Let's go back to the good old days when we were helping ISIS out and elected Trump

Then how come people keep mentioning Animal Farm

If thorns are a dealbreaker, there is no shortage of flowers without them. Indluding rose varieties.

Yeah OP, how dare you having convictions and acting according to them.

Devoid of context, I think 1984 is an ok story with good concepts, bad worldbuilding and double plus ungoodly written characters.

With context, it's a barely disguised anticommunist propaganda piece portrayed as as "anti authoritarian"

To be fair, he didn't come up with it, Freud (who would have a field day analyzing Orwell's books) had the concept of Verleugnung ("denial" or "disavow"). Scott Fitzgerald, of Great Gatsby fame, once wrote that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function".

Heck, if we squint a little we could track back a lot of concepts of 1984 all the way back to Hobbes.

Every store is a library of you shoplift

Aww is someone's little trip to murder and rape brown people not as nice as they expected it?

Exactly. But knowing what worked for Portugal is just one clue. It's also important to have an understanding of why it worked, identifying other factors that could have contributed, ways the policy can be improved, how effective it would be if implemented in vastly different countries ways to adapt policies to those countries, and even expand the concept beyond drugs.

Imagine a country is going through terrible times and decides to implement some radical austerity measures, sell public companies, defund public services, do all the stuff the IMF loves. Or maybe the opposite, the country nationalizes everything and expels all foreign companies. Let's say a decade or two later the country starts really prospering. It would be unwise to assume this is just universal without proper understanding the mechanics of what happened.

Doesn't Brazil have the most after China?

You know how some physics experiments are difficult because of shit like particles having indeterminacy, behaving differently when observed and interference from other particles making them interact in unpredictable ways? Well, people are even worse.

That said, geopolitics is a giant live experiment, you need only pay attention and analyse. If you come up with a good enough model of undertanding, you can predict what is the likely the best course of action before taking them.

.world, welcome to Tankie Lemmy