I want to argue with this, but it wouldn’t be much of a rant community if it talked back.

Intelligence does seem like the white-collar kind of thing which might be left to fancy degreed officers.

I didn’t know military intelligence had noncoms. How does that work?

Dying naturally tends to be an excruciatingly painful and slow process.

eating, drinking water, moving out of the way of danger, etc.

Not eating and drinking is a definite thing.

Good argument

Thanks!

What gave the voters then the opportunity to make better decisions for themselves?

The voting. If it’s anything like Canada, there have been socialist fringe candidates all along, it’s just that there hasn’t been much interest.

You could say people have been railroaded into not supporting socialism, but they don’t. No amount of extra democracy will change that.

No problem. The internet should be fun, not stressful.

I would still have to see any evidence that what I said (essentially that the US has been the biggest bully in the world for the last 80 years) is way off the mark.

If we’re including post-WWII decolonisation, pretty much point to any former colony - which is a rather large map area. The British or French didn’t just let them leave, but did atrocities to stop them until they couldn’t anymore. I went looking for casualty figures, but it turns out there’s not much information known. Maybe we’ll have to wait until the guilty parties are all dead.

I think you’d arrive at the same conclusion that it was a two-sided competition if you were to read up in detail on a few times and places during the Cold War, as opposed to just the US coup greatest hits. Mao did not fight alone. The thing is, it’s hard to capture that all in one number. The USSR spent maybe 20% of it’s GDP on it’s military, while being a third the economic size of the US, to give a sense of scale of the kind of resources that were piling in from the communist direction.

Over a period that long and the area of the whole world that’s about as good as I can do in a Lemmy comment.

Social media manipulation is in no way equivalent to supporting or initiating coups.

Ukraine comes to mind (did we talk about that already?), as does Georgia. Globally it’s in no way just social media, either. In places like the Baltics there’s your classic people with suitcases full of money going around and paying for sabotage, access or votes. That’s not just hearsay - some have been caught.

In the West they’re more limited because it’s harder to get away with, so yeah, they mostly mess with social media. I’m pretty sure there was somebody that went to jail in the US during Biden’s time, though.

I’m not sure I understand your second point here,

It wasn’t a point, I just won’t/can’t argue with the basic idea that they’ve been too aggressive. I’m arguing with the first thing.

why should anyone support the US or any of its closest partners?

I mean, the most conservative stance would be just to support nobody and say every country is awful. Why isn’t that in consideration?

have not supported the US/West position in either Ukraine or Palestine.

Ukraine has lots of third world support (see the votes in the image). Palestine has some Western support; Canada just went against the US to recognise it in what is a very sensitive period in our relations. Sweden did long ago.

The claims that it’s “for democracy” is very weak when there are examples in the recent past of the US either supporting or not opposing coups against democratically-elected foreign leaders. The first example that comes to mind is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the Arab Spring. From what I recall, there was hardly a squeak from the US when that happened, because it benefited the US.

Support for an anti-democratic coup hasn’t happened since the “stop communism” era. If you include not getting involved, neutral Switzerland is a massive bully, and I actually can show it in a Lemmy comment.

I would guess Obama was concerned and disappointed, but also wanted some kind of stability, and to not alienate a new government he was going to have to deal with one way or another. Starting another ground war in the Middle East was obviously out of the question at that point - even closing Libyan airspace was very controversial.

Does one of them have alsimoneau’s number in it (that’s who I meant)? You yourself gave a number closer to 15%.

Having been involved in campaign treasury myself, you absolutely can run a campaign on a shoestring budget. A good campaign costs a bit more, but at the end of the day it all comes from small dollar donations, and if you’re getting a meaningful amount of votes you should get some of those as well.

People tend to blame the government if their services aren’t working or the economy preforms poorly, working class solidarity be damned. That’s why it’s tempting to shut strikes down even if you endorse the basic concept in theory.

Obviously there are regional differences, e.g. US vs Canada vs EU. I think the tendencies are the same but the degree is different at any point in time.

I will point out that in Canada, there’s not much money in politics. We don’t have a Citizens United equivalent. Pretty sure European countries are more like us, although each one has a distinct system.

It’s an essay format, not a deductive argument so the thesis is stated, then it’s given support. Not saying you should be convinced, just explaining why it seems like this.

Alright, I guess I’ve delivered as much rebuttal as is appropriate, then.

It’s also a light year away from an exhaustive analysis. I can’t do that here and now. It takes books to do this.

You know, too much length on each analysis itself actually reduces strength, in my experience. If one’s idea is that complicated, they need to put it in a modular, structured form (so not prose), or are guaranteed to have made logical errors somewhere inside.

Democracy was pushed by the bourgeoisie.

Sure, because it weakened the aristocracy over top of them, not because it was a better way to keep the proles down. Marx, who you probably respect, held that, and it has strong support from modern scholarship as well.

A king may care about his subjects, the rich barely care about the poor.

So, again, that’s not real history. Now most people of a given high class start in a slightly lower class and get lucky, while monarchs are raised in a system of open extreme violence and either knew they were an almighty heir from the start, or were willing to kill and betray friends and family to usurp power. A look through history books will confirm they tend to be more brutal than guys like Paul Fireman (who’s boring enough you’ve never heard of him) or Amancio Ortega (who you also probably haven’t despite being number 9), on average.

I doubt it was driven by competition, since the USSR was never close to lifestyle parity, and the US was never at any real risk of pro-communist unrest. You can’t really make the policies of the period (good or bad) have nothing to do with American voters.

Like, every service by law being available in both seems like overkill. It’s good to have services available in other languages than English, so there’s no reason to shut it down proactively, but native languages, Mandarin and Punjabi seem like equally major priorities without Quebec.

I suppose French on every label would also be overdoing it, by that logic, although without that it would feel less like home.

See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?

Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.

For one thing, inequality is still way lower than it was before democracy.

Wouldn’t the US working in ever deeper cooperation with both China and the EU be better for business? Billionaires move pretty easily between all three anyway.

By all appearances they’ve never fully committed with China because of the ideological gap, and are cutting out the EU now do to new, emerging ideological differences.

Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.

Ah, okay.

So what’s the threshold for this power to be used? It doesn’t actually say.

Is Heise a reliable source? There’s not much corroborating this ATM, and the legislation title returns nothing - maybe because it’s just a draft.

Edit: Also ironic that they make you sign away your full GDPR rights to view the privacy article without an account.

SWAT breaking in to enforce some drug law and shooting the dog is a pretty common thing in the US. They still do it. But, we’re not talking about the US, so it might be harder to just sweep that kind of thing under the rug with tough-on-crime arguments.

Not OP. I was agreeing with you, haha.