soumerd_retardataire

joined 2 years ago
[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Without the excuse of secondhand smoking.
By decree.

freedom and democracy ™

(I'd be more annoyed if tobacco was a way to obtain ideas but, apart from the tabaccheros who live an unscientifically long life, tobacco is worthless so i don't care)

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

At least Russia granted the long-awaited wish of south-eastern ukrainians, who fought alongside them against pro-n.a.t.o. ukrainians.
And despite being righteous(, since Ukraine historically only accepted referendums benefiting it, instead of 'trusting in a better future with China'/'refusing to join those whose "friendly advices" destroyed them in 1991, along with Yugoslavia', they're owned by their capitalists/thieves, mind-controlled by the millionaire's Pravda, so much ashamed of themselves and even of their glorious past when they showed the world what ruling virtuously could look like, e.g. by even refusing hereditary genetics in favor of acquired traits, among thousands of things), russians were much more measured(, including in comparison to the blind destruction by Ukraine, according to the pro-russian propaganda at that time).

Palestine-Israel and Russia-Ukraine-Donbass-Crimea are not the same situations.

 

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/after-denying-massacring-civilians




https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1936913191369343452

80% of the country has been destroyed, 100% of the population displaced, 50% of the deaths children(, 0 solution has been seriously discussed), ... :

https://x.com/dn_osama_rabee/status/1933093727423095151
https://x.com/translatingpal/status/1936134624620540307
https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1936555053768171996
...

17% would only be comparable to the second Congo war(, 1998-2003, 3-5M out of ~30M, mostly civilians from starvation or diseases), or the Korean war(, 1950-1953, 1.5-2M out of 9M, mostly from US bombings), otherwise, a.f.a.i.k., the only relatively recent recorded historical events with a higher percentage are genocides(, that have even reached an unbelievable 90% in two cases).

https://x.com/caitoz/status/1926467525488889926


I mean, what can muslims do except invade Israel(, or at least occupy Palestine) ?
idk...

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1937720341952102414

In primary school, we had to draw pictures for the olympics games in Beijing(, probably in 2001 when it was announced, i drew some kind of factory where they were produced from birth to become athletes since i already had pictures in mind of them mistreating children to produce champions), and i distinctly remember a teacher worried because some students were supposed to go to China ~next year for a trip(, i.i.r.c.), and she was (obviously? )convinced that such assignment endangered them, true story :/.

And Europe is censoring the Internet(, hate speech or disinformation)(, regardless of platforms policy or even national choices). But do not worry, the Chinese People's Republic(, who hasn't bombed anyone in 40 years, something about a speck and a log,) will always need to be liberated as long as the t.v. says so. It'd have been so easy to demonize Taiwan or any other country.
Still no sign of their social credit system b.t.w.
Glad that they were authoritarian enough to have survived internal&external threats.

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There are a lot of books/articles, but it reminds me of these accusations from "The divide" by Jason Hickel :

‘Countries don’t go bust,’ as Citibank CEO Walter Wriston was fond of saying. This made good sense at the time – especially given that developmentalism was working and global South economies were soaring; no one thought they would have any difficulty repaying debts. So banks like Citibank, Chase, Deutsche Bank and others sent representatives jetting all around the global South to convince governments to take out big loans. They called this ‘go-go banking’, or ‘loan pushing’. Many of these loans were legitimate, of course. But in the midst of all the excitement, some banks got carried away. Loan pushers were trained to invent inflated projections of how beneficial the loans would be, manipulating statistics to convince governments to borrow even if they knew full well that they would never be able to repay. Pushers often focused specifically on dictatorships.
(...)
For loan pushers, what counted was not the quality of the loans, but their quantity. For each loan they sold, they made a handsome kickback in the form of so-called ‘participation fees’. (...) These kinds of incentives are known to be problematic. (...)
By 1982, total debt stocks had quadrupled, from $400 billion in 1970 to more than $1.6 trillion twelve years later. In many countries, debt levels reached well over 50 per cent of GDP. If the loans had been used to build productive capacity, this might have been all right. But because they were used largely to cover rising oil prices, the prospect of future repayment began to seem a pipe dream. To make matters worse, the terms of trade between global South countries and their Western counterparts were continuing to deteriorate; their raw material exports were worth less and less compared to the manufactured products they had to buy from abroad, so any income they might have used to repay debt was quickly diminishing.
(...)
The banks, meanwhile, were having a field day. Through the miracle of compound interest, they were raking in enormous profits – more than $100 billion per year by 1980.There was only one problem. The loans were denominated in US dollars, and the interest rates were variable. This meant that any significant rise in US interest rates would mean the interest rates on the loans would rise too, possibly pushing vulnerable poor countries into default. And that’s exactly what happened in 1981, when US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker jacked interest rates up as high as 21 per cent. Poor countries found that they simply could not repay their loans at such high rates. In 1982, Mexico took the inevitable step and defaulted on part of its $80 billion debt. This move spurred other heavily indebted countries – such as Brazil and Argentina – to do the same, and set off what became known as the Third World Debt Crisis.
(...)
According to basic free-market theory, when a borrower defaults on a loan, the loss should be shouldered by the lender; after all, it was their risk to begin with. But Wall Street had so much invested in Third World debt they knew that they would be unable to absorb the losses, and would almost certainly collapse. They refused to let this happen. They set about convincing the US government to bail them out.
(...)
The US government stepped in to bail out the banks by forcing Mexico and other countries to repay their loans. They did this by repurposing the International Monetary Fund. The IMF was originally designed to use its own money to lend to countries with balance of payments problems, so that they could keep government spending up and therefore avoid another depression. It was John Maynard Keynes’s plan for making sure that the economy of the industrialised world stayed afloat during hard times. But now the G7 was going to use the IMF for a different purpose entirely: to force global South countries to stop government spending and use their money instead to repay loans to Western banks. In other words, the IMF came to act as a global debt enforcer – the equivalent of the bailiff who comes to repossess your car, only much more powerful. This radical shift in the mission of the IMF was only possible because during this period IMF leaders – such as managing director Jacques de Larosière – systematically purged the institution of people who supported the original Keynesian philosophy.
(...)
The real causes of the crisis were exogenous: they had to do with exorbitant interest rates and declining terms of trade, over which global South countries had no control. But the IMF had no intention of tackling these problems (...) The crisis was simply an excuse for rolling out an economic agenda that Washington had long been seeking to impose.
(...)
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Western powers had struggled to prevent the rise of developmentalism in the South. What they failed to accomplish through piecemeal coups and covert intervention, the debt crisis did for them in one fell swoop.
The SAPs pushed the very same policies that the Chicago School had tested out in Chile, but instead of being imposed through violence, they were imposed by leveraging debt (...) and without the embarrassing inconvenience of dictators and torture chambers. The brilliance of structural adjustment is that it seemed as though it was voluntary – as though global South countries chose to accept the programmes in order to get out from under their debt.

It's not his only explanation, after all nationalism and humanism are mutually exclusive.

Between 1973 and 1993, global South debt grew from $100 billion to $1.5 trillion. Of the $1.5 trillion, only $400 billion was actually borrowed money. The rest was piled up simply as a result of compound interest.

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Perhaps ignorant and out-of-topic, but that's a f*cking waste of money i.m.o. :

Almost 3 trillion, every year.

 

Here : https://cepr.net/publications/jubilee-report-2025

An a.i. synthesis(, sry for not doing it myself, i realize that these bullet points lack clarity) :

Context & Diagnosis

  • The developing world faces a triple crisis :
    • Unsustainable public debt burdens
    • Underdevelopment and poverty
    • Disproportionate impacts of climate change

The global financial architecture is biased toward the Global North, rewarding capital holders while penalizing vulnerable nations.
Developing countries are defaulting on their people and future, not just on creditors.


Root Problems Identified :

  • Procyclical capital flows destabilize poor countries : money floods in during booms, then flees during crises.
  • Private creditors and international financial institutions have enabled unsustainable and extractive lending, yet avoid consequences.
  • Debt restructurings are slow, shallow, and unfair, often dictated by powerful creditors.
  • Lack of a sovereign bankruptcy mechanism leads to repeated crises.
  • Vulture funds exploit legal systems to sue poor countries for full repayment.
  • Blended finance and public-private partnerships often privatize profits and socialize risks.

  • 3.3 billion people live in countries spending more on interest payments than on health.
  • 2.1 billion live in countries spending more on debt than on education.
  • In Africa, 57% of the population lives in countries spending more on debt than on health or education.
  • In 2023, $30 billion was transferred from poor countries to private creditors in the Global North.
  • Since 2013, public debt in Africa has been growing faster than GDP.
  • Only 8% of global blended finance since 2015 has gone to low-income countries.
  • more here

Seven Key Principles Proposed :

  • No net financial transfers from debt-distressed countries to creditors.
  • End IMF and multilateral development banks bailouts of private or bilateral creditors.
  • Ensure shared responsibility between borrowers and lenders.
  • Require timely and sufficient restructurings to restore sustainability.
  • Prioritize economic growth over austerity.
  • Make credit quality(, long-term, countercyclical, development-aligned,) a global priority.
  • Redesign Debt Sustainability Analyses to include climate vulnerability and social impacts.

Recommended Actions :

  • Launch a new HIPC II initiative to cancel unsustainable debt, including private creditors.
  • Create a Jubilee Fund for distressed-debt buybacks using discounted bond prices.
  • Expand Special Drawing Rights and make their distribution more equitable.
  • Reform IMF interest and surcharge policies.
  • Establish an international sovereign debt resolution mechanism (bankruptcy court or UN-backed mediation).
  • Create global climate and commodity stabilization funds.
  • Introduce capital account regulations to reduce volatile capital flow exposure.
  • Mandate greater transparency and oversight in public borrowing and lending practices.

« Inequality is the root of social ills. » — Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium §202
« We must rethink the whole economic system to guarantee the dignity of the human person and the common good. » — Fratelli Tutti §168


There's a timeline here : https://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee_2025_hub

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Israel has been fucking around for decades, and found out on October 7th.

Also, the pretext/'casus belli' for this war is so lazy, it's not like, e.g., Pakistan and India, or the u.s.a. and Japan : Iran would never want to destroy these sacred lands nor expose palestinians to radioactivity. But w/e, we can use the most unlikely excuses and people will just believe what they're being told, we can't just use the real reasons apparently.

My favorite solution would be to give territories in the u.s. to muslims and in Europe to jews, in exchange for a third of Israel/Palestine to christians(, and a third to jews, and another third to muslims), i said.
Nobody even tries to seek solutions, they're not discussed in the debates, we ignore the available options.

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
3
What ! (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml to c/europe@lemmy.ml
 

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-china-start-talks-lifting-eu-tariffs-chinese-electric-vehicles-handelsblatt-2025-04-10

I would have never ever expected that ! One more proof that i don't understand much about the state of the world.

Special mention to Spain in my humble/ignorant opinion



What a world 🤯, i'm still not fully believing that we're choosing friendship with the p.r.c., it'd be too good to be true.
(we also chose friendship with the islamist Syria b.t.w., and maintained it, so i.d.k. anymore)

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah well, fuck David Ricardo(, it's obvious that we should buy&produce locally, his counter-intuitive results are only valid from a consumer viewpoint, not taking into account the jobs created, the taxes collected by the state, the more secondary enterprises benefiting indirectly from a good economic health, ...), he was only used to justify a neo-colonialist "free trade" locking "poor"(exploited) countries into selling raw materials, as well as selling the ownership of their companies/mines/'natural resources', etc.
Their invaluable ressources were formed over (hundreds of )millions of years and are now sold over a few decades at a very low price set by the market according to the competition(, which isn't the case for the more advanced manufactured products with less competition, such as selling planes instead of t-shirts).
So fuck David Ricardo, and these countries should ABSOLUTELY agree together to form an economic(&military because coups would follow,) alliance to raise in a concerted manner the prices of their raw materials, who should be at the very least 10, if not 100, times higher, and then use that money to manufacture these objects themselves. But they won't, tsk, so w/e.
D.Trump is right in his desire to get back american companies in the u.s.a., even if he only did so once he stopped benefiting from it, the u.s. is too powerful to be oppressed for such decisions, unlike :

  • Haiti in the 1980-1990s, who tried to protect its rice, but the unholy trinity forced them to give up on that measure, and Miami's rice quickly took over, assholes ;
  • Before the 1980s, Ghana produced its own clothes, but because of the western SAPs, they were forced to buy clothes from Europe and Asia and lost their textile industry ;
  • In Argentina during the 2000s, Kirchner also tried some protectionnism like China, but as usual the unholy trinity came to order people around, the US, EU, and Japan added to the criticism of the WHO, and commercial pressures forced them to change their mind ;
  • Tanzania also tried to do the same for its agriculture, etc.

I won't forget that the People's Republic of China was the only non-western aligned country to ever emerge since the colonization(, South Korea and Japan's rise were only strategic, we helped them at our expense like Israel or Taiwan), and also one of the only ones who refused to follow western advices/orders(, i still consider them protectionnism even if they complied — unwillingly in 1842, 1858, 1860, ... ; willingly in the 1980s — with our demands on tariffs, because they :

  • subsidized their economy ;
  • 'obtained, through explicit demands of real partnerships unlike the more submissive(trusting?) global South,'&'are now improving upon' western technologies, as well as creating new ones(, they were faster) ;
  • had reglementations such as forbidding foreign investments in some sectors past a certain percentage ;
  • favored local companies for state projects ;
  • ...
    They've demonstrated the unprecedented success of their system/'set of conditions', and should be imitated by the Global South if it's indeed better/'validated by these last decades'. And the chinese civilization has only just started to marvel us if you also like techno-scientific discoveries).

Fuck Ricardo.

More arguments here, among many books.

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

mass graves

feels like a dissimulation, not only of war crimes but also to prevent the identification of the victims' status(, children, women, elderly, humanitarians, ...), and a body count of the operation.
They wouldn't have been found if Israel didn't communicated the location.
So many bulldozers and yet many more lies, they're even killing patients in hospitals, and have destroyed everything :



« Has not Moses given you the law ? Yet not one of you keeps the law. »
And « As they approached, Jesus said, “Here comes an honest man—a true son of Israel.” », but religion for them is a cultural thing, and they continue to consider themselves victims(, revelations/civilizations came afterwards and honored the legacy of an unworthy little land, yet they rejected it even though they should have disappeared&'be forgotten' if not for them). There's no reason for antisemitism to exist if we're all atheists yet they still believe that it's around and that having jewish friends is now somehow compatible with antisemitism(, jews were anti-christians and anti-muslims as well, they just weren't in power).

At least « two allegations of sexual violence in kibbutz Be’eri — widely reported in the media — were unfounded. », and https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/03/more-human-can-bear-israels-systematic-use-sexual-reproductive-and-other.




https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1906344566308958466 and https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1902504823326703982

They deny any humanitarian help :



Abu Tawila among others :

See also Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh



More than 100.000 israeli subscribers :

https://archive.ph/iF1rz

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1903138235309506716
https://x.com/KhalilJeries/status/1903835805686133149
https://x.com/caitoz/status/1904289208912789968
etc., that's only part of what followed the end of the "ceasefire", a unilateral massacre of "guilty" civilians from planes like we(sterners) are used to.
Accusations are nice but solutions are better, there's no way that pro-palestinians countries will allow Palestine to disappear, and they're too powerful&numerous to be ignored, so Israel may bring down its deserved downfall for refusing to share "their" lands.

If the current territory covered by Israel and Palestine was splitted into three between christians, jews, and muslims, then it'd be more easily accepted(, by the israelis,) if the shares were 33% jews, 16.5%+16.5% christians, and 16.5%+16.5% muslims, the five territories with Jerusalem as their capital(, perhaps with a slightly larger territory than currently). The goal of uniting one day in the future as a common territory with three governments may even be stated along with the redrawing of the borders(, and even end up with only one if the three religions of the Book ever fuse one day, Jerusalem/Israel/Palestine would be even more symbolic).
If Israel ends up with a territory of ~9.500km²(, sharing the rest with the two other religions of the Book), they should ideally also be offered a second country of less than 20.000km² somewhere in the world, accepting the location because of their shared 'presence in'/'ownership of' the Sacred Lands. In that case, no need for the division 33 // 16.5+16.5 // 16.5+16.5, a simple 33//33//33 would do. And if it's spitted 50//50 for jews//muslims, then a second territory of less than 15.000kms² would be enough.

 

From https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1876840263416766523
He also adds that it may have been because of corrupt westerners, not necessarily from ukrainians.

 

cited tweet

(official source for the 25.000)