Oh and both are pro-China too. I guess they're trying to open the next huge can of worms preemptively. Why wait?

So, yeah, I doubt Ukraine is happy with either side in this conflict, and Catalunya separatists are a somewhat more desperate than Madrid. Doesn't really change anything about the conflict.

(why? Let's be honest: Catalunya would benefit enormously from independence, but when the economy goes well, as it did from 2001-2007, they're fine. After that the situation worsened again. The situation is simple: Catalunya has a much better economy than Spain and could maintain government spending, whereas being part of Spain, they need to cut social spending)

The Spanish government has violently repressed this, attacked the people, arrested politicians, tried to threaten other EU nations with invasion (yes, seriously, the current government has a few "rough edges", even if I would agree if someone said that any other party would be worse) unless they arrest Catalunya politicians (then did nothing when they told them to go f themselves), and this mostly with the agreement of regular Spaniards.

Given what is happening in the EU (10+ years of slowly but unrelentingly worsening economy) the situation is slowly worsening again.

Surely you understand now. Go about your business, poor person.

The rest of the article is equally short sighted and plain wrong.

And I'm sure in another 20 years even democrat voters will remember, probably correctly, that Trump was so much better than $us_president_at_that_time.

Love it!

So it doesn't matter what is going on with China, in the press you will always find "China is succeeding", with 1000 because's, usually "because" exactly what the last CCP meeting decided their economic plan is. It doesn't mean shit.

It was answered the moment it was legally able to be answered. In fact, due to a mixup on my part, it was answered 2 days before that point. Oh well, nobody cared.

Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.

Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.

Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.

You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.

The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.

How many loans for MRI machines that require helium haven't been paid back yet?

All I can say is that there is legal definitions about that, and to suggest you go read them. No, EU states cannot withdraw, just like US states cannot withdraw (the constitution forbids it, and some interpret the constitution as if it authorizes the US military to act against congress to prevent it. But even if you disagree with that, the constitution authorizes pretty extreme measures to prevent US states from withdrawing. More importantly, a US state would be immediately kicked out of the global financial system due to debts to the FED, which would decimate even California's economy in weeks or less, despite those debts being entirely fictional), and the UK violated a LOT of treaties withdrawing and it absolutely is not legally possible. They did it anyway for 3 reasons.

Why did the UK do it anyway? First, it was in the EU, but not in the Eurozone (and so did not owe massive debts to the ECB, and the ECB could not simply bankrupt UK banks on a whim like they did with Greek and Italian banks). Second, the EU does not have an army, and certainly not one authorized to act against member countries. Third, the really important core economies (France, formerly the UK, and Germany) have simply stopped respecting their own laws and treaties. A de-facto situation was created by the UK and the system just pretends everything is fine, like Europe always does. The EU was originally a conglomerate, a company, and so it has always worked to accept what states do, and they threaten countries with economic measures, with loan repayments, foreclosures, mass-layoffs, bank closures, that sort of thing. Countries do what they want and send a military squad "with clear instructions". If you want to see what a total disaster the UK withdrawal was (and is), go visit Northern Ireland and talk to a few people how and why goods are traded there.

You see, states make laws, but as is demonstrated every week these days, don't see their own actions as bound by laws, or treaties, or ... at all. And I don't just mean the US, or Iran but equally countries like Spain or France or ...

And that was always the trade that was proposed. Sure, Waymo's (and Uber) will displace a LOT of taxi jobs, but they'll be way cheaper than taxis. Well ... they're not. And at that point, from an economic perspective, this is just taking things away for not much in return.

Once again people get a lot of possible choices and once again they choose for the more expensive one, putting more people out of business, out of a job, and as you say out of society. Now they're saying "yeah but this is good for autistic people and women, who can now travel by taxi without ever seeing anyone". How, exactly, does anyone think that's a good thing for society? Seriously?

Plus I'm a bit of the opinion, if Waymo is already breaking their own proposed social contract now ... imagine what they'll do in 10 years.

Independence from the British Empire that took over in an attempt to stop the wave of muslim genocides that started after WW1. Genocides on the Armenians. On the Kurds. On Jews. And so forth.

> How did that happen if Israel was always so peace-seeking?

Ah. Ok. The Palestinian government (this refers at this point in time to Jewish body under British colonial rule) made a deal with the British. They would deliver soldiers for England's wars and in trade they'd get independence. Same deal Australia made. Of course ... they delivered soldiers ... and independence, well, Britain said "no". VERY much the same deal as Australia. In fact, British soldiers started brutally repressing all independence movements, and that brutality led to more and more fights between islamic indepence movements, Jewish independence movements (famously "Irgun", "Haganah" and "Lehi". Irgun and Haganah are now the IDF, and Lehi ... was congratulated, thoroughly thanked for their performance in the war of independence and its outcome, and ... asked to leave. For good reason). Once these fights got really in gear, there's this little thing that happened in Europe involving Hitler, muslims helped the Nazis in hopes of stopping Jewish immigration to the middle east, but obviously that achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. It resulted more Jewish immigration, a LOT more in fact, which led to yet more tensions. Even between Lehi and Jewish immigrants, but especially between islamic independence (and ... let's be honest, islamic genocide movements, the guys who had gotten to massacre so many peoples. Kurds, Armennians, Greeks, ... but were thoroughly unsatisfied with their mostly failed genocide on the Jews). However, under the circumstances, everyone still saw the British as their main enemy. However, the impossible happened: the British retreated and really just left. But this can be described as "put the Palestinian government in power". At this point, the tensions between Jewish independence movements and islamic ... let's charitably call them independence movements exploded (not that I claim Irgun or especially Lehi were ... afraid of a warcrime or two or ten. But the islamic ones were still WAY worse. In their defence, the convention of Geneve didn't exist yet). Obviously, as everyone knows, the Jews won. As reaction the surrounding Arab countries all attacked. The Jews won again. 20+ years of war. The Jews won again. The Palestinian government renamed itself "Israel" to undo the insult Julius Caesar made (full name "Eretz Israel"). In reaction, muslims attacked all Jews not living in Israel, which cause ANOTHER wave of Jewish immigration to Israel. Then the communists decided to attack the Jews (the hero of Chernobyl, Valery Legasov, got his position in the party, and his academic position, by removing Jewish students from the Kurchatov institute. He even makes a reference in his famous tapes that one of his actions to remove them, removing a doctorate thesis written by a Jewish student, has something to do with causing the accident. Not clear exactly what do). Which caused ANOTHER wave of Jewish immigration (including quite a few Russians, millions in fact, who were perfectly willing to pretend to be Jewish to escape communism, which of course turned out to be a very good decision). Much later the Iranian revolution happened, swearing to complete the genocide on the Jews ... which caused ANOTHER wave of Jewish immigration (not that large, but still)

At some point during this, Israel did the unthinkable. They almost uniformly chose the side of the US. It was thought ex-communist Russians would protest, but "strangely" to everybody who has not yet talked to some ex-Soviet people, these Russian immigrants had no objections to that at all. A lot of them have since served allied to the US military, some even in the US military directly. Most arabs chose the side of the Russians (the Soviets, then later the Russian Federation, you see, the nazis were unavailable after 1944). So the Soviets recruited 100 spies to create a "independence movement". One of them, with nom-de-guerre "The Wise Egyptian" succeeded. Better known with his name shortened, in Arabic: "Yasser Arafat (el-Masri)", who chose the name for his "resistance movement": PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Strangely, they did not really see Israel as their enemy, rather the US. Strange that. Communist-funded. See US as their enemy. But to do that, they started massacring Jews, killed some teams the Olympics, and managed to survive a few IDF attacks. So they got a state from the UN, in trade for normalizing relations. Then, surprisingly a group of religious zealots got enough support, and especially weapons, not from Netanyahu, but from leftists (they still use communist-designed weapons, their famous rocket is named "Katushya", Russian for "little girl", the title of a famous Russian folk song, and their weapons are still mostly Kalashnikov rifles), and spoiled Clinton's big "peace in the middle east" moment. You see, Palestinians (and Hezbollah, and the Houthi's) are paid, mostly by the UN, to attack Jews. The amounts are staggering, and ... Israel taxes this money. That represents ... 1/8th of Israel's economy.

And here we are.

And despite all this, leftist parties do not see any of what happened as their fault. They blame Jews for refusing to get killed (and obviously, the problem Moscow really has with Israel, even today, is that Israel makes access to oil possible for the west. It is not lost on Russia that all the losing parties of WW2 (Germany, Japan, Turkey) lacked access to oil, and all the winning parties (US, Russia) had all the oil they could want.

The goal of paying hamas and the PLO these absurd amounts of money, is to deny the West access to oil. Which is why Russia has not (yet) turned on Iran. Iran is still blocking western access to oil. It's coming, though. It's the mullahs only way out, the only way to keep their kids in American universities and keep their mansions in central London and New York (did you know that's what allah commands? Mansions in central London. Villas in New York. Raise your kids in American, Christian, universities. Most of the daughters are not wearing veils. And by "not wearing veils" I mean "posting bikini shots on Instagram", and apparently several sons do the same with alcohol parties, even some in Iran itself. In case anyone is still wondering why the Mossad is so incredibly successful at recruiting Iranians and where they contact and recruit operatives, I hope this explains that matter). I have actually read the quran, but I must have somehow missed the part about the expensive villas). So I expect the mullahs to chose western money (sorry I mean "peace") which will suck for Iranians (no peace for them, of course it's not like Russia is offering them peace either), but will suck a LOT more for Russia, socialists (yes, really), and the UN.

You judge whether this all makes the world more, or less peaceful. All sides have behaved despicably, though again, there is no comparison and the islamic movements have behaved a LOT worse. And the only thing communists/socialists/UN have planned for Palestinians is eradicating them (just ask a few Afghans) ... just not quite yet.

> Last time I checked, it was the IDF who keeps up the blockade of Gaza and controls everything that goes in and out, not any kind of muslim army.

You need to get your eyes examined and look to the South and the East. It is in fact muslim armies blockading both Gaza and the west bank.