What friends

I’m utterly talentless, so I won’t 😌

Yes.

Accidental discovery: Apparently they did so as far back as at least 2018 lol

A convenient excuse to push for remilitarization, and paint the current enemy as always malicious!

1. This year’s final was yesterday.

2. Because they had a massive campaign to influence votes through marketing two years in a row now, and them winning the popular vote this year is sketchy. Supposedly, last year’s song, which also got very high televote results, did not chart anywhere on streaming services in spite of its supposed popularity. RTVE (Spanish public broadcasting) has launched an investigation into the votes cast from the audience, according to El Pais. And if there was no cheating, that means that either people genuinely liked the song, or that there’s enough brainwormed people to vote Israel out of the desire to take a stance for good or whatever friends of moral thinking like to preach. Also: “no proof needed” is a foolish statement.

3. Iceland can do better, and did so at the start of the decade, but this year’s song was mid.

4. Because Israel is a member of the European Broadcasting Union. Technically, any member country could participate. Morocco did once in 1980, for example. In practice, I have a hard time thinking they’d allow say China to join in, if they wanted… which a broadcaster from Hunan apparently wanted to do around 10 years ago.

5. Stereo Love was never a Eurovision song. Also shame on you for great recession era nostalgia.

There’s three and a half explanations really

1. Most of the pre-contest predictions were wrong and the show’s audience actually really liked the song.

2. Moralistic voters, supporting Israel because you just have to support a good cause (the same kind of voter is probably also prone to nationalistic “We gotta help our brothers in [x] / [y] is our enemy even if the song slaps.”

3. The propaganda campaign worked in gathering enough support.

3,5) Outright vote rigging. Plausible, especially with the EBU’s lack of transparency, but 1 - 3 are more likely.

…huh, Poland is randomly missing from the chart

The fun part is that it could genuinely lead to trouble with the cops. This country is one of the west’s most conservative societies, in the sense that the status quo is holy (and very popular among a large % of heavily moralistic and annoying people) and heavily enforced.

No it’s not? I saw a guy yesterday wearing the five heads of Marxism on a t-shirt lol

What’s banned is the old KPD, which is why the new KPD (which exists due to a legal loophole in the reunification treaty) sometimes gets harassed by the cops.

There is a certain crackdown on USSR associated imagery at WW2 memorial events, but beyond that, the cops and courts don’t have enough of a reason to go after ML groups on the basis of symbolism and self-proclaimed adherence to a communist worldview.

Fair enough.

Are you referring to the author, or the person being criticized?

The Antideutsche are really mad, as can be expected.

They used to be literally funded by the German government (their German language channel at least), until… they were not allowed to sell merch, because of public funding.

He usually is. He’s also a fan of click bait and dropping takes to encourage viewers.

Clint (LGR) has been around for 19 years, and the quality has been consistently good across that time.

Huh Failrace, I used to watch that like 8 years ago.

He seems to do it to get people to buy his teaching material.

Something that struck me about 2020 and the war in Ukraine is how normal life stayed beyond the initial lockdown phase.

You wake up, go to work, even if you might catch a disease that might leave you disabled or worse or if tanks roll down the street, shooting at everything that moves, you return home and repeat.

So it would seem.

From what I read on him, he seems to be basically Francis II in terms of social views. Probably worse foreign policy, but neither likely to make the church more left, nor roll back to the past.