MudMan

Not a pop culture thing, it just sounds… self deprecating, I suppose.

Like, was that his legal name? Because man, that’s ballsy.

Anyway, I mostly agree with you, I am more at home here than on all the microblog platforms. I do feel Bsky does a better job at being that than Masto. Masto is insular and man, I hate to say it, but the way its firehose “Home” feed works convinced me that you need at least some options to handle post sorting beyond raw chronological. I don’t hate it, but if I wanted a social network entirely predicated on arguing about Twitter I’d be on Twitter (and for people in denial about the popularity of their open source alternative we have the Linux forums here, so I’m good there, too).

Holy crap, that was a hard pivot. Is your neck OK?

I mean, Bluesky is a private company, it seems to be incorporated in Delaware as a PBC and they claim it is owned by members of Bluesky itself. It’s unclear if that means Dorsey divested from it when he left the board or not, and since they’re not a public company they don’t have an obligation to say. You know as much about Bluesky as you do about Valve or Ikea.

I don’t actively support them or root for them, but it’s not a particularly huge mystery, and my paticipation on it doesn’t imply my moral support to their board members (who are public and known) or their investors.

You can bridge them together and call it a day. Otherwise, presumably because a bunch of the interesting people who left Twitter are there and not on Masto.

I mean, don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to, I suppose.

It would be preferable for Europe overall for Romania to be, say, not as corrupt, and consequently not as poor. It’d make Europe stronger.

Oh, agreed. And much as the EU has taken that position fairly actively, that’s ultimately an issue of internal Romanian politics and why it’s worth being at least vaguely aware of what they look like, at least around elections.

I’m not even sure that I’m not taking an atlanticist position here. At this point in the game I’m not even sure what that means anymore, because for the second time in a decade we’re in a scenario where the US isn’t “atlanticist” as a matter of policy. I don’t take issue with a defense pact among the surviving liberal democracies, it’s just hard to visualize what that looks like if the US is not on the list.

Short term it looks a lot like the EU, assuming their liberal and social democracies hold up. Longer term I have no idea. A larger thing involving parts of Asia and South America but not the US and Israel? I certainly hope that set of alignments isn’t put to the test militarily, but who the hell even knows anymore.

Oh, and for the record, I am not Romanian myself and, at least as far as civil society goes, I’d dispute that the East isn’t being ignored, beyond using Orban as a culture wars icon.

Well I, for one, am terrified about the collapse of the German coalition, recent regional results an the upcoming outlook. Less up to date on Sweden, beyond the fact that they’ve been yet another struggling center right regime and the abuse of their crises, and in particular their crime stats, as a far-right propaganda strategy. Of Belgium off the top of my head I can tell you their struggles to form stable governments are legendary (and that this is despite better than average economic performance across the inflation crisis) and that process is very much ongoing.

Now, I don’t blame anybody, myself included, for not having a full understanding of the many vectors of EU politics across the Union. That’s an impossible task. I do, however, find it horrifying to actively dismiss the relevance of far-right, pro-Russian advances in any Union member as unimportant to one’s own interests. Doubly so if the person in question can name more than two US Senators or members of the House.

I don’t care that you don’t know off the top of your head, I care that you don’t want to know and think it’s irrelevant. Because it does have a real impact. It impacts Union security, it impacts the power balance in the European Council and, if turned into a trend, will eventually impact the power balance in Parliament.

And again, those matter to you because they literally write laws directly applicable to you. If that doesn’t trigger alarm bells for you, then yes, I’m gonna say you’re not paying enough attention. You don’t need to learn the intricacies of post-communist political alignments, or how typical left-right alignments don’t work the same way in that context or the names of everybody involved… but at least I’d expect the news to make your ears perk up and read a report, especially if you’re busy doomscrolling individual Trump cabinet appointments at the time.

It’s literally your territory. Your political organization. You are a citizen of the EU just as they are. Their elections impact your organizations directly. They impact who writes your laws in Germany.

That’s not geopolitics, friend, that’s domestic politics for you. The fact that so many Europeans just can’t parse this but compulsively follow every detail of US politics is a disease. It’s the gangreous abscess of US cultural imperialism and it’s doing real damage.

Big echoes of the mid 2010s, having weird conversations with delusional Brits spouting EU misinformation with zero critical sense before Brexit. It’s terrifying.

Man, the EU is so boned.

Look, it matters for the same reason Hungary should matter more to you than the US. For one, Hungary insists on giving visas to Russians, and the more Russia-aligned EU countries you get the worse your border security with Russia gets in that exact way. Get enough of them in there and it gets so much harder to enact Europe-wide legislation on security and international relations.

You perceive Romania as cheap labor and a military asset, I assure you both Russians and Romanians perceive it differently. I understand what your priorities are, I’m telling you they’re wrong, which is not surprising coming from central European arrogance but would be good to nudge back to reality before it’s entirely too late.

I know you’re exaggerating for effect, but I am not, it’s time to pay attention to Eastern Europe (as in, Eastern EU) and start to make plans to decouple from the US much more aggressively because they are definitely not going to be allies for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, well, if you are German Romania is effectively your Eastern border, what with being the EU country closest to Russia, bordering Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, with the larger Moldova territory extending into Romania itself and being currently a stated occupation objective of Putin.

So… maybe it’s time to take the blinders off, stop caring so much about transatlantic politics out of sheer cultural imperialism and start caring a bit about your own territorial integrity. Just as a smidge of friendly advice.

But US politics are universal, don’t you know?

Romanians have been dejected about politics for a very long time and in very dangerous ways. The entire “they are all the same” narrative has been so pervasive and the attempts at centrist liberal reform parties so unsuccessful that the populist right having a shot is not surprising. If anything it feels oddly overdue.

It’s still bad, though, but I am very nervous at a scenario where options are reduced to actively supporting the PSD status quo or pro-Russian far right populism. If you’ve heard younger Romanian men talk about politics for the past decade that doesn’t bode well long term.

I guess it depends on what “toxic” means to everybody. I certainly saw a ton of self-centered hostility towards people who saw the platform differently when I was using Masto more. This place is pretty chill and the one bit of Fedi I still use.

My experience on BS was generally fine so far. Some people really block-happy, which I’m fine with, and during the last migration some of the trolls came over to troll and found themselves summarily banlisted almost universally. I don’t expect them to last super long in there.

But as always with social media, experiences are more variable than anybody intuitively thinks.