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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Both of these guys are ancient. I wouldn’t care if any of them used drugs (as long as they don’t pose long-term risks for their health) because they might as well be medication. Or are we going to be so dense that the idea that two 80 years olds are likely taking some medication is going to fly over our heads? Furthermore, where do we draw the line of what a “drug-enhancing drug” is? Coffee? Most adults take it to function under inhuman schedules. Adderall? If you do have ADHD, you do also need it to function; if you don’t have it, it’s going be even less useful than coffee. Anything else that they bought at a pharmacy? I don’t care.

    All in all, this looks like a talking point made up by people who want to treat politics like a sport, where we’re supposed to watch “athletes” compete with equal opportunity for performance, which is definitely not what a presidential debate should be about.










  • Well. Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization.

    Malthus got a lot of shit because he came up with his theories exactly when civilization was entering into a period where the advancements in technology were drastically expanding those limits, and because his ideas were instrumentalized by a lot of unsavory types, but he did find a (very incomplete) segment of truth.

    Right now, the biggest danger of it all becoming relevant again is the possibility that sustained ecological disaster might dramatically lower our population upper limit without us having the capacity to react fast enough.



  • Plenty of different reasons.

    Historically, Greece was a poor country in Europe because it was the periphery of the Ottoman empire and therefore barely received investment.

    Through the 20th century, the country went through pretty corrupt governments (one of them being a dictatorship).

    When they joined the European market, it was already a very unproductive country in relative terms, which tends to force you into remaining in the periphery under normal market conditions; and their most educated citizens saw a very easy and profitable opportunity in just migrating out.

    On top of that, the only sector of the Greek economy that had any sort of strength was tourism, which very rarely provides good wages.

    By the 2007 crisis, they already had a dangerously high debt. Because they were, again, a tourism-focused economy, when the countries that had the most tourists going to Greece entered into recession, Greece’s income plumetted as well, and the debt just soared.

    A little bit later, Greeks elected Syriza, which had simply accepted that they were in a debt spiral that would ultimately crush the country. Syriza’s leaders told the other European governments that their debt had to be renegotiated (annoying for Greece’s creditors, but at least it would be possible for them to pay in some capacity), or they’d leave the Euro-zone and just declare bankruptcy (thus they wouldn’t pay back anything) (terrible for Greece, but perhaps not as terrible as the alternative).

    The rest of Europe told them to fuck off for a variety of reasons (plenty of German newspapers had chosen Greece as their sacrificial lamb, often calling the people of Southern European countries lazy, the Spanish president back then wanted to crush Syriza because they had been associated with a growing Spanish opposition party, generally a lot of them were into fanatical fiscal conservatism).

    Then Syriza chose not to leave the Euro-zone anyway (which provoked Varoufakis to leave the government, out of principle), and just stick to managing the country’s misery. It has only been shit year after shit year for Greece since then, as any possibility of steering into a different direction was shot dead. It’s just a country without hope at this point.