#liberalisation

[poliphoon]

10 lessons from Dr Manmohan Singh’s political life

India’s first Sikh prime minister was no ordinary head of government. As India’s finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh was responsible for ushering in free-market reforms in 1991 that transformed India into an economic engine. Later, he was made the prime minister by the Congress Party. He led the government from 2004 to 2014. These 10 years were replete with rich lessons for politicians.

[indian-school-of-public-policy]

The Role of Liberalisation in India's Economic Growth

Explore the impact of liberalization on India's economic growth in this insightful article. Learn how economic policies have shaped the nation's progress.

[innovativejunction]

A Homage to Dr Manmohan Singh: The Architect of Modern India's Economic Renaissance

A Homage to Dr Manmohan Singh: The Architect of Modern India’s Economic Renaissance In the annals of Indian history, few leaders have demonstrated the profound combination of intellectual brilliance, humility, and steadfast commitment to national progress as Dr Manmohan Singh. As we pay homage to this extraordinary statesman, it is imperative to reflect on the immense contributions he has made…

[papenathys]

In light of the recent attack upon an elderly Muslim gentleman in India, who was assaulted by Hindu extremist sanghis on a train for carrying beef, here are more essays to read, demonstrating how the concept of "pure vegetarianism" in India cannot be separated from ideas of caste hierarchy, oppression of marginalized groups and how foods and diets of different groups are shaped as much by economic disparities as by belief and spirituality:

Note: I know this shall breach containment soon but yeah, white vegans, "pure" vegetarians, and sanghis don't touch this post.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

so your job employs minors under certain conditions. what if a minor just worked at the frontdesk of a brothel? would that be okay since theyre not being fucked until theyre 18? what is the issue about prostitution that applies to minors but not adults? minors are allowed to have sex, unlike for example drinking alcohol or driving a car, which is what is keeping them out of certain jobs, but they can and do have sex so whats the issue? what if only other minors are allowed to buy sex from them, is it okay then? if sex is neutral, and sex is a service, and sex is labor, why would there be moral issues with minors in prostitution? and why do they vanish once a girl turns 18?

people actually realise that sex is not a neutral service but a moralised interaction for a reason. and its wild they can apply this to minors but not adults, as if sex stops being an intimate and vulnerable act once you turn 18. „minors cant consent to sexual actions with adults“ just highlights how important freely given consent is. its assuming that minors dont have the cognitive ability yet to consent to sex (with adults). its a general assumption about minors to protect them.

yet despite the inherent issues with bought consent - relying on income arguably diminishes the freedom of choice - there are no general assumptions made about women in prostitution to protect them, even though the few statistics show that most of them are marginalised, without alternative and often impoverished. adults can be vulnerable too, and especially vulnerable groups are being systematically exploited in the sex industry. just because you have the cognitive ability to consent, does not mean you are in a position to give it freely. the premise of prostitution is that consent is circumvented with money, and money is power, so this is usually a process of a man using his power to get a less privileged woman (sometimes man) to serve him sexually. laws about the age of consent are in effect to protect minors from being abused. yet there are no laws in effect keeping men from sexually abusing other vulnerable groups through prostitution (where i live, and in many places its prostitutes who get punished, not sex buyers).

lets say prostitution is a profession. minors are allowed to work, under certain conditions. why shouldnt 14, 15 and 16 year old girls prostitute themselves for some extra allowance, do some porn after school, do an internship in a brothel? if this thought makes you uncomfortable, you realise that the sex industry is not like any other industry. that perhaps, sexually satisfying men is not a viable career or profession for young girls. its not lack of skill or responsibility stopping teenagers to enter the sex industry like it does with some jobs. because thats not needed to be used as a sex object. in fact, a lot of sex buyers and porn consumers specifically look for young and unexperienced women - men in general actually. the next logical step of legalisation, of treating prostitution as a profession, of bending to the demand, is this. not to be a slippery slope stacy but i wish this was something more people considered.

[reasonsforhope]

"The number of teenage abortions in Finland fell by 66% between 2000 and 2023, its public health institute THL said on Monday, attributing the reduction to the offer of free contraception to adolescents and compulsory sex education in schools.

Finland also passed a law in 2022 liberalising abortion, at a time of deep divisions over abortion rights in Europe and court rulings in the U.S. that restricted access to terminations of unwanted pregnancies for millions of people there.

The number of abortions among women under 20 rose during the 1990s in Finland, which led the Nordic country to respond at the start of the 2000s by making morning-after pills available without prescription from 15 years of age and sexual education compulsory in all schools.

"We can assume that sexual education plays a significant role," THL's research professor Mika Gissler told Reuters, adding that increased access to contraception from a young age was another factor behind the change.

The number of abortions fell 66% to 722 in 2023 from 2,144 in 2000 among all teenagers aged 19 or younger in Finland, while the drop was even steeper at 78% among those under 18 in the same period, THL's statistics showed.

"Since the latter half of the 2010s, the decline in the number of young people's abortions has also been influenced by the introduction of free contraception in many welfare regions," THL wrote in a report...

Under the 2022 liberalisation, Finland from September 2023 stopped requiring women to give a reason for having an abortion, making it available upon a pregnant person's request during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

[Note: That's actually not a very long window for abortion! Many conservative states in the US have actually instituted 12-week bans, and it's caused terrible upheaval and limits to medical services. Sounds like Finland should liberalize further, imho! Still, important progress!]

THL said it was too early to conclude whether the legislative change, which took effect last year, will have an impact on the number of abortions."

-via Reuters, June 3, 2024

[dingodad]

it's interesting to look at jane crocker's political career not always in terms of how it makes her a ""fascist monster"" so to speak - along the lines of homestuck's literal fascist monsters like the condesce and lord english - but in how it plays into the crucial fact at the heart of her character that she is "normcore". jane is a character of the context she was born in, the almost-exact midpoint of the barack obama presidency; superficially and popularly, a time of great optimism for a liberalising america, but through this facade of optimism a time which also saw a great deal of "normalisation" of deeply evil american imperialism both abroad and at home.

jane's love of the NBC's Parks & Recreation is emblematic of this. homestuck and parks & rec are similar in one respect, which is that p&r also began and ended over the course of the obama presidency - and like jane, p&r is deeply of that era. in many senses it is the ancestor to the "copaganda" of programming like Brooklyn 99 which took over its position of popularity into the trump era: at the core of its comic dynamic is the interplay between leslie knope, a progressive-liberal "girlboss" and champion of big government, and ron swanson, the hard-working, moustache-toting libertarian sentinel of private capitalist interest. but in the classic mode of liberal american thought, the core message of the show is that these two characters are friends. despite the complete incompatibility of their respective ideologies, the two must work together and make compromise at every stage, ensuring that the political landscape of america - implicitly the perfect state - never changes or progresses from where it is now. and it's telling that, despite being the liberal "girlboss" with visions of political ascendancy, jane's love and admiration is for the male character. like obama himself, swanson serves to put a friendly, sometimes goofy but always loveable face on american patriarchal hegemony.

because by the time homestuck had closed up and the post-canon had opened america had crossed that threshold from obama's presidency into the next, it's impossible not to draw parallels between jane's descent into xenophobia and the overt isolationism of the trump republican administration. but i think putting jane on this trajectory is also in a very real sense just as much an indictment of the democrat majority of homestuck's genesis; xenophobia is not a "trump problem" but rather an AMERICA problem, and in fact the political landscape of the late 2010s and 2020s is an inevitable progression of the kind of politics that were considered "normal" in 2011, not the result of some freak misstep of electoral probability in 2016.

[psychotrenny]

It's always tragic thinking of the brave revolutionaries who fought to build Socialism in their nation only to one day to watch it fall, but not all of them gave into despair. Marcelino Dos Santos* displayed this admirably in a 1993 interview with South African journalist Tony Hall. Remember that this was a period when Socialism was in full retreat both regionally and globally. Many Communist parties had been outright overthrown, while many others (including Dos Santos' own FRELIMO) had been forced to embrace Capitalism to avoid replacement by an even more rapacious agent of Imperialism. Even the surviving Socialist nations were liberalising to an uncomfortable extent and the Imperialists themselves, revelling in their apparent victory, gleefully predicted that these last bastions of Socialism would soon fall. Yet even in these seemingly hopeless conditions, during an absolute nadir of Socialist power right around the world, Dos Santos had this to say:

The Destruction of the socialist states in eastern Europe was a defeat for the socialist movement- and the fact that Mozambique is no longer a socialist country; and that Angola has also moved away from state socialism. But that doesn't mean that future generations will not take to socialism... patience! Now it seems a fatal situation but humanity is always in revolution... slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism - history is in motion. Do people think that now we have reached the stage where history has stopped? Be patient, I say

*former Vice President of Mozambique. At the time of the interview he was Speaker of the Mozambican People's Assembly and the second most important member of FRELIMO's Politburo

[king-of-men]

Without bothering to look up anything in particular about sweet brother, I suspect it's the opposite: Sweden has exactly one lottery, it's run by the state, and the payouts are extremely easy to track down in public records. So it's easy to get the data and be sure you're studying everyone who won, no selection bias.

Not fact-checked, obviously, but I have this vague sense that I’m constantly seeing observational studies about Swedish lottery winners. The latest ACX linkdump has one, and there were previously influential ones about “what does winning the lottery due to your likelihood of getting or staying married and having children” and “what does winning the lottery do to life satisfaction”. How many lotteries does Sweden have, and why are their lottery winners apparently always the ones used in observational studies?

[postoctobrist]

Absolute November tour-de-force on the Wicker Man episode. You really do got a whole epistemology & theology degree in the dome ready to fire off. Tying a whole analysis together from three different angles like it’s not even hard. I feel like I got fuckin smarter listening to that.

And of course henge jokes

I have to be honest I’m still thinking about the ‘liberalising pagan’ bit. I’m changing the henge from the inside

[ragzonacamrencruise]

Betrayal (An ATLA analysis)

It's really important to me, how, in the Avatar universe, the person who's at the right side of the throne (essentially the right hand), always betrays the one sitting on the said throne.

Exhibit A:

Long Feng, kept the King oblivious to the Hundered Year War and handled all matters that are not partying or charity events, making him the de facto ruler of Ba Sing Se without even the King's knowledge, essentially paving a way for his betrayal.

Exhibit B:

Zuko, said it himself, that he was literally at his father's right hand. Even Azula got only the second best seat. And the next thing Zuko does? He betrays his father. I know what you're all thinking. But didn't Zuko already betray him before? Well, he did when he released Aang from Zhao as the Blue Spirit. But, the important point is, his explicit orders were to capture the Avatar to restore his honour. It didn't matter which methods he used to do it. He only ever openly betrayed his father during the eclipse and that was after he was placed at the right hand in the war meeting.

Exhibit C:

Mai, a betrayal that was a turning point in Azula's declining mental health. But hey, Ty Lee betrayed Azula too, right? Yes. But that doesn't change the fact that Mai did it first and she was sat at Azula's right hand. Mai never really feared Azula. She only followed her around out of her own will. Ty Lee on the other hand, when Azula recruits her at the circus, is found showing fear. She only had the guts to betray Azula after Mai did.

It really puts into perspective how Ty Lee couldn't betray Azula until provoked because she feared her, and Mai betrayed Azula because she didn't fear her enough. It further solidifies Azula's stellar line, "You should've feared me more!", insisting that if Mai had feared her more, she wouldn't have betrayed her. This especially holds true because it's later explained by Azula herself that, "Fear is the only reliable way." Fear kept Ty Lee in line but liberalised Mai cuz she didn't fear Azula more.

But all that goes out the window because Ty Lee betrayed Azula too. This is also one of the main reasons why Azula banishes most of the people around her. Because, "None of them can be trusted", and she trusted Mai as she knew Mai never feared her. It hurts her deeper because she trusted Mai and let her mantra of "Fear is the only reliable way" go, and guess what happens? She betrays her.

This solidifies three things in her brain: 1. Trust doesn't work, and, 2. Fear doesn't work either. 3. Nothing works, really.

Therefore, her action of banishing everybody with, "Sooner or later they all would've betrayed me."

This works for Exhibits A and B too. Long Feng never feared King Kuei and King Kuei completely trusted him until he learned of his betrayal. Trust didn't work, and fear didn't work either.

Zuko had never trusted his father. He only feared him. He has a physical scar on his body to prove it. But once that fear starts to deteriorate, he openly confronts his father and betrays him, letting go of his fear with, "It was cruel, and it was wrong!". Trust didn't work, and fear didn't work either.

So, what does work?

Well, the answer is pretty simple.

Love.

Love works. Any number and different kinds of love, be it platonic, or sibling, or romantic, it doesn't matter. It is foolproof!

Genuine care and affection for a person, doesn't let you betray them that easily. It's what made Sokka decide they should help Aang in Book 1. It's what made Yue turn into the moon. It's what made Toph come back to the Gaang again after she stormed off in Book 2. It's what made Aang come back for Bumi in Omashu in Book 2. It's what made Zuko find his path to Iroh again in Book 3.

The lack of love (from her own parents) is what made Azula's mental health deteriorate, as she thought nothing worked; it's depressing because she doesn't know that love actually works, cuz she's never known or experienced love her entire life, so she doesn't even consider it as an option.

The lack of love is what made the Dai Li betray Long Feng. The lack of it drove Zuko's betrayal to Ozai, Mai and Ty Lee's betrayal to Azula and even Jet's betrayal to Katara.

This could go on and on, but the end point here is that Azula's words on betrayal are true, but only when love is taken out of the equation. Love is the 'X' factor. Without it, there really is no equation, as all leads to zero.

[m-0-renna]

In the 1990s, John Williamson, a British economist and senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, coined the term Washington Consensus to describe the neoliberal agenda to privatise state-owned enterprises (SOEs), commodify public goods, and liberalise capital accounts and trade. These policy choices, driven by the IMF and World Bank in alignment with the US Treasury, find much of their theoretical justification in neoclassical economics and the works of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and those associated with the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society. The Washington Consensus paradigm is perhaps most famous for its role in the so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), which led to a lost decade on the African continent.

For the past several decades, the IMF has enforced a combination of austerity (what they call a ‘balanced budget’ agenda), privatisation, and trade liberalisation on decolonising nations. This has stripped states in the Global South of the capacity to drive their development processes and protect their infant industries. In order to deal with the resulting imbalances, the IMF has frequently encouraged underdeveloped countries to borrow from private capital markets, leading to more debt traps. Meanwhile, the World Bank has historically followed an agenda of recommending anything but large-scale industrialisation for the Global South. In the early post-World War II era, this manifested in its recommendations for countries to stick to their ‘comparative advantage’ in exporting raw materials. By the 1990s, the World Bank was promoting ‘financial deepening’, code for encouraging financial deregulation as a panacea for mobilising resources for development. More recently, the World Bank has shifted its focus to promote development in the service sector and investment in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), both recipes for continued debt bondage on the national and household level. The service sector is often dominated by multinational corporations (MNCs) with monopolistic structures, making states that focus their development on this sector susceptible to the whims of MNCs in the Global North. SMEs, which typically lack the resources (including government subsidies) to compete with MNCs and do not have the advantages of scale of MNCs, end up absorbed into these larger monopoly-dominated networks. Indeed, the combination of financial liberalisation and the promotion of SMEs locks countries into what Samir Amin called generalised monopoly capital, with both upstream (raw materials, technology, and capital) and downstream (distribution, marketing, and consumer access) networks of control.

One of the main outcomes of the Washington Consensus has been an almost religious belief in the power of foreign direct investment (FDI) to drive economic growth and structural transformation. The FDI mindset drives Global South states towards a narrow focus on opening up their labour and natural resource markets to Western monopolies, thereby linking their agendas to the rent-seeking needs of financiers rather than the developmental aspirations of their populations. Empirical evidence of FDI’s transformative capacity, however, is limited at best: this form of investment fails to promote integrative growth that could pave a pathway out of indebtedness and towards national sovereignty, instead promoting unproductive sectors of the economy. Three characteristics of FDI are important to note:

FDI flows are declining. FDI peaked in 2007, the year that the Third Great Depression took hold in the major capitalist countries, and has decreased in the years since. Indeed, according to the United Nations’ Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), both FDI and project finance (long-term infrastructure or industrial funding) have experienced a gradual decline. From 2022 to 2023, for instance, developing countries saw a 7% decrease in FDI flows to developing countries.

FDI flows are non-productive. Over the past few years, UNCTAD’s annual investment reports have shown the changing character of FDI. While in the past it was concentrated in the manufacturing and industrial sectors as well as natural resource extraction, FDI has increasingly been channelled into the financial and service sectors, where it does not generate integrated or transformative development that could help transcend colonial underdevelopment.

FDI flows do not drive growth or investment. According to a 1999 UNCTAD report, large FDI inflows to developing countries in the 1990s had little impact on increasing investment patterns. More recent studies by UNCTAD have shown a clear divergence between FDI flows and GDP growth since the Third Great Depression. This means that economic growth is increasingly independent of FDI flows.

The Washington Consensus has only reinforced the colonial pattern of underdevelopment, producing debt burdens that cannot be easily serviced. With bondholders mercilessly seeking repayment and interest regardless of a country’s economic situation, the debt spiral eats into precious revenues that could otherwise be spent on health care, education, and productive industry and infrastructure. Countries borrow and go into debt. When they cannot repay their debt, they borrow more to pay off their existing debt, and the spiral continues. As Raghuram Rajan, the IMF’s chief economist from 2003 to 2007, wrote in his book Fault Lines (2010), the IMF’s policies are a ‘new form of financial colonialism’.

[oyeixcher]

Every SandRay Scene (84 ¦ ??)

R: "Sand?" S: "What?" R: "I think you should go back to selling booze." S: "Why?" R: "I don't know. I think it's the business that can help build your life. I don't want you to quit because I yelled at you or made a sarcastic remark to you." S: "It's not just that. If I'm with you and selling booze at the same time, it's risky for you." R: "Damn you. Anywhere can be risky. Booze is sold everywhere. You can't force the rest of the world to quit selling. Right? I must fight it myself. And you must trust me. Let's do this. Once the Liquor Liberalisation Act is approved, I'll be your investor." S: "Damn you. Haven't you heard that people in a relationship shouldn't risk doing business together?" R: "What risk? I'm rich and I want you to be rich too." S: "Alright, Young Master Ray from high society. Is that a deal?" R: "Yes." … R: "By the way. I want to rename the brand. What's the old name again." S: "Jude. I named it after the song Hey Jude by The Beatles." R: "I want an easy yet meaningful name. Like… RaySand. Or SandRay. I think it sounds nice when we put our names together." S: "I agree. But I actually prefer SandRay. It sounds like 'sunray'. It gives the vibes of 'the light of hope'." R: "Should I let you win this time?" S: "Yes." R: "It's good. We can save up money and go to music festivals around the world together. It's so good. Thank you for giving my life a clear goal." S: "You're making my life more fun too."

[probablyasocialecologist]

This is The Farming Left: these land workers share a politics, united by the concept of food sovereignty: the right to control of local food systems, which originated with farmers in the Global South. ‘We’re talking about equitable access to resources to enable localised food supplies’, explains Fernandes. These organisations are tackling the challenges of access to land in an unequal landscape: the Ecological Land Cooperative, for example, purchases large plots and obtains planning permission for dwellings before parcelling them up into affordable smallholdings.  The Kindling Trust in Manchester is also seeking to foster a new generation of agroecological farmers. The Trust, which was established in 2007, has a veg box scheme and a community garden, and also offers training to new entrants, but there has always been a long-term plan to establish a cooperative farm. Since raising over a million pounds from more than six hundred investors last year, the Trust is looking to purchase a 120-acre farm in the Manchester area. ‘We want people to feel ownership in whatever way they get involved’, explains co-founder Chris Walsh. Whether they are founding members, workers, investors, or tenants, they will all be represented equally on a governing board.   There ‘is a need for a rural radicalism’ of this kind, argues Chris Smaje, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future (2020). ‘It’s about trying to de-commodify land and take it out of speculative ownership’, he explains. For Smaje, who plans to purchase a 20-acre plot to be divided up among several small-scale farmers, the goal is ‘to build a land-based community’ and ultimately ‘generate more of what we need within our own communities’.  While the radical agrarian community in the UK pales in comparison to the strength of conservative farming interests, this fight for land – and the right to use it – is happening on a global scale. The international peasants’ movement is connected through the 200-million strong La Vía Campesina, linking groups such as Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or ‘Landless Workers’ Movement’, which has, since the 1980s, been occupying land to their counterparts across the world. The world’s farming Left is a David to big agribusiness’s Goliath, the latter having been bolstered by states, major international institutions, and the liberalising of global political economy since the Second World War. From Zapatistas to Scottish crofters, the peasants’ movement is fighting to turn the tide on our social and ecological future before it is too late.

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

oh my god throwback moment? or is that yet another idiot.

reality in germany: taxis casually driving around advertising one of germanys and berlins biggest brothel (3000 m2) which insultingly is called artemis.

not so fun fact: the artemis is member in the bundesverband sexuelle dienstleistungen (bsd) which was a consultant to the ministery of work and social issues responsible for the prostitution law. let that sink in.

also, the bsd is not to be confused with the berufsverband erotische und sexuelle dienstleistungen (besd) that only allows current and former prostitutes as members (albeit even if they run a brothel or agency). confusing? german journalists would agree because they regularly and embarrassingly get the two mixed up.

they are both lobby groups for prostitution though so im against them. but when the media interview stephanie klee (bsd), johanna weber (besd) or other lobbyists from these groups, they dont contextualise it and treat it more like a union.

the devil works hard but the prostitution lobby works harder!