I agree the west is becoming less democratic and the quality of life in China greatly improved, but there is severe oppression in China and that you choose to mention the quality of life over the influence people have on their government says a lot about your loyalty to the Chinese rulers.

The real battle is between the ruling classes.

That’s mostly because the trustworthy news outlet from those countries don’t publish in English whereas the propaganda is. But you’re right people don’t think there is independent journalism in Russia and China. That is not so much an east/west axis but a capitalist democracy / Communist authoritarianism axis.

US agencies might not have much reason, but foreign ones on the other hand definitely do have plenty of reasons.

I don’t think they’d give him asylum from the goodness of their heart but this man has a lot to offer as long as he’s an enemy of the US government.

He’s proven that alright

I don’t disagree with your point, but except for electronics, and Italian marble America can make a lot of the materials themselves. The biggest problem is in many cases the price of labour in the US. And for complex things like cars you can’t even move the entire supply chain even if you wanted to.

There was this guy who had a theory that there was nobody on earth who could make a microwave oven, turns out he was right: there are people who can know how to make a certain part of it and other people who knew about it’s assembly nobody can create one start to finish. So imagine with more complex machines how difficult it’d be to bring all those skills and knowledge ‘home’ to America.

it’s almost like Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing damage he’s doing while stealing money or something*

Makes most sense

If you’re thinking of giving a set, I’d like to suggest one of knives.

I’ve had a bunch of questionable Google ai answers already, not as weird as this but enough to make me believe this could also be not fake.

While I sort of agree. I’m just gonna say, you ain’t gonna find anything mainstream western media that doesn’t have major ties to unethical corpos unless you basically force yourself to only use AP and the Guardian (and even then, pretty sure they still have dodgy ties, just it’s not as visible since no direct “ownership”.)

They are two examples of more believable / trustworthy western news outlets, I don’t think anyone in this thread is anywhere close to implying all western news is true or that all non-western news is false.

Concerning genocide, almost everybody on earth agrees the only sensible thing is to stop it; that’s why most pro-Israeli news act as if there is no genocide happening there. I think they are wrong, Israel is committing genocide.

The Guardian publishes articles critical of the genocide in Gaza, which is the only correct position to take on the issue. However they have served Zionist interests in the past and carried water for US warmongers.

You can be independent and still carry interests of Zionistd and US warmongers, both knowingly and unknowingly. You have every right to be skeptical because of previous publications and also every right to share that here, not trying to argue there, but there is no such things as always having the correct position. Every media outlet will at some point publish something questionable. My point being, you should never swallow news as a definite truth also when you’re trusting a certain source in general.

But this isn’t really evidence that they are.

So what you meant was: this isn’t enough evidence to change my mind. That is a very different statement. I think this doesn’t prove anything but it does support op’s previous claims Reddit boosts Ars Technica content.

This isn’t showing Reddit is shitty, it is showing it is used by it’s parent company to influence the media landscape. That is not just shitty, it is amoral and can be very dangerous when it comes to political pieces.

Tech companies are using media companies to shape the world to their liking, just like robber barrons and aristocrats used to.

most people in the US were too distracted

Don’t worry folks, the 125 party states were not distracted. Can’t say if it will have consequences for the US or it’s citizens but this is not going unnoticed.

Interesting it lines up with the new world / old world concept.

Here’s one I’m not using right now: ,.

You mean I shouldn’t put it in my foot?

I totally agree with you, but that is often not how reality works. For example Norway when they found oil they put (most of) the income from that in a fund and now only use the interest they earn so it is like an infinite source of income. The Netherlands on the other hand invested their money in infrastructure, social subsidies and other stuff that was useful to the people alive when the money was flowing. Now I don’t want to say one of those choices was the better choice, because that is actually not my point. Because either you save up money when the population is growing (meaning people in that time frame have less benefits), or you spend your money and you have a deficit later on. In either case a group ‘misses out’. The same here, because the population is getting older and less people remain to pay the bill, the working people have less money left. In a perfect scenario when this money was saved up earlier, that money wouldn’t have been spent before. Either way, and I agree the society should take care of it self by organising an economy that benefits the society, you end up in a situation were the expenses have to be paid. The right argument is on whether it is worth spending the money (which I think it is), but the argument made is that it only is a problem for capitalists /in a capitalist society and that is just not true. Also communists or for example hunter gatherer societies would face the problem of increased costs of supporting a part of the population that is to sick and old do work.

Sorry long ramble, but it being true that it’s not a problem when you zoom out enough doesn’t mean it’s true that it’s not a problem for the individuals alive during that time frame.

Running*