During the whole Olympic controversy on the Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, questioning her actual gender, someone was making mental gymnastics that she still has testerone level higher than “vanilla females”.

Lol, vanilla females. That alone says a lot.

Shittiest take on this community by far.

It’s an myriad of reasons from what I can tell. Americans are conditioned to think along the status quo lines even if there is certain degree of freedom of thought. The American corporate media carves the political landscape to intentionally but subtly influence folks to pick either only Democrats or Republicans.

Another reason is that, I suppose rugged invidualism won out in the American society for better mobilisation. As you rightly pointed out, there just isn’t grassroots activism among American people (not counting civil and lgbt rights which are undoubtedly grassroots activism and successful ones at that). But this isn’t what it used to be. Before and in the early 20th century, there have been other third political parties still gaining respectable number of votes, the last one being the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debbs. He won a respectable 1 million votes as a presidential candidate while campaigning from prison during World War I.

Not sure what happened why political grassroots activism that could counter either Democratic and Republican parties died out, but my guess is that the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century may have had a hand to convince people to stick with two parties, as well as heavy emphasis on individualistic values.

Too many are accusing them already. Where there is smoke, there is fire.

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In fairness, it isn’t like banning one social media website (and a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation at that) will have either national security concern or threatening fundamental freedoms in Brazil. It could be why Brazil had been so bold.

I grew up with religious parents. Looking back, they restricted me from doing things, even innocuous, without explicitly stating we to why. But I know that it’s because they are afraid I “might get ideas”. Fortunately, I have been to good schools and got taught about basic sex education. Ironically, my parents sending me to good school taught me better than being “taught” by my parents who don’t want me to “get bad ideas”.

I mean historically Filipinos who migrated to the United States were also one of the wide users of marijuana along with Hispanics. And among those communities, the cannabis/marijuana did not have had any negative connotation until the war on drugs.

Yup. Marijuana has always had widespread use by those from formerly Spanish-colonised cultures which are Hispanics and Filipinos.

Having spent my childhood in Asia, child abuse is more or less normalised there. The social expectation is that adults are infallible authority figures and children are meant to be obedient at all times (i.e. absolutely quiet).

I also wonder if 20th century social and political turmoil caused many Asian parents to have anger issues and in turn, cause generational trauma. One reason I dislike the idea that Boomers were handed everything to them on a silver platter is because it neglects the fact that much of the world were former colonies. And the post-colonial status of many countries had been very rough-- experiencing inter-ethnic and international wars, proxy wars (Vietnam War and Soviet-Afghan War comes to mind) and corrupt dictatorships that do not invest well in their people causing poverty.

These turmoils and trauma caused many unresolved psychological issues. The victims of these strifes then become parents, who take out their issues to their children. And in turn, these children become parents who believe that hitting their own children constitutes as good parenting, because that was how they were raised.

I didn’t know that, thanks for letting me know. However, it seems Lucie herself had previously rejected forming a coalition with Macron’s group according to the Wikipedia article.

I know. But I mean any political mess in France, riots or not, is seen as severe by outsiders but aren’t aware how things work in France.

However, I admit that the situation in Mayotte is in a completely different context and unprecedented for overseas French territory.

but it seems strange that he doesn’t just appoint the candidate from the left.

From which part of the left? The New Popular Front is actually an amalgamation of broad left wing coalition of various parties. So Macron had to pick from the far-left communist leader Jean Luc Melenchon, or from the centre left Socialist party led by Olivier Faure.

The French legislative assembly works very differently compared to US Congress or the parliamentary system. There isn’t really one, or two, or only five parties getting votes. The French system is much more pluralistic and it is more like a hodge podge of various parties forming a grand coalition that represents an ideology. Even the current French president Emmanuel Macron’s so-called “party”, Ensemble, is a coalition of centrist parties.

If you want to find out more about France’s current deadlock, here is a good succinct video explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Q5nCCF5ck

I’m amazed that “chaos” there in France is more like “normal”. I remember some riots that happened couple of years ago and one commenter said France might verge into collapsing. I thought to myself that those who think that are not aware how France works, and rioting is a tradition since the French Revolution.

Funny you mentioned, I’ve been thinking about the first Splinter Cell game lately lol.

To catch a thief, you must set another thief to catch him.

To catch a pedophile-

I see that the St Petersburg Research Centre is still thriving after Prigozhin’s death.

The Russians themselves were also detected to be building up troop numbers in Southern Kursk just opposite of Sumy. The Ukrainians cleverly used that to send troops to Sumy, which the Russians must have thought that it was a countermove to defend against them, to mask their true intentions of going on the offensive. The Ukrainians merely turned the operational table on to the Russians.

That being said, with hindsight, the earlier attacks on Belgorod by anti-Putin Russians could have been probing attacks to identify weakpoints in the Russian border. Or perhaps to distract the Russians and redirect troops away from other areas. Or both. All of these are clever and creative plans by Kyiv; and they played their hands well.

Best outcome she could have is she could get early parole, or serve some years of her sentence while the rest is suspended. There have been cases before of victims killing their captors/traffickers and received long term prison sentence, but were later paroled or their sentence had been reduced or commuted to something more lenient.

For a company that pushes so hard to have family friendly image, they had to pull this ridiculous stunt.