Skip Navigation

User banner
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)A
Posts
1
Comments
882
Joined
9 mo. ago

  • I belonged to a small left-wing party in my own country where the oldies (the party was born from the union of parties which dated back to before the anti-Fascist Revolution in my country, which was more than 50 years ago) kinda decided to pass the baton to the younger generation and almost as one stepped aside and passed control to mainly 20-something years olds, all of whom scions of the Middle Class.

    The result was that the party went up in votes when the Left had a resurgence, got into an informal coalition with the mainstream supposedly (but not really) center-left party in Government, to keep the right-wing one out of power, and after that in a period of two elections collapsed to the lowest vote ever.

    As I see it, the party leadership lacked experience (being all from a narrow social circle and lacking all both broad and long life experience) and didn't even have a concrete pre-made Ideology to guide them like, say, the old-fashioned Communists or even the Neoliberals have, because they dropped the strength of ideology of the old guard when they took over and instead just made it up as they went with no strong anchoring on fundamental Principles or a well thought framework, so ended up copying stuff they saw on the Net from Anglo-Saxon countries which was basically right-wing shit disguised as left-wing (i.e. for example "Equality" by treating people differently depending of the genes they were born with, aka Identity Politics), were easily manipulated and outsmarted by the mainstream party leadership and wouldn't really spot social or economic problems until they had hit their narrow socio-economic segment for a while, or have well-thought strategies to solve them, ending up being just another bunch of politicians making the same promises as the rest (which means that outside the party faithful they had trouble gaining trust from the electorate who just saw them as people who sounded the same as the rest.

    IMHO, I think left-wing movements need variety both on the ages of the people involved and their backgrounds in socio-economic terms and life experience, to avoid falling into political traps, becoming little more than groupthink circle-jerks and being disconnected from most of society - being left-wing means working for the many rather than the few, so you should probably have people from all over and of all kinds, in positions within the movement were they're actually participating in setting the direction of that movement, rather than having only a narrow age range, socio-economic background or path in life in control.

    The fetishization of youth is narrow-minded and self-defeating for a left-wing party, especially nowadays, when most young people grew up under Neoliberalism thus have interiorised as "the way things are" many economic and social practices they grew up with which really aren't "the only way to do it" just the way things have been done in the last 5 decades, and have never thought about Politics in Power Dynamics terms since, unlike in the old days, there is very little talk of non-Governmental forms of Power in present day politics.

    This is just as true for the fetishization of old age, social class or educational level - it's not a specific age range, socio-economic origin or path in life that's the problem, it's the narrowing of ideas, perspectives and sources of information that is the result of one group monopolizing the discussion and decision-making.

  • The word you're probably looking for is "Racism".

    Extreme Racism.

    (Curiously not just from the outright Fascists but also from the very people who have spent the last 4 decades doing performative anti-Racism whilst destroying Democracy by making it a secondary power to Money)

    The Nazi way of looking at people never went away, they just changed the lists of ubermenschen and untermenschen - the lives of those from the sub-human races are clearly worth much much less than the lives of those from the master races (which is curiously reflected on how most of the Press will talk about Israelis getting "murdered" whilst Palestinians merely "die").

    (For me Germany is especially disappointing in this regard - a nation supporting a SECOND Holocaust, is clearly not better than when it did the first)

  • Fucking New Nazis doing their own Holocaust, supported by other fucking New Nazi politicians in the US and Europe.

  • Being very much a consensus based talk-shop of competing interests and varied points of view is both the EU's weakness and it's greatest strength: it takes ages for it to act but when it does, it does so in a far more organized way, with more staying power and better long term results than the "rush in, break shit up, rush out leaving it all broken" of players like the US (as seen in places like Iraq and Afghanistan).

    The "American Way" has a lousy track record of delivering stability by itself (did it ever manage to do so after WWII?) whilst the EU Way has a lousy track record of actually going all the way to the stage of actually doing something (though it tends to act in ways other than the military).

    In the long run I think the EU's way delivers much better outcomes for everybody involved, if and when it does manage to get around to actually act in an assertive way.

    In summary, then EU is pretty shit when it comes to immediate reaction and at actually doing anything but it works in long-running situations which are complex to untangle and creating long term stable outcomes.

    A good example of the EU Way is the handling of the break up of Yugoslavia, though one could say it was more a cooperation of the American Way and the EU Way.

  • We have ‘freedom of expression’

    The HRA says that we are free to express ourselves as we see fit so long as it is within the confines of the law.

    That's only freedom of expression for those who make the laws.

  • Judging by the location it crashed and somebody interviewed saying that "they were afraid it would hit the vehicle below", it careened down for quite a distance since it crashed near the bottom.

    Mind you, that specific funicular doesn't actual travel that much of a distance (maybe 400m if I remember correctly - it's been a long time since I had a reason to go to that part of Lisbon).

    Also because it's not that long a distance, it's actually faster to just walk it up or down for most people than wait for it, plus this was the one coming down (as deduced from there being one below), so it's quite likely that most people in it were tourists.

  • The usage of "tankie" we see here in Lemmy (especially of late and from certain well known posters who tend to go around blaming American lefties for "electing Trump" by "not voting Democrat") does not have that subtlety.

    Similarly to what happenned with the term "terrorist", "tankie" has been appropriated and is being used by people with certain specific political beliefs (mainly tribalist supporters of the US Democrat Party mainstream and similar - so basically hard neoliberals) as a form of slander against people with beliefs to the left of theirs, quite independently of them actually being Authoritarian, and the targets thus tend to be in a huge range of political beliefs since the people using "tankie" like that tend to be quite close to Fascism (but not quite) in almost every social domain but Morality.

    Granted, this misuse of "tankie" is far more recent than the misuse of "terrorist" and has so far nowhere as bad real life impact as the other one (the Brits aren't yet arresting old ladies for belonging to an anti-Genocide group that the Home Office has deemed "tankie"), though it's good to keep in mind MacCarthism and the Red Scare and the current geostrategical situation were China seems to be growing to take the top place from the US and the Political and Propaganda discourse around China in certain countries is becoming more like Faith and treated as beyond question in any way form or shape, so who knows what this shit will evolve into.

  • Thanks for with your evasion of the question and even switching to attacking me rather than actually arguing the point, confirming that ultimatelly your entire chain of trust is anchored on nothing more than the nation from where the information, comes rather than trust levels being the results of system analysis.

    That's Nationalism not Rationalism, exactly the kind of shit that polutes most discussions about the Uyghur Genocide and ends up making people distrust most information about it in the West because the real and unbiased information is poluted and swamped by state-sponsored propaganda from the more heavilly Propagandistic Western nations being parroted by Nationalists who believe it because it comes from the "right" nations.

  • Plenty of things published about the 7 October attack have never been retracted, most notably the count of deaths assigned to Hamas which in light of the activation of the Sampson Doctrine by Israel was almost certainly wildly exagerated since the Israeli Military was activelly murdering any of their own citizens that had been captured by Hamas.

    It took almost a year of Israel doubling down almost daily on Murdering and Lies for those retractions to happen and even then they were only in a few Western News media, not as far as I know in the actual Israeli News Media who still now and almost without expection (the notable exception being The Hareetz) keep on unqestioningly publishing whatever the IDF and the Israeli Government says as God's Own Truth.

    Using "the Press didn't retracted it" as measure of trustworthiness of something published by the Press is just circular logic: News Media who knowingly published Propaganda aren't going to retract it unless it blows up in their face to such a level that they are forced to do so, and that almost never happens with wordy "reports" that don't stay long in the spotlight, are hard to validate and which basically say that "country we see as adversary are bad people".

    But even more simpler than that: replace everything with China and Chinese - if a Chinese Think Tank funded by the Chinese Government and even receiving funding from whatever is equivalent to the Department Of Defense in China, put out a report saying that the Uyghurs have been treated just as well as everybody else in China and all Western talk about an Huyghur Genocide are outright lies, would you believe them?

    Because if you believe it when it's all Australia and Australians but not when it's the exact same structure but with China and Chinese instead, then your trust is entirelly anchored on your biases, not on any objective analysis of the problem space and the actors involved.

  • It’s a report that has been widely reported on in the media at the time.

    Well, yeah, that's the whole point of Think Tanks - it's to produce reports for the media to unquestioningly parrot and in this day and age they definitelly unquestioningly parrot Think Tank reports without actually checking them, especially when they align with what the Government says and the target is a different nation's Government (they're more likely to actually check those things and even question them if the target is an internal group in a country, but even in certain countries you see for example reports of the words of spokespersons from, say, representatives of the industry treated with more implicit trust than those from unions, even though both sides should be thought of as equally biased towards certain interests),

    Australia specifically falls in the "Country with wholly captured Press" category, same as the US, the UK and China itself.

    As an example, a lot of the Propaganda pushed out around the 7 of October attack of Hamas on Israel was also pushed out by amongst others similar organisations and was widely reported in the media at the time as well as repeated by countless politicians in the West, and in the fullness of time most of that turned out to be wildly exagerated, misportrayal of events and even complete total bollocks.

    Given the present day levels of "journalistic" "integrity" of the Press, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, "widely reported on the media" isn't the stamp of trustworthiness you seem to think it is.

  • Yeah, there is still some level of uncertainty as they could just have crafted that data, but Reports (which are mainly talkie talkie with selected pieces of information - hence prone t cherry picking) are even more distant from raw data hence harder to confirm as "the whole truth" and when they're from Think Tanks funded by Governments (or, worse, with undisclosed funding sources) in nations that see China as an adversary (or China, or one of its allies) you know with absolute certainty that the makers of such reports have a huge incentive to push the viewpoint of the mainstream politicians of those nations.

    Ultimatelly Trust is a scale rather than just two absolute points, and highly processed selective data wrapped with lots of text is itself less trustworthy because it's harder to check that it's both true and complete (i.e. hasn't been cherry picked), and sources which are funded by those who openly have very specific views of the target of such reports are much less trustworthy on that subject than sources not suffering from such a conflict of interest.

  • Somebody is going to be getting a Non-executive board membership or millionaire consulting "gig" from one of Tiel's companies or one from one of his friends...

    By this point in time in Britain that kind of I thing has been going on long enough to almost be tradition.

  • I've lived in Britain for a decade.

    They couldn't care less about Portugal or the Portuguese and in general they see the Portuguese as just another bunch of Southern Europeans and their view of Southern Europeans is highly prejudiced in a negative way.

    We're a puny little shitty shit country from their point of view, an impression reinforced by Portuguese Politicians bending over backwards and licking the arses of the British elites.

    Like Britain is the "poodle" to America so is Portugal to Britain only even worse.

    There's still a lot of dumb provincialism in Portugal when it comes to foreigners, especially amongst Portuguese Politicians and especially towards larger European nations such as Britain.

    (Mind you, this outburst of Marcelo is pretty healthy in that sense and gives me hope that maybe that's changing, and I don't even like the guy).

    The real specific qualities of Portugal have nothing to do with those delusions that past or present great powers are "friends" of Portugal.

  • Not a single traditional party in Portugal has a name that matches the political ideology the practice:

    • The "Socialist Party" (PS) one of the two dominant "center" parties is Neoliberal (as seen from their love for Privatisation and "Free Markets").
    • The "Social Democrat Party" (PSD) the other dominant "center" party is slightly more Neoliberal (roughly similar to the US Democrat Party mainstream, so PSD is actually to the Right of the Progressives in the US)
    • The "Communist Party" (PC) love Putin, a Fascist and even their "leftwing" thinking is little more than Soviet Union slogans.
    • The "Social and Democratic Center" (CDS) are the conservatives which in Portugal means the yearn for the previous regime (which were the Fascists)

    Like in pretty much all other countries in the West the Overtoon Window has shifted rightwards, though even at the very beginning right after the Revolution in 1974 that overthrew the Fascist Dictatorship, the Socialist Party were never Socialists (it was the Communist Party that wanted a Revolution Of The Proletariat, not the Socialist Party) and similarly the Social Democrat Party was never Social Democrat (for example, they voted against the creation of a National Health Service in Portugal, the exact opposite of the Social Democrat ideals).

  • It's the water from washing the decks of container ships...

  • I think the current bunch and their idiot flunkies are already the kind of people one would not want to have access to any information that could be used to blackmail or harass a person.

    People who have old ladies arrested for demonstrating against mass murder of children due to their ethnicity, are NOT morally upright people who when in power would never abuse information about who watches what porn.

  • If you browse other regions of China there, in some (mainly the ones whose names I didn't recognize which I expect are the most provincial hence why I've never heard of them), you will find a fall in birth-rates from aproximatelly the same values to the same values (i.e. around 1.4 to around 0.6, for example https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/population-birth-rate-by-region/cn-population-birth-rate-jiangxi and https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/population-birth-rate-by-region/cn-population-birth-rate-shaanxi) but none but Xinjiang have that steep drop in 2017.

    Something happenned in Xinjiang at around 2017 and for at least a couple of years that did not happen in the other regions of China.

    We can't really deduce anything about what's still happenning there, either way, from that graphic.

    EDIT: There is a response to this post where a link is provided to a report by a Think Tank created by and openly funded by the Australian Government (as shown right there: https://www.aspi.org.au/about-us/, second paragraph). The post were I pointed out that such a source has a conflict of interest, hence that report can't just be outright trusted, has been moderated away as "misinformation" even though my claim is proven by their own website. Feel free to draw your own conclusions as to why such a comment was removed by a moderation action backed by a false justification (as the page above proves), especially in light of the specific subject we're talking about here.

  • They will loudly announce that in about 2 month's time they will recognize Greta's right not to be imprisioned but only if she stops proclaiming her innocence.

  • fingers crossed

  • Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Lemmy world moderation as usual using "anti-semitism" as a cudgel against Humanitarian beliefs.