pasabagi

29 ms·

271.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Eh, first world countries produce a lot of food. Farming is generally heavily mechanized. Nobody needs to have their 'hands in the dirt'. In fact, I expect most potatoes will not be touched by a single human hand until they reach
272.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Nobody doubts that conspiracies do happen: there's a specific criminal charge for conspiracy, for example. What people call a 'conspiracy theory', in the sense of what you've posted, is a type of discourse that's b
273.
by pasabagi 4y ago
> as a country thinks a lot more critically about political things ... Did you miss the last election, where the far-right daughter of a noted neo-nazi faced off against a man who's only claim to electability was that he wasn't
274.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I think the propaganda aspect is not so much about the performance of the Russian military (on any objective measure, it's been very bad), but rather on the claims that the Russian military is unusually brutal and indiscriminate, and t
275.
by pasabagi 4y ago
A total guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if part of the training set was that big blob of google news articles that were floating around. In which case, the source of the racism is obvious.
276.
by pasabagi 4y ago
In the UK, there were the biggest protests in british history. Tony Blair, the elected head of one of the world's oldest democracies, completely ignored them. He now has a knighthood.
277.
by pasabagi 4y ago
> as they are The current PM called muslim women 'letter boxes'. You've clearly never been to the UK. I'm sure if you had a basic familiarity, you'd rest comfortably in the knowledge that the state there is just
278.
by pasabagi 4y ago
> But there's also nothing else to do other than brake or get out of the way, which can be immensely frustrating. Well, yeah, but the nice thing about somebody being in any kind of not-car is you can talk to them like a normal perso
279.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Well, I guess the (somewhat cynical) calculus most politicians/bureaucrats make is that however many people become ill in the long term, it's probably less expensive than lockdowns (even if lockdowns are less expensive than health
280.
by pasabagi 4y ago
> * Or having 0.3% of your population die, and several times that disabled? Aaaaand, also lock down for many, many more human-hours than China has. The thing that drives me crazy about the 'liberty vs safety' debate in the west
281.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I don't really get the 'pronoun-as-stick' thing. I've never met somebody who has created a pronoun to express themselves. I've only really come across novel pronouns in 80's literature. I have met (and had frie
282.
by pasabagi 4y ago
> The logic is simple, post WW2, the US was the only one with the bomb and could have secured a monopoly on power, but it didn't and here we are. How? The nuclear umbrella makes sense as a defensive strategy: you can't advance
283.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I don't think the EU is being extorted, exactly. It's simply that, for the countries that have done harsh sanctions on Russian gas, it's basically free for them: they weren't importing any anyway. Germany has a real and
284.
by pasabagi 4y ago
My feeling is that certain kinds of governments create certain kinds of administrative cultures, and sadly, post-soviet states often end up with gangster kleptocrats, whether or not they are Russian. The fish rots from the head down, and so
285.
by pasabagi 4y ago
There are some issues with this article. First, the account of the ukranian revolution is neither very accurate nor balanced: generally speaking, shadowy US interference in far-away states ('color revolutions', etc) is more compli
286.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Yeah, can totally see how it might come across as an incidence of 'lawfare'. However, the UK system doesn't work like that. It's very very strongly biased to protect people like Boris Johnson from any kind of prosecution
287.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I think the UN was a bit of a questionable idea to begin with. The US was simply too big, rich, and strong: there's no point at which the UN could realistically bring any pressure on the US to make it do anything. Ultimately, even with
288.
by pasabagi 4y ago
The GDP doesn't really matter in this conflict, since the Ukraine is essentially getting all its weapons, intelligence and training for free. That and, a lot of the Russian military (the reserves) and their equipment (ships, subs, inte
289.
by pasabagi 4y ago
I think in general, western democracies do a lot better on elite freedoms than China, or indeed eastern democracies. When it comes to the actual freedom enjoyed by normal people, it's more patchy. Living in contemporary America, or ind
290.
by pasabagi 4y ago
To be honest, the only thing that interested me about the diaries was what it tells you about the home office, the character of the people trying to have Roger Casement hanged, and the integrity of the institution they served.
291.
by pasabagi 4y ago
Well, kinda. Apparently they dug up the original unpunctuated norman french text of the treason act, then read it so that it had a comma between two clauses, changing its sense, allowing him to be charged with treason: > or if a Man do l
292.
by pasabagi 4y ago
One is reminded of Sir Roger Casement, who was knighted for his work in exposing and opposing human rights abuses in Peru, then hung for doing the same in the British Empire. Fighting for human rights in other countries has always been far
293.
by pasabagi 4y ago
In the UK, his actions regarding Ukraine (which I also found surprisingly brave) are generally viewed as a cynical way of using your suffering to boost his poll numbers. If I was Ukrainian, I probably wouldn't care that much (since it
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by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, they did bury it. First, there were media figures (the wife of the editor of the Sun, for instance) at the parties, so obviously they didn't report on it at the time, and I remember when the first leaks started coming out, Laur
295.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, if you want to downplay it, you can point to a country like Belgium, which has a good GDP, so it's obviously a functional nation (right?), and point out their higher death numbers, then you can say that obviously the response was
296.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, the point about the party story is that it's incontrovertible. With the handling of the pandemic itself, the media could spin, smoosh and soft-pedal the facts to make Boris look 'Churchillian'. Since they're comple
297.
by pasabagi 5y ago
There's also an unusually personal dimension. I expect a majority of people in the UK have either lost relatives or friends during the pandemic, and have had to follow rules regarding hospital visits and funerals that were pretty hard.
298.
by pasabagi 5y ago
In general the idea of removing somebody's citizenship for any reason is highly problematic, as it leads to the possibility of a get-out clause around the inalienable rights that citizens are supposed to have.
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by pasabagi 5y ago
> "inferior races" > Unlike Hitler, Stalin did not use the word "race", but he acted identically against various population groups distinguished by their nationality, which is why I have used the word "race&qu
300.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I had a look at your post history, and obviously, I don't agree with your ideas about COVID - but I'm curious, what got you so emotionally engaged? I've had some relatives die, I've spent large portions of the pandemic c

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