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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 1h

Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, it wouldn't be at all unprecedented for Trump to win it should the Gaza situation actually stabilize.

I hope the Nobel Committee has slightly more dignity than that, however.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 2h

I doubt it's fully a lost cause - or at least, it had better not, since the consequences of that are too ghastly to contemplate - but the amount of cash currently provided definitely isn't enough to reverse it. Who knows, really - we've never seen anything like this in world history before.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 3h

I mean it's functionally a chaebol/zaibatsu setup, correct? Massively powerful system-defining firms who have gotten fed up with Republican governance?

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Reposted by Calliope

Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 1d

yeah every democracy on earth is falling apart at the same time and the average person has two thirds fewer friends than in 2014. but you can put multiple slurp juices on apes

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 7h

Yeah the dunks are almost certainly coming from people traumatized by (conservative and/or religious) parents and grandparents asking them "when are you going to get married and have kids" and reading a social policy as a personal attack.

Reposted by Calliope

Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 13h

You can save up 20 pounds of gold that’s worth years’ worth of spending power on goods and services and that works for you, personally. But if no one has kids, then in 30 years it doesn’t matter how much gold is in your vault - goods & most importantly services simply don’t exist

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 7h

Yeah this is basically correct, you probably do need to actually pay a competitive wage for what is (at least a lot of the time) a full-time job.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

Still mind-shattering to me that *not* having children is judged the "sluttier" position (because you're a filthy whore on contraceptives who gets 12 abortions a week, one assumes) than having them (look, you just put in a mail order for kids and the stork arrived 9 months later).

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

Ironically Biden's "we directly dump cash on you" wound up backfiring this way compared to Obama's "we provide stimulus that functionally gives you cash." Because Biden's cash dump eventually ended but nobody noticed Obama's stimulus at all.

Reposted by Calliope

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 8h

they believe “criminal” is a kind of person you are, not a status contingent upon actions you take. J6 rioters going to jail was not an outrage because there are no laws they could break that would make them criminals, whilst innocence or guilt have no bearing on if others are criminals or not

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

No. They're expensive for producing actual goods. There is a reason rare earth refining straight-up does not happen in the US anymore and it's because environmental regulations and labor costs make it prohibitively costly. Banning poor people from making money is a rather bad way to fix poverty.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

They can help up to a point, but it's far from guaranteed. A world with fewer people (especially young and healthy people) is just a world with fewer (young, healthy) people.

Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

Yes, they bought time by launching limited offensives against the Nazis and digging in. The Soviet Union "bought time" by parading through the streets of Brest-Litovsk with Nazi troops and begging Hitler to let them join the Axis. It's a tad different.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

The Allies declared war on Germany when it invaded Poland. The Soviet Union declared war on Germany when it invaded...the Soviet Union.

One of these things, I dare say, is not like the others.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

Again, the issue is that if you insist on European-style worker and environmental protections, you are going to leave hundreds of millions of people destitute, because those protections are quite expensive. There is a reason Northern Europe has had historically anemic growth. It's a trade-off.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 8h

Yet Eastern Europe is growing richer *much* faster than nations with comparatively higher trade barriers (mostly in Africa). Note how Eastern Europe is experiencing similar or better per-capita economic growth rates to developing nations, despite being middle-to-high income.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

Said protections would have been expensive and time-consuming in a way that a nation as poor as China could not afford. And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people would have suffered and died in abject poverty.

China today *does* have more protections - because it's rich enough to do so.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

"The album situation has developed not necessarily to Taylor's advantage...the enemy has begun to employ new and most cruel quotes...should it continue to play, it would result not only in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of sales, but also the total extinction of Swiftie civilization..."

Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

Fundamentally this is the same sort of thinking that drove Britain to leave the EU - and we've had over a decade to see how that particular debacle played out.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

But nothing "broke" when poor people in South Korea were able to make a better life for themselves and simultaneously drove down the cost of consumer electronics in the West. Everyone won. The same is true of the EEC - what "broke" when Europeans were able to more freely trade among themselves?

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

Sure, but we've seen what that was like too. Smoot-Hawley rather famously gutted the global economy back in the 1930s. Likewise, permanent trade normalization with Japan and (later) China led to the explosive economic growth of both nations and lifted around a billion people out of poverty.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

I mean in fairness, PhDs are under 2% of the US population. Academia is pretty small! But it's a good illustration of the broader point about perverse incentives.

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 9h

The corollary here is that the European model doesn't fully *work* (birthrates are still falling across the continent and every European country is below replacement - and, for that matter, below the US!). Which to be clear isn't really a critique of the European model (I think it's good!).

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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 10h

Yeah one reason the Marshall Plan existed was to build free trade links between the US and Western Europe, and it's *why* Europe got its washing machines in the 1950s and 1960s (among other reasons like the Japanese economic miracle - again, free trade!)

Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 10h

I believe the counterargument is that all of those things are the inexorable and natural result of industrialization and technological growth, and that things were improving in the less free trade-friendly environment of the 1920s and 1930s regardless.

But, just look at how much slower that was!

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