Isn’t as one-sided as you regarding a war in another country

Dems pandered to an Israeli government that was actively campaigning for their opposition. This wasn’t just “your anti-genocide views are simply too extreme for the average American voter”. It was “Netanyahu is funneling Russian money and propaganda into the Republican campaign apparatus while you keep telling him he’s a good boy on national TV.”

Talk about leopards eating your face.

The lesson is that people don’t have the time or attention to fact check, and frankly I think we should have known that.

Why bother to fact check any one thing when it means hunting for the single edible chocolate in a pile of rabbit shit?

You can’t even fucking Google an answer anymore, as the AI generated response is trained on all the bad data that’s bloated the system.

Objective morality in terms of universal human rights and behavioral science can be integrated into a better regulated social media, for example. It just has to be more appealing somehow and easier to access. It also has to be sexy and come with some status, and other benefits.

I would settle for it being a view that won’t get you expelled from a college campus, primaried out of an elected office, or purged from a high profile business position.

All this reporting reminds me of the “But actually this Man on The Street Hated Brexit even though he voted for it” slew of stories.

It’s all just nutpicking. You’ll find far more Muslim Trump voters who don’t know who any of these people are. And you’ll find plenty who are clapping like seals, because they’re just as Murdoch Pilled and MAGA headed as their white peers.

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The early COVID pandemic response was largely voluntary, as people bunkered down out of terror. I knew a few people who caught the disease early on, during an international flight, and they were stuck overseas for months simply because the US didn’t want to let them back in.

And the death toll for COVID wasn’t anywhere near the potential of an avian flu. We’re talking high double digits - 50% of the historical sampling holds. People only get to go to the super spreader rally once before they either get smart or stop mattering. And Trump’s a fucking hypochondriac, ffs. The anti-ax shit was far more a consequence of corporate media trying to bully people back to work than anything Trump personally believed. That’s half the joke of the #NeverTrump movement. Most of the shit they hated about Trump was the silver-lining break from neoconservative dogma.

Vladivostok is barely the closest populated Russian area.

Its a major base of operations for the Russian Pacific fleet.

Russia has the technologies and infrastructure for efficient resource extraction under extreme conditions

Now, sure. And France has the technology and infrastructure to extract resources from the Mississippi delta region now. But the Alaska purchase was in 1867. Russians were still trying to secure territory on their own continent during this time. Repeated wars with Japan, the Ottomans, and with domestic insurgencies plagued the country through the 19th century.

And Alaska was already being filibustered by western colonialists as far back as the early 1800s, necessitating a Treaty (the Russo-American Treaty of 1824) to settle an ongoing dispute over territory (The Oregon Boundary Dispute) that Russians had little capacity or real interest in prosecuting. Much like with the Louisiana Purchase, this was a token transfer intended to get some kind of compensation to relinquish a claim the Russians were poised to lose one way or another.

For some reason it was exploding in popularity from the the 1900’s (as in the oughts, not the century) to 1930 in Finland.

It’s because everyone wanted to associate their kids with the English Queen Mary. Idk why. My Italian grandparents named all their kids after English royalty too.

This does raise the question “Does your age count when you’re in Valinor?”

Because it’s literally the undying lands. Are we really going to pull rank between two functionally ageless beings? Seems petty.

Christian Earth: 6000 years old

Middle Earth: 30,000 years old

Middle Earth wins again

On the plus side, COVID drastically cut our carbon emissions for a year or two.

Imagine what bird flu would accomplish.

But, it was a media event. It wasn’t “rigged”

You could gamble on it, which means there was money to be made courting suckers.

I’m sure the lion’s share of “rigged” proclamations were coming from folks who got baited into bad bets.

Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.

BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you’re waiting for BlueSky to take off, you’re just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.

I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t think this is the future.

Earth’s surface is 2/3rds water and that’s not changing.

But intense heat means more storms with stronger winds and heavier rain. Imagine a Cat 5 hitting the coast every year.

For the price of the bundle? Sure.

There’s about 60km between modern day Russia and Alaska

There’s over 5000km between Vladivostok and Anchorage. Virtually nobody lives in the interior.

Alaska was seen as nothing but barren piece of cold land

It still is. The mineral wealth is extremely difficult to access due to the weather.

But Russia also has enormous fossil fuel reserves. They just sold off a colony that was more expensive to guard than it was lucrative to exploit.

This but unironically. I’ve got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.

The idea that medieval peasants somehow had more free time than the average modern american still is absolute bullshit

Paleontologists will tell you otherwise. One reason you had all those giant cathedrals going up in the Medieval Era stemmed from the enormous excess labor just wasting around in between harvest seasons.

Agricultural surplus creates free time. It’s the whole reason why people opt for farming over hunter gathering.

There’s a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.

The “Serfs had it better” trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.

I don’t agree. But I can’t really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.

So you’re not really a serf if you’ve got plumbing? The labor relationship with your employers isn’t the issue?