Cynicism time:
Rutte knew this was on the table and let the government collapse on purpose (it was very strange at the time why he would make an ultimatum out of an issue all coalition partners agreed on could be solved). Now we will likely have a hard-right prime minister because of the career wishes of Rutte. Super gaaf.
Consumption guarantees citizenship o7
It was a rhetorical question, but yes, April 12: dragged out of embassy, November 19: Sweden drops charges. And soon thereafter America suddenly says they would like to extradite him to the US even though they denied this for years while Assange was in the embassy.
Luckily political dissidents don’t need to fear for their life/freedom in the west, ow wait.
Btw what is up with those rape charges, or did Sweden conveniently drop them the moment Assange was pulled from that embassy?
The Taylor airplane meme has basically been played out and is no longer funny.
But for me the reason I found those memes funny is the same why I find it more interesting to take the piss out of Bill Gates rather than Musk. Everyone already knows Musk is a complete nut job. But there seem to be an alarming amount of people that think Gates is genuinely a good person because of his stupid charity.
From what I see Taylor Swift is just a business woman doing business, and she is very good at that. So most decisions she makes are because she assesses that they are good for her brand, and this includes political decisions/ standpoints. The airplane angle is one of the few things she can not control in this regard, and that is why I find/found it funny to stress that point.
There’s nothing quite like a mouth full of dust.
Chinees and Russian propaganda needs to resort to direct censoring more often because they are not culturally powerful enough to control the narrative so there are subtle differences.
But my point wasn’t about Russian or Chinese propaganda, it was about the fact that our image of Navalny is a construct of a western propaganda effort to create division in Russia.
Western propaganda (mostly) doesn’t work via straight up lying or omitting the truth, it works by choosing what is amplified. And for the past 10 years the story around Navalny was that he was the liberal opposition leader, and once in power Russia would be a good™️country. I think given what we know of his actual activism and statements it would have been a lateral move at best.
That doesn’t mean political murder is a good thing, it just means (to my best estimation) it’s a power struggle between to highly questionable politicians and one of them won.
The truth is the truth, a political dissident died under suspicious circumstances and said dissent had some (pretty) unsavory political views. Doesn’t mean Putin is a good guy.
What I find inappropriate is that western media willingly completely ignore Navalnys actual politics in a ploy to get one over on Putin. How about just reporting the facts for once instead of being a blind propaganda machine.
The Navalny story is puzzling from beginning to end, like mentioned elsewhere his political views were pretty wacky and basically ethnonationalist. But in the west we can not deal with anything more complicated than Good Guy - Bad Guy stories so Navalny had to be the good guy.
But what is strange to me is why Putin would want him dead, and more importantly if Putin wanted him dead why it took him so long. The Russian state has shown to be very effective at killing dissidents in the UK what made it so difficult to kill someone in a Russian prison?
The only thing I can think of is that Putin was ambivalent if Navalny lives or dies, and that the attempts were made by (minor) officials within the FSB acting on their own.
Yep, very demotivating when you put all the effort into screenshotting and reposting someone else’s meme and then it gets removed.