My impression of the conflict: The partition of British India into independent India and independent Pakistan was very violent and traumatizing for lots of people, and also left some unsolved border disputes. The independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan was likewise very violent and saw India helping the Bangladeshi people gain independence. Both events are long enough in the past that people could have gotten over the hate by now, except that it gets refreshed with new violence every few years. In the last few decades there’s been several terror attacks in India that were sponsored by the Pakistani state. But now India too has a religious fundamentalist government, so maybe they’ll be trying to return the favor. Authoritarians love creating external enemies, it helps them stay in control of their own population.

It’s like the saying goes: true beauty is on the inside.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[b] is an initiative of the second Trump administration tasked with cutting federal spending which it characterizes as “waste, fraud, and abuse”.[8] It emerged from discussions between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and was established by executive order on January 20, 2025. DOGE’s actions have included accessing government data systems; organizing mass layoffs of federal workers; and cutting climate change initiatives, scientific research, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency

Yeah, smartphones are a menace as well in traffic, especially when combined with someone as oblivious as in your example :). The government(s) in my country has had several police + information campaigns against smartphone use since a few years. There’s now also a fine of 175 euro + loss of driver’s license for 15 days for using the smartphone while driving in traffic. And waiting in traffic, still counts as driving. If used for navigation, then the destination has to be put in before starting to drive & the smartphone has to be in a holder or connected to the infotainment system.

This heavier punishment is pretty recent and the chance of being caught seems low, so there’s still often people using smartphones inappropriately. Last one I saw this week was an oblivious teenager on a bicycle. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s been a noticable change in a few years.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGd3QWgTLs&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD

For contrast: a video of a more congested street in Paris 17 years ago. The situations aren’t completely comparable: bigger emergency vehicle, smaller other vehicles, smaller street with less options to get out of the way, … One other major difference and the reason I’m posting this, is that 30 seconds into the video, you can see that most drivers have moved to the sides of the road AHEAD of the firetruck and that they are holding still while waiting on the firetruck to pass them. The street + path are less than ideal and there isn’t really enough room, so the truck is still not going very fast, but it’s at least able to keep moving. By moving to the sides, the drivers also blocked in that smaller firetruck that was coming from the side street, so that’s going to cause some confusement after the big one has passed.

The reason that that NYC ambulance is completely stuck in traffic, isn’t because of space, because there is plenty compared to that Parisian street, but it’s the drivers who are not creating a path. It’s not an infrastructure problem, it’s something that can be taught + encouraged if there is a political will to make a change.

Yeah, absolutely. Americans making excuses as to why solutions that work in other countries, would not work in the USA, are a scourge on your society. Your lives could be so much better if you lot stopped falling for that American exceptionalism propaganda and stopped inventing reasons to not do anything about known problems. And now that you’ve turned into a banana republic, I’m done being polite about it.

As if the usa is the only country in the world with congested rush hour traffic. I’ve been in streets that were way more tightly packed + chaotic than this and people would still clear a path for vehicles with sirens. The emergency vehicle would only be able to go 20 to 30 kmh without a motorcycle escort, but that’s still significantly faster than what we’re seeing here.

What we’re seeing in this video, is that (some) vehicles that are directly in front of the ambulance move out of the way, but vehicles that are a tiny bit further ahead, don’t even try. If a vehicle that is directly in front of the ambulance can move out of the way, then a vehicle that is 30 places ahead, is also able to move out of the way, but they don’t even try … What should happen is that as soon as drivers hear a siren, they should start looking for where it’s coming from and then clear a path, and drivers should also especially not be driving into the path that others are clearing. Instead it seems like these drivers wait till the siren is right behind them and only then some start to move out of the way.

Looking for excuses in American exceptionalism reads like a case of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”. This particular problem is something that can be easily improved upon by a public awareness campaign and some light fines for those that keep obstructing after the campaign has been running for some time. But what’s obviously even easier than that, is finding an excuse to continue doing nothing about the problem.

Bart De Wever was never the chairman of Vlaams Blok. He’s never been a member of Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang, which makes it kinda hard for him to have ever been their party leader.

It still needs repeating to counter propaganda from Russia and Russia’s western supporters. If you leave propaganda unchecked, worse things tend to happen.

From what I’ve seen, men absolutely love digging holes. Every summer on the beach it’s the same: there’s always men digging holes. They bring their kids to the beach just to have an excuse for digging a hole, a waterfort, some dams, … For the kids ;)

Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.

If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)

Not that hard, just got to look up how Crassus did it.

Your description fits Bangladesh, except for the location. If you’ve seen news reports about major disasters in exploitative clothing factories, then those were probably about factories in Bangladesh.

Myanmar is majority Buddhist. No outsiders, except international criminals (scammers, drugs) set up any factories in Myanmar, because of the civil war and political instability.

Demonizing outside influences is common to all cults. It innoculates the cult members to those outside influences, leading them to immediately disregard information that contradicts their cultist beliefs, keeping them trapped within the cult’s echo chamber more effectively. To keep the cultists innoculated, they have to constantly remind them that they and their beliefs are being persecuted and that the only source of truth, is the cult leaders.

That said, how “real” is r/conservative? I just checked it and every single thread is flaired users only. It’s a far more controlled echo chamber than the Donald was in it’s heyday, and when the Sint-Petersburg troll farm was brought offline during the usa elections of 2018, the Donald was gone from reddit’s front page for the duration.

To me it seems like r/conservative is a method of distributing the current narrative to cultists, but it doesn’t require actual input or discussion from those cultists. It seems to actually discourage posting by normal conservative users, since any kind of wrongthink will lead to a ban, and it’s hard to keep up with the changing narratives for normal users, so catching a ban is easy.

Imo that comment was made to reinforce your message, it wasn’t written as a message to you (because you had already decided).

The russian assets in the White House want to portray Zelensky and Ukraine as insufficiently thankful for USA aid and as disrespectful towards the usa, and to use those supposed slights as justification for cutting off aid. To reinforce this narrative with their audience, other fellow travellers are now repeating those lies.

This goes back to the white house meeting where Trump and Vance claimed that Zelensky was disrespectful because of how he was dressed (normal) and how he didn’t thank anyone according to them (he had, profusely, there’s video of it). It was a clown show and the meeting didn’t deliver the desired images + soundbites, so now the usa republicans are working overtime in providing the necessary soundbites for fox news etc.

And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You’re wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.

Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you’ll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.

Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this “Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.” was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here’s statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.

That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.

Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.