I think you're a young Italian guy, and I don't think you understand the context. I'm not looking for anything from you on this board. I've done my homework, and I've been around and seen things.
It is entirely factually that the United States needs nothing from the rest of the world for resources than rare earth metals. I know more about this, but I can't entirely talk about it because I can't parse all the things I know that I can't legally talk about without review since I have a human brain. I'm not being hard on you as some others are because I'm willing to let you be a young Italian guy and accept your limitations and mine. I make mistakes all the time, so it would be dishonest for me to judge you too harshly.
I just don't care, at all, about the past anymore beyond what could inform the present to prepare for the future. I'm pretty sure I have a good enough grasp of where the world is headed right now, I've done what I can with my meager means to prepare for it, and I'm entirely focused on paying my bills, loving my family, and doing a good job with what little I can affect in my day to day life. I've largely quit the thread because I don't personally find value in learning that Bill Gates bought more farm land, there's yet another study on the vaccines, or that Biden crapped himself in front of another world leader (figuratively or literally). I'm just not mad about it, anymore. I've moved on. I also devolved as much I could to bedrock in order to work forward, and I realized there are a lot of fundamentally deep things wrong with just about everything out there. When there's that much first order stuff that's gone completely sideways... who am I to come up with actual solutions for that?
The world sure acts like it wants to kill itself, and so since I can't do anything to stop it... I'm just not worried about it anymore. I'll keep doing what's good and right, regardless, and I'm certainly going to sleep well at night while we still have running water, internet and air conditioning.
Have I asked you where in Italy you grew up/live? The only reason I say this is that if you're a "city kid," I might recommend you finding an old house/villa out in the country with some farmland either attached or in the commune, fix it up, stay local, train/coach out of your barn, and just unplug from this nonsense. As stupid as the Italians have been over the past 2.5 years, it's really hard to get so oppressed when your cousin is the mayor.
I mean, it is really bad, but we’re not gonna be running out of electricity and running water.
Famine, reduced births and increased deaths, limited resources, all it takes is to add on men with guns going door to door to send you to camps and we'll only be at the place where our great-grandparents were with the World Wars, albeit with this psycho enforced medicine aspect to it.
So in that sense, I can see how Jovan's right (his country had war on its territory much more recently than us) and so are you, Rip - it's just another environment similar to that of a War, but the past few US and EU generations haven't gone through one, so it all feels bleak. I think I'm safer over here than back home, crazy as that sounds.
....to you all. I should have clarified, that doesn't sound crazy to me at all.
Never was a city kid, never will be. I never understood the fascination people have with such an artificial and caothic environment. But also never a farmland boy. I guess somewhere in the middle, suburban areas, I moved around a lot. I gotta admit I did grow up spoiled as a kid, but later on, money was always less and I had to adjust to a "broke" mentality. No heritage or property either. And no mayors in my family.
Now I live in a town by the sea in the center of Italy, no big cities here, although it is a touristic area in the summer, lots of hills and mountains on the countryside. I grew up and was located up until a few months ago in Lombardy. You can imagine what I had to go through when the Covid nonsense started.
So China is not taking minerals from central Africa through slavery to manufacture smartphone components back home and make an enormous profit? Because that's what I've heard. We agree at least that a country like China, who has slavery INSIDE their country, is likely to be involved with slavery outside as well?
I understand a lot of African countries' problems come from actual internal corruption and self-interest from the upper classes. But I believe there still is a lot of external interference.
It seems to me like the convenient narrative is the opposite one, the one that goes "it's just their own fault cause they're too dumb to figure it out".