It's my personal conviction that there will be a nuclear war within this century, as humans by nature cannot see what's the collective good for the species as a whole and act on it. Humans can hardly survive any nuclear war, given the ample evidence of the stupidity and intolerance shown abundantly in current Covid crisis. It's always individual rights first, without any attendant responsibility part. If a society, or a government, can't handle virus, you can't handle nuclear war, where far more chaos and destruction are afoot than staying home and binging on Netflix. If we could delay it, it's better. May be human would find some tech to move somewhere else. Responsible societies, like China, is the only best hope for humanity. So if China is able to change the thought process in western world, if at all, then I see it as a win for all, the greatest good for the greatest number.
Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
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While I hope that Brazil could settle its divide peacefully, but I have to ask: why does everyone here think Lula is some kind of savior? Remember that it's under Bolsonaro that Huawei won the deal to build Brazilian 5G, PetroChina won offshore oilfield, and China expanded agricultural and mineral import from Brazil.
Blacks have the slavery excuse.... what excuse does Hispanics have about racial oppression? They have nothing comparable to Chinese Exclusion Act or Yellow Peril... it's diversity for sake of appearance.
The US has been creative destroying South/Central America via the Monroe Doctrine/Colonialism/Drug War for the past 100+ years.
I'd like to expand on why I believe "Regime change is a bad idea", the economic trajectory of basically the entire world for the foreseeable is on the downward trend. NO GOVERNMENT will be popular or stable for long. You really don't want to be seen as backing any party lest you are blamed for supporting an unpopular party.
Most of the west's enemies are created this way, the west wants a government to uncritically enforce their will and interests regardless of their domestic popularity. And will turn on the more popular government if they deem it not sufficiently enforce their interests abroad.
In the west itself, the average person, by nature, wants everything all the time. They want the nationalistic pride of a strong independent country that don't need no others but doesn't want inflation, wants economic growth but no immigration, wants tax cuts but strong public services, wants more exports but hate talking to those they deem beneath them. But obviously nobody can give them want since one usually come at the expanse of another.
Japan has being like this for decades, UK has been riding the idiot carousel since BREXIT. The average person doesn't know what to do except for hitting the reset button endlessly hoping someone will magically deliver what they want. Nothing last enough to matter, hedging on any political party/person is useless.
It all boils down to ages old question of what is a good life, or what you'd define as a good life. That perception had killed off other human cousin species before, even though they may not have put that idea in words or language, but that's the basis of cooperative group warfare, because you couldn't possible have a good life if other tribes were on the land you hunt and gather. And many, many more wars and conflicts since.
It'll kill us too, only hope is to delay that inevitability as much as it is possible. Another possible delay mechanism might be educating their future elites in Chinese universities about Chinese culture and thinking.
It'll kill us too, only hope is to delay that inevitability as much as it is possible. Another possible delay mechanism might be educating their future elites in Chinese universities about Chinese culture and thinking.
Tbh the blacks who are getting the most benefit from affirmative action are the foreign students from African nations like Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia etc or the children of first generation migrants from those nations.
Ironically, their ancestors would have been the ones selling their brethren to the slavers across the Atlantic…
Ahaha Biden called up Scholz straight away after he got back home to check that he's still loyal to the empire, from a position of strength no doubt. Scholz be like errr yeah sure man.
Better get that phone book ready because now that Scholz started the trend there's going to be a lot more people repeating the trip afterwards.
Better get that phone book ready because now that Scholz started the trend there's going to be a lot more people repeating the trip afterwards.
Never a dull moment in Amerikkka...
Demonstrators attempt to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Nov. 6, 2022, 11:00 PM AEDT By and
WASHINGTON — Armed men in masks and tactical gear have secure ballot drop boxes. Candidates of both parties physically, election workers . And threats against members of Congress are .
For many voters, a vicious spiral of violence and fear is creating angst, paranoia and an overwhelming sense of dread that the nation is on the eve of destruction, according to a growing body of public opinion research.
Democrats worry that the GOP is bent on seizing power regardless of the outcome of elections — a concern rooted in former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race he lost. a large portion of Republicans fear democracy is in peril because they believe that elections are rigged against them.
“The corollary to denying the 2020 election is that the deniers don’t believe that exercising their vote is a way to fix [problems] on Nov. 8,” said former Rep. David Jolly, a political independent who served in Congress as a Republican from Florida.
Trump’s false claims about the election have convinced some of his most ardent supporters of a dangerous theory, Jolly said: “You can’t reclaim democracy by going to the ballot box on Nov. 8 — you actually have to use force or intimidation.”
Polls consistently show that Americans — of both political parties and no political party — are worried about the state of the union and their place in it.
Two-thirds of Americans say the country is at its lowest point in their memory, and more than a quarter report being so stressed they can’t function most days, according to a commissioned by the American Psychological Association in which more than three-quarters said the future of the country was a significant source of stress in their lives.
“We didn’t even ask these types of questions before the 2016 election because politics didn’t seem to be a driving stressor,” said C. Vaile Wright, a clinical psychologist and a senior director at the APA. “The way the political climate has changed to be more negative, the way the media has changed, I do think it has, for a lot of Americans, changed the way we process and deal with election season.”
Social media, push alerts and the 24/7 news cycle pound out a drumbeat of disaster. Old escapes, such as the World Series and movies, offer no respite. The post-Citizens United avalanche of political cash gives political actors the ability to flood commercial breaks and streaming video services with campaign ads like never before. Most of the ads warn of the dangers of electing one candidate or another in the darkest of terms.
“There’s a point of information saturation where you’re constantly exposing yourself to negativity, and that’s not helpful,” Wright said.
Trust in media and democratic institutions is at an all-time low. In one of his first acts as Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk promoted a baseless conspiracy theory about the intruder who bludgeoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer.
Attack ads accusing Pelosi of being hellbent on “” did not pause as her husband lay in the hospital, nor after police documents showed the attacker seemed to be partially inspired by the years of work and millions of dollars conservative have invested in turning Pelosi into a boogeyman.
Frustrated by the fear that democracy no longer serves them, some Americans are becoming convinced that violence is the answer.
A of an unusually large sample of 8,620 Americans from July found that almost 1 in 5 agreed that violence is sometimes needed to “protect American democracy” when “elected leaders will not.”
Among those who said violence was sometimes justifiable, 12% said they were personally willing “to threaten or intimidate a person,” 10% said they would “injure a person,” and 7% said they would be willing to “kill a person.”
“We expected the findings to be concerning, but these exceeded our worst expectations,” said Garen Wintemute, the lead author of the study.
Numerous studies have found that large majorities of Americans expect political violence to increase in coming years, while large portions of the population — 43% in one survey — say is at least somewhat likely in the next decade.
A majority — 56% — of Republicans agreed the to “arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life,” according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, compared with 35% of independents and 22% of Democrats.
In the final turbulent days of the midterm elections, America, given the threat to free and fair elections, can be compared to “a fourth-world country,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and an MSNBC political analyst who has been highly critical of what he has characterized as extremists in the GOP.
The FBI plans to stand up multiple “command posts” to deal with potential threats on Election Day. The Department of Homeland Security, which was established in response to international terrorism, now says domestic extremists are the country’s. And both agencies last week that “perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence.”
“America is facing a mainstreaming of violence among people who are well-established in their communities and who seem to view their violence not as a criminal act but as an extension of political behavior,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, testified before the Jan. 6 committee this year. “Problematically, this was also the demographic picture as Nazi extremism mainstreamed among regular Germans in the 1930s.”
Of course, political violence is as old as the nation, which was itself born out of a violent insurrection against the British colonial government. Armed rebellions challenged the government from the start, the Civil War nearly ended it and the 20th century was rife with bombings, assassinations and political intimidation, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Weather Underground.
But experts worry that tolerance for violence is not only becoming more mainstream, but that political incentives in a highly polarized environment make it difficult for leaders to apply the brakes.
The Cooperative Election Study, a huge long-term academic research project administered by Harvard, found that one of the best predictors of pro-violent attitudes in individuals is “,” a term borrowed from psychology used to describe ways of seeing others as evil, less than human and a mortal threat to the nation.
See link for rest of article
A spiral of violence and fear is creating angst for many voters ahead of the midterm elections
Three-quarters of Americans say they worry about the future of the country as a threat of violence chills the air.
Demonstrators attempt to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Nov. 6, 2022, 11:00 PM AEDT By and
WASHINGTON — Armed men in masks and tactical gear have secure ballot drop boxes. Candidates of both parties physically, election workers . And threats against members of Congress are .
For many voters, a vicious spiral of violence and fear is creating angst, paranoia and an overwhelming sense of dread that the nation is on the eve of destruction, according to a growing body of public opinion research.
Democrats worry that the GOP is bent on seizing power regardless of the outcome of elections — a concern rooted in former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race he lost. a large portion of Republicans fear democracy is in peril because they believe that elections are rigged against them.
“The corollary to denying the 2020 election is that the deniers don’t believe that exercising their vote is a way to fix [problems] on Nov. 8,” said former Rep. David Jolly, a political independent who served in Congress as a Republican from Florida.
Trump’s false claims about the election have convinced some of his most ardent supporters of a dangerous theory, Jolly said: “You can’t reclaim democracy by going to the ballot box on Nov. 8 — you actually have to use force or intimidation.”
Polls consistently show that Americans — of both political parties and no political party — are worried about the state of the union and their place in it.
Two-thirds of Americans say the country is at its lowest point in their memory, and more than a quarter report being so stressed they can’t function most days, according to a commissioned by the American Psychological Association in which more than three-quarters said the future of the country was a significant source of stress in their lives.
“We didn’t even ask these types of questions before the 2016 election because politics didn’t seem to be a driving stressor,” said C. Vaile Wright, a clinical psychologist and a senior director at the APA. “The way the political climate has changed to be more negative, the way the media has changed, I do think it has, for a lot of Americans, changed the way we process and deal with election season.”
Social media, push alerts and the 24/7 news cycle pound out a drumbeat of disaster. Old escapes, such as the World Series and movies, offer no respite. The post-Citizens United avalanche of political cash gives political actors the ability to flood commercial breaks and streaming video services with campaign ads like never before. Most of the ads warn of the dangers of electing one candidate or another in the darkest of terms.
“There’s a point of information saturation where you’re constantly exposing yourself to negativity, and that’s not helpful,” Wright said.
Trust in media and democratic institutions is at an all-time low. In one of his first acts as Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk promoted a baseless conspiracy theory about the intruder who bludgeoned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer.
Attack ads accusing Pelosi of being hellbent on “” did not pause as her husband lay in the hospital, nor after police documents showed the attacker seemed to be partially inspired by the years of work and millions of dollars conservative have invested in turning Pelosi into a boogeyman.
Frustrated by the fear that democracy no longer serves them, some Americans are becoming convinced that violence is the answer.
A of an unusually large sample of 8,620 Americans from July found that almost 1 in 5 agreed that violence is sometimes needed to “protect American democracy” when “elected leaders will not.”
Among those who said violence was sometimes justifiable, 12% said they were personally willing “to threaten or intimidate a person,” 10% said they would “injure a person,” and 7% said they would be willing to “kill a person.”
“We expected the findings to be concerning, but these exceeded our worst expectations,” said Garen Wintemute, the lead author of the study.
Numerous studies have found that large majorities of Americans expect political violence to increase in coming years, while large portions of the population — 43% in one survey — say is at least somewhat likely in the next decade.
A majority — 56% — of Republicans agreed the to “arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life,” according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, compared with 35% of independents and 22% of Democrats.
In the final turbulent days of the midterm elections, America, given the threat to free and fair elections, can be compared to “a fourth-world country,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and an MSNBC political analyst who has been highly critical of what he has characterized as extremists in the GOP.
The FBI plans to stand up multiple “command posts” to deal with potential threats on Election Day. The Department of Homeland Security, which was established in response to international terrorism, now says domestic extremists are the country’s. And both agencies last week that “perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence.”
“America is facing a mainstreaming of violence among people who are well-established in their communities and who seem to view their violence not as a criminal act but as an extension of political behavior,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, testified before the Jan. 6 committee this year. “Problematically, this was also the demographic picture as Nazi extremism mainstreamed among regular Germans in the 1930s.”
Of course, political violence is as old as the nation, which was itself born out of a violent insurrection against the British colonial government. Armed rebellions challenged the government from the start, the Civil War nearly ended it and the 20th century was rife with bombings, assassinations and political intimidation, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Weather Underground.
But experts worry that tolerance for violence is not only becoming more mainstream, but that political incentives in a highly polarized environment make it difficult for leaders to apply the brakes.
The Cooperative Election Study, a huge long-term academic research project administered by Harvard, found that one of the best predictors of pro-violent attitudes in individuals is “,” a term borrowed from psychology used to describe ways of seeing others as evil, less than human and a mortal threat to the nation.
See link for rest of article
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More peace cowards and Putin puppets!!!!
Issued on: 05/11/2022 - 16:58
Protesters said sending weapons to Ukraine did nothing to help peace efforts
Rome (AFP) – Tens of thousands of Italians marched through Rome on Saturday calling for peace in Ukraine and urging Italy to stop sending of weapons to fight the Russian invasion.
"No to war. No to sending weapons", read one large banner carried by protesters, as a vast crowd broke into cries of "give peace a chance".
NATO founding member Italy has supported Ukraine from the start of the war, including providing it with arms.
New far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said that will not change and the government has said it is expecting to send more weapons soon.
But some, including former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, have said Italy should be stepping up negotiations instead.
The peace rally was attended by some 30,000 people, Rome police told Italian media.
"The weapons were sent at the beginning on the grounds that this would prevent an escalation," demonstrator Roberto Zanotto told AFP.
"Nine months later and it seems to me that there's been an escalation. Look at the facts: sending weapons does not help stop a war, weapons help fuel a war."
Student Sara Gianpietro said the conflict was being dragged out by arming Ukraine, which "has economic consequences for our country, but for the respect of human rights too".
The Group of Seven foreign ministers, including Italy, on Friday vowed to continue supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
Thousands in Italy march for peace in Ukraine
Issued on: 05/11/2022 - 16:58
Protesters said sending weapons to Ukraine did nothing to help peace efforts
Rome (AFP) – Tens of thousands of Italians marched through Rome on Saturday calling for peace in Ukraine and urging Italy to stop sending of weapons to fight the Russian invasion.
"No to war. No to sending weapons", read one large banner carried by protesters, as a vast crowd broke into cries of "give peace a chance".
NATO founding member Italy has supported Ukraine from the start of the war, including providing it with arms.
New far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said that will not change and the government has said it is expecting to send more weapons soon.
But some, including former prime minister Giuseppe Conte, have said Italy should be stepping up negotiations instead.
The peace rally was attended by some 30,000 people, Rome police told Italian media.
"The weapons were sent at the beginning on the grounds that this would prevent an escalation," demonstrator Roberto Zanotto told AFP.
"Nine months later and it seems to me that there's been an escalation. Look at the facts: sending weapons does not help stop a war, weapons help fuel a war."
Student Sara Gianpietro said the conflict was being dragged out by arming Ukraine, which "has economic consequences for our country, but for the respect of human rights too".
The Group of Seven foreign ministers, including Italy, on Friday vowed to continue supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
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