I think merelly “spends more per-person” is nowhere strong enough to really illustrate how bad things are.

For example, the United States spends more than TWICE per-person in Healthcare than the United Kingdom.

In fact judging by this it spends almost twice as much as the European country which has a 69% higher GDP per-capita - Luxembourg.

And even with such much higher spending levels, based on this healthcare outcomes are actually worse.

Healthcare in the US is world-beating by a large marge in how spectacularly inneficient it is.

Trump wanted to fuck children but he couldn’t go there to do it in person so he remotelly had them fucked in bulk.

If you don’t think that’s important enough to beat cancer research in getting funds then you’re one of those people who doesn’t want to make America great again.

/s

In a Universal healtcare system, there is a monetary incentive for the autorities to make laws and regulations to prevent disease - prevention is a lot cheaper than fixing things after the damage is done.

In a pure for profit healthcare system there is no such incentive for the autorities - in some ways, there might even be the opposite incentive, depending on the levels of Corruption and how much more profit the Healthcare sector can make if people are more sick: after all, when a country spends twice as much as a percentage of the GDP in Healthcare, that means there’s a lot more money to be made in Healthcare, and private interests have an incentive to buy politicians and regulators to help them profit as much as possible.

Beyond this there is also the whole “doing what’s best for our people” incentive, which is the US is so weak that it doesn’t even apply to some obviously bad things (for example, easy availability of guns, which is definitelly bad for people’s health) much less to more subtle pathways to damage people’s health such as unhealthy food.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

If nothing happens that society and its practices will never change and the pain will continue.

If the whole castle of cards collapses due to this, whilst it’s a small consolation for the current slaves given the pain they’ll endure, it’s way more pain spared for would be future slaves.

Further, the scumbags will definitelly lose if the whole slave-using realestate-bubble empire whose value supports their wealth collapses back to nomads camel fucking in the desert.

If you’re hosting some other country’s military bases you’re either its Ally or its Vassal.

I can understand why they do it, but none the less there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Shouldn’t have been an ally of the US and Israel.

Number of captains who took his advice: 0

The power of this guy starts and stops with No-Brain individuals in America.

True.

The US is just even worse off in that regard because of the very high dependency (what I read in the Omnivore’s Dilema was over 70%) of its food supply on hybrid corn.

That’s mostly a problem for countries were almost the entire food base is directly (food, food products, high-fructose corn syrup) and indirectly (chicken and cattle feed) hybrid corn which cannot be grown without fertilizer (as the plant density is too high for normal land to be able to support), i.e. the United States.

Other countries won’t suffer quite as much.

Fair enough.

Personally I think that his actions and words provide so much and so ample proof against the man that misportraying a picture of him adds nothing to the proof against him whilst introducing doubt on the character of the critics that would use forms of deceit such as that misportraying.

In other words, it’s a net loss rather than a net gain.

Further, as a Principle I’m just against all forms of misportrayal of a person and situation, no matter what the political color of those involved - if I was only against it when it was done to attack people I dislike, then it wouldn’t be a Principle, it would just be me doing some performative-Morality.

Just telnet to 127.0.0.1 and you’ll find them all there.

This goes deeper than people realize.

I totally agree.

For me the use of cherry picked photos like that is a big red flag about the absence of Journalistic integrity of that publication and that shit (as well as a lot of other slimy Propaganda techniques) is all over the place, especially (but not only) in the Press in Anglo-Saxon countries.

I follow the Principle that people should be judged by their actions, and Principles apply to everybody indepently of their political color, so I abhor misportraying of a situation by people closer to me politically just as much as I abhor it when done by people far from me politically - if you put your principles aside for some political colors but not others, then they’re not really principled and instead you just have principle-sounding slogans you use in politics.

And to address your first part, I do analyse any shocking pictures in the same way and with the same skepticism (the bigger the claim the bigger the proof required) - for many it’s not hard to figure out alternative explanations which have a high probability. You can tell if it’s a true skeptical analysis like I try to do or just denialism like many people do for political ends by 2 things:

• Do they do it always to “protect” one political side but never a different political one?
• Do they use low probability possibilities to dismiss high probability ones? For example, claiming that Musk was doing a “from my heart to you” movement rather than a “NAZI salute” when he did his salute, TWICE, in the Republican party conference - in terms of probability based on context, his past comments and even the details of the salute, the “NAZI salute” was a much higher probability explanation than any other explanations put forward by people who seemed more driven by liking him than anything else.

There are quite a lot of reasons for showing such displeasure, maybe a comment from somebody else at the same time or even just finding a bit of cartilage or bone in the bacon (I myself might very well do such a face if I was eating a bacon sandwich and there as cartilage or a bone in the bacon).

Also it’s quite possible that bacon sandwich was simply a bad bacon sandwich.

It’s also possible that Ed, being an upper middle class wanker like Blair, had never eaten a bacon sandwich before and didn’t like it (which is weird, since even ultra posh upper class English wankers would have been exposed to fried bacon at some point in their lives, if only when eating a Full English Breakfast) or was secretly a vegetarian or vegan.

The very purposeful fake outrage against the Labour Party and Ed Milliband around that created by the British Tabloids during an election campaign has nothing to do with the reality of what was really going on and all to do with the style of British politics and the stupidity of a large fraction of the British electorate (as proven not that many years later by the Leave Referendum campaign and subsequent results).

The picture and the context around it says a lot more about Britons than it says about Ed Milliband.

Your take on Self-Determination boils down to just saying “I know better than they do” - you think they should change their mode of government to something else which you think is better and if they don’t then it’s perfectly justified for those who you aprove off to do it for them.

That’s pure Imperialist bullshit, no different from what from the bullshit out of the elites of every single imperialist power, including America and Russia, and is a variant of the good old “it’s civilized people coming to civilize the barbarians” idea so common in justifying the atrocities European colonialism.

Maybe me being Portuguese rather than Spanish and my countrymen chosing to kick out the Fascists rather than, like in Spain the Fascists deciding to given themselves immunity for their actions and “allow” a transition to Democracy, explains why I believe that self-determination eventually works and you believe that outsiders imposing their will is a morally righteous path.

As for the rest, that’s pure dissembling and raging at strawmen to avoid addressing my points - if you could disprove what I wrote you would have done it rather fixating on spelling and raging like a child at your own, self-crafted purposed miscaracterisation of myself and what I wrote.

You’re obviously putting political loyalty above Principle and in doing so you display the same contemptible lack of Morals and Principles as the worst Americans and Russians.

Frankly, you sound a lot like the Fascists: different political flag same authoritarian heart.

Again, you’re just digging the hole deeper:

• You’re just denying the whole principle of Self-Determination, same as Americans do. It’s not up to other people to decide how somebody else lives their lives. China took every single possible future away from Tibetans, many if not all of which would be better.
• All your statistics are based on a country which has been heavilly “colonized” by the dominant ethnic group of the invading nation since. Yeah, sure, the Hun live great lives in Tibet, but what about the ethnic-Tibetans? This is like saying the territory of Palestine is much better as it is now with a big chunk of it occupied by Israel than it would be if it remained is it was back when the whole area was ruled by the British - if you both ignore the natural improvements in quality of life it would have had anyway even under self-rule AND look at the average including the colonizers rather than only the original native, you get better numbers.

Basically you moved from using the American justification argument to using the Israeli justification, which I’m afraid isn’t actually less imperialist, quite the contrary.

Something completelly different and totally valid, IMHO, is if China had inspired Tibetans to overthrow their leadership and install Communism - similar to Vietnam - but that’s not what China did: China chose annexation and colonization - the path of domination not the path of partnership.

Sounds to me like both of you are correct: most Americans don’t like him but there are still millions of them who cheer him and his kind of populist actions and words.

The position of his hand in that photo and him being a Fascists seem more like coincidence rather than being related.

There are non-NAZI, valid in that situation, arm and hand movements which yield still photos that look the same as a Heil Hitler, for example waving for people to “cool down” (arm to the front and slightly to the side moving up and down, hand open, palm down).

(This for example does not apply to the actual video of Musk’s NAZI salute, since a NAZI salute is the only arm and hand movement that matches what was shown in that video of Musk - in the face of that whole video the universe of alternative explanations is zero)

So this still of Hegseth with his hand in that position does not logically prove the guy is a NAZI or even a Fascist because there are other entirelly valid non-NAZI hand movements that would yield such a still.

Now, if that was a video of the entire thing and it was the same whole movement as Musk did, that’s a whole different story.

It’s what Hegseth says (including in this specific instance) and his actions that prove that he’s at the very least a Fascist, not this single shot photograph.

Tibet was a feudal kingdom where the vast majority of the population were starved serfs legally bound to the land of their god-given lord. China liberated Tibet from feudalism and rose life expectancy and material conditions massively, while preserving their heritage, language and culture, and a degree of autonomy within China higher than most other regions (Tibet is an autonomous region).

That’s the “they were ruled by evil dictators so we freed them” argument so beloved by Americans when they invade a country to take their shit.

That Chinese propaganda right now - 2026 not 50 years ago - justifies China’s invasion and annexation of Tibet with the same kind of argument as America’s invasions are justfied, says all we need to know about the mindset of the power elites in both countries being pretty much the same, reinforcing fears that the Chinese Communist Party that rules China right know still has the same principles as it did back when it invaded and annexed Tibet and hence will do the same in a similar situation.

You parroting that just further makes my point that it’s justified to be concerned with the possibility of China invading the weaker neighbor country is has always claimed to be part of it rather than a separate sovereign country.

I can tell you that, at least for Europe, they’re doing pretty much the same thing as the US, only it’s higher tariffs rather than blocking the Chinese products.

The effect of special protectionist tariffs on the competitiveness of local companies might not be as strong as for outright blocking of the competing foreign products, but it’s in the same direction, which is why recently even Tesla (which are shit at the actual building cars part of the business) were wiping the floor on EVs with massive European car making businesses which had enormous expertise in actually making cars and decades to evolve EV tech and failed to do so.

Corruption is so entrenched in Portugal that unlike pretty much anywhere in the World, Libel is an actual CRIME prosecuted by the local version of the Public Prosecution Office, which in practice means that no actual damage has to be proven (the legislation literally talks about “protecting the honor” of the person targetted by the libelous comments) and only people with the proper political connections to get the Public Prosecution Office to act (i.e. politicians and rich people) get to be “protected” by this Law.

Oh, and in a country infamous by an extremelly slow Court system, they in practice expedite Libel cases where politicians are the “victim”.

So even descriptions of systems to detect Corruption have to be very carefully worded so as to not even imply that anything caught by them is actually Corruption.

I’m Portuguese and, having also lived elsewhere in Europe, firmly believe that in the domains of Politics and Justice, Portugal is basically a chunk of South America that happens to be in Europe. If it wasn’t for the EU - mainly the laws and pressure coming via it, many ultimatelly originating in places like Northern Europe - the country would be an even bigger shit show.