Regarding the election result (also from Reuters): https://archive.is/rzdSb
We seem to be back to the bad old days (arguably, the 80s) of "this despot/ethnocentrist is a goodie, because they're our political ally". Not that this is anything new, of course. They're just more blatant about it now.
She's like Ardern or Trudeau, but in a much more corrupt, arguably less "democratic", poorer, non-Anglo country...
See also Poland's very own "I want a federal EU" prime minister Tusk...
There seems to be more “clusters” of F2Ms, though… At least among teens and young adults.
I believe there was a cluster in Palo Alto (surprise surprise) of all places, a few years back…
I was trying to find the article prior to writing this, but it seems most of the evidence has been scrubbed, since (again, to no one’s surprise)…
But I do recall the “social contagion” angle being talked about in various publications. Which lines up with the anorexia and other “mental illness” (people on TikTok claiming to have one, etc) comparisons…
When it comes to adult trannies, though? Yeah, you’re generally right…
Which makes sense I guess. There’s a lot less perks to being a mediocre, ugly “man” than to being a mediocre, ugly “woman”, I imagine (in reality)…
Huh, TIL!
I didn’t know any of that (I should have, about Cyprus at least, but I didn’t). Thanks!
All very complicated…
The Soviets’ tendency to move ethnic groups around at will obviously contributes to that…
I guess what you say about the Baltics applies also to the Russkies that stayed in Poland, East Germany, etc., after 1991..?
Honestly, this is all definitely interesting, but I guess I haven’t thought about it in detail before…
The only Russians I met in Sweden presumably had citizenship (as they owned property), lol.
Are you Romanian then? Definitely an interesting part of the world!
Romania is very corrupt. Moldova, I believe, is more so. So it wouldn’t surprise me if the criminal entities there are cross-border, plus probably the politicians are in cahoots (kick backs, etc.)
But it’s also some sort of historical revisionist thing, i.e. “Moldova was always historically part of Romania, and only split off by the Soviets to serve Russian interests.”
Which is only partly historically true, and is, almost to a tee, very much the same argument Putin uses to justify Ukrainian-Russian “brotherhood”…
Which is… Ironic.
There’s also the desire to destroy anything from the Soviet era (such as the writing system, political structures, old textbooks, etc.), so I guess this plays into that…
Which is kind of what Ukraine has done as well, albeit replacing Russian things with their Ukrainian equivalent…
It’s all very stupid.
I suppose though, to give them their due, it’s a bit like East Germany, in that Moldova is poor, and barely produces anything of large-scale economic value (except wine, lol), so it’s in the economic self-interest of the elites to merge with the larger, less-poor, EU-member “mother country”…
However the majority of ordinary people do not want this merger, and unlike the 90s, with the breakup of Czechoslovakia (also an elite project with limited popular support), I don’t see this one being quite as easy to ram through…
Edit: it’s worth noting that Moldova is effectively land-locked, and only has one port that is capable of handling large ships. Whereas Romania (which wants to buy said Moldovan Port, because of course they do)… Is not.
All of which suggests to me that Romania is almost certainly manipulating large parts of this, a bit like Bulgaria (yes, really) does with (North) Macedonia, for similar reasons…
I’m interested in how that works - is it much like how NIrish residents can get it through having had previous generations of relatives in the Republic..?
Which raises interesting points in places where this doesn’t apply (such as ethnic Croats in Bosnia, for example)…
But I suppose we can’t possibly expect them to apply the same rules everywhere. Tis an interesting thought experiment, though…
I don’t even know how Cyprus manages that (presumably they’re just not in Schengen?), let alone all these other cases…
I… Realize that everyone’s circumstance is different, and I’m glad you’re (presumably) close to your mother, but I personally would recommend thinking about that decision extremely carefully, and maybe even trying it out, short to medium-term, first…
Because (almost) everyone I know who has done that, for the same reasons as you mention (and it was the same for me), has… Ended up regretting it.
I think there comes a point once you’ve been out of their house for a bit where it just… Doesn’t work to go back. Or, at least, it isn’t necessarily a positive outcome for one’s mental health.
But that’s just my 10 cents.
Do whatever you feel is right for you and your circumstances!
It really, really feels like that in Australia now, too.
Hell, even in one of the big local subreddits, someone said pretty much exactly the same thing. So when even they admit to it, it’s probably true…
See also the Moldova thing, and current state elections in Aus, for much of the same…
I have some semi-educated thoughts on this (yes, hello, I’m still alive) and literally no one around me cares, nor does the Australia media, it seems, so please allow me to indulge myself for a minute…
Moldova, much like Ukraine and the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, et al) has suffered a serious identity crisis ever since the USSR fell, arguably owing to linguistic/cultural tensions that go back way before that.
In general, the push and pull has been between the pro-Russian camp (Transnistria and its allies ) and the supposedly pro-European but really pro-Romanian faction.
And I don’t say that lightly. Because what is interesting is that, unlike say Ukraine (where Russian is being erased and replaced by Ukrainian), the pro-“European” camp would quite literally be happy to erase their own country, if it was politically tenable.
They’ve already done this by removing any references to a separate Moldovan language/dialect, and even by demanding that Ukraine deprecate Moldovan (because there is a sizable Moldovan minority in Ukraine) in favour of “Romanian”.
That latter point has really only happened since Sandhu and Zelenskyy both took office.
This comes after they deprecated the Cyrillic script (historically the main writing script in Moldova, which resulted in the destruction of previous “elites”, exactly as Ataturk did in Turkey) soon after independence.
On Reddit, the Moldovan sub is dominated by Anglos, despite the vast, vast majority of locals there not speaking any English. They constantly shit on the “country hicks” (using the equivalent slur) for not voting as they are told, and wanting to retain things like the Cyrillic script, and references to a Moldovan linguistic and cultural identity.
And that’s where it gets really interesting: none of these pro-Romanian policies have popular support. None of them. From extinguishing the Moldovan identity to changing the script to even unifying with Romania in the future. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to Sandhu speak. Or from reading Wikipedia or Reddit. And hell, even their Eurovision entry a couple of years back was pushing this weird “pan-Romanian” idea, and selling that their is no real, measurable difference between Chișinău and Bucharest. Which is odd, considering that even in the days of Dragostea Din Tei (written in Romanian, by a Moldova group living in Romania) no one would have dared to claim that…
That is the context of this referendum, which she barely got over the line, and of the runoff presidential elections there: an extremely pro-Romanian globalist who the media pretends is “liberal and pro-EU”, vs the so-called “backward conservatives” who apparently only exist in rural areas, and are “bought out” or “brainwashed” by Russian propaganda.
It ain’t great. And shit, I say all this as a Europhile and supporter of both Ukrainian and Moldovan independence.
Something about all this, ever since Sandhu got in and became “popular” in the West, just ain’t right.
But, much like with the Voice Ref in Aus last year, I don’t hold my breath for either Wiki, or Reddit, to acknowledge that.
TL;dr she’s a pro-Romanian globalist, and this is all much more murky and complicated than most sources are making it out to be…
This is… Truly pathetic to watch.
I guess at least it, umm… Fights like a woman.
Chucks tantrums like a (little) girl, too.
Have to at least give it that much…
These celebrities truly do enjoy sniffing their own farts.
“I’m the GOAT, y’all, and I know it.”
No, no you’re not. Fuck off back to the ghetto, scum.
No way I could sit through the entirety of this bullshit…
So they’re both Canadian then? My (admittedly ignorant) impression is that it is fairly easy for Canadians to move to the US, fairly indefinitely, provided they have no criminal record, etc..?
Somewhat like how it is for Australia and New Zealand.
At least, that seems to have been the case for (at least most of) the many Canuck celebs I know of…
It’s also partly because, to my knowledge, municipal waste collection just… Doesn’t exist. And there’s no, for example, urban garbage bins/trash cans.
People just dump shit on the side of the road, and then burn it. On the open-windowed trains, it’s just thrown out the window…
In Darjeeling (so relatively less poor, at least historically), when you walked around the town squares, you would have piles of trash smouldering away off to the side, and everything vaguely smelled of it. It was… Unpleasant.
Varanasi and Old Delhi were the worst I saw, however. At least 10 times worse than Darjeeling, Jaipur or even Agra (where the Taj is)…
Having been there, if you go to the Northeast, it’s not really like that. Especially areas of just forest and farmland.
Mind you, I had to travel several hours east by train from where I was staying, already in the East (West Bengal) to see that, so you do have a point…
In general though, the further you get from Delhi, the less the overdevelopment is a thing.
Rajasthan (which you see in, for example, Octopussy) really wasn’t that bad…
Swedes would like a word… /s
But also, other Scandis do genuinely seem to see Danes as more… Swarthy, and they do have somewhat of a point, lol.
Not that “swarthy” means much, in reality, but nonetheless…
I discovered recently that the (Highland) Scots nickname for Anglos (🤢) and even some Lowlanders is Sassenachs, i.e. Saxons, so there is that…
Interestingly, there’s a “Judge John Deed” episode that covers this quite nicely (not sure of the title) where a boy needs to have an organ replacement from an animal, and refuses it on the grounds of being a vegan, but his parents want to force him to take the transplant against his will. Won’t spoil it except to say that it gets ethically… Messy.
But the fact that we’ve gone from that to actively discussing whether parents should be able to consent to actually killing their child (because that’s what it comes down to, in the end) is quite frightening, imho…
I don’t agree, actually. I can see the argument for withdrawing continuing care to keep a person artificially alive (e.g. the Terri Schiavo case, or the Boy in the Bubble), but I do not agree with the parents or state deciding to euthanize an individual, who is cognizant (and again, that’s an important consideration), against their will…
That’s murder. Or, if you like, “justified homicide”. That’s where I draw the line, personally. YMMV, and that’s fine, but it scares me a bit that we’ve gone from Terri Schiavo to this level of discussion, in twenty years…
To answer my own question there, Darwin is apparently roughly 9% Abo or Abo-heritage, whereas Alice is a smidge over 20%:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Springs
21.2% of the population is enough to turn it into a dysfunction shithole. "Impressive", in a sense.
Wait, did not the aboriginal already allow this for children, haha
I mean, to be facetious, we know they're not above diddling their kiddies, and I do believe honour killings were a thing in Abo communities, historically, but...
More seriously, it largely comes down to it being a unicameral territory, with a relatively small population (and therefore a small parliament), where it is relatively easier to get controversial legislation across (the US equivalent is DC. The British equivalent is maybe Wales). The only trouble was/is that the Federal government had the power to overrule said legislation, which is what they did:
The Abos, in this case, had very little to do with it, apart from I suppose being the historical reason why the NT is still a territory rather than a state.
Darwin, though (where the political power is) is extremely different to say, Alice Springs, or even Arnhem Land, which is where we generally hear about the kiddy-diddling and such. I'm not even sure Abos are a plurality in Darwin...
It's more, in this case, about the fact that children, by definition, cannot consent. This is also why "gender affirming care" for minors is inherently immoral.
We, as a society, have determined that those below a certain age cannot (legally) consent to certain life-changing things, and I would argue that death is the most definitive of those.
Besides, even leaving aside the issue of childhood more broadly, an infant generally cannot even verbalise, let alone conceptualise the concept of their own mortality, so this becomes really, really fishy...
Unless we want to redefine euthanasia as eugenics, which this is much closer to, by that definition...
That's the thing, at what point does it go from "voluntary" euthanasia to state-sanctioned murder (e.g Zyklon B in the Nazi extermination camps)? Generally the line for that is drawn at consent, so if we're dealing with children who cannot legally consent (and unlike with say, dementia, cannot have consented earlier in life), then that opens a whole other can of worms...
See, what I find odd is that the supposed "majority" of voters in the Low Countries support laws like this, hence it tends to attract broad political support.
I don't really understand that, in countries with 10 Million+ each (you wouldn't see that in Au/NZ, but I suppose you do in Canada), but it's almost like... They don't seem to view human life as having the same "value", I suppose.
Obviously the ultimate result of such views is genocide, but we're not quite there yet.
But yeah, discussing issues like this with Germanics (Dutch, Flemish, Swiss, less so actual Germans, for obvious reasons) is... Interesting. There's a big "gap" there, and I'm not quite sure why...
One thing I realised recently by spending time there, is that many of these continental European countries take the idea of being a (theoretically, if not borne out at all in reality) "flat society", with supposed "full equality". Hence being extremely early adopters of gay marriage, and "trans rights" (Belgium seems exceptionally obsessed with the latter, for reasons I do not understand), and, in many cases, adopting Soviet-block apartments for all, even at the cost of levelling their historic, "vernacular" architecture (looking at you, Sweden, Norway and Finland)...
Which seems to be at least part of the reason they hate England (less so the other "Home Nations") so much - that idea, and everything that comes with it, just doesn't to jive with Brits, despite the efforts of Labour and the Guardianistas, lol.
If I had to sum up what the end result of the "flat society". model is, at least in the Nordics, I would say... Beige. Everything just ends up beige.
Depending on how you look at it, the worst is probably their fellow Low Country, Belgium (in spite of the whole Catholicism thing)...
They've been doing it for longer, and their "scope" for euthanizing the mentally ill is considerably more broad. Plus I think they are higher on raw numbers, for that category...
However I believe the Dutch are the first to allow this for children, i.e. those who cannot consent to other things, but apparently can consent to state-sanctioned murder..?
Where you guys in Canuckistan differ seems to be in the breadth of where this is being applied, e.g. for "financial distress", etc.
It does strike me as fairly terrifying that we have gone from "in the case of terminal illness, in a few jurisdictions, in limited cases" (the Northern Territory in Australia, Jack Kevorkian, the Terri Schiavo case), to this becoming so widespread that it is a media trope, now, and there are whole TV series and movies based around it, and that you have bipartisan support for such extreme laws, everywhere from Canada to the Pays-Bas. It's insane.
Makes you wonder - if we're at this point now, where are we going to be on this issue (and abortion, and "gay rights") in another 20 years? Are we unironically headed for Futurama-style suicide booths? Because hell, at the rate we're trending, that doesn't feel all that far off, sadly...
It's also interesting as someone with a disease that would make me eligible for this (way into the future, but not as far into the future as for most people), that my voice is... Ignored as an "inconvenience"? Generally people with terminal/chronic/neurodegenerative diseases only seem to be listened to when we support euthanasia (or when we are "special", like Steven Hawking or Neil Daniher), never when we are against it.
As Stella Young said like a decade ago, before she died, that seems a little bit backwards and fucked up.
Tbf they’ve also interfered in Western European elections at a national/state level (mostly the two big ones of France and Germany), though of course in that case, those countries are in the EU (as is Poland), so it’s a bit more… “Expected” or “palatable”…
I’m not so sure about the case of Zelenskyy. You could argue that they’ve kept him in power, but in terms of him getting into power in the first place… It did seem fairly organic. Of the candidates at play in that particular election, I’m not sure the EU would have chosen him. But honestly, who knows?
That feels like a very long time ago, at this point, given everything that has happened in that region since then…
But yeah, I do absolutely think he should step down at some point, ideally once martial law is over, and then we can start looking into all that more seriously…
But we shall see what happens, I guess.