You ever noticed that the West thinks vikings are cool but the Mongols are evil?
Congratulations Europe, you wasted the time of 60 countries to talk about some hypothetical 61st one. Wonder why CELAC wants nothing to do with that one war over there while their allies blockade Cuba and threaten other Mesoamerican/Caribbean nations with invasion.
Retracting a paper is a rare act, especially for a scientist of Tessier-Lavigne’s stature. A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted.
If you've ever read published research for a living, this statistic is frighteningly low.
We're on a open source website built almost exclusively to build spaces for communities with barely any profit, and people come here to tell us that greed is what motivates people. Frankly bizarre.
It sure is weird since chatGPT is not as advanced as me yet. It also doesn't like communism. Sadly bots are made by the very same corporations I have issues with.
Compartmentalising the impacts of a mode of production in a society is usually how we get into a bind on trying to tackle problems that arise from them. They are not just "who owns what" but also dictate how humanity and society produces and therefore reproduces. Large urban factories were not a possibility nor desirable under feudalism or North American indigenous collectivism. When one says that "capitalism is the root of the problem" it means that the climate crisis we are living now is a clear consequence of our society's organisation over production.
So here's some examples to illustrate. Due to the arbitrary concept of "private property" inherent to capitalism, lithium mines in the Lithium Triangle can be owned by foreign corporations. That means that despite those mines directly affecting the lives of the local communities (which includes most workers there), they are kept there and protected by world governments no matter how much they protest. That is an anti-democractic use of the local resources that can't easily happen under either communism, anarchism or collectivism and yet is the norm under global capitalism.
Another example is the production of sugar, which relies on both work conditions akin to slavery but also constant burning of the plant that wrecks the local ecology. Populations who work producing sugar cane (in particular slaves) have revolted against that in favour of self-sustainable agriculture since sugar monocultures have been a thing, and yet they have had little power to change that economy without also locally abolishing capitalism. These often come with foreign invasions, as was the case of Haiti.
And finally in the case of the Paris Accords, the big majority of Unitedsadians supported staying in it, and yet the USA left it either way. The people who will suffer and die due to ecological crises of any scale are usually the workers and not the owners. That means that if the workers are in charge of production rather than the owners, it is easy to see how they'll be more willing to change that production to prevent harm to themselves, even if you ascribe to individualism as a natural human trait.
There is absolutely a need to bring capitalism into this, and even more its birth in colonialism and descent into imperialism. There can be no "accountability of the bourgeoisie" if we live in a dictatorship of this same bourgeoisie. The slave masters didn't bend over backwards to help the slaves, and the kings have routinely sent levies en masse to their deaths. We shouldn't expect any different from our current rulers. One obvious example of a communist ("anti-capitalist" if you object to that label) nation that has done the most to combat climate change is the PRC. On the other hand the übercapitalist United States is historically the worst at that. This is not coincidence.
And on the matter of "human nature". As I've pointed out before and that you've not acknowledged, many natural human societies parallel to European and settler ones have long pushed back against this backwards pseudoscientific notion. In order to make any universal rules for whatever domain you'd need to have complete information about it. However not a single person knows all known history, and all known history doesn't even include all actual history. It is typical of those who know little history to make bold proclamations about how "humans have always been a certain way" against humans that are a different way right before one's own eyes.
Your position seems to have softened to say that the issue is "selfish people controlling corporations", but that assumes that corporations themselves are universal concepts. Either way, the existence of selfish people doesn't automatically imply that all modes of production and equally vulnerable to it, and liberal capitalism in itself exists on the principle that all people should focus on self-interest and selfishness. It is no surprise that a system that was developed to effectively colonise a land, genocide its people, exploit workers and extract every local resource only for short-term profit will end up doing just that.
If you yourself don't have any solution and yet feel your opinion is relevant you are the one engaging in contrarianism. The very least you can do is read (and by that I mean actually read in depth) of those who actually have ideas. The Red Deal link is meant only as an introduction for something which I assume is from your country, feel free to develop your understanding further in whichever direction you want. Even if you come up with a solution under capitalism, it'll be a start. Just don't come back with no solutions while complaining that others' solutions are not good enough.
Some of their founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton (yes that guy) and Aaron Burr (that other guy) who wrote a lot of the guiding material to interpreting the constitution later went on to profiteer a lot from lawyering for wealthy dudes, including the very first murderer on trial of the country who killed his female servant after getting rejected and got acquitted. It's like this by design.
Friendly reminder to build from source and not execute unknown .exes if you're a windows user. It is very common for a program to be "open source" in theory but add unwanted stuff in their official executables. Those programs look alright, but never hurts to be careful.
Users are attributing climate change to “capitalism” with no evidence or reasoning to back it up.
Have one (very liberal capitalist) brief source presenting some evidence to how capitalism is to blame. Then have a very short summary write-up on how China has been the world leader in combating climate change. Happy?
At least they won't be suffering under the burden of being both unemployed and in tuition debt. It baffles me that Western universities still demand so much money for what has become a basic employment requirement, and even worse that lots of them are more expensive to foreigners.
The United States has double China's emissions per capita, and China actually is the world leader in the production of sustainable development products like solar panels even though the USA had a 150 year head start in its industrialisation. Despite whatever criticisms you may have against China, looking only at total emissions is definitely misleading. China's renewable power has gone up fivefold in the past 15 years in absolute numbers and double in percentage of total production. The USA hasn't even been building hydro dams since the 80s, while China has built some 15 in the past 20 years. Since one is explicitly the most capitalist country and the other is """capitalist actually""", I think it is fair to say that capitalism has a negative correlation with fighting climate change.
Though I have no idea why you included the Russian Federation there, since it is a capitalist oligarchy created by and modelled after the USA. Do you believe that Russia is communist by any chance?
Not sure what you're talking about on "sect or religion" when referring to different cultures doing things differently. The link is not some "gotcha" Reddit moment, it is a good source for you and others to start questioning this notion of "human nature" given that lots of humans have been questioning this very same "human nature" dogma since it was imposed on them by Europeans starting 500 years ago and continuing to this day. Notably you shifted the discussion to talk about the Soviet Union, which has nothing to do with my point and doesn't even exist anymore. Just because nameless "previous civilisations" caused uncited "environmental collapses", doesn't mean that every civilization works by the same rule. Specially considering this current environmental catastrophe is on a whole different level and we have current day civilizations that would love to prevent it, if only they got their Land Back.
Mind telling me what this One Goal of yours might be and how it could be possible within capitalism? The ones who have the most to sacrifice are those at the top, ghettoised minorities will go mostly unharmed in most actually practical solutions.
Looking at the world while compartmentalising the overarching mode of production will only get you solutions from that overarching mode of production. You were quick to dismiss it as the wrong tool, but what is the right tool then?
The EU-CEPAL summit is starting today, probably some fun headlines about the Third World being "unreasonable" to the North inbound.
MPs? We don't have those, it is a Congress like the USA not a Parliament and they're called deputies.
Either way, this is part of campaign older than the Bolsonaro presidency where mildly left minority elected officials have been threatened, derided, impeached on nonsense charges, murdered, murdered again, or forced to flee the country. Since the last election in which the world has only focused on Bolsonaro losing the presidency the Congress actually got filled to the brim with deputies and senators aligned with his ideology. They are just continuing their age old purge of leftists and "deviants" that started during the USA-backed '64 dictatorship with the means that they have now. There is even some reason to believe [1] [2] [3] that the USA has ramped up their meddling ever since 2014, possibly due to Brazil's quick rise in the global power landscape and building alliances with other USA rival countries such as China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and others to oppose USA global hegemony and embrace multipolarity. Now that Brazil is building even stronger ties with both the EU, other third world countries and China, the right-wingers are on the back foot and have to lash out. Don't be surprised if we get another murdered politician soon, with all suspects mysteriously disappearing to Miami.
I'd recommend looking into how indigenous people have historically dealt and wish to deal with climate change before claiming much about "human nature". A lot of so-called "human nature" is just the universalisation of European capitalist values. I suggest starting by reading about the Red Deal, specially if you're from the USA.
Huh, interesting. They can get tried when the USA gets annexed by Ukraine then.
Good point. Maybe the original report should've been linked there rather than the CIA mouthpiece reporting of it. I've never seen this laboratory and they should not automatically be trustworthy just because they are from an university, since it is not peer-reviewed, but let's analyse their claims.
Summary from their report:
H3. INORGANIC, CHINA STATE-SPONSORED
Most Likely Scenario
- The majority of the evidence that we have identified is consistent with the hypothesis of a state-backed influence operation.
- The timing coincidence between the removal of a Chinese state-sponsored IO by Twitter in July/August 2019, and the start of the HKLEAKS campaign, is an indicator tilting the analysis towards HKLEAKS being backed by the Chinese government.
- Javascript code used by HKLEAKS contained Mandarin words and acronyms in Hanyu Pinyin spelling, typical of mainland China.
- Some doxxing used privileged information, only available to the Hong Kong and/or Chinese authorities.
- It is possible that the campaign also benefited from some degree of organic engagement by sympathetic online communities.
First and last one are just opinion based on the three in the middle. First actual one is just about another "operation" of spammers on twitter that "originated in the PRC". Although they claim in the summary that they were "state-sponsored" both they and their source on that (which is the Australian govt btw) provide only as evidence that they have spammed against people who are generally hated by patriotic Chinese people like Guo Wengui. In all honesty, to me it just seems like they assume it is state sponsored because the tweets are in Chinese and coming from China, and even the "timeline" is not that much of a certainty with a 3 week gap between both events for a riot timeline of around 3 months. China has a lot of people with very high approval for their own government, and there is no listed evidence there besides the "coincidence" for both of them being the same group, let alone being handled by the same shadow branch of the government.
Second one is just bizarre, obviously if the campaign is coming from mainlanders it is going to use mainlander lingo. Again, that only narrows it down to being made by mainlanders (possibly even mainlanders that participate in Hong Kong), and does not implicate the government.
The last one is the best smoking gun they have, but that could also be a leak and there's no evidence presented to determine any intentional participation from the actual government. Their main source on this. They also link to this facebook post as a "other reports", not sure what is up with that. I'll admit that the reported response by the agency doesn't help their case, but I haven't dug into that and it is not an admission of guilt either.
So in conclusion, I see very little evidence in the report itself that it was state-sponsored other than trusting blindly the Aussie govt or assuming that because something is from the mainland it is made by the government. They don't even include their shy "Most likely scenario" assessment in their conclusion, and it is only in a random box in the middle of the report.
I still stand by my words that this is basically "something that happened in China happened in China, therefore is the fault of the government" kind of nonsense. Feel free to correct me though.
I'll leave you with a Weibo post from one of the alleged spam accounts which I found really recognisable for Westerners. I wonder what that'll mean for northwestern countries. Is the USA sponsoring disinformation campaigns on twitter during protests and riots?
In the past four months, rioters in Hong Kong have blocked the subway, the airport, the roads, surrounded the government headquarters, stormed the police station, destroyed public and private property, insulted the national flag and national emblem, attacked journalists and tourists, exposed the identity of police officers and their family members recklessly, incited sexual harassment of the wives of the police, and bullied the police’s children who were still in kindergarten. These illegal acts are shocking and outrageous! Today’s Hong Kong is devastated, and Chinese people all over the world are heartbroken and find this unacceptable!
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Low effort post
Jump
I think one thing that often gets passed is that Trump was the brokest of clocks and would sometimes pay lip service that things that the citizens actually want, like avoiding participating directly in new wars. Not that it was ever applied consistently, but it was a legitimate campaign thing both in 2016 and 2020 where civilian republicans claimed that Clinton and Biden wanted WW3 and since Trump's campaign was also extremely contradictory he got to play both warmonger and pacifist to his followers.
You can even see how some traditionally anti-war "centrists" like Tulsi Gabbard have gone full Republican after the Ukraine war and how older Republicans have changed from Bush era "we need to bring freedom to their souls from their bodies" to "genocide in america first". The other explanations are valid too, but it is also a genuine concern of a portion of Republican voters and since the Democrats can't keep their cluster munitions in their pants it's a free win for Republicans.
responsibly manage your currency
I mean...
I can’t help but think of the climate activists who defaced the Van Gogh painting. Except they didn’t – because the painting is actually behind protective glass. I sincerely doubt most people got that fact from the outrage news cycle that followed that incident.
If it makes it better worse, Britain then promptly passed a bill that makes "disruptive" protests like that illegal. The government policy towards the climate crisis there is still the same ol' "Keep Calm and Carry On".
Malcolm X has an old speech which applies very well to this issue as well. Too bad you can't vote for him anymore.
Even their understanding of the Vikings is incredibly western, most barely know about how prominent the Varangians were in Eastern Rome because they only read Latin sources. It begins and ends with Ragnar and some Marvel superheroes (and the Nazis, obviously).