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BahRamYou
22m ago
I can't help but feel like there's a certain similarity to that, and how most European elections work. With all your different political parties, and weird cutoffs/bonuses, and backroom deal-making to make a coalition...
Ethan
Quality assurance
4m ago
That's the price for entry in reading Dostoyevsky. It requires a suspension of disbelief when characters go on impossibly long monologues while other characters listen with impossible patience.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
34m ago
Confusingly.
Basically, Eurovision has two separate votes: televote (ie. conducted among viewers) and jury vote. Both are organized country by country, with both the televotes and the juries awarding a maximum of twelve points to the top-voted country, 10 points to the second most voted, and then 8, 7, 6, 5 etc. to the next ones.
The implicit purpose of the jury vote can often specifically negate the televote when there's a feeling a "non-preferred" song (typically one that seems too much like a comedy entry and not like a traditional Eurovision winner ballad) might win (like last year...), so it's possible that Israel might, for instance, win the televote and not the jury vote. Then again it might also do quite well in the jury vote, Israel has not been a particularly bad performer there either in the previous contests, from what I've understood.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
38m ago
162 million people The 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, organized by the European Broadcasting Union, reached 162 million people over the 3 live shows across 38 public service media markets.
ace
1hr ago
One could argue. She dated her boss (Willie Brown) who subsequently appointed her to some cushy gigs.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kamala-harris-affair-willie-brown/
Snopes says the truth is "mixed", which means it's pants-on-fire level embarrassing.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
I like the vibe of vice city the most. I will try to find repacks of it that dont have malware and play it with a bunch of mods. I feel like a boomer here but I feel that video games peaked in the 2000s.
Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.
BahRamYou
47m ago
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
How does the voting work? Are their brackets and eliminations, or is it just one giant vote and winner-takes-all? Being "polarizing" can work when you're just one choice out of many, and the haters weren't going to vote for you anyway, and they're split between many other options, but it attracts a small number of hardcore fans.
Biden, the dementia case isn't nearly as consequential as people running his administration.
Why are we even talking or pretending a person who needs a chest sheet for a press conference matters??
The people running things aren't sane (the title IX reform) or competent.
Felagund
3hr ago
Sorry, I kind of have to agree with ArjinFerman—at least, it would be disastrous for the forum if everyone started adopting your tone and habits of response. You're consistently above-average in antagonism and dismissiveness. And this definitely is one of the factors in you drawing more downvotes—it's often the reason if ever I downvote you. That of course doesn't address the overall problem of voting based on whether people like it driving dissenting views away, but it could make a meaningful difference in your particular case.
So I guess, two.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.
I mean, technically I'm not sure he's done multiple against a single opponent, but since convicted criminals can't run for President in Russia, and Putin has tight control of the courts, he only needs the one. And this is, in fact, his primary method of preventing election losses; IIRC he's done it to several candidates that looked like they were gaining steam.
Of course, the fact that Putin does, in fact, abuse disqualification is no defence of the tactic.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Judging by precedent, studiously ignoring them seems to be a popular option.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
Yeah, some mods later, vice city does not feel as old as it should. I really dig the Miami vice vibe it has more than anything else. Makes me want to visit the place lol.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
The 2d ones?
practical_romantic
1hr ago
I played vice city and sa a little as a kid so want to play them in that order. Just cannot find malware free repacks of them that work lol.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
I was trying to get vice city to work since I liked its vibe the most and played it as a toddler with my cousins lol, might have to load up 4 now since I could not find it on fitgirlrepacks.
Dean
1hr ago
The unmeasurable concept of popularity is creating a self-referential loop here, which is what avoids the original question. Putin is as popular as he is because he runs personality cult -> Putin runs a personality cult because he was popular -> the propaganda of the personality cult is what creates / proves his popularity. It's not an answer to the earlier question of how popular Putin actually is independent of the suppression state in which anti-popularity factors are squashed.
(One insight would be the result of the Wagner Mutiny. No one joined in on the mutiny against Putin... but there was no mass popular uprising in his favor either. There was no equivalent to, say, Erdogan flooding the streets with his supporters during the failed Turkish coup.)
On the other hand, we could compare Putin's popularity with Russians outside the scope (and reach) of his personality cult. This is primarily Russians abroad, but they do exist as a counter-example of Russians, and Putin is not, shall we say, particularly popular amongst those who are not imbibing on the Russian state-influenced media apparatus. The tendency to murder high-profile dissidents does tend to keep people from wanting to be high-profile, but that's a suppression of dissent, not a popularity, unless the undefined standard of popularity is claiming that people keeping their heads down are actually a sign of popular support.
And it's not like there was much of a substantial alternative to him in particular. His biggest opponent was Primakov, another ex-KGB goon, not exactly someone to expect kindness to dissidents from.
Putin and his backers actively worked/conspired to undercut all substantial alternatives to them in general and him in particular. It's been one of his more consistent strategies over the decades, both domestically and externally.
This is not surprising on the Russian political front- the Security Services were the most capable and coherent survivors of the Cold War and had the best means of coordinating formally and informally for mutual benefit and a common understanding of a better vision that a critical mass could get behind- but this is and was a political consequence of policy decisions, not an inevitability or even a testament to popularity.
It turns out that a one-party state with no meaningful civil society does not have coherent political party groups to fall back on if the uni-party collapses.
There should be a requirement that people who act as if the ruling class is only a useful category when it is legible explain what they think people ought to do in political regimes where the ruling class is incentivized to be as illegible as possible.
Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question. And we happen to live in one such illegible regime.
These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.
In a sense it is in effect completely irrelevant what the nature of the ruling class is, what matters is who is their friend, and who is their enemy. And that can be easily divined without needing to elucidate the specifics of who they are down to a list of names.
jkf
3hr ago
Biden and Pence were not President -- every other President has been allowed to go through his papers at his leisure and select what to return and when. Obama probably still has stuff. It seems like a fairly civilized policy.
Ditto6687
2hr ago
What makes it a gulag instead of a prison? How are American jails different?
If they locked up Trump, would you refer to American prisons as "gulag"?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
14hr ago
You're not saying anything that hasn't been said for years - since before we left reddit.
The median poster here is not a MAGA Trump supporter, but a disaffected former liberal. Actual MAGAs, or even old-school Republicans/conservatives, are almost certainly a minority, albeit a vocal one. We have some (former) alt-righties and DRs and a few actual fascists, and a few lefties. But most are still somewhere in the center and only appear "right wing" simply because, as others have pointed out, we don't ban people for supporting Trump or preaching white supremacy or complaining about Jews or saying trans women are men, and thus we tend to attract people who really want to talk about those things.
Honestly, what would you like? More left-leaning opinions? Bring in some more (higher quality, non-trollish) left-leaning posters. Maybe you are right and we're doomed to eventually become a Nazi bar. But you aren't helping when most of your contributions read like shitposts too.
By the way, there is quite a dedicated core of left-wing posters who consistently downvote and report every right-wing post, and vice versa. Despite people claiming they don't want an echo chamber, empirically quite a few people do want an echo chamber. So we're always fighting against that too.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
11hr ago
the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds
This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.
Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.
No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.
Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.
All rhetoric serves an interest.
In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.
Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.
The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.
I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.
I'm sure some of that is just "what decade did you grow up in" but yeah, 2000s had some great advantages for the artistic potential of video games:
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