You’re probably right. At the same time, stability and the right environment for business can do wonders for a country’s economy. Just compare the dirt-poor China that Deng Xiaoping opened to global investment and the now-dominant regional superpower of today.

However, birth rates are more correlated to wealth, not to religion. Poorer people have more kids than wealthier people. Palestine is much poorer than Israel, partly because of the constant war and unrest there, as well as the lack of a strong state apparatus. This means nobody wants to invest money to start businesses and create good jobs Meanwhile, Israeli companies and people exploit this by hiring Palestinian workers at very low wages.

Palestine is also beholden to the monetary policy of Israel as they are forbidden by treaty from establishing a national currency. Thus, the currency of Palestine is largely the Israeli new shekel.

Once there is peace, there can be work to fix these problems and increase the living standards of Palestinians. Once that happens, history tells us that their birth rate will naturally decline.

Wow. Shocking.

Not going to lie, I thought it was fake news.

Hang on a minute—the population of Israel is some ten million but the population of Palestine is only some five and a half million. Israel is 74% Jewish and 18% Muslim. Palestine is 93% Muslim. The rest follow other religions or no religion (they are mostly Christians).

This seems to mean that there are 7 million Muslims and 7.5 million Jews. And these figures predate the Gaza war; no doubt the number of Muslims in Palestine has gone down, due to obvious reasons.

Well, we’ll see. The thing is that if the Palestinian Authority wants to be recognised as a state, it needs to act like a state and not like an ephemeral government-in-exile. Democratic governments can change through elections, but the state as an organisation is still there. The PA uses the name “State of Palestine” in its formal communications, so it needs to live up to that instead of acting like a ragtag band of desperados begging for whatever scraps of power Israel tosses to them.

Does the current government of the Palestinian Authority have the confidence of the people? Maybe. We don’t know. But I assume the answer is “no” until I am proven wrong. Fatah controls the PA but technically lost to Hamas in the 2006 election. Again, that was 18 years ago. A lot has changed since then! Hamas has turned Gaza into a shit hole. The pockets of the West Bank run by the PA at least are serviceable.

I’ve never heard of that. Do you have any further reading?

Netanyahu has not come up with any end plan for his Gaza war (because the whole thing is a ruse to keep him in office and out of jail at this point). It seems the Palestinians have so generously done so for him.

The logical end plan is probably a tenuous peace with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is smart they’ll either make peace with Hamas or betray them all and turn them over to the Hague. The former will stabilise the Palestinian state at the expense of risking another Israeli invasion. The latter will stabilise relations with Israel in exchange for potentially weakening the unity of Palestine. But the PA cannot keep their heads in the sand and ignore Hamas.

Elections must be held. The Palestinian Authority has no claim to any mandate from the Palestinian people. Their latest election was over 18 years ago. If they want international legitimacy then they will need to demonstrate they have the confidence of the Palestinian people.

With a strong PA, there are two logical endpoints—a two-state solution with strong cooperation between Palestine and Israel, perhaps even to the point where there can be freedom of movement between the two or even united citizenship; or a one-state solution with the entirety of Palestine being absorbed under the state apparatus of what is now Israel, forming a bi-religious or secular successor state (due to the new voting power of Palestinian citizens).

Nobody will be entirely happy and get everything they wanted in the end, nor will everyone think that the result was totally fair, but I think at some people, people get tired of endless war and become willing to compromise. This may not happen in our generation, but it eventually must.

I took the time to educate myself and read more about the government situation in Palestine before forming an opinion on this. The last Palestinian election was in 2006, so I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that the current government of the Palestinian Authority holds no mandate from the people of Palestine. I think a good starting point would be to hold immediate elections, then hopefully there will be a change in government and negotiations can begin for peace in Palestine after Netanyahu goes to jail

Just as a matter of curiosity, what other organisation would you say would be a better choice to run the Palestinian state?

I’m sure I could but I would rather eat my own shit than live in Shenzhen.

Most non-white minorities employed in Hong Kong are still paid wages high enough to sustain their families back in their home countries. But there are few legal protections for them. Most labour laws don’t apply to them. Just as an example, the Minimum Wage Ordinance doesn’t apply to domestic workers. They are paid a pittance compared to those who employ them (just a few thousand HKD a month) and cannot survive if they aren’t given the free room and board by those who employ them.

Still, there is a vibrant culture. Just walking down the streets of Sham Shui Po you can see them congregating in the streets, around the Western Union office, or Jollibee on their weekly one day off. There are also places like the Chunking Mansion in Tsim Tsa Tsui, which some people have called a “Kowloon Walled City 2.0”, but that is false; it’s a thriving centre of South Asian culture in Hong Kong. There are probably other places too that I just don’t know of.

And here again, come the misinformed people putting words into an article they didn’t read to justify their misinformed viewpoints. I will add this as a Hongkonger—

Everything in the article is more or less true. Before the handover of Hong Kong to China, Hong Kong’s minority of Europeans were much more active and prevalent (because they had a disproportionate amount of political power and controlled a lot of the wealth). After the handover, this special status went away and naturally, the Chinese majority took over the Government. Through the decades, Chinese investment and the power of the Chinese economy have wrestled away economic hegemony from Western companies, although American and European money still holds a lot of power in Hong Kong. Infamously, after US President Donald Trump put HK Chief Executive Carrie Lam on the sanctions list, the banks closed her accounts and she was forced to receive her salary in cash.

Nonetheless, the white minority in Hong Kong were still active from a cultural and economic standpoint, but they are leaving. These are the reasons—

• Hong Kong is autocracising. The exercise of Government power is becoming more and more arbitrary, no longer constrained by a rigid set of guarantees and restrictions. People (not limited to just Westerners) are no longer confident that the Government of tomorrow won’t decide to strip away the freedoms they’ve enjoyed, arrest them for their political views, or seize control of their businesses. China is imposing its political ideals on Hong Kong, and China’s system only works if you have complete trust that the Government has your best interests at heart. Hongkongers, both Chinese and otherwise, especially those educated in the West or in Hong Kong’s Western-style universities, tend to follow the Western liberal tradition of not trusting the Government. Hence, they feel threatened when the Government starts stripping away the elements of the liberal democracy they expected, and they don’t feel safe in Hong Kong.
• Yes, people see things like the Chinese national being played on TV four times daily and new laws being passed making it illegal to criticise the Chinese flag or whatever and they think “This is bullshit, why does the Government care about that?” And yes, people do think that even if you can criticise the Government doing things you don’t like, the Government doesn’t care about your criticism in the slightest and there’s nothing you can do about it. They feel neglected and left without a voice. All you can do is complain about it over tea with your friends. People think that if you start a protest or political movement critical of the Government, you will get arrested for some trumped-up reason and the police and bureaucracy will harass you.
• Living in Hong Kong is losing the advantages it once had over other cities. For the educated professional, there’s no reason to stay in Hong Kong instead of chasing higher salaries and lower costs of living in Europe or America. And plus, since that demographic is overwhelmingly liberal, they feel that the way Europe and America are governed is closer to their own political views, and they feel safe in the legal guarantees afforded by those countries’ constitutions. I made a salary of 2,500 USD = 20,000 HKD a month working in IT as an intern in America with no experience. Hong Kong employers baulk at the prospect of paying me 20,000 HKD a month now. Meanwhile, I can easily find a job in now the USA with my qualifications now paying 40,000 HKD/month equivalent. Hence, brain drain. It made no economic sense for me to stay in Hong Kong.

I will, however, give a brief mention of the fact that this article mentions the exodus of white people, but it is important to note that there is also more than ever a growing minority of South Asian people (Indian subcontinent, Indonesia and Malaysia, &c.). I think it is pretty racist to not count those people as contributing to the internationalism of a city. Nonetheless, these people tend to be employed in an exploitative system of domestic labour rather than participating as genuine equals. They do not enjoy the same rights as Chinese Hongkongers or white Hongkongers and labour laws do not afford them nearly the same protections. They form an underclass, something that Hong Kong likes to sweep under the rug. More Hongkongers than will admit are openly racist to them; a slang term for an Indian person is a homophone for “a worse [person]”

Do none of you know that the UK is already a recognised nuclear state under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons? The UK already has a stockpile of 280 nukes under its control.

Nukes in Britain aren’t something new, so people who call this the Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 are being stupid.

Before you all comment: read the article. It’s not that long.

Ukrainian Pravda lays out information in an extremely clear and concise way. This is the news, this is why, and this is the quote. That’s it. One sentence each. It’s very to-the-point.

That being said, the headline is misleading rubbish. The US isn’t abandoning Ukraine, it wants Ukraine to be able to defend itself without needing to rely on American aid.