Protest in India is against the election commission for manipulation of the voter roll. I've seen Western media get this wrong as well.

That was over exam fraud. The education minister resigned which was the goal so that protest ended. This protest was started by both the federal opposition party and the roach protestors on Sept 24.

It started that way but became a cost of living protest.

Deploying the same methodology that Republicans used to track cost increases under former President Joe Biden, JEC Democrats found that the average US family is spending roughly $700 more per month on basic items since Trump took office in January, pledging to bring prices “way down.”

Smart to use their methodology. That way they can't call it flawed. Well they can but they'll sound stupid

Calling the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a "huge mistake"

Describing Martin Luther King Jr. as "awful" and "not a good person"

Stated "If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to think, 'I hope he's qualified'"

Claimed successful Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were "affirmative action picks" who "do not possess the cognitive capacity to be taken seriously"

Sounds more like the musings of a hedonist than a badass. The incoordination and head trauma are not as far off brand as he thinks it is.

Western nations really need to teach their kids about colonialism. There needs to be an honest appraisal of the harm that went into creating the global imbalance we see today. Without it, the average person ends up cognitively deficient in discussions of global geopolitics (there are far too many that fit this bill).

I still meet too many people that hold onto a colonialism happened because we're awesome attitude with a profound knowledge deficit on the number of genocides that went into the process.

They argue on a Western technological advantage which can be a reasonable assertion but also Western moral superiority which is so laughably misinformed they might as well have not gone to grade school.

Is the purpose of human intimacy procreation?

If no, then why can't we have intimacy without the unnecessary outcome of the propagation of our species?

If yes, should we require that every relationship between man and woman result in offspring? But we don't, do we?

So, if we have the personal freedom to choose whether our relationships result in progeny and if there is more to intimacy than procreation, why are you so afraid of non-heterosexual relationships?

Taylor Swift owns multiple secondary properties in New York City.

She has amassed a massive real estate footprint on a single block in Tribeca, worth an estimated $50+ million. Her holdings include:

• ​An 8,000-square-foot duplex penthouse at 155 Franklin Street.
• ​A second-floor unit in the same building purchased for nearly $10 million.
• ​An $18 million townhouse right next door at 153 Franklin Street.

Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani finalized a deal to implement a pied-à-terre tax surcharge on luxury secondary residences in NYC.

The tax starts as a 4% surcharge on the property's value and then there is an annual charge that scales up progressively based on the assessed value.

Rhode Island passed a similar luxury second-home tax targeting non-resident estates over $1 million, a piece of legislation that the press nicknamed the "Taylor Swift Tax" due to its impact on her $17 million Watch Hill mansion.

To say that this alone is balancing the budget is an oversimplification (what are hot takes if not reductive) but the tax will have a meaningful impact because she owns a lot of property in NYC.

It wasn’t open to interpretation.

And yet, 2000 years later, here we are.

There is essentially universal agreement in the field of child psychology that "beating" your child is the wrong approach.

I've yet to meet a parent that completely ignores their child in a public venue. In many cultures children are considered to be a part of society / community and so they are given some autonomy to discover the world with their peers. Hyper individualistic Western society is really the odd one out here and Western cultures are the only ones where I've seen this take expressed openly. Conclude from that what you will.

Getting caught with "you can fuck off" on a hit mic doesn't help either. Last thing anyone wants is for Canada to gain a reputation of cheating, especially after the drone scandal with the Canadian womens soccer team at the Paris Olympics in '24.

Ahead of the tournament, on 22 July, New Zealand players noticed a drone flying over their training session and reported this to local police.[2] Drone operating laws in France ban drones from being flown above people and ban recordings made by drones to be shared without the subjects' consent. French police were already wary of drones in terms of security around the 2024 Summer Olympics.[1][3] Saint-Étienne police followed the drone and found and detained its operator, a member of the staff of the Canadian team. The New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) then reported the incident to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) integrity unit, before making a public announcement the next day together with New Zealand Football, expressing their disappointment towards the Canadian team. The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) then apologized to the NZOC and said they would review next steps with Canada Soccer and all the relevant governing bodies.[2][4]

The drone operator, analyst Joseph Lombardi, admitted after his arrest that he had also filmed another New Zealand training session on 19 July,[5] a fact later made public by the COC.[1][3] Though Lombardi immediately said that the spying was "a personal initiative", the police found a text message exchange on his phone with assistant coach Jasmine Mander that indicated Mander knew of the spying.[6]

If you're resorting to espionage please just accept that you suck and don't do things that drag your nations reputation in the process.

*with their anglicized names

India, for example, has been traditionally referred to as Bharat (depending on language root) domestically and among the 100s of languages and dialects used there the name India is never used. Similar to Deutschland and Germany.

I'm not a woman but will speak on what little I know from life experience.

From a woman's perspective, an offer to share intimacy is not necessarily validating in the way a similar offer may be received by a man.

For some, perhaps many, women there is the looming question of whether an offer of intimacy is simply a man looking to make them the object of their sexual gratification. Many women are not interested in that.

As men, we're not used to getting offers. So much so that when we get one it makes our day, week, month etc. For many women, the challenge is not getting offers, but there is a looming question of whether the offer genuine. What is the intention of the person showing interest? It's not that men aren't also concerned with these questions. It's just that, for a variety of reasons, the stakes are lower for men. So they spend less time thinking about them and more on just being excited someone noticed them.

1. Dogmatically sticking to fossil fuels.
2. "Protecting" domestic manufacturering jobs by refusing to engage with your neighbours.
3. Using tariffs to keep out affordable Chinese EVs that use tech everyone will probably be using in 15 to 20 years.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. You can only artificially prop up your domestic market for so long. You'll inevitably fall behind even further on innovation with this approach.

Might be the first to make a CoPilot or ChatGPT powered car though.

The caste system is not based on skin color. That was a misreading of ancient Indian texts by colonizers in the 1800s. There are darker skinned people of an upper caste background in South India and vice versa in North India.

It is based purely on pedigree / who you are born to.

The caste system is medieval feudalistic bullshit that needs to be eradicated in all forms from every society.

"The British class system is so complex, so riddled with microscopic nuances and unspoken rules, that it functions essentially as a caste system. It is not about how much money you have; it is about an intricate tribal code of accent, vocabulary, and behavior that is almost impossible to learn later in life."

Anthropolgist Kate Fox: Watching the English

"Class is a skin on the back of caste... In England, the class system is so rigid, so tied to ancestry, accent, and birth, that it functions essentially as a caste system"

Isabel Wilkerson: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent

"Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerrybuilt modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts."

George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier.

Israel is the West's last great colonial settler project so there has always been a predilection to turning a blind eye to international law in relation their geopolitical affairs. Far right authoritarians are often chummy with Netanyahu because he is living their colonial dream of genocide and displacement.

Why do they control what people say? I'm not sure it goes that far. But the cultural bias apparently runs deep enough in the West to ruin people's lives over it if they dissent.

An unsurprisingly one sided perspective on gentrification with no attention given to the displacement and economic exclusion of those already living in those 'ghettos' and 'hoods'.

Can communities built on a settler mindset ever reconcile their past and grow beyond it? Or will it always be ok as long as the people that do it have money and dress / act / talk the way some may like?

A lot of indigineous thinking captured in one passage, particularly restorative justice.

I was raised Christian but reading texts on Indigineous thought has been what has helped me realize what makes a good person.

Too much in Abrahamic religions is about obedience and blind submission to authority which is why I often feel drawn to eastern religious thought also. Both Eastern religious thought and the indigineous worldview are more holistic in my view.

I find Abrahamic religious teachings to be very exclusionary (hey if you beleive what we believe we'll let you into heaven) Almost like a country club of sorts. Eastern and Indigineous philosophy (with the exception of the caste system warping into a rigid institutionalized social hierarchy due in part to Western influence) seem to be much more inclusionary.

It's important to remember that all of America benefited economically from the slave trade.

Illinois had de facto slavery (indentured servitude) and initially, after the territory was acquired from the French, many slaves were kept in bondage based on prior treaties.

Chicago was built as a trading hub for shipping Southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco to Eastern markets and Europe. So while the value of labor was most apparently stolen in the south, middlemen in Chicago eventually got a cut of that stolen value.

Finally, Illinois farmers sold massive amounts of corn, pork, and beef to Southern plantations. Plantations in the South devoted essentially all of their agricultural capacity to cash crops so they needed to be fed by the Midwest to remain viable. This arrangement allowed the nation as a whole to maximize the export value it derived from slavery.

https://will.illinois.edu/news/story/illinois-issuesslave-state