Where I saw it first, people honed in on the “We don’t have the right to ​repeat [1917]” part as further proof of the CPRF being controlled opposition or “SPD in WW1” social chauvinists, pointing to other instances of “Zyuganov asking Putin to do socialism”. However people on Lemmygrad and other communist parties seem to view them favourably. I remember hearing more young people becoming members. Then there’s the mess of establishment Russian politics being essentially this photo: Three massive flagpoles in Saint-Petersburg, flying the flags of the Romanovs (beloved by ultranationalists), USSR and Russian Federation; behind them is the supertall headquarters of Gazprom.

So what is the situation with the CPRF? What do they stand for and would they be more than socially conservative social democrats if they ever supplant United Russia, electorally? Is the party evolving behind the scenes? And are their pleas to the bourgeoisie just political theater and not to be taken seriously?

You’re right and I agree, I just wanted to note that the “grey filter” doesn’t have to be a literal post-processing filter like the “grey trees” were (I remember that ridiculous moment); bad-faith framing and lying by ommission are much more common than outright lying in Western media. I’m quite a pedant on these sorts of things.

I say it’s more because of where and when they took these photos, those do the “grey filter” already. They took them in winter in northern provinces, where the trees and shrubs become bare and heating with coal is still prevalent so there’s often a haze. Meanwhile the grassy oil silos are a stock photo by Reuters from spring 2020 in warmer Oklahoma.

The solar field in Shanxi is in a dry, eroded landscape that has lots of exposed soil: for comparison, below is such a landscape in summer, from China Daily. Then there’s the black tarp of a construction site nextdoor on top.

The photo in Zhengzhou is literally a field of black and white cars in an industrial park. Roofs are the only bright colours present.

One could say: “It’s barely spring, can’t help it.” But why bother taking your own photos now if you throw in stock photos anyway? I say it’s because they wanted to give their photographer something to do and a contrarianism that goes: "China takes these photos when it shines, but it doesn’t shine all the time, eh? "

It’s possible that in the case both parents were sent away they also sent their kids along as to not separate them from their family, with the kids exempt from forced labour. From what I understand Gulag sites were more like forced labour villages than conventional prisons.

The video in question is here: https://hexbear.net/post/6784802

The road bridge that collapsed in Genoa was demolished and replaced in two years and cost €202 million, albeit being much shorter, less high and over land instead of water.

BofA deez bridges

In the native language “Uyghur” the U is pronounced between an “ou” and Cyrillic У, “gh” sits somewhere between a guttural R and soft “kh/X” (voiced uvular fricative).

Along with what cfgaussian said, the Netherlands also gets warnings of us becoming a “narco-state”. The ports of Antwerp and Holland competing like in the good old days haha.

A day before the vote, around 5,000 people demonstrated outside the parliament, carrying signs reading “Hands off the Istanbul Convention” and “Latvia is not Russia.”

Tamar Dekanosidze, the Eurasia regional representative for women’s rights NGO Equality Now, said the bill attempted to reframe gender equality initiatives as pushing an “LGBTQ agenda,” adopting a Kremlin-style narrative that allows politicians to portray themselves as defenders of “national values” ahead of elections.

“This would mean that, in terms of values, legal systems and governance, Latvia would be more aligned with Russia than with the European Union and Western countries,” she said, adding that this “directly serves Russia’s interests in the country.”

“What are we, a bunch of RUSSIANS?” Very predictable.

Not gonna lie, the headline is kinda funny, makes me imagine a bunch of guys physically moving hour hands on clocks.

The part about “public-private partnerships” got me a little worried, but private rents seem to be limited to upkeeping fees and “ancillary facilities” like parking lots, not the housing units themselves, which I find reassuring.

By contrast, in the West “public-private” housing projects usually mean that the housing gets built by the government and then leased out to private corporations for the first 20 years or whatever. I remember visiting Hamburg’s “Hafen-City” development as part of an excursion (I was studying urban planning+traffic engineering at the time), which is developed along this line and finding that weird when I asked the guide about it.

[Peter Thiel] finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

• “In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.”

The person in the video also places the caveat near the end that he’s talking about the dev space:

And I think that it might just be the year of the Linux desktop. And when I say that, of course, I do mean for developers. I don’t think my mom’s probably ever going to learn Linux.

Babiš and his party have seemed to drift a lot in policy stances over the last 20 years, I mean he’s had coalitions with the Communist Party at one point. Their right-wing designation comes from being queerphobic, xenophobic and anti-environmentalist under the guises of ‘anti-euroliberalism’ and ‘national sovereignty’. Foreign-policy-wise he’s a true centrist, as well as being a unabashed Zionist, go figure.

Babiš publicly profiles himself as a conservative and his party sits in EU Parliament under the same grouping as all of Europe’s “mainstream far-right parties”, Patriots for Europe.

Regarding promises of welfare spending, I want to point out that Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has often promised the same things in the past, but then his party votes for austerity every time, in government or in opposition. The Law and Justice Party in Poland also talks about a strong social safety net, mainly to distinguish themselves from the neoliberal opposition.

These people are offering a deal of sorts: they promise social benefits in return for loyalty to the big strongman against ‘the elites’, which shields them against criminal investigations. If not social benefits, then the power fantasy of ‘owning the libs’ that they feel wronged by.

My mind first went to the OG

Takaichi often cites Margaret Thatcher as a role model. Takaichi also has the nickname “Iron Lady”, like Thatcher.

I divided China’s change in emissions since 2015 by the global change in emissions in 2015.

(12533.4 - 10355.2) / (40812.4 - 37467.3) = 2198.2 / 3345.1 which is… 65.7%, far from 90 percent. If they mistakingly used the graph of CO2 emissions that excludes other greenhouse gasses it still only gives 74.3 percent.

At this point I give up where they pulled that from

Sidenote: doing the same for 2023-2024 gives China a share of just 33 percent of increase in emissions.

On the far right, SPD

Heh.

Why was United Russia there? Did I miss an about-face of theirs?