It's wild to me that we frame legitimate concerns as xenophobic.
The second sentence explains why the nationality matters:
> Some farms are foreign-owned and are shipping the crop to Saudi Arabia, where it's illegal to grow because it takes too much water.
In this globalistic world it's worth considering that stringent policy in one area of the world can be worked around by taking advantage of lax policy in another area of the world. It's not xenophobic to talk about that. It would be ignorant not to.
>In this globalistic world it's worth considering that stringent policy in one area of the world can be worked around by taking advantage of lax policy in another area of the world. It's not xenophobic to talk about that. It would be ignorant not to.
Saudi owned farms circumventing Saudi laws is an issue for the people of Saudi Arabia. If it is legal in the US, it should be legal for everyone. If you want it to be illegal in the US, it should be illegal for everyone. The owners are and should be irrelevant.
> If it is legal in the US, it should be legal for everyone
That's a strawman. No one is arguing against that.
How a resource is being used by foreign corporations is an important input to policy decisions.
We're at a point in today's society where the mere suggestion that nationality might be relevant is met with accusations of xenophobia. It's the same way with race or sex.
> We're at a point in today's society where the mere suggestion that nationality might be relevant is met with accusations of xenophobia.
How is the nationality relevant? Would this behavior be acceptable if the farms were owned by an Australian company? What about a publicly traded American company? What about an Arizonan billionaire? I don’t see how that would change anything.
Monopolizing natural resources is bad regardless of the nationality or residency of the people profiting.
While I agree with your conclusion, unless by "nature" you mean "human nature," the statement
> Race exists due to nature
is absolutely false. Race is a cultural construct and has little to do with biology or national origin.
In geopolitics (especially as applied to critical resources) -- and that's what this comes down to, really; not simply greed -- this never the case, of course.
It's always relevant who the owners of are - and what kinds of influence led them to being able to put down stakes where they have.
Aside from purely capitalistic motivations, there is such a thing as environmental warfare. Unless you want to naively assume that any foreign nation might always have the best interests of another in mind when exploiting their resources.
A company is not separable from the regulatory environment and culture in which it's based. A British company opening a diamond mine in Botswana is a very different story from a Namibian company opening the same diamond mine.
> I didn't notice anything different about addresses
I mean.. they don't have any. So maybe you didn't pay attention. Sure, if you're typing in the name of a tourist destination, that's fine. But how do you find a person's house?
In CR the addresses are referential. So you might live "300 meters south of the retirement home, 100 East, red door".
Indeed. If former employee startups were the major concern, they wouldn't pay so much. It's financial independence from working at faang that enables lots of devs to leave to start or join startups.
This may be true, but it doesn't explain the problem. If there's a bigger problem with bullshit today than in the past (and the article certainly does zero work to convince us of this), it's not because it takes too much effort to refute bullshit -- it's because there are no social consequences to being marked a bullshitter.
> if Obama and Pinker are bullshitters, I'm not sure the label has much meaning
They aren't. Nathan J. Robinson (author of this article) is. Here's the full quote from the Obama speech.
> I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations, but I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
You can read this charitably (a passionate person who's excited about the collective project being embarked upon) or uncharitably (not very humble to connect your own presidency to the salvation of humanity). But it's total bullshit to read that as:
> a man who manipulated people’s emotions with stirring messianic rhetoric about how his election would mean the oceans would stop rising and change would come to the land, then delivered eight years of milquetoast centrism
If this is manipulating people, then literally every politician (not to mention every football coach) to ever have existed has manipulated people, and the core argument of the article shrinks to nothingness.
Also, it's a plain lie. Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.
Funnily enough, if anything this irony bolsters the author's point that bullshit can be found anywhere. Even articles about bullshitters are themselves full of bullshit.
> Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.
That really soured me on the author’s credibility — there’s no mention of opposition, and no matter what party you’re in you should agree that 6 of the 8 years he was in office were intensely adversarial.
Dude, if you want to blatantly lie HN is not a good place for you.
> all the Iraq war protests during bush
Now read up on what that meant politically: was the Congress more or less supportive of his initiatives? Did those supporters find popular support or opposition? Were millions of dollars spent astroturfing them into a movement like the Tea Party or did Democrats largely dismiss them as a fringe?
Thanks for that deep dive. I too thought the article fell apart at that point.
For a minute I wondered if the piece was about to become self-referential; gradually slipping into complete bullshit in order to illustrate how it’s done. (Much like the film “Adaptation” changed toward the end as the protagonist changed his writing.)
Alas, it was just sloppy thinking and poor writing.
