It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.

We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.

In a non first past the post voting system, it’s less likely that 1 radical party remains in power long enough to screw up the high courts. But it can still happen, case in point Hungary and Poland.

Iirc, Orban had been in power for many years in Hungary and went for a gradual erosion of the independence of the courts. Death by a thousand cuts.

Pis in Poland only had a majority for 2 election cycles, but they needed only the first win to screw up the courts. Instead of a gradual (legalistic) takeover, they went for a bonkers hostile takeover of the supreme courts: https://freedomhouse.org/report/analytical-brief/2018/hostile-takeover-how-law-and-justice-captured-polands-courts

The eu should have kicked out both states out of the decision making process and implemented sanctions, but since that required unanimity, Poland and Hungary were essentially protecting each other from consequences. Now that pis lost in Poland, I hope that the eu takes action and prevents this from happening again.

Or in other words, it’s to make sure that those kids stay in the cult of stupid. Ignorant and stupid people are easier to control, both by external grifters, but also by the parents.

14 to 16h is too short for a default. Not everyone will (or even has) the ability to take out their smartphone multiple times per day every day to catch up with the news. Someone who will only read it during the evening, would need posts to stay up 24 to 26h. So that to me is the minimum. Personally I don’t mind if they stay up longer, there might be new interesting top comments if the post itself stays on top longer.

This pier has got to be one of the most expensive examples of virtue signaling ever. Since Israel controls the land that the pier connects to, aid that comes off this pier would always get the exact same treatment as aid that hits an Israeli overland checkpoint, the pier is a pointless + very costly edifice.

Imo the only reason that it exists is so that the USA government can claim to be helping by throwing money at the problem, without actually doing anything about the problem.

I think we really underestimate the amount of trolling that professional trolls do, I don’t think the amount of useful idiots online is that big. While the Russian IRA was knocked offline during the 2018 usa elections, I found that the discourse on reddit was radically different. Subreddits like walkaway or the Donald were suddenly absent from my front page and discussions seemed more civil.

A professional working a 9-5 job of making troll posts, who is using professional tools, who has scores of accounts and spreadsheets with prepared talking points that are based on data analysis, who is working to hit kpi, … That single professional is able to make a lot more posts and have a much bigger impact than a large group of geezers shitposting on their smartphones.

A recurring theme with hard brexiteers was that making “short term” sacrifices was worth it for “reclaiming sovereignty”, which would magically lead to more prosperity in the “long term”. To some, (others) being worse off than before, is a price they’d gladly (let others) pay if it would allow “their team” to score a victory.

In the Usa there’s people cheering for Russia, for the downfall of USA democracy and for Trump to be king. These are such extreme standpoints that it’s hard to believe that they would be serious, but when you see them on camera, then it’s obvious that they are true believers and that they’re not being sarcastic. If those people are real, then I can easily imagine some spiteful british person saying unironically that being worse off now, is a sacrifice that they’re willing to make for “reclaiming sovereignty”. Especially if it’s online and they actually live and work in Sint-Petersburg.

In a world where The Onion cannot make up news that is crazier than the actual news, irony is always going to have hard time.

There are people who actually believe what you had posted, so without additional cues that it’s intended as sarcasm (like starting with Hur Dur or ending with /s), it’s anyone’s guess what you actually meant. In person sarcasm works better because we can easily add physical cues, but on the internet it’s best made very obvious imo.

By blindly supporting Israel, Germany is making themselves complicit in all crimes committed by Israel. Because of how blindly and willfully Germany is walking into helping with the in progress ethnic cleansing, the slogan “never again” has never sounded so empty to me before.

I’m going to second this: a few pairs of Crocs, each placed at a strategic exit and going outside for a few minutes is no inconvenience at all anymore. For anything that takes longer than that, I put on suitable footwear for whatever I’ll be doing.

Ever since the Norman French invasion of 1066, exile was the British solution for potential trouble makers. The Anglo Saxon nobility ended up in Constantinople, but once there were colonies, exile really became Britain’s version of bread and games. Troublesome people, like people with opinions or pregnant maids, could be send to the other side of the world whenever needed. Once all people with opinions on things like fairness and egality are gone, then you are left with the complacent bootlickers who are are happy to just victim blame. Until it happens to them that is, then it’s unfair.

This probably depends on where you live.

Every super market that I go to, where I am expected to weigh vegetables and fruits myself, has touchscreens for the scales. This has been the case for many years now, I can’t recall when they changed from buttons to touchscreens, so probably 15+ years.

The bank ATM where I withdraw money has a touchscreen in addition to the old buttons and keypad. Both work, but the touchscreen has more options.

Spain was neutral during WW1 and WW2. They did have a big civil war, but that was less destructive than WW2 (still very bad though, just not nearly as bad as WW2).

For Germany it might be the reason: Lots of large German cities were mostly destroyed, some practically entirely + they had a large amount of refugees from east of the Oder that needed new places to live.

This level of destruction was not/much less the case in France and Italy. A quick google search says that France actually lost less housing stock during ww2 than Britain did. https://www.britannica.com/topic/casualties-of-World-War-II-2231003

If you make a comment like that on the wrong instance, that happens, but it’s not like that on every instance. Commie instances are filled with tankies and they have always been very dogmatic, just exhibiting nuance and historical awareness will get you those massive downvotes. Also deeper comment chains on more neutral instances can be weird, but that’s probably small sample bias because few people will dig down that deep.

I had seen that and I did not say that it didn’t, but the page that was specifically about indian rape statistics instead of statistics on all crimes, contained additional information pertaining those rape statistics, including a section specifically about how wrong the Uttar Pradesh rape statistics are. All statistics are wrong, but some are simply more wrong than others.

About the only thing the UK government has done right in the last few years, is getting help to Ukraine. I think the UK was even sending small weapons (shoulder fired rockets) in the first days of the full scale invasion, while most other nations were still waiting to see if Ukraine would buckle or not. And since then they were always early with other significant help: training programs, tanks, … They did well in this case I think.

I was talking about stories involving rape that made it into international media and that I read about. Uttar Pradesh features frequently in those.

Anecdotal stories and statistics are 2 different things, but it’s possible to infer some things from them. One important thing about statistics is that you should never accept them at face value (the same with anecdotal stories obviously), they are collected by humans after all.

Your wiki page is about crime, but there’s also one about rape: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_India

That page has statistics about “registered” rape cases. In the registered rape cases Uttar Pradesh ranks fairly low, which does not correlate with the amount of scandals that make it into international media. And since loads of those scandals seem to involve police, it’s not a stretch to conclude that the number of registered cases is a vast underestimation of the real amount.

Reasons why it’s likely lower: police refuse to register cases against specific persons or cases from specific people (Dalits), but far more will not be registered simply because the victims don’t even try. There’s the shame of it being known that you were raped, but there’s also justified fear of retaliations afterwards, if the police wasn’t directly involved in the rape in the first place.

The mismatch between the high amount of anecdotal stories and the low statistics also tells us that there’s no improvement to be expected in the next few years. The first step to recovery, is accepting that you have a problem, and Uttar Pradesh is clearly not there yet.

It is by far the highest population state in India. More people = more scandals. But even when you try to account for that, there’s still an aweful lot of scandals coming out of Uttar Pradesh.

And many of those scandals involve local police or rich locals who believe that laws are for other people, but getting international attention does land them into trouble. So what we’re seeing is probably just the tip of the iceberg, but that’s true in other places as well.

Every citizen of a democratic country, who is still inside Russia at this point, is a potential hostage and bargaining chip for the Russian government. There’s no independent press or judiciary in Russia and the Russian government has no morals and few scruples. If they need a hostage, they’ll take one.

Griner (a basket ball player convicted to 25y in prison for petty charges) was exchanged for Viktor Bout (the person on whom the movie Lord of War was based).

The Russian laws are also a minefield of post truths and petty rules, so it’s not hard to find some kind of charge against any individual. Basically everyone will be breaking the law in some way in Russia and the crooks in the Russian government can decide when and where to go after someone.

Yeah, it’s a “both sides” argument, while it actually isn’t both sides. The comment is trying to paint politicians from both sides as equally bad, while I have only read articles about republicans doing this. And they’ve been at it for years, it must have been 2019 or 2020 when I first read about the book thing.

But moral standards for democrats are slipping as well, which is why I wanted to give that poster the benefit of the doubt and I was hoping that someone could provide a source showing that (some) democrats too are now guilty of this.