Different people have different thresholds. I can say that in my personal experience, the majority of people in Romania have been able to rationalize everything until this point as Trump just running his mouth, but the “real powers” (Romanians in general are very conspiracy-minded) would never let him actually upset the apple cart.

Some people had the spell broken months ago, during the first round of universal tariffs. Some people saw the stories of Europeans being abducted for weeks at the border for no reason and that woke them up. Some explained all that away as a few unfortunate mistakes, not a real pattern. Then the next round of negotiations with the EU, widely considered a capitulation to the US around here put some people back to sleep (we gave him what he wanted, maybe he’ll leave us alone now).

The higher tensions get around an actual military engagement, the more worried people are getting, the more people are snapping out of it.

LBC radio host James O’Brien has been shouting from the rooftops about the worst case scenario for months, and unfortunately he’s being proven right.

It’s normalcy bias. Career analysts, people that have made their living predicting the next major geopolitical shift, are more vulnerable to it than your average Joe. The world has operated one way for their entire lives, and it’s very difficult for most people to see that the rules of play have completely and irrevocably shifted.

They assume that the US won’t do something this patently self-destructive because the US has (mostly) operated on a logical set of self-interested principles dressed up in the language of “Democracy” and “Freedom”. The idea that it would blow its own kneecaps off while overtly and clearly talking the language of imperialism and might makes right is so outside their experience that it’s unthinkable until the spell of normalcy bias is broken.

No way it’s Popa in Romania. Popescu is an insanely common name, by far the most common I’ve heard.

Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in turn part of the EU. This is about as ridiculous as saying that Russia could walk into Alaska and claim it because it’s sparsely populated.

Can’t blame him for walking right up to the line of acceptability. If he’d have actually laid the blame where it’s fully deserved, he wouldn’t have a fine, he’d be defenestrated.

I’m not on PopOS, but as a general rule of thumb always do a backup before a major version upgrade. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

It’s not a specifically Indian issue, it’s generalized. It’s also not intentional, just a result of the way virality works.

Because the clips most likely to go viral are those that agree with stereotypes (fat American, lazy Mexican, drunk Russian, thieving Romanian, etc ad infinitum), those are the ones you see. Then people make more of them because it’s an easy way to get clicks. They’re popular because they reliably cause the same arguments (and thus engagement).

The machine does not care about anything but maximizing eyeballs on their platforms.

In a hypothetical well-crafted treaty (which I agree Russia would never sign) there would be penalties attached to breaking the conditions. Sanction snap-backs, for example.

Chill, he’s just being a fun guy!

Came to the comments to add exactly this. Am I predictable, or is this just the natural reaction to this image?

It is not bipartisan. The countries that take more than they send (primarily Republican states, I’m led to believe) would absolutely refuse.

You know what would have helped denuclearization? Giving the Budapest Memorandum teeth. Obama and every subsequent president made some mealy-mouthed “We’ll send a few old guns” to Ukraine, despite the deal being Ukraine gives up their nukes and Russia (lol), the US and UK defend them.

Every other country’s leadership looking at that has reached the obvious conclusion: nothing but nukes that you yourself control will save you against a nuclear power.

I know it’s an autocorrect issue, but “Uber the bus” sounds like the next goal of businesses gutting public infrastructure and replacing it with the gig economy. In other words, very on brand.

That isn’t how I read this at all. My immediate understanding was “Israel is doing settler-colonialism, people rightfully are against it. China is doing settler-colonialism, nobody seems to care”.

Maybe you’re right, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I see Trump more as the symptom of the rot than the cause itself.

I honestly believe that things would be worse if he had gotten shot. Trump is a despicably vile human being from every single angle, but he’s also senile, incredibly incompetent and narcissistic to the point it interferes with his goals.

A Vance presidency would be much worse, imho. The same goals, but not nearly as plagued with mental issues.

“Because no injustice has been justified by any injustice. Never, under any circumstances, though it was still so horrific and take it from me: Auschwitz was horrific. But Jews like Leon de Winter thus justify the violence against Palestinians or Lebanese and they find Jews who think otherwise traitors. Even my foster brother once literally wrote it to me: Hajo, you’re a traitor. Of course that affects me, but the primitive train of thought that is behind it: that you have to repay evil with evil, I find worse. I’d rather be a traitor than a perpetrator of crimes.”

Hajo Meyer

Ben Gurion washed his hands of the Diaspora… As early as a Mapai party conference in December 1942, he said that the tragedy of the European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them. Those were the words of a leader who was willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews to the idea of a Jewish state.

 Marek Edelman

My sense of betrayal grew. A question surfaced: was this what they died for? My relatives, all those Jews, all those thousands of names on the memorials? Was this horror of a racist, repressive state the result of their deaths?

Marika Sherwood

There’s plenty of Jews out there who saw what Israel would have to do in order to reach their goal of being a Jewish state from the beginning and wanted nothing to do with it. Plenty of Holocaust survivors at the time were very explicitly against the taking of land from a pre-existing population, and understood that to make it a Jewish state you’d need to remove the people there… somehow.

Some Rabbis have even made the argument that even attempting to form Israel in the first place is heretical.

Anti-zionist Jews have been a thing for as long as Zionism has existed.

Not true. The sign up bonuses go to their next of kin. Russia is legitimately paying it out.

There are entire regions that have regeared their local economies to depend on these payouts. Because it’s mostly underdeveloped regions signing up, this has become the most bizarre and macabre investment program in the world. Here’s an excellent video on the topic.

They measure stress. Kind of ironically, it’s likely more reliable on people that think it works and thus get stressed while lying during the test. Of course, it can’t tell why you’re stressed so false positives happen a lot.