If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that what you do is not important as much as the narrative that you are able to spin.

As long as TV news networks, podcasters, news outlets, and Musk’s Twitter exist, people who are too ignorant to understand they are being lied to, or too lazy to parse credible information, will stay in the dark and vote red in the next election as well.
Democracy doesn’t work when the electorate is too illiterate to cast their vote justly. They’ll just vote for the next clown who promises them the moon.

I don’t have a solution.

You know the times are dire when you find yourself rooting for Moscow Mitch.

Electing Trump the first time was the equivalent of Brexit.

Electing him twice is the equivalent of setting your own home on fire, walking back inside while the house is still burning and taking a nap, hoping that the flames will only destroy your neighbour’s house.

Watergate was such a big scandal that Nixon gave up before the impeachment procedure had even began, and it left such a big mark that we still talk about it so many decades later.

Trump was involved in many, many more scandals of far greater magnitude, and yet he won the majority of votes.

What the fuck happened during the last 50 years?

I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol

About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.

EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.

And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.

Oh don’t worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/09/racism-in-football-are-italy-s-ultras-the-problem-or-the-solution

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240120-milan-s-match-at-udinese-halted-after-racist-abuse-of-maignan

Europe is in a very sorry state lately. A lot of far-right parties are gaining ground and/or winning the elections. Italy has elected a far-righr politician, France and Germany are very close to electing one.

I feel like the 2016 US elections have had a profound influence on ours as well. (Not faulting Americans for how the situation evolved, of course; it’s our fault in the first place).

People crying for these Russians, who are in relative safety and who were free to go, are just comical to me.

There is no “relative safety” in war and “free to go” means abandoning their homes and belongings, which is a fucking awful thing to do. Who are you, random armchair commentator, to speak like that?

Where were you when all these Ukrainian cities were shelled and other war crimes happened?

I was crying for them as well, just as I’m crying now, just as I will always cry for people caught in the flames of war, which is one of the worst experiences a person can be asked to live through.

Y’all think that having fucking empathy for civilian lives means rooting for Putin, which is not true. Putin is a dictator, a criminal and an abhorrent human being, and I hope he pays for his crimes. Here, I said it again. But this article is not about Putin, it’s about a woman lamenting that her government lied to the population instead of doing anything to protect them, and now she hasn’t heard from her elderly parents for days.

It’s something that I wouldn’t wish happened to anyone, ever. The fact that they are Russians doesn’t suddenly change the tale into a comedy. Laughing at the expenses of random civilians who happened to live under the autocratic rule of a violent narcissist is not something that I will ever condone. I can root for the Ukranians while also keeping my humanity. But apparently you can switch it on and off at will depending on who you are looking at.

I said nothing about Ukranians’ actions being unjustified, nor do we have any reason yet to think that war crimes are being committed in the area. If this brings them an inch closer to winning the war, I wholly support them.

Still, laughing at people suffering because of war is such an abhorrent behaviour to exhibit, and the fact that people are bending logic to justify it is wild.

You all should learn some empathy.

You are underplaying the struggles of civilians in a war zone just because they happen to live on the wrong side of the border.

Civilians have all the rights to not want war on their country, at their doors, no matter which side of the border they are, and they are allowed to lament the incompetency of a government that hides critical information from them in an attempt to cover up its failures.

The Ukrainians have the right to keep fighting, and I hope they win this war. Putin is a criminal and he must pay for his crimes. This doesn’t mean that civilians caught in the crossfire are being petty.

It doesn’t matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we’ve not lost the context of the story.

We literally did. We don’t know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don’t know when, only rough estimates.

For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.

If our civilization falls, there’s no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.

It’s not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.

For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer’s existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, “he” probably didn’t write both poems. It’s far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.

We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc…) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the “original” trilogy, but there’s no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.

Ehy, don’t worry, mistakes happen. I’m sorry you got downvoted to oblivion.

It’s Thailand, not Taiwan.

(Taiwan already legalized it in 2019)

Fuck this government.

I’m Italian.

Four years ago the DDL Zan, a law that sought to fight language and deeds that amount to religious, political and racial discrimination by adding aggravating factors for sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, was proposed.

Among its detractors, the Vatican itself, who urged Italy to stop the law because, according to them, the Law calls into question church’s ‘freedom of organisation’ and threatens ‘freedom of thought’.

While those cartoonish evil cults aren’t common, they are not the only evil religious organizations in the world. The head of one of the abrahamic religions, and one of the most popular religions in the world, fought against the freedom of my fellow LGBT+ individuals because of their supposed right of hate speech, apparently. So no, it’s not an American perspective, and yes, all religions are evil.

Religion is ignorance and refusal to face reality.

As long as people behave, treat others, and vote according to the sacred scriptures written by a crackhead thousands of years ago, and their influence shapes the world around me and puts a limit to my freedom, then there will be no distinction between religion and extremism. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Damn, thanks for letting me know. I’ve been using the Simple suite for years and even bought some of them because I wanted to reward the developer. I’m saddened by the news of the acquisition. I’ll swap them with the new fork.

Summit has that functionality.

Woah, that’s awesome. I live in Italy and my therapist asked for €80/hour. I eventually had to choose between daily expenses, university fees and therapy, and the latter was, unfortunately, the one I decided to cut.