Would you describe India as a social democracy under Modi? I am hesitant to. There are robust welfare schemes no doubt but the leanings are overwhelmingly capitalist especially in areas of the country controlled by the BJP.

Middle aged East Asian people are not physically fit lol. This is racialized faux intellectualism. Lemmy should have higher standards.

‘Nihilism and body weight are linked’… Source? ‘Trust me bro’

Location matters though. It wouldn’t make sense for a house to cost as much as it does to make. Though obviously prices have become completely detached from reality.

A Westerner is someone that lives in a previous colonial metropole, usually Western Europe, or one of their settler nation states.

In other words, someone who does not live in the global south ie. those peoples victimized by colonial imperialism.

Why refer to them as the bourgeoisie proletariat? It’s the first time I’m coming across the phrase but it makes sense. This 20% segment of humanity holds 80% of global wealth, to the great suffering of others. This 20% segment has historically contributed over 50% of cumulative carbon emissions, disproportionately contributing to climate change through relative excess, while looking down at those that have less than them.

While not talking about any one person in particularly, surely anyone can see that describing this segment of humanity collectively as the bourgeoisie proletariat couldn’t be more fitting.

South asian, not south east asian. It’s not racist but I definitely rolled my eyes. It’s a movie from 20 years ago and Americans are not known for being particularly ‘worldly’ so it comes across as sees brown person - oh here’s a movie from a couple decades ago that I remember had similar looking people in it

Thanks

Conflating the actions of the Israeli government with Jewish people as a whole sounds pretty antisemitic to me.

Edit: this is in reference to the Israeli government.

How is it a victory if the best case scenario is exactly the state of affairs prior (ie. the strait of hormuz being open) to the start of this war? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say nothing was accomplished? I wouldn’t be suprised if Iran leverages greater geopolitical influence from this, that’s how incompetent Trump and the group of great American intellectuals currently in his government are.

This is absolutely true.

Even with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Britain initially struggled to compete with the sheer quality and cost-effectiveness of Indian hand-woven fabrics.

They instituted a 100% tariff on importation of Indian fabric to support their nascent mechanized textile manufacturing.

This allowed them to hone the machinery by creating a sandbox to grow their new expertise in. The quality could not match what was produced by hand but the sheer volume and efficiency could easily outdo manual methods.

Over time as they gained political influence, they were able to point guns at and break the thumbs of the right people in India effectively eradicating Indias domestic textile industry.

They then forced Indian markets to accept British cloth with no tariff, making that consumer sandbox bigger.

Minus the colonial / coercive economics at the end there, this is an example of Britain using tariffs very effectively to grow their own industry while taking down a global leader in textiles (one that even the Romans wrote of 1500 years prior).

May well have played out the same without supportive policy, but the protectionism certainly helped them grow their own industry faster and the violent / coercive colonial element helped them remove a traditional, higher quality though analog/manual competitor sooner.

What America is doing is more of a dying empire vibe. Protection for the sake of clinging to the old and familiar way, with no plan or strategy to adapt for the future.

Depends how much the average consumer is paying attention. Many probably don’t know that every EV can use the Tesla chargers now.

The competition here is certainly constrained. Most car manufacturers are making less EVs due to decreasing overall demand and expirarion of federal EV tax credits.

The real competition is on the other side of the Pacific. Europe and Canada have accepted that on some level while the US continues to artificially prop up its EV market ex-China.

There are legitimate concerns don’t get me wrong. But the US won’t be able to hide from a more dynamic and competitive product forever.

Tesla has 35% market share in Norway.

France saw an increase in Tesla registrations by 203% year over year.

Sweden had a 144% increase in registrations. Denmark had a 96% increase.

In the US, the core demographic remains white male, ~48 years old, with a household income exceeding $140,000, particularly in conservative states (Texas/Florida).

Part of the problem is that competition is still lacking in many ways especially when it comes to charging infrastructure.

Yeah it’s not just Indians:

In 2025:

According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.

Favorability / loyalty have dropped across all groups over the past several years.

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She is definitely not strong on foreign policy, this much was apparent when she spoke on complex issues at the Munich Security Conference and struggled to be fully coherent.

But there’s still time for her to hone it. What was her path to getting here?

She’s trying to create a middle path here where one side is genocide. It’s pretty disconcerting overall but Israel is the last great Western colonial settler project and colonialism is prosperity / glory to the West and genocide / displacement to the Global South (or human majority).

Thankfully there are many here that are against it but clearly she feels that a centrist approach will be more expedient for her political aspirations.

It’s military keynesianism and the US economy has been running off of it since world war 2.

The economic issues were a direct result of US foreign policy.

​In a January 2026 interview at the World Economic Forum and his February testimony before Congress, Scott Bessent took credit for engineering a “dollar shortage” that triggered a currency crisis and mass protests in Iran.

Bessent used phrases such as “Making Iran broke again” and described the resulting economic turmoil as “economic statecraft with no shots fired.”

Through sanctions, the dollar shortage and currency crisis/hyperinflation led to the collapse of one of Iran’s major banks, which led to the protests prior to the war starting.

Sounds like an overstatement of the European civilian response. A majority of Westerners have generally supported colonial settler activities for the past 500 years.

It gets engagement from all sides. Advertisers dream come true.

Thanks for that. Always interested in hearing different perspectives.

Kerala India achieved developed nation level performance on HDI (human development index) indices in a few short decades with expansive land and policy reforms under a democratically elected communist party.

Communism is an extremely effective tool at shaking off feudalistic old world tendencies but, as a system, it is extremely economically handicapped in a world where the wealthiest nations are capitalist.

Which is why China has had to adopted a hybrid “state capitalism” / mercantilism to achieve its rapid economic ascent.