“But hur dur bacon”

1374. I look really good for my age

Reminds me of Serena from Handmaid’s Tale – she helped install a theocratic dictatorship where one major goal was to strip women of their rights, and was all surprised Pikachu face when she had her rights taken away from her

I think it’s interesting is that so many autocracies keep up the pretense of democratic and rules-based governance; even North Korea has elections. Same with political trials like you see in so many authoritarian regimes, from modern Russia or China to Nazi Germany – it’s like autocrats need to be able to pretend to themselves that the system they run is fair and just, and that they’re not just tyrants who govern with impunity and enforce rules arbitrarily.

What I don’t get is why? Why bother when it’s immediately obvious to everyone that it’s all a sham? Why not drop the pretense, which everybody knows is just a pretense?

Looks like your Lemmy frontend / client turned the community mention into a link so it just took me to lemmy.world, but here’s one that’s not a link: !political_weirdos@lemmy.world

Out of curiosity, what is Harris’ stance on Israel? I’m from YUROP and I don’t actually know very much about her policy positions

Any bets on whether this will change anything? I mean yeah, it doesn’t seem likely and the prevailing opinion seems to be “fuck no”, but I have no idea how informed that opinion is.

Now that’s a meme I’ve not seen in a long time. A long time.

Russian population growth isn’t 0, though. Yes, the war’s going to make a demographic dent, but they’ve turned their schools into military indoctrination machines

But the thing is that Ukraine is getting worn down as well, and the longer this drags out the more emboldened Russia will become, not to mention the fact that right now Ukraine doesn’t have the capacity for retaking territory – if the war ends with Russia making territorial gains, you can bet your ass this won’t be the last Russian invasion in Europe in the near future.

Oh it absolutely will hurt them plenty even if they “win” this war, but the problem is that the more of their strategic aims they accomplish the more emboldened they’ll be. Sure, it’ll take them a while to regenerate their forces (and their demographics being what they are it won’t be easy), but I don’t think that they’re nearly as screwed as commonly assumed.

Russians are no strangers to misery, and the masses are generally more than happy to live with a boot on their necks as long as they believe they have their boots on somebody else’s neck as well. Casualties (wounded or dead) really don’t factor into it, especially considering that it’s the non-ethnic minorities who are dispropotionately getting the short end of the stick in the war – which is how it’s always been with Russia starting from imperial times. It’s a colonial empire but with contiguous borders, and they have no compunctions about throwing minorities in the meat grinder.

People often say that seems to be the rationale, but I don’t quite buy it. Artificially prolonging the war has much bigger risks involved as it lets Russia not only learn from their mistakes (which they have been doing, regardless of what people often seem to think. Not that they’ve suddenly unfucked themselves but still), and it also gives them time to regenerate their forces and move their country more and more towards a war economy.

If the assumption is that EU and US leaders are just cold and calculating but still want Russia to lose, it’s hard to imagine they’d choose this drip feeding tactic

Seriously, it feels like many “western” leaders want Russia to win. The aid we’ve collectively given Ukraine is comparatively pitiful, compared to what the risks are if we fucking let Russia win. Unsurprisingly the countries that are doing the most to help Ukraine are the ones that have had to live under Russian occupation.

Yes, it’s great that Ukraine fucking finally got some F-16s, but the total amount pledged is absolutely pitiful and a lot of them won’t even be arriving until a few years from now

Intelligence (and I don’t mean IQ but intelligence as an abstract trait) is probably normally distributed just like the vast majority of other biological traits, so the mean is the median

I mean how do you even source a claim like that?

Even giving examples of this supposed bias would be better than essentially just going “they’re biased trust me bro”

From The Guardian’s live feed on this:

Iran’s Khamenei says avenging Haniyeh’s killing is ‘Tehran’s duty’

Avenging Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination is “Tehran’s duty” because it occurred in the Iranian capital, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday.

According to Reuters, Khamenei said Israel had provided the grounds for “harsh punishment” for itself.

“We consider his revenge as our duty,” he said.

There has been no immediate comment from Israel on the strike, which took place hours after Haniyeh attended the inauguration ceremony for Iran’s new president.

I don’t understand why people seem to hate this bot. I’ve seen commenters saying MBFC itself is biased but without actually providing any sources which is sort of ironic, and one bright spark vowed to downvote it every time because “they’re begging for donations”

Gall acknowledged that […] her statements about the Black teens “created at least the appearance of racial bias.”

Oh it was just the appearance of racial bias? Jesus fuck I wonder what she thinks “real” racism looks like

I guess “consumer pullback” is one way to describe what’s going on with the economy…