Fair points. At least with real life politicians you can find out about their past behaviour though, if you do some reading.

On the internet people can just easily lie about who they are. There might be a propagandist on social media who has a strong foreign accent, so in real life you’d know they’re from a foreign country, but on the internet you can’t hear their accent, so they can easily lie about where they’re from.

Also even just for casual interactions on social media (e.g. Reddit), I think one of the reasons that people get so angry in discussions/arguments is because they don’t have to see the face of the other person. I guess it’s like a dehumanising interaction.

True. Another thing that I think is artificial about social media is anonymity. In real life you can see who somebody is when you’re talking to them - you know whether they’re lying about their age, or accent, or whatever. But online you could have an American pretending to be a European, or a Russian pretending to be an American, etc. And anonymity seems to encourage some people to be more abusive and insulting than they would be in real life, talking to real people.

Anonymity might have some genuine uses though (like trying to escape persecution from your country’s government).

People like Nigel Farage would probably say “they’re trying to rig democracy by making you vote again and again until you choose the ‘right’ answer”. And some Brexit voters would probably believe that narrative.

I think it’s definitely possible that there will be a push from the British public to rejoin the EU, at some point. Maybe in 5 to 10 years though.

I’m not saying I necessarily agree with the idea that getting too close to the EU would be a mistake. I think it makes a lot of sense for the UK to have strong ties with the EU.

Brexit was a massive headache for Britain so I think that’s why the UK government doesn’t want to open up that argument again immediately. I guess Starmer does want to build stronger ties with Europe, but he probably wants Brexit-voters (many of whom were from poorer parts of the UK) to feel like their vote is being honoured. If they feel they have been completely ignored then they might give their support to Reform UK, Britain’s equivalent of AfD.

Jupiter, the emperor of Europe…

You could say Germany isn’t unique though. The US is also split between those who want to be friendly with Russia (Republicans) and those who don’t (Democrats).

With Germany I guess Merkel believed that business ties with Russia would persuade Russia to not threaten Europe, but now that theory has been disproven, so Germans seem to be more supportive of the idea of cutting ties with Russia and boosting Germany’s defence spending.

It’s odd that the article title says “majority of Europeans” when the article itself makes clear that only some western European countries were surveyed. So I thought people should know that.

I like DST. I like having sunlight later into the evening during the summer.

I don’t know about the apps because I normally use Lemmy on the web. There might be an option in your app to just see posts from your subscribed communities though.

On the Lemmy.world website you can see posts from your subscribed communities by clicking the “subscribed” tab near the top of the page (the other tabs are “local” which shows you just posts from your instance - Lemmy.world in your case - and “all” which shows you the top posts from all Lemmy servers).

Also on the Lemmy.world website, if you scroll down on the main page, you can see your subscribed communities in a list on the right-hand side of the page. I sometimes use that list when I want to look at a particular community.

AfD got 21% in the election though, higher than just 6%. I think it’s like someone else in this thread said - the right don’t want to buy Teslas because electric cars are seen as “woke”, while the left don’t want to buy Teslas because they don’t like Musk.

94% say they won’t buy a Tesla car

It would be cool if European countries joined together to make a European nuclear force (starting with French and British nukes I guess, and then they can pool money to fund further weapons development).

Maybe this will happen in the future, but it might be a while until then.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And surely the Ukraine war shows that nukes are useful for deterrence. Biden was reluctant to give things to Ukraine (tanks and planes) because he feared escalation from Russia - i.e. the use of tactical nukes.

If Ukraine had nukes, maybe they wouldn’t have been invaded.

1. You’ve assumed that person is a westerner, which I think is unbelievably arrogant
2. You’re suggesting that person shouldn’t comment at all just because of a mistake they made

To me it seems the arrogant one here is you

You’re making a lot of assumptions based of one mistake, but you don’t have to insult me.

You’re a member of the wrong instance if you don’t like assumptions and insults.

I think Wikipedia’s description is good: “Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.”

I assume the 27% are mostly fans of Marine Le Pen and they quite like Donald Trump.

Meta is bad although I would argue that X and Tesla are worse.

People thought the first Trump presidency was a politically divided time, but maybe we’re now entering an even more divided time, given that social media is now fragmenting along political lines, more prominently than it did before.