Trump and Putin their relationship isn’t going to reverse. Trump is a gullible idiot and Putin is not, if they meet and negotiate face to face, then Putin is going to get what he wants. Especially because Trump has said before negotiations even started, that he wanted to give the occupied lands to Russia. Trump is such a “master negotiator” that he sells out his own side before the talks even start. This is why Putin wants to negotiate alone with the usa, without the eu countries or NATO present.

The Observer is one of the oldest news papers in the world. Generally quality journalism I think, though I’m not a regular reader. Since a few decades under the same ownership as the guardian, but apparently sold 2 months ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Observer

And articles changing after first publishing happens quite a lot. It beats putting out a separate article for every small development in an ongoing story. For example: entity A said x about B, and later there’s an update wherein B denies x happened. In quality journalism it used to be done in clear updates at the bottom and/or top of the article. But now with Trump, A is claiming x and then later A realizes how dumb that was, so A claims they never said x and that they’ve always been saying y. Good luck reporting on that in a clear and concise manner.

If you’re curious what their official children are up to: https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-20/nicaraguas-political-dynasty-heirs-in-a-golden-cage.html

Tldr: the eldest daughter accused her father of sexual abuse and had to run to Costa Rica. The lives of the other 8 adult children + the lives of their families are mostly controlled by the president’s wife.

Consort is not necessarily sexual, fe: The mayor was known to be consorting with known criminals. It’s also not necessarily an illicit relationship: “queen consort” in the UK for example.

Paramour works for both male/female illicit sexual partners.

Personally I like “her/his poolboy” for a ladies’/man’s male paramour, but that meaning is probably not going to be in a dictionary, though most people will get what is meant.

Also the same category as Reagan’s election and the embassy hostages + Iran contra affair. It’s part of the standard republican playbook now.

And the Palestinian genocide and your other examples aren’t “worse” in any metric (yet). The use and misrepresentation of those examples just tells us that you’re a tankie who engages in whataboutism and spreads untruths to build a narrative.

I agree with your point but I think the Palestinian genocide is a bad example. Imo better examples from the top of my mind: the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides likely were far worse both in absolute numbers and as a % of the population, and the policies of Maoist China got many more people killed.

It sounds like republican* atheists are not allowed to make an honest oath. If you have to swear on something that you don’t believe in, what value does that oath have?

• Not the usa party kind, but the ones who want an elected head of state instead of a hereditary one.

Except when it isn’t. If the price of the locally fermented alcohol is lower than the price of imported methanol (not every country has a chemical industry and some of those countries have a really low GNP), then it’s just not going to be the case. And since there have been methanol contaminations in such countries, we know with certainty that it isn’t always caused by adding methanol.

Some scientists heard the same argument (that it was added methanol), thought that wouldn’t always make sense and then did some research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5028366/

“This study assessed some traditional fermented beverages and found that some beverages are prone to methanol contamination including cachaca, cholai, agave, arak, plum and grape wines.”

Here’s actual statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303450/bilateral-aid-to-ukraine-in-a-percent-of-donor-gdp/

Apparently Denmark is leading the pack with 1.83%, closely followed by the 3 Baltic countries. Poland is 7th with 0.68%. The usa is “only” at 0.35%, which is still by far the most of any of the non european nations that have send help, and also significantly more than a bunch of eu nations.

This is all aid, so weapons, humanitarian and financial. With the different kinds split out: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/

It’s not only their faulty Overton window, imo the big problem is that their “methodology” of determining bias/credibility is very poor. It’s basically 1 volunteer scoring a few metrics of the site being reviewed, which has lead to some very questionable credibility scores in the past, probably caused by the bias and/or amateurism of the volunteers. When those odd scores caused enough controversy, then those scores got arbitrarily adjusted, but only those scores. In particular the owner + volunteer staff of mbfc appears to be very pro Israel, so Zionist propaganda outlets like unwatch get given high scores, while media outlets like the guardian were given the same mixed credibility rating as fox news, for no other reason than that the reviewing volunteer happened to be extremely biased.

If a biased organisation uses a weak process to assign bias ratings, then the output is going to be nonsense. After numerous controversies, they probably have corrected ratings for all large news and propaganda organizations, but smaller ones will not have caused the same controversies and since those ratings are a product of the same process, they’re going to be just as faulty. We just don’t know it because there have been no public controversies about those yet.

Basically you can’t trust their credibility scores. If you know the site being reviewed, then you can make an assessment yourself if the rating is actually credible, in which case you also actually didn’t need the bot to tell you that. And if it’s a small unknown site, then there is no way to know that that credibility rating can be trusted, making the bot useless. And if people were to start trusting the bot, it would be worse than useless.

Dogs also love to wrestle over the stick/ball/… Think 2 dogs holding onto the same stick with their teeth while growling and pulling as hard as they can, they’re having fun.

The dog I grew up with (malamute) would fetch something once and then have you try to get it out of her mouth, which was impossible to win for a human, so you’d have to feign giving up and then she’d drop it. And if you then threw away the object again, she would give you “the look” after which she would saunter off and ignore you. So I’m pretty certain that she didn’t like fetching, but she loved wrestling and pulling.

What happens when the bias checker is biased?

The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It’s just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about “we” and “our” in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the “checking”. The site claims to be objective, but there’s been enough examples to show that it isn’t (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).

The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to “several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system”.

For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I’d say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it’s easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it’s also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying “data”, you’re just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.

Fox news gets the same credibility rating of “mixed” as the guardian, which should tell you all that you need to know about the credibility of the mbfc site.

Edit for context: fox news commitment to factuality, is so bad that they knowingly air news that they themselves know to be false: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trump/673132/ Rampant misinformation, sitting on news until they can release at a more opportune time, selective reporting, airing heavily edited footage to make their guy look less like an idiot, … These are all things that fox news does, but I’m hard pressed to find any examples of the guardian doing any of these. And yet still somehow, the mbfc site wants us to believe that the guardian is as untrustworthy as fox news. Somehow I’m not buying it.

Completely. Calling NBC news center left is a real head scratcher, that bot is apparently living in an alternative facts reality.

USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.

Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.

History is written by the victors.

This pier has got to be one of the most expensive examples of virtue signaling ever. Since Israel controls the land that the pier connects to, aid that comes off this pier would always get the exact same treatment as aid that hits an Israeli overland checkpoint, the pier is a pointless + very costly edifice.

Imo the only reason that it exists is so that the USA government can claim to be helping by throwing money at the problem, without actually doing anything about the problem.

It is by far the highest population state in India. More people = more scandals. But even when you try to account for that, there’s still an aweful lot of scandals coming out of Uttar Pradesh.

And many of those scandals involve local police or rich locals who believe that laws are for other people, but getting international attention does land them into trouble. So what we’re seeing is probably just the tip of the iceberg, but that’s true in other places as well.

This has got to be one of the most stupid memes ever.

The percentage of Soviet citizens that were put into prisons/gulag camps/colonies will have far exceeded the percentage of us citizens currently incarcerated in the usa, and in far more inhumane circumstances.

Unless the op is trying to deflect from the problems of the USA penal system by drawing attention to a far worse system, I don’t get the point of this meme.