Why is every fraction of this conflict a piece of shit?

Because colonial terror doesn’t exactly inspire peaceful and productive governance.

Hezbollah is fascist and terrorist organisation

[Citation needed]. Not that I’m a fan of Hezbollah, don’t get me wrong, but both these words have meanings and I don’t see how Hezbollah satisfies either one. BTW you double posted.

And they will still end up cleaning your toilet and flipping my burger and deliver my food

I’m not talking about those, but the ones coding your web portals and prescribing your medicine. Tight immigration policy can effectively deter these people, which would be a detriment to European economies because of declining birthrates. See: Japan and South Korea. In 2025 Germany needs Syrian doctors more than Syrian doctors need Germany, that’s my point here.

It’s not even about money, I will just never want to do it and there’s not enough people in any of these jobs and many more even though we’re in an economic downturn period.

I totally agree on the moral front, but it is about the money. The reason there aren’t enough people in these jobs is that they don’t pay a living wage, not that they’re inherently icky.

I strongly believe that to improve a country you need educated citizens

True, but you also need cooperative authorities willing to give their educated citizens the leeway to prosper. That’s the real bottleneck here; plenty of developing countries have accessible higher education. If you want the EU to help developing countries develop, you should start from neocolonialism. Many of the regimes holding back developing countries are basically running on foreign dollars and euros.

As if people can be motivated to come to Europe on a whim and only haven’t come because we only accepted from a dangerous entrance by sketchy boat.

I mean, yes exactly. Why would you think otherwise?

Even of it works, it’s an expression of values that will corrupt the EU forever.

Uh… I’m sorry to tell you but that ship has already sailed. The EU already treats workers as objects.

Not exactly. Immigrants without valuable skills will go illegally; those with valuable skills will just go somewhere else or not bother and that’s not good for the labor-hungry European economy.

Realistically, there are two possible explanations for why the Democrats are so stubbornly useless:

1. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

2. You can’t get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.

Either way the idea that they could “learn” anything fundamentally misunderstands why they do what they do. Their job isn’t to get into power; it’s to make sure you don’t get into power.

Unexpected but not surprising in hindsight. This has been how that worked for a while now.

Yes and no. This ultimately a desire for their elected representatives to just fucking do something, and both Trump and Mamdani promised to do things that will make their lives better. Obviously one of these is a grift, but that’s beside the point.

You’re getting downvoted but I agree. Neoliberals will do nothing but say slightly meaner words to Trump as he kidnaps their constituents.

Wrong method, right answer kind of thing. NATO is far too much of a US sock puppet.

Waste it doing random shit. If I was in your position I’d start getting through my watch and read list. Oh and learn a new language, that never hurts.

That’s a surprise given that Ukraine was still ruled by its pro-Russian regime at that point. I guess I have a few more people to wish a slow and painful death now.

I mean, yes, but this “victory” came at the cost of two hundred thousand dead, God knows how many wounded, twenty years they could’ve used to develop their country and even tighter Taliban control than before the US invasion. Afghans managed to kick the US out, but they did not succeed at defending anything. If I was Venezuelan my lesson from this would be “absolutely don’t get into war with the US,” because such a war would leave their country in ruin just like Afghanistan.

If they do that will you protect them from the wrath of the US war machine? Exactly.

What? You’re not making any sense.

there’s simply 0% chance that any family anywhere in this country is living in poverty with that kind of income.

The original Substack addresses this point, but the short of it is: Most income gains from 35k to 100k are cancelled out by a loss of government benefits, so there’s a lot less difference between these than you’d expect. You only start making real gains starting from 100k. Now a family making 100k will have expendable income that’s true, but the vast majority of its income will still go towards essentials so it’s still one emergency away from insolvency.

Edit: This means that a family with two incomes and two young children making 50k is getting a market price equivalent of 50k in government benefits, so we can crudely approximate families straddling the poverty line as making 100k net. In that case the difference between the effective official poverty line and the proposed poverty line is a large but realistic 40%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_income_thresholds

TL;DR: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

Uh… right where they are? The American welfare state is insufficient across the board, so it needs to be strengthened across the board, and employers across the board should be forced to pay living wages.

I mean those are technicians, not factory workers. For those see: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes519199.htm

By this point, I am almost afraid to think that even voting as the solution is beyond us.

Exactly. Trump is a symptom, not the cause (and that’s before we get into how he’d probably rather launch a coup than lose his majority in 2026).