“We are preparing for the worst,” said a Swedish soldier and tank driver, Alva Stormark, 19. “Because we know there is a war in Europe and we are close to the Russians.” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Trump is so jealous of putin invading Ukraine he has been jonesing to invade someone. I mean it's not as if trump has to put his life on the line

People keep wondering why they're going after Venezuela. It's because they want to do regime change and control its oil, then use a big tract of land there to keep a tax free "network state" that looks like Dubai but operates like Rhodesia. They are saying this out loud! Believe them!

Venezuela's just the first of many, and they're hoping other places will just fold instead of getting into a protracted air and ground war after this one. And I know what you're thinking: Didn't the creation of Dubai require slaves? Yes! Good point! Noodle on that for a minute.

Lol discord No it fucking isnt

300 Ukrainian drones heading into Russia. #explodey

Requiring foreign visitors to hand over 5 years of social media isn’t “security,” it’s unchecked government control. All-seeing surveillance systems don’t make us safer. They are in direct opposition to our civil liberties. www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

Reality:

Dude did you see the new episode of Torment Nexus?! Yah! We should build that!

It's funny, the Wikipedia for Black Mirror says "some critics have found the formulaic morality themes of the series obvious" and yet it's already clear that the series is *far* too subtle for techbros and their financial backers.

For real, check this out. Evil.

UPDATE: my AI-generated grandma watched too many youtube videos and now she's a flat earther

Ukrainian maritime drones have hit another Russian shadow fleet tanker, Dashan, under the flag of the Comoros, in the Black Sea. #explodey

This is quite openly fascistic from the Labour Permanent Under Secretary for Migration and Citizenship. There can't be any doubt about it.

"wE juSt HaVe tO ACcepT thE puBLiC's ViEws On WhaT iS aCCeptABle aNd noT trY to ChanGE iT." I guess it was an immutable fact that 16% of GOPers supported gay marriage in 1996 and 55% in 2021. Just facts that can't be changed that ... changed ... somehow.

Claims of "Polls say voters prefer X so we must do X even if we don't really like X" are just ways of saying "we don't want to do politics" (or just ways of trying to mask that they really DO want to do X but don't want to admit it). SOMETIMES X is a reality. But it's changeable.

Any pundit who immediately jumps from "polls shows x% favor y" to "we must do y" or "we must accept y" is eliding over a LOT of intermediate steps and assumptions--steps and assumptions they may not even realize they are eliding over.

So pre-CECOT polls showing high fav for Trump on immigration: COULD mean "Americans genuinely love this idea, and we have to accept that as a political reality" OR it could mean "Americans aren't really paying attention, current media framing makes them think Trump's doing fine." OR OR OR.

Many polls are less measures of stable preferences than snapshots of current perceptions of highly mutable policy takes. This is why the phrase "let the data speak for itself" fills me w rage. Because data is ALWAYS open to multiple interpretations, based on underlying theoretical views.

Most analysts, pundits, academics, and terminally on-line Bluesky posters are high-info voters, who likely have somewhat stable policy view bc they think nonstop abt the issue. It's why they do what they do! But most voters? ARE NOT THAT WAY. Which means a survey is measuring SOMETHING ELSE.

Ah, yes, that great immutable thing, "public opinion." I feel like the combination of widely available data, along with a naive if not almost seemingly willful refusal to understand how it is generated, is a major bane of our current time.

In the abstract, widely available polling data, if the polls are well designed (and that is load-bearing "if"), should be helpful in a democracy. As long as those using it understand what shapes it. Far too often, polling data is taken as a sign of stable underlying views, which ... often not so!

We saw that w the Dem CECOT protests. Every reactionary centrist pundit was screaming "ppl like what Trump is doing! This will backfire!" ... only to see Trump's fav on immigration crater when Dems CECOT trips put the issue on the public's radar. First time Trump went underwater on immigration!

THIS! i think there is an entire generation of political leaders and consultants who don't actually know how to *lead* a political movement and think their job is just following polls

"we just need to take the politics out of politics and then we'll just win" is basically the sales pitch and that uh makes no sense

If you live in Maryland and you want to contact Bill Ferguson, his number is 410-841-3600 or 800-492-7122. You can email him at [email protected].

I'm usually a "prioritize winning elections over winning factional fights" guy but that goes out the window with anything these group chat psychos touch. We have to crush them or they'll turn the Democratic Party into Labour

"the alternative is to being called a racist" It's genuinely possible that the entirety "white male identity" culture is simply poorly made Russian propaganda. Don't be an rube challenge. Difficulty: impossible.

Again, need to point out: Musk’s current girlfriend is half Indian and he has 4 children with her. If there’s a problem, he’s part of it.

the John Birch Society should not be commenting on Five Nights at Freddy's. That would be like Julius Caesar having an opinion on Timothee Chalamet. I refuse to entertain the possibility.

What’s that saying, hit dog holler

It also helps that they are breaking democracy by breaking every single possible law, and just getting away with it, because every law has an asterisk *not for gop right next to it

Reality tv created a parasocial bond with the uber rich and now they’re protecting their nonexistent wanna be wealth.

I was blasted as classist for it, but I still like this quote: "MAGA are people with six teeth defending people with eight yachts".

In this context, what Trump & co. are doing in Venezuela almost makes sense, except what they're doing isn't attacking the structures of drug trafficking, & they're actively hostile to any attempt to strengthen overseas allies except by empowering scammers & murderers. It's Bizarro foreign policy

It obviously makes absolute sense for those modern post-industrial economies to take up radical efforts to disrupt such choices, attack international organized crime, & work to strengthen economies & institutions abroad. But our right wings are pro-scamming because they can't afford not to be.

The ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia is over and both sides are sliding towards open war along their disputed border. Today Thailand has been striking Cambodian positions with F16s, drones and mortar. Another one Trump was supposed to have “solved”.

I know it's been said before but if people hate Trump this much when his second term is going exactly as predicted, what the fuck was the median American voter expecting? What is/was the hold he had on the imagination of this nation of fuckwits? If the racism isn't enough, then what else was there?

it’s just remarkable how thoroughly the media has normalized all of this; how clearly the media will normalize absolutely anything provided it endures longer than a handful of news cycles.

Demented mad king shit.

"The jobs where you don't interact much with people are dying off" is the whole underlying thing making a certain subset of guys really mad. The gender play preference stuff with toddlers, adult-shaped.

I fucking hate them all

There is irreparable damage a not even full term Vance admin could do both to our own democracy and democracies across the world and in traditional American fashion, a lot of my countrymen seem to not take the latter part of that too seriously

yeah gonna need all those guys defending normies using AI because they "dont know better" to just shut the fuck up forever

They have held parts of Ukraine for years-murdering, torturing, raping, looting, abducting. Unchecked and in complete silence.

The bodies of 449 people who died during the occupation of Izium in 2022 have been identified and reburied, the Izium Administration reported. Russia occupied the town for only a few months, yet managed to extinguish countless lives.

(And no, the Russian Empire cosplaying some kind of Marxist internationalism for 70 years doesn't get a pass - most eastern Europeans always saw it correctly for what it was)

"If you don't want to get killed and raped by my emotional support fascist empire then you're a obscurantists nationalist" I wonder why Razem would ever disagree with this rhetoric

Idk how to tell this to people but literally every polity you can come up with, no matter how decentralised an anarchist federation it might be, will need to think of answers to the question "what if we're attacked"

I get being a tankie when the opposition is literally Hitler, but the rest of the time, not so much. Left and right despots have much more in common with each other than with open societies. "Communist" China is now a capitalist dictatorship. Russia isn't socialist any more but it's still despotic.