Also, yes, we're not in bad terms with Venezuela. That's basically our policy with S. America, to try to be friends with everyone. Heck, even Franco was friends with Castro. This type of policy goes a long time ago and it's not because "we are socialist sympathisers".
>The left-leaning media has, for the most part, ignored the topic (El Pais for one...),
Most of them sadly (even the poor ones) don't give a fuck about Venezuela once they're here, because come on, will you really want to go back to a shithole vs one of the best countries in Europe in regard to quality of life and such?
>and any meaningful efforts to boycott anything would need the media/government's support.
Indeed. But not only "media" and "government" also other parties, like PP or Ciudadanos, which remind us of how bad Venezuela (because that filthy podemita is gonna expropriate your house, just like it has happened in Madrid with Carmena or in Valencia with Joan Ribó) but are yet to pretty much do nothing about it even when they were in power.
Spot on. This will be and is being used to justify a world of luxury for the 1% and a world of pain for everyone else who isn't "perfect".
I personally believe we should strive to create a better world for 100% of the population, not justify the shortfallings of the current mixed-capi-soci system.
As someone who's the same height (yay?) it's okay, it's really average around the world, you're not short, you're average for 95% of the world ;) (Also it's 5'10")
Having said so, may I remind you that the biggest predictor for your own personal wealth is the wealth of your parents, so you know.
It's not only ethically wrong and offensive, it may actually be factually wrong also. How much of a person--and their suitability for some role--is genetic predisposition, and how much is their nurture and experiences?
Furthermore, if you did identify the "ideal" person for that role, then you'd want more of them: so you'd want clone factories, eg Kamino.
Genetic Diversity is rather an outcome of a fact that mixing genes helped us evolve (mutations - vs diseases, environment changes etc)
Now or rather soon, when human species will be able to takr control over evolution process, genetic diversity will make no sense because you will be highly immune to anything and environment will be no different.
I know its hard to admit even now some families are highly superior to other when it comes to genes inheritage, but thats how it is.
Some may say that Eugenics sucks because for example it would not allow mentally ill people reproduce and they have such ppl in family, but overall majority of population has no such issues and mby they would like to have those genes out of the genes pool. All depends on how you look at that, collective vs single entity etc.
Just because you have a bad gene doesn't make you a bad/inferior person so yeah when humans take control over their source code they may put some genes on sleep.
You also forget that there are always trade offs. You can't be "perfect" because there is no such thing.
Back to real world, we all pay taxes and live in this world so I believe we should demand and receive equal opportunities.
> a bad gene doesn't make you a bad/inferior person
In fact, we don't always understand the interplay between, say Asbergers and savant skills, or schizophrenia and intense creativity. We might need to live with some of these to retain the whole spectrum of humanity.
My personal feeling, no facts here, is we should look at low hanging fruit that we all agree is isolated and can bring no benefits, such as Tay Sachs or Huntingtons. Those will not be missed and we well gain experience with the harder problem of evaluating the harder choices.
I think the article explains pretty well why that is not possible.
And goverment cannot do anything to change that - ppl are just too different. Its like teaching someone how to play violin - if you dont have the talent you will have to learn 10 times as long for 20% efficiency.
Sooner or later most countries will have to tackle this issue and im sure more successful ppl (with better genes) wont be willing to wait for others just to simulate "equal opportunity".
I disagree. My parents emigrated to different lands (with me) to provide me additional opportunity to excel. I'm early into my career and have a higher salary [6fig] than my parents', primarily due to the sacrifices they made over the years.
My job, life and other attributes couldn't have been predicted by salary nor any other vanity metric.
Jesus Fucking Christ. As someone who's 19 years old and struggling with life (see my post history if you want to know more, but it ain't pretty, heh) you've sure done a lot of things and congratulations for you success!
You seem to have an unlimited thirst for knowledge. I envy that at a personal level.
> This assumes that the pension system there will be able to sustain itself in a few decades hence despite low birth rates and limited immigration.
Indeed, the system is not perfect and the general outlook of it is pretty bad. But you still have a higher chance of getting a pension at 65 in Europe than in the US while being mediocre. Also don't forget automation, which I'd assume will trickle down to benefit the lower and middle European Class faster than it'll happen in the US.
Again, assumptions. The future is unsure for sure.
>Also, most people in developing countries, i.e. most people in the world, do not have that option.
Indeed. But most people on HN are usually from North America or WE, so you know... saying that is a bit disingenuous. You could say "most people are _dirt_ (emphasis on dirt) poor and cannot lift themselves out of poverty". Yes, most people in the world are like that, but we all know that for example this article is not directed at those sorts of people, but rather at "Westeners", who probably won't go hungry in their lives ever unless a major catastrophe happens.
There is a huge number of people in the world outside of the West who are between "dirt-poor" and having European-style pension. They do read such self-help articles.
As long as you have many young people and few old, that's a good system. Basically "taking care of your parents" but through the state in a collective manner.
That recently many historians have began to consider this line of thinking "wrong" because of the rise of illiberal democracies, i.e. Russia, Hungry and the success of China as a Pseudo-Capitalist Dictatorship.
I don't see why. 9/11 was shocking, but ultimately doesn't seem to have caused major change in the political systems of any Western countries, nor any significant movement in that direction.
The Patriot Act essentially nullified the bill of rights, allowed indefinite detention without charges, and put power in the hands of secret people/programs answering to secret courts with secret interpretations of law. They were also grabbing people to put on torture flights. That's a police state. Unlike those that inspired it, it selectively uses its Gestapo powers against tiny segments of the country... far as we know... where most people never see it. That lets 99+% of people go through normal processes (eg courts). Then, they started connecting police-state surveillance to main, enforcement agencies with parallel construction to hide targeting methods. So, more of their opponents might be eliminated through trumped up charges on top of folks that are actually bad. The Dual State continues.
You bet 9/11 had huge effect on our political system. Went from a corrupt democracy with cops and courts that went too far sometimes, but occasionally reigned in, to a police state where folks could be kidnapped and tortured with criminal immunity on those doing it. The few times they've gotten caught on this stuff, like with the leaks, nobody running the programs did time, Congress often gave them retroactive immunity, and some were expanded. That's so bad that blackmail is about the only explanation I can come up with at this point for how they're behaving. Surveillance programs make that easier to do, too, esp if running in black programs. J. Edgar Hoover situation possibly repeating but with wider net.
I just don't see how that's categorically different from COINTELPRO (which murdered people with impunity), ECHELON, etc. Even the FISA courts were established 23 years before 2001, and in 2017 there were actually fewer FISA warrant requests approved than in 2000. Who got busted for this stuff before 2001?
COINTELPRO was a program in one, government group acting rogue from a long time ago that got shutdown. The current activities involve every branch of executive government with Congress's blessing.
ECHELON was an unlawful surveillance program that intercepted satellite/radio traffic with a focus on foreign personnel. Patriot Act allowed surveillance of Americans on all mediums with financial penalties or imprisonment for non-compliance with backdoors (see Core Secrets where FBI "compels" companies to "SIGINT-enable" products).
NSA management used to limit what was collected on Americans specifically to avoid trouble with Congress and FISA courts. After 9/11 and Patriot Act, they were told 9/11 couldn't happen again. They're maximizing what they collect on Americans with more cooperation between them and organizations that imprison Americans.
The differences between the isolated cases you pulled out of decades of government and the total, officially-blessed elimination of our rights today is difference between day and night. Hell, a good chunk of America votes in favor of what's in the Patriot Act. They're willing to give up their freedoms for false claims by NSA etc that they'll stop terrorists. I'd have never seen it coming back in school after reading on all the progress activists made before that time.
Also reminds me of The Siege. Mainly, the fact that they'd declare a state of emergency that suspends the bill of rights due to terrorist actions in New York. Which they did. They renew the state of emergency annually, which keeps specific executive orders going.
EDIT: I don't have my old write-up on CoG. The link below which was in top of Google has a lot of the same info, though. I haven't fully vetted this source so obviously fact-check anything on there.
We were moving towards an open, inclusive society pretty much since the Berlin wall fell and germany reunited. 9/11 inverted the progress we were making, and now we’re slowly sliding away towards facism again.
That’s how it feels to me anyway. Europe certainly has it’s growing share of racists.
the security state in the US has grown substantially since 9/11 and created very significant changes in american politics and society.
ICE is a very easy example, pre-9/11 it would have been unthinkable to keep migrant children in cages; the power that that agency has has grown immensely. there's also been significant expansion of other apparatuses, e.g. NSA surveillance of the internet, FIVEEYES, etc. the increased military investment in drones is also a direct result of 9/11 (well, technically more from supreme court decisions regarding Guantanamo prisoners, which, also, direct result of 9/11!).
Sure, there was an expansion of surveillance and drones, but I don't see how that's categorically different from what was already happening; it's still the same system, as far as I can tell. I mean, pre-9/11 US had COINTELPRO, ECHELON, McCarthyism, and all that stuff described in the Family Jewels report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Jewels_(Central_Intelli...
Fukuyama basically argued that the end of the Cold War marked a point of no-return after which all countries would have slowly but inevitably converged towards globalised, market-based, open societies. All the stuff you mention pre-dates that.
The worst we got in the Clinton era, when Fukuyama was writing, were the crypto wars and the Clipper chip, which look incredibly tame today and were both resolved in the public's favour.
So yeah, in the '90s, a lot of people thought "the West" had turned a corner. Fukuyama went beyond that and posited that the world had turned a corner. And instead, we fell right back into fascist nightmares as soon as we were attacked by a bearded guy on dialysis that we ourselves had armed a few years before; the Russians and Chinese decided that not starving was preferable to being "democratic", whatever that might mean; and most of the Middle East, Israel included, doubled down on its eternal fervour for holy war.
That was my point - history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule. Many progressive movements tried to tell the elites that, by singing a triumphalist note for late-stage capitalism, we were planting seeds for a massive backlash. They were ignored, like they would be ignored in 2003 on the risks of war and again today on the risks of ignoring global warming and rejecting migrations. Sooner or later, chickens will come home to roost, and it won't be pretty.
I only read the essay, not the book, but that doesn't seem quite what I got from him. He's not saying liberal democracies can't have times of turmoil, with such fascist nightmares, but that those are not an alternative ideology pushing for a different system. And I think that's true - people pushing for more surveillance or voting for Le Pen and Bolsonaro are not idealists trying to forge an alternative to capitalist western liberalism, they just want it tilted some way or another. Western democracies always had underclasses, and people are fighting to change which those are, not pushing to overturn the bedrock.
Regarding the Middle East and Isreal, he writes:
> In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to
believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.
and
> There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. (...) This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.
And both of these seem true to me; there's no great spread of Islam ideology, nor of Zionism, they are isolated ideologies that can affect others, but not actually compete ideologically with Western liberalism.
history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule.
Maybe not - and in fact, like Fukuyama, I hope not; as he writes, "[t]he end of history will be a very sad
time" - but I'm also not convinced that we've actually seen evidence of that. As of now, it seems possible.
Sure, the last 5 years of National TV Stations here in Spain talking about Venezuela 24/7h just didn't happen.
>our current government is more or less on friendly terms with Maduro's government and there is little insensitive to do anything about it.
You mean the PP too? https://www.google.es/amp/s/m.publico.es/espana/gobierno-raj...
Also, yes, we're not in bad terms with Venezuela. That's basically our policy with S. America, to try to be friends with everyone. Heck, even Franco was friends with Castro. This type of policy goes a long time ago and it's not because "we are socialist sympathisers".
>The left-leaning media has, for the most part, ignored the topic (El Pais for one...),
https://elpais.com/tag/venezuela/a
"Sure".
>despite the increasing number of Venezuelan asylum-seekers arriving in Spain each year
Yes, those poor, poor migrants.
https://www.eleconomista.es/construccion-inmobiliario/notici...
Most of them sadly (even the poor ones) don't give a fuck about Venezuela once they're here, because come on, will you really want to go back to a shithole vs one of the best countries in Europe in regard to quality of life and such?
>and any meaningful efforts to boycott anything would need the media/government's support.
Indeed. But not only "media" and "government" also other parties, like PP or Ciudadanos, which remind us of how bad Venezuela (because that filthy podemita is gonna expropriate your house, just like it has happened in Madrid with Carmena or in Valencia with Joan Ribó) but are yet to pretty much do nothing about it even when they were in power.