Democracy has existed far longer than fascism has… the earliest fascist movements weren’t until the 1910s, while the earliest recorded democracy was around 508 BC, with the earliest recorded usage of the term in the 430s BC. You’re wrong by a margin of millennia
My dear god, this is history fundamentals. And the sheer balls you’ve got to have to be that rude while being just this severely wrong is obscene.
I’ve seen a lot of answers with other good reasons, but I think the main reason has slipped under the radar: the US wants to control the naval routes (via Baffin Bay) between the Atlantic and Pacific through the arctic which are progressively opening up more due to climate change.
Currently Denmark and Canada each control one side of that passage, but changing either to being under US control would effectively allow them to control trade flows through those routes.
Democracy isn’t a magic anti-fascist spell, sorry to break it to you. If someone can convince enough of the population to elect them, then they get into power, fascist or not.
By your definition, there really hasn’t been a “real” democracy ever, frankly, since it depends on there being a state with no imbalance of wealth whatsoever. If that’s how you want to define it, sure, go ahead, but I’m going to keep using a definition of democracy that’s based on how the institutions of elections and the state are built, because that’s a useful way to discuss political systems, and “democracy is when only leaders I like are elected” is not.
Brazil’s leaders are elected through universal suffrage, its speech and media are (relatively) free, that’s a democracy by any reasonably useful definition. There’s plenty to criticise in how that democracy functions, especially how money and power can influence those outcomes, but there is no perfect democracy, just the best attempts at what people can build within their existing social systems.
Democracy is a political system, while capitalism is an economic system - understanding how they interact with each other is useful and important, but pretending they’re mutually exclusive is unnecessarily reductive, and closes the space to actually discuss those things.
Edit: the mere fact that Bolsonaro attempted to retain power by force, but was unable to do so in the face of losing the election is direct evidence that there are functional democratic institutions in Brazil
And now it isn’t, that’s democracy, baby
I fully agree that Bolsonaro was a straight up demon, but I also agree with the idea that - currently - the administration of Brazil is probably about as good an example of a good world citizen as it gets
Oh yeah, Russia is real good at keeping those tech oligarchs in check /s
BRICS is such a loosely linked group that generalising like that is just never going to be accurate; Indian and South African, for example, policy on tech regulation couldn’t be more different if they tried.
Don’t get me wrong, I think BRICS is a good organisation for economic cooperation between these very diverse countries, but there’s really no common political, social or economic characteristics.
Brazil is a good example of that, because under Bolsonaro, it couldn’t have been more different - regulations on big tech and banning X would never have happened under his tenure (well, at least not with the same goals)
It’s somewhat specific to social media, but otherwise is very generic “anything critical of authority” answer imo
Plus, as you say, we have no idea what the actual prompt or response were 🤷
I’m not sure this is actually meaningful - presumably grok doesn’t actually have knowledge of the twitter algorithm itself, so this is just a run of the mill AI make-it-up-on-the-spot response
They don’t do that, because as a service, it continues to cost them money to provide it as time goes on.
That’s not their business model, and acting like it’s equivalent to ransomware for them to not use the business model you’re demanding they switch to is absurd.
If you want to keep your cloud services, pay the subscription cost, it’s that simple.
Okay, I too could afford to pay for your OneDrive subscription, but I’m not going to because - frankly - I don’t care about your cloud storage needs.
The fact they’re technically capable of providing you something for free has nothing to do with whether they are legally or morally obligated to do so.
You’re not the centre of the universe, sorry.
The fact that all of those services have costs - so what you’re effectively saying is that the companies should pay for these things for you whenever you demand it
If they promised you X service for a certain period of time when they purchased something, then you have a right to that service for that period of time. But if they didn’t do that, it just happens that the same company sells that service as a separate product to what you bought, then of course you don’t have a right to it.
If you’re asking whether the rules for services you’ve paid for are different to the rules for services you haven’t paid for then yes, absolutely.
If someone is providing a service at no cost, they have no obligation to continue that service, because you have not provided them anything in exchange for anything.
“I want” is not a valid legal argument for having a right to something.
No, because that’s not what tips are for? But if you don’t pay for the groceries, then yeah, they should be allowed to not give you the groceries, because that’s how buying things works
But if you specifically agree to pay someone a certain amount of money to load your groceries in advance, then refuse to pay them, it’s totally valid for them to not load your groceries, because you didn’t pay for the service you bought
Jesus Christ on a bike
Okay? But I never said I agreed with them, did I? Just that it’s not such an intrinsically evil concept as to legitimate you being an asshole to the original commenter
Sure, but you put them there, without taking backups, and then stopped paying them to keep them
Commitment like living and working there, you mean? Nobody was proposing it should apply to corporations, because they aren’t people
All they’re proposing is that people who pay their fair share for, and depend on, government services should have a say in how those services operate
I mean not providing a service because you stopped paying the cost you agreed to for the service is quite different from forcibly destroying random people’s data if they don’t give you as much money as you demand
It’s not like they remotely connect to your pc and wipe your hard drive if you don’t pay up
Weirdly aggressive response - it seems fairly clear to me that they’re arguing that people who live, work in the UK should have a right to vote, not that they should be exempted from paying tax
The one who’s been convicted for assault, contempt of court, public disorder, using a fake passport and mortgage fraud? The very same
I mean, I don’t disagree that there’s similarities especially wrt to nationalism etc, but I also think those things are far more widespread than the UK and US.
Germany for example has had the AfD emerge as a major party with a big rise in nationalism, Italy has Brothers of Italy in power, who were an explicitly fascist party until very recently, and Italy has a long history of nationalism. China and Russia are extremely right-wing, propagandised, xenophobic, nationalist, surveillance capitalist and deregulatory (moreso wrt Russia), but it would be very silly to claim that makes them America-like.
I’m just stating how I see it from the perspective of a person actually from Britain - not sure what you’re referring to wrt UK/me personally(?) having a superiority complex about it, in fact I’d argue self-deprecating, anti-British attitudes are an integral part of British culture in a way that is a direct inverse of US nationalist fervour.
I just think “the UK is America lite” is a very reductive way to look at a country that is highly culturally and politically distinct from the US. Whether that’s the NHS (the first ever single-payer national health system), which the US has no equivalent of, the importance placed on the separation of church and state, or the far stronger regulatory frameworks that have frequently been a preventative factor that have repeatedly caused trade deals with America to fail (eg the whole bleached chicken thing).
Well that’s just not what I said - you specifically said fascism, which was invented in the 20th century. It has more specific characteristics than just hierarchical violence; ethno-nationalism, militarisation of the state, flexible suppression of opposition and centralised autocracy.
Just because you’re mad about being corrected doesn’t mean you need to be a dick about it.