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International Events VIII: Been living under a rock so long


TheLastWolf

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Seems to be in line with banning burkinis from beaches and public swimming pools. Designed to marginalise the Muslim community in the guise of emancipating women and forced secularism that somehow only ever applies meaningfully to Muslims. Don't know if Bretheren is a Christian sect that is in France, but their women typically have to wear headscarfs, I wonder if that's going to be banned.

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15 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Just a political message to distract from the really important things. Another fruitless and unhealthy preoccupation with individual and collective identities, because politicians know that endless discussions about symbols can save them from having to do anything for the people.

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On 1/20/2022 at 3:05 AM, DireWolfSpirit said:

 

Because you know you can tell the terrorists by their scary clothes.

And the shade of their skin.

If a woman  looks…”foreign”  enough and they’re wearing a headdress then they are oppressed.

If the woman in question is not oppressed by an abusive husband, if she isn’t married, she’s oppressed by some male relative, if no male relative cares how she dresses  then she’s still oppressed because she’s been brainwashed.

On 1/19/2022 at 4:26 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Seems to be in line with banning burkinis from beaches and public swimming pools. Designed to marginalise the Muslim community in the guise of emancipating women and forced secularism that somehow only ever applies meaningfully to Muslims. Don't know if Bretheren is a Christian sect that is in France, but their women typically have to wear headscarfs, I wonder if that's going to be banned.

It's really feminist when women are punished in response to the threat of men abusing them and always expected/pressured to dress in a way that sends the “right” message in regards to female sexuality/s

Though seriously xenophobia and racist do love to pretend their brutality is gender equality.

China justifies sterlizing, raping, and enslaving Uyigur Muslim women with the idea of liberating them from the constricting confines of Islamic patriarchal oppression.

 

On 1/20/2022 at 6:23 AM, Rippounet said:

Just a political message to distract from the really important things. Another fruitless and unhealthy preoccupation with individual and collective identities, because politicians know that endless discussions about symbols can save them from having to do anything for the people.

True. 

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who converted his first three paychecks into Crypto, just an hour or so before Crypto crashed, is a pea in the pod of El Salvador's President.  Like Bukele thinks El Salvador should be, and DeSantis seems to think Florida should be also, Adams thinks NYC should be a / the Crypto hub of the world.  I still can't figure out how or why the damned NY State Democratic party shoved this dimwit down NYC's throat.  Surely, surely, surely there was someone intelligent and educated, and less corrupt, they could have backed instead of the stooge-clown, Adams!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/26/el-salvador-bitcoin-dip-crypto-crash/

https://www.bloombergquint.com/wealth/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-takes-paycheck-in-crypto-may-have-lost-about-1-000

 

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In terms of El Salvador, hard to know whether being beholden to the USD or Bitcoin is worse for an economically struggling country. Either way you don't have currency sovereignty. I don't really know which is worse. I think the move to bitcoin was mostly made because it's cheaper and quicker for ex-pats in the USA to send bitcoin back home than USD, and it is probably not really desirable for people to convert the bitcoin back to USD in El Salvador. One problem though, is the El Salvador govt requires some taxes to be paid only in USD, so no one can live an exclusively bitcoin existance and at some point you have to convert some of your Bitcoin to USD. So it is almost the worst of both worlds having 2 forms of legal tender neither of which are sovereign to the El Salvador govt.

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Air India, India's nationalized (in 1953) debt ridden airline returns to the founders, Tata, after 8 decades (since founding). The Congresss govt of the 60s and 70s nationalized every damn thing without considering the losses it would incur from mismanagement. Now the right wing-ers are selling everything to their corporate campaign-funders, the Ambanis and Adanis, Birlas and Tatas...noything much will be left with the State by the time Mo and Sha are finished

ETA

2.4 b $ deal finalized 90 days ago, but the final takeover was yesterday.

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I do find these tables interesting.  And the commentary around it, even more so.  Its quite negative, unsurprisingly.

Quote

The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. The results are given on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

While corruption takes vastly different forms from country to country, this year’s scores reveal that all regions of the globe are at a standstill when it comes to fighting public sector corruption.

At the top of the CPI, countries in Western Europe and the European Union continue to wrestle with transparency and accountability in their response to COVID-19, threatening the region’s clean image. In parts of Asia Pacific, the Americas, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, increasing restrictions on accountability measures and basic civil freedoms allow corruption to go unchecked. Even historically high-performing countries are showing signs of decline.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021

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I'm struggling to understand how the UK went up in the CPI. Though perhaps all of what we've seen in the last year is baked into that score.

I may be wrong, but I seem to recall the top scoring countries used to be in the 90s. So 1st equal being 88 I think is not a great sign in general. It's still nice to be #1 though.

...

I was right. Finland, NZ, Denmark all above 90 in 2015, all been downhill from there. Denmark peaked in 2014 at 92.

Australia has dropped 4 points in one year. That's quite bad.

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13 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Look at the cute panda mascot, everyone, not at the concentration camps, the destroyed mosques, or the dictator for life running the show...

And above all else DO NOT look at Winnie the Pooh!

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Why Cyrpto will not do away with state authority:

https://acoup.blog/2022/02/04/fireside-friday-february-4-2022/

Quote

 

... the power of the blockchain is that it puts you and your assets beyond the reach of ‘the man.’ It does no such thing. Your NFTs, ethereum and metaverse avatar may all well exist in cyberspace, but you exist in meatspace, as does the food you eat, the utility bills you need to pay and crucially the servers that all of your digital ‘assets’ exist on.1 If the state is unable to exert its claims over you in cyberspace, it will simply do so in meatspace and as far as I can tell, very little if any of this technology connected to the blockchain does anything to harden these systems against meatspace attack. Indeed, to the contrary, the massive server complexes required to maintain the blockchain and their proof-of-work system make for fairly obvious meatspace targets, as do the companies that manage crypto-wallets. For instance, MetaMask is run by ConsenSys, which is headquartered in New York; it would be fairly trivial for the United States government to thus acquire a quite complete inventory of all of the blockchain assets of anyone using MetaMask by pointing metaphorical legal guns or, failing that, very literal actual guns at ConsenSys. . . . .

. . . . Offshoring the servers also seems unlikely to work in the long-run. For one, you haven’t offshored yourself, so the same meatspace-strategy still applies, particularly for tax assessment: they can’t arrest your OpenSea wallet, but they can arrest you. At the same time, offshoring catches the companies running the platforms (OpenSea, Metamask, etc.) and the server farms running mining on the horns of a dilemma: a small country might impose few restrictions, but ask the Dey of Algiers what can go wrong if a small state disrupts the economics of major powers. On the flip-side, the sort of state strong enough to protect the servers is also likely to be the sort of state looking to impose its own conditions on them and use the technology and its community to their own strategic ends. Escaping US or EU regulation only to end up as a geostrategic tool of China or Russia or whatever other great power might be in play is not likely to be much of a victory in the long run (and just as likely to get them legally shut out of the economies of the countries they’ve just departed).

In this sense, any cryptocurrency faces the same problem all non-governmental actors face: the larger you become and the more you appear to threaten the state, the more the state becomes hostile – and the state’s resources are massively, overwhelmingly greater. If crypto as a whole ever does ‘go to the moon’ it is likely to find the tax-man there, already waiting with the bill.

 

 

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16 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Ah duhhhh!

Unless, perhaps, you live in an anarcho-capitalist non-state. The dream for a few, a hellish nightmare for most.

 

Libertarian paradise!  Their work here is now accomplished.  :P

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In under reported news.

Well, more like drowned out news with the heating up of the Russian-Ukraine war, and the Kanadian Karen Karavan (or do you prefer Canadian Caren Convoy?), and British Party Minister Johnson dominating the news cycles lately.

The situation at the EU borders (Poland in particular) is still dire. We have ongoing illegal push backs and human rights violations, Poland has established a de factor law free zone, where no journalist or aid worders are allowed (EU values, we pretend to care about those, when it's not too inconvenient), and now they are about to build a wall straight through Europe's last jungle (Bialowieza Forest).

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

It's International Women's Day.  The people who hold up more than half the world.  The women of Ukraine know this, have done this, are doing this, for a single instance, forever.  After a man's debacle, it's women who clean it up and start over until the next guy comes along with his wrecking ball.

 

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