Pat Finnerty on YouTube does a great series called What Makes This Song Stink. It's definitely not for everyone, as he doesn't give a shit about YouTube algorithms and keeping videos to an ideal length. But has a recent hour long video on Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town. The video (Pat Finnerty's not Jason Aldean's) is phenomenal.
Beep beep hold on let me get out of my car hhhyyyup
Alright OK what do I have written here
"BUT TOTALITARIAN DICTATORS AND THOUGHT POLICE"
Smoke on that one!!!!!!!!!!
OK now I've got to get back into my car, which is significantly harder than getting out, due to its comically small size and my giant bright red shoes and nose
The basic idea and institutional tenets of the German policy of remembering the Holocaust are sound and correct. They are quite literally a model for other societies who are descended from horrible horrible people. Like I wish the US and Canada did a fraction of what German does to acknowledge and honour their own very dark past of colonization and genocide.
It seems however that one particular thing has gone very wrong: they have adopted a bizarre definition of anti-semitism that precludes most opposition to the state of Israel, even when Israel does plainly indefensible things. And because we are talking about Germans, for whom rules really fucking matter, this has lead them to some truly bizarre situations such as persecuting Jews who criticize Israel as antisemitic.
And when Israel does step over the line, and Jewish Israeli Holocaust scholars, like Omer Bartov, are telling you this has started to really stink of genocide, the Germans find themselves in an impossible bind, which they resolve in the shittiest way possible by taking a side and condemning the other side as antisemitic.
They could and should have plainly said: this is a complex matter, but we trust the ICJ, we will wait for their determination, no further comment. That would have been an entirely honourable position for them to take. But no, they forced themselves into a position of having to defend one of the two litigants, like a caricature of an annoying white saviour "ally", like the worst caricature of the male nice guy "feminist" who mansplains feminism to women.
Germany can very well be an authority when it comes to far right antisemitism. If they say a right wing group is anti-semitic, I am by default inclined to believe them. But when it comes to criticizing Israel, when there are multi-dimensional nuances and complexities, and when Israel itself is under a right wing extremist government, Germany is far from an authority that should have any fucking say about which Jewish public voice, like Masha Gessen, is ... being anti-Semitic.
What do you mean 'till the price of oil plummeted"? The whole world plummeted in the 08' crash. Sure the price per barrel plummeted in 2009 but the price of oil has since gone up to those early 2000's levels...
Bruh, Venezuela has some of the dirtiest crude on the planet and lacks the ability to refine it themselves relying on American refineries which have had an embargo against importing Venezuelan oil till last year, you are so out of yout depth in global economics is laughable.
Venezuela is an example of a petrostate, where the government is highly dependent on fossil fuel income.
Petrostates are vulnerable to what economists call Dutch disease, in which a government develops an unhealthy dependence on natural resource exports to the detriment of other sectors.
The oil price plunge from more than $100 per barrel in 2014 to under $30 per barrel in early 2016 sent Venezuela into an economic and political spiral, and despite rising prices since then, conditions remain bleak.
(Source: Council of Foreign Relations)
So yeah, socialism didn't kill the Venezuelan economy, over-reliance on fossil fuel did.
Memes
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