Exactly, I’m also thinking Mercosur’s role in this conflict will be decisive! Or were you talking about the USA that has eaten up the word America?

I agree with your point though, words get eaten up all the time. It’s a very good strategy for capturing the attachment people have with the word. It’s been done with the word democracy as well.

You guys are so f*cking screwed 🤷

The court found those adolescents as guilty of having pointed out Paty to the murderer.

Pretty wild to go to jail for 6 months for telling someone about your teacher that is showing photos of the prophet. Should everyone who retweeted the Charlie Hebdo cartoon also be charged with complicity them?

Sure that’s in paper. But does he head the state? North Korea is also a democratic republic if you go by the official definition…

I’m from Belgium, which is also a kingdom, but our king has absolutely no power. The state is headed by the federal government, not by the king, in practice. I would imagine that to be the case in the Netherlands too.

Would you argue that the head of the state of the Netherlands is the king? It being written to be so doesn’t mean it is so in practice.

Wait what? In the Netherlands the king forms a coalition? Or is it like in Belgium where the king appoints someone to try make a coalition and if he can’t then appoints someone else. Usually party heads of the parties in decreasing order of number of votes 😅 I guess the only real power the Belgian king has is censoring a party from initiating coalition talks.

It’s terminology. I guess they’d be called so today, yes. They wouldn’t be called like that a few hundred years ago when the term democracy first became public. The word democracy actually has a very interesting history. At the time of the founding of the United States of America, the founding fathers were actually motivated in crafting the constitution of the republic by fears of democracy breaking out. The resulting constitution also never mentioned the word democracy in it.

The Netherlands isn’t a republic and republic basically just means “not a monarchy”.

A republic means a state with representative democracy. (Not strictly necessarily representative, but it’s hard to even imagine a State system with full democracy.)

You can be a democracy without being a republic and a republic without being a democracy.

Exactly, because a republic isn’t very democratic. What I’m saying is that representative democracy is barely democratic at all. Especially when using systems like majority rule. In most representative democracies today, the general public is barely if at all participating in the government of public affairs. I’m purposefully using the original meaning of the word democracy: government by the people or the people governing themselves. If the only way we can govern is by checking a box on a ballot twice a decade and that resulting in anywhere between 1 and 250 people having full authority over an entire country, I would not call that governing at all. And it shows that in most republics, policy enacted by their governments rarely represent what people actually want and care about.

Does he have any effective political power?

In a republic*, ftfy. Republics and majority rule in general are not at all so democratic. The vast majority of the population has entirely no input in government.

Sure, but that only works up to a certain point. When they are ignored, voters will get even more annoyed and he might grow towards next election and become impossible to ignore. The same is happening with Vlaams Belang in Vlaanderen.

Just having allies sell oil for dollars instead of some other currency already helps the US a lot. It’s called seigniorage, the more people use the US dollar, the more they can print without feeling much inflation. The whole gulf war was fought to ensure those countries traded oil in US dollar.

In the last year or two, several countries have traded oil for another currency for the first time in ages. Which is big. With Iran sponsoring Palestine a lot, they might have similar ideas. The Arabs of all people understand the oppressive tactics of the US and their currency.

But how many civilians are they going to revive?

Hamas is not really a government at all though. They barely have any support in Gaza. Many years ago some election was held but there was only Hamas to choose from basically. I wouldn’t call Hamas in any way representing anyone else but themselves, and not the Palestinian people. Maybe more rather their Arab sponsors.

Pussies too

That’s the exact problem. Corporations aren’t people. They might be run by people, but they are a concept of their own, that create a very twister social dynamic where the people that run them have certain feeling of obligation but also a sense of irresponsibility. Because the “corporation”, or the embodiment of the abstract end of maximizing profit, takes responsibility for the employees’. Mostly culturally, but even in many ways legally too.

How about Cuba, then?

I think it’s mostly the uther lack of consideration for the locals at the time. Europeans went there with the explicit aim to “conquer” and loot a continent that was inhabited by dozens if not hundreds of societies. They went there, killed, raped and enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. Can’t imagine to hear anyone defend that kind of behavior.

It’s dangerous to confuse a national identity with an ethnic one. But I grant you, it’s nations who are at fault with claiming the terms and other ones by acknowledging them.

But aside from that (and I just wonder), is there such a thing as a Chinese ethnicity? I always imagined China was pretty diverse, ethnic-wise. With the northern mountain people, the coastal people the western people (I don’t know names or terms) being quite different from one another… Is that not true?

They are. There’s a FOSS version of Telegram on f-droid.