Statistics: Posted by late — 18 Mar 2024 18:14
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 18 Mar 2024 16:57
Charles Hugh Smith wrote:
...The enormous profitability of edible snacks is mirrored in all the other manifestations of America the Snackable: our daily lives are now composed of one bite-sized addictive snack of social media, novelty memes, political opinion, financial data-snacks and pundits' opinions and snackable videos after another.
Attention spans and the ability to grasp complex issues have withered to snack-size, and whatever is being marketed as "ideas" are as devoid of value as an empty-calorie snack...
6. The snack is a legal addictive product as the snack has been designed to hijack humans' innate receptors for sugar, salt and fat and satisfying mouthfeel. (Bet ya can't have just one.)
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 18 Mar 2024 16:53
Statistics: Posted by late — 18 Mar 2024 16:49
Haitians tried to install quality leadership chosen by them. But the US government intervened severely all the time.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 18 Mar 2024 16:24
...Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."[2] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."[3] This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."[4]
The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images."....
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 18 Mar 2024 16:11
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 16 Mar 2024 17:14
Statistics: Posted by late — 16 Mar 2024 17:01
late wrote:
...humans are human...
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 16 Mar 2024 16:44
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Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 16 Mar 2024 16:30
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Statistics: Posted by Rich — 16 Mar 2024 16:09
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Statistics: Posted by late — 16 Mar 2024 12:05
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 11 Mar 2024 14:28
Statistics: Posted by late — 08 Mar 2024 13:12
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 06 Mar 2024 16:48
QatzelOk wrote:
If the CIA uses collaborators (through extortion), this doesn't make them less evil.
And your reference to "Putin's Russia" is pure trend-following - using our current newsfeed to "prove" something is very weak methodology.
Statistics: Posted by Rancid — 05 Mar 2024 18:37
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 05 Mar 2024 17:37
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 04 Mar 2024 20:07
Statistics: Posted by Rancid — 04 Mar 2024 19:47
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 04 Mar 2024 19:41
Statistics: Posted by late — 04 Mar 2024 19:16
Statistics: Posted by Rancid — 04 Mar 2024 18:37
Today, "Liberalism" is basically about letting "huge piles of cash" determine social policy. "Huge piles of cash" is a secular god for the liberal, and Trevor Noah is a well-paid media personality, and thus worships at the altar of "huge piles of cash."
For some reason, "Huge piles of cash" can never accurately recall history.
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 04 Mar 2024 17:42
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 04 Mar 2024 16:32
Statistics: Posted by Rancid — 03 Mar 2024 19:45
Statistics: Posted by late — 03 Mar 2024 19:32
How I lost faith in the established media
Helmut Scheben / 29.06.2023 When news later turns out to be false, it is often already etched in our memories as "historical truth".
During and after the 1991 Gulf War, the media in the USA were prohibited from photographing or filming images of the coffins of dead US soldiers. This measure was only lifted in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers was also forbidden, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the huge archive of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank.
Three seconds of thousands of videos shot during this war. Three seconds that - as is clearly recognizable - were due to a mistake by an editor who had placed an IN or OUT incorrectly, so that material became visible that should actually have been censored.
Scenes of defeat have not been shown since Vietnam. So there are no more defeats, because the TV news compressed into two and a half minutes is what makes history in our minds.
In his book "Liberty and the News", the US journalist and media theorist Walter Lippmann stated in 1920:
"Newspaper columns are public information carriers. If those who control them assume the right to determine what is to be reported and for what purpose, then the democratic process comes to a standstill."
(Lippmann p.24)
A few years ago, I couldn't have imagined that my morning walk to the letterbox to pick up the newspapers would be accompanied by a quiet counterpoint of reluctance and boredom. I like having paper in my hand with my morning coffee instead of looking at a screen. Reading, however, takes up less and less time every year. One reason for this is that many topics no longer interest me, for example the eternal soap opera of British royals, the daily obligatory LGBTQ issues, the me-too attitude of groupies at rock concerts or parliamentary investigations to find out why banks are going to the wall in the financial casino.
However, the real problems of most people, the war in Ukraine, the escalating conflict between the USA and China, i.e. events that are currently changing the lives of millions of taxpayers and burdening future generations (armament, inflation, energy policy, sanctions policy, asylum etc.) are presented in our leading media with such a reduced perspective that it leaves me stunned. The denial of reality takes place with a matter-of-factness bordering on rabies.
Out of 100 articles, there are not 5 from the point of view of the other warring party
I took the trouble to check the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger, which I subscribe to, for one-sidedness. From Russia's attack in February 2022 until the end of 2022, I looked at around one hundred articles that dealt directly with the war in Ukraine. By the hundredth report, I was exhausted by the same old story. Almost all of them describe the suffering and heroism of western Ukraine in the Russian war of aggression and - in garish colors - Russia's crimes.
Experts on weapons systems and geostrategy incessantly repeat why Russia must be defeated, and the investigators know little more than the hunt for some Russian or Russian woman whose assets could be expropriated.
I couldn't find five articles out of a hundred that reported what was happening on the other side of the front. The suffering of the pro-Russian Ukrainians under the rocket attacks and artillery fire of the pro-Western Ukrainians is not worth mentioning. The people behind the front line do not seem to exist for our major media. They report exclusively from the perspective of NATO, i.e. from the perspective of an arms lobby that functions worldwide as a crowbar for the US as a force for order.
The one-sidedness of the reports stems from the one-sidedness of the sources. Apart from the inescapable British secret service (whether 007 is involved remains a mystery so far), the daily sources of our "notification" are: President Selensky and his entourage in Kiev as well as his friends in Brussels, London, Washington and the associated experts and NATO think tanks. The Russians appear mainly as criminals who deny their crimes.
And when a dam bursts, largely flooding Russian defense positions and a territory occupied by Russia, all the German talk shows, as well as the Swiss radio magazine "Echo der Zeit", immediately find experts who know that it was the Russians who destroyed the dam. Just as it is the Russians who are shooting themselves at the nuclear power plant they are occupying. "Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind", says Shakespeare in King Lear.
In the years before the Russian attack, OECD observers recorded daily artillery detonations, and in February 2022, hundreds of explosions per day. Well over ten thousand people died in the fighting in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. So this war did not start in February 2022.
Did our newspapers report on it? They have largely swept it under the carpet. They only see what they already know. In other words, they always know what they're going to see. In other words, what I can read in the newspapers every morning. And therefore what I no longer have to read because I already know what it is before I open the newspaper.
"Don't be fooled by your own"
In the fall of 1983, more than a million people demonstrated throughout the Federal Republic of Germany against the deployment of nuclear bombs. Even in several countries that were members of NATO, a majority of people opposed further nuclear armament, because it was clear that the much-vaunted "balance of terror" had long been guaranteed by the British and French A-bombs. During the debate in the Bundestag, opposition leader Willy Brandt said that his party, the SPD, was being bombarded with letters of protest:
"These are Germans West and Germans East, these are Europeans and Americans, these are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, workers and entrepreneurs, artists and soldiers, housewives, pensioners, and they are scientists and engineers of all academic degrees. I wonder who will benefit if the commitment and collective expertise of these fellow citizens is swept into the trash with all the arrogance of power."
The FDP-CDU majority in the German parliament chose the dustbin for the people's vote and decided to station medium-range nuclear missiles. Although these were abolished as part of a disarmament agreement, US nuclear warheads are still stored at Büchel Air Base in the Eifel region. German air force pilots train in their use as part of the so-called "nuclear sharing". It is no military secret that Russia has always been and continues to be the main target.
In the same year, 1983, Christa Wolf's book "Kassandra" is published, a text about a seer who contemplates the fall of her homeland Troy before her death:
"When the war begins, one can know, but when does the pre-war begin? If there were rules, they would have to be passed on. Engraved in clay in stone, handed down. What would it say? It would say among other sentences: Do not be deceived by your own."
I let myself be deceived by my own, but it took me a long time to realize that. The "Süddeutsche", the "Frankfurter Rundschau", the "Neue Zürcher", the "Spiegel" and other papers were my leading media when I was learning journalism.
The big media, both those financed by television and those of private corporations, have failed miserably in all the wars I have been able to observe. Their job would have been to question the actions of governments, but in many cases they have turned out to be loudspeakers for government propaganda and warmongers in unjustified and senseless wars.
The Balkan wars opened Pandora's box
If I remember correctly, my first major professional crisis came during the Balkan wars. I couldn't sleep at night when I realized that people were lying through their teeth. Tuzla was my key experience at the time. The city in Bosnia had been defined as a protection zone in 1993. Blue helmets were stationed there. The Bosnian Muslim population was to be protected from Serbian attacks. However, Serbian artillery continued to fire on the town. These attacks were a daily news item on the radio for months. The Western media were overflowing with indignation at the shelling of the "safe area".
I was taken aback when blue helmet soldiers told me in 1995: "The Serbs sometimes shoot in there, but the artillery in Tuzla also shoots out at the surrounding Serbian villages every night."
Tuzla was supplied with weapons by the USA at night and in the fog. There were restricted military areas where UN units were denied access. The same government in Washington, which outwardly played the role of "honest broker" to bring about an end to the war, secretly organized so-called "black flights" to arm the Bosniak military.
When a Norwegian blue helmet officer noticed this in 1995 and made it public, he was ordered to remain silent and was punished. The British broadcaster ITN/Channel 4 made a report on the matter, which I took over for a magazine on the SRG program Schweiz 4.
My attempts to draw the attention of the Swiss media to the revelations met with indifference. In Bosnia, as in Kosovo, NATO determined what was allowed to be known and what was not. Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, later complained that she had run into a wall with her request for insight into NATO's secret operations.
It was only much later that I learned that leading PR agencies in the USA were feeding the press with horror stories about Serbian concentration camps and Holocaust plans, which a gigantic media apparatus chased around the world in a matter of seconds. In their study "Operation Balkan: Advertising for War and Death", political scientists Jörg Becker and Mira Beham have identified well over a hundred such PR contracts in US archives. The brief was to portray the Serbs as perpetrators and the others as victims. James Harff, head of the PR agency Ruder Finn, described his job as follows:
"Our trade is to spread the news, to get it out there as quickly as possible (...) Speed is of the essence. Because we know exactly that the first message is important. A denial no longer has any effect."
Mira Beham: War drums. Media, war and politics. 1996. p.172 ff.
PR agencies provide the arguments for war and death
Harff showed a certain professional pride to Jacques Merlino, a deputy editor-in-chief of France 2, when he candidly described how his agency "pulled off its job with a great bluff" by getting three powerful US Jewish lobbying organizations to warn of an impending holocaust in the Balkans in advertisements in the New York Times.
"With one move we were able to simplify the issue and present it as a story of the good guys and the bad guys (...) And we won, because we picked the right target, the Jewish audience. Immediately there was a noticeable change in the use of language in the media, accompanied by the use of terms that had a strong emotional charge, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and so on, all evoking a comparison with Nazi Germany, gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody dared to contradict it."
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer consequently toured Europe with the slogan "Never again Auschwitz" and his Defense Minister Scharping told the people that the Serbs were "playing football with the severed heads of their enemies." A photo that went around the world as proof of the Serbian atrocities and as an argument for the NATO war of aggression showed a horribly emaciated man with a naked upper body behind barbed wire. It was reminiscent of the photos of German extermination camps in 1945. The photo was - as was later proven - a fake. The refugee center in question, Trnopolje, was not cordoned off by a barbed wire fence at the time, nor were there any half-starved people there.
Nothing has changed. The war generates the same old propaganda. In 2022, a "writer from East Germany" living in Ukraine named Christoph Brumme wrote a regular "diary" in the NZZ am Sonntag in which he predicted, among other things, that the Russians would set up concentration camps in Ukraine and that Putin was a second Hitler. He was probably seriously ill and would stage his suicide with a nuclear bomb. And much more besides.
The category of "embedded journalists" had already emerged during the 1991 Gulf War, and there is hardly a term that better describes how this profession can degenerate into a kind of prostitution. In his study "Second Front: Censorship and propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War" (published in German by dtv "Die Schlacht der Lügen"), the US journalist John R. MacArthur showed how the media was kept on a leash and how the public was deceived.
The symbiosis of the big media and their governments became a matter of course after the 9/11 attack. This was defined as an attack by a hostile power and, following this logic, first Afghanistan and then Iraq were attacked. A "war on terror" was launched around the world, and once the clean-up was underway, "by the way" oppressed peoples were also "liberated" in Libya and Syria. The results can be seen in all these countries.
The renowned science journalist and peace activist Norman Cousins had already given the ideological mission of the US superpower a name in 1987: "The Pathology of Power".
A fabricated rape story in Libya
It is incomprehensible to me how journalists, who have been lied to so often by governments, continue to disseminate the political guidelines from above as if they were the tablets of the Ten Commandments. In June 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on camera that she now had proof that Libyan ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi was using "systematic rape" as a strategy. At that time, civil war was raging in Libya. The Libyan army was trying to put down an uprising that had been escalating in the wake of the so-called "Arab Spring" since February 2011. The USA and its NATO allies had been bombing the country since March 2011 in order - according to the official argument - to help the Libyan people oppressed by Gaddafi and "enforce a no-fly zone".
A Libyan woman named Eman-al Obeidi was regarded as living proof of the accusation of rape. The woman had gained access to the luxury hotel Rixos Al Nasr in Tripoli on March 26, 2011. Hotel staff and security guards tried to prevent her from making contact with the journalists who were sitting there at breakfast. The woman screamed that she had been abducted and raped by Gaddafi militiamen at a checkpoint three days earlier.
Libyan government spokesman Musa Ibrahim later explained that Ms Obeidi was initially thought to be drunk and mentally disturbed. It was then established that her statements were credible. The case was in the hands of the judiciary. It was a case of ordinary criminality and not a political crime.
Ms. Obeidi was interviewed by CNN and numerous other media outlets. She was presented as proof of the wickedness of the Libyan head of state Gaddafi. It hardly seemed worth mentioning to the major media that Libyan doctors had cared for the woman, had confirmed the rape and that the Libyan police had arrested suspects shortly afterwards.
In 2011, I asked an Amnesty International office in Zurich what the truth of the allegations was. I was told that Amnesty had been investigating in Libya for several months and had found no confirmation of the allegations of mass rape. The spokesperson for the Libyan organization "Human Rights Solidarity Libya", which was close to the insurgents, also told me on the phone: "We have no evidence. The only concrete case is that of Ms. Obeidi."
In the meantime, the crap had run its course and the story experienced an almost frenzied proliferation in practically all Western media. My Google search on Sunday, July 20, 2011, showed 21 million results. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno Ocampo, provided an excellent lubricant for the media apparatus with the remark that he actually had "information" about mass rape. When asked by a journalist what he thought of reports that Gaddafi had Viagra imported so that his soldiers could rape, the chief prosecutor did not reply: "Leave me alone with such nonsense". Instead, he said the perfidious sentence that evidence was still being collected: "Yes, we are still collecting evidence."
The fantasy continued to proliferate for weeks. The Swiss newspaper "Le Matin" took the creative story-telling as far as a photo illustration of a king-size bed complete with lamp and bedside table: allegedly a room in an underground bunker where, according to the paper, Gaddafi abused his female victims. During this time, I never met a journalist who said he was ashamed that his choice of profession made him part of this industry.
"Atrocity management" is as old as war itself.
Demonizing the enemy is a tried and tested instrument that is as old as war itself.
In his standard work "Images of War, War of Images", historian Gerhard Paul uses over 200 images to illustrate how modern visual media have branded war as iconography in the collective memory. According to Gerhard Paul, reality is lost to the same extent as the images are perfected and standardized.
Crimes against children are always effective in the media. This ranges from the Kuwaiti "nurse Najirah", who told a human rights committee of the US Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tearing out the tubes of incubator babies, which later turned out to be a fabrication by the PR agency Hill & Knowlton, to the human rights commissioner Denisova in Kiev, who lost her job in June 2022 because it had become clear that she had spread lies. These included the claim that she had evidence that Russian soldiers were raping small children.
The depiction of the enemy as a bestial monster seems to be an unavoidable stereotype of war propaganda. During the First World War, the story that German soldiers had snatched a Belgian woman's baby, chopped off her hands and then eaten them was a long-running story in the French and British press.
When the enemy is a monster that embodies evil in itself, wars are easier to justify. In more than forty years of journalistic work, I have found that the major media usually disseminate such propaganda stories uncritically and are only very late or never prepared to admit their mistakes. The "New York Times", which asked its readers for forgiveness for the misinformation surrounding the war in Iraq, is the only case I know of.
In 19 years of working for Swiss television SRF, I am not aware of any case in which a program has apologized for false news. With the exception of the Meteo program, when the weather forecast was wrong.
In 2011, I drew the attention of Amnesty International Switzerland to the fact that there were no television pictures of the destruction caused by the NATO air strikes in Libya. The Libyan government's television studios had been reduced to rubble in the first wave of attacks. The NATO command center in Naples was thus able to prevent emotional images of victims being pulled from the rubble from being shown on Western TV channels. The problem had not come to the attention of the major media, or they ignored it.
The Amnesty spokesperson replied to me at the time that this one-sided portrayal was also of great concern to them. When I had finished the report for the Tagesschau in the evening with the editor at the editing suite, the head of the Tagesschau said during approval that this sentence by the Amnesty spokesperson had to be removed from the report. When I asked why, he said: "Otherwise the viewers might think that Gaddafi wasn't so bad after all and was in the right."
A new era of censorship has dawned
The corporate media and the fee-financed broadcasters dominate the news market. They all claim that they are the Fourth Estate, keeping an eye on the powerful, and that this is what makes democracy possible. My experience is that they are much more believers in a kind of religious community that sees itself as the axis of good. Anyone who does not share their world view is hushed up, defamed or simply banned.
In this sense, governments and their associated media work efficiently. The 27 countries of the European Union have banned the Russian news channels RT and Sputnik. Anyone who broadcasts or receives them will even pay a fine of up to 50,000 euros in Austria. This is how easy it is believed to be to enforce the diversity of opinion. Protest or criticism from the major editorial offices of the Fourth Estate? Zero.
While the Russian social media* continue to discuss this war with astonishing vigor and controversy, the Western media are obsessively trying to convince us that anyone in Russia who says anything against this war will be imprisoned. "Ten years in prison for thinking" is the headline of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (June 6, 2023).
Opposition media are simply banned in Kiev. Do we have to report on this? Obviously not. This is then dealt with casually, almost as a digressive digression, in eight words: "Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian broadcasters have been showing a joint program" (Zürcher Tagesanzeiger, 28 July 2022). Community program? That almost sounds like community service.
The concealment is systematic. Nowhere is this more evident than in the silence that our leading media are maintaining about the rampant censorship of social media. A few weeks after the EU banned Russian channels, Google announced that it would block all Russia-related media worldwide. As is so often the case with Big Tech, the pressure allegedly came from its own staff: "Google employees had urged YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels."
Millions of posts disappear from the platform. Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was involved in the Edward Snowden revelations, has pointed out this extreme censorship campaign and the billions of dollars that play a role in it:
"Unsurprisingly, the Silicon Valley monopolies are exercising their censorship power in full alignment with the US government's foreign policy interests. Many of the major tech monopolies - such as Google and Amazon - routinely seek and obtain highly lucrative contracts with the US security apparatus, including the CIA and NSA. Their top executives maintain close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Democrats in Congress have repeatedly called tech executives before their various committees to threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they don't bring censorship more in line with the party's political goals and interests."
Anyone who reads the Twitter files knows how the system works. A discreet intervention by the FBI can cause leading media outlets to put politically sensitive topics on ice until the "danger", in this case an election defeat for candidate Joe Biden, has been averted.
What shocked me at the time and still leaves me stunned today is the hooliganism that is reflexively set in motion by a media mob when a few dare to swim against the tide and question published opinion. The political scientist Mira Beham told me that she had been banned from writing in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" because she dared to argue that the perpetrator-victim scheme would get us nowhere in the Balkan conflicts, that the matter was more complex. Nowadays, a renowned journalist like Patrick Baab loses his teaching position at the University of Kiel if he dares to report from the Donbass "from the wrong side of the front".
Orwell's dystopian vision of "newspeak" and "ministries of truth" is well on the way to becoming reality. In this respect, we are indeed experiencing a turning point, even if the German chancellor meant something different when he used the term.
The word "luegenpresse" is not accurate
Media scientist Uwe Krüger has documented that most of the established media's alpha males are members of NATO- and US-affiliated institutions. Of course, there is the factor of coercion and conformity, such as the well-known fact that every employee at Axel Springer Verlag ("Bild", "Die Welt") has to agree to the statutes that demand support for the transatlantic alliance and solidarity with the USA.
Nevertheless, one should be careful with the abusive term "lying press". The matter is infinitely more complicated. On the one hand, as far as news outlets are concerned, there is a system based on abbreviation and exaggerated spin. The philosopher Paul Virilio spoke of an "industry of oblivion", which incessantly fills up what has just been reported with new news. A news apparatus that produces highly fragmented fragments of events cannot provide context and background, even if well-meaning journalists wanted to.
And they want to. In my entire life, I have hardly met any media people who wanted to falsify or report dishonestly. People don't lie, they are usually convinced of what they say and write. They are shaped by their entire life story, their education and their social contacts and are integrated into the world view of their environment.
There is this "huge chunk of truth", which the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand called "implanted memory":
"We are all born into a universe of fields of discourse shaped by the ideological power struggles of previous generations. Even before the historian can acquire the tools for critical questioning, all the history, politics and Bible lessons at school, the national holidays, memorial days, public ceremonies, street names, memorials, television series and other spheres of remembrance shape his world of imagination. There is a huge chunk of 'truth' in his head that he cannot simply avoid."
Shlomo Sand: The invention of the Jewish people. S. 40
Every magician and sleight-of-hand artist is familiar with the problem of an industry that is supposed to serve the daily search for truth under the name of journalism: perception is not determined by actual events, but by expectations. By a huge chunk of "truth".
(gray box in the middle of the article)
Author Helmut Scheben
Helmut Scheben (*1947 in Koblenz, Germany) studied Romance languages and literature in Mainz, Bonn, Salamanca and Lima. He received his doctorate in 1980 from the University of Bonn. From 1980 to 1985, he worked as a press agency reporter and correspondent for print media in Mexico and Central America. From 1986 he was editor of the weekly newspaper WoZ in Zurich, and from 1993 to 2012 editor and reporter for Swiss television SRF, including 16 years on the news program Tagesschau.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Statistics: Posted by Negotiator — 03 Mar 2024 19:00
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 03 Mar 2024 18:19
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skinster wrote:
Cuba still knows what solidarity looks like.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 03 Mar 2024 14:51
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Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 02 Mar 2024 14:36
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Statistics: Posted by late — 01 Mar 2024 17:49
wiki wrote:
In the year 1CE India accounted for 32% of the world's GDP (its highest point). The gross domestic product of India in 1500 was estimated at about 24.4% of the world's economy, 22.4% in 1600, 16% in 1820, and 12.1% in 1870. India's share of global GDP declined to less than 2% of global GDP by the time of it's independence and would only gradually rise after the liberalization of its economy beginning in the 1990's. The Republic of India currently contributes 3.6% of world GDP (nominal) and 7.5% of global GDP (PPP) in 2023.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 01 Mar 2024 17:07
Statistics: Posted by late — 01 Mar 2024 16:17
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With his own point of view.
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Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 29 Feb 2024 00:08
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Statistics: Posted by wat0n — 28 Feb 2024 23:23
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 28 Feb 2024 23:12
Tainari88 wrote:
Colonialism is not working wat0n.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 28 Feb 2024 22:55
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 28 Feb 2024 19:40
Statistics: Posted by wat0n — 28 Feb 2024 18:29
wat0n wrote:
@Tainari88 how common are noise complaints in Puerto Rico? I can actually understand @QatzelOk's point, at least in Chile it's a source of tensions between Chileans and Venezuelan immigrants (specifically).
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 28 Feb 2024 18:18
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 25 Feb 2024 19:43
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Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 25 Feb 2024 18:34
Tainari88 wrote:
...Puerto Rico and San Juan was a noise hell in the 1980s and in the late 1990s, and now and in the past. Loud dance music booming everywhere is NORMAL shit for us. Reggaeton and Bad Bunny pounding on your ears all the time and every merengue tune and loud stuff is the norm in that part of the world Q...
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 25 Feb 2024 15:34
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Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 15 Feb 2024 16:41
Statistics: Posted by late — 14 Feb 2024 17:38
I used to think just like you. In the past, empires rose and fell all the time. WW1 killed off about 4, WW2 ended the British empire, but it was on it's last legs after WW1.
We have the strongest economy, the strongest military. Our only potential rivals are the EU, and they are close allies. At least they are as long as we can keep the lunatic out of the Oval Office..
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 14 Feb 2024 14:39
Statistics: Posted by JohnRawls — 13 Feb 2024 22:23
Statistics: Posted by late — 13 Feb 2024 20:32
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Statistics: Posted by late — 28 Jan 2024 18:58
Citing Chrystia Freeland, late wrote:
...Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 28 Jan 2024 17:23
Statistics: Posted by late — 27 Jan 2024 12:38
Statistics: Posted by Potemkin — 27 Jan 2024 09:04
Statistics: Posted by Potemkin — 27 Jan 2024 08:57
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 26 Jan 2024 22:05
Statistics: Posted by late — 26 Jan 2024 18:57
Statistics: Posted by wat0n — 26 Jan 2024 18:15
Pinochet wasn't a fascist.
Statistics: Posted by Tainari88 — 26 Jan 2024 18:05
late wrote:
...I had a chip on my shoulder when I was younger (I'm in my 70s). I still hope you will outgrow it.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 26 Jan 2024 17:52
QatzelOk wrote:
Not really. I wanted to respond to your positive description of capitalism's housing strategies, by comparint it to Cuba's housing strategy.
In six visits to different parts of Cuba, I never saw anyone sleeping in tents or defecating on the streets. In USA cities (and in my own more and more) we are seeing people freezing to death in private tents under highways. No human shit smells in capitalist Montreal, so far...
QatzelOk wrote:
I think this comment could easily replace all your others in this thread, and this one, single comment would have as much impact as all the rest combined.
Statistics: Posted by wat0n — 26 Jan 2024 17:47
Do you really want to discuss Cuban housing?
Pinochet wasn't a fascist.
Statistics: Posted by QatzelOk — 26 Jan 2024 17:29
Statistics: Posted by late — 25 Jan 2024 18:05
QatzelOk wrote:
Letting rich people (capitalism) control education means that it will no longer encourage free thought or critical thinking. Capitalism and its ideological programming, has dumbed down Americans to the point where they know how to do their jobs and drive their cars, and very little else (cooking, repairing things, engaging people in conversation...) Americans have learned that education is for people with money, rather than being for people with brains or ideas.
QatzelOk wrote:
Letting capitalism control our housing stock has lead us to homeless people shitting in city parks, young people putting off marriage, and the impoverishment of entire classes of working people. This total failure is due to "rentierism" being the easiest way to stay rich if you inherit money.
QatzelOk wrote:
Yes, it can morph into fascism on a second's notice when it fails.
Fidel and Che enjoy a chuckle while reading wat0n's posts about the failures of mafia-run capitalism
Statistics: Posted by wat0n — 25 Jan 2024 17:43