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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • rsuri@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldTrue Story
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    1 hour ago

    There’s a million reasons people have given me for voting Trump, none of them rational. But the classic tropes of fear and disgust won out again. I’m old enough to remember the 2004 election, then it was gay people. Now it’s trans people and dark-skinned migrants. I really didn’t think those old tropes would work this time, but it just keeps working. Americans will just keep falling for it, apparently.

    While it’s depressing that we’re reminded of the power of dumb at hateful people yet again, we should remember that nothing actually changed in that regard this election. We’re just discovering what’s always been there beneath the surface. I don’t think the malaise we’re feeling now is so much about what Trump will do - sure scores of people will die from bad policy, but that’s nothing new. Rather, we’re upset about what this reveals about ourselves. But we shouldn’t be upset about the act of revelation, because it tells us what we need to fix.



  • Your comment after being imported into China:

    The chinese narrative isn’t that nothing happened , it’s that there was a battle outside the square, including protesters lynching and burning cops and cops gunning down unarmed protesters on bikes from their trucks. This is corroborated by videos and pictures.

    The western narrative of tanks going into the square and gunning down tens of thousands of protesters (after getting delayed by tank man) is blatantly false, as you can see in the uncut tankman video pans over to show the square the tanks are leaving was empty except for some bikes.






  • We’ve had six straight administrations of almost total non-enforcement of antitrust. I’m happy with Biden bringing lots civil cases when no one else has done anything about the problem, especially because civil cases are much easier to win. The goal should be to fix the problem more than punish people for what past administrations effectively legalized.









  • The crazy thing is everything up to this point was so much better. They’d show biden waiving at “nobody” and then they’d zoom out and there’s someone standing there. Or he’d say “president of Mexico” when he meant to say “president of Egypt”. But then last night was like nonstop fail. It’s the perfect nightmare scenario because now everyone can say “You shoulda seen it sooner!” but really, we couldn’t.


  • rsuri@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldEat the rich?
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    4 months ago

    According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

    Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

    But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.




  • rsuri@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

    A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.