Mine’s just one I got from a random kid name generator.

A bit off-topic: not sure why, but I keep seeing posts here on Lemmy lately about Romanian women pulling the short end of the stick in terms of gender equality. I hope I’m not offending in any way with this question, but is Romania sticking to the traditional gender roles?

Accurate user name

Some other EU countries have had their own struggles helping Nazi Germany, and some still have parties that support far-right characters. That doesn’t mean that the countries themselves are led by nazis. Furthermore, as the guy above mentioned, the leadership of Ukraine never followed through to regard this guy as a hero today. However, I find the following quite interesting:

A poll conducted in early May 2021 by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation together with the Razumkov Centre’s sociological service showed that 32% of citizens considered Bandera’s activity as a historical figure to be positive for Ukraine, as many considered his activity negative; another 21% consider Bandera’s activities as positive as they are negative.

So, right before Russia invaded Ukraine, people were against this guy. However, as soon as Ukraine’s independence was threatened by the same entity that this guy advocated against, people changed their opinion. The poll was taken immediately after the invasion, which would be a bit of a confounding variable here.

I chalk it up to socio-economic issues due to the Soviet Union, which led to poor education in many areas of Ukraine. See East Germany, where a majority of people have voted for AfD. Oh, and let’s not forget the overall negative sentiment against Russia after they invaded in 2014.

Nevertheless, would you argue that invading Ukraine to “denazify” them makes sense in this context? You mentioned atrocities from WW2, but that’s not being done today. Whatever deaths that were happening pre-2022 conflict were due to the Donbas War, which Russia also instigated. What reason would you then have to support Russia in this conflict? It is pretty clear that they are pulling in many arguments to justify their expansionist wishes.

Don’t get me wrong, I am also of the opinion that the US should gtfo of Europe, but I do not see a reason to excuse whatever Putin’s regime has been doing.

You keep throwing the word “nazi” around quite a lot. Explain what it is, and why Ukraine is ruled by nazis now.

Russia has been increasing trade with China in the past few years. I’m afraid that, even without US support now, Russia would still be able to carry on for a while longer :(

Ok, but there are laws involved here. In Romania, you can’t be president if you are under 35 years old, or, among others, if you have a criminal record. The people that were stopped from running for president weren’t barred because they went against the mainstream parties, but because they openly promoted personalities that were doing the equivalent of the Holocaust in Romania. This is punishable by law by up to 3 years in jail, and they’re being actively investigated.

The lady in this post was previously denied her run in the summer of last year, and she kept quiet about it until now because they probably told her they won’t pursue it further if she steps back. She took the deal, probably because she realises that she’d rather keep grifting on Facebook than spend 3 years in jail.

How can you have democracy if you let people vote for a person that says he will remove all political parties? There must be checks and balances that stop you at some point. Also, Romanian law prohibits candidates with ties to fascist or extremist ideologies from participating in elections. That’s in the law, introduced by people that were democratically elected.

But lets be honest, it’s the not being hostile to Russia that did it. Can’t have that in a US colony where they plan to have the biggest base for their imperialist wars.

Sure, the US that is now serving up its allies on a silver platter to Putin? His friend Trump is going to revert sanctions any day now for that sweet oil. For power in the Middle East, maybe, but the EU is hopefully going to wake up soon and kick all American bases ASAP.

And who helped the openly fascists ukranian to power in 2014?

Firstly, the Euromaidan protests didn’t get hundreds of thousands of people attending just because they got brainwashed by the EU/US. Allegedly, Russia attempted to do the same thing in Romania with Georgescu, and only a few hundred people showed up to protest the decision to take him off the ballot. People in Ukraine felt betrayed when Yanukovych wanted to reject EU and get closer with Russia, a country that has had 146% voter turnout during one of its recent elections. Arguably, maybe the EU is not the best, but its system is way more decentralized than Russia’s, allowing better representation of its population and reducing the chance of corruption. At least we don’t hear people that are criticizing the government “randomly” falling out of windows here…

Secondly, Poroshenko was openly fascist? Or whom exactly do you mean? If I’m not mistaken, Poroshenko assigned a Jewish person as his prime minister. Or you might be hinting at the Azov Brigade being integrated by him into the national army? What would you do when Russia starts invading your country, though? Either way, you might be right that it is in the benefit of the EU (and perhaps US) to have closer ties with Ukraine, but it goes both ways. Ukraine did not like what happened in Georgia, and wanted more security and pro-democracy allies. That does not mean that the EU made Ukraine into a Nazi puppet state to fight Russia.

Not sure if this helps much, but maybe you can reach a social security center in your county?

https://anes.gov.ro/asistenta-pentru-victime/centre-de-asistenta/

Also, maybe you can also get someone to help more here (sorry if not super helpful, I briefly read the translated versions of the websites):

https://www.eliberare.com/centrul-de-informare-si-asistenta/

https://armatasalvarii.ro/blog/2020/09/30/ce-sunt-centrele-de-asistenta-si-protectie-victimelor-traficului-de-persoane-si-ce-servicii-ofera/

Seeing that you have access to the internet, and no one checks what you post, maybe you can send a few emails when you have time off?

No, democracy is when you are intolerant with the intolerant. Maybe read up on what she says/does before commenting.

I think you can find a bunch of clothes on the online retailer Zalando. They also have a good return policy and sometimes bigger sizes on female clothes (if you need that). You can give that a try if you wish to try them in the comfort of your home.

Though, I’m not sure if they have good coverage outside central and western Europe.

Fooyin is also a solid choice.

On PC: Linux, LibreOffice, LibreWolf, BetterBird, Lemmy, Invidious, Le Chat + Ollama (w/ Open WebUI), Proton stack, moved to Helix for development rather than VS Code.

On phone: EMUI (yes, I’m changing my phone soon 😂), F-Droid + Aurora, IronFox, SimpleX + Signal, Loops, Pixelix, Organic Maps and HERE WeGo (for local transport), pipepipe, DeepL.

Planning on getting the upcoming Fairphone 6, if the rumours are right, and it comes out in the summer. I’m also considering the Shiftphone 8.1, but I haven’t heard much about it before this year. I previously wanted to get a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it, but I’d rather not have my money go to Google. Although, I currently rely on Google Wallet to pay without a card, but I might just go back to carrying my wallet with me rather than send more data to Google about my purchases.

Oh, I don’t know how I forgot about this. I have already signed it last year haha. Thanks for reminding me!

Well, what I’m thinking about is not too far from education. I am suggesting that we have independent fact-checkers, or at least tools that show all the angles of a certain issue (e.g., something like Ground News, but not owned by a for-profit organisation), paid by tax money. This should be incorporated in something like an API that Fediverse instances could tap into. Again, not governments deciding who is right or who is wrong, but citizen-backed initiatives that work for the people. There should be open source plugins that could be used by fedi instances to relay the fact-checking or other relevant information.

I am categorizing this as governmental regulation because the tax money is allocated by the government specifically for content “moderation”. However, this doesn’t mean that content should be removed from social media just because it talks about a topic (unless it is illegal), but people should at least have additional information available for free that they could research further. And no, I don’t think the community notes employed by Meta and Twitter are enough, as we’ve seen how that went for the Americans in the last election.

Mate, I am not advocating here for the EU to break E2EE, nor support linking of your social media profile to a citizen number that can be used against you. Similarly, I do not wish for the EU to start generating its own propaganda machine to replace the US one.

I am merely stating that we should invest more in EU open source, promote more fact checking and open algorithms (or even banning them) for social media. What is happening with Twitter, Facebook and TikTok is not ok. We do not need social media to profile us and push content that a state or rich person deems necessary for their benefit. Aren’t you on Lemmy specifically because of that?

Thank you for the information. I’ll keep that in mind for the future! To be honest, I intended to find a petition on this topic and share that to incentivize some mobilization, but I could not find anything. This was the most recent article I could find on the topic, given my limited time to research. If you have a suggestion on an article, I would love to change it to that!

Someone shared this link earlier: https://madein.md/en

It’s a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

Here is a quote from the actual “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership” PDF:

Needed reforms

[…]

Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

[…]

They are engineering most of these situations that we’ve seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: “This is going to be great television” - the guy is not even hiding it.

On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won’t abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of “theatrics” is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

It’s truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.

Precisely. The only enemy that the US conservative party sees is China. Everyone else is a business partner that they must strong arm into favourable deals for the US.

I don’t know… I feel like this is all premeditated. Project 2025 basically describes this exact thing: get EU to stop relying on the US. It’s all a bit more insidious than just Old Donnie being stupid and vain. I truly wonder whether this is a US conservative’s gamble to get stronger allies, or just a much bigger plan to extract more wealth for the rich in the US.

I, for one, would love to see Europe get rid of American dependence, but I have a feeling that everything will go back to the usual after getting peace in Ukraine. The US has enough buffer between them, China and Russia to not care, and plan for much farther ahead. They will keep lining up the pockets of policy makers to get them to lean towards their interests, and 2-3 generations down the line we nudge even closer to far right capitalism. Especially since Europe now might start shifting it’s industry to produce weapons, which will take our focus away from other important areas, like local chip manufacturing.

I’m curious to hear other opinions though. What is your take on all of this?