Why is Winnie the Pooh dressed like a sexual predator?
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The two are hardly mutually exclusive....oh, bother....
I hear there's a major sex-pest issue in the pro-china industry.
sex-pest
I keep seeing this term, can you translate it to American? Is it referring to anyone obsessed with sex, or specifically people who commit sexual assault?
I've heard it used, as an American myself. Sex-pest is someone who is bothersome towards others, typically in a harassing way with some thin layer of plausible deniability, in the expectation or hope of getting reluctant sex out of someone else.
Thanks.
If factories in your country have suicide nets, maybe you aren't doing socialism right.
If factories in your country have suicide nets, maybe you aren't doing domestic governance right.
FTFY
I think both premises are well-justified by the presented evidence. That is to say, doing either effectively makes suicide nets vanishingly unlikely.
Not making a point here, I just like numbers:
China has a population of ~1.4 billion
China has 698 billionares
China has the one billionare for every 2,005,730 people.
United States has a population of ~340 million
United States has 724 billionaires
US has one billionaire for every 469,613 people.
Edit: I like numbers. I don’t like Reddit/Lemmy formatting.
I think it'd be better when adjusted for GDP.
China gdp: $17.96 trillion
China has 1 billionare / $25.73 billion GDP or 1 billionare / $18.22 GDP / capita
US gpd: $27.94 trillion
US has 1 billionare / $38.59 billion GDP or 1 billionare / $114.88 GDP / capita
Ohhhh numbers. Very yummy.
Wouldn't a lower number of billionaires to a higher amount of profits be more favorable to everyone except billionaires? So that particular example actually favors the system in the USA, oddly.
Of course, GDP only accounts for excess goods and services sold to other nations, which for the USA includes financial services like trading platforms and exchanges, heavily skewing their actual production capacity.
I think so, yeah. Also, billionaire means anything more than 1 billion, right? It might help to look at how much wealth they actually have; for example, if one nation has 1 billionaire (with $30 billion) and another has 30 billionaires (each with $1 billion), I wouldn't argue that the former is especially better off.
Yup China has the fastest growing billionaire and millionaire class. It's no more socialist than America but we need a boogy man, as long as that antagonist isn't capitalism the wheels towards the cliff will keep turning.
It's an authoritarian country where labour unions are illegal and the ruling party is dominated by wealthy billionaires. They spew out xenophobic propaganda that claims that foreigners want to repeat the humiliations of the past (over a century ago) and therefore they need strongmen to protect the people.
We probably should just call them fascists, but since they say they're socialists we believe them. Fascists would never claim to be socialists, they're known to be super honest about that kind of thing.
Do you think it’s socialism that makes the US establishment wary of China?
Honestly, not really anymore.
Biden has saved socialists from Far-Right Coups
It really seems that the U.S. is growing more accepting of international socialism, as long as it's democratic.
Indeed. That’s why I asked the question.
Say what you will about how fucking stupid American foreign policy is and has been, but it’s at least somewhat tempered its approach to socialist governments around the world.
Even in the Cold War, it was horrifically uneven. We were cozy with Yugoslavia and intermittently cooperative with the Arab socialist states (and Israel, which was dominated by the at-the-time-actually-left Labour coalitions), but couped the democratic governments of Mossadegh in Iran (who wasn't even a socialist) and Allende in Chile for seeming a little too 'red'.
Diving into Cold War history, you realize how much of the lines sold about realpolitik, liberal internationalism, and material conditions are all less important than their defenders present them as.
No one has a plan. There's no rationality or structure to it. Personal quirks of low-ranking bureaucrats and cultural perceptions of political decorum are often as important as national-scale economic concerns.
It's why democratic participation and awareness of foreign affairs is so goddamn important. Because otherwise, Mr. Empty Suit in a sinecure position during an unforeseen crisis who had a fucking cold the day a meeting was supposed to happen determines the fate of hundreds of thousands.
Shit's almost never inevitable.
Totally. It’s absolutely terrifying (and occasionally, very reassuring) how much a single person can impact the entire planet.
To your point about voting and democratizing foreign policy: I tend to agree with you, but I also have some reservations. I think you can observe how easily things become overtly politicized and based, based on short-term political gains. Bureaucracy and individual expertise/institutional knowledge and inertia can safeguard against some shockwaves that occur based on shorter term democratic changes. I do think that there’s plenty of space for a technocratic approach to administration, where decisions are based on longer term thinking than a lot of representative democracies reward in the political sphere.
Just to be clear: I’m defending expertise within a democratic government’s institutions, not for opaque policies or a system without oversight. I’m just saying that just as I like to have scientists leading a county’s national science organizations, I like having foreign policy experts leading a county’s foreign policy organizations.
Oh, certainly. But an active and involved population can help steer the ship back on course by democratic means when any given foreign policy bureaucrat fucks up.
It's really weird how narratives alone can change the direction of nations,
We used to say we are the arsenal of democracy to justify all the right wing coups we sponsored against socialist leaders, even if they were democratically elected, and now a major US party's establishment has zero qualms helping socialists if the socialists are the ones who are going to the defense of the global democratic society, because "we're the defenders of democracy."
The joking innuendo became a legitimate foreign policy planck!
I think this is part of an overall tone shift in the US' culture, a rise of Radical Sincerity. Everyone is so burnt out of wink and nod cynicism after decades of it being the norm in one iteration or another, that the punkish backlash to the status quo cynicism and fake smiles is to play what was once made fun of as childish delusion completely straight.
Sincere fantasy stories, abandonment of lampshading tropes, exhaustion with wink and nod fourth wall breaks, shift to a sincere insistence on following through on the values we were told to aspire to, through religious upbringing or through the narrative of national history we were taught.
No, but it's a convenient drum to beat for the right-wing.
Absolutely not. If you look hard at the colonialist shitfuckery the US perpetrated during the (so-called) "Cold War", "socialism" was only the enemy as far as the propaganda and pretexts were concerned - in reality, the insurgencies the US tried to repress and the governments the US undermined were all nationalist in nature.
The US isn't threatened by socialism because the US defeated any internal socialist threat with Roosevelt's New Deal - whether they will do that again is anyone's guess.
Post this at another instance that I shall not invoke by name, watch yourself get deleted and maybe even banned.
No way, tankies would never do this /s
All the .ml users showing up to explain that actually real socialism is supposed to produce billionaires, because of reasons.
I mean you could argue an end goal is every person having the effective wealth of a billionaire in terms of being able to have what they need right when they need it and being able to enrich their lives without worry for losing money that might be needed for an emergency later, but that specific stretch point is so far into a post scarcity future it is only a slight exaggeration to say it's literally the "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" meme but as an actual civilization.
the “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” meme but as an actual civilization.
We have that. It's called The United Federation of Planets.
China is not socialist no matter what they say.
Can you provide more context? Im very confused after skimming the first few paragraphs
It's a stupid comment practice where they claim ownership of their comment and place what they think is a binding and effective license against AI using that comment.
It literally does nothing. This is the modern equivalent of making a post on Facebook to assert that you have rights and control of your comments there.
Beyond the tools for editing and deletion you have no such rights in the Fediverse and it's a good way to demonstrate you don't understand how anything works.
Nothing stops anyone or any entity from indexing, ingesting, or scraping federated content.
They put that link in all their comments. It's got nothing to do with what they say.
Oh lol, thanks for clearing that up
Truth is, the number was once well over 698.
Ask Jack ma what happened.
Socialism: A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.