This is not news. It was the same last year.

What? Now already? That’s sad.

I’m not sure how much you know about Eurovision, but each country’s jury is appointed by the participating national broadcaster, not the organisers. And we’ve seen before that if the points announced during the show are different from what a country’s jury voted, the national broadcaster loudly complains about it (see the 2022 jury drama). This means that if there was some conspiracy to give Sweden points, the broadcasters and their jury would have to be in on it too, including those of Finland, Moldova, Israel, etc (which all gave 12p to Sweden) – certainly not countries that have any interest in Sweden winning. I can’t imagine the EBU pulling this off and compromising their own integrity just for a nice anniversary.

I think the actual reason for the disparity between the jury vote and the televote is more nuanced than that. The makeup of the juries could play a role here: it’s only five people per country, and it’s largely radio hosts, TV personalities, and songwriters, who have already established themselves in the industry. So it’s not a conspiracy, just bias. Another factor is that the juries only give points to the countries they ranked at the very top; the 11th best song gets the same number of points as the 26th ranked song: zero. By design, this will mean one country or a few countries will get a big jury lead, then some countries get in the 100s of points, and most get less than 60 points. And the same with the televote. This year this was quite obvious, but it’s not the first time. In 2017, Salvador Sobral got even more jury points than Loreen got this year, but because he was also the televote favourite, no one said his victory was undeserved.

Not every Eastern European country is like Hungary though… In fact it’s only Hungary, now that Poland’s getting a new government.

Also it’s not like Western Europe’s free of populists either.

At least then limit your attacks on the Israeli military or police. Mass killing civilians does not do anything about the genocide of Palestine. There’s a good chance it’ll only make it worse.

The idea that people just being in a country are automatically complicit with the government’s actions is the real mental gymnastics here. And yeah I understand that hatred can make people blind, but that does not make it justifiable.

Shoot the person harassing you, sure. That’s something completely different from killing civillians arbitrarily.

I still have some Reddit Premium left, so I don’t get ads, so I don’t feel guilty about visiting the site occasionally. But I removed the link to Reddit from my task bar, so the times I visit the site is almost always just because I followed a link.
That said, I do miss Reddit a little bit. Kbin replaces it partially, but simply because if its size it’s much more likely you find something interesting on Reddit than on here.

This is such a well-produced video! From the cinematography to the voice lines

It’s weird if it’s real, but it’s also weird if it’s fake. That’d mean that they moved a lot of troops out of Ukraine, split them up with some heading to Moscow and others staying in Rostov, destroyed the morale of the Russian soldiers staying in Ukraine and allowed Ukraine to continue their counteroffensive, shot down six of their own helicopters and a plane in the conflict, and killed and wounded several of their own soldiers, all just for show. They could have done this so much more efficiently.