Oh, ads work alright on people like me. People like me who despise ads. People like me who go out of their way to avoid ads. People like me who, when confronted with ads which somehow manage to make it to our ears for a few seconds before we manage to skip them or rip off the headphones - the only ads which I'm still confronted with are "dynamic ad insertion" specimens in netcasts, often at DOUBLE THE VOLUME - will remember the brand or company and actively avoid giving them our business.
Yes, ads work, maybe not in the way the advertiser thinks but they work alright.
"Cliché parroting" makes for a nice sound bite but in this case it is not the best description of what the parent does. If you want to use a two-word phrase to describe his claim I'd go for "pattern recognition" to which I'd concur that yes, indeed, there is a clear pattern of blue states and cities [...] being obstructionist and sheltering criminals.
Those who go through the official migration paths - in the U.S.A. or elsewhere, doesn't matter - are not "illegal aliens" so that word play with "as yet undocumented immigrants" doesn't hold. People who are waiting for their paperwork to go through the official channels will have some form of proof of their application status. If they were told they could await the results while in the U.S.A they're not illegal aliens, if they were told to await permission outside of the U.S.A they are. Those who cross the border with the intent to stay without legal permission are "illegal aliens" and are in violation of whatever laws cover migration - 8 US code § 1325 in the U.S.A, artikel 197 Wetboek van Strafrecht (for those declared unwanted) and artikel 61-67 Vreemdelingenwet in the Netherlands, etc. Some of these illegal aliens violate other (criminal) laws which makes them "criminal illegal aliens" but everyone who stays in a country - any country - without legal permission has violated whatever laws cover migration into that country.
You still need JavaScript to instantiate WebAssembly and let it interact with the page, which is why your sibling comment admits there's still a bit of JS.
I had a look at the maps in the article and noticed they somehow managed to forget the Netherlands, the #2 exporter of agricultural products in the world. This makes me wonder about the quality of the rest of the article given that Nature, once a journal of note has rapidly gone down the ideologically biased slide like many other publications and as such lost a lot of credibility.
The Netherlands is also the #4 importer of food in the world. I reckon with these transport heavy countries it is very hard to estimate how self-dependent they actually are, versus how much is settlement lag on the transport portion.
The biggest export product is dairy and eggs; I get that, most of our country feels like it's pastures lmao. And eggs / chicken farms are relatively compact, not sure what they feed them though.
But second is "cocoa and cocoa preparations"... the Netherlands cannot grow cocoa itself, wrong climate, so this is all processed imported raw materials as well as re-exported cocoa beans. Third is "horticultural products", so that's all the flowers and tulip bulbs coming from the greenhouses and tulip fields, but also keep in mind a lot of that is grown in e.g. Africa and just passes through.
We're in a strategic location, sea access, rivers going deep into Europe, and we have a lot of trade connections, is the gist of it. Oh and good cows / pastures.
Dismissing the dutch agricultural output as "creative bookkeeping" goes waaaayy too far IMO. Your own article distinguishes local production and re-exports and those make up less than half.
The country of plofkip disappearing into water and steam as you cook it, of south-american chicken re-labeled as a dutch product, and the country of absolutely tasteless, hard-as-rock tomatoes as a great export product.
A quick cycling tour through any of the greenhouse areas will quickly remind you why such an agricultural model is maybe not the greatest of ideas.. The lingering chemical smell is all telling.
> The real benefiter of this is the capitalist ...
Tired old socialist rhetoric.
The real benefiter of this is the state which can now have many times the tax base at the price of none. Where women used to take care of the children and do the housekeeping those tasks are now often done by paid day care, taxed by the state and paid help, again taxed by the state. From a single tax payer a family - father, mother, two children - now supplies two tax payers and several 'downstream' tax payers.
It's hilarious how the government used Rosy the Riveter to convince women that being liberated is slaving away building death machines for the state to literally blow up all our money, while sending your kids to people who don't give two fucks for them, all while moving all that domestic stuff to the GDP so they can tax the shit out of it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s not the capitalists making trillions from the free doubling of labor supply, it’s the politicians taking their 10%…
You don't need to add this, just say that you agree with him on that point. If the mob comes down on you for agreeing with the devil you can counter that you agree with facts, not based on who happens to voice them.
A flowery description of conquest by the Islamic Mughals. Where is the indignation about the destruction of Hindu temples and idols, as documented in his memoirs, the Baburnama. About his disdain for indigenous religions which laid the foundation for Mughal atrocities continued under his successors?
Imagine a similar description of conquest by, say, the Christian Spaniards in the Americas. The noble conquests of the brave Hernan Cortés, in similarly flowery language. Imagine the shouts of protest against... well, there is no nedd to imagine since those protests are commonplace.
The Islamic conquest and colonisation of the middle- and far-east is one of the more bloody episodes in history rife with all the vices for which western colonisers are constantly blamed. Slavery was and in some places still is commonplace but the same voices which proclaim the vices of the west are silent or point at the virtues of others who were and sometimes still are guilty of the same. Why is that?
Tbf, Babur was equally disdainful about Islam and would wax eloquently about getting drunk on wine and high off opium.
He was just a Chagatai raider who somehow ended up the ruler of a principality.
The actual empire was built by Akbar and Shah Jahan.
Political Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism only arose in South Asia in 19th century with the collapse of the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh Empires and early British attempts at mass Christian conversion which led to political religious movements arise in the late 19th century.
in those times religion was a scant sixth in order of reasons and rationalisations for conquest and empire, then as now it was a technological advantage, guns, and the rajputs didn't have them, mobility, the rajputs were agrarian, the mughals were mostly pastoralists and always on the move.
but just so that you know, I have traveled through north west punjub, to muree, and lundi khotal, and there are ruins of stupas and things much much older that litter the landscapes, so to pick one particular starting point is disingenious, or worse.
The Mughal empire was founded in 1526 and dissolved in 1857. Hernan Cortés was born in 1485, reached the Americas in 1504 and conquered the Aztec empire between 1519 and 1521, very close to the Mughal conquests. There are whole academic disciplines based around criticising Western colonisation and conquests but I am not aware of anything similar targeting non-Western history.
My reaction is not so much targeted at this specific example - religious (Islamic) conquest - but towards the lack of criticism of non-Western conquest and colonisation.
I am of Indian Christian stock (which is only relevant because I have no religious or creedal stake in any of these sites) but I have noticed this bias as well. The destruction of classical North Indian temples or religious sites by invading islamists forces is met with indifference in most of the world while similar invasions by Christian forces in the Americas or Africa are properly criticized. We have endless critical scholarship on Columbus and the Spaniards (which there should be), but the moment anyone says anything about the somewhat contemporaneous Islamic conquests in Asia, suddenly you are accused of islamophobia. For example, I have seen people lamenting the destruction of the universities at Nalanda and Taksashila being accused of islamophobia because they point out that Islamic radicalism was the intellectual basis for the burning of these institution.
People should be free to criticize all of these events as they see fit.
Yes, that is part of what I was getting at. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, if we're to criticise Christian conquest there is no reason whatsoever to refrain from criticising conquest under any other flag or religion, especially one like Islam which - not having undergone something like the Enlightenment - still has conquest of the world under Islamic rule as one of its basic tenets. There can be endless debates about whether the duty of all muslims towards jihad is to be interpreted as some form of spiritual conquest or in the way it is interpreted by groups like Boko Haram and Daesh but it is clear that Islamic scripture has been and still is used as a call to arms and conquest and with that it is just intellectual dishonesty to use terms like 'Islamophobia' towards those who point this out.
Yes I agree. I don't think anyone should be accused of islamophobia or christophobia or hinduphobia for that matter for pointing out problematic episodes in the history of Islam, Christianity, or Hinduism. The constant accusations of islamophobia have created the current backlash that we are seeing in India. I will criticize my own group of Christians as well with many calling for criminal penalties now against a man who insulted St Francis Xavier. Of course my view is heavily drawn from the fact that I'm American which means we are free to insult anyone and are taught to grow thick skin.
But the simple truth is that criticizing Islam in the Indian subcontinent often ends in death or threats of violence, unlike most other religions, which seem better able to handle criticism. Look at Salman Rushdie. Scary
Abrahamic societies will naturally be sympathetic to the acts of other Abrahamic peoples and antagonistic to pagan and polytheistic cultures, especially if the non-Abrahamic culture rejects the Abrahamic proselytising that purports to "civilise the heathens" as many Indic societies did. To expect anything else under some expectation of fairness or empathy is nothing but childish naïveté.
Western Christian public culture is anything but sympathetic towards the acts of Western Christian colonisers. There is sympathy towards other cultures, Abrahamic or otherwise but towards its own there is mostly atonement of sins and self-chastisement, at least outwardly.
The ignorance of Western people to think "Abrahamic bad", "Eastern good" is very aggravating. Modern times have given us plenty of violent Bhuddist and Hindu extremism right before our eyes, for example. And it isn't the first time in history for either of those either. No religion ends up being special, because, unfortunately, humans are fundamentally misbegotten.
Not to mention the ignorance in this thread of the basic fact that Muslim empires kept attacking and supplanting each other in South Asia, culminating in the Mughal defeat of another Muslim empire, which is exactly what this article describes. But instead of actually reading it, you'd rather bring naked biases and caricatures to the table.
Is that what you read in my comment? Because that is not what I wrote. People sympathise with those who are similar to them. Europeans sympathise with Ukrainians, Muslims with Palestinians, Abrahamics with other Abrahamics. How you got from that to your "Abrahamic bad", I can't even fathom.
Jews probably have a very different view from yours as to how Christians expressed their Abrahamic solidarity during nearly two millennia of persecution in Europe.
I very much agree with you: its not what westerners want to hear. The fact that you comment got downvoted to dead for no real reason rather proves that.
Sounds like aspartame is a boon for your health if its addition means you eat fewer Mars bars and drink less sweetened bubbly water. Hooray for aspartame!
In that case feel free to jump. Eat candy bars, drink sweetened coloured preserved bubbly water and do all those other things you want. Isn't freedom great? As long as your freedom does not curtail another's feel free to do what you want within the bounds of the law. I'll even go so far as to add that some laws can be violated without consequences because they're outdated, superfluous, bought and paid for by those who stand to profit from their establishment or otherwise not conducive to a thriving society. Of course there is that problem with the consequences of your and my freedom: if you decide to indulge in too much freedom and as a result of that incur large medical bills from cliff-jumping, the mentioned candy bar and sweetened water diet and other similarly unhealthy habits it would not be fair to limit my freedom to do what I want with my hard earned money by claiming the tax payer (where I live) or insurance customer (where most people on this forum live) need to pay for your habits. As it stands this is the case but it doesn't have to be that way. Maybe there should be extra insurance premiums for habitual cliff jumpers and candy bar customers? Of course this is not easy to implement since it would not be fair to those eating one of those bars every other month or people who jump from 2 m high cliffs.
Yes, ads work, maybe not in the way the advertiser thinks but they work alright.
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