My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:
The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing.
If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
Yes. If you are genuinely unaware and not just asking a rhetorical question, yes socialized medicine is a major goal of the progressive left. We came close in 2010 but the votes in congress weren't quite there. The only reason major parties don't pursue it is because progressivism doesn't have the votes. You can definitely vote for it though especially if you participate in primaries.
So is democracy not real? I find it funny that when things do right it's because of our superior system of people choosing their leaders, and when things go wrong it's because people don't have any choice.
Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor flawed example.
Despite the founders being anti-party politics and wanting a spectrum of representatives each representing a block of the broader population and hammering out consensual deals that most can live with, the US has devolved into a two party system in which neither party especially represents 50% of the population despite both butting up against the median of actual voters.
This is the doom spiral of iterative FPTP and Hotelling's 'law'.
Other democracies have many parties, larger parties mixed with smaller parties, greater voter engagement, various forms of proportional voting systems (there are several), etc.
US democracy is just one example of many global democracies.
Why do Americans want to break things anyway? The economy was doing fine, unemployment was low. What is the trigger that made half Americans go nuts? There does not seem to be a rational cause unlike 1860.
Ah but you forget that the economic exploitation of the former colonies was supposed to continue. It is not so much communism that frightened the West as it was nationalism.
Vietnam’s independence took a back seat after WW2 for the US because France made regaining its colony contingent upon playing along with NATO. France floated the idea of aligning with the USSR to scare its Western allies. So for the US it decided Europe was the more important sphere.
The US’s main strategy with the communism was one of containment - see George Kennan’s Security Council memo.
Why containment? Because the USSR was exporting revolution. The US could take the stance of doing nothing, but then the USSR would have free rein. And it wasn’t a matter of “let the people in those countries go communist if they want to”, because with USSR support a minority of people could impose communism on a population that wasn’t interested in it. Hence containment - just slow or stop other countries from going communist by matching what the USSR was doing - bankrolling and training political groups in those countries.
So doing nothing with Vietnam and letting France regain their colony aligned with containing further expansion of communist in South East Asia. If Vietnam went back to a French colony, then communism wouldn’t take hold (or it would at least be difficult for it).
Only for the internal market. America will never again manufacture steel or cars for the rest of the world.
The days of America being the factory of the world (which really only lasted a few decades) are forever gone.
In the Netherlands newspapers have traditionally been funded by subscribers. Running a newspaper is not that expensive- most of the news is after all happening in the third world were a few thousand euro can get you far.
Have your journalists fly economy- or worse Southwest lol.
People who cannot afford your product are not your audience, it is okay to be elitist.
Yes this is basically the result of two pretty terrible Belgian media conglomerates buying everything up and combining it into one pulpy slop. The government let it all happen.
Are you sure they’ve always been funded by subscribers? Things like classified ads used to be a core money maker for newspapers and the internet destroyed that market. Then the ad market got turned upside down by the internet too (though interestingly paper ads still attract higher rates!). Very few newspapers have actually thrived directly from subscriber revenue.
Not exactly they've always been co-funded by ads too. We've even had free newspapers in the Netherlands that were given it for free purely funded by ads. They tended to be light though. Like the spits and metro papers that are handed out at train stations. I don't think either exists anymore, I don't live there anymore but I didn't see them last time. Probably because everyone now has a smartphone.
After binge watching hundreds of hours of police videos and journalists that ride with police I would lean towards prescription pain killers being the root cause. Doctors prescribe a powerful drug. The prescription expires. They turn to street alternatives Fentanyl at the moment. They are now zombies. Getting off of Fent is near impossible for most so they are run through the system. It takes 6 months of being in treatment to get 89% of people off that drug. Keeping people in treatment that long is challenging to put it mildly. According to law enforcement the only things making a difference are NARCAN and blocking Fentanyl from entering the country.
