czech
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We spend 3.5% of our GDP on defense and that’s actually far more than most countries. We have the 6th highest GPD to military spending ratio in the world. The countries who spend more of their GDP are relativity tiny. They amount to 11% of the total global spending on defense vs the USA’s 39%.
The second largest GDP is China- they spend 1.6% of their GDP on defense. Third is Japan @ 1.1%… You get the idea.
Regarding the 2% NATO obligation- most members don’t make it so it doesn’t seem to be a real obligation.
The singer does seem to be trying to distance himself from the conservative implications:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/entertainment/oliver-anthony-song-response/index.html
“The one thing that has bothered me is seeing people wrap politics up into this,” Anthony said. “It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news try to identify with me, like I’m one of them. It’s aggravating seeing certain musicians and politicians act like we’re buddies and act like we’re fighting the same struggle here, like that we’re trying to present the same message.”
But the line about:
Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds
seems a bit hateful unless that’s supposed to be a metaphor for “fat cats”. The CNN article thinks it’s a metaphor:
“though it has also courted controversy for its lyrics referring to politicians as “obese,” welfare recipients “milking” the system,”
But the antisemitic connotations seem like a stretch to me. To assuming that criticism of capitalists is automatically antisemitic seems pretty antisemitic to me in it’s own right.
This is fantastic. I’ve been a $5 Kagi user for a few months and have been really enjoying it. The only issue has been that sometimes when I’m working on a project I need to blow through a ton of similar queries to find what I’m looking for; I’ve been forced to switch back to google for those. Now I’ve upgraded and am going full Kagi.