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True, if it’s somewhere nice, maybe everybody should protest.
True, if it’s somewhere nice, maybe everybody should protest.
I’d love to know the stats on the demographics of the pro-Palestinian protestors. Exactly how many American citizens is Trump proposing randomly dumping in another country because he doesn’t like what they’re saying?
I disagree. Neoliberalism turbo-charged all of the problems with capitalism, by encouraging the “everyone out for themselves, dog eat dog world” mentality.
A good economy serves the needs of the people. As soon as you have a situation where people are effectively ground into paste to feed the economy, it’s not a good economy.
Yep. An awful lot has to go badly wrong in an economy before rich people start feeling it, and that’s the only point they start caring.
Hence why I said “it appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism”. He didn’t create the situation and he’s tried to combat it, but there is so much more he could have done, given that the underlying problem is neoliberalism.
People will stop believing a country is in recession when it starts to feel like they can actually afford to do the things they want to do, like live in a home and eat food once in a while. They are incorrect to believe that it’s a recession causing their current dire circumstances, but they’re entirely correct to believe that something is amiss when they’re just barely keeping themselves alive. It appears to be due to Biden’s mismanagement only insofar as Biden has opted for largely continuity neoliberalism, which is how things have been mismanaged for the last 40 years or so.
Railways and public transport are grouped under infrastructure because even if climate change was not an issue, public transport is infrastructure that’s good for people and the economy. There’s plenty of statistics to support the idea that good public transport infrastructure has a wide range of benefits, including improved economic growth, that pre-dates climate change by decades, and will still be the case long after climate change is fixed. The Victorians didn’t build railway lines all over Europe because trains are better for the climate than cars. :)
Just to play Devil’s advocate here… The US takes that approach to guns inside its own borders, expecting that asking nicely is enough to stop people shooting up schools. So it would be kinda hypocritical for the US to hold Israel to different standards. Guns are America’s real religion.
Republicans don’t think those are birthrights either, because they don’t care about anyone after they’ve been born. They wouldn’t care about foetuses either if they had to be fed and housed.
‘Is money a birthright now?’
If it’s not, then logically a 100% inheritance tax must be imposed. After all, nobody is entitled to money just for being born, right?
That doesn’t mean that the parents’ concerns about how so much isolation would impact their childrens’ mental, emotional, social and academic development weren’t valid, though. In fact, it’s pretty obvious at this point that many children were adversely affected, many in ways that will impact them for the rest of their lives. It is definitely not a given that the people that joined Moms for Liberty because they were worried about their children being so isolated during critical stages of development are also Covid deniers and bigots.
That was not known at the time, though. What was known was that children were at a much lower risk of dying (and of getting seriously ill), and there were plenty of parents who had very valid concerns about the impact on their children. What we’re going to see over the next 20-30 years is an awful lot of children growing up with severely stunted social and emotional development, which was a much more foreseeable outcome of Covid restrictions in schools than long Covid.
I’m not saying having restrictions was right or wrong. There was probably an ideal balance in there somewhere, but given the situation, it would have been a damned miracle if anyone had figured out what it was. What I’m saying is that the parents with entirely valid concerns about how the restrictions affected their childrens’ development were not necessarily Covid deniers, and are certainly not necessarily bigots.
I dunno, there were plenty of parents over here in the UK who took Covid seriously, but still opposed the degree of restrictions in schools because of the impact it had on their kids. It basically came from a place of being aware that children were much less at risk from Covid than older people, so they accepted the need for measures that protected the vulnerable while still disagreeing with the need to keep children so isolated.
(Interestingly, the ongoing government inquiry here about the government’s response to Covid has concluded that if any women had been involved in the decision-making on Covid restrictions, the restrictions on children would not have been as extreme as they were - not because women are inherently Covid-deniers, but because they would have considered the long-term impact on children, which the entirely male decison-making team simply didn’t think of.)
So my assumption is that many mothers in the US felt the same way - and these people aren’t Covid-denying, anti-vax, racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots. They just wanted their kids to be able to go to school normally. While undoubtedly the loudest voices in Moms for Liberty were Covid-deniers, I would expect that the majority of those who joined the group were just normal mums worried about their kids during the pandemic.
I wonder if a big part of it was that there wasn’t as large an overlap between being unhappy with coronavirus restrictions in schools and being opposed to children learning about diversity as the Moms for Liberty group thought. All the mothers who were only thinking about how the restrictions were impacting their kids social, emotional, and academic development (and those concerns did have some validity) have now got what they wanted: their kids are back at school and growing up normally. They don’t feel the need to go on a crusade against minorities because that was never what they were worried about.
I’ll acknowledge that my experience is limited, but as a former accountant in a small accountancy/auditing practice (less than 20 employees) that had to compete with dozens of other similarly sized practices in the same geographic area, all of whom managed to not be corrupt… it seems to me there’s a solid argument for breaking up the Big Four into smaller auditing companies. And if that means there are corporations who are too large to be audited… well clearly those corporations are too large and would also benefit from being broken up.
My thinking has always been that the only “reality” I’m qualified to talk about is my own perception of it, and it’s not something I can define for anyone else. Therefore, logically, the only appropriate course of action is to accept what other people perceive as real for them, as long as what they perceive as real doesn’t require them to force their perception of reality onto others. Accepting a particular deity as real? That’s fine, it’s real for them even if it’s not for me. But when that drives the person to persecute queer people, that’s them trying to define reality for everyone, not just themselves, and that’s not okay.
I’m not sure if that fully matches up with soulist theory, but it seems to me that our thinking on things are compatible, and I’m happy to consider soulists as allies. :)
I was extremely sceptical at the premise of this based on the title, but having read the whole thing, there are actually some very good points in there that I agree with.
Very interesting. The conventional wisdom for dealing with inflation has been to raise interest rates, which has a knock on effect on, among other things, employment. Speaking solely of the government in my own country, they seem to believe that reducing inflation will restore trust in the government, but this data would seem to suggest that their attempts to reduce inflation may actually be eroding trust further because their methods result in increased unemployment. It’s certainly not the only misdiagnosis in their attempts to work out why nobody trusts them (breaking the law, giving so much public money to their mates, and almost weekly sexual misconduct scandals doesn’t exactly inspire trust, but they’re convinced it’s “not an issue for most voters”), but I can definitely see how this could be a contributing factor. We’ve seen the opposition parties picking up seats with genuinely record-breaking swings in the last couple of months, too.
Having flicked through a few spots in the video, and being British, my conclusion is this:
Britain has got some major problems, many of which there is a lack of political will to fix, to the point that I could identify the general subject of many sections of this video just by the title on the timestamps. But the video is still pretty rubbish and overly sensationalised, with some of the opinions presented (smoking bans being bad, switching to an American style insurance-based healthcare being a good idea) are just straight up idiotic.