It's a far right conspiracy theory, that OP's trying to tie to legit criticism of the CIA's atrocities despite having nothing to do with each other-- all in order to try to hide the fact that it's literally part of the Great Replacement conspiracy.

A lot of those 17 are dictatorships, where the elites are unsurprisingly big fans of Russia / Wagner helping them prop up their regimes. Actual normal people in those countries tend to be significantly more anti-Russia.

Thankfully, enough parties have pledged not to coalition with the far right that it looks like they'll be boxed out of power. Most likely outcome seems to be Sanchez's center-left party allying with further-left parties and regional / secessionist parties to form a minority government.

Things could still fuck up during coalition negotiations, but for now I'm cautiously optimistic. Probably the best possible outcome, given the circumstances.

(Also the far right party lost half its seats in Parliament, lmaoooooooo)

Friendly reminder Russia is committing atrocities in the occupied territories. So any kind of negotiated "peace" that involves Ukraine giving up territory means them consigning all their citizens living there to torture, random executions, wanton sexual violence, having their children taken away, and worse!

That's what you're calling for when you advocate a "negotiated settlement".

So back in the day, r/IAmA used to actually get really cool people to come do interviews on a pretty regular basis: celebrities, authors, activists, politicians, prominent scientists. They even got President Obama to do an AMA, while he was sitting US president! (For a long time, it was the most upvoted thread in reddit history.)

And I don't just mean once or twice a year, these interviews were happening multiple times a month. Users could ask whatever they wanted, no matter how off the wall, blunt, or challenging, and the interviewees would usually answer almost all of the top questions.

It was all thanks to Victoria. She was the reddit employee in charge of reaching out to celebrities to do AMAs, and then helping them get set up and navigating reddit for them when the time came. It was one of the coolest features of reddit, and it was all thanks to her.

So naturally, of course, they fired Victoria on the flimsiest of excuses.

Why? We're still not 100% sure-- reddit never officially explained. But the leading theory is that reddit wanted to change the way IAmAs were run to limit users' ability to ask hard questions. Ever hear about the Woody Harrelson IAmA disaster ("Can we please focus on Rampart, people?")? Maybe reddit's plan was to limit the kinds of questions users could ask, to reduce the odds of PR disasters like that. Who knows.

Whatever their plan was, though, it failed. Killing the thing that made IAmAs so cool compared to normal interviews also completely killed users' interests in them. And without Victoria to reach out to celebrities and help them with the IAmA process any more, the rate at which celebs would show up on site to do AmAs tanked.

Nowadays, you're lucky to get one AmA with someone people have actually heard of a year, and even then they'll usually only answer a handful of cherry-picked questions. For all intents and purposes, the feature is dead.

Friendly reminder a significant portion of the Republican party has been in Putin's pocket since at least 2016!

As an elder Zoomer, can confirm. Seeing first-hand the horrific effects social media has had on so many of my IRL friends' mental health-- and how it's utterly decimated IRL communities-- makes me want to cut it out of my life as much as possible.

If your business can't afford to pay its workers a living wage without going bust-- then it deserves to go bust.

Jimmy Carter did-- Ted Kennedy challenged him for the 1980 presidential nomination. The result was them doing so much damage to each other that the ultimate winner of the primary (Carter) came out battered and bruised, giving Reagan the edge he needed to win the general. And we all know how well that worked out for the planet. (Spoiler alert: horrifically.)

Because most lemmy users used to be redditors, and redditors are morose and pessimistic as fuck.

Except that the Biden Administration kept working with the railroad unions for months after the strike to pressure the railroad companies to give them sick leave, resulting in the railroad companies caving and giving the unions everything they wanted this spring. Union leaders are on record saying they couldn't have gotten it done without the Administration's help.

But progress doesn't sell as well in the papers as doom and despair, so almost no one knows about it.

Also, people are vastly underestimating how slow boats are. A boat large enough to be useful for search and rescue can only move at like 30 mph, tops. The wreck of the Titanic is only a few hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland; reason it took so long to find the sub debris field is because the boat carrying a submersible capable of diving to those depths only just arrived on the scene this morning-- four days after the search began.

No way any boats stationed on the east coast of the US could have made it to the Medditeranean in time to be helpful in the search for the drowned migrants, and vice versa.