Mr Yoon has been credited by the US for taking bold steps to overcome historical differences with neighbouring Japan to build up trilateral political and military ties and counter China’s growing regional influence and rising threats from North Korea.
In other words, they have been busy doing nothing helpful to anyone and catering to the status quo, just like Washington LOVES.
I wish people would stop going on about Brexit. It was what the people wanted. Literally every single brown “”“person”“” has left the country and we don’t have any EU overlords shoving their rules down our throats. Every other aspect of our life bring worse and facing food shortages is a small price to pay
“what the people wanted”? I’m going to assume you dropped the /s tag since the morning AFTER the vote the biggest Google searches in the UK were “What is the EU?” and “What is Brexit?”
There are people who actually believe what you had posted, so without additional cues that it’s intended as sarcasm (like starting with Hur Dur or ending with /s), it’s anyone’s guess what you actually meant. In person sarcasm works better because we can easily add physical cues, but on the internet it’s best made very obvious imo.
There are people who actually believe what you had posted
No they don’t. No racist person would ever say that “literally every single brown ““person”” has left the country”. If you’re not neutron star level dense, it’s pretty obviously sarcasm.
A recurring theme with hard brexiteers was that making “short term” sacrifices was worth it for “reclaiming sovereignty”, which would magically lead to more prosperity in the “long term”. To some, (others) being worse off than before, is a price they’d gladly (let others) pay if it would allow “their team” to score a victory.
In the Usa there’s people cheering for Russia, for the downfall of USA democracy and for Trump to be king. These are such extreme standpoints that it’s hard to believe that they would be serious, but when you see them on camera, then it’s obvious that they are true believers and that they’re not being sarcastic. If those people are real, then I can easily imagine some spiteful british person saying unironically that being worse off now, is a sacrifice that they’re willing to make for “reclaiming sovereignty”. Especially if it’s online and they actually live and work in Sint-Petersburg.
In a world where The Onion cannot make up news that is crazier than the actual news, irony is always going to have hard time.
That’s a really interesting article. I didn’t know there were so many benefits to solar panels over crops.
However, I don’t see how growing crops under panels could become widespread.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimate that if just 1 million acres of farmland was covered in solar panels, the nation would meet its renewable energy goals.
For reference, Iowa alone has over 35 million acres of farmland. Solar panels are almost too efficient to cover a meaningful amount of farmland.
This entire concept has been studied extensively in China, and the conclusion has been that the yield is vastly overclaimed when solar panels are deployed on productive soil.
Your claim is that… China has incentive to reduce deployments of solar panels by criticizing the deployment of solar panels over agricultural land? We’re talking about the same China, right? World leader in solar panel production, being criticized by American and European leaders for overcapacity in solar panel production? I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here.
Jeez my bad the government responsive for legislating the sale of my broadcast rights has no oversight into the operations of my media company. Silly me.
Mr Stanley said farms were facing “an existential moment” because of the changing climate, which could put many out of business, reducing UK food security.
“The problem that we’re facing is that weather is becoming so extreme that it is overwhelming our ability as farmers to continue to grow crops at all in some places,” he said.
Yes, but let’s not lose sight of what’s really important, by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts.
While I’m not saying the farmer quote shares this belief but it’s hard to take when there have been so many “farmers protests” about changes to subsidies linked to reducing emissions and planting more trees
There was a Climate Town video that explains how the US tried to institute strict emissions standards in the mid to late 90s. Exceptions were given to all work trucks because it would make them too expensive for small farms. This led to car companies leaning into that form factor, and now the Yank Tanks are ubiquitous and infecting the rest of the world.
Vehicles over a certain weight can be exempt for a farm vehicle like a suburban. Also the longer the wheelbase the less fuel economy the vehicle has to have, which is why manufacturers are making larger SUVs that can’t even pass the moose test.
Yeah we just had a huge protest here in France, except for a smaller union they all agreed that the pesky ecologists were to blame for their problems. And the government was more than willing to agree with them, better kill our remaining farming land for short term profit than reign in their buddies at Nestlé and Danone.
I’m with you, but it’s not even about having to sell their yachts. These leeches have so much goddamn money that they could lose most of it with no materiel impact to their lifestyle. They just horde it out of a combination of addiction and lust for power.
Can you provide evidence that billionaires yachts cause more environmental damage than say average people using their car.
I’d be really interested to to how billionaires are solely responsible for this mess.
Edit: Congratulations everyone. The oil and gas industries do not want individuals to feel responsible for climate change and want them to push the blame elsewhere so everyone keeps consuming. You’re doing what they want. This is bang out of the oil and gas playbook.
roughly 447 times the entire annual carbon footprint of your average American
So now back to my question does the number average Americans outnumber the billionare more than 447 times?
There are 333,300,000 people in America so that means there needs to be more than 745,637 billionaires living in America for billionaire yatchs to to more damage than the average person. There are only 756.
So the claim is wrong. People don’t like it but average people in the world do more damage to the environment than billionaires. People have no interest in changing but if they want to save the world they must change.
by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts
They are directly saying that we sacrificed the planet to allow billionaires to have yachts. It’s right there.
There is a huge danger in this world that nobody is taking action for the damage they are doing to the world. If billionaires have done no damage to the world then what? Everything is fine and we can go on living the way we are? No. The world’s fucked because of everyday people.
The average person needs to change and consume less and pollute less. Blaming billionaires for everything and acting like the everyday person is innocent is exactly what the billionaires want because then you just consume the stuff they sell and they get richer and the world gets worse.
The only way to fix this world is if everyone consumes less. Deflecting isn’t helping the planet.
Of course not, but it’s a wildly disproportionate rate of consumption for an individual, which you’re well aware of. I agree that the ultra-wealthy are something of a totem when it comes to eco-rhetoric, but the fact is they perfectly represent human overconsumption, and acknowledging this as abhorrent and in need of curbing is the first step towards moderation in general. Also, telling the working classes they need to reduce their carbon footprint while tolerating this behaviour from the ownership class is not a coherent message. The vanishingly small kernel of a point you think you have is not contributing anything to the discussion, and I say this as a committed troll.
Billionaires should absoultely reduce their consumption and I never said anything to disagree with that point.
The issue is people are looking for any and every excuse not to do anything. That is an issue and it’s a bigger issue than overconsumption from billionaires.
Corporations directly try to convince people that there is nothing the individual can do to change the environment so they might as well just use as much oil and gas as they like.
It’s a direct play out of the oil and gas PR system and people are doing it for free. Billionaires want people to not blame the individual and it’s working.
All because people want to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
Billionaires are wasteful. But the damage to the world is coming more from the average person than from the billionaires. Misleading people on that fact is going to to more damage to the environment than anything billionaires do.
You know, I don’t disagree with your ultimate point. But if you look through this comment chain you should recognize that the way you chose to make it is:
Needlessly antagonistic, and (therefore)
Not very effective
If you wanted to convince anyone or provoke interesting discussion I think you failed.
In the future, you should just make your argument/statement instead of asking “clever” bad faith questions.
Yes, but let’s not lose sight of what’s really important, by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts.
This “joke” is more damaging than anything I have said and should be called out as such. Corporations directly try to convince people that there is nothing the individual can do to change the environment so they might as well just use as much oil and gas as they like.
It’s a direct play out of the oil and gas PR system and people are doing it for free. Billionaires want people to not blame themselves and it’s working.
All because people want to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
Billionaires are wasteful. But the damage to the world is coming more from the average person than from the Billionaires.
Yachts, on average, burn 20-50 gallons of fuel an hour.
Super yachts and mega yachts have fuel capacities of 10k-50k gallons and burn 100-500 gallons per hour.
Before I had a PEV, I would run through about 10 gallons a week. I had that car for 10 years, meaning I used less fuel in a decade than a mega yacht does in a day. I traveled around 130k miles on around 5200 gallons of gas and that car had pretty shit MPG of 25.
Cruising speed for yachts varies quite a bit, but assuming a speed of 50 mph means a super yacht gets between 0.5 and 0.1 MPG.
Then there’s the private jets, the 30k sq ft houses, and the fact that 80% of emissions can be tracked back to 57 atate-owned or private companies…none of which are owned or run by the poor or working class. All of that is only considering the western world and it’s definition of poor, the poorest 100 nations only account for around 3% of total emissions…so yes, its the rich people.
Your really out of line here. I’m not the average person, but I’ll compare with myself. Taylor Swift consumed more than 16000 gallons a month (or more than 70000 litres) for at least the first 7 months of 2022, and that’s after selling one of her jets due to public exposure. Compare to me, I work from home and made 3000 kms in 2 years, for an average of 23 litres a month. So she consumed 3000 times more than me. Even if the average person does 10 times my mileage, she would still be 300x the average.
People underestimate how few billionaires there are and how many average people there are.
Average people do more damage than billionaires.
Do your calculations but times it by number of average people and number of billionaires. Which is the point I have directly mentioned in each and every post.
No. First of all there are a lot of billionaires and orders of magnitude more almost-billionaires with the means to do that kind of damage. In second place this is just jets which are used to go straight from a place to another, but yatches are way less efficient and are used to roam freely so overall they pollute much more. And these are only two of the thousand things the rich do that create infinite pollution. But of course let’s focus on straws.
While actively funding and supporting a genocide too.
West Germany was never denazified.- More Nazis in German justice department after WWII than during Third Reich: study>Fully 77 percent of senior ministry officials in 1957 were former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, a higher proportion even than during the 1933-45 Third Reich, the study found. - businessinsider.com/former-nazi-officials-in-germ…> From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.
>
>Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.
data that ends before the BIRTH of the majority of Germans
Look, I’m not saying that Germany doesn’t have a problem with an increase in far right politics and violence in recent years, but to claim that they never stopped being a Nazi country is some ahistorical tankie edgelord bullshit.
Until recently, Germany has been a near-pacifist country almost pathologically careful to “Nie wiederholen, nie vergessen” (never repeat, never forget) and pretending otherwise doesn’t accomplish anything except expose your very shallow and underdeveloped understanding of the world.
I dunno man, Germany just can’t help itself from committing or supporting genocide throughout their history. Are Nazi’s flying flags in Germany? No. Is Germany passing laws and carrying out foreign policy as if they were still run by Nazi’s? Most definitely yes.
Such fear porn. It’s amazing that now Sweden and Finland have become NATO members that they are subject to even more scare tactics! I think it’s ridiculous. Nobody is shelling Russians from Finland or Sweden for the last 7 years. Granted, joining AMericATO is a big mistake but mainly because you are submitting your national defence to US rent seeking instead of developing a European arms framework.
There is a European arms framework, that is developed to be compatible with NATO and thus US stuff. Nordic fighter jets which have been exported to many countries can carry US missiles. All the while, the US is phasing out the M16/M4 in the USMC for a German licence built rifle. They have been using German small arms for a bunch of stuff for a while.
Also, it’s not NATO who’s saying the Russians want to attack neighbouring states, it’s Russia who is saying that, who has been saying that, who has actually been attacking neighbouring states. Finland and the Baltics have been invaded in the past by the Russians as well, and Putin is open about wanting to reconquer them.
Check out the function of nato after the Cold War. Also check the new American economic tent seeking ambition if you want to see how Europe fits into the economic picture.
Yeah, the country I grew up in joined NATO after the Cold War, and it is viewed there as a universally good choice. It had us join the West, which has led to a big jump in living standards, civil rights, international relations, and not the least, I don’t have to worry that Russian tanks will shoot up my granny’s house.
What is it that you see as bad in former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO? Are you implying that they were forced to or that they want to leave now, or that somehow it is bad for them?
If Russia was going to attack NATO the place to do it would be on the Swedish border. As NATO not deployed that many forces in that area, mostly to avoid antagonising the Russians.
In the absence of any explicit threat though I don’t think NATO really needs to do anything very much.
If im being really nice maybe theyre talking about a strike from the bit of Prussia the Russians own over to Gotland and then using that foothold to attack into mainland Sweden. But im pretty sure the Swedes fortified Gotland specifically for that issue so IDFK.
This dude is going by pre-20th century European borders lol
I know it’s a meme we don’t exist, but we actually do. We’ve also got the biggest and arguably most accurate artillery in Europe.
Homeland defence willingness against a superior enemy is at 83%, one of the highest rates in Europe.
And seeing what we managed in WWII against Russia without allies or gear (now we have both), when the Soviets were well armed, it’s understandable Putin would be a bit apprehensive about opening up a new front on the Finnish border.
Is Russia really in any position to be trying to wage war on multiple new fronts? Poland just implied Russia is going to attack Europe. With what? Dry Russian wit and empty vodka bottles?
Russia still has a lot of men and has already transitioned into a war-time economy. All Europe has done is have Baltics and Poland (and probably also Finland) go through potential invasion strategies, the rest of Europe doesn’t even believe in the possibility of war. The only way circumstances could be better is if Trump gets elected because that old fuck will make sure to hamper US support. Other than that if you’re going to invade you couldn’t want better conditions.
I’m not saying it will happen. I’m going to say the invasion would the stupid and hardly beneficial for Russia and the logical thing would be to not invade. But I will add that I said the exact same thing about the invasion of Ukraine and we know how that went. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibilities.
the invasion would the stupid and hardly beneficial for Russia and the logical thing would be to not invade. But I will add that I said the exact same thing about the invasion of Ukraine and we know how that went.
The main difference here though is the consideration of NATO. If you attack Ukraine you’re attacking one country, if you attack NATO you’re attacking many, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, who have some of the largest military’s forces on the planet and access to nuclear weapons. Russia had reason to believe it might have actually win against Ukraine, there’s no possible way they can think that they could win against NATO.
He’s counting on NATO continuing to take the “let’s just sanction him” approach. He’s essentially hoping they’re bluffing while he tries to get the gang back together. (USSR)
They won’t do that if he’s actually invading though. NATO’s point is they won’t ever escalate a situation. That whole point is to try and prevent something like world war II happening again. So declining war on Russia while he’s attacking a non-nato country would be an escalation. But they’re all about responding in kind to an attack against them.
Why multiple fronts? The current conflict may be frozen under “right” circumstances, Putin will have several years to resupply. It doesn’t matter if Ukrainian allies have more economical and technological power than Russia if people in places like Germany cry that Currywurst now costs 1 EUR more than 2 years ago, and just want this to be over.
If I remember right, most polls show people are against sending weapons. This might be why Scholz is cautious about sending Tauruses. The Baltic states have warned for years that Russia is a threat, even before Ukraine was invaded in 2022. But others didn’t listen to them then, and many still don’t take them seriously. The truth is, Russia is doing better than Ukraine’s allies because people think the conflict won’t reach them, and they prefer not to support politicians who would sacrifice short-term benefits for long-term security.
I’m not disputing your main point, I just think it’s interesting that you chose Germany as an example, which, as I wrote, is one of the top contributors, even adjusted for GDP.
In that case, I fail to follow your explanation. What’s more important: Words/sentiments, or actions? For example, Macron talks the talk, but fails to walk the walk, as evidenced by France’s sub-par contributions.
In my opinion, the outcome is what matters. But also: Sign off the Tauruses, Olaf!
I think most people are missing the strategy of modern Russian warfare. Is Russian going to roll tanks and soldiers into the Baltics this year? Probably not.
Russia is using more of an asymmetrical approach to warfare with a ramp up. On the low end is the disinformation campaign. (News and religion: there are a lot of Orthodox in Latvia) Economic “Little Green men” Conventional warfare Nukes or the threat of nukes
I’m the Baltics they are in the disinformation and economic section of the ramp up and are worried about escalation.
Also note Russia goes up and down that ramp escalating and descalating as they did in Ukraine.
Turns out we should have been helping Ukraine against Putin’s fascistic colonialism instead of supporting an entirely separate set of fascists commit genocide in Palestine.
The issue is partially that we have no real voice in American politics. Republicans are highly responsive to the whims of their voters, Democrats work hard to ignore when their voters have demands. Republicans have not choice to do what they’re voters want. Democrats have carte blanc because they know “Blue no Matter Who” and “Any Blue Will Do”. It’s incredibly important to recognize this divide in electoralism. The policies of the Republican party are the will of the Republican voter. Republicans are scared shitless of their voters because it is a non stop series of purity tests effectively contrived through the alt right media. If you step out of line as a Republican, consider your career vanished
Its super fucked, but its also people conditioned to believe that the Democrats are out there trying to do work for them, when they are just as invested in the US monoparty as the Republicans are. And those people are the majority of people on lemmy, pretty much representing a down vote brigade whenever you criticize Democrats, or point out that they are part and parcel to the dysfunction in our political system. They aren’t adjacent or subject to the problem; they are the cause and source and one of the primary beneficiaries of the dysfunctional state. The Democrats are not your friends. They aren’t on your side. They have shown that at a national level they do not give a fuck about the polices they campaign on. If it wasn’t for Democrats setting the table for it in 2008, there would be no MAGA movement right now. Failing to go after any kind of meaningful policies or actual criminal prosecution of the engineers of the financial crisis; effectively validating BAU and the Bush era policies and tax cuts: they had no interest in differentiating themselves from contemporaneous Republicans. This left the primary criticism on the table and perfectly valid: that the extant political system doesn’t reflect the will of its users. Enter MAGA. A specific and reactionary populist movement to address this criticism precisely. And it works because its transactional. MAGA voters are getting what they pay for when they vote MAGA. The policies are horrendous and deplorable, but you can count on MAGA politicians to work to get them into place. And herein lies the crux of the matter: Democrats are not interested in the politics they campaign on. They do not work to get the things they campaign on into place, because there are no consequences to them for not getting the job done. This is a direct extension of ‘Blue No Matter Who’ and “Any Blue Will Do”. Democrats always have an excuse for why it can’t be done. Republicans who fail to get it done are replaced.
I can’t argue with your logic here, and neither can I fault your conclusion. All that being the case, though, what can US voters do in this case?
Not vote? Vote 3rd party? Do you guys even have more than 2 parties over there? Seems like you have even more of a duopoly than we do over here in the UK.
The Democratic party is the only one actually implementing positive changes, and half the things they do gets neutered by Republican politicians and judges. Infrastructure bills, student loan forgiveness, etc, are you not paying attention?
I don’t think this is exactly right. For the longest time Republicans were the same way, dangling a carrot of doing something to get votes but never actually doing it. I think Donald Trump has emboldened a lot of people to run for office that don’t understand that you don’t actually give the base what they want cause it makes you deeply unpopular with everyone else.
You need to listen to what MAGA and rightwingers say when they are critical of the establishment. You don’t have to agree with them and you shouldn’t, but you should try to understand why they make the decisions they make and come to the conclusions that they do.
The MAGA movement was able to fuckold the Republican establishment into doing the will of their voters. It just happens that the will of their voters is vile and wrong, and basically orchestrated through the distribution of rightwing media. It went from outside radicals to business as usual in the Republican party in one election cycle.
Trump pushed for every single one of his campaign tent poles. He didn’t get them all, but he pushed damned hard for almost all of them, and got or made progress on many of them. You should hate him. You should hate those policy positioned he pursued. But he did his voters right in that they voted for a person who would go after those policy positions, and he went after those policy position. These anti-human policies are what right wing voters want.
Here are is a video interviewing rightwingers. Pay attention to how they frame things, how they are structuring their arguments:
And what you are describing, Republicans in the business of dangling carrots; that was the republican party for decades. Its also been the business of Democrats for decades. The difference is that the MAGA movement was able to force the Republicans into action on their polices. The progressive movement has been unable to do so with Democrats.
I generally agree with you, I think the one part I disagree on is the why Republicans go along with this. Sure some of it is because of the purity testing kind of stuff but a lot of it is just because the Republicans for the longest time have paid lip service to these issues but never done anything about them. Like with abortion for example. But then you have someone like Donald Trump come in who is just like, well why don’t we do all these crazy things. And that is what emboldened more people like him, with no experience in politics and no understanding that you can’t actually give the base the way out there stuff without alienating the general public, to run for election and start winning in very red areas. So it’s less of a pressure on the party from the outside to start following this new MAGA movement (although that does exist too) and more of an internal transformation of the party under Trump.
Democrats have always been “the big tent” party, which is part of their weakness, as their voters have a wide range of “demands” that are often, if not always, contradictory. You have to remember that this is a party that has to appeal to religiously conservative black people, while also appealing to upper middle secularists. They are trying to appeal to both conservative religious muslims, and at the same time the powerful voting Jewish bloc.
It’s not an easy tightrope to walk, but it’s not regularly “ignoring demands of the party” it’s “which of these two competing demands of our party can we ignore that will hurt us less?” They basically try to appeal to the voter, but that’s impossible because they are trying to please too many disparate groups at the same time.
Republicans have the advantage of having to appeal to a smaller group and set of beliefs, and then just get everyone else to fall in line behind it (although that is being tested now with MAGA delusionalists vs the traditional conservatives). Republicans have been pushing this fear of different people (immigrants, different religions)and liberal elites for decades now (as you note in another post, via things like right wing media). . . it’s just that they lost control of it when someone (Trump) rose up and fully embodied the id they had been fostering. . .and now they are just following the playbook where they have to get everyone to fall in in line behind that.
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