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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Can someone explain to me why Americans seem so hostile towards Biden over Gaza all of a sudden?

    US support for Israel goes back decades. America has been in bed with all sorts of dictators commiting heinous crimes and still is. Not to forget the illegal invasion of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties or the long list of US war crimes revealed by WikiLeaks and largely indiscriminate drone strikes across the globe. Most of these seemed to elicit much harsher condemnation overseas while the US public appeared generally uninterested. So why does this conflict in Palestine in which the US isn’t even an active party suddenly evoke such an emotional response?


  • For now reddit seems fine (even though I feel a noticable deterioration of multiple communities). Though the important change is that alternatives have established themselves. Lemmy might not be big right now but from now on reddit has to be extra careful not to upset redditors. Every new step they take that worsens the experience will drive a new wave of users away from their site and now more of them will find communities elsewhere that have been established during the first exodus this year.

    At the same time I’m unfortunately quite certain that the enshittification of reddit will continue as investors demand higher profits. So we will see more waves of redditors leaving. Such a migration in waves could also be observed with Twitter, after every new step that Elon took to ruin the site.


  • Xenon@lemmy.worldtoEurope@feddit.deDraghi: EU must become a state
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    7 months ago

    Can we please stop this eternal debate about the EU becoming a state? I feel like it’s besides the point and only evokes harmful reflexes on all sides. The question should be how to streamline and organize decision making. Who decides on which level about what. As Draghi points out correctly, certain stategic decisions should be made at an EU level. That would be more efficient, more impactful and help Europeans as a whole but it’s not really about “turning the EU into a country”. I get that “the sovereign nation state” has been the single one all-encompassing, all-powerful entity at the heart of political thinking since at least the 17th century but I just feel like it’s no longer necessarily a helpful frame of reference for many developments in the 21st century.



  • As far as I know the fact that slave trade was already a well established business in western Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly with Muslim nations played a huge role. European colonizers were in desperate need for workforce in their new American territories. Plagues from the old world had absolutely decimated most of the indigenous population plus many Europeans also struggled severely with tropical diseases that they weren’t used to.

    Originally, African slaves were mostly used out of economic convenience and not for specific ideological reasons. It’s quite disturbing to consider how this particular anti black racism that is still very prevalent today developed directly as a result of and as an instrument to maintain the institution of slavery. The economic circumstances of the 16th or 17th century still have enormous implications for our moral landscape in the 21st century.