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@danksy-lives

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I don't understand the voting system for eurovision. But how did Sweden win? Did they bribe judges?

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That’s the theory! ABBA won Eurovision in 1974 and started their career, so 2024 is ABBA’s 50th anniversary. There’s one Reddit post saying that the person works in Swedish entertainment business and their boss had told them that they’ve decided to celebrate ABBA-week with Eurovision - before any country even had decided who they are going to send to Eurovision. The Eurovision final had a way too much emphasis on Sweden and ABBA, too.

Sweden’s representative singer Loreen herself said in one interview, that Sweden had to win because of ABBA.

Swedish media also knew for certainty that Sweden is going to win through the whole spring before Eurovision artists had been chosen. It wasn’t even “what if we win” but “lol of course we will win”.

Jury, aka 186 people from different countries, gave so many jury points to Sweden that even if 2nd runner had gotten all 12 points from televoting - meaning that in every single European country the countrymen wanted the 2nd runner to win - the 2nd runner would have still lost. Doesn’t matter if and when Eurovision viewers send millions and billions to Eurovision by voting their favorite song - the jury has spoken.

The gigantic amount of jury points for one country also means that all other countries didn’t receive jury points or got very little even when there was nothing wrong in their performance - and in any other year than in upcoming ABBAvision 2024 they would have received jury points. The jury points would have divided wider among different countries’ artists. Norway is especially pissed off but so is Germany, too.

So, 186 people decided the winner when millions of people wanted someone else to win. In fact, 70% of the Eurovision televoters wanted Finland to win. Rest 30% wanted either Sweden or someone else to win. No country gave maximum points to Sweden. The average point for Sweden from public was 6 and for Finland 10.

And then, Swedish media dares to say that televoting and people can’t be trusted and they can’t be let to decide who they want to win because “the audience doesn’t always know right” (a direct quote).

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To add into this speculation: One of the criteria for jury is vocal capacity aka how good performer’s voice is and how well they can control it. The other criteria are performance on stage, composition, originality of the song and overall impression.

Keeping these criteria in mind, it is a wonder that Spain’s Blanca Paloma didn’t get more points from the jury, only 95. Her performance had much more elements than Loreen’s, and her vocal capacity and ability to control it is so goddamn evident throughout Eaea. The song has tempo changes and different vocal ranges, all which take lots of skills to master.

And, let’s be honest, Eaea’s staging was much more innovative and protean than Tattoo’s. If “overall impression” is one of the criteria….

Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster's self as "Cookie Monster".

no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ

I love the Original Flavor Vader. Like, subsequent stuff made him ridiculous by giving him a backstory and world building and shit and I love it, but just imagine

He’s the Emperor’s goth Space Rasputin who you all have to let hang around, even though he’s really killing the vibe, has absolutely no real authority over any of you (Tarkin is the one giving the orders!), and likes to spew vague threatening mantras while you try to strategize and shit. None of you know where he comes from, Darth may or may not be his real name, and that religion he likes to lecture you about is Extremely Illegal

So one day you tell him his esoteric dying faith–that, like, two old men and a twink from Desert Bumblefuck still take seriously–is old, weird, and not as powerful as your fash wetdream planet-destroying laser–and also kinda useless, dude, it hasn’t exactly fixed that Rebel Problem you have going on

Unfortunately, he is also a seven-foot-tall laser-sword-wielding robot wizard of death, so in response to this, he gets mad and chokes you out with his mind

Your other boss (Tarkin, is Probably In Charge) treats this like it’s normal and tells both of you to play nice while you make sure your trachea is intact and The Magic Death Cyborg sulks in the corner because he wasn’t allowed to murder the non-believer

Jedis being illegal actually is not mentioned in original recipe star wars so it’s not even that his religion is illegal from that perspective he’s just like if the dude who still believes in Zeus was right that Zeus is real

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See, now I want more content that really leans into the idea of how fucking weird it would be for an ordinary person in the Star Wars universe to bump into the plot.

Like, you’re living in a science-fiction universe, right?  You’ve got your space ships and your space job, after work you hang out at the space bar, and then there’s these guys, who are like 75% living in a swords-and-sorcery universe–and another 20% is a Western, so there’s really only about 5% overlap with real life.  

It would be like if you were working at Starbucks and then all of the sudden Jesse James is in the parking lot having a shootout with King Arthur.  (King Arthur is deflecting the bullets with Excalibur; it’s super-rad, but as far as you know, physics didn’t work that way.)  Then they leave, and you’re back to your regular life of dispensing coffees and worrying about the creeping advance of fascism.  

the linguistic shift from "avatar" or "icon" to "pfp" is bad actually. bring back the implications of ritual significance. cowards.

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i see they're already arresting protesters in london today. Hell

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they're being arrested for unloading placards from a delivery van. By the way

according to the guardian, the protesters asked why they were being arrested, and they didn't get a response. these people were detained without official reason. that is fascism and suppression.

in conversation about white people who go to Japan and expect their knowledge of anime to culturally carry them, I was once posed with “it’s like if there was a Japanese guy who was obsessed with spongebob and came over here and thought he could get by just communicating in spongebob quotes.” This is a false equivalence because if such a man existed we would crown him king. We’d love him. Americans would fucking love that. sometimes I get sad that this isn’t a real guy I can invite to a party.

OP I know that you're joking but SpongeBob was literally how I learned how to speak English

i gotta say i agree that exposing children to algorithmic content feeds is going to make them grow up with one billion new kinds of mental illnesses and it's a serious societal problem that urgently needs addressing but it makes me v. v. v. uneasy when i see posts going around that identify this issue and come to the conclusion 'this is why it's important for parents to know what their kid is doing online' and uh girls there are a lot of kids out there who would be dead if their parents knew what they were doing online

"yeah this aspect of capitalism is extremely alienating and traumatizing" and im nodding and smiling and then they add "which is why we must retreat to the safety of the family" and i start abruptly high-pitched screaming like a fire alarm

grabs you. hey. listen. one day youll get out of your parents house. you will be able to not go to church on sunday. you will be able to cut and dye your hair any colour you want. you will be able to wear crazy eyeliner and black lipstick or whatever makeup you want. you can swear and be openly queer with your friends and transition and date. YOULL GET OUT OF THERE!!!!!!!

i think getting clocked while shopping and invited to participate in a music video for a song which among other things is against transphobia is definitely one of the funniest most confusing trans experiences ive had lately

Did they know who you were or did they just know you were trans?

to be fair a grand total of maybe five people live in switzerland so if you go there youre pretty much guaranteed to run into her at some point

this is a flawless strategy that definitely works and i recommend all my followers travel to switzerland immediately and try this

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.
Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.

this is so cool

Absolutely love it

I want to push back on the narrative that's already going around that the "Reality TV" boom was because of the writer's strike. It's straight-up anti-labor propaganda attempting to claim the strike didn't do anything.

And it's blatantly false.

1) Survivor premiered in 1997, Big Brother in 2000, Amazing Race in 2001, American Idol in 2002, and that's just the big-name network ones I can think of off the top of my head.

The last WGA strike was in 2007.

The reality TV boom was already in full gear long before the strike.

2) The 2007 WGA strike lasted from November 5, 2007, to February 12, 2008 - Three months and one week.

It takes a hell of a lot longer than that to develop, pre-produce, shoot, and edit a television show than that. No studios turned around a reality TV series in those 14 weeks.

This keeps being brought up because they want to dismiss efforts of the workers by claiming the studios can quickly pivot to something that doesn't need writers (bullshit) and blame what's seen by many as a blight on American entertainment, reality TV, on the WGA strike.

The trolley is about to run over all sentient life in the galaxy. You cannot switch the tracks, but you can still save everyone’s lives by pulling one of three levers, all of which involve sacrificing yourself. The red lever will destroy all trolleys, but will also kill you as well as all public transportation across the galaxy. The blue lever will merge your own consciousness with all trolleys, allowing you to control them and stop the trolley from running everyone over. The green lever will use your body as a catalyst to synthesize organic life and public transportation together - organic life will no longer be stuck in the cycle of creating public transportation that rebels against its creators, and both forms of life will finally be free.

I consider myself a liberal, but one of the internal contradictions in a lot of naïve formulations of liberalism is that a free, egalitarian state is in fact a totalizing vision of the social order, which is in direct competition with other totalizing visions of the social order (which includes many if not most major religious dogmas, among many other things). The liberal state is in direct competition with the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and many other similar institutions. The "multicultural" solution is to allow castrated, domesticated versions of these institutions to exist under the aegis of the liberal state. But telling a religious person that their beliefs and practices are compatible with liberalism because they are not outlawed is as ridiculous as telling a Communist that Communism is compatible with liberal democracy because the Communist Party is allowed to exist in the United States.

Liberal democracy involves some amount of toleration of groups whose doctrines would be incompatible with liberal democracy were they to succeed, but this is a naturally touchy area since there has to be some amount of legitimate self-defense on the part of the liberal order. The popular understanding of Popper obviously goes too far*, but it's equally possible to not go far enough (indeed, "too hot" and "too cold" can be hard to clearly distinguish here, since competing illiberal visions will often invoke liberal theory about the limits of toleration to legitimate their own planned purges should they come to power).

Worth noting (especially re: what @togglesbloggle is saying in the replies) that ostensibly liberal governments have used all types of violent repression against communist movements, above and beyond what can reasonably be construed as self defense

I mean, this is true enough as a gotcha (that roughly 1917-1968 liberal democratic regimes probably erred on the side of unnecessary panic and roughness towards perceived internal Communist threats), but it's obviously a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference, and fits right into the framework outlined above without any need for a special super duper apology codicil just for Leninists.

I definitely agree with @vacuouslyfalse as far as the facts of the matter. But I do note that McCarthyism is remembered as among the most illiberal moments in the last century or so of the US's history, generally held up as a preloaded (even cliched!) negative example, right alongside Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.

Reactions against illiberal ideologies are one of the widely acknowledged 'danger zones' for the stability of liberal democracies, in a way that's pretty well commented on by better minds than mine. Ethnic and religious solidarity are another (in fact, this is the main reason to give religion special treatment in the constitution in the first place). I genuinely don't know whether a hypothetically sane governing democracy could just treat communism and Catholicism the same way that it treats every other opinion, not go all J. Edgar Hoover on them, and remain stable. It would be pretty to think so.

On the narrow point about McCarthyism, there's two things I would say, which kind of cut in opposite directions:

One is that McCarthyism is arguably remembered mostly because it impacted a lot of elite Hollywood celebrities and intellectuals, as opposed to the bloodier and more demotic crackdowns of the First Red Scare which tend to figure very lightly in schoolroom accounts of American history (except for the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, which IME is bizarrely usually framed exclusively in terms of the ethnic angle of prejudice against Italians).

But on the other hand, I think it is pretty much undisputed at this point that the State Department was in fact absolutely crawling with Soviet spies during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations (not surprisingly: Communism was a fad among exactly the type of schoolmarm intellectuals who populated the original New Deal bureaucracy, and Russia was a wartime ally, so the high-level traitors who were pleased to see Stalin handed half of Europe on a plate after the war were never the primary targets of counter-espionage). And McCarthy's downfall in fact wasn't due to what we would regard as the greatest sin (HUAC inquisitions against Communist art world figures), but rather for trying to tangle with the military deep state, which is pretty much always a losing proposition.

That said, I do think that the ways in which McCarthyism is used as a parable in American civic mythology is very relevant to this discussion -- bourgeois artists and intellectuals in a liberal democratic state want to retain the right to participate in anti-democratic movements, which puts a hedge around at least certain kinds of crackdowns in the long term.

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I find this discussion lacking bc it assumes something McCarthyism asserts without evidence—that liberalism (politics philosophy) is identified with capitalism (economic system) and that non capitalist systems of govt are inherently illiberaleres. I don’t think that’s true! There are plenty of examples of philosophies like democratic socialism that are politically liberal and not capitalist, and pre-Stalin formulations of communism that see democracy as inextricable from communism.

That authoritarian communism is our go to central example of communism feels kind of historically contingent, a result of the USSRs success and the imitators it engendered and supported outside its borders. But a lot of what attracts (some) people to socialist movements in the first place is that they feel liberalism fails to deliver on its promises and permits illiberal contradictions of the sort well beyond just “not tolerating authoritarian political movements,” but outright encouraging them or preferring them when it serves the interests of elites in a supposedly liberal society.

Liners crackdowns on socialism and communism weren’t driven by fears of creeping authoritarianism—they were driven by a desire to defend capitalism. And while I think you can make the argument that liberal ideals aren’t totally incompatible with capitalism, i don’t think you can make the argument liberal ideals require it. I certainly would go further and argue that, unless heavily restrained (and maybe not even then) capitalism is actually an impediment to the liberal project.