That commitment, with no details, follows Putin’s promise to start shipping 25,000 to 50,000 tons of grain for free to each of six African nations in the next three to four months — an amount dwarfed by the 725,000 tons shipped by the U.N. World Food Program to several hungry countries, African and otherwise, under the grain deal.
Jesus, 725,000 tons compared to 50, it’s no wonder African Nations are not at all happy
Also it should be noted that only a handful of African leaders went, as opposed to back in 2019. African Nations are well aware it seems that backing Russia is a bad idea
I just wish they’d kick out China next, both Russia and China have had a terrible influence on Africa and have kept them in bondage for decades.
If this only affects prosecution of crimes inside of the military that is already a great step but what I really wonder about is if it will also affect prosecution of war crimes committed by US military. Could someone elaborate please?
It’s really interesting because these kind of “Kids are leaving the farm!” stories go back basically to the industrial revolution. I imagine eventually it’ll be the case that most american farms are either purely industrial operations ran by corporations or “hobby farms” ran by rich people unconcerned with profit.
Edit: Apparently I didn’t RTFA, this is about farmWORKERS, not farmers. My point still stands about farms and agricultural practices further down. However, a scale of agriculture that requires extremely low paid, often illegal work force with no rights, is not a sustainable practice either.
The main issue is that you need a serious scale of operations to be able to earn money from agricultural practices, and that leads to a fairly monocultural crop, subsidies for certain crops and cog-in-the-wheel operations. So it is already heavily affected by industrial corporations. This is not just true for the US, it’s like this in the most part of the developed world. So the “family farms” tend to get outcompeted even when the farmers are pretty much working round the clock, and still with decreasing rewards and increasing loans while they have occasional crop failures. So it doesn’t surprise me if the next generation wants to experience life that isn’t a constant toil.
There are already “hobby farms” as well, not only run by rich people with horses and McMansions.
And then there is a homesteading movement, where families go the other way. They want to escape the rat race and settle down, have more time with their kids and be self-sufficient. Some even do it in an extremely frugal way, some in an eco way with permaculture instead of monoculture. Some are even ex-farmer progeny who want to get back to their roots in a smaller scale.
Can someone explain the change to me? I do not understand how it was done before, why that was bad, and how this is different and better. (Things I probably would have included in the article, had I written it)
Historically, these investigations have been handled by the higher-ups in the chain of command. Say one soldier raped another and the victim reported it. Their mutual boss and that boss's bosses would be responsible for any investigation and discipline.
They have the same negative incentive to provide thorough investigation and justice as college campus police do - because in the end it makes them look bad at their jobs and makes the institution that signs their paychecks look bad. So they just don't. Often victims are ignored or worse, disciplined themselves.
This change will provide a third party not involved in the chain of command for reporting and investigation of sexual assault allegations.
No because that means admitting that it happened in the first place. It's a huge problem with reporting. Remember "there'd be less Covid if we just stopped testing for it?" Same problem.
Investigating and prosecuting a rape means admitting that rape happens in your unit. Punishing victims to keep them quiet allows the bosses to continue pretending like it never happens
I’m still confused though, they know handling reports is part of their job. How would doing that part of their job well not make them look good at their job? ~Strawberry
They’re in the position of authority and there is a chain of command, soldiers are trained from the very beginning to obey the chain of command without questions.
To climb the ladder or gain more power, they have to look good. They’re not going to get promoted if their records have any “negatives”.
Who is going to verify the reports? Their bosses, which means they also have the same incentives to only want good stuff, in order for themselves to get any considerations for promotions.
When their boss goes up, the boss under them will likely get promoted too.
What the boss said, goes. There are usually far more consequences toward the victims and whistleblowers than the actual authorities.
That’s why there should be independent review process where these folks have no incentive to have good reports.
I don’t get it, why aren’t “holding sex offenders accountable” and all of the ethical and moral concerns enough of an incentive for those along the chain of command? ~Strawberry
Adding to @Chetzemoka comment: The military has a peculiar concept for responsibility in command, such that a senior officer or even NCO could have thier career totally ruined for investigating a rape. Not for other crimes, mind you, but some arcane language held that they could be held culpable for not having prevented the attack. Biden has rather firmly corrected that error.
Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself wondering is this finally going to be the year when any doubts about the climate change crisis are blown away by a spate of costly climate extremes. That could be one benefit of 2023 being off the charts like this.
That’s the problem. Everyone knows it’s legit at this point. But there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in pretending it’s not. Then as COVID taught us 30 percent of people just don’t want to be told what to do so will say fuck you and do the opposite just to piss you off.
Yeah, I don’t understand why they can so peacefully ignore this like water wars are near to happen. When I say we need to find a solution on how to save water and keep it for emergency, their respond like “hell nah, still don’t happen today so I don’t care. Better buy fuckin Iphone 15 Pro Max just to piss you off because I have more money to buy it rather than invest save water solution for my family like you said”.
Better find people with “off-grid passionate” commune to prepare early before it start happening rather than discussing, debating, or doing nothing bout that.
A Republican my team has been lobbying for like 6 years now has moved from “doubtful of climate change” to “climate change is occurring, but we don’t know for sure our impact” - so yes, things are slowly moving toward sanity.
Worth noting he drives an EV and has solar panels personally, and his public stance is 100% a reflection of his constituency and not his own views.
There’s about 1/3 of us, I call them the “idiot army”, Hillary called them “deplorable”. I think it’s just an artifact of the normal distribution of critical thinking skills and character traits like empathy.
I don’t believe these are “bad” people so much as easily taken advantage of and mislead (by the actual bad people) into being useful. I think one of the things MAGA has done is activated this group, that’s why I call them the “idiot army”, Republicans (e.g. Bannon) learned how to activate this group more effectively and explicitly than groups had in the past.
Some things act as human sieves and can be used to identify your victims (like how spam is geared to make the less gullible of us delete them but the more gullible might respond). If you’re a right wing political operative, these techniques can also be used to identify and manipulate those who could useful towards your goals.
You gotta think like an evil genius.
For us, we should realize that for this group, things are never going to click. Instead, we should be looking toward how we can thrive despite 1/3 of us being idiots. Identify techniques to prevent bad actors from using this 1/3 to gain power.
Abolish Amazon prime tomorrow. Break the company into tiny pieces, raise the cost of streaming platforms and cut the CEO pay by 1000% (they will still make millions).
That’s what consumers want. You can see viewers just giving money to talents on twitch and YouTube. People want to reward good content. Hollywood and these large corporations have just become extremely good at separating the workers from the value of labor, and taking the overwhelming lion’s share for investors.
I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.“
—Prof Lesley Hughes
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
The cause in both these statements is that global warming will NEVER be an immediate threat. Humans are wired for immediacy, and if the threat is not a right now thing, they switch to ignoring and adapting. Our psychology is wired to try to address the tiger and to adapt to what is unfortunately continual environmental collapse.
Those who understand we literally cannot do that and that a great many of us will die are not equipped to handle that information without simply sinking into increasingly immobile despair, because...what the fuck can I do about it?
I already eat little, don't even own a car, my worst offense is having internet but it's necessary for work. My other options are to become homeless again or Amish.
People in many countries are suffering greatly already from natural events that have been kicked up to 20. All I can do is watch. And I do. But more and more as someone who has a large stomach for suffering, even I'm beginning to evaluate what good it's doing me, as a civilian, to watch.
I can't help, or I would have. Whatever's going to happen to me in the future is unavoidable. My choices then are between Despair and Not Despair. This is why the masses won't pay attention. They don't have the bandwidth for the entire planet.
The politicians, however, have no excuse for this, and had we less tendency to shut our eyes and stomp our feet and more biological ability to plan in long term, they would be on pikes in the 00's.
Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
Unfortunately, at the risk of sounding defeatist, warning the public is pretty much a lost cause at this point. The ones that are receptive already know (and are seeing it first hand this summer), and the ones who aren’t have their heads so far up their own asses that they’re receiving AM radio. And realistically, there’s not much for the average person to do; it’s the industrial -scale operators that are the largest problem, and they’ll resort to murdering their opposition (both figuratively and literally) before giving up a cent of profit. We as a populace need to full on revolt and take back our health and planet, but we are so effectively convinced our enemies are our neighbors that I really am not sure what to do here.
You gotta get the Rs in on it. For a while right and left was more of a friendly rivalry, albeit intense at times. Barring nazis and zealots they’re not all bad. You can see them peaking out every now and then. Tradesmen unionizing, adoption of solar panels, the simple acknowledgment of systemic corruption, the libertarians trying really hard to figure out how to run a country without a government(lol). They’re not all bad extremists. Though they do seem easily controlled by state.
Not individually, no. Collectively, even if we don’t have everyone, we can go pretty far and we did not too long ago, many times. This is what we should be advocating for, I don’t think there are any other alternatives at this point.
The true dispair is knowing that the ones primarily responsible for the issues we are facing (private jets, mega yachts, hundred million dollar properties, etc.) are completely untouchable by us.
We just get to watch in horror as our world decays and the rich get richer.
I mean, they're quite literally not, though. All it takes is luck, firepower, and someone willing take out Taylor Swift.
I'm sure it will have to get one fuck of a lot worse before people in that tax bracket catch it from their own security, but if enough people are self-sacrificing for long enough, they may even have to outlaw guns or something. Which would at least give my wretched corpse a chuckle.
I don’t know where you take that from but the super rich are a tiny tiny fraction of the problem. They don’t buy containerships full of stuff, they don’t eat millions of animals per day, they don’t constitute the vast majority of travel.
Yes, on a per person basis they have an extremely large footprint, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the industries that feed the consumption of the average citizens.
That’s in no way a rich people thing. Polluting less often means that stuff people are used to will cost more or will be less available.
The greens in Germany suggested that maybe meat is too cheap and people should eat it less and maybe also don’t drive your car so much. And a good chunk of the population lost their fucking mind at the audacity to suggest doing something in two sectors that massively contribute to climate change.
The reality is that effective action against climate change is hugely unpopular and politicians realize that it’s often political suicide because people hate change and there is no way to combat climate change without lifestyle changes for every single citizen.
The cold hard truth is our societies need to change from the ground up but it’s a death sentence for any politician to lobby for the changes required. Imagine if a politician came out and said “meat is now banned” and “petrol is now banned”? They would be laughed into obscurity.
We are fucked because we do not yet want off this ride. We want our cheap consumption. The fix is nuanced and multi-facetted and I don’t know if we will get there. Look for geo-engineering to science us out of this. We aren’t going to do the right thing. We’d rather seed the ozone with sulfer dioxide to lower the earth temp.
That politician would be laughed out by his own peers, not even the people of the US. Granted, I know a lot of people that would flip their absolute minds if things like that were banned, but at the end of the day they’ll move on.
The big problem is no one on the floors of the House or Senate would have the balls to vote it in. It’d be the lone politician and his friend. Every couple months they’ll introduce a bill and then have it dashed.
Lobbyists are shit in the US and they contribute to most of our backwards problems. Policies would be getting lobbied by oil and utility companies to stop these politicians. Smear campaigns the whole deal.
The only reason we haven’t made the major life changes we need to make is because it isn’t profitable.
We are not profitable, unless we consume. Unless our money continues to funnel to the top hands we will continue to perpetually destroy our planet. Simple as that.
As citizens, we can only access the changes we need to make based on the size of our income. I can’t afford to get an electric car, fresh ingredients are expensive, I can’t buy a house to then fit it with solar panels.
This change has to come from the people that have the means to change it for everyone, hence the top 400 people holding some 98% of the US currency hostage.
This is not a problem civilians can solve. We can try, but we will fail. The footprint is from the people that can stop it and the only major lifestyle changes would be difficult, but doable for us, it’d be near impossible for the billionaires to adjust to such a degree, and I’m not confident they ever will.
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
I think our situation is more like that of a decades long cigarette smoker. They know their habit is deadly, and know exactly what the remedy is, but most of them will smoke until they die or until it’s too late because quitting feels impossible. There are smokers that do quit though, everyday.
For the last thirty years, Pakistan has been funding, training, and harboring Islamist extremists to control Afghanistan and subtly fight the West.
Go fuck yourselves Pakistan, look at what you have created to suppress women in the neighboring regions, openly and proudly killing LGBTQ+ people, and responsible for the War on Terror by harboring Bin Laden. And now it's coming back to bite you in your hairy asses.
Don’t forget kids once we hit 130 were gonna start dropping like flies, going outside will be dangerous, your AC bill will be astronomical and the rich people will all be fine in their bunkers!
I lived in Phoenix for a while, 05-08ish. I grew up and live in Florida now. The difference really is the “dry heat” that everybody treats as the big joke. You can still sweat in 125 and dry air. 125 in humid air doesn’t let you sweat.
Yeah someone always comes out the Woodworks from Phoenix to tell everyone how they’re babies. Once we start hitting more high wet bulb temps everyone’s fucked.
OP said that once we hit 130s we start dropping… I was just making the point that we’ve already arrived at 130s and people are dropping…
PHX isn’t the only place being hit right now, NYC is getting cooked, Vegas is getting cooked, the list is extensive and my point was that people already are dropping due to heat.
Chill the fuck out, more than 9 million people are under extreme heat warning.
Why discredit inhumane temps based on location. Dry or not, we are all getting cooked.
The heat has been constant this year. We are 30 days now of over 110F, a handful of those days hit 120+.
I’ve been here for a years now, but this year the heat is hitting different. Humidity is definitely another animal, but 120s is nothing to bat your eye at.
Here I am thinking, “they don’t have a plan for climate change.”
/Reads article.
Ah their “plan” is to make climate change even worse and sweep under the rug anything that shows what a horrible fucking decision that is. That’s par for the course for conservatives. Fuck everything up, hide evidence, blame others. Core conservative values.
It’s like saying someone has a plan to solve suicide but that plan is to murder them before they can do it.
Well honestly what does trump (or most republicans) care anyway? They’ll be dead in a few years so they don’t need to be concerned if the world is baking. All they care about is next quarters earnings.
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