News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.
The Western world really needs to start doing something about Russian propaganda and money in our politics. Or it is going to eat us from the inside out.
I think you start by arresting anybody who takes Russian money to influence elections for treason. Grab a few high profile folks like that, and the house of cards starts to crumble.
Yes only home grown rich fascists should be allowed to influence politics with money.
Hold on I think I've heard this one before
I was reading the comments on this on /r/europe and there were Romainians commenting how they were shocked as this as they'd literally never heard of him. He wasn't in any TV debates or any of the usual media election circus. Friends, family - nobody had heard of him.
I know people live in "bubbles", but for a candiate to suddenly be in the lead where people who are politically active have never heard of him is wild.
here in czechia, one of our new europarliament representatives is guy named filip turek, former car racer and current nazi. in the past, he had nothing to do with politics whatsover, i had no idea such person exists until after the elections.
his whole "campaign" on tiktok was "green deal woke, combustion engine good". his adhoc party motoriste sobe (car owners united) in coalition with one more seemingly insignificant party got 10,2% of votes.
we are entering the era of real unfiltered democracy and it is fucking terrifying.
This has a real “democracy is bad, actually” vibe to it that I see expressed a lot on the right of the political spectrum (Tim Poole and the others taking Russian money to pump out pro-Republican bullshit).
Is this infecting the left now too? Or are you a conservative?
I think it may be a mistake to avoid listening to positions other than your own because you internally categorize the sentiment as the enemy.
It's mildly inflamatory to say that critiques of a system are equivalent to "an infection" and can stifle reasonable discussion
I didn’t say anything about not listening to it. In fact, I read it and engaged.
I’ve listened to it on the right too which is how I know those people who’ve been saying it in the past.
Frankly, your response makes so sense.
I’m interested to know who, if not those governed, should be choosing how their government runs.
Is this infecting the left now too? Or are you a conservative?
if you can't say after reading my comment, i would just move on 😂
I wouldn’t want to get into it more deeply if I were you either.
People reading this thread should ask themselves why far right talking points which are literally anti-democratic are making their way here. Why can’t this account just answer a simple question honestly?
People making these comments should come with their ideas for what is better than democracy. Who but the governed should choose their government?
oh no. such sick burn. i am on fire! 😂
Sounds super sus which is likely, given russia
Turnout was 51%, similar to the figure five years ago.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when your ass doesn't show up to elections.
It's sad, yes. But, he doesn't have nearly enough votes to win in the second round. Especially since the votes were super split among a bunch of guys. Most people will just vote for his opposition, Lasconi and Romania will have the first female president. Who is also only the 2nd or 3rd worst option, which is better than I expected. All in all, feels like a win to me.
It’s sad, yes. But, he doesn’t have nearly enough votes to win in the second round.
yeah, don't count on that. this is result of the first round of presidential elections in czechia in 2018.
guy in the first place, milos zeman, is fucking pro-kremlin, pro-peking traitor, alcoholic and immoral asshole. he was going for his second term, so there was no doubt whatsoever about what he is and how he would act in the office.
the five guys behind him were all center-right liberal democratic candidates. we also thought "just add their votes together, there is no way the fucking moron will win".
this is result of the second round:
he got ~1,9 million votes in the first round and 2,8 in the second one. it is not as easy as just counting the votes for his opposition.
we got another 5 years of the pro-kremlin traitor, who almost vomited into our crown jewels, after arriving there straight from ww2-end-celebration party at the russian embassy to prague :
I'm not saying it's impossible for him to win. Definitely not counting our chickens yet. But many people in Romania vote for familiar names, for the big parties. He's an independent and most people have never heard of him. In your case, that was the incumbent. It's a big difference.
He somehow managed to get 2.1 million votes. That's huge and a major surprise as everyone is saying. But it's another thing to get 4-5 million votes. Yes, he'll get more votes in the second round, but in order to win, he'll need to more than double his votes. (He got 2.1 million out of almost 9.5 million votes) Which is unlikely. Not impossible, no. There's still a chance that people will be dumb. But it's unlikely.
(He got 2.1 million out of almost 9.5 million votes)
well, i hope that difference will be enough and wish you (all of us, really) good luck.
The strong showing of Georgescu, who has no party of his own, and campaigned largely on the social media platform TikTok, came as the biggest surprise of the election.
this is just a fucking disaster. turns out that democracy is not so great system when majority of the people is bunch of idiots. the good old world with media elite being the gatekeeper to public discourse looks pretty nice in retrospect.
My (conspiracy?) theory I've had for the last few years is that the world is at large shaped by a misalignment of various ML algorithms, that have been given a goal "Maximize the time user spends scrolling at our platform" several years ago, and it has turned out that if you turn someone into a conspiracy nutjob/radicalize them or in general turn him into a piece of shit, it rapidly increases his engagement with the platform. It makes sense to me, because it probably ostracizes you from the people around you, and your nutjob social bubble that validates your new opinions is only on the platform, making you spend a lot more time there. Turns out, a lot of far-right and facist ideologies are pretty comforting, you have someone to blame and you can just be a dick to people you don't like, which is a lot easier than being nice to others, dealing with stuff you are not comfortable with, and accepting that you might be a problem. This shit sells, and ML algorithms have probably figured out that it's the thing that sells the most.
It was my reason why I started avoiding any kind of content delivered by personalized algorithm. I kind of suspected this even before the LLM craze, but seeing how extremely good can a ML algorithm get at one task (turn text into image, for instance) if given enough data, it is horrifying to think what would an algorithm trained on literally billions of users giving their whole life, conservations and behavior as training data be able to accomplish, given the task "here is everything about the user, what do I show to him to keep him on my platform?".
I wager the answer is "tell him that it's OK to be a facist and hate everything that scares you" for quite a lot of people.
That shit is super scary, because even if you know this is happening, the ML algo has hundreds of thousands of people like you and already had several years of feedback loop to figure out what will work on you (which, probably isn't the same thing as for others, but something probably exists). And the only way how to avoid it is to never use any kind of personalized content - most importantly, personalized search.
And then you also have a lot of nation state threat actors who are actively using this to push an agenda. The world is fucked.
This was proven true by every analysis of the 'algorithms' of social networks.
Capitalism is a cancer.
It makes sense to me, because it probably ostracizes you from the people around you, and your nutjob social bubble that validates your new opinions is only on the platform, making you spend a lot more time there.
Seems quite accurate to me. A former friend who drifted into one of these right wing bubbles posted a poll from Germany where we‘re both based, that showed that around 80% of Germans would have voted for Harris and he claimed he doesn’t know a single one of them and that the poll is fake.
Of course the poll was relatively accurate and he is simply only exposed to these 10% of the population bubble of Trump fans but does not realize this.
Hey, thanks for sharing this.
You said something that hits really close to home about one of my most important relationships — a relationship that is starting to experience value drift as they get sucked deep into social media.
I’ve been feeling like a conversation needs to happen, but haven’t had the ability to characterize my thoughts as well as I’d like. Your comment helped me a lot to get closer to what I’d like to express about it to them.
people are not dumb, they are desperate. they turn to fascism because "left" wing bullshit parties are offering nothing.
yeah, people are dumb. and if you are admiring fascists, so are you.
who is admiring fascists? are you not capable of reading?
also ironic because george carlin is exactly the type of status quo defeatist that let this happen.
who is admiring fascists?
person who creates false dichotomy fascism vs. "left wing bullshit party" and explains that the desperate people have indeed no other choice than to turn to fascism. that would be you.
also ironic because george carlin is exactly the type of status quo defeatist that let this happen.
of course. who else would be responsible than the stand-up comic 😂
if you dont analyze the root cayse of people turning to fascism, you will be forever voting blue as the climate disaster gets worse and worse, and the fascists are in power anyway. did i say george carlin was responsible for anything?
for you its sadly gonna be a meltdown in 4 years when you cant vote for your favorite blue fascist anymore. try starting with some reading comprehension and you might figure it out, then some history cause its repeating and you seem to be clueless.
Far-right taking the lead fails to shock me anymore.
Yeah its entirely expected. Its a global trend and its not gonna stop.
This is what the tech billionaires want for all of us. Just wall-to-wall regressive fasho shitshows so we’re too busy fighting each other to see who’s hand is in the till.
Fuck putler, fuck his dumb war, and fuck his puppets.