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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Does the article say the headline is wrong? Or does it say conspiracy theorists listen to facts because it relies on a handful of willing participants who changed their mind when seeing facts and reports? Because that’s not the crux of the crazy conspiracy theorists.

    Try again when the chatbot talked to the likes of Graham Hancock or the hardcore MAGA death cult. Facts don’t matter.

    Rand pointed out that many conspiracy theorists actually want to talk about their beliefs. “The problem is that other people don’t want to talk to them about it,”

    Just look at this guy who straight up pretends that no one tried to talk to them before.

    It does talk about gish gallop at the very end, and claims that the chatbot can keep presenting arguments - but doesn’t actually say that it has worked.


  • Oh Luke was definitely asking her about their birth mother, knowing that it was the same woman. The question here is that Leia didn’t know what he was talking about. Since she gives him an answer about someone who died when Leia was young, maybe she’s just thinking that Bail remarried later.

    Before the prequel trilogy came out, it could have been their birth mother she was talking about, and she just didn’t know that Luke was her brother; but after ep 3 came out, and we see Padme die, we have to assume Leia was adopted by the Organas, but Bail’s wife died when Leia was young and he later remarried, and Leia is thinking about that woman after Padme and before Bail’s new wife, thinking that she is her real mom.

    And yeah, it’s completely possible that Lucas originally intended for Padme to be the one Leia was talking about, but the point is, the movies don’t actually specify if she meant Padme or the middle wife, so it can still be explained.


  • That detail wasn’t in any of the movies so the line in ep 6 still makes sense the way you thought. I’m pretty sure anyone would assume that’s what she meant, since we never hear that she knew she was adopted. Whoever made Bail’s wife die in the explosion of Alderaan is the one who messed up, or Lucas ignored that addition when making episode I.












  • The link quotes him calling the Kiev regime a putsch, but that was back in 2014, and that was in fact a revolution. It’s not about Zelensky, but he does give all the current talking points (neonazis in Kiev, NATO provocations, Russia can’t have NATO at their doorstep…). BTW no one did anything about Russia stealing Crimea, either, everyone was still trying to justify not doing anything.

    That was 10 years ago and he has been (very) slowly toning it down: when making the left alliance a few weeks ago, he finally relented on allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine because the rest of the left made him, there’s still hope he’ll give up the anti-NATO talk… eventually. If he makes it to the government, when someone asks him about Russia bombing children’s hospitals, at some point he’ll have nowhere to run because he doesn’t actually support that. He shouts and curses quite violently at journalists who help out the far right, but on serious subjects in serious interviews, he actually has to be reasonable (and he is). On the last presidential elections, when he showed up to the round 1 left parties debates, he was all proper and serious and making his points properly and sensibly - and then he lost on round 1 and the next day in the street, he screamed his head off at the first journalist who put a microphone in his face.

    Oh, and over this side of the world, no one claims Russia is socialist. But leftists do get mad at the EU and NATO for crushing the farmer class and playing the capitalist hand, that’s what that is about.


  • Yup. I don’t even get what “populism” is when mentioned in media. Isn’t that-- democracy?

    Populism is demagogy, it’s repeating people’s complaints back to them, to amplify them and place yourself as an apparent leader, but without actually bringing any solution - and when it does, it’s immediately far right “beat everyone out”. Democracy is actually creating policy and voting on it, which by definition implies people disagreeing in that vote. Populism is rounding up everyone with the same mind, excluding everyone else (not voting on anything) and trying to crush opposition with numbers and no policy. It’s the antithesis to democracy.

    Edit - it might depend on the region of the world, I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of left wingers be called populists. Originally it just means the opposition between the people and the elite, so that would match what you say, and apparently some left parties are trying to return to that definition for some reason, but it seems the Pope is taking the other version that has become much more common.





  • The center left hasn’t been listening much for a few decades, which is why the far right has been steadily rising from a 20% ceiling to this 35% ceiling just now. But the alliance that won today is not center left - it has some legit left. You can tell because the center and the media have been working overtime to prop up the most divisive figure as Literaly Worse Than Hitler that needs to be stopped at all cost, even by electing literal Nazis.

    But this new left is also an alliance, and the current fear is that some of them will jump ship to side with the center right when we all realize that we really can’t form a government, because no one has an absolute majority. Even with those potential defections, the center will likely still not get a majority back. Worst case scenario is the left breaks, no one can govern, and Macron uses an obscure law to take over 100%, best case scenario the left holds and Macron can’t even do that and we have a chance of getting at least SOME improvement.


  • President is elected, assembly is elected, president picks a prime minister among the majority party in the assembly (hopefully the same as his own, since the assembly gets to confirm the pick), prime minister picks a government (picks the ministers in their own party) with the president’s blessings. In case the majority party is opposite the president, the president doesn’t get much of a choice, as we know the majority party will only accept ministers on their side.

    When the assembly is reelected, the prime minister typically offers their resignation regardless of the results (we are here), and the president can accept it or refuse it (we expect Macron to refuse, or at least delay it until the end of the Olympics, which makes the most sense, but Attal will almost certainly be gone after the Olympics). Then a new government is formed. A prime minister usually gets a couple governments under their belt until the president gets a new prime minister. Attal got shafted by the early dissolution since he was only here for a few months.