I love when someone posts an AI response to support their argument, then someone else asks for the prompt and it shows that the asker must have had to go through a dozen iterations of prompt to get the answer they want

Makes sense, the more immigration is seen to be a problem the better republicans do on voting day.

They want to talk about how high immigration is but so little to tackle it, Dems are incentivised to do the opposite.

Super apparent in the UK where the conservatives government decided to spend enormous sums sending a handful of asylum seekers to Rwanda rather than actually paying people to process their claims.

Way to disengage with every point made and assume I am a warmonger.

I did almost include a paragraph on the morality of the bombing of Pyongyang, but after some thought I realise it wasn’t even a decade after ww2 and area bombing cities was part of how America and its allies won that conflict.

Would you say bombing Germany was necessary or justified to stop facism in Europe? Was the bombing of Japan necessary or justified to end Japanese subjugation of Asia?

I’m not sure I have a consistent position on this, it feels like the bombing of Korea was excessive but the bombing of Germany was necessary, but I can’t find a good justification for that split.

Either way I’m not particularly interested in defending the US’s conduct, but the original commenter presenting the invading country as being innocent and laying all the blame for the war at the feet of the US is gross.

This isn’t even getting into the fact that NK has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Huh, surprised they got banned since that seems to be broadly true esp in context of your second point, maybe it was a different comment that got them nuked

Damn, their whole account is gone, what did they say?

The standard penalty for starting a war is being in a state of war, during which your opponents will try to kill you. Until the war is over your opponents will keep trying to kill you.

Its worth noting that armestice wasn’t reached until Stalin died and the new soviet leaders weren’t interested in prolonging the war, which suggests that the belligerents in the conflict were happy to continue it as Koreans continued to die in order to support their territorial and idiological designs.

In my opinion the US shouldn’t have crossed the 38th parallel north, doing so brought china into the war and ended the possibility of a quick end to the war and fewer deaths, but that sin pales in comparison to starting the invasion in the first place.

The real tragedy is the same as it ever is in wars, innocent civilians and young soldiers die in droves because someone in power wanted more land, more subjects, more resources more power and made the decision to take it at the cost of these lives.

And let’s not pretend that if the ROK and the US didn’t fight there wouldn’t have been massacres of civilians, purges of intellectuals and “political dissidents” and forced migration.

The community we are in is somewhat appropriate when you are advocating that “war is bad” so people shouldn’t fight back when they are invaded because people die or powerful nations shouldn’t militarily support victims of invasions because that “prolongs the war” during which yes; people die. I see enough of that from the various anti-ukraine/pro-russia shills, it’s nice to see that logic gets applied to other cases where a country with red in it’s flag tries to annex its neighbour too.

America and the USSR agreed to partition Korea along the 38th parallel after liberating it from imperial Japanese rule.

Subsequent to that the Chinese communists agreed to arm and back north Korea in return for Korean support during China’s civil war.

Later on North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea I feel like this is a very important point you somehow completely failed to mention. They then captured most of the Korean peninsula down to Busan.

At this point the US (technically the UN but most forces were US) reinforced the ROK troops reclaimed the lost territory and invaded the north capturing Pyongyang.

At this point China reinforced the north Koreans and recaptured Pyongyang the fighting then stalemated around the 38th parallel after years of fighting an armistice was agreed and the current borders were agreed.

Your protratal of the US deciding on a whim to butcher the poor north Koreans then impose a separation on them would be laughable in how poorly it conveys events if you weren’t seeking to mis-atribute the cause of a war that killed 3 million people

Israel’s war crimes do not excuse Hamas’ terrorist attacks, nor do Hamas’ terror attacks excuse Israel’s war crimes.

Intentionally escalating the conflict and suppressing rival organisations then turning around and saying “we are the only counterbalance to Israel, you must deal with us” is also kinda gross.

That said, it’s weird that they want the UK involved given the history of the conflict and the relatively paltry (and apparently declining?) level of arms exports.

I think the EU also designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Germany is a big arms exporter so I would have expected them to focus on getting that designation repealed.

Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished

Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.

But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.

The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.

Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?

To play devil’s advocate;

The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.

The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.

Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.

The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.

E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.

The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.

The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.

The interesting thing about reading from different bubbles to get the different perspectives on the same event is just how different the set of events covered is.

The right may be furious about something and the left barely cover it and vice versa, it needs to be a huge event to attract comment from both sides.

Even if you don’t buy into this logic, you still have to do it in quite a few places because the security auditors have a line in their checklist about being able to extract any internal information from error pages

“A Line in the Sand” by James Barr is a good book on the topic, it goes into how the rivalry between Britain and France wound up with them attempting to carvr up the middle east between them after the fall of the ottoman empire.

War and destabilisation of the Arabian population was the outcome, but I think it is highly reductive to say it was the intent, for one that would imply some level of cooperation beteen the colonial powers against the native populations when they regarded each other as bitter enemies and didn’t really regard the people of the middle east at all.

Every step taken by Britain and France was with the aim increase or secure their territory while undermining the other. A lot of these steps were training arming and funding of local military/gorillas/terrorists opposed to the other country, but usually these were inflaming and exploiting existing religious/ethnic/tribal tensions rather than manufacturing them from nothing or drafting into an officially military force, which has the unpleasant property that even after the colonial powers have departed, the trainings traditions and blood feuds continue.

Isn’t the original post here a Reddit screenshot?

Best of luck with the job search, linkedin is awful, but at-least the need for it passes.

“Big government” means thinking the government is bigger and more expensive than it needs to be.

When all the government needs to do is keep me happy then any program which I understand benefits me is vital and any which doesn’t is “big government”

Bristol is supposed to be very nice, Brighton is probably the most LGBT friendly city in the UK from what LGBT friends have told me, London is generally accepting of everyone but can be expensive.

Obviously do some more research, but I figure it’s worth putting those two cities on your radar.

A bit of both, I got Manchester from the skyline then needed to sate my curiosity