It makes sense - a country with plenty of space and natural resources, a mild climate (relatively, looking forwards), innovative engineering skills, new potential from connections to europe, should be encouraging immigration, but 4.5m implies a lot more than just return of refugees, and east europe had westwards emigration in recent decades, so from where are these new arrivals going to come - turkey, africa, south asia ? Archaeologists suggest that ancestors of many eurasians spread out from the pontic steppe - time to come back ?
The first step would maybe open the doors to the migrants that cross the Mediterranean, whichnas you mention, are Turkish and North African primarily (I believe one of the larger countries involved was Libya?)
The number of arrivals peaked this month on the small island of Lampedusa off Italy’s southern coast, with 4,800 people arriving on a single day, the agency noted.
It is possible to hate Russia for what their leaders are doing to Ukraine and still have empathy for those being brutalised by the same Russian leadership within Russia.
They were oppressed for ever since the ussr fell. They lived and agreed to live in a shell of a country whose only goal was making oligarchs rich.
At this point any thinking person who has not left russia is complicit in the atrocities of their country and I couldn’t care less for their well being.
Disagree, the russian (and all other people who were part of it) people were oppressed during the USSR (pick up any book by Solzhenitsyn) and by the Czars before them. This did not start in 1991.
agreed to live
That is where I disagree. The vast majority of people do not have the ability to leave.
At this point any thinking person who has not left russia is complicit in the atrocities of their country and I couldn’t care less for their well being.
And the same can be said about the US invasion of Iraq. Any person there is complicit in the war crimes. (which I do not agree with)
Sorry but this is massively reductionist and jingoistic.
@tallwookie maybe. The war in Tigray has many genocidal elements, including a man-made famine caused by destruction of crops, equipment, and water infrastructure.
So if the UN doesn't do something, Abiy might be able to accomplish genocide in a shorter timeframe than that.
Deliberately killing 10% of the Tigrayan population from Nov 2020 to Nov 2022, by: systematically executing males of teenage age and above, massive systematic sexual violence, looting of most food/agricultural/industrial resources and holding a very tight siege is argued by several researchers as showing intent [1][2]. Clearly that was the #TigrayGenocide .
The report itself ([3], point 72) finds #CrimesAgainstHumanity (by ENDF + EDF + Amhara/Afar Special Forces + 'fano'), not #Genocide. Tigrayan forces committed #WarCrimes (not crimes against humanity) (point 71).
@tallwookie No, a "UN invasion" would solve nothing. The question for rich-country outsiders is which local/regional/continental groups/institutions should be supported. African civil society has plenty of ideas and is very active.
@boud Thanks for pointing out that distinction about the report. From what I have seen over the last few years from credible NGO reports, eyewitness testimony, video footage etc I am pretty sure it is a genocide.
I also agree with you that this is something I'd like to see tackled by AU or similar as a first option.
@Armen12 Abiy folded most of the opposition political parties into a "new" party so it is effectively a one party state these days. The big challenges to that came out of Tigray and Amhara.
If you are talking about American politics 🙄 then yes your Biden administration has been placing sanctions on the Ethiopian government because of the human rights situation there.
However it recently lifted the food sanctions. By all means write to your representatives about this.
I find the diaspora conflicts irritating. Most of them fan killings back in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan then create such a bitter environment in the communities hosting them (like Calgary or Sweden or Germany). Tell these people to go and fight in the Ethiopian fronts and they coil back. But they want the kids of poor farmers to go and die for their abstract ideas (sometimes genuine, but mostly misdirected at the wrong people).
Merci pour l'article, je vais le faire tourner.
Et je m'abstiendrai de m'épancher davantage pour ne pas vous pourrir votre journée. Bisous à tout le monde <3
Merci,, on va y arriver :) Et puis dans 50 ans au plus tout ça n'aura plus aucune importance pour moi, ce sera à celles et ceux qui resteront de faire au mieux.
My concern is more the possibility of defining disinformation in some politically conveniemt manner.
Its already happening. In fact, looking at it from a wider perspective than nowadays teenagers are often able to, the modern "fight against disinformation" is just fighting propaganda with one's own propaganda. And if you read the Hittite and Egyptian descriptions of Battle of Khadesh, it isn't really a new thing either.
Its always happening, but the tools available evolve and the level of support fluctuates. We have a lot of new tools right now and what seems like a disturbing level of support.
I hate these kind of discussions. UNESCO released a report of over 400 pages full of research, recommendations, possible outcomes, etc. but here we are discussing just what people think when they hear “ban smartphones”
I understand the logic that UNESCO is trying to make. However instead of a global ban on the device itself, ban the addictive parts of it. TikTok and most other corporate social media are designed to keep everyone, kids and adults alike as addicted to the platform as possible. Phones are still a valuable resource for a student, including being able to call in the event of an emergency or having access to maps or other things.
Ban the actual evil on the phones, not the phones themselves
I would assume the average school child is more concerned about instagram or tiktok vs other parts of the internet. I would not be against finding a way to limit access to other sites, but I would prefer a privacy respecting way. Just requiring an ID is a shitty solution and screws over adults more then it helps kids (they will find grandma’s id.) If a privacy valuing solution is brought up I would be 1000% supporting it.
I think trchnical solution is not s problem, if we decide what needs to be applied we can do it.
If kid finds grandmother’s id - it is simple enough, punish grandma for providing her id, it will teach adult to be responsible. Additionally, not all kids will be able to do it. I doubt they will follow us.
My opinion, eve if it is obvious, parents are responsible Punish them for not protecting their kids.
Wouldn’t that effectively restrict a lot of platforms to people age 16 or older? I am a bit worried that such an id law could cut off younger queer teens dealing with abuse that’s severe enough to qualify as abuse in the academic sense, but not in the eyes of the law, from vital community… ~Strawberry
Tiktok actually has (or had, last I looked at it) a lot of value for marginalized groups finding content made by and for each other. I used it for a while before the ads got to be too much, and I had NEVER seen so many regular trans and nonbinary and ace and aro people getting to talk to each other about whatever instead of only about gender and orientation (and seeing them existing as regular people in video form is just really fucking comforting if you’re not around others like you in real life), nor so many informative videos by and about disabled folks. T
he platform has (had?) an incredible ability to enable discovery of niche communities, and I rapidly learned a hell of a lot about accessibility (from videos by actual disabled people about their struggles and solutions and day to day lives), about modern Native American cultures (especially there were a lot of Native American amateur comedians that were very funny) and concerns (f the pipeline), about ex-mormon experiences, about autistic people (yes, there’s a lot of misinformation on tiktok about neurodivergence, but there’s ALSO a lot of actual neurodivergent people talking about what their day to day experiences are actually like in a way that’s really damn hard to find in other places that are dominated by Doctors and parent-directed articles), and people/culture from India (before India banned Tiktok), and so on and on, that I wouldn’t have learned about otherwise.
And there were more successful female and Black comedians than I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I had more videos by Black people and Asian people and women then I’ve ever even come close to having in my youtube feed; it’s not even comparable in that respect, really.
All of which long-winded paragraphs is to say, don’t ban Tiktok, or other specific platforms. Especially not when the bills that are ostensibly to do that hand absurd amounts of power to government to do the same to future platforms with little to no oversight and with little to no justification. And more platforms just like them will crop up out of the ashes anyways.
Instead, ban individually-personalized advertising, aka the root motivator that makes companies want to peel every scrap of information out of their users in the first place.
Individually targeted advertising hasn’t been a thing for that long, even though it feels so ubiquitous and unstoppable now, and for decades companies did just fine with population-level targeting like newspaper ads used to be.
I don’t think the individualized ad targeting has added anything of value to society.
Having typed all that, I re-read your comment and, yeah, I suppose schools could at least block social media sites on their school wifi. That can only do so much when they’ve all got data connections anyways, though.
Anyway I agree that phones shouldn’t be banned. It’s infeasible, inadvisable, and counterproductive.
I appreciate your comment. I have personally avoided tiktok due to other parts of the internet (as well as coworkers and friends) portrayal of it. However you shed some light into things I would actually find value in as a person. I do see this sense of community as very good thing. My concern is more on the side of how addicted one can get to it, but I assume if it is giving them a community they never had, is it a bad thing?
I actually quite like your conclusion. Targeted ads have added nothing of value to the common person. I guess it also is part of the reason I blame the addictive nature of these apps, they want you addicted to show ads and make money.
Despite all those positives, the foundation of the platform is built in an abusive, addictive way. We shouldn’t ban any social media applications, we should regulate them to end their abbhorent practices / business models. I totally agree that we should ban targetted advertising, although there is a good middleground solution as well: banning targetted advertising which relies on cloud-based AI. If recommendation algorithms could run locally on your phone, with a way to validate everything is processed locally, you could keep the modern formula for social media while simultaneously maintaining privacy. I would imagine the suggestions would become more primitive to account for the extra processing power, but at least people can continue to doomscroll if they’d like. My idea applies better to post recommendations than advertising, but if ad recommendations could be kept anonymous (the entire system would need to be open source), you could have a privacy-respecting service AND tailored feeds / advertising.
Regulate Social Media (including domestic corporations) > Ban Social Media > The Current Situation, imo.
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