Yeah it’s the same here, they and the younger gens have apparently gotten very polarized; the ones who are “good eggs” are really decent folks, and the shitty ones are really shitty.

So while the extremist reich wing party PS (Perussuomalaiset or “Finns Party”, because naturally only a nationalist wank is a real Finn) was their most popular party, as a proportion of their cohorts more young people voted for the Left Alliance than older ones did. Here’s a handy table from our 2023 parliamentary elections (source):

• KOK: National Coalition Party, fiscally conservative
• PS: Finns Party, extremist right wing
• SDP: Social Democrat, liberal / marginally left
• KESK: Centre Party, what it says on the tin
• VAS: Left Alliance, democratic socialists
• VIHR: Green League, liberal & green
• SFP: Swedish People’s Party, right wing
• KD: Christian Democrats, nearly as bad as PS
• LIIK: Movement Now, nominally center right but about as right wing as KOK

Actually based on that study the claim that gen Z is more conservative than older gens doesn’t seem to hold up. Seems like they’re about as conservative, but also more likely to vote Left

Hmm, I wonder if Gen Z’s politics are different over there compared to here, because at least in Finland the 2. most popular parties they voted for were a right wing extremist party and a “fiscally conservative” party that is essentially indistinguishable from the extremist one (the joke is that the way to tell them apart is that the “fiscal conservatives” wear more expensive suits.) Sure, many do also vote for eg. the Left Alliance who are democratic socialists, but on the whole the generation is more conservative than the older ones

I’m not entirely convinced putting the US in charge of it would make things any better. It’s not like eg. Facebook or Twitter aren’t full of reich wing bullshit on purpose

Honestly I think we’re thoroughly fucked at this point

Same shit happened here in Finland too, our extremist right wing party is very active on TikTok and the under 25’s voted for them in droves. That generation is more conservative than Millennials or even younger Gen X, which is a bit fucked up. Especially young men and boys have gone off the deep end

Ah, I managed to completely miss the last part of the comment because I’m an eejit who can’t read good

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.

By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though

That’s pretty much how I expect things to go as well. Russians have a long history of imprisoning and outright murdering any POWs returning to Russia – they know the stories the POWs have would run counter to the bullshit they’re fed, so it’s easier to just get rid of the POWs if they don’t toe the line.

And it’s not like this is the first prisoner exchange that’s happened during this war. If released POWs were actually capable of changing the narrative, they’d probably already have done so.

People released from Russian captivity always look like concentration camp victims.

It’s disgusting how so many western “leaders” seem to be completely OK with the idea of letting Russia win. That country needs to be dealt with somehow, they’re quite literally fucking evil.

Gotta say that I’m unfamiliar with any Christmas carols that could use the lyrics “some or all of up to five 2,000-person brigades plus at least one 400-person independent battalion—plans to stay”

Ah, that’s because I’ve blocked it

Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians

This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.

The way I’ve understood the “defund the police” movement’s point is that they’re saying police funding is excessive because a lot of the things cops do should be handled before the cops have to get involved, eg. with higher funding for mental health and social services, housing for homeless people etc. So the point is that you wouldn’t need as many cops in the first place if things were handled more humanely “downstream” so to speak, instead of just letting problems fester until things go sideways

“Non-profit” doesn’t mean nobody gets paid

we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.

Well there’s your problem.

The values of any corporation are “make the stockholders and executives richer”. Whatever utter horseshit they spew in their “mission statements” and “values” documents are just that, utter horseshit.

“One country, two systems that are totally not the same system we swear”

“One country, two systems” isn’t quite as “two systems” as was promised, much to the surprise of pretty much nobody. I wonder what the situation is in Macau?

So jailing and murdering political dissidents, agressive imperialism, extensive propaganda that paints a completely distorted view of what the state is doing, having a small and rich ruling class, russification of minorities etc. are completely different from what was going on during the USSR? Religion is the only new part here, and even that is surface-level only as it always is.

Oh yeah true, I forgot about that! Although frankly it seems like it’s just a part of Russia’s USSR cosplay, just one that’s been going on for longer, where the Leningrad Military District was just re-established this year

I’m from an Eastern European country that was USSR aligned and part of the Warsaw Pact.

Then you really haven’t been paying attention if you think the modern Russia isn’t up to essentially the same bullshit that they were during USSR times, just packaged up in different rhetoric.

The reason why people even brought up USSR is because, newsflash, the dude’s nickname is USSRboy. Can you deduce why somebody would sarcastically say that they got what they bargained for when they got arrested? I’ll give you 3 guesses.