Big J

Nothing humourous in the last couple of pages..... 😑

This thread is just an embarrassment. For f*cks sake, will you all just grow up? There isn't a chance in hell you'd speak to each other like this in real life, so show some civility and stop acting like school kids. This used to be a really interesting forum where you could reasonably discuss controversial stuff (as well as all the arb related topics) but lately it's more resembling a cesspool than anything else.

Yep, I listen to a lot of those. I disagree with them a bit on their attitude towards protein though. They are not advocates of a higher protein intake, which for me, coming from an athletic background, is very important. I've taken their 30 different plants a week mantra to heart though, and sometimes get close to that in a single day. My gut microbiome is (I believe) a healthy place

I am happy with my audio choices. It's not all political podcasts. I spent a while yesterday learning about the potential issues with the concept of terraforming Mars. My job is skilled but repetitive, so I have to keep my brain occupied. I use Peltor WS Alert XPs. They are Swedish made and literally everyone and their dog here uses them, but I got mine in the UK about 8-9 years ago. No Brits seem to use them, instead favuoring shitty bluetooth ear pieces or propping their phones against their shoulders. Why wouldn't you want high performance ear defenders, coupled with excellent audio quality and a microphone so good that you can chainsaw and hold a conversation simultaneously? Highly recommended. I just retired my first set after about 20,000hrs of use (dodgy microphone, which I could replace, but I had a second pair on standby)

OK, well if that's the case, just rise above it. I'm not privy to all of the details of the spat, but whatever it is, it's wearing. There comes a certain point where it's best just to move on. We're all here voluntarily and grudge holding and personal attacks diminish the experience. And before you say anything, I honestly don't care who started it. To quote my (and everyone else's) parents! 😄

I listen to a variety of podcasts from a variety of sources. The far left stuff is quite irritating (and the far right stuff is disgusting) and clearly partisan, so I tend to largely avoid that. My go-to podcasts are (for your reference), Times Radio, The Rest is Politics (and TRIP USA), The Bulwark and a bunch of science, sport and health stuff too. I wouldn't say that is especially radical. As for the length of my posts, I do try not to waffle and to present my arguments concisely. I can touch type very quickly if I'm on the laptop, and if I'm on my phone, I tend to dictate into my headset, which is even quicker. If I am going to make the effort to post something, I might as well do it properly.

Dave, please can you drop this. I honestly don't care what people do for a living and if he chooses not to share that detail about his life, so be it. Continually raising it in every interaction with him on the forum doesn't serve any purpose and undermines the points you are trying to make. Just move on and try to respectfully address any points of disagreement. To coin the phrase from The Rest is Politics, it's excellent to be able to disagree agreeably. If ever anyone resorts to insults, it's obvious that they've lost the argument.

Again, you've not provided any sort of useful contribution to the discussion. Just generalisations and assumptions, but at least you mostly refrained from being offensive. Yes I despise Trump. You can objectively loath someone without objectively loathing everything they do. The issue is that almost everything he has done has been loathsome. He truly is a man without a single redeeming quality and that's reflected in his rhetoric, his policy and his actions. I am well aware of how insular the US is. I've only been there three times, but having visited Texas, Florida and NYC, at least they were three quite different places. Even in a city as global as NYC, it's still inward looking.

That was an interesting podcast - thanks for the link. I am fortunate to have tonnes of time at work to listen to interesting stuff. Either way, the Skynet (from the Terminator films) scenario seems closer than ever, but there isn't anything I can do. I'm just glad that with the advent of AI that I don't have a white collar job.

I appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it stuck to your perception of the facts, as opposed to attacking me and others. I don't agree that America is a place that enjoys a high degree of freedom. It is incredibly unequal, with high levels of gun violence and substance abuse. Access to healthcare and education is prohibitively expensive for many and the cost of having children in terms of childcare and parental leave are one of the main reasons why the US is so dependent on immigrant labour. People living in the United States simply cannot afford to have children. For each and every one of the 14 points listed above, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite behaviour or policy. American hegemony is most likely going to come to an end in the coming decades, and what follows it is unclear. China has a catastrophic demographic problem, decades in the making, relating to its one child policy. There are now as many people in China over the age of 53 as there are under, and their economy is entirely reliant on manufacture and export, at the expense of a suppressed domestic consumer market. What I think will ultimately be the downfall of the US is that the debt burden is now the single largest expense for any US Administration, greater even than the budget for the military. With Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, the deficit will only increase and America's level of indebtedness will skyrocket whilst the personal wealth of billionaires will expand exponentially. And then you factor in AI and the future looks pretty bleak.....

There's just no effort to dispute my assertion that Trump is a fascist. Just deflection, distraction and schoolyard insults. Please, for the sake of an intelligent debate, engage with what I and others are saying and make a reasoned argument for why you believe that Trump is not a fascist. The moment you catch yourself resorting to an insult, a redirect or whataboutery, bring yourself back on topic. We all clearly have different politics. That's fine and perfectly natural. But the moment you resort to personal attacks, you undermine your credibility and any good points you might make simply drown in a sea of personal vitriol.

I agree, though in the context of his current entourage, he has quite a few female MAGA clones in his administration. However, his historic attitude towards women has been awful, as you say.

I don't think so. It's all documented and there isn't the same resistance to paying tax here as in the UK. I may be wrong though.

France does have, I believe, the highest tax rate in Europe. I lose about 41% of my total profit in tax and social charges. I have very few costs these days as I just contract myself out as a machine operator. Sounds like a lot, and it's a fair chunk, but then the rates of pay are quite a lot higher here, and you get a tonne back from the state. For example. with our two daughters, we have 22 weeks each of parental leave for us to take before they are 12. That equates to about £19k tax free over the next four years. If we ever do any work on the house, we get 30% of the cost of the labour back from the state. Green subsidies on things like solar panels are 50%. I've just applied for an employed position as a wheel loader driver at the larger sawmill that I used to work at. With the antisocial hours allowance, the pay is as good as anything I would get self employed, plus they even factor in 60hrs of paid leave a year just for things like medical appointments. If you don't use it, they'll pay you for it, or you can take it as holiday, meaning you get 9 weeks paid leave per year. We don't live in an affluent part of Sweden, but everyone has enough to get by without struggling here. It does contrast where we used to live in Devon and even just outside Edinburgh.

No one has really answered my question yet, so I'll pose it again. If Trump doesn't represent a fascist ideology, then what would you consider fascism to be? A useful guide is the 14 early warning signs of fascism, as was displayed at the Holocaust museum in the US: Powerful and continuing nationalism Disdain for human rights Identification of enemies as a unifying cause Supremacy of the military Rampant sexism Controlled mass media Obsession with national security Religion and government intertwined Corporate power protected Labor power suppressed Disdain for intellectual & the arts Obsession with crime and punishment Rampant cronyism and corruption Fraudulent elections With the possible exception of Rampant Sexism, I would argue strongly that Trump et al are meeting and exceeding the requirements for the other 13 points.

Finally, someone answered. You're wrong of course, but at least you bothered to address my question. Hitler did not ban private gun ownership. Quite the opposite. Power was quickly consolodated and centralised in Nazi Germany (as it is the case as it develops in the US). Free speech? You cannot seriously be suggesting that Trump isn't attacking media outlets and commentators that don't speak favourably about him? Would anyone else like to try to answer the question? If Trump isn't a fascist, then what is the definition of fascism?

But the raids that they are doing have got nothing to do with deporting criminals. Stephen Miller has said as much, demanding that ICE target 7 11s and Home Depot (hardly the hangouts of criminals): Stephen Miller targets Home Depot and 7-Eleven to round up undocumented migrants WWW.INDEPENDENT.CO.UK White House Deputy chief of staff ‘eviscerated’ ICE leaders and has created ‘fearful environment,’ report reveals The White House is doing a few things simultaneously. Firstly, the bulk of ICE activity is in states regarded to be liberal. This consolidates support for MAGA in traditionally red states. The Right Wing media spins these protests (and the massively heavy-handed government response) as if they were a repetition of the LA Riots. California didn't ask for the National Guard, nor the Marines. The last time the National Guard was deployed in the US was in the 1960s by Lyndon B Johnson, to protect (civil rights) protesters, not to oppress them. Secondly, Trump is testing the water to see how the American public responds to US military on the streets of the US. His grip on power may depend on his ability to normalise domestic military deployment, and with the mid-terms not far away and the courts thwarting many of his executive orders, retention of power by any means necessary is within the Trump playbook. As a point aside (because I think it's worth asking) - those of you here that are supportive of Trump obviously wouldn't agree with me that he is a fascist. If he isn't a fascist (or indeed if you think he is) please could you define what exactly constitutes fascism and how it differs from the current state of affairs in the USA? What's somewhat frightening is that the Nazis took far longer to consolodate power in Germany in the 1930s. We're not even 5 months into the Trump regime.....

I would say that the size of the protests is fairly limited when compared to the scale, brutality and illegality of the ICE raids. If I were part of a community that was at risk of being snatched off the street and deported to some foreign concentration camp, I would be pretty pissed off about it.

I generally try to work as little as possible, though I'm not doing very well at that at the moment. I look at the year as a whole, and try to do 1800hrs. That averages 150hrs a month (holidays are outside of that). I try to take 10-11 weeks off a year, so I average about 44hrs a week. In an ideal world, I'd split that into 4 shifts of 11hrs, but it's tough to get the Swedes to work long days, so I'm tied into a 4.5 days a week shift system that's somewhat irritating. I shouldn't complain, but I'm still happy to grumble

It's just a joke. The divorce between Trump and Musk is nothing if not incredibly funny.

I am starting to wonder when this current economic model (ponzi scheme, borrowing from our children's future) will come crashing down. If western nations continually run deficits, their national debt to GDP ratios will continue to increase. The interest paid on servicing the debts only increases, costing governments more and more, causing them to borrow more. You then reach the situation that the US finds itself in, whereby foreign lenders no longer regards US treasury bonds as 100% reliable. The credit rating for the US then degrades, interest rates on treasury bonds and other forms of national debt increase, meaning the government has to aportion more of it's budget for debt repayment. Then you get some clown like Trump who passes broad tax cuts for the rich and the deficit increases even further. At the end of the day, who is actually going to pay for it. and indeed, when?

That is an opinion piece, so not exactly objective. But of course, large scale immigration is problematic. I would argue that the Swedish state has done a lot to aid with integration though. SFI (Swedish for immigrants) is a government funded language learning course, which is comprehensive, and at the latter stages, they pay you to learn. It's obviously different in the cities, but here, our immigrant population is largely European, so culturally closer. We have plenty of folk from the middle east and further afield, and I'm glad for the diversity at the school - my children are now bilingual, but there are loads of kids that speak 3-4 languages fluently. Hard to imagine a better start in life really.

I don't have any experience of urban Sweden really, so can only comment on my locality. The economy here is quite largely based in manufacturing, forestry and timber industries, so folk tend to be pretty practical.