World News Thread (Politics,whatever)


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WizardStan said:
I'm pretty sure it starts back on page 30 when you basically gave comradekingu a blanket pass to shitpost here as long as he didn't do it anywhere else. The quality of "world news and politics" dropped right off the cliff after that.
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Off topic section is just a honey pot to keep the garbage out of the on topic sections.
 
About Stallman: All I know he gave a lecture to Spanish speaking people, and the croud said that English would be allright, and then at the end, during questions, one of the questions was so basic that this meant that they did not understand a word of what he said, and then he flipped. He could have done that more graciously, but who knows what problems he was carrying that day. I could only find the end-fragment and not the complete lecture.

Klumpen said:
but this one didn't kill himself
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Well, he had his family, gf and his ex to lean on. The other guy was left all by himself, even family did not believe him...
The problem with all this is that this also hurts the women that are truly abused. Because the public opinion now gets swayed and polarized, and true abusers can say "Lies! Look at these other cases! "

Klumpen said:
Daryl Davis
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Inspirational!

In other international news: I now pay a little more for my gasoline; and am a little more scared for another gulf war.

Dutch News: Just a few blocks away from where I live, they shot a Lawyer that was defending the crown witness against 'a' Dutch mob. That crown witness also lost his brother (also liquidated to scare him and keep him quiet). These things did not happen here.
https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/599496...g-voor-betrokkenen-in-zaak-ridouan-taghi.html
 
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Awesome speech! :cool:


Greta Thunberg urges US senators to learn from the sacrifices of Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists in the fight against climate change.

My name is Greta Thunberg, I am 16 years old and I’m from Sweden. I am grateful for being with you here in the USA. A nation that, to many people, is the country of dreams.

I also have a dream: that governments, political parties and corporations grasp the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis and come together despite their differences - as you would in an emergency - and take the measures required to safeguard the conditions for a dignified life for everybody on earth.

Because then - we millions of school striking youth - could go back to school.

I have a dream that the people in power, as well as the media, start treating this crisis like the existential emergency it is. So that I could go home to my sister and my dogs. Because I miss them.

In fact I have many dreams. But this is the year 2019. This is not the time and place for dreams. This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake.

And yes, we need dreams, we can not live without dreams. But there’s a time and place for everything. And dreams can not stand in the way of telling it like it is.

And yet, wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep.

These are “feel-good” stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have “solved” everything. But the problem we are facing is not that we lack the ability to dream, or to imagine a better world. The problem now is that we need to wake up. It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science.

And the science doesn’t mainly speak of “great opportunities to create the society we always wanted”. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action - unless we start to act now. And yes, of course a sustainable transformed world will include lots of new benefits. But you have to understand. This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.

And we need to treat it accordingly so that people can understand and grasp the urgency. Because you can not solve a crisis without treating it as one. Stop telling people that everything will be fine when in fact, as it looks now, it won’t be very fine. This is not something you can package and sell or ”like” on social media.

Stop pretending that you, your business idea, your political party or plan will solve everything. We must realise that we don’t have all the solutions yet. Far from it. Unless those solutions mean that we simply stop doing certain things.

Changing one disastrous energy source for a slightly less disastrous one is not progress. Exporting our emissions overseas is not reducing our emission. Creative accounting will not help us. In fact, it’s the very heart of the problem.

Some of you may have heard that we have 12 years as from 1 January 2018 to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide in half. But I guess that hardly any of you have heard that there is a 50 per cent chance of staying below a 1.5 degree Celsius of global temperature rise above pre-industrial levels. Fifty per cent chance.

And these current, best available scientific calculations do not include non linear tipping points as well as most unforeseen feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost. Or already locked in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Or the aspect of equity; climate justice.

So a 50 per cent chance - a statistical flip of a coin - will most definitely not be enough. That would be impossible to morally defend. Would anyone of you step onto a plane if you knew it had more than a 50 per cent chance of crashing? More to the point: would you put your children on that flight?

And why is it so important to stay below the 1.5 degree limit? Because that is what the united science calls for, to avoid destabilising the climate, so that we stay clear of setting off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control. Even at 1 degree of warming we are seeing an unacceptable loss of life and livelihoods.

So where do we begin? Well I would suggest that we start looking at chapter 2, on page 108 in the IPCC report that came out last year. Right there it says that if we are to have a 67 per cent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we had, on 1 January 2018, about 420 Gtonnes of CO2 left to emit in that carbon dioxide budget. And of course that number is much lower today. As we emit about 42 Gtonnes of CO2 every year, if you include land use.

With today’s emissions levels, that remaining budget is gone within less than 8 and a half years. These numbers are not my opinions. They aren’t anyone’s opinions or political views. This is the current best available science. Though a great number of scientists suggest even these figures are too moderate, these are the ones that have been accepted by all nations through the IPCC.

And please note that these figures are global and therefore do not say anything about the aspect of equity, clearly stated throughout the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. That means that richer countries need to do their fair share and get down to zero emissions much faster, so that people in poorer countries can heighten their standard of living, by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built. Such as roads, hospitals, schools, clean drinking water and electricity.

The USA is the biggest carbon polluter in history. It is also the world’s number one producer of oil. And yet, you are also the only nation in the world that has signalled your strong intention to leave the Paris Agreement. Because quote ”it was a bad deal for the USA”.

Four-hundred and twenty Gt of CO2 left to emit on 1 January 2018 to have a 67 per cent chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise. Now that figure is already down to less than 360 Gt.

These numbers are very uncomfortable. But people have the right to know. And the vast majority of us have no idea these numbers even exist. In fact not even the journalists that I meet seem to know that they even exist. Not to mention the politicians. And yet they all seem so certain that their political plan will solve the entire crisis.

But how can we solve a problem that we don’t even fully understand? How can we leave out the full picture and the current best available science?

I believe there is a huge danger in doing so. And no matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we can not make “deals” with physics.

Everybody says that making sacrifices for the survival of the biosphere - and to secure the living conditions for future and present generations - is an impossible thing to do.

Americans have indeed made great sacrifices to overcome terrible odds before.

Think of the brave soldiers that rushed ashore in that first wave on Omaha Beach on D Day. Think of Martin Luther King and the 600 other civil rights leaders who risked everything to march from Selma to Montgomery. Think of President John F. Kennedy announcing in 1962 that America would “choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”

Perhaps it is impossible. But looking at those numbers - looking at the current best available science signed by every nation - then I think that is precisely what we are up against.

But you must not spend all of your time dreaming, or see this as some political fight to win.

And you must not gamble your children’s future on the flip of a coin.

Instead, you must unite behind the science.

You must take action.

You must do the impossible.

Because giving up can never ever be an option.
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source
 
About this Stallman thing, this affair exposed social problems very well. That mob controlled by some party gives this party has a significant control. That people just don't want child abuse cases to be properly solved and criminals to be prosecuted, people just want to hang someone. That we've never moved from XIX-century village mentality.
And if we judge someone's professional life based on a non-professional aspects it means that we're living in a slavery, we're only manipulated into not seeing this.
These cases are important and should be solved by a team of professional psychologists, child psychiatrists and law experts to find the losses of each separate case, including parents in the investigation as there were cases in which parents literally sold their children sometimes even doing blackmail. No, now it's "let's hang someone". And we deserve democracy? We're shoving a weapon in child abusers court defense's hands!
The equality in our society is damaged. This is a corporate version having nothing in common with reality. This "equality" is pushed by companies which is dangerous by itself as any real going towards equality would threat their business plans... and sometimes CEOs heads.
So what in fact is this new "equal" like "healthy" fast foods? It's going with equality in these domains in which it would increase sales. When it will cause people to be divided to form another conflicting, and buying more, groups, and in which a tribal pride will increase sales of "only for..." products. Then the "equality" is good.
But if the "equality" will decrease sales, well, that's not here. And there are groups which work reverse way (e.g. ugly people), which will buy more when ostracized and hanged with dogs. And... guess what, they are monsters in the media!
 
The "Internet mob" issue is not a new one. It's the problem of crowds. Crowds are powerful, they can impose their views, be it in democracy or in an authoritarian regime. A misguided crowd can cause a lot of trouble and even a good-intentioned crowd will often go overboard with bad consequences.
But this power is not only "evil". Even in democracy, there are cases where the institutions move too slowly or are unfair. I doubt we'll be able to get democratic governments to take climate change seriously without these crowds.

But in any case, crowds, and the violence of crowd, is often a reaction to another source of violence, historically state violence, though I think we can expect corporate violence to have similar consequence in the coming years. If you've got internet mobs destroying famous/important people lives over unproven accusations of rape it's because you've got many famous/important people who are actually rapists and would never get convicted because of the "rape culture". Mobbing is a problem, but if you want to solve it, fighting rape culture would be more efficient that fighting the mobs themselves.
 
I'm at the strike in Berlin today from 12 o'clock onwards.
ElPoco said:
But in any case, crowds, and the violence of crowd, is often a reaction to another source of violence, historically state violence, though I think we can expect corporate violence to have similar consequence in the coming years. If you've got internet mobs destroying famous/important people lives over unproven accusations of rape it's because you've got many famous/important people who are actually rapists and would never get convicted because of the "rape culture". Mobbing is a problem, but if you want to solve it, fighting rape culture would be more efficient that fighting the mobs themselves.
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It's not a "rape culture", it's a "rich people get away with everything" culture.
 
ElPoco said:
fighting rape culture would be more efficient that fighting the mobs themselves
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I'm not sure you see the irony in what you're saying here. By "fighting" you are no better than whatever "group" it is you are attempting to oppose. It's these conflicts that certain groups are either actively, or unconsciously, exacerbating. "Divide and conquer" - which we're seeing more and more frequently... All you need is to associate a trigger word with a group (give them an emotionally disturbing name), and demonise anyone who vaguely appears to resemble a "member" of said group.

Sometimes the best way to win an unwinnable argument is to simply ignore it. We all know this all to well with the mantra "don't feed the trolls"
 
A raid on Area 51 happening at the same time as a global strike against climate change is the perfect definition of society in 2019.
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Unfortunately, in such controlled environment like modern "social media", in which even "private" communication are subjected to monitoring and censorship, I just cannot naively believe in "spontaneous" and "from-the-bottom" actions. Especially when many of these proposed by different actors have been censored. This is dividing for a profit, OK, maybe there are "useful idiots", but they are rarely the initiative.

And how about Area 51 action? Did they see any UFOs? I expected at least some photos of experimental aircraft :).
 
PCXT said:
And how about Area 51 action? Did they see any UFOs? I expected at least some photos of experimental aircraft :).
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From what I saw, two armed soldiers and a flimsy wooden stop bar thingy stopped about two dozen people mostly in some kind of fancy dress (and one idiot with a North Korean flag)
 
levi said:
From what I saw, two armed soldiers and a flimsy wooden stop bar thingy stopped about two dozen people mostly in some kind of fancy dress (and one idiot with a North Korean flag)
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I did expect the army to use the excuse to legally shoot down weebs.
 
FaeMinx said:
Wait... What? The apocalypse is over already!?
o. O
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Our parents were the apocalypse, the results are just creeping in.
[doublepost=1569477923,1569476642][/doublepost]https://www.thelocal.de/20160914/who-is-to-blame-for-berlins-poverty-crime-and-debt-berlin
the city is saddled with almost €60 billion in public debt
[...] 'Capital of child poverty'
etc...
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In the week leading up to state elections in Berlin, the capital was garlanded with yet another trendy accolade, being named the 'second most liveable city in the world' by New York-based Metropolis magazine.
But points won for up-cycling disused breweries into working spaces for techies and "creatives" suggest the magazine didn't have your average Berliner in mind when it cooked up its rankings.
Berlin's reputation in Germany - where one national newspaper dubbed it "the failed city" - is less glamorous.
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Berlin sold most of its property to reduce debts and now most of the town is owned by private investors so the city has no means to actually make money anymore (and the inhabitants can't afford rent anywhere).
It's a desaster.

BTW: Did anything change for the ever rising German debts thanks to compound interest since the war?
https://www.thelocal.de/20180105/debt-clock-in-berlin-runs-backwards-for-first-time-in-22-years
Must have been directly after they sold lots of state owned property to private investors again, because
https://commodity.com/debt-clock/germany/
[doublepost=1569507591][/doublepost]twitter.com/markhumphries/status/1177178666402365440?s=19
 
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