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.

If it wasn’t deniable by pundits like you, then it wouldn’t be a dog whistle.

To me this looks as much as a gaff as Elon Musk his Nazi salutes. This “gaff” is yet another obvious dog whistle by USA republicans.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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

The russian assets in the White House want to portray Zelensky and Ukraine as insufficiently thankful for USA aid and as disrespectful towards the usa, and to use those supposed slights as justification for cutting off aid. To reinforce this narrative with their audience, other fellow travellers are now repeating those lies.

This goes back to the white house meeting where Trump and Vance claimed that Zelensky was disrespectful because of how he was dressed (normal) and how he didn’t thank anyone according to them (he had, profusely, there’s video of it). It was a clown show and the meeting didn’t deliver the desired images + soundbites, so now the usa republicans are working overtime in providing the necessary soundbites for fox news etc.

Trump and Putin their relationship isn’t going to reverse. Trump is a gullible idiot and Putin is not, if they meet and negotiate face to face, then Putin is going to get what he wants. Especially because Trump has said before negotiations even started, that he wanted to give the occupied lands to Russia. Trump is such a “master negotiator” that he sells out his own side before the talks even start. This is why Putin wants to negotiate alone with the usa, without the eu countries or NATO present.

The Observer is one of the oldest news papers in the world. Generally quality journalism I think, though I’m not a regular reader. Since a few decades under the same ownership as the guardian, but apparently sold 2 months ago.

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

And articles changing after first publishing happens quite a lot. It beats putting out a separate article for every small development in an ongoing story. For example: entity A said x about B, and later there’s an update wherein B denies x happened. In quality journalism it used to be done in clear updates at the bottom and/or top of the article. But now with Trump, A is claiming x and then later A realizes how dumb that was, so A claims they never said x and that they’ve always been saying y. Good luck reporting on that in a clear and concise manner.

If you’re curious what their official children are up to: https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-20/nicaraguas-political-dynasty-heirs-in-a-golden-cage.html

Tldr: the eldest daughter accused her father of sexual abuse and had to run to Costa Rica. The lives of the other 8 adult children + the lives of their families are mostly controlled by the president’s wife.

Also the same category as Reagan’s election and the embassy hostages + Iran contra affair. It’s part of the standard republican playbook now.