I live in Paris. Just got a 200€ fine coming back from a running session.
Beware, RATP rule enforcers are now dressed as civilians and targets gullible individuals who breaks stupid rules, (mistook my pass with my credit card when i tried to check-in : 50€ for forgetting my pass, and 150€ for entering an quasi-empty bus by the middle door).
I see why RATP resorted to racketeering after all this over-budget fiasco. Hope it's worth it.
Most people today would agree with Mossadegh's initiative and the point remains that he was ousted from power for his nationalization of a western oil company and his inimity with the islamists and the Shah. The US helped in the process. And it's no disrespect to the iranians to state those facts.
Everyone in Iran, including the Shah, wanted Iran’s oil nationalized. It was the economic consequences that tempered others. The Good Dr. had to go hat in hand to US and beg Eisenhower to aid after oil revenues stopped. That was his bright idea.
Also your story is not the propaganda narrative that is repeated. This is the single paragraph story:
Iran did have a democratic government, but because the PM nationalized the oil, US did a coup and installed a dictator, the shah.
And that is entirely different from your “US helped in the process”. That would be accurate because that is all it was: in the main political support. Then, we in fact had a decade were Generals were powerful, until the Shah, finally in 60s (without CIA and to the great annoyance of the Kennedys) assumed all the power after having disbanded the Communist party and defanged the National Front. The “dictatorship” began 10 years later and it was far more benevolent than say a psycho killer like Mao who murdered millions. But Mao was a “great man” and the Shah is a “dictator”. Go figure.
I agree there is cause for concern, I just find the narrative style to be of disservice and detracts from the issue, as it appears to me that the use of a catastrophist, panic-inducing, anger-laden tone and structure is a mechanism to buy people into their view through fear instead of reason, which in turn drives the wrong response for addressing the issue.
IOW the good part is that they're fact driven, the bad part is that they cherry-pick and use doomsday FUD-like tactics to drive their point home.
There won't be The Day™ when the system goes authoritarian. It's a slope and one must panic at every step. If you wait for The Day, it will be too late.
I'm always appalled by comments like these that justify their sympathy for authoritarian practices simply because they align with their interests. I'm in Paris, France, and police brutality has been increasing hand in hand with the corrupt nature of our government over the last decade, and it's horrifying.
The apple is completely rotten; the way our election system works and all the dirty tricks you can do when you're in power mean people are not left with any other choice but to revolt. This does not bode well for our country.
> sympathy for authoritarian practices simply because they align with their interests
Nothing personal, I'm talking about the interests of all the voters who freely elected the current president and parliament.
If you are not happy, it's our duty as a society to provide you a way to express your point. But the right to express your point does not involve the violence to get our attention. Most people just want to go on with their daily life, and putting obstacles to them will not gather any sympathy around you.
Considering the number of people who died and the number of babies that haven't been born due to the conflict, I'd argue that would have been a counter-argument against engaging into this whole mess. The longer this goes on, the dire the prospects are for the Russian speaking world.
Peter Zeihan had an interesting take on this, that the Russians moved on Ukraine because their demographic decline means that if they don't invade now, they will forever lose the ability to wage war and hence defend their homeland. The Soviet-era population is rapidly aging out of military service age, and the post-Soviet generation is tiny, and so they will not be able to field a meaningful army if they wait. Basically Ukraine is a last-ditch attempt to save the Russian state.
In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea, and the world shrugged. The prediction was more stark, that Russia would attempt to march straight across Ukraine and invade Poland and Moldova. So far that appears to be their intent, though they got hung up in eastern Ukraine (see: Russia's demographic decline being too advanced to field an effective army).
You need more than people to field an effective army. You need to equip them and lead them in an effective way. To go back almost 100 years, Mussolini in Italy used to boast to have 8 million bayonets [1]. We know the results.
That's part of the demographic issues that Russia has, though. The science & engineering talent needed to keep their military machine going is all of Soviet vintage, meaning they entered their careers before 1991. They are all in their 50s at a minimum now, retiring within the next 10 years, and with Russian life expectancy for males at 65, may die shortly after.
The 1990s were a lost generation for Russia, and then talented young engineers that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s largely went into more lucrative software jobs. Many emigrated to the West; I work with a number of them. The folks who can keep all the old military hardware running (let alone develop new ones) are getting increasingly old, and won't be around much longer.
Poland has been in NATO for a while now; non-starter unless he wanted WW3. And those would be NATO regulars in the mix, not kelptocrats in NATO hand-me-downs.
two years ago NATO seemed to be an organisation in shambles, with no mission and no purpose.... Kremlin's propaganda even said - Do you really expect Germans and French to come and fight for some backward eastern european country ?
The resolution and unity displayed by NATO members surprised everybody, even the NATO members themselves
It was basically a shrug; for instance the 2014 invasion wasn't enough to cancel NS-2. Lots of people, Europeans particularly, continued to do business with Russia. In doing so, they were funding the full scale invasion that followed. Only after Feb 2022 did the international community get a bit more serious about sanctioning Russia.
Also the shrug at 2014 wasn't unprecedented. The world also shrugged when Russia invaded Georgia 6 years before that in 2008.
Georgia and Russia are UN signatories. Invasion is still expressly illegal.
If we make excuses, that aggressive wars of conquest to expand borders and subjugate people is sometimes OK - inevitably leads to "the world does not deserve peace".
It really is throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the document everyone agreed to while bodies were still rotting, says aggression must be stopped so it doesn't spread.
Apparently the past does not effectively speak to the present, that people still think its OK to negotiate with tyranny. Cutting a deal that involves giving up on millions of people just to save your own skin is what damns humanity, and should damn it, straight to hell.
Humans volunteering other humans are scum. It's unconscionable to me the degree of apathy involved. The willingness to try to bribe tyranny with other people's land, lives, their fucking children.
The potentially fatal flaw of the UN charter isn't the obligation of all members to stop any aggression. It was never even slightly imagined that a founding member, and permanent member of the Security Council, would conduct a war of conquest. And so now the Security Council is rendered useless.
Poland has an article 51 right to aid Ukraine in collective defense. They can send ground troops. They can send and launch long range weapons. Moscow is a legitimate military target.
We are here because of every inaction that came before.
What does this have to do with the point that the US and EU did in fact essentially shrug at the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? Are you disagreeing with that?
Yes, but I think Peter's point is that they moved because their demographic decline means they have less and less chance of achieving the main goal - securing the eight access points along the Russian border. Ukraine is just "on the way to two of them".
Most guests are on the Rogan podcast to sell a book, or shill something. Unless they are one of his inner circle.
This guy seems unusual however, probably one of the few used as plausible deniability to prove he doesn't exclusively have right wing conspiracy theorists on, to keep the Spotify money flowing.
Oh Peter was definitely selling his new book at the time, but his mannerism came across as quite manic.
I actually bought one of Peter's books and found it quite enlightening at the time, but then found out that some of it didn't quite like up with reality and he seemed unwilling to adjust some of those view points.
Agreed, the Macbook Pro 16" has a 100wh battery and i'm looking for something that has at least 3/4 of its autonomy, otherwise no point in investing into a >1500$ laptop.
