Resultados encontrados: 1223
04.04.2021 em Superpower presidents
Escrito por Skanderbeg, 04.04.2021 at 08:39
China, although was an empire, never conquered outside their ethnic group.

This is a fairly revisionist view of Chinese history. China has invaded and conquered other cultures plenty of times. It's merely that their empire lasted a long, long time, so the cultures and ethnicities that they conquered were assimilated into Han Chinese. Heck, this process is still ongoing today - note, for example, the current CCP attempt to push Mandarin in Cantonese-dominated Hong Kong.
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15.03.2021 em Fall of capitalism.
The decline and fall of capitalism is indeed inevitable.

But the idea that the thing that replaces capitalism when it falls is going to be an outdated 19th Century industrial ideology is... interesting. In an era when mass labour is less economically relevant than possibly ever before, if Communism intends to stay relevant in the information age then it needs to go through some serious doctrinal revisions - the old Parisian model and the Soviet model barely worked even in their own era and they provide no meaningful vision for the future.
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Escrito por Skanderbeg, 08.02.2021 at 02:58
-snip-

Natural resource rents are a tiny fraction of the world economy. It's under 3% now and even during the Oil Shocks of the '70s it didn't rise above 10%.

Since the Industrial Revolution, countries just do not become economic powers on the basis of their natural resources alone. Places like Saudi Arabia are secondary powers today at best. I don't expect this to change all that much in the future. If anything, as the world slowly moves into a post-industrial economy, I expect the importance of natural resources to decrease. Natural resources are abundant on this planet and resources that are abundant don't make for much of a bargaining chip.
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"Country" encompasses so many things - culture, people, international reputation, economy, etc - that it's hard for me to say anything meaningful if I am asked whether I like a country. I love American cinema, for example, but I would never want to live in the United States.

So here I coloured in the map using just one criteria - do I like the way politics is done in that country?

I only coloured in countries that I've heard enough about to have a meaningful opinion. The rest I've left grey. You can probably guess my general ideological stance from this.



If I instead asked myself "would I want to live in that country", some of my answers would be quite different. If that was my criteria then I'd push Poland and the United States down to orange, Russia down to red, Sweden up to dark green, Australia and South Korea up to light green, etc.
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I find a Russian resurgence back to superpower status unlikely in general. It just doesn't have the demographic or economic foundation for it.

Russia was a superpower mostly by historical coincidence - the Industrial Revolution elevated Europe above the rest of the world in terms of technology and industry, and most of it got blown up in the Second World War, leaving the Soviet Union as a superpower pretty much for the lack of other contestants.

Both of those things are changing - Western Europe is has largely recovered - at least economically - from the Second World War. Recently they've also started to chafe a little under American leadership and are starting to assert a little more independence. Meanwhile, the Asian powers with their large populations are rapidly catching up.

Historical coincidence let Europe dominate the world and let the Soviet Union dominate Europe. But those coincidences are starting to fade. With a population of over 100 million people and an abundance of natural resources, Russia certainly has the weight to remain a European great power, but its Soviet heydays of controlling half the world is now firmly in the past.

...unless, that is, something unexpected happens and blows up East Asia and Western Europe again.
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06.02.2021 em True Free Nations
What does juche North Korea, authoritarian-democratic Russia, one-party state China, and Muslim theocracy Iran have in common other than their mutual dislike of the US and the western world?

What the heck do you think "freedom" means, anyways?
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03.02.2021 em Great Powers
When we're talking about great powers, what, exactly, is meant by "power"?

If we're merely looking at the ability of countries to influence the decisions of other countries, I'd put China at number two and Russia somewhere far, far down there. The only reason I can think of why Russia might even be a candidate for number two is if you think "power" means "military power".

...and arguably the European Union as an institution exerts more global influence than the national government of any of its members.
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Escrito por Skanderbeg, 29.01.2021 at 04:30
-snip-

What's the source and methodology on these projections?
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28.01.2021 em The GameStop Fiasco
Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 28.01.2021 at 11:33
They took short positions on Gamestop because the company is in terminal decline and they employ methods that put the stock on a downtrend. That's what everyone does, except not everyone has millions at their disposal and is capable of adding specifically in order to influence the market.

Nobody thinks that GameStop as a company is actually worth $400 a share, and very few people who bought into this trend did so with a view at the long-term profit potential of the company. They bought in - that is to say, those people who are actually looking to profit bought in - with an eye at being able to price-gouge people with short positions. Short-term speculation.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 28.01.2021 at 11:33
Furthermore, it is a good thing that brokers are helping their biggest investors because then they would have a solvency crisis.

Better for the brokerage, maybe.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 28.01.2021 at 11:33
And the last to get out would be the most moronic among retail investors. It is for their own good

People know perfectly well that if they're holding onto stock when the inevitable crash comes, they're going to lose their investment. Are you saying that the brokerages know the interests of these people better than they do themselves? If we accept the premise that experts know what's good for ordinary people better than ordinary people know themselves, then what's the point of having a market economy? We might as well bring back Soviet-style industrial planning where experts arrange for what's best for everyone and be done with it.

The premise of a market economy is that the individual knows best what he or she most desires. And sometimes that's setting fire to $300 for a meme.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 28.01.2021 at 11:33
You should have shorted when the firms started closing long positions and you would have +50% gains today

I don't have skin in this game, and I won't put my skin in this game, on either short or long positions. I subscribe to a variant of the efficient market hypothesis, which states that if there is some easy money to be made, then by the time I hear about it someone way smarter than me would already have made off with it. I suppose you could call me risk-averse, and a stock market event like this has risk written all over it. I like nice and stable index funds, thank you very much.

I'm merely interested in this issue because discussion about it has blown up on other forums I visit over the past couple of days.
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28.01.2021 em The GameStop Fiasco
First, a brief summary for those who haven't kept up with recent news ----------------

Disclaimer: I am not a financial expert and this is my understanding of the situation as an untrained layman.

Short-selling is an investment technique. If an investor believes that a financial product, such as a stock, will decrease in value, they can borrow and sell it, with the intention of buying it back at a lower price at a later date to repay the debt. An investor that does so, and thus has an obligation to pay back some financial product that they no longer have, is considered to have a short position on the product.

A bunch of Redditors noted that some hedge funds had enormous short positions on the stock of GameStop, a flailing video game retailer. Knowing that these funds were thus obligated to buy large amounts of GameStop stock at a later date to close their positions, and that this will create an upwards pressure on the price of GameStop stock, these people flocked to buy, and the price rose.

This has since attracted a large number of small investors ("retail" investors), some of whom are trying to profiteer from the situation, some of whom are just trying to drive up the price to hurt hedge funds and don't care if they lose their shirts in the process, and some of whom are just in it for the memes. All this had led to a massive price spike in the price of GameStop stock - more than tenfold in a week.

Since firms with short positions on GameStop have to pay whatever the stock is worth to close their short positions, this has driven a few of them into panic and the people who manage hedge funds have done everything from misinformation campaigns to temporary restrictions on trade in order to drive retail investors into panic and drive down the price. So far it seems to be working, with the price starting to collapse. But who knows.

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I usually just post on already-extant threads on this forum, but I'm making this thread for two reasons - first, I'm surprised nobody covered this story yet, given how many people on this forum make money off the stock market on the side. There's only one thread by Sean a while back, and that was discussing a tangential issue. Second - and more importantly - based on what I've read in other political discussion boards this seems to be one issue where everyone is in agreement.

It doesn't matter, at least on the sites that I discuss politics on, whether they're self-described socialists, or liberals, or classical conservatives, or diehard Trump supporters. This situation has brought together people from all different political ideologies together in almost unanimous denunciation of the tricks played by the media and stock trading platforms to artificially engineer a panic. Basically everyone is aghast at the hypocrisy of financial officials and mass media calling the actions of Reddit retail investors - who gave publicly-available investment advice based on publicly-available information - "market manipulation" while having stayed quiet about the past antics of the finance industry and are still staying quiet about the heavy-handed response by that finance industry to this latest situation.

The government should stay out of the business of retail investors and go after the people who are actually engaging in blatant market manipulation. So I think, anyways.

Discuss.

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rev. 18:07 28-01-21: there are now unconfirmed reports that some brokerages are forcing their clients to sell their stock in GameStop
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Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 26.01.2021 at 11:45
China's political-economic system is not sustainable, which is supported by history. China has to pressure its own business moguls into submission. Just take a look at Jack Ma. It's obvious what happened there and it's obvious to any business person in China. Their system is backwards and will implode under pressure from international bodies that are disgusted by its immoral practices. Theft is no substitute for a system that fosters rapid innovation

I think the great success that China is enjoying in European markets for manufactured knick-knacks demonstrates that in the end, a cheap price tag will attract way more customers than any European or North American squabbles over "safety" or "consumer rights" or "intellectual property". Unless regulators start hammering at Chinese goods, Chinese exports will continue to boom, and regulators will only start hammering at Chinese goods if their respective governments tell them to.

If you want "international bodies" to start hammering away at China's unethical practices, disengaging from international diplomacy is probably a bad idea.

Escrito por Fatcheek, 26.01.2021 at 11:19
I'm just cringing at the fact that you said this.. talk about scared of china

Internal US government documents like the 2017 National Security Strategy shows that the Trump administration, unlike the Obama administration preceding it, considered China to be an irreconcilable adversary. If you do not believe that the United States needs to confront China's rising influence, then congratulations, that is in itself is in opposition to the Trump administration's stated motivations.

I don't comment on the wisdom of picking a fight with China, but when your government picks a fight and then proceeds to fail so utterly at actually damaging the supposed enemy, that is a mark of foreign policy incompetence.
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Escrito por IWEARPINKPANTIES, 26.01.2021 at 08:40
Utter disaster that has been Trump's foreign policy? You mean like the no win wars that Bush started, Obama kept going, and Trump helped stop? You mean all the new wars he didn't start, unlike both Bush and Obama? Obama started a good four wars on top of Bush's wars he kept going: Yemen, Libya, Syria, just to name a few.

His China policy. Trump has made opposing China a central element of his foreign policy (or at least, his foreign policy as presented to the public). While I have nothing inherently against that - China is a serious threat to US interests - the way he's gone about doing that has been completely ineffective. Worse than nothing, even.

Whatever nonsense the "America First" people like Trump believe in, the days in which the United States was a fortress entire to itself is long in the past. The Old World (that is to say, Europe, Asia, and Africa) contains about 80% of the world population and 70% of its GDP, and with moves like the Belt and Road initiative China has made very clear their intent to rearrange diplomacy and economics in the Old World to put itself on top of a new world order. Needless to say, if China succeeds in doing this then the days of American economic and military superiority are numbered.

So what, exactly, has Trump done about it? Well, the major regional rivals containing China's military ambitions are India, South Korea, and Japan. India's been hit with punitive sanctions under the Trump administration and Trump's demands of more payment for protection from South Korea and Japan left these countries seriously questioning US intent in the region - to the point that Congress had to pass legislation forcing the government to maintain a certain number of troops there. Economically, as China pours money into the Canadian and Australian mining industries and puts up billions in euros to buy up major European ports and shipyards, Trump's antics have left these countries, the United States' traditional democratic allies, reeling in shock at the sheer fickleness of the US administration and Trump even got into a trade war with both Canada and the European Union at one point. Trump's hatred of international trade agreements, in particular, meant that China stepped in to draft some new ones - centered around itself, of course - and if the US wants African governments to stick to its side of the divide in what looks like a rapidly upcoming Second Cold War, maybe don't insult them on public television.

The Trump administration's "anti-China strategy", in other words, seems to mostly consist of throwing out its economic, political, and military partnership with the United States' traditional democratic allies, leaving a power vacuum that China seems increasingly happy to step into. "America First", to everyone who isn't an American, just means that they can't trust the US anymore and should go talk to someone else for diplomatic guidance, military protection, and economic security - like, say, China.

So much for containment.

I'd say that had Trump won a second term, that right there would have guaranteed a Red 21st Century.
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As a left-leaning internationalist who finds Trump despicable (in particular, the utter disaster that has been his foreign policy), I am nonetheless forced to agree that the heavy-handed response of the big tech companies is a very worrying sign of the state of liberal democracy in the 21st Century.

There can be debate on the superficial question of what people should or should not be permitted to say in certain public spaces, but I think that one thing that all of us on both the left and right can agree on is that bloody information-communication technology corporations should not be the ones answering that question.

What I've noticed is an extremely alarming tendency for the key issues of our era to be settled basically by momentum instead of by public debate.
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26.01.2021 em USA and communism.
Escrito por Fatcheek, 25.01.2021 at 14:37
China is a very prosperous country at the moment, and its currently leading the world in trade and technology, very much on its way to being the Global Superpower, which even Americans are scared of. After all, the tariffs say a lot about it.

A strong nation is not necessarily a good thing.

It doesn't really matter to me how influential my country is on the international stage. What matters to me is the quality of life I can enjoy from living in my country of citizenship. It certainly helps if my country is an innovative hotspot or a global great power, because these things means it's easier for me personally to grow wealthier, but they are not good things in and of themselves.

And the quality of life in China is... well, I wouldn't want to live that way. I like my freedom of thought and expression too much.
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21.01.2021 em USA and communism.
Escrito por Skanderbeg, 20.01.2021 at 11:44
What about Chinese Communism? One party state with market economy? Since oligarchs can hijack democracies, and votes doesn't matter anymore, we could simply copy Chinese politics: they are executing their corrupted individuals while supporting infrastructure, jobs, and citizen wellbeing.

...and also putting an ethnic minority into concentration camps, suppressing democratic reform in Hong Kong, and making people that the Party doesn't like disappear. No thanks.

If China is our model for what a communist society looks like, then I will confidently assert myself as an anti-communist.

Escrito por Skanderbeg, 20.01.2021 at 11:44
You can't deny [...] that authoritarianism is more efficient than democracy - where goals change every 4-5 years after elections, and authoritarian goals are there as long the regime exist.

The government having a constant long-term goal is only a good thing if you happen to agree with said goal. It's more important that the government be kept in check by a powerful citizenry than it is that the government be able to carry out its agenda without challenge. Politicians tend to be self-interested, and can only be trusted to work in the people's interest only insofar as they need the people's approval to stay in power.
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Escrito por Philsfromthesoul, 20.01.2021 at 14:16
I want an American-Russian alliance, it's time to bury the hatchet and work with each other. China is the greater threat.

No. Absolutely not. Have people already forgotten that Russia is providing aid and shelter to paramilitary leaders whose forces murdered European Union citizens in 2014?

The defence of the liberal-democratic world should be carried out by nations that share liberal-democratic values, lest they find themselves beholden to authoritarian strongmen like Putin. Certainly Western Europe needs to pick up the slack instead of continuing to rely on American protection, but the US must also provide a reliable and equitable partnership to its democratic allies - which it has completely failed at doing these past four years.
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17.01.2021 em USA and communism.
One fascinating thing I noticed about any debate about "socialism" in the context of US politics is that this is a word that can be defined very narrowly or very expansively depending on whatever best suits the speaker's arguments.

When the motion of debate is "should we have socialism," self-described capitalists use the narrow definition of this word, to mean the distinct set of Soviet- or PRC-aligned communist dictatorships that existed in the Cold War, and of course we shouldn't have socialism, because of course we don't want famines, or political purges, or concentration camps, or what have you that characterise these historical communist dictatorships. From that perspective, why would anyone support socialism? What kind of monster would do that?

When the motion of debate switches to "what policies characterise socialism," however, anti-socialists suddenly do a 180-degree turn and define socialism extremely broadly, to mean basically any kind of intensive state intervention in the economy. Of course Western Europe is chock full of socialist states, and since we have already established that socialism is a thing that the United States shouldn't have, it follows that the United States should avoid implementing such radical socialist policies like universal healthcare that Europeans have.

And of course self-described communists do much the same thing, only the other way around.

So instead of trying to write a substantive argument on a foundation that won't support one, I will instead ask the original poster this. When you say that the United States should have "some communism", what, exactly, is meant by "some communism"? What policies does this entail and what social changes does it imply?

Without a clear and agreed-upon definition there can be no intellectually honest discussion.
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When a new epidemic can kill thousands of people per day in a western, industrialised country and it still takes months for the authorities to convince the public that a threat exists, that says some very interesting things about the ability of modern American democracy to respond to reality. I'd be surprised if both parties haven't already started making discreet probes into the loyalties of US military and National Guard personnel, just in case.

On one hand, there's something poetic about seeing something that the US has inflicted on so many other democracies now happen in the US itself. On the other hand, American conspiracy theories have started to seriously leak into our corners of the internet, and I'm terrified of what that might mean for my small democracy.
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Escrito por Augustus Caesar, 26.12.2020 at 09:19

Nothing wrong with that, political views may differ between one and another but I'd prefer people to choose and select those who they think best represent them and what they believe their leader should be doing for their country. This might not always line up with your own beliefs but it's a lot better than people just blindly voting for someone because they grew up in a certain party supporting house hold or they just follow some kind of trend, as long as people are thinking for themselves then that's real democracy.

My stance on the matter is that no politician gets to be a viable contender to be the leader of a country of significant size without being deep in someone's pocket, so if everyone is a corrupt hypocrite you may as well pick the corrupt hypocrite that looks vaguely professional and says the right keywords at the right times.

Still better than living in a dictatorship.
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On the nine axes:

48-52 neutral
81-19 extreme democratic
86-14 extreme globalist
38-62 moderate pacifist
28-72 freedom
80-20 extreme equality
91-09 fanatic secular
74-26 progressive
39-61 moderate multiculturalist

I'd say that this describes my views broadly well, except that I don't think I lean that far into socialism. I tried to avoid answering questions neutral/unsure (because that just sounds like a cop-out) unless I really didn't have much of an opinion, so that might've skewed my results towards extremes.

I also think that a survey like this suffers from an unclear definition of "culture". By culture do we mean art, cuisine, language, attire? In such superficial matters of culture I'm a complete multiculturalist and I think the more cultural diversity we have the
better. Or by culture do we mean values, etiquette, attitudes on law and on spirituality? In such more fundamental matters I tend to be much more uncompromising.
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Escrito por Sid, 08.12.2020 at 22:27
Instead of censoring, we should ban algorithms that encourage echo chambers of the same opinion.

Seconded. Our lives are ruled over by systems that are poorly understood, even by the very people who built them.

That I'd say will be the greatest threat to modern democracy in the next 10 years.
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Wait, is this not already a thing? If it isn't already a thing, it should be.

Seconded.
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So with most constituencies having been called it looks like a Biden, McConnell, and Pelosi government in the United States for the next two years. Of course it's still a bit too early to tell, but I don't think it will be too controversial to predict that nothing significant will get done under this government. McConnell will throw his Senate weight around to block anything vaguely controversial (never mind the 3-6 Supreme Court) and the none-too-reformist-to-begin-with Biden government is more than likely to just shrug and go "oh well". The United States will progress a little on economic and technological metrics (assuming another coronavirus-scale crisis doesn't happen) while all of its social problems remain unsolved and grow somewhat worse and the world will take one more small step towards environmental catastrophe.

...well, at least Trump is out of office, so the worst outcome was avoided. No more having to sit through incoherent nonsense from the White House when I'm watching the overseas news.

Going forwards, the Democratic Party really should drop their opposition to things like genetically-modified foods and nuclear power, opposition that is founded more on hysteria than on a sound scientific basis, and really consolidate itself as the party of consensus expert facts against the Republicans'... well, if you support them it's what the mainstream media is covering up and if you don't it's unashamed conspiracy theories. That will probably give them a much stronger running than trying to fight the culture war on gun control, immigration, or cultural pluralism, which is what they have mostly been doing to date; those being much more contentious issues where the Democrats are frankly at a popular disadvantage.

I will add, though, that it's very interesting that the politically-interested on both sides seem thoroughly exasperated with their respected party establishments. Right-leaning enthusiasts mostly tend to see the Republican mainstream as part of the swamp which needs draining while left-leaning enthusiasts tend to see the Democratic mainstream as being just as business-friendly and warmongering as the Republicans - just with rainbows and smileys.
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It has been truly fascinating to see, on the internet, people who have previously justified the United States' lax gun controls on the basis of the necessity of an armed population to resist a tyrannical government to do an about-turn and suddenly decry violent expressions of dissent as illegitimate. Considering the coronavirus lockdown protests of the month before and the current round of protests now, both violent but occurring for very different reasons and involving different sections of American society, I think the vision of mass popular uprising against an oppressive government that right-libertarian supporters of the Second Amendment envision is, in the strongest sense of that phrase, a wish-fulfilling fantasy.

Anyways, responding to the actual topic at hand:

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 03.06.2020 at 01:56
First of all, it should not be contested that the case of George Floyd is incidental to a society run by men. It is the natural consequence of the existence of evil which is found, from time-to-time, among police. To suggest otherwise, or to suggest that this case is incidental to a society steeped in racism, would require evidence that lies far beyond what the facts of this case alone can tell. Yet, in the past week, Floyd's death has led many to believe that society in the United States is not only steeped in racism, but that it is endemically racist. On these grounds, evildoers have rioted in cities across America, resulting in night-long curfews, which have resulted in the law-abiding being quartered in their own homes while rioters run roughshod throughout the streets.

It is my opinion that your view of why these protests are happening is deeply limited. For most people sympathetic to the protesters, George Floyd's death did not make them believe anything. It was already believed, for perfectly good reasons, that United States policing was deeply racist and Mr. Floyd's death was merely the spark that set off the fireworks. People are not out protesting the death of one particular man, they are protesting an institutional injustice of which Mr. Floyd just happened to be a highly visible example.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 03.06.2020 at 01:56
These riots are not an auspicious beginning to America's future, and, worst of all, they are symbolic of the destruction of a republic that has stood for over 200 years. [...] Rioting and looting on the back of George Floyd's death only stains his memory, undermines the cause of an otherwise innocuous protest, and burdens businesses that are already struggling in the wake of COVID-19.

There are, of course, people who are simply making noise for the sake of noise, and rioting for the sake of rioting. Since I don't think that there will be any disagreement from anyone on these forums that these people are the worst dregs of American society, I will for the moment exclude them from consideration and discuss only those rioters who are violently rioting as an extension of and in support of the protests. I will also acknowledge that the current protesters and people who are supportive of the protests are not a unified bloc and there consequently are radically differing opinions on whether violence as a means of protest is appropriate; as it so happens I am a part of the group that believes that it is not.

That being said, even if I disagree with their actions I can understand and am sympathetic to those who choose violence as a means of protest.

First of all, why is nonviolence good? I would argue that the reason that it is good for society to be nonviolent is because it gives people security. In a lawful society, disputes are resolved by law, and therefore people are reasonably assured that public authority will not punish them as long as they follow the law and that, even if they break the law, they will be punished only as prescribed by law. This frees the population to build their lives in confidence; they do not have to fear that their life will suddenly be turned upside-down by arbitrary actions from public authorities. This is why we resolve disputes peacefully and this is why nonviolence is good.

But for those people who do not feel that following the law makes them secure from public authority, what incentive do they have to remain nonviolent? If they already feel that they do not enjoy the benefits of the rule of law, why would they ever make an effort to uphold it?

Second, if peaceful protest and dialogue fail to accomplish anything, then what means do people have except force the issue by violence? When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, as the saying goes, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 03.06.2020 at 01:56
Rioters have been able to justify their actions not only against small businesses, but also churches and the World War II Memorial, by re-affirming to themselves that the "system" which allows business owners—most of whom are of a minority status—to operate, is the same system under which Floyd was murdered. The only issue is that their argument presupposes the existence of a "system" that does not exist. They riot against it, they personify it, yet their failure to define the omnipresent "system" is precisely what allows them and hangers-on to realize their dreams of anarchy. Rather than blame the "system," they should blame themselves: you are to blame if you make bad decisions in life.

An analogy that I like to make is a steam engine. A single molecule of water vapour charts a random path through chaotic Brownian motion, and physically speaking there is nothing wrong with seeing steam as a collection of individual water molecules each with its own velocity undergoing Brownian motion through collision with their immediate circumstances and neighbours. If you intend to fix a steam engine or even just understand why one isn't working, however, this view is extremely unhelpful; to do these things you need to view steam in the abstract, as a collective mass of substance that demonstrates collective behaviour.

So it is with human beings. An individual is unpredictable and in possession of some degree of free will, but people as a group behave in statistically-predictable ways in accordance with large-scale forces. The decision of whether or not to have a child, for example, is an extremely personal one made for extremely personal reasons, but I don't have to personally know a single European woman to confidently predict that Sweden will have a higher crude birth rate than the Netherlands next year.

The lives of people, just like the paths of water molecules, are determined to a fairly large degree by their environments. There is the obvious limitations of environment - one can't take a job that doesn't exist, marry a person one's never met, and so on - but environments also influence so-called individual choice. People are raised in a society and live by interacting with a society. Consequently, making a decision that is independent of social influences is no less absurd that making a decision that is independent of the decision-maker's own life. The United States doesn't force anyone to believe in any given religion, for example, but people who grew up under Christian parents tend to choose to be Christians more often than people who grew up under nonreligious parents. Clearly this "individual choice" is not truly individual, but is heavily influenced by incentives offered, cultural attitudes imbued, and personal experiences given by society to individuals. The choice of what religion to follow isn't the same choice for someone who grew up in a devout family as for someone who grew up in an atheist one.

In much the same way that abstract macroscopic features of steam like temperature and pressure are representative of real, individual, and microscopic environments of each water molecule and influence the path they chart through an engine, abstract macroscopic features of a society, such as racism in law enforcement, are representative of real, individual, and microscopic environments of each American resident and influence the path they chart through life.

This is what is meant by social system.

Escrito por Tribune Aquila, 03.06.2020 at 01:56
  • The Declaration of Independence states clearly and unequivocally, "all men are created equal"; it does not say that some men are created equal, or that all white men, or all Americans, or all Christians are created equal. A quick review of literature from the period demonstrates conclusively that by "men" the revolutionary generation meant "mankind"; that is, humankind. See Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), chap. 3.

    [other quotations snipped for length considerations]

    [more discussion of early American politicians also snipped for length considerations]

  • Are you generally in the habit of taking politicians at their word? That is a highly unhealthy habit and I would advise you to break it as soon as possible.

    Even if we accept the dubious claim that the founding fathers of the United States did not believe in black inferiority, I think it is obvious that for a society to be racist, it is not required for any particular member of that society to hold racist opinions (although I will note that considerable numbers of Americans do in fact hold such opinions). For a society to be racist, it is only necessary that people behave in racist ways, whether or not they believe in racism.

    Early American society was systematically biased against black people. There were real reasons why a black slave was less likely to become successful in the newly-independent United States than the white plantation owner he worked for, even if they were of equivalent strength of character. Therefore, early American society was racist. It doesn't matter whether a white plantation owner believed in racism or not, when he was perpetuating it by exploiting the labour of black slaves.

    And this is what is most sinister about the social systems that you so casually dismiss. It's possible that the founding fathers of the United States genuinely believed in what they wrote. It is possible that they genuinely believed that slavery should be abolished. But many of them nonetheless continued to own slaves and lord over black people because in the society they lived in and the country they helped establish, it was highly profitable to own slaves and politically difficult to advocate for the abolition of slavery. With such economic and political incentives dangling in front of them, they freely chose to act in ways contrary to their conscience - and as a result millions of black people continued to suffer under horrifying conditions.

    If this is understandable when it comes to early American leaders, I don't understand why so many conservatives find it difficult to understand this when it comes to people of the Information Age.



    TL;DR: Examining people's behaviour independently from the social context in which that behaviour occurs is a pointless exercise in futility and people should stop doing it.
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    02.06.2020 em Nova Aetas: 1450-1550
    Sounds amazing. Now if only the map would get hosted and actually fill in my timezone...
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    Escrito por Al Fappino, 31.05.2020 at 20:59

    Why am I the villain

    Possibly because, to put it mildly, RP is not exactly the favourite genre of the kind of core players that frequent the forums.
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    Escrito por Estus, 01.06.2020 at 06:29

    I believe that bad people will always try to take advantage of a legitimate cause to steal and simply promote destruction.

    This seems to be the only post in this entire blasted thread to date that I can agree with without reservation.
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    03.05.2020 em Better spectating.
    I agree with the listed suggestions; it would make game spectating much more enjoyable.

    However, it must be accompanied with an optional game feature, "mute spectators," that will prohibit spectators from chatting for the duration of the game. Otherwise the potential for abuse in competitive games and the like is too large. I say optional game feature, though, because in not every kind of game that happens on AtWar is such strict fairness necessary and in some game types engaging with the spectators is a part of the experience.
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    At this point, why use a drop-down menu at all? Unless there is some technical reason why it is not possible, just having a text field that users can type some valid integer into would serve perfectly well, be more flexible, and be more scalable if the game ever needs to expand to support even larger maps with even more players.
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    01.05.2020 em Ally end option
    Escrito por DancesWithWolves, 28.04.2020 at 13:48

    It sucks to be the last player eliminated before the ally end. Especially when the game settings originally state "no allies." It's cheating.

    Seconded. While the suggested feature would be useful and save considerable time in the end-game, it should be restricted so that if an ally end is not otherwise possible (that is to say, if the game settings are locked and the maximum number of alliances is smaller than the number of players less one), then it remains impossible with this feature also.
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