So, we’re trapping them in debt slavery so that we can steal their natural resources. They die, we profit. Win/Win

Also, it’s not like those profits go to us. They go to the manufacturers and their investors, with only some coming back in the form of wages. It’s mostly a way to take public dollars and then hand it out to political donors. Win/Win/Win

The DNA damage comes from the formaldehyde that the body produces when metabolizing aspartame, but guess what? The body makes formaldehyde anyway, just from its natural metabolic processes. As long as you don’t consume too much it’s fine.

The problem is over-consumption, which is the basis of having a consumer economy. If everyone ate less the food industry would collapse. They need us to overeat and if we ever stopped they’d have to reconcile with the fact that they can’t just keep growing their profits infinitely. Plus, when we overeat, they can make even more money by treating the sicknesses it causes. Win/Win!

Sugar isn’t harmless.

They could, we’d just need to hand over even more of our privacy and rights.

Which was always the plan.

“What’s the difference?” - USA

Those solutions don’t really work if you need an ID to connect to the internet. Can’t access your VPN without internet access, can’t get on a P2P or usenet without accessing the internet first.

And porn can still be purchased or shared on bootleg DVDs.

They’d definitely prefer this, that gives them a physical media that they can track and the police can seize.

Plus it’ll give them more excuses to search through people’s belongings.

In order for social media sites to actually be able to enforce this law it’s the only thing that would work. They might feel pressured to make deals with the internet service providers to actually implement this kind of ID check for internet connections.

If they don’t, it’s only a matter of time until some country does pass such a law.

And the social media sites, in the interest of complying with the law, might make deals with the internet service providers to actually put an ID check on every internet connection. This isn’t impossible.

Even if they don’t, once legislators realize their law didn’t fix the problem they can always pass new legislations.

My point is that this isn’t impossible.

One is purchasing a month to month phone plan with cash for example

They could require you to show an ID to purchase a phone.

Or finding open wifi networks

Open wifi networks certainly wouldn’t provide an ID to connect, which would mean they couldn’t be used to access social media.

This is not an unsolvable problem. The question is if Australia is willing to piss everyone off to actually do it.

They could require an ID to connect to the internet.

If you have to use a government ID to access the internet I don’t think there’ll be a way to subvert it. The tech fixes like face recognition and age inference can probably be spoofed, but IDs seem rock solid unless you steal someone else’s ID.

These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or so-called “age inference”, which analyses online behaviour and interactions to estimate a person’s age.

Surely this won’t be used by the government to monitor internet usage!

At this scale those debts are a chain around their necks that can be used to control them.

As for the aid package, it merely covers half of the debt. On top of that? It’s conditional! Ukraine has to meet certain requirements to receive that aid: energy, border management, agricultural demining, and the development of a list of “strategic and essential” raw materials. Aside from demining that doesn’t sound like defending freedom, that sounds like they are trapping a client state into dependency so they can be exploited for primary production.

This has never been about freedom, I don’t know how anyone could ever believe it was.

Is that why Ukraine is over $100 billion in debt to its Western “allies”?

Putting people into debt slavery is a weird way to defend freedom…

It’s our decision whether we give them billions of dollars of weapons.

Biden and the rest of Europe never gave Ukraine enough support to win either.

This should tell you that the goal of US intervention in Ukraine was never to win.

Liberals don’t want to talk about that. They want to pretend the only problem is Putler having Trump’s pee tapes or something lol

Their job is to serve their donors. That’s why a few Democrats threw themselves on a landmine to collaborate with Republicans to end the shutdown, despite voters showing them clear and obvious support on election day. They had literally zero electoral reason to cave, they did it because the rot runs the party.

The rot can either be cut out, so overthrowing the party leadership, or the party can be left behind to rot in the dustbin of history. If we do not address the rot everything will get worse forever until the country collapses.

The rot runs the party, you aren’t going to clear them out without overthrowing them somehow.

I think the DSA should split the party.

And there never will be.

Maybe the Democrats aren’t the best vehicle for progressive ideas.

So? He wants this because his donors want it, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s using leverage to get what he wants.