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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1122 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 4, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Israelis so far are getting off easy given how they acted.

Israel placed second in this year's popular vote, an announcement which was immediately met by accusations of vote-rigging (not sure how that's supposed to work but whatever)

Correct me if I'm wrong: country with biggest vote share gets the most points, 20 votes per verification method, +/-143k votes in Spain, of which +/-111k were online (supposedly bank account verification), the rest phone verification, 26 options so votes heavily distributed.

Seems rather easy to skew, and reasonable to assume Israeli intelligence or whatever would try. High result is a good talking point, opportunity to frame doubts about the vote as deranged, as you do, is a nice bonus.

More than anything I'm just struck by how petty all of this is.

It's not petty. This stupid contest is not some rigorous musical competition, displays like ostracization of Israel are right at home here.

Renaming a park because it's named after a Jew and, decades later, some unrelated Jews did something you don't approve of strikes me as the definition of petty.

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