290 karma · joined October 5, 2025
This is not true, and very much the kind of propaganda spewed by the (far-)right, please do not trust it.
The entire crowd chants very explicit chants against the government and police, gathers around fires in the street, shouts at police when they attack the demonstrators or fire gas canisters and flash-bang grenades. The crowds that get out are not getting smaller, despite mainstream media and government equating the protests with violent looters, so it seems everyone marching feels a need to. There are looters, but they're a tiny, insignificant minority.
The protests are violent because the repression is violent, and because they are marching against real suffering.
> I don't care about foreign wars that I have no control over
Talking about a war of invasion by a fascist country on the border of your continent and a genocide. I'm wasting my time.
Weird misreading of my comment. I'm not saying he would, I'm saying even if someone as fundamentally as him did, I would think less of them, but that I still would understand it.
> Violent crimes are okay when people I politically agree with do it.
Violent resistance to genocide is something I fully support, with absolutely zero qualms about what unfortunate drone, military company, or government official gets hurt in the process. I'd expect everyone would support that, no?
> justifying the sort of behaviour that you claim to oppose (fascism).
Mate... are you serious?
An advice for you: stop supporting Russia and Israel, you could hardly have chosen a worse moral alignment.
And yes, getting support from amd making apologies for a country like Russia is a good signal of who not to want anywhere near the halls of power.
The normalisation of fascism, the criminalisation of resistance or even of protests, all the way to the boot stomping on your face, all those things appear so fast, too fast to react. So I can see why one would prefer to take the rights of far-right politicians away. If Corbyn came to power and witchhunted Reform, I would think much less of Corbyn but I'd still understand why others would cheer on that.
And when it comes to Palestine Action, they did the kind of violent crimes that I hope will be taught to future generations, same as we taught about resistance in WWII. I and everyone else support Palestine Action not because of the old women, but because they did burglary and vandalism against a terrorist state carrying out genocide. Sunshine and rainbows.
Meeting standards is nothing but a formality, a form to fill. The PhDs and lab staff doing the killing, if they have any qualms about the act itself or just the purpose of the killing, generally justify it away as being what they have to do to keep the job. The "humane" killing methods are learned on the job through trial and error, and such errors keep happening regularly to experienced staff.
Prior to lockdowns, many/most lab animals just got killed: interesting quality of life standard.
What's written in lab policies is not at all how it happens in reality.
A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.
Between the end of the Cold War and the start of the war in Ukraine, there was no peace in Afghanistan, in the Caucasus, in Syria, in Georgia, and in Crimea.
Russian misinformation and funding of far-right parties had never stopped. Every country in Russia's vicinity knew that it was coming for them. In the West relations were peaceful indeed, because all these wars were with faraway peoples.
If you're not a paid shill but genuinely believe what you're saying, you're what they call a useful idiot. This attempt at the apology of Russia, in this pretend calm tone, with emotional bits peppered throughout, is disgusting.
A lot of people who came to the West thanks to the peacefulness of Russia also want to go rebuild their countries 'Some day. Maybe.'
And lower down you say Ukraine should have some neutral autonomous territory. Maybe parts of Poland and of the Baltics and of Finland will also know the prosperity and peace that comes with 'neutrality'.
How dare you.
Many such comments are very dumb, asking 'and how do you feel about viruses, screwworms, etc.?', but since you say this is a genuine question: mosquitoes are numerous and we know that they represent a source of food for many species (bats, birds, other insects). As far as I know, there is genuine debate among scientists about the role that mosquitoes play in their ecosystems. Everyone here has seen species of animals and plants eradicated and then being reintroduced or replaced, when we realise what role they were playing.
Again, assuming you're asking in good faith: you're asking why these commenters are so concerned while humanity is eradicating species all the time anyway: these are not the same populations... I'd wager there is a big overlap between those wondering about consequences and those taking action for the planet (not eating animal products, not flying, etc.). Similarly, I'd wager there's overlap between those posting such illogical retorts, and those eating animals at every meal and driving their car daily.
I see the same ridiculous retorts in HN debates about the condition of animals.
> HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
> VON WEIZSÄCKER again expressed horror at the use of the weapon and HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the “most devilish thing imaginable”.
> WEIZSÄCKER: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in GERMANY under the HITLER regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.
Fascinating. You definitely must post it, I'd enjoy reading a discussion about this, as would others in this thread.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
Sounds very probable: gives a plausible reasons for sending a lot of infra up, absolutely doesn't have to be profitable or even effective, puts the focus on AI instead of the MIC, and is in line with the kind of contracts Big Tech runs after.
To me this model explains a lot of why so many big companies seem to be investing into what every expert I've heard says goes against basic physics. The only thing missing for it to be more than an interesting idea is why China and the EU are not fighting this.
> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency
Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.
> very few people are voting anyway
There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.
> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing
Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.
The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works.
Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
The dark ages were indeed a time of cultural collapse: science largely stopped, state capacity was cut massively (one indicator being that the Romans used to field armies of hundreds of thousands and the successor states in Europe would wage war with a few thousand men), large public infrastructure projects disappeared, religion started wielding a stifling influence on all aspects of life and society. Depending on who you ask, people will tell you that things improved for the ordinary people or very much worsened.
History, like other fields in academia, undergoes cyclical periods of rejection of dogma, as new researchers try to make a name for themselves by turning on their predecessors: I see the rejection of Dark Ages in the last decades as largely that, and recently there is more of a reversal, with new Middle Ages researchers turning on those previous researchers.
For crusades: this was not an answer to conquest. Byzantium had lost its crown jewel, modern Turkey, to Turks and then Arabs (a region, by the way, that had been reconquered and lost for centuries). The emperor at the time, Alexios, wanted a few hundred Western knights, to help him reconquer a few cities in the region (Jerusalem was not part of his plans, or at least priorities, religion was very much not a variable in his calculations), but the pope at the time saw a way to increase his own power and stirred up a religious hysteria: when the Western armies arrived to Constantinople, the Byzantines were surprised by the size and the goals of them, conflicts happened immediately, and the entire story of the first crusade is the emperor trying to conquer some revenue-generating lands and distrusting the Westerners, while the Western princes wanted to generate revenue for themselves (on my phone, simplified). Over further crusades, the Byzantines started to hate the 'Franks' (Westerners), as did the 'liberated' cities, for the many crimes and massacres they committed. Religion, and helping the fellow Christians, was simply a weapon wielded by the pope, the emperor, and the princes.
I think the rest of that previous comment is bigotry, but the poster is right about Crusades being a shameful event in the history of Christianity.
If I had one advice, it would be to find someone who relates to how you feel, because being able to talk about it to someone who's been/is there is the one thing that really helps, in my experience. I don't know where, a friend, a suicide support group, a men's group, but being able to talk about these feelings and be really understood does help.
In the meantime, try just to be around people when it's hardest.
Sorry to not have anything better to offer. Hope you keep going, brother.
It is true that the issues of people who vote far-right are ridiculed, and they themselves are demonised, which the parent holds, and I agree, is unproductive.
Far-right voters are largely the losers of globalisation/economic growth trying whatever they can to improve their situation: the phenomenon of many of these voters alternating between far-right and far-left from one election to the other is one of many indicators of what their real goal is, ie improving their situation.
Re migration: it does have negative effects on the economically marginalised, which the readership of HN and the talking heads in mainstream media are largely not. Among these are increasing housing costs, downward pressure on salaries, rapid and alienating shifts in cultural (and I mean cultural, not racial) makeup of cities and neighbourhoods: none of this should be controversial.
The establishment parties (so right and "left" like SPD, Labour, PS) have financial incentives to increase migration, which they do (see the Boris wave in the UK).
While migration is not an inherent evil at all, the way it's done by these parties does lead to negative effects, which adds one reason among many to vote for the far-right. So the short-term solution (curbing migration) is the simple and popular answer. The long-term solution (curbing capitalism) is harder and unpopular, so radical left parties unfortunately get fewer votes (except in France, where there's a real chance of the LFI showing a better path).
I imagine this fixes the misunderstanding. See you at the next rally, friend!