USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.

Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.

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

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.

I also really appreciate about Lemmy how there can be a 2 day old thread on everything and I throw in my 2 cents and even after 2 days, that comment gets read. It really beats the endless reposts (and bots reposting top comments!) of reddit.

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.

It did draw extra attention, lots of extra attention actually. Navalny’s problems in the Russian prison system made the news frequently, regularly reminding everyone what a fucked up state Russia is. Immolating himself on the red square would have been far less effective since that’s been done a few times already (there’s been a few people who have immolated themselves there already). So as a suicide with a message/martyr for a cause, it was in my perception fairly effective at getting a message across I think. Point in case: we’re talking about it again even now …

Is it really a faux-pas? It probably depends on where you live and the people you live amongst. Where I live, it seems like only the extreme right (the successors of the people who helped the nazi’s genocide the Jews) + orthodox Jews support Israel unequivocally. Most others don’t see it as black and white and still consider Palestinians as humans who need hope and prospects, which they’re obviously not getting under Israeli occupation.

The majority of Palestinians in Palestine apparently support Hamas, but it’s likely that they would not be supporting Hamas if Israel had been acting in good faith and not been slowly (a lot faster now obviously, but they were going slowly for years) ethnically cleansing them from Palestine. It’s kinda a chicken and egg situation.

If Rabin had not been murdered by an extremist israeli in 1995, there might have been peace now in those lands, but instead Israel is now being lead by those extremists and they aren’t interested in peace or co-existence.

Coincidentally, there was a recent media event in my country event where a celebrity publicly displayed support for Palestinians.

She had this to say: “Raising a Palestinian flag does NOT mean that I support Hamas or that I hate Jews or that I am okay with innocent civilians - wherever they live - being killed. It means that I want all wars and all genocides to end.” https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2024/01/08/laura-tesoro-palestijnse-vlag/

Public reactions (in dutch): https://m.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20240107_96484050 The minister Jan Jambon was in his youth a member of the local fascist party and is pretty vocal that he would like his current (more mainstream) party to collaborate in the future with that fascist party. So that he thinks that it is a “faux-pas” to express support for Palestinians, does not surprise me in the least.

Edited because of grammar.

It’s reddit though. How can we know how many of those people are real?

Even before the Reddit app debacle, reddit made very questionable decisions and if you went to look at that discussion at a later date, the answers that were artificially boosted to the top (this depended on how you went to look at the site, it seemed a lot less in old reddit) seemed as fake as a fake Amazon review, as if reddit was astroturfing their own website.

The change that broke reddit for me was this: https://old.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blocking_updates/?limit=500 I have no way of looking at the thread without using old.reddit, so I don’t know if it still looks as astroturfed as it did back then.

This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.

The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.

Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don’t get the point of this meme.