I love this trend, because anybody who provides a serious answer whatsoever has already fallen for its trap. It's such an absolutely absurd scenario that's just specific enough to be divisive, and just vague enough that you can fill in the gaps with any preconceived notions of your own. It's impossible to provide any answer in which you can't be made to look like a clown, because every answer comes with baked-in counter arguments to it. Any answer you provide makes you look either heartless or clueless.
It almost makes me appreciate rage-bait as an art form.
Or, you know, just listen to women.. Revolutionary, I know, and seemingly impossible to some, but that's literally all you need to do to not be "trapped" (magically managing to claim victimhood where there is none, as per usual), instead of outing yourself, just like OP suggests.. ¯*(ツ)*/¯
Would you say the same if the argument was about the inherent danger of black men? If a bunch of white women were online saying black men are dangerous we wouldn't say that black men calling it out were "magically claiming false victimhood" we'd say those women's fears, even if they are truly felt, are a product of prejudice and unfair and they're spreading of these ideas is damaging.
You seriously think women are equally afraid of white men as they are of black men, or Muslim men, or immigrant men?
The answer is no. Which is why right wing groups astroturfed this meme in the first place - to otherize minority groups and increase xenophobic policies. All under the name of protecting women/feminism
Which is what always happens - we need to protect our virginal women from the foreign hordes. Fascism has a pretty simple playbook
I'm pretty sure every woman I regularly interact with has realized that white men are scarier than men of color, by and large. Have you been paying attention for the last 8 years?
Most of Africa's nations are younger than 30 years. Several African countries still pay taxes to France. Nearly every African country doesn't have sovereign control over their natural resources. So Ya, not to even mention the millions of people stolen from their countries. Africa is poor purely because of outside influences
The other side of that debate is that .... the outside influence could work with Africa to make the continent self sufficient and capable on its own. Several studies and research has shown that if properly set up and organized, the African continent has more than enough resources to produce its own food supply, clean water supply and energy production.
Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point .... the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world ... it's more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.
It's a prime example of how as a civilization we build and maintain our world on exploitation, coercion and death
Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point … the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world … it’s more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.
I would argue it's more complex than that. The very conditions created by European colonization have resulted in extreme instability and corruption in the resulting, mostly-arbitrarily drawn states, which heavily discourages investment from rational (though amoral) actors. It's not that the rest of the world market doesn't want Africa to be more "Developing Southeast Asia" than "Place we get raw resources from", it's that the conditions European colonization foisted upon it make getting there from this point very difficult.
Honestly, I'm not sure that there is an optimal solution there. All I'm certain about is that the European powers didn't give a shit about anything other than resolving their own claims in an ideal fashion when releasing their colonial vassals piecemeal.
Honestly, I’m not sure that there is an optimal solution there
Well that's why I'm asking the question. If you look at Goma and Rwanda, for example, tribes were putting a genocide on eachother before the Europeans arrived. They were doing a genocide after the Europeans left. They are doing a genocide on eachother right now when everybody pulled their hands off. At which point can you blame the genocide on the tribes themselves?
Rwandan genocide was very much fueled by Belgian racial policies.
My point isn't that Africa would be a utopia if the European powers hadn't carved it up like a toddler with a birthday cake, my point is only that the borders as formed in most of Subsaharan Africa are completely arbitrary divisions which rely more on conflicting colonial interests than realities of the people on the ground.
Take a look at Nigeria if you want an example of how conflicting ethnic groups artificially forced together by an attempt of colonial powers to maintain some measure of control turns out. There's a reason most countries in Europe were either ethnically dominated empires, or ethnically homogenous nation-states - and likewise, there is a reason why European imperialists put great effort into dividing subject peoples abroad.
The ability to construct and sustain a state, or any community, is based on shared values and cultural memes.
Or do you just want to point out the bad and throw in the towel on the question of how it can be fixed?
Man, that's for wiser fucking people than me. I'm not going to pretend to know the best outline to split up and combine African ethnicities within contiguous borders. I studied pre-modern European history, not post-independence African geopolitics. I don't have the expertise necessary even for a rough sketch.
And honestly, I don't think it can be fixed at this point, at least not across all so-afflicted countries. The damage is largely done. In the past 60 years, institutions have been established, internal migration has intensified, nationalism cultivated, etc. Most of Africa is probably pretty stuck with the problem, and has the unenviable task of making disparate peoples cooperate within a single polity. It is possible - but it is also difficult (see: India).
Gay people, please keep being who you are. While I was never naturally inclined to fear or hate the LGBTQ+ crowd, getting to know many of them as coworkers and friends helped me to truly understand them. And unlike people who would post hate speech on social media to politicize their own wedding I have never met LGBTQ+ people that cared I was white, male, or straight.
Fucking seriously. What the actual fuck is wrong with these people?
I hate propagandists with every single fiber of my being, more than I hate absolutely anything in the entire universe, and yet I rarely think about them unless something specific comes up.
If the city cares about aaving money theu would be buying useless military hardware for the NYPD. Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, and Osaka all do fine without blowing massive amounts if the municipal budget on military gear for their police departments. The NYPD "officially' had a 2022 budget over $5billion with aroind 36,000 officers. That's comparable to the entire military budget of Romania. Hell, the NYPD has field offices in 6 foreign countries.
Costco is unique in its food court prices, they must be heavy into loss leader territory at this point. It was a really good deal back before covid, and these days it's basically daylight robbery compared to anywhere else.
Not only that, but the food kiosks (at my local location, anyway) don't scan your costco membership either, so you can just walk in the exit and get some food without signing up.
They always get me on higher end frozen food items I end up wanting to try, even though they're not really a better deal than what I could get at Safeway.
I'd love to see how that works out for their higher end memberships, where you get money back for buying shit.
I think you have to spend something like $6000 over a year to make back the total cost of the membership... but that's not completely unreasonable if you get quite a few things there regularly.
I think it could make sense not to scan for memberships and allow nonmembers to buy the food even through it's a loss leader. If people are coming in for the good deal, especially if they're coming regularly, there's a chance they'll buy a membership and start shopping there
I (an American) had actually never heard of Costco until I moved to Japan. Where I grew up we had Sam's Club, but no Costco, so when I got to Japan and the other foreigners were talking about how they love getting the chance to go down to Costco, I had no idea what they were talking about.
Didn't see a Costco in person until a few years later.
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