Threading through all the actions is a rallying cry for a rethink of a tourism model that campaigners say has increasingly funnelled profits into the hands of a few, while leaving locals to pay the price through soaring house prices and rents, environmental degradation and the proliferation of precarious, low-paying jobs.

There, that’s the line. It’s not about “tourists bad” or some kind of hypocrisy. It’s about “we want a different tourist industry that doesn’t externalize it’s costs to society”.

I get doing that on national holidays and such special occasions, but otherwise I find it kind of too much.

Enlightenment has been around for 28 years. This means there is enough adoption for it to keep going on.

Best way to advance the social conservative agenda: build up societal desperation via a fiscally conservative agenda.

Carney’s government is a progressive conservative government.

Fuck Benjamin Netanyahu. May the people who voted for parties that support his coalition get the day they voted for.

The drone warfare revolution. They have levelled up technologically and we haven’t. A whole lot of assumptions are out the window. For example, the NATO doctrine has always been that Baltics are “speedbumps”, they slow down the invasion until the cavalry comes and blows the invaders out of the water. But drone warfare has shown wars are no longer manoeuvre wars and it’s much easier to defend territory once captured. Which means that the speedbump doctrine doesn’t work.

Other example: Russia has had to learn to fight with meat wave attacks and masses of cheap drones at scale. We rely on a few highly trained and highly equipped professionals that rely on expensive and complicated supply chains. Our system is technologically superior but much more brittle.

In both those cases, the sheer scale of the US Armed forces can potentially deal with both problems. But without them, these are much less tractable.

It’s really not that simple. American car companies are inefficient, dependent on archaic, dirty and complex tech. This is propped up by the oil and gas lobby that resists electrification at every step, to the point of making stupid American cars an icon of the culture war.

North American car companies can absolutely also electrify, and move towards more efficient, and simpler tech. And then we can talk about using subsidies/tariffs to level the field. But as stands, that’s just throwing consumer money into a bad policy pit.

The fact that when it comes to politics I see Americans nowadays keep repeating over and over and over again “this can’t be done”, “they don’t have the power”, “that will never happen”, is to me astonishing. When I was growing up, America was where things HAPPENED. What happened to you guys? Where did this learned helplessness come from?

So your party structures are broken and unable to produce good outcomes? Change them. Reform them. Update them. What the fuck is wrong with you people? You made democracy into a fossil that you no longer fit in and you’re despairing. It’s supposed to be a living breathing thing that evolves all the time. WTF.

Never heard of activism, have you.

I thought it started on October 7.

And CP is not suing the shit out of them?

Remember how Dukakis got tanked by a goofy helmet? Yea, Harris sank when she couldn’t propose any change from Biden.

I actually absolutely agree with you. I think Varoufakis is playing the gadfly role here, the kinds of provocative questions he poses are challenges to do better.

Israel is exercising a naval blockade of Gaza in line with the war between the two parties and based on prize law is actually allowed to board and inspect all ships heading to Gaza.

Yea, you just made that up.

Israel’s blockade is far from uncontroversially legal:

Crucially, a legal blockade IS NOT ALLOWED TO STOP HUMANITARIAN AID: https://theconversation.com/there-are-clear-laws-on-enforcing-blockades-israels-interception-of-the-madleen-raises-serious-questions-258562

That’s not “free” as in “you can go any time”. That’s “sign here that you did something that I think is illegal and that you don’t think is illegal and that also recognizes my right to define what is and what is not illegal and then you can go”.

Many people on Lemmy went from critizing Israel for commiting genocide (which is a fact) to openly supporting the Hamas during the last year.

This is an extraordinary claim. Please provide your extraordinary evidence.

Not really, it’s just logical conclusion of believing in a project but then watching it fail repeatedly, and finally questioning whether it’s worth saving. His actual proposal is for a deeper democratic federalism, but he doesn’t think that will fly, because he’s disappointed.

No it doesn’t actually. His argument starts at about 29:50 of the video. As far as I can tell, he argues that military Keynesianism (the idea of using military spending to drive economic growth) works in the US because it has a federal government and a unified military-industrial complex that redistributes contracts to stimulate weaker regions. Varoufakis criticizes this model as morally corrosive, saying it requires endless wars to justify continued production and spending. This is not a new criticism, that’s just Truman. Next he says that Europe, lacking a federal structure or unified military-political command structure, cannot even replicate this system in any coherent or democratic way. He sees recent EU defense initiatives as a hollow imitation that is just political theater making the analogy with the “Green Deal”, which was basically abandoned despite big promises. Basically, he says that military Keynesianism, like the Green Deal are both “smoke and mirrors”, that don’t offer neither real growth nor genuine security.

That’s it. That’s the argument. What is hypocritical about that?

Elsewhere in the interview, he makes the argument that the EU should either go towards some kind of democratic federalism (in which case, one could assume that there would exist the framework for controlling the military-industrial complex) or just call it quits, because the current model is just not viable. That’s coherent with his view of military Keynesianism above.

His thinking on Ukraine is pragmatic and calling us on our own hypocrisy. He criticizes Western hypocrisy for arming Ukraine without committing troops and condemns attempts to mimic the U.S. military-industrial model, which he sees as both unethical and structurally impossible for Europe. That’s where his Hitler line comes in, that if Western leaders truly believed Putin was a danger like Hitler, they would actually fully commit, instead of the tragedy we currently have. And that’s a valid argument, right? If we truly believe that Russia is a real and present danger, enough pussyfooting, enough half-measures, go big or go home. Federalize, arm, fight. If not, what the fuck are we doing?

Your comment is a bit incoherent. Its first part seems to imply it’s a needed thing that we should do, the second that it is a dangerous thing that we should avoid. Which is it?