Politics

Politics FAQ & Useful Links This post is intended to be a reference for three kinds of information: 1) How to go about posting on the politics board (rules and guidelines) (coming soon). 2) Helpful links to reference sites that are useful for discussion here. 3) Links to previous discussions on hot topics so you can refer back to how we talking about an issue before. To that end I could use everyone's help, especially with the second and third points, which you can start adding to right now by replying to this thread. This thread will be open but moderated -- I'll be able to see your replies but I'll only tap certain ones for visibility. Others will be …

In their most recent act of compassion, liberal lefties have decided to add Republicans and neoconservative values to the endangered species list.

Winter is approaching, and I fear that Ukrainians once again will probably suffer greately from the cold: for four last years, Putin has been bombing Ukraine’s power plants. The most terrible aspect is that he does this rationally, with the goal of preserving his own power. Since the first democratic revolution (the Maidan) took place in Ukraine in 2004, the Ukrainian model of society became an ideological threat to "Putinism." If Ukrainians lived happier than Russians, the Russian people - seeing this - would also be inspired to stage a democratic revolution against Putin. Consequently, Putin artificially makes the Ukrainians unhappy; the pro-war supporters of Putin hav…

Currently, Switzerland's political system is most close to what I call direct democracy (although, in reality, it still isn't a true direct democracy - I can explain this point later). A referendum is held in the country every three months. Below, I will share what I know about Switzerland. I have 12 points, but for now, I will present five: 1) According to WHO data, Switzerland has a suicide rate of 9.8 per 100,000 people (2019). For comparison, WHO figures show rates of 14.5 for the USA, 21.6 for Russia, and 21.2 for South Korea. It is also worth noting that euthanasia is legal in Switzerland, which implies that suicide is less stigmatized there than in other countrie…

It's crunch time for the EU Cyber Resiliance Act. But will it make any difference, especially to AI ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Resilience_Act

“Russian bot traffic has dropped dramatically in the past few days after Ukraine knocked out Yandex’s biggest data centers, with a third attack happening last night. Cloudflare reports that bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks.” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russian-disinformation-bot-traffic-nearly-eliminated-overnight-after-ukraine-drone-strikes-cripple-multiple-of-russias-google-data-centers-ukraine-intensifies-bombing-of-yandex-data-centers-in-response-to-moscows-strikes-on-kyiv-data-centers Russia seems to be behind a lot of the pot-stirring and tro…

Donald Trump was 'slighted' again, and did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Even after having 'stopped' 8 wars 😄 😆 🤣 . And I'm sure we'll hear plenty about it over the next few days. The Peace Prize went to Navanethem Pillay, a South African Jurist, and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. D Trump will no doubt, start insisting that he deserved it more, and pressuring her to give it to him. Ironic actually, as Navi's lifelong efforts to promote peace, international law, and ensure that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted, is arguably the exact opposite of what D Trump has done.

At a political rally in Nebraska last night, president Trump made the astonishing suggestion that he would “Let Iran take out Los Angeles or San Diego… It would be a small price to pay” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eltBhn7WV4 The context was that Trump was trying to defuse concerns that many Republican voters currently have about the impact of the Iran war in raising the price of their fuel and groceries. The president was trying to assure his audience that the economic hurt was a small price to pay for ensuring that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon”. Trump then went off on a tangent about another “small price” he would apparently be prepared to pay - that of al…

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri falsely accused Jack Smith of perjury and called him a “dirtbag” at an open Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday after suggesting that texts leaked to Republicans by the Justice department “proved” that Smith was attending an Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball game in Georgia on 3 February 2024. https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/eric-schmitt-jack-smith-perjury-caitlin-clark-hearing-b3058747.html This photo however shows Special Prosecutor Jack Smith sitting in the crowd at College Park MD while attending a female collegiate Basketball match between University of Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes on Saturday 3 Februar…

Following what has been widely reported as the most impressive speech made by a British Prime Minister this century, Andy Burnham has seen a positive and immediate response to reopening the Brexit debate by both France and Spain.

Why the Rest of the World Thinks Americans Are Brainwashed From the YouTube webpage: What if the most effective propaganda isn't on a poster or a state-run news channel, but in the songs you sang as a kid, the history class you sat through, and the pledge you recited before you could even spell it? How much of what Americans believe about their own country is actually true, and how much of it was carefully engineered to keep you from asking that question? As someone who's lived in over a dozen countries and spent a decade studying cults, dogma, and thought control, I started noticing patterns in American culture that people overseas find absolutely bizarre, but most Ame…

This is such a skillful evisceration of the largest company in US healthcare that I feel it's worth bending the forum rules and asking people to watch. However, to show a little deference to the discussion format here, here is a bit of transcript... ...and YT has in its wisdom chosen to block my copy/pasting of some introductory passages from the transcript they provide. Can I get a variance here? (At least until I can copy it elsewhere)

Damien Walter equates Enclosure, the historic forced appropriation by the wealthy and powerful of traditional rights of access and usage of common lands to the current appropriation by the capitalist tech giants of the rights of access and usage of global knowledge through the proferation of LLMs and associated infrastructure. Her renames AI as 'Collective Intelligence' to emphasise that the product being marketed to us is our own collective knowledge base and that of our predecessors, processed and filtered as if it were industrialised food production. ChatGPT is People echoes Charlton Heston's anguished cry at the end of the 1973 dystopian epic Soylent Green. I found i…

As China’s leader Xi Jinping concludes his state visit to the USA this week, attention will now turn in security circles to the vexed question of whether China might launch an attack on Taiwan, and if so how soon ? For a number of years American military strategists have been concerned about something known as the “Davidson Window”. About four years ago Admiral Phil Davidson the former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command told Congress that China could be ready and willing to take control of Taiwan by 2027 https://www.globalguardian.com/global-digest/will-china-invade-taiwan This year is seen as a milestone of special significance to mainland China because it will m…

For the first time since the good old days, a far-right Nazi-affiliated party has won a state election. Both states are located in the East. The party is buoyed by anti-EU and foreigner sentiments (though, as per usual, in these areas the percentage of foreigners is very low). Also, they are pro-Russia, as it is often the case in European far-right parties. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/01/europe/far-right-germany-regional-election-win-intl-latam/index.html Surveys suggest that especially young people are voting for the extremes and about half of the voters indicated that they did not vote for them out of protest but out of ideological agreement. Considering that …

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship So this is now a story how AI errors could have disastrous consequences if there are no safeguards between AI generated analyses and subsequent action. This follows a host of other pushes to use AI-based methods in e.g. law enforcement and other areas which will likely already have real-life issues. The big question here is what kind of safeguards would be feasible in the first place and would folks be willing or able to implement them?

As far as I can see, the Western democracy is mostly an illusion; the Western countries are ruled by the financial aristocracy. This works as follows: if a problem arises in society, the financial elite, represented by parliamentarians, passes laws to solve it; but these laws simultaneously serve one more purpose—increasing the wealth and power of the elite. In particular, these laws are always aimed at suppressing the small businesses, because small businessmen are less dependent on the power and can overthrow it. Currently I have two examples, but I apologize for not fact-checking everything thoroughly; I hope somebody here can help me with this: 1) I have seen an inter…

Don't know how this will play in other countries, but the arc is the last bit of this minute and a half video https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/ce8pp9r03z7o

Truth or still fiction ? Scary or what ?

Recently mired in sleaze, Farage and some of his most senior lieutenants seem to have been caught hook, line, and sinker by a team of investigative journalists in a sophisticated undercover sting operation that could well, if verified in a court of law, result in substantial servings of porridge. Aired on Channel 4 last night. Popcorn time!

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Catherine Fitts was using the phrase "two sides of the same party" several times: https://youtu.be/BvLz1bI2sXU As far as I understand, it's perfectly obvious that just like any representatives of big business inevitably monopolize and cartelize finally (they understand that it's more profitable for them to cooperate than to compete), the same process finally occurs with all parties. The only way to solve this problem is direct democracy, at least like in Switzerland - several referendums each year. I really hope that Trump would initiate an all-US referendum asking people to vote on all hot US issues - prohibition of abortions, "gend…

https://spectator.com/article/britain-is-facing-huge-demographic-change/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1twt9zv/matt_goodwin_new_uk_school_data_out_today_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1l5l9g1/white_british_children_are_now_minority_in_one_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1u5s505/white_people_blocked_from_jobseeker_schemes/ Do the Britons have any possibility to vote for politicians who at least talk about this?

Good morning mister president of the U.S. What is your plan to reverse inflation in the event your tariffs and actions are not successful to make the United States great and wealthier again ? Will you compensate me for the devaluation of the currency and worsening inflation ? Add your own messages below.