Negotiation is essentially an exercise in empathy, trying to put yourself in the other side’s shoes, moderating a negotiation is essentially the same thing twice. Is it any wonder that an egocentric person who only cares about himself is not good at it?

Apparently they were spared a world expo on top of all the other misery.

Russia is essentially a small state with a couple of centuries of imperialist thinking.

I would go one step further and remove all of the imperialist thinking in Russia, just to be on the safe side.

“Tazi-tech music” sounds like the kind of sounds someone might make when being hit by a taser.

I wonder if it is like character creation in an RPG, 5 minutes to elect a new pope and then the rest of the time is time they need to think of a name.

Pretty sure that doesn’t even cover the “just above the average wage” earner in most western countries though I suppose it depends a bit on if you count the parts that directly go to the government without even counting as gross wages (employer parts of social security, health care,…).

Still wouldn’t be worth it. We can’t expect Canadians to sacrifice themselves to the shitty US system, even the one without Trump.

Probably the same kind of ignorance of other countries’ perspective that makes Americans think the political center is somewhere between the US Republicans and the US Democrats.

I think if the Taiwan conflict ever goes hot Taiwan is going to lose no matter who “wins” just by being the battlefield and we can also forget about getting any chips from there.

Honestly, I fully expect China to just wait out Taiwan right now because the US is busy hurting itself. Who wants to distract their enemy when they are constantly making huge mistakes?

He is the messiah of his own cult, wouldn’t you call that a religious leader?

Why would countries with a much, much smaller black population percentage than the US have a black president? Not to mention that the Netherlands and Japan have a prime minister as the head of government, not a president.

Anything containing allegations of antisemitism when it comes to an Israel-specific issue can basically be dismissed immediately, they have overplayed that card for too long, even many Jewish organizations in other parts of the world are fed up with that line.

I mean obviously the EU is Israel’s biggest trade partner, it is literally a block of almost all the nearby countries they can trade with, but I was more thinking about why not the leaders of those individual countries too? Why focus on the EU which has much less of a direct shared foreign policy than the individual member countries.

My point was more that while parts of the population might have been progressive there were very few political figures on the progressive end of the spectrum and very few political actions.

In fact in 2016 the very slightly more progressive of the two major parties in the US felt so strongly that they needed to stop progressive movements that they nominated an extremely establishment candidate (Hillary Clinton) in an election that was clearly shaping up to be an anti-establishment election despite having a popular anti-establishment progressive candidate dropped in their lap (Bernie Sanders).

Not that I necessarily disagree but why the EU in particular when pretty much every other western country is just as complicit with Israel?

Being dragged kicking and screaming into making some progress is more how I would have described the political side of that though.

No, most of it is coming from BILD and the other traditional media that poisons our public political discourse for decades.

They started out feeling oppressed even when nobody did anything to them, based entirely on misinformation.