• 11 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The Judiciary has decided that the Executive must not be beholden to neither the Legislative nor the Judiciary. This is terrible, because it breaks the separation of powers. Now, if only the Executive wasn’t beholden to any of the other powers to force the Judiciary to go back to reason… Oh, wait.

    Irony aside: no, this isn’t a matter of not having standards, this is a matter of making sure that democracy is capable of perpetuating itself. If the organism gets infected by a virus that intends to mutate the whole thing into a degenerated parody of itself, it must send its antibodies. Not doing so means letting the last line of defense fall all by itself, which is even against the very spirit of the law.



  • I once ran up against a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry. Motherfucker, there are really well documented non-cishet-normative social classes in Norse Scandinavia, in pre-Modern Albania, in pre-Muslim Arabia, in several places of Indonesia - what porn industry did exist there!? He couldn’t come up with anything, but wouldn’t budge either. Some people get stuck in a prejudice and will behave like raving conspiracy theorists the moment they’re offered some bullshit explanation that makes no sense but agrees with them.








  • Plenty of different reasons.

    Historically, Greece was a poor country in Europe because it was the periphery of the Ottoman empire and therefore barely received investment.

    Through the 20th century, the country went through pretty corrupt governments (one of them being a dictatorship).

    When they joined the European market, it was already a very unproductive country in relative terms, which tends to force you into remaining in the periphery under normal market conditions; and their most educated citizens saw a very easy and profitable opportunity in just migrating out.

    On top of that, the only sector of the Greek economy that had any sort of strength was tourism, which very rarely provides good wages.

    By the 2007 crisis, they already had a dangerously high debt. Because they were, again, a tourism-focused economy, when the countries that had the most tourists going to Greece entered into recession, Greece’s income plumetted as well, and the debt just soared.

    A little bit later, Greeks elected Syriza, which had simply accepted that they were in a debt spiral that would ultimately crush the country. Syriza’s leaders told the other European governments that their debt had to be renegotiated (annoying for Greece’s creditors, but at least it would be possible for them to pay in some capacity), or they’d leave the Euro-zone and just declare bankruptcy (thus they wouldn’t pay back anything) (terrible for Greece, but perhaps not as terrible as the alternative).

    The rest of Europe told them to fuck off for a variety of reasons (plenty of German newspapers had chosen Greece as their sacrificial lamb, often calling the people of Southern European countries lazy, the Spanish president back then wanted to crush Syriza because they had been associated with a growing Spanish opposition party, generally a lot of them were into fanatical fiscal conservatism).

    Then Syriza chose not to leave the Euro-zone anyway (which provoked Varoufakis to leave the government, out of principle), and just stick to managing the country’s misery. It has only been shit year after shit year for Greece since then, as any possibility of steering into a different direction was shot dead. It’s just a country without hope at this point.



  • By “crossing the red lines” do you mean ex-Eastern block countries joining NATO? Those countries joined out of their own free will BECAUSE they feared Russia might want to attack them. And, oh surprise, Russia did attack the one country not sucking up to them that didn’t join NATO. Why should Russia’s security be sacred above that of all its neighbours?

    If by red lines you don’t mean that, then they’ve clearly not been crossed. Russia and US or EU troops have not directly fought each other, and no country has used nuclear weapons so far.









  • For your own link:

    The ANC repeated its position that the armed struggle against the country’s white-ruled government, which began in 1960, was a just war and that civilians had not been deliberately targeted.

    But the ANC statement said some of its guerrillas weren’t sufficiently trained and “were never thoroughly under the discipline of the ANC.”

    Avoiding harming civilians was a deliberate modus operandi of the ANC, the same way that Hamas deliberately kidnapped civilians. They cannot be blamed for attacking military bases - they should be blamed for attacking that which was neither military bases nor infrastructure.