“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.
- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.
- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.
Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
I also would acknowledge the intent of offering neurotypical as an alternative might be kind.
However I also agree "normal" works quite well. It is especially distinguished by the quotes as "normal" and subjective, not normatively valued.
Given our evolutionary history as social animals, this is expected. The genes (and memes, in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) for alienating oneself from the tribe and going solo were less successful than the those for remaining in the tribe. We can reasonably expect such adaptations to include sucking up to alphas to avoid being banished from the tribe, being distressed when outside a group, and feeling good when in a group.
- to persuade
- to develop my worldview (speaking, typing, thinking all use different neural pathways)
- to collect feedback and be challenged
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
It is mentally exhausting to stay abreast of all issues that humanity faces, no doubt. I’ll agree with you there. But it doesn’t take much energy for me to say, “man what’s happening in Sudan is messed up.”
What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.
I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.
They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?
On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
Mental health is important as well.
I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.
Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:
Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.
Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.
Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.
Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.
That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.
Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.
> If your children play football you really need a car.
A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.
Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.
Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.
Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)
Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.
I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.
The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.
By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").
Perhaps someone should clarify though that most of us are looking for legal means to rattle the shackles of our (Tr/B)illionaire overlords.
The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.
Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.
Bicycles and public transportation.
My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
Edit, reply to Lukan as I am rate limited with my comments: I’m sure that those people you saw in Leipzig and Berlin are global 5% earners, maybe even 1%-ers. That is a very luxurious lifestyle that not many can achieve.
Edit 2, again to Lukan. My point still stands that the Germany lifestyle is very luxurious compared to the rest of the world. And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city.
I am pretty sure they are not, I don't just see them, but also speak with them. But normal approach is not compare "global 5% earners", as probably all of germany would fall into that bucket, but compare locally. So can a normal german household afford them?
And the answer is yes. But if the household also needs a SUV and a garage for that, then maybe not.
But I was talking about people who cannot afford their own house. And they could afford a cheap car - or a cargo bike.
I never debated that.
"And even in Germany, you need a decent income if you want to live in a high density city."
But this is not correct. You can get a 4 room apartment in Leipzig for 750 € a month (but of course you won't be the only one applying).
Also you may want to email dang about your rate limitation. Your recent comments seem fine enough to me to fix that.
in poorer places people use more bikes, or just walk.
the car based spots are from wealth, and many had bicycle friendly infrastructure that was torn down to build super highways for cars
On what planet is getting your groceries on a bike "more privileged" than driving?
It's the nice thing about government in my opinion: we create it to serve us as a community. Our taxes are the price to creating the community we want to live in. From taking trash away to keep the neighborhoods clean, to good schools to educate our (and other's) children.
If we want public transportation, a bike-able city—we just need to demand our tax money go to that.
I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.
It’s like Down’s paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting). Being a paradox doesn’t make it untrue.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
Right is right; Belief doesn't effect truth.
Such as in physics, there are differing theories, but the underlying truth doesn't change.
> Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
Just because you are blind doesn't mean others can't see.
Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
Media only gives you super-hearing.
Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.
And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).
Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).
So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres.
At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it.
On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war.
Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
Iran isn't going to drop their nuclear program. They know full well that IF this deal actually works out (it won't, but just for the sake of argument...), they can go back to their clandestine enrichment program and nobody will actually look very hard (just like before). It'll be a return to normalcy, except they'll also be exacting tolls on the strait and building up with that new fat wad of free cash. And if it doesn't work out, they just stand firm until the USA gets tired and goes home with a fig leaf "we won" as November nears. Either way, similar result.
Russia is going to lose this war in a slow and grinding attrition that will smack of Afghanistan, that's not in question. But their ambitions aren't going to die. When they're ready again a decade later (and if NATO is still a thing), they'll grab a chunk of NATO land and extend their nuclear umbrella over it, daring the paper tiger to do something.
As far as I'm aware there is no reason to believe so
I remember Bennett's shuttle diplomacy between Russia in Ukraine in 2022 and he struck me like a person who values peace more than Netanyahu does.
Ultimately, a younger Russian leader who does not live in the past like Putin does may realize that Russia now has fewer people than Bangladesh or Indonesia and cannot afford old-style wars of conquest anymore.
Too many people looked at Gaddafi's fall and Kim's endurance and made a short generalization "it pays to have nukes". But there is nuance in that contrast - if Libya was a friend of China and directly bordered it, no one would dare attack it the way it was attacked, nukes or not.
Iran's largest leverage is in controlling Hormuz and threatening Dubai, Qatar etc. with destruction of their oil and water infrastructure. All of this can be done cheaply with conventional weapons. If they ever use nukes, though, they can expect to be nuked in response.
Such an option was offered to him and was refused.
isnt that leaving out the current only nuclear power in the region?
world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen
the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive
fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…
Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.
Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.
The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
Is this referring to the flotilla full of food sailing towards Gaza that was invaded and kidnapped by Israeli pirates inside the national waters of Greece?
It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).
I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
if you want to be able to have say, cheaper government, you need to be elect local officials on the palestine side, so that folks other than just the pro-israel ones can bid
But a company boycotting others for political/religious agendas is not going to be able to provide the cheapest/best service, it’s therefore not optimal to go with companies that practice BDS.
I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.
For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?
So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.
There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...
In fact most people have, in some way.
Neither are a positive finding.
I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.
Was he a fascist during that time?
If everything that you know about the world fits in a 2km radius around your house, you aren't doing anything.
America has a lot of Iran hawks, especially in goverment/military circles. They got their way.
Trumps military/war track record so far is a.) Iran war b.) Venezuela kidnapping c.) pro-Russia stance in Ukraine d.) board of peace composed of dictators and murderers e.) regular boatsmen murders f.) trying to steal Greenland. The Harris "refuses to take pro-palestinian side and refuses to abandon Israel entirely, but still not enough for pre-Israel side to accept her" is weak sauce.
Harris has a background as a prosecutor and has a track record of being literate and processing stacked feet thick piles of paper.
The force pushing to bomb Iran has always been Israel, the counter force has always been detailed backlogs of military exercises that relentlessly conclude that to be a bloody stupid idea.
It was predictable that Harris would take good advice (and perhaps follow that), and equally predictable that Trump would bluster his way forward and ignore the existing weight of experience and prior exercises.
FWiW I would not have predicted that Trump would stick himself into Iran ... I honestly thought he was stupid, just not that stupid. Although the Obama deal was famously one of his weird tic like bugaboos .. correctly factoring in how much room the former POTUS occupied in the Trumple cranium was likely where I failed.
You say that as if all the other presidents' wars in the middle east were shown to be good ideas and they were smart to follow that advice and kill all those people their generals wanted to kill. Iran seems to have not been nearly as terrible as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, or Syria. The death toll is only around 10000. What's the problem? Don't say oil prices increased because that's a good thing.
That would be entirely your take on things I did not mention.
> The death toll is only around 10000.
What's the population of the suburb you live in? About that?
> What's the problem?
\1 Trump started by destroying an agreement hard fought for by multiple countries that actually contained enrichment.
\2 The US has lost the bulk of post WWII soft power built up over decades as a result.
\3 Iran has splintered into independent smaller groups any one of which can go rogue with nuclear weapons / dirty bombs.
\4 Other states (eg: North Korea) are now fully emboldened and have ramped up their actual nuclear weapon production.
... etc.
There's a long long list of problems here - all could have been circumvented by a competent POTUS with a full experienced diplomatic cadre.
This comment shows you're being disingenuous. If a war killed 4 people, you'd be asking how big my family was. You can obviously understand the significance of that figure and it's nothing to do with suburbs.
Trump and the day drinker were the first senior US officials to take that seriously - Trump kicked that off by neutering a working and workable international agreement that capped HEU levels and allowed routine inspection and on site monitoring agreement, with more stupidity following.
Harris, and most other "traditional" (non MAGA) candidates typically follow the advice of the core military and intelligence services; it's unlikely any career politician would have jumped into open assault on either alleged drug boats or Iran.
it would be a different case, and very likely a different iranian response if israel had started the war, and the US did its more typical "is nearby and shoots down missiles flying overhead"
People don't do that.
Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.
Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.
You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.
People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.
The US has an extreme case of it, with their 2 parties system, but most countries can't keep 4 different issues actively guiding politics.
He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.
The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.
So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
And even if noone could predict that - the worst part is all the Americans sitting by, twiddling thumbs after seeing Trump making the whole world worse. You are the loudest "democracy" on the planet, but noone demands the necessary accountability from the dear leader. Democracy does not only happen on election day.
MAGA was going to be bad in some way, but the Democrats were very bad in very known ways, so voting for whoever was at least saying they were against war was the rational decision for anyone who cared about not having genociders at the helm of the state.
This implies that Donald Trump/Republicans weren't pro-Zionist and didn't support Israel which is obviously untrue.
The truth is there was no "non-genocide" candidate between the two parties and pretending otherwise - particularly by voting for Trump - was simply self-delusion.
(Unlike the meme-puppets who now believe that some genocides are better than other genocides).
The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.
You vote for who you were told to vote for.
Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.
A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
So, not entirely nothing.
Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.