Bet good money to see a full court press from China discouraging turnout in the 2024 election.
A Trump win is far better prospects for them being able to invade Taiwan before the demographics of it become impossible to overcome than a Biden win, and white TikTokkers aren’t gonna be convinced to vote Republican, expect a LOT of disinformation about how Biden doesn’t do anything or how he’s exactly the same as Trump and any other crock of shit you hear the twits spit out whenever they want to explain why not voting isn’t handing Trump the win or why doing that isn’t a fucking first order act of betrayal of the disemprivileged.
The international situation is the biggest argument against Trump. Another 4 years of incompetence and self serving is something we cannot really have right now without huge consequences. Kind of feels like all the arguments in the US are just a distraction from the bigger issues.
I did not fully get from the article what exactly it is that makes marriage too expensive? Surely getting a marriage certificate is not prohibitively expensive? And shared / dual income would make it easier to stay on top of finances…
In order for a man to marry they need to own their own home & have a decent car. This is the societal norm in today’s China, without these things the women’s parents will not approve & they are still a confucianist society to a point, so eloping is quite rare. Now in Shanghai the home owning part is not so easy :-) Though the article is not great, because the “wealthy” part doesn’t make much sense.
(wealth starts with owning a large home, while driving a “Benz”)
This reluctance to tie the knot is worrying policymakers grappling with a decline in births and a rapidly aging population in a country that was once the world’s most populous, and where marriage rates are closely tied to birth rates as unmarried mothers are often denied child-raising benefits.
I heard the CCP wanted birth rates to climb. That’s not how you do it. The slowing economy doesn’t have to have this effect on young people. The Chinese government has a much stronger ability to manage these effects than democratic free market economies. I hope they would manage to use that.
Yea, until we see him actually with holding aid under the condition they end the genocide his words don’t mean anytjing.
Especially since he just doubled down on the quote that’s dogged him where he said he was a zionist earlier in his career. A few days ago he just re-affirmed bluntly that he is and believes Israel is “the only safe place for Jews” as a justification for Israel to continue murdering children.
do u really compare the most dense city in the world to… that?
or u try to make a point that so many buildings were destroyed yet so many arabs are alive thus Israel is doing a great job not harming the population?
Gaza is not even remotely the densest city in the world. There are several cities in Israel alone that are denser.
Also, yeah, the death toll among civilians is a tiny fraction of that in these cities during WW2 despite similar levels of destruction, which does support the claim that Israel is actually warning people.
The claim he called propaganda was that every male over 18 +40% of women are seen as, and killed as, terrorists by the Israeli army, not that there wouldn’t be dead civilians. Nobody, literally nobody, claims the latter. Also YOU are funnily the one doing that by being anti-Israel? That, other than Hamas, is an actual country with civilians. Just stop the polarisation and dramatisation. One can be against wannabe autocrat Netanyahu, the war crimes the Israeli army is committing, and yet hope they kill every single Hamas member. Gaza has to be freed, from Hamas and Iran’s snd Quatar’s influence. Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
do you genuinely think that the actions of Israel are going to actually achieve the goal of killing every single Hamas member? what the Israeli government is doing is actively building support for radical action, because the position Israel is taking, the actions they’re taking, are unreasonable and abhorrent. if your goal is to kill all the insurgents, you lose. because there is no practical way to do that without victimizing the population, killing innocent people, and driving the survivors of that terror campaign into insurgency themselves. we’ve seen this play out before, in so many places. Israel is doing nothing but ensuring the continuation of this conflict.
Unlike those two countries Israel ACTUALLY has a proven track record of working with Palestinians on a civil and economic level and not like your crusader kings jihad DLC fantasy.
maybe there was a track record. there isn’t one any more. the only record the people of Gaza care about is the death toll. how are they expected to trust a country so willing to deliver death, disease, and famine upon them? how are we, as people who care for the lives of our fellow human beings, expected to side with racists and murderers? Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Hamas is a blight, no doubt, but it is a response to decades of oppression and harm, harm that Israel is gleefully embracing, even as the world turns against them. the kind of dysfunction that makes a state do what Israel is doing is not worth preserving. the kind of ideology that could justify what is happening right now is not worth fighting for.
Very well put. It reminds me of the quote:
If there were an Oscar for best theatrical performance by a country, Israel would win every year. It’s a country based on theater. It’s a lunatic state - completely insane.
Your conclusion is wrong from what they say. Don’t project and polarise. Killing civilians is horrible and must be stopped. But that’s different from targeting them as terrorists. And you know that! How will this mess be ever solved if even on the most basic level are these stupid dramatisation and accusations?
Yes I know, it was a facetious comment because anyone still supporting Israel appears to be in a different reality than I, and I see no point in debating this issue.
I love how a country is allowed to just get away with killing children and UN workers and doctors and journalists but we condemn countries that do the same thing like Russia. It makes no sense that Israel should get a free pass, all it does is expose a huge double standard
If Ukraine had initially launched an attack on Russia and killed 1,200 mainlycivilians, taken 200+ hostages and thrown in a bit of organised gang rape, I doubt Ukraine would be receiving its current level of support, and there may even have been some support for retaliatory action by Russia.
That’s not to say that Israel’s current appalling treatment of Palestinian civilians is justified
Let’s ignore how many people israel has killed, they need to kill more, and let’s also go ahead an label everyone who says “too much” a hamas supporter
Then you go here and it’s again 90%
Let’s not even call hamas terrorist, more like freedom-fighters with some friendly rape and friendly fire thrown in.
Here in the fediverse there are many people with opinions similar to mine, i.e we are on the side of civillians, not any of the belligerents in this hellscape of war crimes.
Ah, so only beehaw prohibits downvotes, not other Lemmy instances. TIL.
I guess even what I showed you may have gone negative if downvotes were allowed. The person I was arguing with wasn’t being nasty about it, just incredibly obstinate.
I worry about a return to Nazi style anti-semitism (though I hate Likud) which the polarized discussions are leading us towards. It is arrogant to think it could never happen again.
Some Lemmy instances have downvotes, some don’t. It varies by instance. I think most instances have/allow downvotes. Beehaw & Blahaj are two bigger ones that don’t that I can think of off of the top of my head.
Also agreed with your last bit. I’m nervous about it, too. I wish people would just be decent and… not suck, lol.
If it makes you feel any better, I got banned for my first and only comment there (not even a post) which was a link and an explanation of the high credentials of the author. Like this…
Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Except it wasn’t Palestine that attacked, it was a group disassociated with the Palestinian Authority, that Israel itself funds so it can justify the “war” to favor the arms dealers and distract the constituents of the terrible administration they’re receiving.
The two conflicts are not even remotely comparable.
Given that I was replying to a message drawing equivalence, you'll see that I was saying that they weren't really equivalent, in that Ukraine hadn't mounted an attack on Russian civilians. Hope that helps.
Isreal’s main exports are cutting-edge technology found nowhere else in the world. Russia’s main export is oil. Western and European Union countries were fine getting their oil elsewhere, but they absolutely do not want to give up advanced tech. Especially since there will always be other countries that don’t care and will continue trading anyway.
Israel sells billions worth of weapons a year, sometimes to repressive regimes like the Myanmar junta.
It also innovates quite heavily in that space.
I have been noticing a number of doctors mentioning a new kind of burn on children in Gaza. Israel routinely deploys new weapons there, and this may well be a new example of testing experimental weapons in Gaza
It's security software - firewalls, VPNs, that sort of thing. It's not that it's not available anywhere else, but the Israeli stuff was always considered among the best before this conflict kicked off.
Russia bombed Kiev for the hell of it, not even pretending there was a military objective. Russia also is conscripting Ukrainians to fight against their fellow countrymen as cannon-fodder on the front line. It is kidnapping children into Russia.
IDF are the good guys, just like the Ukrainian army is. That doesn’t mean that every single individual in either army are angels or that every operation is virtuous, just that their overall intentions are just.
An important question: What would the world look like if these guys won versus if they lost?
The whole point of the article is Biden criticizing Israel for going too far in their mission to eradicate Hamas. He even criticized US for invading Afghanistan.
Bit of a tangent, but I find it insane that the US spent over 2000 billion to fight the war in Afghanistan, but congress is unwilling to authorise giving the Ukrainians 60 billion. A relatively small amount, that means Ukrainians can keep fighting Russia, decreasing the likelihood of American troops ever having to get involved in a war in Europe.
I once did the sums to calculate that USA could have afforded a run a gun buyback scheme (like Australia) rather than invade Iraq, you know… to cut down on Americans killing Americans.
Ah, but from where I sit (a long way from the US), it looks more like a pissing contest between the Republicans to see who can be the most terrible human being in government, than it does look like any sort of actual policy or principal.
It's not about helping Ukraine, or avoiding the mistakes of Afghanistan - it's about trying to make Biden (and/or 'The Dems' in general) look bad, even if that involves civilian deaths.
Are they evil, Russian agents or just absolute clowns? It doesn't really matter, does it. The end result is the same.
From someone in the US, smack dab in the middle of very dense Republican land (Oklahoma,) I want you to know that you’ve nailed it! You’re spot on. I wish you were exaggerating, lol.
He criticizes their war crimes with one hand but with the other hand he gives them billions of dollars to help them commit more.
Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel had received "full backing" from the U.S. for its ground incursion into Gaza and that Washington had blocked "international pressure to stop the war."
There’s really no reason why we had to be in a war in Iraq. Afghanistan… yeah, probably not there, either, especially given how intimately we understood how well they had been trained at guerilla warfare against foreign invaders.
Although, that’s not guite accurate; there were reasons, they were just serving different, less publically recognized, purposes. Much like Netanyahu’s war.
Good thing that basically every other action you could do falls between “do nothing”, and “commit ethnic cleansing”, so they’ve got a lot to choose from!
Too bad they decided to go with the ethnic cleansing instead.
Do you not think Israel could have killed pretty much everyone in Gaza if they were interested in ethnic cleansing?
Meanwhile Hamas really did do their best to ethically cleanse, and have said they would do it again given a chance.
The reality is still pretty bad: at least 10,000 civilians killed and it seems Bibi wants to push all Gazans out of Gaza altogether in their mission to root out Hamas.
That’s why I try to be very deliberate in differentiating between “Israel”, which is a country and government, and “Israelis”, which are the people who live there.
As an American, I’m extremely mindful of this distinction:
Being anti-American is bigotry based on national origin.
Being anti-America is a moral and justified position against an Imperial, settler-colonialist state that kills millions around the globe.
OK. By the way Israel always has coalition governments so there are several parties in this coalition although the largest component is Likud. The war cabinet is only Likud and National Unity (party led by Benny Gantz).
I guess that is like trying to discuss who the trainer of the football team is with a guy in the grandstand who just wants to throw beer cans at the opposition.
This shit goes back further than people here care to investigate…
"The Antichrist will pass by this salty barren area i.e. Madinah, in a passage of a canal. Most of those who will come out to him will be women so that a man will return to his intimate wife, mother, daughter, sister or aunt to tie them up for fear that they might go out to him. Then, Allah will afflict him with Muslims who kill him and his followers and the Jews will hide behind a tree or a rock and the rock or the tree will say to the Muslim: There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”
This Hadith was reported by Ahmad in his Musnad. About 1200 years ago.
Well Iraq, the first time, yes. They invaded Kuwait which in my opinion did legitimise the first gulf war (though opinions may vary). Though IMO it should have happened under UN flag but of course the security council is forever locked into a stalemate.
The second war, no. Whatever it was… Made-up WMD’s, funding of military industrial complex, Dubya’s desire to finish daddy’s pet project, whatever. A real reason there was not.
Works out pretty well for him, considering the west is just about done with caring about Ukraine and is dropping support across the board. Soon he will successfully claim the valuable parts of Ukraine he started the war over.
reuters.com
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