism everywhere - from knitting to hiking. Which is the point - once you are woke to this systemic conspiracy thinking, then you will see sexism, racism and white supremacy even if you see somebody throwing a bugger from his car as he waits on a red light.
By domino strategy: take your own troops and conquer Korea. Take Korean troops and conquer China. Take Chinese troops and conquer the world. A strategy Genghis Khan also used quite successfully with many defections even of Han Chinese generals and troops into his army. Mongol invasions of Japan or Đại Việt were only minority "Mongol" armies with majority fielded by subjected nations,.
Maybe you reacted to dozens of "rude" cues of waiters who want to remove you from the table - after paying the tip of course - so they can sit down somebody else who will consume some more. If you ignore those hints, then the service can get really nasty. Try it sometimes.
Basically all the stereotypes about X or Y European culture being rude/unfriendly/etc. are false.
Interestingly enough, I have exactly the counter view of US culture, especially related to restaurant service. I find US waiters as rude. First they impose themselves upon me as if I care about their name or their stupid questions about where I am from or why am I in the US - as if I cannot tell that they don't give a shit. Then they constantly interrupt me and my friends with inane sales pitches - and if god forbid we go under some invisible sum of $spending per minute, then they actually slam the bill on the table and just kick me out as if I am some hobo. So much for friendliness. To me US waiters are bunch of fake stupid clowns putting on clownshow for US patrons, who for some reason like that shit.
Nevertheless despite this rant, I put up with it when I am overseas and act accordingly with fake smiles and everything - each country has its own thing and US people like their waiters to be clowns for some reason, it is what it is. I am not there to reeducate them about proper continental way of "invisible" manners of waiting staff. But it would be good to have some basic respect for other cultures as well and not take your own manners as the etalon everybody in the world should aspire to. For instance Japanese people are polite, they do not like to be touched and in general like their space. People in Brasil on the other hand love to touch each other, so if somebody comes to me and taps me on my back he means no disrespect or sexual assault or whatnot.
Women are subject to groupthink, but only on surface level. I think it is a strategy of conflict avoidance and reducing negative emotions. But privately they act differently. There are many examples regarding this, just remember the whole "man vs bear" kerfuffle, another example is when women rate each other's looks in public when they give huge bumps even to obviously hideous women. I heard a theory that this is evolutionary strategy, women are more vulnerable and therefore tend to be more "socialistic" for lack of better term - at least on the outside. But privately they are as aggressive and vicious as men especially in social environment, they just have to be careful not to be seen as such. Saying something out loud and then voting differently is prime example of such behavior, similar to being all smiley and warm toward another woman only to "carefully" badmouth her behind her back by using wannabe compliments in game of social status.
I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.
I think this is disingenuous way to describe the kerfuffle. It is not about a squirrel, it is so much more. The owner was treated as some kind of criminal, waiting for hours while government agencies raided his home as if he was some member of cartel or something. Also the squirrel we are talking about was a mascot of his nonprofit serving 300 other animals, it was quite famous minor social celebrity with many cute videos. There is so much packed into it besides a cute little squirrel getting killed, it is what its killing represents. There is so much you can read into this: the insane level of licensing, the fact that government probably spent thousands of dollars in mandays of agents investigating and killing some "random" squirrel. It is about facelessness of bureaucracy, where even blunders like these cannot be pinpointed and they just go away as if nothing happened
And it is also about media coverage, including comments like yours here. Which is now standard "why do you care so much about X" response. It is easy to throw back - if some stupid squirrel is so unimportant, why did government went so hard after it? You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it? If I grant you that it was just some stupid squirrel, then the person in charge of the raid should be automatically fired for mishandling public resources on such a stupid thing, right?
I agree ballot harvesting, among other things, is wrong and shouldn't be allowed, but you challenge the rules before hand, not after you lose. And before you tell me Trump was sounding the alarm on it, my memories of 2020 are that, yes he mentioned ballot harvesting here and there, but it was mainly about mail in fraud or fraud by the poll workers at the actual polls.
I am not a US citizen. I don’t care about Trump or Kamala or Obama or Bush or Gore. Your core election system is fucked, it allows for a fraud, which for sure played some role in tight Gore/Bush Florida election, where ballot machines somehow “missed” 61,000 votes, not even talking about other election shenanigans. Your whole political system is electorally suspect and thus illegitimate, no matter who benefits or rules.
I do still believe the Putin elections are shady. This is cause there is not really a big difference between Putin being able to rig it 30%, 40% or 50%, so the outcome is still controlled by him.
How is it controlled by him? Do you have any evidence of mass fraud outside of a few videos of soldiers peeking how people vote etc? Or is it that the whole system is rigged by holes, from selection of candidates, assasinations and assasination attempts to bullying of government workers, media system, espionage and the rest of it?
Again, from where I stand your whole electoral system is illegitimate. People do what the can, such as those supposedly 12% who supposedly voted against Putin. Who knows what are the real numbers and if fraud was “outcome-determinative”. The fact of illegitimate elections is “outcome-determinative” by itself.
The US doesn't have an explicit requirement to register your current address.
Neither is it so in Slovakia. You may move about in and out of the country, live decades elsewhere and that is fine. In fact it is a huge issue for major cities, that get portion of income tax of their residents for financing municipal activities. And they get nothing from people living there with official residency in other towns and villages. So they tie stuff like free parking places and other perks to official residency paperwork. But if you dont care, you can skip it.
The point is, that you will be registered voter based on the adress where you live in - for local or national elections. If you cannot be bothered to change the residency, then it is on you.
I can talk specifically about Slovakia or back then Czechoslovakia. The boomers born after WW2 reached their prime in 1970s, which was post 1968 invasion of Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia and period of so called Normalization. This was era of economic and cultural stagnation, purges, stifling cultural environment and disconnection of regular people from public life. Your career prospects were politically tied, there was feeling of ubiquitous demoralization and sclerosis in the system.
The issue, I think, either in the USA or in Eastern Europe isn’t that young people think Boomers had it so much better, it’s that Boomers apparently think that their grandchildren have the same opportunities that they did
The US vs Czechoslovak comparison of "opportunity" is absolutely off. Young people in Czech Republic or Slovakia now have much more opportunity than boomers had in 1975 Czechoslovakia. It goes beyond gadgets, we are talking about basic stuff ranging from opportunity to travel, opportunity to study what you want, even opportunity to buy something or even having long hairs at school or Lenin forbid - to go to the church. The cultural and social institutions in USA vs Czechoslovakia were almost as if from other planet.
What is interesting is that acknowledging that boomer pensioners have it tough is "common knowledge", that is why acceptance of boomer vs millennials theme is so interesting. It is part of common speak, even jokes. Let me tell you one from early 2000s that I find hilarious, dark humor is hallmark of tough times:
Do you know why a rat has four legs?
So it can get to the trash bin before a pensioner
Pensioners in Slovakia are the lowest of the low. Here is a 2022 article from Slovakia how 27% of our 1,1 million pensioners are living bellow the poverty line of EUR 424 a month, especially women as they live longer, had lower wages during their lives and their pension did not keep up with inflation. There is a reason for poor "babushka" or "babička" trope in Eastern Bloc, our seniors do not go for vacations to Mediterranean in their old Mercedes. Yeah, you can look at such an elderly women who romanticizes her youth, how fun it was to go with her "pioneer" friends from school to some socialist potato brigade and how happy she was. There is certain dignity to how many of them carry themselves despite their circumstances. But the truth rings different if you look at her way of living, actually having some kind of envy or resentment for how she has it so much better than you to me seems insane.
The way it works in Slovakia is that government knows your place of birth and that is where you are "automatically" assigned as a registered voter as soon as you turn 18. If you move your place of residence elsewhere, then it is on you to approach the government to get your residency papers in order so that you can be automatically reassigned for voting in this new place. If you know you are temporarily out of your city for voting, you can ask for special voter ID that enables you to be manually added to voting list elsewhere, you cannot just pop up in some random place, show your ID and vote. And despite all this, our most important elections have about the same turnout (68% in 2023 parliamentary elections) than let's say 66% for 2020 US presidential elections.
I guess this could be the same in USA. I suppose that if you get into the country legally, you get some kind of residency permit with some home address. In Slovakia, even homeless people have their residency officially marked just as the city/town where they live - there is a "default" government address, which also determines where they can go to vote.
Yes, there is a proof of "outcome-determinative fraud" - like for instance existence of ballot harvesting. If some person in my country of Slovakia came to the voting room with a bag full of ballots he "collected" and then tried to shove them into the official ballot box, that would be considered an election fraud and he would be arrested as an "outcome" by police that guards all the voting stations. So yes, your whole voting system is illegitimate and fraudulent as it allows unhinged voting practices, you are a banana republic.
But I will give you a benefit of doubt. Just as a thought exercise - please give me an analysis of "outcome-determinative fraud" let's say for the latest presidential elections in Russia and if you consider them fraudulent or not. Apparently according to the laws in Russia, the elections were splendid - no allegations of fraud were confirmed based on whatever they consider as "fair" elections in their minds. Or is your stance that elections were shady and Putin maybe did not get 88%, but he would for sure get 51%, so there was no “outcome-determinative fraud”, so all is well and good?
As non-US person I consider US presidential election system as mindbogglingly stupid, prone to fraud and unsafe. Ballot harvesting, voting machines, no requirement of any ID in many states, inability to actually count votes for days or weeks, etc. When I raised these questions before, a lot of people mentioned how this is complicated system where states have their own rules and so forth. It does not matter. Your elections are laughable and a mockery of security, it is far beyond anything I have seen in my country of Slovakia or other countries where I follow elections. Also your politicians are unwilling to do anything about it to make elections more safe and trustworthy, while constantly talking about "threat to democracy".
So the steelman of Trump's argument - or argument by any other candidate who loses and raises questions about legitimacy of election - no matter the results, your elections in their current state will always have huge issues with legitimacy and trust no matter who wins.
It may be so, for instance look at British Imperium - in a sense the local English population was first to be subjugated. Your cookie-cutter aristocrat who wedged himself into imperial bureaucracy let's say in India, had possibly more in common with some Indian educated native embedded into Imperial Civil Service and who worshiped the empire compared to some Welsh coal miner or English factory worker. It s a common enough theme in empires, for instance the Russian aristocracy during the Tzarist era was thoroughly westernized, they spoke French even during the time Tolstoy wrote his novels like War and Peace in 1869. They were looking down on Russian and Turkic and Finno-Ugric or even German imperial subjects and serfs as uncouth and unsophisticated dregs, who should be happy they can enjoy their enlightened and benevolent imperial rule.
The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US.
I find this fascinating, the same is happening in my country of Slovakia. My working theory is that we live in de facto what accounts to US Empire. It is not dissimilar to let's say Roman empire or British empire - you have various naturalized people who feel allegiance to the empire, they adopt the imperial customs and ethos and even ape people in imperial centers of power. It also fosters certain strange allegiances, I am sure upper class of Roman Britain or Egypt felt more in common with Roman elites than local people - not unlike what is happening now.
When it comes to culture, there are obvious things such as racism or sexism etc. However what I find interesting is that people here internalize even completely invalid themes - for instance the boomer vs millenial dichotomy from US. In Slovakia, boomers spent their best productive years during communism or very shady early years after the fall of Eastern Bloc in 1989, with 20%+ unemployment and average salary of $100 a month/$1,200 a year - if you were lucky enough to actually have an average job and the employer was actually paying you on time. Boomers at large do not have any financial property such as stocks or bonds to help in their retirement, because these were not accessible. Whatever they had, they probably lost it to double digit inflation, failing state banks and bankrupted post-communist industry. At best they may own some old commie apartment in some small town where they lived their whole lives. They are wholly dependent on state pension, which averages around 60% of average net wage, many of them have to work various odd jobs to survive. And yet young people are parroting the US talking point of how boomers had it so much better than them, how they hoard wealth, how much harder it is now in current economy etc. It is amazing to see.
georgioz
2mo ago
Since you mentioned athlecisism, IQ is a score that takes several activities - imagine running, lifting weights, foot-rope drill and maybe throwing a stone. Then average it to some score hoping you captured something like athleticism.
For IQ test the aim is to measure this underlying intellectual ability, the famous psychometric g score/factor of "general intelligence". Individual tests like matrices or vocabulary or object assembly have correlation between 0.6-0.8 with g, but neither of them is perfect correlate. In fact it is harder to say what this general IQ is supposed to be, similarly if let's say professional weightlifter is more athletic than a professional marathon runner.
Democrats dropped tens of millions for MAGA candidates in 2022 from their own money, while declaring the same candidates as existential threat to democracy.
Spending government money to get some votes of shady characters? Absolutely no problem, especially with so many naive people around.
georgioz
2mo ago
I may be one of those people, but I do consider all rights as privileges. Right means entitlement absent of any duty, which means somebody else has duty providing you with said right. Even original US set of rights in American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man gives government duties through law to to enforce these rights privileges.
In this case right for asylum means nothing else other than duty of you fellow citizens to accommodate foreigners. If society as a whole refuses these duties, then said "right" is dead. Duties related to rights are not enforced by god who strikes you with lightning and they are not enshrined in trajectories of planets in Solar system. They are social conventions and they are direct results of what duties citizens are willing and capable to undertake - we have all seen what happened to human rights during COVID for example.
georgioz
2mo ago
It may be statistically correct, but it doesn't justify restricting my liberty to make my own choices.
Of course it may justify it, there are situations where your choices are limited exactly on these grounds - like with myriads of other illegal drugs and many other illegal activities, that limit your liberty to make many choices. What are you talking about.
I watched a Sagaar/Crystal Breaking Point show on the topic, and to me it seemed funny that for some reason none of them mentioned the potentially most important reason: crypto has been historically used to protect money from various actors, including garnishing the income due to child support or other such obligations. If you have irregular or under the table income, you can store it even using cash such as with bitcoin ATMs or peer-to-peer trading, there are also other methods. Sending signals that the government will be easy on these practices may be very important for black men specifically.
The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.
I thought that we are beyond this point already. At least since COVID, everybody knows that rights, including human rights can be suspended at will, sometimes based on unilateral decision of governing bodies for what constitutes a crisis. We now hype everything ranging from climate change through mental health or obesity or anything else as crisis, this is the feature and not a bug. It was actually one of my direct examples to many people during COVID - what prevents government to declare some arbitrary crisis and act with heavy hand?
Also this is nothing new, human rights were undermined constantly. Look at declaration of human rights and let's use Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Waterboarding is widely deemed as torture and yet it was used by CIA in their War on Terror and to my knowledge nobody was punished for it.
Another one is of course article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
This one is dead, governments routinely spy on peoples electronic correspondence and ignore their privacy. And it seems that nobody gives a shit.
Of course Article 14 is also very sketchy:
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
This is my favorite one when I am talking with progressives who are supposedly staunch defenders of human rights. It is interesting to watch how many people are then using legalese to weasel out of this one.
Asylum is part of Article 14:
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Again, many people may bog this down into legal battles of who is asylum seeker, if Belarus is not safe country for many such people trying to cross Polish borders etc. Call me cynical, but I do not see how this should be some barrier nobody will cross.
the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
It is far more sinister. It is public secret, that Hillary Clinton wanted Trump as her opponent, she expected to defeat him easily in 2016. While this strategy backfired, Dems had no problem funneling over $50 million to promote MAGA candidates during 2022 midterms, expecting easier opponents while from the other side of the mouth shouting how they are threat to democracy. There is great deal of cynicism and theater in current politics.
I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the sunlight difference for Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northwestern Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.
But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.
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