Human rights defenders this week condemned President Joe Biden’s upcoming state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was once banned from entering the United States for supporting violent Hindu supremacists who massacred Muslims—as part of an ongoing U.S. “whitewash” of the right-wing leader’s extremism.
“For almost a decade now, human rights activists and others have regularly brought to the White House—Democrats or Republicans—that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, it’s right-wing, it’s anti-Muslim, and it’s anti-minority” Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, told Huff Post.
“To fail to note Modi’s violent, anti-minority, authoritarian tendencies, and his corrupt mismanagement of the Indian economy, is not only to ignore the U.S. government’s own findings but a strategic blunder with the potential to jeopardize global stability,” IAMC said.
Human Rights Watch published a letter to Biden ahead of the visit, critizing the disregard for human rights by Modi’s government:
There are numerous areas of concern. Increasingly in recent years, BJP leaders have used toxic and hateful speech targeting religious minorities, inciting violence or discrimination against them. BJP-led authorities have tightened restrictions on free speech while ramping up censorship and using overbroad and vague laws to investigate and prosecute critics. Modi’s government has also demonstrated blatant bias in protecting BJP supporters and affiliates accused in a range of crimes, including murder, assault, corruption, and sexual violence. At the international level, Modi’s government has often proven unwilling to stand with other governments on key human rights crises, abstaining or refraining from condemning grave human rights violations elsewhere.
“Nothing of the sort has been implemented but there are discussions so that we can trade in local currencies of countries like India, Russia or China,” Egyptian Supply Minister Ali Moselhy was quoted as saying by Reuters
Lol, not quite what the headline sensationally implies
The title is sensationalist but it is indeed a reality that we will see unfold in the next couple months/years. I honestly can’t wait for my country to finally be free from the dollar.
My country and my Brazilian brothers are already planning on creating a local currency called Sur Global, and it seems the trend after the proxy war in Ukraine is shifting towards trade done in other currencies among the Global South. I remain hopeful we will be free from your oppression in the future, even if you do not wish to see my people better!
In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and western capitalists. **The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.**State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997.
Improvement of living conditions in the USSR for example happened not just for a massive number of people, but at a pace not seen before.
In the USA, a prime example of capitalism gone wrong, there’s poverty so bad that it’s the 4th leading cause of death (and worse, the poverty may even be underreported). There’s rolling back of social programs, overturning of child labor protections, destruction of the public education system, over-incarceration and for-profit slave labor-driven prison systems[^1]. Try to make me a similar list of government-backed initiatives in the USA that are intended to lift people out of poverty rather than put them there or keep them there. There’s a lot of effort being spent on making sure people can’t get themselves out of poverty. The USA is much more interested in punishing and continuing to exploit the impoverished than helping them–helping them isn’t profitable.
Another thing you’re conveniently overlooking is the destruction of the rest of the world, that is, the ones not being supposedly lifted up in those capitalist states. Even if everyone in the capitalist states was lifted out of poverty, if the cost of that was destruction of other country’s economies and lives of the people therein, effectively putting them into or keeping them in poverty, then it’s a wash at best. Capitalism is great at externalizing negative costs: externalizing it not just onto consumers, but onto citizens of the world, and, worse, onto the future stability of the planet and its ability to host life.
If you take into account the number of people forced into and kept in poverty worldwide and compare that to the number of people truly lifted out of and kept out of poverty due to capitalism, I don’t think you’d be able to assert what you have.
[^1]: And if you’ll remember, the only reason most of these social programs ever existed in a somewhat-useful manner in the first place was because the USA had to convince its populace that the existing capitalist system was better than the competing socialist/communist states it was waging economic and ideological war on. Once it was able to destroy the ideological competition, it could change its narrative as well: now, the failure of those socialist/communist states was due to inherent failures of the underlying ideology and not due to a concerted external effort to defeat it. Once there was no competition on the “treating-your-citizens-better-and-like-humans-deserving-of-empathy” front, tearing down of these programs sped up, and the money that was taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket that should have funded those programs was not returned to the taxpayer but instead funneled cleanly upwards.
The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history
Should be pretty easy to provide some actual numbers then, doesn’t look good according to this:
I’m not even including North Korea as people are literally starving because of military spend, and Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Is that data supposed to go back before 1990? Because it doesn’t on my end, and as such that data isn’t going to prove your point or disprove mine.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation. Similarly in Cuba: not every fault can be blamed on the USA, but if you don’t think the continuous trade embargos aren’t partially at fault for the situation, I don’t think you’re honestly evaluating the situation.
Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would much rather have access to any sort of free healthcare than not have access to any, as is my current lot in life. I don’t care how good certain exclusive healthcare is, when the majority of the population has no access to healthcare. But frankly I think you have an unjustly negative view of the Cuban healthcare system:
Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors per inhabitant in the world. We have more than 100,000 doctors for a population of 11 million – 9.2 for every 1,000 inhabitants. We also have the highest ratio of health workers per inhabitant – 500,000 overall. But it’s not that we have leftover professionals. We don’t have so many doctors because we like training them, but because we have a health policy that employs all of them. This includes those who are in management positions and those who are committed to our international solidarity missions, our collaboration in health.
… and Cuba doesn’t hoard its medical professionals …
We do a lot of international collaboration. Cuba has been there to support others during all the major health disasters. During the Ebola crisis, Cuba was one of the very few countries that sent medical brigades in Africa. We are always present during earthquakes, fires, and floods. And we always favor communities where most of the time there are no health workers, or we go to places that lack healthcare services. This is the vision of Cuban medical collaboration, which is implemented through two main channels: health workers’ training and provision of care.
Notice that healthcare works differently when it isn’t purely profit driven. It works differently when incentive structures favor patient health over profit.
I mentioned this later in my comment: if you look at the suffering caused externally by capitalism, it’s at best a wash with the benfits caused internally by it. You’re also pointing to examples where things aren’t great because of USA’s interference. It’s disingenuous.
The USA loves to wage economic and ideological war and, when it makes some progress in tearing down its target, point to the downfall of the target and pretend that the downfall is purely due to internal conflict. And you’re buying in to that narrative.
The latter part of my comment was, in my opinion, more important than the first part. The proportion of the world’s population being hurt by capitalism, compared to the proportion of the world’s population helped by it, is massive; the fact that you’re putting more value on small benefits conferred to a small proportion of the population at the expense of the rest is unfortunate but to be expected in a defense of capitalism.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation
If the place is not so arable, why is South Korea doing so well?
It’s almost as if communism leads to autocratic states in every country to try it…
Up close, things look different. According to a recent survey of 5,000 persons, 75% of 19-34 year old natives of the world’s 11th richest nation want out
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, hilarious for you to mention Cuba and DPRK given that your shithole excuse for a country has done everything possible to choke their trade with the world. Good thing that SWIFT is going the way of the dodo now.
Lol, you’re claiming one measure in physical quality of life means communism is great. Ignoring the fact that all of those countries have now either failed or have moved to a market based system in order to improve life.
Yeah, pretty hilarious that once these countries abandoned communism and switched to capitalism quality of life rapidly deteriorated. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Not according to actual data from the last 30 years, but you don’t actually accept facts so discussing anything with anyone as deluded as you is pointless
Why do you think 19th century ideology is relevant in the 21st?
And it’s the height of ignorance to think that communism is a 19th century ideology that hasn’t been successfully evolving for over a century. I knew that UK education system was bad, but holy shit that’s embarrassing.
In fact, capitalism is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in history and is currently destroying our ecosystem at a planetary scale. You should also learn the difference between correlation and causation if you think that technology is developed as a result of capitalism.
No, capitalist ideology that necessitates constant growth and capitalism is directly responsible for setting the conditions for how humans behave. Meanwhile, technology develops much faster outside capitalism as USSR has shown where nearly a century of capitalist progress was accomplished in mere decades with USSR going from an agrarian society at the time of the revolution to being the first in space.
The page you posted is just using the SWIFT network. People who don’t trade in USD generally don’t use SWIFT. USD is still the dominant currency but I have seen numbers somewhere around 50% not 80%.
Wow this is horrifying, can’t even imagine. I also can’t imagine the survivability of such a small vessel means there is any chance of them being alive. Horrible
If we’re going to do this whole “your source is unreliable” nonsense, can we at least get some consistency? Attack the BBC for outright lies and misinformation and siding with moneyed interests at the expense of the rest of humanity; attack CNN for the same; attack The Economist for the same; attack NYT for the same; attack the Washington Post for the same.
Also, just because their editorial opinion differs from yours doesn’t mean they’re unreliable. Just because they “defended Bashar Al-Assad” doesn’t mean they are “fake news”. There are plenty of people in the world whose world-view does not align with yours, and they aren’t all lying and wrong. It should also be noted that if an article links out to other sources, then even if you don’t agree with the article’s editorial opinion, you can still gauge the truthfulness and form opinions on the subject by following to the sources.
Edit to add: In this specific case, we saw several news sources you are unlikely to call ‘fake news’ all report the same lie with tiny variations: NYT, CNN, and Politico, among others. What they said was so blatantly false, even the Pentagon denounced it. Cuba condemned the reports, saying:
Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the accusation is “untrue and unfounded”, arguing that the articles were “promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba”.
Before you get all up in arms that a news outlet from another country or side of the political spectrum must be spewing 100% lies, you should ask yourself why you are willingly to blindly believe the entrenched western media outlets, who have proven time and again that they are used to manipulate world events, manipulate public opinion, and are overall a blight on the average man’s wellbeing.
We do need action on all levels of society, and we need to be treating this as a crisis.
On a local level (in the UK) there are a lot more community and Council groups being setup to try and find solutions I would absolutely recommend attending those.
Other than that, ensure your pension is invested in green and eco investments and try to fly less (maybe even drive less).
Pension, lol. I don’t know how old you are, but I wouldn’t count on pension in very few decades.
We would need to do much more than flying less, driving less and invest money. We would need to change the entirety of our lifestyles. And by now we probably need to have luck as well.
Lifestylism is not something that will magically save the planet, there are actors bigger than us and who control more power over the planet then the entire population located on it.
Also flying less and driving less, you can only do that if the infrastructure is built for it. In Europe? Yeah duh, look at Italy it killed domestic flight thanks to trains. But the US? Forget it! Amtrak fucking sucks, and you still have to drive from your suburb to the train station because viable public transport does not, and will not exist there. It’s been gutted completely by General Motors who essentialy are defacto the US government. (EDIT: The previous statement is to say that the US does not respond to the needs of it’s citizens but to those of capital)
The true enemies of the world are the shareholders willing to kill it for profit, and they have names and adressess. (Side note; do not commit to adventurism)
I don’t think this is actually as bad as people say.
It’s not that we won’t have drinking water. Municipal water use is tiny! And provided with enough incentives (higher costs) people will use less water. And this can be done in very reasonable ways by issuing water tiered rates.
Agricultural water use, is a whole different topic. However, until we can incentives better water management on our massive agricultural lands, it’s only going to get worse.
I think better management and recharge of groundwater is the only way to weather the unpredictability climate change brings to precipitation. During winter floods it will be necessary to divert flows to areas where it can soak in to recharge aquifers and make it through the dry times. There simply isn’t enough space for surface storage to fill the gaps.
I think it’s important to note how much hardscape and channelling has been done to prevent widespread and sheet style flooding, and how they contribute to this problem of ground water recharge.
Most places that are flat enough to build are flat enough to build because of thousands of millenia of flooding, especially sheet flooding, laying down sediment and making them flat. Then humans get annoyed because the flat low places floos, so they build flood control.
There is a post further down about how Muni water really isn’t an issue and I agree with this. I’ve put up a couple posts explaining this on Reddit and hacker news. I could rehash it if some one was interested.
Are you surprised? After SA continued doing business with Russia after much of the west had imposed sanctions this type of inconvenience is expected. It’s petty and exactly the type of thing delegates are used to
Yeah the fact that SA doesn’t agree with the west politically totally justifies holding their delegation hostage. Thank you for your insightful comment.
edit: presumably downvoters think it’s normal behavior for countries to do this sort of thing, if this is the way the west is going to keep acting on the world stage then life is going to get very hard for westerners
One could say that with every election. It’s always a gamble but when you start from such a low point it really doesn’t matter. Putin is a violent dictator using a scorched earth policy against Ukraine. He is ruthlessly suppressing LGBTQ people to the point where their existence cannot be spoke of. He kills his opponents and is engaged in an ongoing Cold War with the USA. He needs to go.
Also, given the lack of a clear successor, Putin's death would likely lead to a power vacuum and infighting-- which means they'll be too busy fighting each other to focus on attacking us.
archive.is/j7NqS if you don’t want to be assaulted by cookie notices and paywalls and more.
Edit to add: I find it absurd how this logic is used so often:
He insisted that Russia was justified in starting the war because Ukraine was run by “Nazis”, even though its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.
It’s logical nonsense to think the two are mutually exclusive. Moreover, it ignores the very real issue of Nazis in Ukraine. We even see this “don’t believe your eyes” nonsense, trying to convince people open and proud Nazis aren’t in fact Nazis.
Nobody honestly believes Putin started the war to fight Nazis, he just used it as an excuse because he thought the West would stay out of his way for this flimsy lie. Instead he was quickly called out for using resources such as his own Wagner Group in the war which directly recruit modern Nazis, and thus lost all credibility.
Russia also said demilitarisation and pointed fingers at NATO. If it’s this and denazification, it would suggest that Russia was hoping for NATO/the West to get involved in exactly the way that it got involved.
Further, the Russian perspective is that NATO was already involved by running a coup then supporting about a decade of shelling in Donbass. If that’s the case – and the important detail here is not what westerners think NATO reps were doing in Ukraine all those years, but what Russia thought – there is no logical scenario in which Western involvement comes as a surprise. It was known to be there before the invasion.
And if NATO really wasn’t in Ukraine before that invasion, the point still stands: Russia expected NATO involvement even if it’s initial intelligence was faulty.
That doesn’t mean denazification is the main reason for the invasion. Although there are people who accept that reasoning as it was more than just a Nazi presence. It was an organised Nazi terror campaign against ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, killing thousands.
No matter how you look at it, Putin was just swinging his dick around thinking he was a big boy that could tell everyone else where to stick it. I really do believe he thought Russia was a dominant world power, but he’s living in the dark ages and didn’t have a clue that social media can change governments. Zelenskyy knew how to play the game and got people to care about his country again, and that immediately made a difference in how much aid they could ask for.
You sure about that? Wasn’t Russia like in a much worser shape after WW1 and got raided by line 15 countries at once (“to strangle the bolshevik baby in its crib” according to Churchill)? And they still prevailed?
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