> leaders often favoring national interests to what would be best for the union
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
Because of the convoluted way the EU works, those national leaders can have outsized power and even veto some decisions (Hungary, anyone?). The parliament needs to have more power if we want to make the EU more democratic.
Let's face it. Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy. The administration radiates hostility and aggression to anything democratic. In the new national security policy the EU is the adversary of the US. If that isn't a wake-up call.
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
>Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of >this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how >"if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002.
- Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States
- Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
If you find yourself with a view of reality that massively differs from others, you have two options.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
I think the viral quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." is probably pretty apt. The IRGC also has real support among the Iranian population. Putin clearly has strong support in Russia.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
I mean, I would have said something exactly like that a few years ago. But first of all, history is full of atrocities committed by humans. They may all have considered themselves good people, but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter? And secondly, I have encountered people who appear to think that decency is for sissies or something to that effect. Those people seem seriously emboldened lately. Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
> but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter?
It matters less for them, and more for you. Yes, we see them as horrible, but also yes, they see us as horrible people. In the end we're all humans, and we all work towards what we think is better, but the method and goal what "better" actually is obviously differs.
> Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
Yes, of course they do, but their definition of "good person" differs between you and them. For you, decency is "good person", for them, ignoring decency is "good person", so of course they aspire to being a good person, whatever that means for them.
Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
> We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
He hasn’t said what the parent said he did, and in the peer comment linking a video of him saying something similar, the context supplies quite a different meaning than was implied above.
The issue with voter ID laws isn't with the concept of having to identify yourself at the ballot box, it is with the way it is implemented.
For example, in my EU country I can vote with my passport, my drivers license, or my ID card, and they accept documents which are expired for up to 5 years. For context: this is less restrictive than the documents anyone is technically required to carry every time they leave their home! The number of people who can't meet this requirement is basically zero, and a decent bunch of municipalities offer them for free to poor people.
Meanwhile US has no universal ID system, which allows the pro voter ID groups to carve out a list of "acceptable" IDs which just so happens to be popular with the people that are going to vote for one side of the political spectrum, while excluding the forms of ID which are popular with the other side. And of course it's not just about identification, as they also add a bunch of irrelevant details to the requirements like the information having to exactly match your birth certificate.
Combine that with the failed two-party system where even a handful of votes often completely swings the political landscape and it is pretty obvious what is going on.
State ID (usually a driver’s license) is the defacto universal ID system.
It’s not hard to get, and you need it to do everything from filling a scheduled prescription, buying alcohol, entering a bar, flying on a plane, or purchasing cold medicine. You literally cannot function as an independent adult without one.
You also need to show it — along with a second form of ID — to be hired at a job.
Anyone claiming a state ID requirement meaningfully prevents anyone from voting is being deeply unserious.
If they actually believed what they claim, they’d be campaigning to remove the ID requirements that are already pervasive in our daily lives. They are not.
I’ll also note that buying a gun requires not just multiple forms of ID, but also an entire background check. If we can do that for one constitutionally enumerated right, we can damn well require a photo ID to cast a ballot.
I think you’re being disingenuous and deliberately trying to refocus the conversation on something else now.
He literally said “if you vote for me, you won’t need to vote again”. It’s not an ambiguous statement and doesn’t require extra context. Everything else you said didn’t really have anything to do with it.
People forget what FOSS is, and you get a world of unclear expectations. FOSS is code + a copyright license. How the code is created is an entirely different matter, and where FOSS projects often fall short. As FOSS projects come Forgejo is well-organized around a community governance model.
Indeed, the fact that maintainers didn't have until only recently the control for disabling Pull Requests tab in a GitHub repo, is what drove a lot of issues in FOSS collaboration over the past decade.
FOSS and open source licenses never ever granted entitlement for contributors to have their proposals reviewed/merged by maintainers. Neither it ever offered entitlement for users to ask for free support.
FOSS is about giving people access to source code so they can do with it whatever they want, and maintainers/authors should have always had the ability to "publish and forget" the source code, without having to deal with those "entitlements".
Great article format with all the dynamic widgets in it. Will have to give this a good read. It is a very interesting topic given how much of (global) public opinion is formed through "social" media.
It is good to realize that it has never been "Nice Uncle Google" and always an advertisement moloch offering tools to hook their product. All that trust that was bestowed was never warranted.
The shared causal structure is the absence of facts and denial of science. Nearly every religion on earth also suffers from that in their gospel, where many fictitious and supernatural phenomena are bundled together and sold for truth.
I'd prefer to speak about "evidence in support of/against" rather than "facts", which often conceals a presuming-the-consequent kind of fallacy.
> denial of science
Whether "science" is believed or denied by any particular person has no effect on whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence has or is visiting earth.
Demanding that "science" be believed is un-scientific. I am not drawing an equivalence between science and religion here, but pointing out that your argument is a super hand-wavey appeal to an inviolable "gospel". I'm old enough to remember when a theory like intra-galactic panspermia was regarded like canals-on-Mars.
In my view, ETI theories are lacking any credible evidence and this makes me sad.
There is nothing anti-science about the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. In fact its apparent absence is has a name -- it's called the Fermi Paradox.
And the facts are just ... released. It's the interpretation of the observations that are disputed. And unless you think they are all fake, the explanations that do not involve alien tech are non-trivial to say the least.
I'm not sure why you'd think there is any shared causal structure with flat earthers at all.
Extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the universe, and extraterrestrial life visiting Earth are two distinct things, and the former is vastly more probable than the latter.
Yes, and to bring it back to GP's point, if someone comes telling you they just saw a flying saucer rise on a big chem trail above the flat earth's horizon, then you perhaps don't take their next claim all too serious.
You are assuming that the people who are arguing about "transients", or people like Avi Loeb, are also people who believe in flat earth or flying saucers.
Yes, that is a more honest assessment than longing for the time "when computing was much less political". It simply wasn't, and not recognizing that leads directly to the mess we have today and onwards towards bleak future.
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