Congrats to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia for making the cut
Yo, german bro here. When I go by train from my village Willich to fucking Düsseldorf I lose connection 2 times, going 10 kilometers into the state capital.
My friend in Wesel can't reliably call his clients by car cause it's just a connectivity minefield around there.
Send help
Germany is so far behind with wifi coverage, it's insane. Fiber is also rare outside of the hotspots. I volunteered in a refugee center once and an ongoing joke among them was how war-torn Syria had better internet connection than Germany lol
Old farts in charge don't care about it. Merkel has promised full net coverage a couple times but oh well. It's definitely better than it was before, but there are still lots of areas where there is work to be done. As our saying goes: Deutschlands Mühlen mahlen langsam. (Germany's mills grind slowly)
Tell me about belgian fishing, going to live in Trier right beneath the border and german fishing laws a catastrophic so I will practice catch and release in Belgium!
Almost like news written in english tends to focus on english-speaking countries and their allies
The obvious context of this meme is articles that express the "consensus opinion of the international community" on some foreign issue. Like "international community condemns antisemetic criticism of Israel." Or "international community condemns Niger coup, calls for original government to be reinstated so France can keep buying cheap Uranium from the second poorest country on the planet."
Was about to say. Oh my God the interconnected western world cares about the western world!
More news at 11.
Yeah fuck my local news station for covering local news. It should only be coverage about places that I will never go to, issues I have no control over, and be an exercise in guilt and self-righteous masturbation for the people running it.
why should I pretend like I give a shit about the third world when American media tells me everything I want to hear /s
South Korea is pretty good about pumping out culturally relevant stuff too. Honestly I'd say they do it better than Japan these days (not that I'm personally interested in stuff like k-pop, but it's clearly huge)
Korea is certainly ascendant but I doubt they've passed Japan in cultural exports. At least in the US, there is anime and Sushi in basically every population center these days, whereas Korean BBQ and chicken are still mostly popular in large urban areas (where sushi is still way more popular).
Genuine question: How exactly are they more culturally relevant than Japan besides K-pop and maybe Korean novels? When it comes to matters besides entertainment, I guess I'm a little clueless.
Their movie industry seems to be on the rise, too. Not sure I'd say they're outpacing Japan though
Not the OP, but I think that's exactly what they're talking about, entertainment. I don't know if Korea has overtaken Japan in that sphere, but it's certainly significant. I'd also point out that Korea's COVID response was so organized that there was a period of time that it was being looked to and mentioned in the media which is culturally relevant (kinda like pointing out the Finnish education system or the German reputation for engineering).
Basically democracies. It is kind of difficult to consider non-democratic dictators like Putin or Kim Jong-un as representatives of some kind of “community”.
South America just isn’t really too involved in international politics in general, the whole region is neutral in almost all conflicts since very few directly affect them
They are involved in their own politics, just like the first world only cares about what happens to the first world.
If you use the old Cold War definition, yes. Otherwise
However, as the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the definition largely shifted to instead refer to any country that boasts a well-functioning democratic system with little prospects of political risk, in addition to a strong rule of law, a capitalist economy with economic stability, and a high standard of living.
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I said this about Assad as well, but when someone is a forever ruler, it may not be as democratic as the name implies
Of course. I am not going to defend the particular choice of countries in that picture. Where is South Korea, for example? However. Democracy is greater than just democratic election. Fascists in Germany also come to power in a free democratic election, does not make Nazi Germany a democratic country.
Never realized South Korea, Taiwan, or other SEA countries are not democracies but dictatorships.
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In Thailand's last election, the winner of the PM race had their win vetoed by their military-only Senate because he wanted to make it legal to criticize their king.
If the military and king overrule the vote, then it's not a democracy
South Korea at least should probably be included in this map. It generally does include capitalist democracies, but it's not sufficient and probably not necessary for the general criteria.
Never heard that they don't generally stand alongside the rest of democracies if you hear 'international community'. All of them condemning Russias attack on Ukraine, China taking parts of the Philippines and the terrorist attack on Israel from the Hamas.
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to be fair, South Korea is a company country, fucking Samsung is more influential than the government is many places
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In Thailand's last election, the winner of the PM race was vetoed by their military-only Senate because he wanted to make it legal to criticize their king.
If the military and king overrule the vote, then it's not a democracy.
Latin America and India doesn't count because they are full of brown people, right?
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Ah yes, Brazil, famously not a democracy and instead an authoritarian post-modern Soviet state.
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Ah yes Brazil, beacon of freedom, like the freedom to shoot some slum kid in the face for the crime of being a slum rat.
Brazil makes the USA seem like the fucking beacon of freedom and equality that the fucking G.I. Joe cartoons portray it as.
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Dumbest comment I've ever read on this platform, congrats! Let's see if it remains the dumbest next year, maybe I'll order you an award.
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dumb? have you ever fucking been to Brazil? well at least outside the posh tourist areas.
I already know the answer is no, because anyone who HAS knows that the shit I described is all too common, and it's not like I haven't lived in "economically challenged"(see Hood) parts of the US.
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have you even fucking been to Brazil?
Oh, I don't know let me think... You could say so, yes, given how I live in Brazil.
I already know the answer is no
I don't know how you managed it, but your new comment became the dumbest ever.
Nothing odd about it. There are historical reasons for that. But English speaking? You do know that there are many countries in EU?
You are so stuck on details you entirely missed my point. Are you just going to ignore the fact that the "world" depicted here is literally just Europe and its most successful colonies?
Yeah colonialism is a "historical reason", but wtf are you even saying there? Being killed is "a reason" to be lying on the stairs, but explaining that by saying "he has his reasons" is so out-of-touch as to be insane.
yeah,
these are the democracies that invaded Iraq/Libya to install a democracy.
I keep having to remind myself how much good it did to the people of Iraq/Libya.
They're only dictators in our minds, because the West has told us they are for years. I've always wondered what's really behind their strategy, but we can't get unbiased news about their countries and the people living there anymore.
It's really interesting to me because they are dictators, they're also the only countries that managed to give the big finger to the US' meddling and disrupting regional politics. Did they become dictators to stop that or is it a chicken and the egg situation? Need more info.
Yes I'm not sure, only in the sense that I've seen what happens when you kill a dictator and try to replace it with 'democracy.'
Everyone swoops in, hires some armed forces to get the natural resources they need and then leaves. The population is left to fend themselves and are usually governed for decades by the stronger mostly extremist government party. By the time they revolt, they get beat down again and again, until they just give up and the country descends into another humanitarian crisis.
It just sets them back for decades. That's all.
Current Africa is the fault of British and French. Current Middle East the fault of British, French and the USA. Current India has strong feelings against the British. Current Iran has a strong theocracy because of the USA. Current South America still feels the effects of the USA's CIA's meddling.
Of course it is your oil-and-war-industry-mirror governments. It has been an entity whose sole focus has been war profiteering and thus warmongering at least since the WW2, no matter how democratically(!) you choose your presidents. Your warmongering government doesn't even care about its citizens (see healthcare, gun laws, abortion laws, lgbt laws, online and other privacy rights, etc.). Your whole nationwide and even international media is a public opinion shaping and damage control asset for the government.
What the fuck do you expect to hear from other people, who have been direct or indirect victims of your warmongering and coups, to say about this? Tell you that is is so known a fact that we can practically ignore it at this point and carry on with our lives? Problem is, unless you stop, we can't even carry on with our lives.
Idk, I feel like Al Jazeera gets quite a bit of visibility and has a good amount of credibility, but Qatar isn't on this map.
It is, so you definitely want to keep that in mind when consuming their content. On the flipside, they have access to sources in the Middle East that your big mainstream western media organizations can only dream about, so you don't want to ignore them entirely either. There are ways to be smart about it.
edit: forum link
Great question!
Random video and forum with question:
WaterWorld, How many Cigarettes did the Smokers have? [6:06 | historicalnerd] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pDZK9JGJEeE
I feel the same about the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Was there a cigarette ship in the fleet or something?
America is a dictatorship of money disguised as a democracy, and the others are vassal states in lockstep with American foreign policy. Most of them have colonized and exploited the rest of the world for centuries and they're still doing it now, to the tune of over $10 trillion a year in net extraction from the global south.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
yeah,
these are the democracies that invaded Iraq/Libya to install a democracy.
I keep having to remind myself how much good it did to the people of Iraq/Libya.
and we all remember what a paradise those countries were. man, that time gadaffis son killed a waiter because he spilled soup. you miss him?
remember the black dude who gets shot for talking back in America ? anecdotes don't prove a general point.
btw Libya was doing better under Gaddafi
was that the reason for those arab springs?
was at least the weapon to kill gadaffi american so you can blame the west?
fuck hamas.
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Iraq is absolutely a functioning democracy and not a dictatorship right now.
Libya would be if it actually got invaded, which 100% should have happened. UN forces not taking control of the situation is a huge stain on the UN.
Calling for the invasion of Libya is fucking monstrous.
Over a million Iraqis died due to the US invasion of Iraq.
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The UN working in Libya as peacekeeping forces would've prevented the monstrous situation we're in now, at bare minimum. If you don't believe that, you quite simply are not recognizing past UN peacekeeping successes.
I have never supported the Iraq War but to deny Iraq is currently a functional, if very deeply flawed, democracy is, in my view, to devalue the Iraqi citizens and the fledgling democracy they have.
The UN working in Libya as peacekeeping forces would’ve prevented the monstrous situation we’re in now
Because it's that easy to counter Islamic extremism in a power vacuum. ISIS was active and gaining power in 2011, including in Libya.
to deny Iraq is currently a functional, if very deeply flawed, democracy is, in my view, to devalue the Iraqi citizens and the fledgling democracy they have.
The state of Iraq's corrupt democracy as of 2023 is little better than under Saddam
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/16/the-long-shadow-of-saddams-dictatorship-in-iraq
And all it cost was over a million Iraqi civilian deaths, millions of refugees, and the birth of ISIS in 2007.
The 2015 British Parliament inquiry found that the Islamic extremists fighting Qaddafi would not have succeeded without western air power, weapons, intelligence, and personnel, meaning the best way to prevent the humanitarian crisis in Libya would have been to fucking leave Libya alone in the first place. The inquiry also found that the intervention was economically motivated rather than humanitarian.
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Because it’s that easy to counter Islamic extremism in a power vacuum
Hey look I found the exact issue the UN peacekeepers address in these exact situations
The 2015 British Parliament inquiry found that the Islamic extremists fighting Qaddafi would not have succeeded without western air power, weapons, intelligence, and personnel, meaning the best way to prevent the humanitarian crisis in Libya would have been to fucking leave Libya alone in the first place.
Just let Gaddafi murder people who want democracy with superior air power guys. It's simple.
hey look I found the exact issue the UN peacekeepers address in these exact situations
Yeah? And how the fuck did that strategy work out anywhere else in the middle east?
people who want democracy
The coalition air mission was to support Islamic extremists in battles against the Libyan government. Those rebels wanted an Islamic state in Libya, not a democracy. They were also committing racist pogroms and atrocities against black Libyans, and western operatives on the ground were aware of it the entire time.
Read the fucking article. Here it is again:
Read every word of it before you respond to me.
Not sure where you have been in the past years but ISIS and Islamists in Libya.
The Middle East is a curious place. Regime change doesn't work if the population are too fractured for nation building, which Middle Eastern countries has plenty of. It is tragic to argue that living under authoritarians that provide stability is better than living free but without law and order.
I'm an advocate for democracy as much as the next person, but the secular dictators are what kept Islamic extremism in check. In this case, the dictators are the lesser evils. Which is why people accept that Bashar Al Assad won the Syrian civil war instead of placing faith on any of the opposition to rule, some of whom are Islamists.
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I would, quite frankly, rather live in a world with more democracies and more extremists than a world with fewer of both.
Liberal Democracy is the only acceptable form of governance.
Liberal democracy only works if people are A) well educated and informed and B) have a strong identity as a group. Societies need to be well informed on issues and work towards finding solutions that benefit all. Unfortunately, many countries lack either or both.
maybe you should read some articles from beyond the international community.
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from beyond the international community.
I know it's not your point but this implies asking aliens and I think that's fun.
As to your article, I am not and have never defended the Iraq War. Iraq is still a democracy, and I hope it remains one forever. That would be the absolute least the people of Iraq deserve after that war.
I don't miss Bush. A man I was too young to vote for, who lost the popular vote and was installed by his brother. A brother who got his position because his father was the head of intelligence service. Bush was a mediocre painter and a war criminal.
Is this post done in relation to some news story that just occurred?
Or is this just a generic First World versus Third World post?
It's the ladder, then they missed a few First World countries on that map.
I think its pretty close to a map of countries that don't recognise Palestine, or who continue to benefit from colonialism or globalisation.
I think its pretty close to a map of countries that don’t recognise Palestine, or who continue to benefit from colonialism or globalisation.
Ah, okay.
For what it's worth, as someone who lives in the US, don't just believe what you're hearing on CNN (etc.), that is very one-sided Pro-Israeli.
There are plenty of people who want to see Hamas destroyed, but not the Palestinians. They want the Palestinians to live free like any other Nation on this Earth, and in happiness, and absolutely hate seeing what's happening to them right now.
Palestinians tried peaceful protest. They got shot.
Hamas only exists because other strategies haven't worked.
Don't think you and I on an Internet forum are going to come up with the solution for world peace.
Hamas only exists because other strategies haven’t worked.
It's been said that it's Iran that lets Hamas exist, as Iran is trying to control and influence the region of the planet they live in (as any other major power would do in their corner of the world), and that their primary goal is not peace between the Palestinians and Israeli.
But again, we're not going to figure this all out on an Internet forum.
So that's why innocent protests in Palestine get protestors shot?
Don't let the perfect solution prevent you from finding any solution.
So that’s why innocent protests in Palestine get protestors shot?
Ultimately, yes. We're all more interconnected with each other than we'd like to admit, and violence begets violence.
Don’t let the perfect solution prevent you from finding any solution.
I never do.
The solution is known, it’s a secular state - which the US is actively opposing.
Not sure I'm understanding you correctly or not.
Are you saying that the US should force Israel to be a secular state?
Can one country force another country as to what their belief system should be?
The masses may be opposed, but you’re just the cattle that feeds the beast.
Moooo, I guess. /shrug
If you want to see the Palestinians live free then you want israel destroyed.
Look how Israel murders non Hamas Palestinians in the west bank and colonizes their land.
israel is a cartoonisly evil version of Jews that became the Nazi's themselves. Hamas is the result of people having tried every form of peaceful solution with israel and israel continuing to commit genocide.
If you want to see the Palestinians live free then you want the israel destroyed.
No I do not. I want them both to live.
The israeli state needs to go, their people don't need to die for that. Jews couldn't live in peace with Hitler either. Now that Hitler is gone they can live in Germany again
israel is a Nazi-esque ethno state based on racism and discrimination. Unless that is removed you can't even begin to think of peace. Nazi's need to go.
I guess I should be less surprised how this meme is sailing over people's heads in here
Me reading this comment a second after replying "whoosh" to a comment: face -> palm.
Sorry but too many -wanna-look-clever abbreviations for my poor technical brain to keep track of in multiple languages to even care about. Since you only came to insult, demotivation went up even further. Male sure not to have meltdown, i have heard it can be detrimental for snowbased.
They absolutely would not be far right in Japan and a few more on this map, but they would be right to far right in a lot of countries not on the map too.
I'm mostly poking fun. Some people will say rest of the world and really just mean Western Europe. You're mostly right though. I think economically, yes, definitely right or at least right of center. Socially though, very left. LGBT rights and civil equality and refugee acceptance are sadly not the norm. We've still got serious conservative parties pushing against them.
It's honestly a hard thing to distill down to one metric. And if you want to consider the cultural context too, it gets even more difficult. People like using the whole world in comparisons, but it's rather complex to accurately do that here.
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Unless you're talking about the UN, of course, in which case the map in the picture us essentially inverted.
It seems like media is controlled by a small number of people, not sure if they have anything in common.
Where spreading certain types of news, while excluding other viewpoints (and trying to smear the rest), will help keep them in power...
Not sure though, haha...
It seems like media is controlled by a small number of people, not sure if they have anything in common.
They do.
They're capital owners.
Yes, I agree.
May be I should have added "..." or made it more clear, that yes they do share things in common.
My fault on that end, thanks for pointing it out!
Normally when people talk about a "small cabal of elites ruling the world" it's a dogwhistle for "the jews".
That is a thing to watch out for... Thanks for pointing it out!
I was talking about 99% vs. 1% protests that were huge a while ago.
Framing working class vs. wealthy class.
Just to reiterate - if thinly veiled antisemitism wasn't your intent, you may want to phrase your subtle implications differently in the future.
Ah, another thing ro watch out for. Thanks for letting me know!
Remember 99% vs. 1% protests a while ago, they were pretty big.
Billionaires and wealthy class are the groups most people think about.
Working class vs. wealthy class
edit: wording and topic
I get it and apologize for my tone. I wasn't yet convinced at that point that it wasn't subtly veiled anti-semitism. Sorry that my internet cynicism sometimes runs high. 🙂
Thank you for the explaination!
Yes, we all can get too much into cynicism when talking in the interwebs!
Have a great day and thanks again!
No it's because the rest of the world is ruled by maniac dictators and poorly educated populations. Deny it fervently and all you proof is to be putinsbiatch
Ah yes, that does mean its uneducated population is ruled by a manic dictator. My mistake.
Also, it's weird, if Samsung rules the country, that its current president (I bet you can't name him without Googling) prosecuted them for fraud when he was a public prosecutor.
Much is known of the causes of certain things happening around the world.
By looking at leaked documents and reporting from know journalists that live in many different countries.
I think your comment is /s, but not sure, hahaha
Hope we all keep learning and have a great day!
Why would I be sarcastic about it? It sure isn't a joke.
Most all of countries in Africa and South America and a lot in Asia and all of ME is ruled by people that do not have the best intentions nor best interests for their people. De facto dictators.
The worse is they call themselves left wing OR right and they the same slave of some big insurance companies and the plaything of hedgefunds. Us & Europe aren't different, just richer.