Western conservative parties were mostly fiscally responsible until the 80s, and outside the USA they’ve tended to come around on many civil liberties. Women’s suffrage was passed with cross-aisle support in many European countries, for instance, as was same-sex marriage. Even today, the conservative parties in Northern Europe mostly stand for fiscal responsibility. In general, conservative parties in systems with Proportional representation seem to be much less exposed to capture by the far right.

I’ll almost certainly never vote conservative, but given how many do, I’m thankful to be living in a country where that means budget cuts and reduced income tax for the upper middle, and not the stripping away of rights and liberties and deficit-funded tax cuts for the rich.

That’s the point. The Republican party isn’t conservative at all, but radical. They’ve abandoned most conservative political positions, including orthodox fiscal management, and exchanged conservative values for a constructed collection of ‘traditional values’, which are derived less from tradition than from the endless grievances that have replaced policy as their political program

Corbyn was the worst thing that could’ve happened to Labour. The man just did not understand the role of Party Leader and could not prioritise party or country over his own nostaligia-tinged ideological pet causes

He’s making light of how twisted the US understanding of the word “conservative” has become.

Salads and sandwiches should be served room temperature, never right out of the fridge cold

Grit your teeth

Stiff upper lip

Sisu

Many ways to articulate this

The main quesiton is what you want long term. If you want to eventually move in with a romantic partner, I would advice you to get used to independent living beforehand. Having to cook for and clean up after a partner who never learned to live without mommy and daddy is a huge turn-off for most people and can sour a relationship very fast. I would ask you these questions:

Do you cook dinner for the household at least every week?

Do you clean the kitchen yourself after cooking?

Do you do the grocery shopping for the household?

Do you often tidy up the pots and pans after meals (not just your own plates and cutlery)?

Are you the one who takes a walk around the house putting away stray plates, glasses & clothes and tidying up? Do you do this at least once a day?

When something breaks, are you often the one who repairs or replaces it?

Is it typically tidier & neater when your parents are away than when they are home?

If you want to live with a romantic partner in the future, and the answer to any of these is no, I suggest you have a long hard think about whether you’re preparing for the life you want, or just staying where it’s comfortable.

I would go the Social Services office and explain my situation. Provided I could prove my identity I would walk out with a couple hundred dollars cash, an address for decent temporary accommodations, and an appointment with a case worker to find a more permanent solution for me.

That’s the security of the Nordic welfare state.

EU carbon permits shot up from €20 and have been hovering under €100 a tonne post-COVID. ~€200 is when existing direct air capture starts to become competitive. If it can be scaled at that price, we might be closer than we think.

Also bureaucracy and public ownership

and hyper-socialist policies

The Nordic Model isn’t really all that Socialist. It’s based on strong welfare and labor rights, but also very much on the free market. The most Socialist country in Europe is probably France

The effect of the 2 party system on how people understand politics and society is incredibly interesting

It’s been seventy years now. How long do you think dead Britons will have more responsibility for and power over India and Pakistan than the people in those countries?

Maybe? We’re currently trying to implement a different economic transition, from pollution to green. I don’t think popular resistance to those changes imply that we should try for a happy medium instead. Similarly, the difficulty in achieving Socialism democratically doesn’t necessarily imply anything about how desirable the end state would be.

The big issue with “trying” communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Gradualist Socialism was the political project for Social Democrats in post-war Europe. They had 30-odd years to achieve it in several countries. The issue becomes that once they started notching up victories, radicalism decreased, and that when they’re not starving and oppressed people categorically will not vote to let someone collectivize their farms and expropriate their homes. It seems clear to me that in real-world conditions, a Socialist state can only come about through revolution, because the path in a democracy is far too long and leaves far too many angles of attack from a liberal opposition.

The TB one for instance found that TB gets worse whenever there is an IMF loan but not in the same circumstances when there is a loan from somewhere else.

Yes, because the countries taking those loans aren’t distressed.

There is a reason China’s loans are so popular.

They are popular because they come with very little oversight. Countries with higher transparency do not find them very appealing, as Italy’s recent withdrawal from the program attests.

You don’t seem to realize that IMF loan conditions have very specific governance requirements which directly impact governmental decisions around health spending.

They come with very specific governance requirements which impact governmental decisions about a whole host of things, because those governments have proven incapable of sound fiscal management.

Again, the IMF is in no way perfect and I’m sure there is a myriad ways the conditions of their loans can be tailored to minimize negative outcomes. But that does not mean they cause these problems any more than every cancer death being a failure of medicine means doctors cause cancer.

I’ve looked at all of the sources you provide, and they all point out the fact that countries experience bad outsomes after an IMF intervention, which nobody’s disputed. My argument is that countries in similar dire straights will experience even worse outcomes if there is no such intervention. As an example, I could name Venezuela, which experienced an extreme increase in child mortality, your favored metric, after leaving the IMF. The root cause is economic distress, not the IMF intervention.

Minimizing the negative effects of government failure is absolutely worth examining. Identifying the mistakes made by the IMF in past interventions is a noble goal. But we should not blame international organizations when poor governance causes countries to fail.

You will see a lot of bad outcomes following an IMF intervention for the same reason you will see a lot of bad outcomes following oncology visits. Once you’ve gotten to the point the IMF get involved, things are already going to hell. What do you believe the effect on infant mortality of bankruptcy to be?

Which Arab nations are Joe Biden currently exterminating, then?

China is way way worse than the IMF. The IMF restructures the debts of distressed countries to help them avoid bankruptcy. China sabotages this sort of help by refusing to negotiate on the same terms as other creditors, preventing the IMF from doing it’s job.