The reason why I believe it’s irreversible is because of the power of the media. Too many people still believe the global warming narrative and are open to mass immigration. Not to mention the fact that the USA has succeeded in convincing many Europeans that Russia is to be an enemy instead of an ally.
All of this will greatly increase the cost of living for the common man while at the same time the welfare state is being destroyed. Europeans will face much hardship the next decennia and I don’t think they’ll be able to recover.
I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but I’ll voice it here anyways :)
Believe me, there are many in the liberal sphere who do not support unlimited mass migration. Open borders are not compatible with a welfare state.
As for denying the changing climate and supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I don't feel anything I can type in short order would enlighten the reader if they don't already see the injustice after a few hundred thousand dead.
Maybe you liberals shouldn't support neoconservative conflicts that drive the migration in the first place. Hillary's State Department did such a great job in Honduras, Libya, Syria. The same is happening now in Ukraine. These conflicts are all about preserving American hegemony, nothing more.
Should tell the Russians that they seem to think the war in Ukraine is about fixing the “mistake” of Ukraines independence.
I am just quoting what the Russian media said in there accidentally posted victory article early on in the war.
But I agree it is super delusional.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...
>> Russia is restoring its unity - the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe of our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome
I suggest you read the article i think you’ll find the word NATO doesn’t even appear in it.
> they just don't want NATO setting up shop on their borders
Then they have already failed as the Russian border with NATO is now longer then it would be if you included Ukraine and Ukraine isn’t even in NATO.
I don’t think it was this though as Germany gave Russia assurances before the war that they would veto Ukraines NATO application.
> NATO has spent the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union breaking all of their assurances to Russia that it would not expand, literally encircling them.
There was never any formalised agreement to not expand NATO, so no promise was ever made.
Regardless of that Russia has multiple international agreements with Ukraine (that are formalised) that say they will never threaten their sovereignty.
Why doesn’t Russia have to follow those?.
Another question one might ask is why Russias neighbours want to join NATO it’s probably because Russia has invaded nearly all of them at some point in time.
Seems pretty reasonable to me to want to defend yourself from what at this point seems like a likely future invasion,
The word NATO appeared in every diplomatic negotiation about the Donbas preceding and subsequent to the war. Don't waste people's time with nonsense-- I can find an article in US media that also puts forward every conceivable position if I try hard enough.
>Regardless of that Russia has multiple international agreements with Ukraine (that are formalised) that say they will never threaten their sovereignty.
Why doesn’t Russia have to follow those?.
You mean like the Minsk accords that Zelensky failed to implement? The Ukrainian people put their faith in him to end the war, but he caved to the Right. Turns out actors don't make good presidents, as we know in the US as well. https://harpers.org/archive/2023/10/the-tragedy-of-volodymyr...
It’s not nonsense it’s russias own position on the war straight from there own kremlin approved propaganda outlets.
I know it’s an inconvenient article as it dispels the narrative of this war being about NATO and shows it for what it really is, russian imperialism.
> You mean like the Minsk accords that Zelensky failed to implement?
All the agreements I speak off predate the Minsk accords by years to decades.
russia didn’t follow any of them so why should we have faith they would follow anything new?.
It’s not like russia obeyed the Minsk accords either (shocking I know).
russia doesn’t appear to follow international agreements when it doesn’t benefit them.
So once again I ask why does russia get to ignore and violate all the formalised agreements it has with Ukraine.
Where as everyone else has to obey vague not in writing promises that where never formalised?.
Putin is a monster on the same scale as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Your support for him is disgusting.
You may not owe monsters better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
How silly to try to talk about a handful of climate protestors who actually give a shit about the planet in the same breath you talk about garbage exports (citing... Nothing) and then using that to excuse China and India using rivers as their own garbage disposal.
As for the climate hypocrisy argument, sorry to hurt your preconceived notions, but it's already proven that most of the waste that ends up dumped in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-environment-plas...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Philippines-sl....
https://e360.yale.edu/features/plastic-waste-imports-recycli...
But go on, vacillate and down vote in your self righteousness.
Your argument comparing climate protestors and governments who ship garbage to developing countries is bunk, though. Ever thought about who those protestors are angry with?
An intelligent conversation can be had about failing democratic institutions in the west, the need to disincentive wasteful consumption, and (as happens already) what levels of support developed countries owe to developing countries to dissuade the latter from ramping up fossil fuels consumption.
But your finger wagging still doesn't make sense in the context of thinking India or the developing world is any better.
I never implied that India or China are doing any better (although India has taken massive strides which is usually ignored by the West). My gripe is with Western countries criticizing the global south for environmental neglect, when they don't do anything about it and simply ship away their problems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/climate/oil-kenya-africa-...
Stop being a parasite and return to India if you hate Europe that much. But no, no, you people seem to hate the places you run off to but don't want to return. Same with Russians enjoying the "decadent gay West" while claiming they hate it and supporting Putin. Same with Turks living on German welfare while loving Erdogan.
Put your money where your mouth is and go back to India. Then you can complain.
He is free to hate the West while living in it. He's not going to prison for it (unlike he would in the countries he likes, ironically). He's not getting deported from the West despite claiming to hate the West or anything.
But I am also free to call him out on it. I have the same freedom, no? Why would he have the freedom to insult me (and you, since you said "our western") but not us to insult him back?
He can call me a hypocrite for West not being perfect and not solving all the problems of the world, and I can call him hypocrite for hating the West and its values yet still living in here for want of luxury. Is it a useful conversation? Not really, honestly, but it is fair.
But more importantly, look up paradox of tolerance and philosophy following from it. You can tolerate a lot, but tolerating too much is suicidal, because the intolerant will eventually take over. This is a general principle - welcoming people in the West is fine, for example, welcoming people who hate the West and want to destroy it is not.
Absolutely anyone under any regime—British or Iranian—can say “then leave if you don't like it”.
Instead, his retort was to tell me to pack my bags and eff off.
"Stop being a parasite." Sure, I will. This is exactly the kind of attitude displayed by hoity-toity Europeans that has led me to this position. Curse on all the immigrants who actually struggled to create a life for themselves, which includes me and a number of my employees who also migrated (mostly from Eastern and Balkan Europe) in search of a better life in the West, by virtue of their talents and skills, while you import the best "doctors and engineers" from across the Med. You can tell my one of my Croatian employees to "stop being a parasite", even though he can't get a house to rent in his preferred locality by virtue of being from a Balkan country, in spite of earning 4x the median wage of the country. Yes, we're the parasites and cockroaches, and like any of those, we'll find a more inviting home (incidentally the US and Singapore are already being touted as options).
But you go on, you poor thing, and keep insulting us from your high and mighty "Europeanness". After all, it's only a few decades now till the end of twilight.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I am not the original commenter, but let me add here my own observation. In the USA we have a lot of laws and regulations that are supposed to prevent industry from polluting the environment, exploiting child labor, unduly endangering their workforce, etc. You cannot produce a product to place on the shelves of Walmart if you violate these rules. I think most Americans support most of those regulations. But we do not impose those rules on companies from China or India.
This means that a product produced in the USA can cost significantly more than an identical product produced in India. Naturally, USA industry recognizes this and shifts their production out of the USA. You could characterize this as "ship your garbage to other poorer countries." That is, don't allow USA rivers to be polluted but make your money by polluting rivers outside the USA.
I don't suggest that the USA removes its prohibitions from USA industry. I suggest that they impose the same prohibitions on non-USA industry with respect to markets inside the USA. And by this I don't mean raise tariffs. I mean that if a company in Iowa is not allowed to put a product on the shelves at Walmart because their smokestack is too dirty, then a company in Qinghai should not be allowed to do so if their smokestack is too dirty by the same standard.
Oh my goodness, “brash talk”. We Westerners give out a whole laundry list of things that we do contary to our “proclaimed values” and then in the next paragraph say “anyway, if we don't get our act together the third-worlders might stop looking up to us and our values”.[1] It's farcical how arrogant that is.
[1] Mock quote.
Anyway, there is nothing good that came from the last NATO led interventions, did it? Which is part of the problem.
But report me if you want. I'm sure all of us on this site would get banned because we (“we” as in HN, lest you accuse me of misreading again) constantly disagree about how we interpret each other here.
Don't worry, to the rest of the developing world, Western democracies are already considered to be a bunch of moralizing hypocrites, looking to impose their erstwhile colonial tendencies in other ways. Oh, and you guys are a laughing stock with the recent immigration issues, what with Lampedusa being showcased front and center of the news.
You guys ship your garbage to other poorer countries in some sort of wretched don't ask, don't tell policy, then blame those same countries for polluting the earth. Meanwhile a bunch of clowns in your countries inconvenience the rest of the populace by sticking themselves to the roads as a "sign of protest". To quote Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE foreign minister, "the next generation of terrorists will be from Europe and the West".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-dV4m43xZmY
Get over it, you guys are already a joke, already on the decline. Get out of your city shells and walk the rural areas a bit to see how your fellow countrymen actually feel about the policies of your government. Of how the common man has been continually shafted while you preach and vacillate about human rights.
I look forward to the amount of PhD dissertations that will study the decline of Europe and the West over the post-GFC decade. Rant over.