World Politics Digest thread

For sure and it's probably the simplest and fairest: but to allow for that you'd probably need a brand-new bureaucracy to facilitate a national, dynamic structure for retirement. Even if you didn't, the public service would probably agitate for one, lest they lose a union-mandated tea break. And like tinkering with the age in the first place, good luck selling that to electorates twitchy at the suggestion of even more "red tape"

The first proper state retirement system, IIRC, was under Bismarck in Germany around ~1880, retirement set at 70; and with a quick google check, the average life expectancy then was approx. 40 ... so clearly the idea was most people would be dead before they could pull money from the state. And really, that has probably been the case with all pensions when all's said and done. Except France apparently.

Christ if people start living to 100 en masse, we may have to even consider retiring the Centenarian Bounty lol.

Well like I said, it's a conversation people seem reluctant to have in any realistic, pragmatic way. There's a huge top-to-bottom revision required about how a modern country handles the reality of an older population; one that both lives longer, has longer careers, children at a later age etc. etc. etc.

Heck, you wanna really dive into the rabbit hole, what of cemeteries? The population of Ireland has more than doubled in my lifespan, and so what do we do about plots for when people pass on? Can't keep extending cemeteries endlessly, not when as you mention - there's a housing crisis going on. One partially caused by the aforementioned undying population.

Truthfully? The armchair political enthusiast in me has a big, loud sign marked "do not touch" when it comes to Israel. I just can't find an angle to unpack the subject, while tiptoeing around the ideological mindfield of even mildly criticising Israel.

By all accounts the whole thing reads like a lost cause that, like Taiwan, smells of a situation everyone is trying to just pretend doesn't exist and will exist in this shítty limbo forever. Israel's full dive into right wing populism is despairing - not least for one of its cabinet's recent comments about the nonexistence of the Palestine identity - but also not remotely surprising either. A constant existential war footing invariably breeds a resting sense of that kind of dogma.

That's why I tend not to engage. I see no entry point onto the wheel that doesn't invariably throw up an impossibility blocking any real progress towards harmony. Genuinely don't see an end point, not without descending into apocalyptic scenarios. Starting with the (unlikely?) scenario where America stops being a friend to Israel.

Oh I get why America is and remains an ally of Israel; I did say "apocalyptic" with deliberate intent towards hyperbole cos like you imply, Israel's existence broadly continues because of that American lock. Woe betide any neighbour who took leave of their sensee and made a real play for Israel (notwithstanding the likelihood of Israel's supposed secret nukes acting as deterrent ala South Africa's own secret response from fadó)

I'm reading Silvio Berlusconi has been admitted into intensive care for a heart condition; 86 years old so no that surprising, apparently had left the public eye for a while now. It seems weird to think of a time when he was the most vulvar, outspoken politician in the Western World. Trumped, as it were, since then but by all accounts a prototype Trump of sorts.