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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • It is down for the over the Mediterranean Sea routes and up for the from Turkey into Greece routes. And through the Canary Islands.

    How long the downward trend will hold remains to be seen, however. Smugglers are always quick to adapt and find new routes around border controls. In the Eastern Mediterranean, the second-most-used route, smuggling networks are now using speedboats in increasingly aggressive ways to avoid controls and targeting islands farther away from the Turkish coast in the central Aegean, according to Greek authorities.

    The number of migrants arriving in Greece by sea and overland during the first eight months of the year rose by 57%, U.N. data shows.




  • When it comes to military action, it is all about proportionality. Obviously Israel has the right to defend itself but killing(and starving) tens of thousands of people and flattening Gaza is not proportional. Obviously the US has the right to defend itself but invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, suspending human rights(Guantanamo/cia black sites/patriot act) is not proportional.

    And the Iraq invasion was straight up imperialistic, literally what Russia is doing now to Ukraine, which is why tankies use that invasion as a “gotcha”. Which is why everyone in the EU opposed, even most EU governments. There were a lot of protests in EU in opposition of that invasion.


  • Lets see what George Orwell wrote about that. Try to read all of it, especially the last paragraph. It isnt about being against pacifism, it’s about how pacifism can be used by authoritarian regimes on liberal countries and how that societal asymmetry defines the end result.

    Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.

    The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

    Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with.

    In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

    Not all wars are good. I was against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. But this war is one of the few occasions where american interests mostly align with the moral thing, helping an invaded country defend against an imperial invader. This is one of the least controversial and relatively clean cut wars in history.



  • You could argue that what we have isnt true capitalism, since our current system doesnt include the environmental cost. If we could do that, then the cost of doing things would greatly increase, thus forcing capitalism to be more environmentally friendly.

    I dont want to defend capitalism, but there is a potential version of capitalism that could work. Kinda how we use the replicative aggressive function of viruses for healing.

    The fact that in the West, right wings are often insane, doesnt mean much. 95% of new coal power plants are built in China. Are they right wing? I think they are but tankies think China is socialist.

    Obviously China has immense demand for power and it is in many ways a developing country. They took some measures to reduce the negative environmental effect. Their cities were covered in smog till recently, they had to do something.

    But despite that, they still value the growth/wealth of cheap electric power.