Apart from being wrong, the rest simply made zero sense, so I admit I simply blocked him. Waste of time IMO, I don’t mind people disagreeing if I at least can understand where they are coming from, but those 2 comments were worse than a bad AI IMO.
You are right, that is a great video, very well made and spot on correct.
The video shows Norway having by far the highest benefits for families with children, so I looked it up to see if it works, but their fertility rate remains very low at only 1.4!
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Post news articles only
The euro has had the biggest gain of the major currencies against the faltering dollar, surging nearly 14 per cent to above $1.17
That’s for 2025.
Wall Street banks expect the euro to strengthen to $1.20 by the end of 2026
So 3 cent decline for the dollar for 2026, that is pretty stable if that holds.
The headline must refer to what has already happened, but then why is it “on track” instead of it being already a fact?
Or does the author not believe the Wall Street banks?
Anywho I don’t believe the dollar will only decline 3 cents against the Euro in 2026.
The American economy would clearly be in declining growth already, if it wasn’t for the AI bubble. I suspect this to become clearer when job numbers for January and February 2026 are released.
The completely irresponsible federal budget for 2026 probably won’t help either, and the Trump administration is almost guaranteed to make things worse as they continue their crazy policies, with or without Trump, I don’t think that really matters much. The rest of the administration is as crazy as Trump is.
Better to live to fight another day IMO. I will strongly discourage anyone from going on hunger strike, it will more likely than not ruin your health for the rest of your life, and it will also shorten your life, if you don’t die outright while striking.
True but that was a first and it was bigger and part of simultaneous demonstrations, and it broke with dogma of women being weak. So probably way bigger story for the press back then in the early 1900’s.
Today hunger strikes very often don’t get much attention, in this case, it is close to game over for these people.
Funny then how your previous comment is completely disconnected from the real problem.
I think I’ll just block you, because you are too weird for me.
I don’t think you understand the problem, because lower is absolutely worse. A small decline in population is fine, the world probably has too many people already. But a steep decline like this is catastrophic for a country.
The fertility rate required to maintain population is around 2.1, having it at only 0.8 is really bad, making the South Korean population basically on a path to extinction within a few hundred years.
The principle of doing it yes, the way of doing it no.
Absolutely horrible, it’s sad anyone had to live through that. I hope you are OK now.
force her to abort me.
Wow I didn’t know they did that! That’s horrible.
Also she got sterilized for giving birth to me.
Goddam, they were absolutely ruthless!
I think congratulations for being alive is in order.
It may have been OK to have a policy, but this kind of enforcement is absolutely not IMO.
I thought it was only about losing privileges like the ability for the children to get a higher education.
Isn’t it? If the population is growing too fast to be sustainable, who else can regulate this? Having many children is a disease of poor countries, having to few children is a disease of rich countries.
You can prevent people from having many children by taking away privileges. Problem is it doesn’t work so well the other way around. But would you find it equally wrong to stimulate child birth though giving privileges to families with children? Both are regulation to adjust behavior. Where I live we have incentives for people to get children, and we have free fertility treatments.
Would it be wrong if we had too many children to for instance remove free fertility treatment if you already have a child?
I don’t think it’s quite as black and white as you suggest. And almost ALL governments of developed countries have policies that influence how many children people get. Except those policies are to stimulate people having children rather than preventing it.
I just don’t see the one child policy as a good idea in any way because it’s too extreme. If they had to have a policy on this to stabilize the population, it should have been a 2 child policy. And realistically at the time they introduced the policy, the global population was increasing at a unsustainable speed, and the same was the case for China, and they had to do something to prevent people from having an average of about 5 children, simply to help the people get out of poverty. But they went to far IMO.
How is that relevant? The problem in China now is that the policies worked for setting the number down, but now it doesn’t work for setting it up.
And it’s far from the government just “saying” so. The policy was enforced with privileges for those that followed it, and loss of privileges if you didn’t.
Notably whether your child would be able to get an education. And that shit actually works whether I would want to follow it or not.
I always found the one child policy weird, why wasn’t it a two child policy to maintain population stability?
since 1980, <snip> the number of enrolled students decreased from 9.9 million to 5.07 million.
That’s half the student in 45 years!
Korea’s birthrate ― the lowest in the world with the total fertility rate remaining below 0.8
Meaning it’s getting even worse!!
These numbers are insane, I’ve heard that South Korea is working like crazy to make robots that can help lift the burden of taking care of the elderly. But I wasn’t aware it was this bad!!
From the context it appears this is in UK, it would have been nice if they had started off early telling us where they are actually held.
But no matter where it is, this is sad, live to fight another day is a good motto. Hunger strikes rarely accomplish anything but harm to those that do it.
There are 100M citizens in the party, which is a small percentage of the population.
That’s less than 10% of the population, and still everybody can only join under one party program. That’s not democracy.
The system is, in fact, democratic,
No it isn’t, you claiming that only shows you don’t understand what democracy is.
The size of the party in China is small,
That is mostly irrelevant, it’s the lack of political freedom that matters. Here we have 12 parties in parliament, no less than 2 of them are new parties, that sprung from older parties because they wanted to change the political agenda. Such an option does not in any way exist in China.
they have to prevent disruption of the revolutionary government by outside forces.
No they don’t, and they already don’t allow anyone to express such opinions anywhere else, it’s even easier to prevent it within the party. That point is pure bullshit. It’s the authoritarian paranoia that fears change, even if a majority of people want it. But here the CCP fear even the MENTION of change!! The only thing worse is autocracy, where a single individual holds all power.
And as it turns out, the party is incredibly responsive to the people.
But still people are not allowed to ask for democracy.
This isn’t really true in one-party systems. One-party systems have factions and the factions all fight for their program within the party.
The same is true when you have 12 parties, the difference is that in CCP you have to stay within what is allowed under one party program. In a democracy you can do the same but within many different party programs that span a wider spectrum, where in an authoritarian country many of them would be illegal.
The US outlawed the communist party, blacklisted every communist sympathizer
I already mentioned that USA is a deeply flawed democracy, that has failed to improve their democracy. In Scandinavian countries the Communist party is absolutely 100% allowed and legal. But In Denmark when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Danish Communist Party went bankrupt because support from the Soviet Union dried up. And there was so little interest that the communist party doesn’t exist here anymore. We do however have a number of left wing parties that are based on social democracy. Denmark has one of the highest democracy ratings in the world, so when arguing on how democracy works, you should use a functioning democracy as example and not the very flawed democracy of USA.
That would never happen in the US because the US would brutally put such protests down very quickly.
In a democracy demonstrators don’t generally throw bombs at police, because the demonstrations are allowed, and their political viewpoints are allowed, and police does not try to arrest peaceful protestors.
however, we given orders to disengage when things got too violent.
Nice to hear there is some humanism, it didn’t go so well at Tiananmen Square square in 1989.
But yes I’ve been aware for years that the Chinese “thought police” is not as ruthless as it once was. For instance an Internet blogger criticizing the system is not even necessarily imprisoned, but instead the blog can be taken over by authorities, and the content switched to state propaganda. A way more humane approach that is still efficient.
Progress has been made, but silencing opposition is not democracy.
launching point for Western terrorism
Everything you write about Hong Kong sounds like propaganda. But the part about Western Terrorism is weird. There is no reason to believe terrorism would somehow be carried over from the west to China. If a person from Hong Kong perform a terrorist act in China, that is 100% a case of Chinese terrorism.
But these are two very different experiences. China is under siege, being surrounded by nuclear military bases.
Nukes can be intercontinental, so geography is not so relevant. And China is surrounded by Russia, Kazakhstan, India and a bunch of smaller countries, none of those countries would ever stand a chance against China in a war. India and Russia have nukes, but why would China be afraid of being attacked by them?
The idea that China is under siege is exactly what a totalitarian regime would claim before invading another country, just like Putin did before invading Ukraine.
Are you saying China is planning an invasion?
the powers that be in the US do not listen to the people at all, and consistently have terrible approval ratings, whereas the Chinese government is constantly working on their process of listening to and addressing the needs of the people.
As I’ve mentioned already, USA is a very flawed democracy, and some of the dissatisfaction is due to this, they have options, but no good options.
In China however, the people don’t have an alternative political party with an alternative offer to compare the Chinese government to. And considering the development has been generally good for quality of life in China, it is understandable that the majority of Chinese population is pretty happy with how things are going.
I recently watched a Norwegian youtuber called Bjørn Nyland who test drives electric cars, and who went to China, to try some of the new Chinese electric cars. And he filmed freely in China (Shenzhen), something that would not have been possible just a few years ago. But it’s also amazing to see how modern Shenzhen is, and the number of cool eating places is insane. Very clearly the places he visited people had very high living standard. Probably a good bit above average for China, but goddam it looked nice.
I can understand why people in China think things are generally good, and are happy with their government, in some ways they have done an extremely good job.
whereas in the US Indian reservations are horrible places
It’s funny how you continue to use USA as an example, you should be aware that USA is not respected in this regard in Europe. USA is in many ways worse than China.
As a democracy they are a joke that we call only one party better than China. They have a horrible history of slavery, and the racism continue to be high despite being a multicultural society for 2 centuries! They don’t have healthcare for all, like every other democracy, and they don’t have paid education.
You are not really making much of a point by pointing out that USA sucks too.
BUT!! Think about this, among one party countries, China stands as a shiny beacon above the rest. Whereas USA as a democracy is rock bottom in almost every aspect, except they have a huge economy.
USA is about to fall into one party authoritarianism, What do you think the chances are? Will the people be better off with just one party?
It sounds like you’re saying Totalitarian == Fascism == Authoritarian
They have traits in common, Totalitarian is dictatorship by one ruler, Authoritarian is centralized rule that does not allow political opposition much like China.
One of the main aspects of fascism is that it is always authoritarian or totalitarian. So being authoritarian means being similar to fascism in some of their main aspects.
But == usually means identical, and I never claimed that. Just that China being having an authoritarian government, means it shares significant similarities with fascism.
America is more authoritarian than China
By definition democracy is supposed to be the opposite of authoritarian, but most definitely USA is the most authoritarian and also most flawed democracy that exist.
it imprisons more of its people,
USA is the most unjust democracy in the world,
it (USA) uses violence against the entire world,
Yes even Americans are beginning to realize that. Unfortunately China is beginning to behave a lot like USA, which I don’t really blame them for, especially the 2nd term of Trump has been awful for relations between China and USA, but I’m afraid it has also put a strain on relations between China and EU. I find the Nexperia debacle particularly embarrassing for EU. Had it been bought by a company from any other country, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But because it was China, and Trump somehow thinks it his job to make as much pain as possible for China, USA pressured EU and Netherlands to prevent China access to a company they bought fair and square under EU regulation!? Apparently the situation is being resolved, but here should never have been a “situation”.
China, on the other hand, does not allow the president to issue unilateral executive orders
Good. 👍 That may explain why China seems to generally behave more balanced and intelligently than USA.
China is not somehow obviously evil compared to the West.
I never claimed that, I have great respect for what China has achieved in many ways, China seems to respect the sovereignty of other countries, but for some reason Xi is hellbent that Taiwan must be reunited with mainland China. Why not accept that Taiwan is now a different country from China? And try to work together, China is the most obvious major economic partner for Taiwan anyway.look at Russia trying to “reunite” Ukraine, it has made life hell for millions of people. With no benefits for either side. The soviet union was legally dissolved in 1991, why not accept that? And in the same way, why can’t China accept that for all practical purposes Taiwan is an independent country now?
Interesting debate, although I disagree at times, you put forward a reasonably balanced argument IMO.
Now I’m out of space too. 😋
And it’s 02:30 here now, so I say goodnight. 🥱 💤
A problem designed to solved by a “small” bribe to Trump.
In theory you could have democracy with only one party, but AFAIK that’s not really how it works in China.
Who people can vote for is decided by the party, and AFAIK not everybody can become a member of the party, and participate in that decision.
Also only one party means only one party program, and that can never be democracy, as when people vote, there is only one party program to vote for.
It’s also not a democracy if certain viewpoints are oppressed, which is very much the case in China, and which we have seen very clearly in Hong Kong.
But yes China has some level of a very very flawed democracy, and there is a visible path for improvement within the system, when the political landscape allows for it.
But as we have seen with the American flawed democracy, the powers that be may be very hesitant to yield power to a more democratic structure. In that way USA has failed for about 200 years. Hopefully the Chinese model allows for a bit more progress than we’ve seen in USA.
Regarding the 95%, that is very high, but I have no doubt that the government/CCP is very popular, after half a century of strong economic progress, with actual progress to the population too, I’ll even go so far as to say it’s well deserved.
But on the humanitarian side, and respect for minorities, China is still way behind. It is also a country with death penalty, which is clearly contrary to democratic values.
The idea that China is fascist is laughable.
The most visible signs are oppression of opposition, which is 100% undeniable. And also oppression of the truth through censorship, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre is still illegal to even talk about. So no processing of the mistakes, and no learning from them. These are the 2 clearest markers of a totalitarian system.
As I wrote, fascist as in authoritarian, and it is a fact, IDK why you consider facts laughable?
Britons making sure the decline after losing the Empire, and later after Brexit continues.
Xenophobia and exceptionalism combined is probably the most direct route to decline of a civilization.
It’s weird how USA and UK are messing up completely like they are dancing a weird dance of death together.