For the other nations in nato it would be for the best (imo obviously). Republican usa is not a reliable ally and the other nato nations have not all come to terms with that new reality yet. If the usa quits nato, then it instantly removes all doubt and the remaining nations of NATO can immediately start work on improving the alliance, instead of being stuck in limbo for a few more years while they’re hoping that the usa will somehow magically unfuck itself.

My bad for assuming wrong.

And yeah, sarcasm with just text doesn’t work very well, got to add something for making obvious that it is sarcasm, or plenty of people (me included as you saw) will assume otherwise.

Fault? I didn’t mean to imply that China is responsible for starting the latest bout of civil war in Myanmar, because they weren’t. There’s really no reason to believe that whenever something bad happens, some outside big boogeyman is entirely to blame. If you want to know what caused the current civil war to start, try looking it up, but please don’t make assumptions.

If you can’t look it up because of time constraints or other reasons, then accept that you don’t know. It’s impossible to know everything, so there’s nothing wrong with not knowing some things. But imo not knowing something and knowing that you don’t know, is a lot better than making assumptions and inventing alternate facts.

China is a direct neighbour of Myanmar, with a history of political meddling in Myanmar and also of setting up illegal exploitative businesses by entrepreneurs. But even without the meddling, they are direct neighbours, which should be enough reason for Myanmar journalists to want to know what is going on in China.

Fascists don’t respect democracy or even other people’s rights, so it’s logical that democracies should not trust them in positions of power. It’s basically the paradox of tolerance: “if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.”

And if you want to see what happens when these kinda of people are left unchecked in the cause of retaining the “moral high ground”, just look at the USA. The USA democrats have been giving in for 40 years against increasingly perverse transgressions by republican actors, and now it’s a dumpster fire on the cusp of becoming a full blown dictatorship.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-trumps-war-on-elite-universities-which-schools-have-lost-funding-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it-200621655.html?guccounter=1

This article lists 7 schools that are known to have had funding taken away as punishment. Harvard is just the only one that dared to publicly speak out against the bullying and now the bully is trying to make an example of them.

The republican war on higher education is older than Bannon’s graduation from high school. Trump already targeted them during his first term. Ron Desantis has been doing the same in Florida. Texas republicans have been going at it for years as well. And that’s the ones that I know about.

It’s retaliation for this: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/harvard-trump-funding-antisemitism-columbia-b2733306.html So Harvard isn’t the only target, but they’re the ones that dared to publicly stand up against the bully and now the bully wants to make an example out of them. It’s basically a repeat of Ron Desantis war on higher education, but now on a national scale.

Here’s an overview of how other universities are faring: https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-trumps-war-on-elite-universities-which-schools-have-lost-funding-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it-200621655.html?guccounter=1

Welp, I’ve taught my parents to use the fakespot site before doing a purchase on Amazon. Fakespot was never a perfect tool, but it was easy to use and better than not checking review quality at all.

The carbon comes from another source and sticks to the metal, you’ve probably already seen examples irl. If you burn something in a steel pan on the stove, then there will be black residue (char) left sticking on the pan. A burnt electrical outlet is another case, there the carbon comes from the plastic.

Lead in water makes the water taste sweet. My guess is that they charred lead dust to make it look grey/black and then used it as artificial sweetener.

My impression of the conflict: The partition of British India into independent India and independent Pakistan was very violent and traumatizing for lots of people, and also left some unsolved border disputes. The independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan was likewise very violent and saw India helping the Bangladeshi people gain independence. Both events are long enough in the past that people could have gotten over the hate by now, except that it gets refreshed with new violence every few years. In the last few decades there’s been several terror attacks in India that were sponsored by the Pakistani state. But now India too has a religious fundamentalist government, so maybe they’ll be trying to return the favor. Authoritarians love creating external enemies, it helps them stay in control of their own population.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)[b] is an initiative of the second Trump administration tasked with cutting federal spending which it characterizes as “waste, fraud, and abuse”.[8] It emerged from discussions between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and was established by executive order on January 20, 2025. DOGE’s actions have included accessing government data systems; organizing mass layoffs of federal workers; and cutting climate change initiatives, scientific research, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency

Bart De Wever was never the chairman of Vlaams Blok. He’s never been a member of Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang, which makes it kinda hard for him to have ever been their party leader.

Denmark can pay the USA in ozempic pills.

I live in a country where every citizen automatically receives a government id at the age of 12. We have to bring that id when we go to vote, but even if I were to lose the card at the worst possible time, there are contingency measures to allow me to still cast my vote. The idea is to get as many people as possible to vote, the id card greatly facilitates this process, but it’s not used as a tool to keep people from voting.

In the usa (and the uk, and maybe other countries as well), citizens are not automatically granted an id card. Instead they have to acquire + maintain some accepted means of identifying themselves if they want to vote. And there some Americans saw a great opportunity: what if they made it so that certain minority groups would have a statistically harder time acquiring and maintaining identification that was deemed acceptable? And what if the state government could arbitrarily purge voter lists based on data mined information? The voter id requirements are used not only for facilitating the voting process, but also for suppressing undesired votes.

If you want some examples of usa voter suppression: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States

It still needs repeating to counter propaganda from Russia and Russia’s western supporters. If you leave propaganda unchecked, worse things tend to happen.

Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.

If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)

When Trump dies, someone else will take over his role, and that other person is bound to be a lot smarter than Trump (it’s a very low bar). At this point, it seems to me like the only thing that might stop the usa’s descent into fascism, is Trump completely destroying the economy in record pace because of his unfathomable stupidity. If the usa opposition can’t defeat fascism with Trump in charge of the fascists, then they have no chance with someone like Vance in charge.

The allies had the same dilemma with Hitler in WW2. They had a solid plan to assassinate Hitler and they really wanted to, but Hitler’s meddling incompetence was helping them win the war.

Additionally, British officials believed that Hitler’s incompetence and flawed military tactics were, in fact, advantageous to the Allied cause. They argued that by leaving Hitler in power, the Allied forces could continue to leverage his bungling strategy against the Germans. They believed that replacing Hitler with a competent successor could pose a greater challenge, as they might be more adept at waging war against the Allies. Source: https://ahistoryfactaday.org/the-controversial-decision-to-not-assassinate-hitler-in-1944-weighing-political-pragmatism-and-conventional-tactics/

Not that hard, just got to look up how Crassus did it.