The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.
Not actively malicious perhaps, but prioritising profits over lives is evil. Either you take care to make sure the systems you sell lead to the best possible outcomes, or you get out of the sector.
Agree that most companies prioritize profits over lives in an unconscionable manner, but there's a point of diminishing returns where eventually you can save a few more lives, but at an astronomical cost. Auto manufacturers have the same dilemma: spend a few hundred million dollars adding safety features, or nix the features and hope to lose less than that in lawsuits?
Eventually the question will be, how far do we really need to go, i.e. how much profit do we allow ourselves before it's morally untenable and we should plow it back into R&D? Unfortunately, as long as health care is for-profit, and absent effective regulation, companies will always err on the side of profit.
The company not existing at all might be worse though? I think it’s too easy to make blanket judgments like that from the outside, and it would be the job of regulation to counteract adverse incentives in the field.
Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.
Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.
Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.
Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.
> A ship's flag state exercises regulatory control over the vessel and is required to inspect it regularly, certify the ship's equipment and crew, and issue safety and pollution prevention documents.
I think turning a fledgling democracy into a kleptocratic dictatorship and starting an unjust war that has caused 500k casualties is at least on par with the worst the US has done in recent history like Iraq.
The United States and its allies have dropped at least 326,000 bombs and missiles on countries in the greater Middle East/ North Africa region since 2001.
People 30 and under in the region have barely known a day when the US were not bombing them or their neighbouring countries - that is bound to have a pretty strong effect on how you view a country.
326 000 is 5 days' worth in terms of Russian invasion of Ukraine at its peak intensity. Those who are 30 and under have seen only a one year when Russia has not been at war - during the economic crisis that followed Asian financial crisis of 1997. But this does not get even remotely as much attention as wars involving the US, because there are no paid shills flooding every imaginable place with stale copypastas about foreign wars, skewing people's sense of proportion.
> there are no paid shills flooding every imaginable place with stale copypastas about foreign wars
This is not true. All sides have literal "paid shills" producing propaganda online, on our (and their) TVs and in the Cinemas. If you are unaware of this, or truly believe "only the other side does that" then the propaganda has worked extremely well.
The West also has paid shills promoting is propaganda - this is very true of course.
But it's usually either comparatively benign (promoting fluff films like Top Gun), or quite transparent (like RFE/RL which makes no effort to hide the fact that it is government supported). And it usually doesn't lie outright, but prefers to use much more subtle forms of manipulation (e.g. "nation-building" and all that).[0]
Russian/Chinese propaganda meanwhile is incredibly blatant, and has no compunction at all against straight up lying, or saying the sky is blue when it's actually orange. Or in Russia's case, that a war of naked aggression that was very much optional for them is really a defensive war that was forced on them, and so forth.
The point is here is not that one side is "good" and the other is "bad". But to suggest (as you seem to be doing) that there's some kind of basic equivalence at play, in terms of the scale and kinds of propaganda used by the respective parties is very naive.
[0] The insane lies and other propaganda used to promote the 2003 Iraq war were a major exception to this general tendency, of course. In that sense, they were much closer in spirit to Russian/Chinese-style propaganda.
There is an unheard population of Ukrainians who want the war to stop and for there to be peace with their Russian cousins.
It is the Western powers who are sacrificing Ukraine in order to put Western weapons systems on Russias borders. Not the Ukrainian people.
And, in the context of what was done to Iraq (5% of its population murdered for the purposes of the USA's racist, elitist ruling classes), it is no wonder that this silence is perpetuated.
There is an unheard population of Ukrainians who want the war to stop and for there to be peace with their Russian cousins.
Actually, they are very much heard from, and their views are carefully studied by public opinion researchers.
However (1) they are a minority and (2) you are definitely misrepresenting their views to suggest that favoring an early ceasefire means "wanting peace with their Russian cousins", per your disingenuous choice of phrasing there.
It is the Western powers who are sacrificing Ukraine in order to put Western weapons systems on Russias borders. Not the Ukrainian people.
As if the solid majority in Ukraine who wishes to continue the fight (along with all of those who foolishly sign up to go the front) were just puppets, with no idea as to why the fight was really being waged, and no ability to see through this gigantic sham that has been foisted upon them, which should be as plainly obvious to them as it is to you.
Western public opinion researchers == propagandists for the military industrial complex.
No one said they were "Western" in this case. Strange that you jump to that assumption.
Solid majority? Post your sources
The research is very easily findable. The numbers also resonate with my own impressions from countless discussions with actual, real Ukrainians, both in and outside the country.
Normally I'm happy to provide sources asked, but from the tone and content of your responses on this and related threads, I don't think you actually care.
From what you just said, above, whoever is doing the research -- if their data doesn't support your highly jaundiced and moralistic worldview, you've already decided that must be because they're propagandists for the military industrial complex, end of story.
So, rather than resorting to ad hominem on the basis of fallacies, post the details. Lets see your sources.
I speak with Ukrainian refugees every single day, as I live within hours of Ukraines borders, and have volunteered with refugees from the Wests' wars for decades, helping them rebuild their tattered lives - from Iraq to Afghanistan and Syria, to Ukraine and now Palestine.
So if that makes me jaundiced, so be it.
>Normally I'm happy to provide sources asked, but from the tone and content of your responses on this and related threads, I don't think you actually care.
I've dried the tears of countless mothers and their children, and helped many of them move to safer parts of the world. Perhaps, I care too much.
But I've seen the products of callous disregard, too many times.
How about you provide your sources in response to a recent situation in which you made a highly untenable, and also quite provocative assertion -- yet, when asked to provide sources in a perfectly polite and unassuming manner (very much unlike your own formulation in this case, which was full of innuendo and sarcasm from the get-go) -- you simply bailed:
You may not like it, but the USA has called for Irans' destruction a hundred times.
And then perhaps we'll talk.
Note please the special emphasis on "the USA", meaning an official, governmental statement or policy (not just the throwaway pronouncements of 1 or 2 of its windbag politicians). And the number "a hundred", as in, you know, 10x10, or heck, any number of roughly similar magnitude.
Being as these were, after all, the words you chose to use for some reason.
Perhaps, I care too much.
Thats great, and I'm sure you're a great person too, on the whole. I've actually upvoted a lot of your other postings (there was one in particular about "catharsis" that I stumbled on while searching for something else, which seemed right on the money and which I really liked).
It's just that, given various indications -- such as the blatant exaggeration followed by blatant evasiveness highlighted above, and the weirdly propagandistic phrasing you seem to like to use to a conspicuous degree -- I'm just not sure that, in regard to geopolitics at least, this whole factual accuracy thing is really your "bag".
