IIRC government recommendations can impact the composition of school lunches.

The United States is attempting to corner the global fossil fuel market. The correct response here is the very thing that will mitigate the impact of climate change: pursue renewable energy.

I think this is often the case with Trump. However, when this does happen, at some point along the way there’s usually hints dropped about what kind of “deal” could be made (like agreeing to buy a bunch of US military equipment). But with Greenland, there has been no indication at all that Trump is interested in budging from full ownership of the island.

Respectfully, the two things you are trying to compare are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

Edit: If I am being as generous as possible, I suppose you could stretch the definition of “colonialism” to include Tsarist Russia and Siberia (not sure I would agree, but let’s call it that). But even then, by the time you get to the USSR I don’t see how you could call it that, as opposed to the USSR literally just developing part of the Union.

Because once the news broke of the Ellisons buying US TikTok (and their transparent reasons for doing so), it became clear to me that for the free and open internet, “winter is coming”.

Oct 7th and the global outpouring of support for Palestinians (and trashing of the reputation of Israel) was a huge wake-up call to the ruling classes. I think until then, they were largely content with controlling the narratives via traditional media spaces. The aftermath of Oct 7 taught them that social media and the internet cannot be ignored and in fact must controlled. It’s not like anyone under 65 is watching Fox News or CNN, and not many reading the NYT. All of the actions we have seen in the last 2 years - making sure Facebook / Google / Twitter / Reddit and now TikTok have tightly controlled messaging, requiring IDs and verification, etc - are pointing towards a future where free expression online is severely limited. I don’t want to be a part of that.

And I do believe that it’s important to get out there and discuss things that are important to me with others (Palestinian and indigenous liberation, communism, online privacy). I’m not happy to just retreat into my own bubble. That is ultimately the reason I joined (I was of course already included to using the fediverse as I’ve long appreciated FOSS and decentralized systems and non-commercialized things in general).

They know just how bad it will look and how unpopular it will be if they just take Greenland by force. They’re trying to convince the Danes to sell it under duress to give it a veneer of legitimacy.

Slower growth was a problem from circa 1975 to 1985. By the mid-80s, the Soviet economy had problems but none of them were catastrophic (and tbf, consider how various capitalist economies right now have very serious issues but those economies are not collapsing). That was the view of Western intelligence agencies in the mid 80s btw - that there were problems but that everything was more or less fine.

A former unnamed CIA director once told historian Eric Hobsbawm that had Andropov lived another 15 years, the USSR would still be around today. I do think as late as the Andropov era, the leadership in the USSR had a good understanding of their problems and were starting to put the country on a better path. Then Andropov died and a lot of the changes made by Gorbachev and the leaders around him really threw a bunch of spanners into the works.

The book Socialism Betrayed is an excellent book if you want to understand the reasons for the collapse of the USSR (Chernobyl was not a major factor, but I wouldn’t say it had zero impact). Or, if you would prefer to read a book not written by Marxists, Revolution From Above would fit that and IIRC the authors of the later largely come to the same conclusions as the former.

Much like the collapse of the Roman Empire, it’s a very complex topic that isn’t easily boiled down into simple answers.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

When my dad was a kid, my grandparents did absolutely nothing for Christmas - no decorations, no tree, etc - until Christmas Eve, then they went all out. Then they’d pack it all up the day after Christmas. I feel like if the Christmas “season” was only a few days, I’d hate it much less.

I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies (the music especially is just so bad). The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.

I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.

But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.

On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.

So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

(Copying what I said on the lemmy.ml cross post because I’ve been thinking about this for a while and want to get it out).