Iraq protests

[r16]

Didn't they decide to allow Boeing and the West into the investigation? Thought I heard that on the news this morning.

accepting they shot it down and the lack of cockpit response was due that the cockpit was the place that was hit , conducting PR for their good friends in Russia , so that Russians can sell more Tor missiles .

No he wasn't. See Steve Coll's book "Ghost Wars."

(on the thorny issue of whether Bin Ladin was an American asset)

it's CIA's PR piece . Explains how they made a women majority team to think out of the box and then did everything possible to hide that out of the box thinking , until the towers come down .

Only if President Obama is responsible for 500,000 deaths in Syria.

In other words: no.

he definitely allowed slave bazaars to happen .

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Japan literally has government initiatives trying to persuade people not to stay in their homes and cut themselves off from society, ala hikikomori

Also intense levels of virginity

 

[Yeekim]

"Do not go with the herd, that's what I mean. Hamsters betray once changed conjuncture. People who can choose unpopular decisions, a much more reliable." these sage words are actually from a webpage from 2011 , machine translated ./…/ . ı have no idea what would be the correct translation of the Russian word that has become hamsters.

I'm guessing it's суслик, suslik.

 

[tamyrlin]

Babson college does not consider satire to represent values and culture of college. If a satirical post response can get you fired, then how would you punish a person who made an actual threat to destroy cultural sites?

Spoiler Article :

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ost-babson-college-asheen-phansey/4425515002/

A Babson College professor has been fired for a Facebook post that jokingly suggested that Iran's supreme leader should make a list of American cultural sites worthy of bombing.

The private Massachusetts college announced the termination of adjunct professor Asheen Phansey on Thursday, drawing criticism from free speech advocates who said the personal social media post was not serious.

“In retaliation, Ayatollah Khomenei [sic] should tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb,” Phansey wrote in the since-deleted post. “Um… Mall of America? Kardashian residence?"

The post came after President Donald Trump tweeted that he would include cultural sites in the list of 52 targets he would strike if Iran took action against the U.S. after killing its top general last week. Trump walked back on the remarks Tuesday after facing accusations of threatening war crimes.

n a statement, Babson College said it condemns threatening words allowing violence and hate to continue.

"Babson College conducted a prompt and thorough investigation related to a post shared on a staff member’s personal Facebook page that does not represent the values and culture of the College," the statement said. "Based on the results of the investigation, the staff member is no longer a Babson College employee."

 

[r16]

I'm guessing it's суслик, suslik.

thanks . So , ı guess it's just some random idiom in Russian .


rant about the situation in r16's town : Also gives a chance on ranting how dear Americans have been busy telling locals "He's mocking you." when the whole thing is like about letting them laugh so that they will not do anything random that will hurt them . ı am a wonder in it , because ı was and am a total loser . Experience man , of the kind that buried the Soviets and Americans barely made it , but of course they don't exactly know it . How about getting lost , so that they will get tired of laughing at me ? Instead of warning them that causing too much anger causes grief , in people , too . Can be applied to all . Translation would be do not mess with things too hard , but no one can stop Donald Trump ?

 

[innonimatu]

Japan literally has government initiatives trying to persuade people not to stay in their homes and cut themselves off from society, ala hikikomori

Also intense levels of virginity

The west is following. On that and other problems.

The only changes I think that could be made to immediate effect would be to totally abolish the high corporate income tax rate so that foreign multinational firms would have an incentive to set up shop in Japan rather than in Hong Kong or Singapore, and to a lesser extent Taiwan and Korea.

Right now a good many of inefficient Japanese firms are effectively shielded from foreign competition because the high corporate income taxes make it very unpalatable for profit-seeking multinational firms with different governing standards to come in and lure talent when the cost of doing business here is twice that of Taiwan and nearly three times that of Singapore and Hong Kong.

It does not look like Japan ne3eds to do that. They still net exporters. There is talk (exaggerated imo) of future lack of labour force. And technologically Japan is one of the most self-sufficient countries in the world.
Why make any effort to attract foreign companies. What problems does that address?

 

[amadeus]

It does not look like Japan ne3eds to do that. They still net exporters. There is talk (exaggerated imo) of future lack of labour force. And technologically Japan is one of the most self-sufficient countries in the world.
Why make any effort to attract foreign companies. What problems does that address?

Without going into too many specifics, multinational companies are generally viewed here as offering better pay and conditions than the more conservative Japanese companies.

What else could be done to reverse two (three?) decades of sluggish growth rates? They’ve tried helicopter drops and public spending and big corporate bailouts... and here we are.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Without going into too many specifics, multinational companies are generally viewed here as offering better pay and conditions than the more conservative Japanese companies.

What else could be done to reverse two (three?) decades of sluggish growth rates? They’ve tried helicopter drops and public spending and big corporate bailouts... and here we are.

In a world becoming overpoplated, with global warming impacting food production and of resource depletion,
for an already developed economy, sluggish growth rates may be the best that can be expected.

 

[luiz]

Without going into too many specifics, multinational companies are generally viewed here as offering better pay and conditions than the more conservative Japanese companies.

What else could be done to reverse two (three?) decades of sluggish growth rates? They’ve tried helicopter drops and public spending and big corporate bailouts... and here we are.

I think the interesting question is whether Japan needs high growth rates. European countries have been accepting millions of immigrants and reforming their economic systems to keep growth afloat amid a falling native population. Japan clearly made a different choice: accept low growth while investing heavily in automation to keep things going, even if not booming. They have managed to remain a high wage, zero unemployment society while keeping very high social cohesion, which many might say compares favorably with major European countries (E.g. France, which is far from being the worst case, has 10% unemployment, much larger subemployement, and your pocket will get picked if you're not careful in large areas of most big cities. And while this is subjective, there is a growing sense of falling social cohesion contributing to a general feeling of malaise).

 

[amadeus]

I think the interesting question is whether Japan needs high growth rates.

It does, and it can without importing a permanent underclass of foreign low-wage labor.

 

[red_elk]

Japan has already maxed out its GDP, it can't grow further

 

[Gorbles]

In a world becoming overpoplated, with global warming impacting food production and of resource depletion,
for an already developed economy, sluggish growth rates may be the best that can be expected.

The overpopulation theory is a myth. And also based on some extremely outdated projections.

 

[luiz]

I don't even think there is social regression. That apparently quick "modernization" of the 1970s was a thin veneer applied by "progressive" (not entirely fond of the word, but it'd be hard to explain) governments trying to change their countries where most of the population was not on board with the new ideas. These things take time. And most of those governments got toppled in one way or another before they had the time to get thinks to change. In different ways in each country, so each country should be discussed in its own details if you wise to discuss the past. Even in Israel where there were no coups the political situation is very fragmented, and this is a result of changes.

"Islamicization" seems to be, for its adherents, an attempt to find some kind of stable basis in a situation that has indeed changed. Its success is a measure of the real change that has been happening in the region as the old (and sometimes more tolerant) ways of life were wiped out by modernization. They have not gone backwards, they've advanced forward and gotten into the problems that change brings: the old is torn down before the new is ready, anything can happen. They'll also find ways to get out of the problems.

It was perhaps assumed that technical modernization would lead the rest of the world to automatically adopt the "western" social model, as if there was a single inevitable modern way of like. This was absurd. Different countries there have different backgrounds and there is (fortunately) not a global, homogeneous culture. It's up to the people of each to navigate their own paths. But repressive theocratic rule anywhere does not look like it'll have much staying power. Most of the trouble in the Middle East is that too many of the countries there have governments that also want to exercise power in other countries. And believe that necessary for their own safety. And are faced with other countries from outside playing chess there. Deescalation of both ambitions and fears is going to be a very complicated effort but it is the only good way forward. At least now everyone seems to be saying that word. Some hope.

I think there are several factors at play here, and indeed their sum means there was concrete "social regression" in the Middle East from the 1970's to the present.
One of them is the so-called "Vengeance de Dieu", which is not exclusive to Muslim countries, but was arguably more intense in them than anywhere else. Basically, in many regions there was a big "spiritual revival" in the last decades, with previously non-religious people rediscovering churches. This was very evident in the Balkans, where it was once joked that a "Bosnian is a Yugoslav who doesn't go to the Mosque, a Croat is an Yugoslav who doesn't go the Cathedral, and a Serb is an Yugoslav who doesn't go to the Orthodox church". By the time of the war in 90's, religious identities where very much their defining factor, with Bosnians forming mujaheddin units and the Serbs putting up crosses on the sites of Mosques they razed. Basically, as one identity collapsed (communist, Yugoslav) people reverted back to old and familiar religious identities. In the USA and Latin America around the same time the boom of evangelical churches begun; following the end of the USSR Russia rediscovered it's Orthodox faith and identity. And in the Muslim world, fundamentalist approaches rose fast. Unlike what is commonly believed in the West, Islamic fundamentalism is not the domain of old, poor, desperate peasants. No, it was the young, educated and urban groups that embraced radical Islam. They became far more conservative than their parents (and BTW this is true too in Western countries with big Muslim populations; the first generation immigrants are typically very secular; it's the young who roam around with big beards and dressed as if they were in some Wahhabi mosque). Growing popular participation reinforced Islamic fundamentalism, not the other way around. Even countries which are still autocracies such as Saudi Arabia had to adopt more radical Islamic laws to appease growing fundamentalist insurgencies.

While technical progress is pretty much unstoppable at this point, it's a Western myth that social progress will go hand to hand with it. And it's a Western delusion that technical progress will lead to Western-style liberal democracies.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

While technical progress is pretty much unstoppable at this point, it's a Western myth that social progress will go hand to hand with it.

I think the social progress is inevitable in its own right, as is technical progress. But I don't think they necessarily move forward in lock step, nor do they only move forward all the time.

I don't know that I ever thought technical progress led directly to democracy.

I did use to think social progress did, on the other hand. What scares me right now is that China is seemingly breaking that mold by having social progress develop alongside increasingly punitive and intrusive authoritarianism.

 

[luiz]

I think the social progress is inevitable in its own right, as is technical progress. But I don't think they necessarily move forward in lock step, nor do they only move forward all the time.

I don't know that I ever thought technical progress led directly to democracy.

I did use to think social progress did, on the other hand. What scares me right now is that China is seemingly breaking that mold by having social progress develop alongside increasingly punitive and intrusive authoritarianism.

Why would social progress be inevitable? History, and not only Western history, suggests otherwise.

 

[Estebonrober]

Why would social progress be inevitable? History, and not only Western history, suggests otherwise.

This isn’t true at all. Social progress has a long slow ark towards justice. To quote I’m sure many of your favorite progressive politicians.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

History, and not only Western history, suggests otherwise.

On practically every metric, the world is a better, safer place on the whole than at any time in the past. There are issues of course and locations where poop hits the fan. But overall, global society is much more respectful of the average person than ever before.

 

[luiz]

This isn’t true at all. Social progress has a long slow ark towards justice. To quote I’m sure many of your favorite progressive politicians.

On practically every metric, the world is a better, safer place on the whole than at any time in the past. There are issues of course and locations where poop hits the fan. But overall, global society is much more respectful of the average person than ever before.

As already mentioned, in the Middle East there are more restrictions on the rights of women and religious minorities today than there was in the 60's or 70's. Turkey is moving away from secularism and towards a more conservative Islamic society. Large parts of the world have pretty much abandoned even paying lip service to Western-style social liberalism (Russia and China come to mind, but actually much of Asia fits the bill), proclaiming the superiority of their own mores.

Now if you mean to say that right now most places are more socially "progressive" than in the Middle Ages, yes sure. But that's not very pertinent for we the living. I was more talking about what happens over a few generations.
(that said, there are some places which are indeed less socially progressive than they were in the Middle Ages, which does make a point about the "inevitability" of social progress...)

 

[Farm Boy]

This isn’t true at all. Social progress has a long slow ark towards justice. To quote I’m sure many of your favorite progressive politicians.

Food security, clean water, shoes, and protection from exposure does more for that long slow social arc than anything else. It sets the table. It's also easy to underestimate how much of everything is sorta survivors' bias. Chattel slavery was officially dead in much of the world by the dawn of the 20th. But that doesn't mean we didn't do a really good job of replicating on several occasions competitive horrors to the worst of history on the percentages scaled up to meet the challenges of absolute numbers.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

As already mentioned, in the Middle East there are more restrictions on the rights of women and religious minorities today than there was in the 60's or 70's.

On practically every metric, the world is a better, safer place on the whole than at any time in the past. There are issues of course and locations where poop hits the fan. But overall, global society is much more respectful of the average person than ever before.

You're going to have to make a better argument that temporary setbacks in a specific region invalidates world progress. I don't have to reach back to the middle ages to show that the world is better.