Many countries have restrictions on what you can and cannot post (hate speech being a common one). Turkey in particular has been moving towards autocracy over the last decade or so, so I wouldn’t be surprised (to be clear this is speculation feel free to correct me) if it had restrictions on lgbt issues or political dissent or something.

Yip, that’s the one

I saw a youtube video from a woman that had a similar experience yesterday. Came from a deeply red, rural community, and went not to war but to a military base in okinawa. She talked about how many of the US military structures are actually quite socialized (everyone at the same rank gets the same salary, free healthcare, etc.) and also about how eye opening it was to get a different perspective on the pacific war than just the narrative of the US.

I can definitely see how just leaving the country for a place with a radically different culture alone could push you towards more leftist views (though afaik in military bases you still have to actively seek out interaction with anything outside the base), to say nothing of experiencing the horrors of war first-hand.

Don’t stay in my ass.

Lack of alcohol supply (a specific kind no less) is so far down the list of actual problems though. The majority of the population of the EU in every country seems to be on board with suffering a little in order to stick it to trump, so whiskey is really a weird thing to not import, especially given the potential impact it can have on the political opinion in affected regions.

The coloring is solely based on which number is higher for each country, that doesn’t change if you use relative numbers.

Am I missing something here (after quickly looking up virginias climate) or is this no different from the average central europe experience these days? Not that I don’t agree that these temps indoors fucking suck (or that just about everything DOGE does is horrible), it just really doesn’t seem like anywhere close to the worst results of pausing affordable housing. Complaining on a really priviliged level if you will.

As much as it sounds good, this is not an argument that will convince anyone who is against DEI (and honestly while DEI usually seems implemented quite well it’s not any better of an argument than “North Korea is called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, so they’re a democracy”).

The people that are against DEI mostly fall in 2 categories. One is flat out racists, which have no issues being against these values. The other are those that believe that the implementation of DEI is in some way bad and discriminatory. This is ime often based on sensationalized news about a few edge cases or stories that were twisted to a degree where they’re basically made up. They don’t need to be told that diversity, equity and inclusion are good values, they need to be informed about the fearmongering being just that.

Though with what trump is doing I suspect many of the latter category are already realizing that trumps version of “getting rid of DEI” is doing exactly the bad things they were told DEI does, so maybe we’re already mostly left with the racists.

One of the major draws of discord is the fact that they host the servers for you, for free. Anyone can make an account, click a button, and have a discord server.

Afaik matrix does allow this (haven’t used it personally) but it’s something where I am a bit worried about hosting costs if it reaches a large scale. (Also unsure about how the matrix protocol works precisely, but if defederation is a thing which I feel like it has to be, I can see it leading to huge pains since discords use case is often about being part of a specific communitu, as opposed to twitter or reddit. Being unable to join a groip or see some messsges because of federation issues would be a major headache).