Could not agree more. I’m a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don’t support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that’s telling. Just FYI, there’s been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don’t hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I’ll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he’d be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because “We’re all Christian!”. Trust me, you haven’t seen “Christian love” like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:

1. My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)

2. I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.

3. The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).

4. I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there

This is what underfunding education for decades and TikTok does to a country. Romania has the highest number of TikTok users per capita in Europe.

To me, “guys” has been a gender-neutral term for a while now. At least that’s how it’s used here in my little bubble in Europe.

Switzerland or Finland?

is it called Jewish or Jews in this case?

Jews. A thing can be Jewish, a group of people can be Jews. Another rule of thumb you can use is adjective vs noun.

There are plenty of anti-Israeli Jews. Don’t paint us all with the same brush.

There is strong legal backing to this. Romania bars anyone with ties to or rhetoric similar to the Iron Guard (Romanian fascists) from running. Georgescu has strong ties to them, and he’s not even the only politician barred from running due to this for this election (Sosoaca).

Oh, they absolutely do. As far as I’m aware though, the people Ukraine got out ASAP to any country that would have them were women whose husbands were conscripted and were the caretakers for multiple children.

As we all know, women are incapable of fighting. When we fire a gun the recoil breaks all our bones!

I know, military service is the final boss of sexism, but that’s still how it is in Ukraine. There’s some murmuring they may be expanding their conscription to women of fighting age without children, but it is still the case that women are exempt from mandatory military service.

Not really. These are refugees. Women, children, and disabled people primarily I’d imagine. What’s actually going to happen is that after arrival in Ukraine, they’ll be moved to Poland/Romania/etc to keep them out of the line of fire again.

The only thing this does is disrupt their lives again for no reason.

Don’t worry, we know. We wouldn’t be re-arming like crazy if we didn’t. The general vibe here in eastern Europe is one of worried, resigned determination. I’ve never seen pro-EU rhetoric this popular before in my life.

As an eastern European who knows what it’s like to have an angry belligerent neighbour next door, I feel for you. I don’t have much to offer other than hoping you and yours continue to be ok, and hoping that nearby countries in similar situations can organize somewhat to help eachother.

I’d be very interested in more recent stuff. As I mentioned, the last time I seriously looked at this was 3 years ago, in the opening stages of the war. It’s very possible that new methods have been developed, people’s opinions have changed over time, or both. If you could possibly throw me some links to more recent papers, I’d greatly appreciate it!

It’s really hard to find on Google considering this was an academic paper from 3 years ago, but generally the big problem with polling in Russia is that for obvious reasons Russians are scared to give their honest opinions. If asked over the phone what they think of Putin, every politically neutral Russian and even some anti-Putin activists will say they approve.

From memory, the methodology they used was to give 3 propositions unrelated to Putin (less contentious policy decisions) and the respondents were only asked how many of the statements they agreed with, not which ones. Then they did the same thing again with 4 propositions (4th one being if they approve of Putin), then a 3rd time (this time with the 4th one being if they disapprove). With those 3 datasets, you can then essentially subtract the 3 unrelated propositions from the 4th one they actually cared about, all without requiring the respondent to actually state their opinion on the phone.

Is this situation the same for support for Trump in the US?

I haven’t gone too in-depth into this, but a quick search show a 50/50 split in favorable vs unfavorable opinions of Trump. Last time I took a look, serious pollsters who found interesting ways of measuring support for Putin in Russia without endangering those participating found generally a 33/33/33 split between those in favor of Putin, those against, and those with no opinion (part of the intentional depoliticizing of the Russian population).

So, I guess it’s vaguely accurate to say there’s more people that dislike Trump in the US compared to Putin in Russia, but also more people that like him.

It’s gonna be interesting watching to see if all the “All Russian people are complicit because they don’t rise up and kick Putin out” crowd actually put their money where their mouths are and show them how it’s done, or if it was all bluster.

To be clear, I hope it’s the former but I think it’s the latter.

The thing is, they can’t. It’s a unified market. Any tarrif against Denmark is by definition a tarrif against the EU.

We already started during this year. No sane leader trusted in a coin flip to guarantee our security. A possible Trump presidency was planned for.