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7 votes
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Finland's President Alexander Stubb has called for expansion of the UN Security Council, abolition of its single state veto power, and suspension of any member engaging in an “illegal war”
41 votes -
London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids
28 votes -
Doctors have urged Finland's rightwing government to change “problematic and damaging” plans to ban undocumented people from accessing non-emergency healthcare
13 votes -
Norway sees electric cars outnumber petrol models – sovereign wealth fund cushion has made it possible for government to offer green incentives to motorists
11 votes -
São Paulo mayoral candidate treated in hospital after getting clobbered with chair
7 votes -
Swedish government says excessive screen time is causing a severe health crisis for youth – new legislation in the works to require schools to ban access to digital devices
14 votes -
The carbon tax is good for Canadians. Why axe it?
17 votes -
Donald Trump is safe after Secret Service opened fire at suspect with firearm near his Florida golf club
48 votes -
An Israeli and a Palestinian discuss 7 October, Gaza – and the future
8 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 9
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
27 votes -
NYPD officer lands $175K settlement over ‘courtesy cards’ that help drivers get out of traffic stops
54 votes -
It is time to do away with the empty recurring weekly threads
It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads. Those who do not...
It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads.
Those who do not wish to see topics on those events should unsubscribe from the relevant keywords for their own browsing, as all of us with other interests unsubscribe from those keywords.
There is no flood of this content that makes gathering things in weekly threads relevant.
No content is drowning on tildes, as no group has issues with too many posts.
It's uninviting to folks who are actually contributing submissions to the site to be told they shouldn't be making these, but should rather make them in empty, dead posts. That is not fair to them, nor is it a good look for the site.
These dead recurring threads should be done away with. They serve no function. The experiment has shown they are not needed, are not used and are simply auto-generated robotic clutter.
109 votes -
US and British citizens among thirty-seven sentenced to death in DR Congo coup trial
23 votes -
Operating on good faith in a bad faith environment—the implications
I've been reconsidering things about honesty in the wider context of politics. I think honesty is at the heart of a good faith approach. You have to be both honest about the limitations of your...
I've been reconsidering things about honesty in the wider context of politics. I think honesty is at the heart of a good faith approach. You have to be both honest about the limitations of your own thoughts, you have to seriously consider the opinion of the person you're talking to, and you shouldn't attack their person in any way.
It's assumed in ethically liberal communities that honest and constructive conversations are the way to go to get political power, in the positive sense. "They go low, we go high." This is, of course, true in some contexts. An entirely bad faith approach to people would result in alienating potential allies. Having a good faith approaches also gives you some sort of moral argument, which you can leverage.
With this being said, this claim, that it is the only way, is extremely insufficient in several dimensions.
First of all, there are a lot of situations where bad faith approach, where you ridicule and attack your opponent, mock them, or even lie about them, etc. work. A recent example is the Couch Fucker bit about J.D. Vance. It's obviously not true, but it was a very useful piece of propaganda. It just caught on, because he really did seem like the kind of guy to do that. A similar example was misinterpreting a certain search, and saying he was searching dolphin porn. Again, he looks like the type to do that. A third example is the AI-generated images about the MAGA crowd bringing fake semen cups to support J.D. Vance. It's not real but it caught on, because the MAGA crowd contains a lot of people that seem that self-unaware and cultish.
Second, the "good faith first" approach ignores a key dimension of politics—the conflict. "Ideal citizens" in liberal democracies, or people looking up to liberal democracies and their ideals, like to imagine that a properly ethical, positive, constructive dialogue-based approach will triumph over bad actors. Gestures widely at the world This is simply not true. There are a lot of situations where such people fail.
The reason for this is that conflict is not "clean". It is conflict. It can be hard or soft in a wide spectrum, but one would have to ignore pretty much reality itself to claim there are only soft conflicts in the world. The good faith approach, which I outlined above, assumes that you can still overcome the hard conflicts with their "clean" approach (unless it's open war).
This is not true either. There are a lot of, and increasingly, bad faith actors in democracies or semi-democracies that are undermining them in every way they can. They want to take people's rights away, make them poorer, conserve or institute hiearchies, and a lot of them also want to kill you. A major chunk of the far right population would be delighted to genocide the people you love and yourself. And a bigger chunk of the right-wingers are sympathetic to them.
This is not a war in the conventional sense, but it's a serious hard conflict. So, the stakes are not just losing an election and then putting up with some leaders with "differences of opinion". Stakes are much higher. If or when they succeed, a lot of people will suffer at the hands of these weirdos. Some of them will even directly or indirectly get killed.
In light of this context, approaching bad faith actors in bad faith is within reasonable ethical limits, and it's the strategically sound option. This is, again, not a black-or-white thing. Not every situation requires the same strength or variety of bad faith response, neither ethically nor strategically. A context-sensitive approach is required.
This context-sensitivity, in other words flexibility of mind, is at the core of what I'm trying to illustrate here. Black-or-white thinking about having to choose between good faith and bad faith leads to ruin. It's a spectrum. A person ought to assess the situation at hand, and respond properly.
For example, on Tildes I try my best to approach topics from a place of good faith. I think this approach on Tildes mostly works, because a) people here in general try to operate on good faith b) people here seem to try to distance themselves from populist and rash arguments c) it's left-leaning to an extent, and definitely very anti-far right, so less insane opinions.
I neither would want to be bad faith here nor would see any point in it. However, on places like big social media sites (Reddit, Twitter, etc.) I don't really see the point. They are rife with fascists and fascist sympathizers. I saw plenty of naive people -I've been those people- try to explain things earnestly to them, assuming that their opinion is simply based on ignorance and misunderstanding, and not on active ill-will and a conscious choice to hurt people.
Before any objections, I will say that I am aware of the nuances. Not every right-winger is the same (and I have not made that claim), and even among far-right people there are ones who can be persuaded, because they simply are ignorant. But in vast majority of the time, these actors are operating on bad faith. They are not interested in constructive arguments, they are interested in spreading their filth in order to hurt people.
Keeping this in mind, it can be seen that a better counter to their claims is some variety of bad faith. In other words, more ostracization by labeling them things like weirdos and incels. More couch fucking, more dolpin porn, more cups of cum.
33 votes -
Donald Trump trials - Georgia election interference state court case - Megathread
Texts, documents hint at convicted witness bail bond business owner Scott Hall's wide ties to Coffee County breach, Trump allies ahead of trial Hall played a part in various post-election events,...
Texts, documents hint at convicted witness bail bond business owner Scott Hall's wide ties to Coffee County breach, Trump allies ahead of trial
Hall played a part in various post-election events, and he's taken a plea deal. He will testify in the Georgia 2020 election trials.
Hall's alleged involvement following the 2020 election reaches beyond the small south Georgia county. This includes personal relationships with those close to the former president.
Several media outlets, including CNN, have reported that Hall is related to David Bossie, chairman of the conservative group Citizens United who briefly led the former president's post-election legal challenges. Bossie's name appears in the Fulton indictment.
In late November 2020, David Shafer introduced Hall to a group of individuals including Robert Sinners, a current spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State's office who then worked for Trump's campaign. In the email, Shafer said Hall was "looking into the election" on behalf of the former president at Bossie's request.
This is described in Act 4 in the indictment, though Sinners is referred to as "unindicted co-conspirator Individual 4" by Fulton prosecutors. Sinners has since disavowed the post-2020 election activities that took place in Georgia.
Hall may also know about the letter former Justice Department official Jeffery Clark wanted to send that alleged the agency "identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."
34 votes -
Germany’s expansion of border controls is testing European unity
12 votes -
National Museum of Denmark is handing over an iconic cloak belonging to an indigenous group in Brazil at a ceremony being attended by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
14 votes -
Kamala Harris’ lead dips in national US polls and it’s very close in the key states
28 votes -
Dutch will spend $2.7 billion on improving infrastructure to keep ASML
7 votes -
Post-Positivism is not yet normalized in international relations
6 votes -
After this year's widely lauded Olympics in Paris, Denmark's capital announced it is exploring the possibility of hosting the international sporting event in 2036
19 votes -
Texas is close to adopting new oil and gas waste rules, first in decades
9 votes -
How a start-up utopia became a nightmare for Honduras: US investors are suing Honduras over special economic zones, and the dispute could bankrupt the country
22 votes -
China's Arctic dreams make the Norwegian port of Kirkenes a global prize – and an unlikely hotbed of East-West rivalry
6 votes -
Thinking out loud: A US service to help you move to where your vote will count the most
Maybe this topic is silly, but I am up from insomnia, so here it goes. I watched a piece on the news about how the election may come down to teeny tiny little town in Nebraska. I remember a...
Maybe this topic is silly, but I am up from insomnia, so here it goes.
I watched a piece on the news about how the election may come down to teeny tiny little town in Nebraska. I remember a similar situation coming to pass in the 2020 election.
There are many teleworkers now. Many of them are IT people who would be happy anywhere there is a good Internet connection.
I was thinking that a movement to get people to move to where their votes would count the most would be interesting. At least to talk about.
There could be a web site/app that would identify the potential most crucial areas, like that little Nebraska town.
Nomadic and patriotic teleworkers could then move to such places a year in advance of an election, vote, and move on if they aren't happy in those places.
16 votes -
We found North Korean engineers in our application pile
33 votes -
Greece cracks down on excessive tourism. Curbs on short-term rentals and cruise ship traffic could damage crucial sector, warns hospitality industry.
13 votes -
Norway wants to ban unhealthy food ads that target teens – doesn't go as far as the UK's rule but pushes far beyond other European countries' efforts
10 votes -
Romania protests to Moscow after jets scrambled overnight
10 votes -
The Russian economy at war (2024) - Sanctions, growth, inflation and mounting risks
13 votes -
Unexceptional exceptionalism: The use of force by great powers and international instability
4 votes -
Chat control is back on the agenda of EU governments. The Hungarian Presidency will collect “guidance for further work”. Take action to stop chat control now!
11 votes -
Over 100,000 protest in France against new prime minister
16 votes -
Challenge or opportunity? EU-China economic cooperation and the Belt and Road initiative.
4 votes -
Laboratories at home and abroad: Russian information operations pre-deployment
9 votes -
The games behind your government's next war
11 votes -
Russian banks say yuan coffers empty, urge central bank action, while Chinese banks in Russia are avoiding currency trading for fear of secondary Western sanctions
21 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 2
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
8 votes -
The new Māori Queen: Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, 27, to succeed her father Kiingi Tuheitia as Māori monarch
22 votes -
Bethesda yanks Thatcher's Techbase Doom mod from in-game browser
36 votes -
Sweden has announced controversial plans to scrap its tax on airline tickets from 2025
6 votes -
Congressional insider trading: Is it real? And can we use it to our advantage?
9 votes -
I never expected to run for office—here's what I learned
32 votes -
Bipartisan group of 350 US city mayors commit to electrifying fleets and broadening EV charging infrastructure
18 votes -
US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to invest $76 million closing legacy oil & gas wells in Pennsylvania
16 votes -
America is losing Southeast Asia: Why US allies in the region are turning toward China
19 votes -
Where do you fit in the US political typology?
29 votes -
China-linked ‘Spamouflage’ network mimics Americans online to sway US political debate
25 votes -
Sweden's immigrant hip-hop stars are redefining Swedishness – Muslim rappers are dominating the charts with music sharing the Swedish Muslim experience
7 votes