I don’t know about direct Russian funding, but it seems like the Russians have long used propaganda tools to generate false support on social media for Jill Stein https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russians-launched-pro-jill-stein-social-media-blitz-help-trump-n951166 And she has repeatedly chosen to hire/work with people very tightly tied with the MAGA movement https://www.salon.com/2024/09/23/jill-stein-paid-100000-to-a-consulting-firm-led-by-a-suspected-january-6-rioter/

While the two party system is a huge problem, it doesn’t seem controversial to say that a very conscious and long-term strategy for getting away from it is necessary, especially now. Why wouldn’t anti-democratic forces try to exploit third parties to siphon off and neutralize anti-fascist opinions? I get that the Democrats have loooads of issues, but that doesn’t mean just anything else is better. Unfortunately smaller parties can oftentimes be even easier to influence. And even in the most ideal case where all third parties would be good-faith actors you still have the fundamental issue that splintering into smaller groups doesn’t work unless they would all agree on supporting the same candidate to win in the current American system. Very frustrating and by design, yes!

Imagine if there was a candidate in the 60s that was obviously funded by the CCP and supported by its propaganda machine, which was plotting to surrender its country to the CCP, while being a vocal supporter of planned economics and thumping Mao’s little red book like the Bible. I think a lot of leftists would agree that such a party, though far-left on its face at least, would have been undemocratic at its core and not in the interest of the country itself.

It is in my mind very misleading to try to use an analogy with Bernie Sanders. Sanders, AFAIK, is not interested in upheaving democracy or selling out the country to Russia. This is fundamentally different from many current far-right parties in Eastern Europe.

Now, is it a wise strategy to straight up bar Georgescu’s party without explaining the reasoning as the article claims has been done? Perhaps not (though ample evidence supporting the decision has been provided previously by Romanian intelligence agencies). But one can understand why extreme measures might be called for to counter the electoral interference of a country that is actively invading your neighbor and has openly talked about wanting your country to become a puppet, too.

From ISW, "Georgescu has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership and “wisdom” and claimed in 2022 that Ukraine is an “invented state.” ( https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/likely-kremlin-backed-election-interference-against-romania-threatens-bucharests ) Could you find a similarly extreme and anti-democratic view espoused by a “far-left” leader that you think non-tankie leftists commonly support? If you still don’t see how extreme Georgescu’s party is and why they can be rightfully called a Russian agent I highly recommend checking out the ISW article, actually it’s well worth reading either way. Georgescu was even too explicit a Russian stooge for other ultranationalists to stomach (for a while).

I also really liked this part

“[…]I love Teslas,” he says. “I’m just trying to share what’s going on to better help the engineers to fix this super fast.”

He’s just so cute, the way he’s keeping his copes up despite everything

I’m not quite as convinced as you are that there was that deliberate a strategy to prolong the war and let it fester, and I still think the description of it as just an American proxy war is overly simplistic. But we do seem to agree on many points, most importantly that Ukraine should have gotten, and still should get, a lot more support and not be artificially restrained. Thanks for the chat.

The point was always that whatever “deal” was worked out, unless Ukraine would become part of NATO or have security guarantees with say NATO boots on the ground for decades, Russia would have only used the temporary pause to build up its forces while doing hybrid warfare, then try again in a couple of years. Also, it is misleading to characterize the war in Ukraine as an American proxy war, it ignores the complex relationships between all involved actors and most importantly ignores Ukrainian autonomy. Lastly, Netanyahu did “what Trump said” temporarily because it was in his interest to boost Trump as he expected to soon get Trump’s blessing to continue waging war on Palestinians (and it seems even Netanyahu was surprised by how emphatic Trump’s approval is).

Now, IMO Biden should have been much bolder in sending more military support to Ukraine and approving long-distance strikes etc., which would have encouraged other NATO allies to do the same. By trying to play it safe, Biden & co. ensured that the conflict would become more drawn out and expand, making things more dangerous for everyone. The Democratic Party and European allies could have used much more war rhetoric, painting Russia as enemy number one, to drum up more popular support at home, but again hesitated. The Biden admin also should have worked with the Ukrainians and other European allies on a realistic, sustainable peace deal rather than talking loosely about how Ukraine needed to “accept” that they would lose terrain while also saying Ukraine’s very reasonable security guarantee requests were “unrealistic”. But that’s very different. To suggest that Biden could have just said “ok stop, now peace” and created something lasting seems utterly out of touch with at least all of Russian politics ever since Putin came to power.

The “about” page indicates that the author is a freelance frontend UI/UX dev, that’s recently switched to “helping developers get better with AI” (paraphrased). Nothing about credentials/education related to AI development, only some hobby projects using preexisting AI solutions from what I saw. The post itself doesn’t have any sources/links to research about junior devs either, it’s all anecdotes and personal opinion. Sure looks like an AI grifter trying to grab attention by ranting about AI, with some pretty lukewarm criticism.

Of course, there are different opinions, but here’s my take (as a Swede, but not an expert in politics/history):

The issues didn’t start during the last decade. In the 90’s, it was politically decided that schools wouldn’t be nearly as centrally managed by the state as they had been, instead municipalities would handle most school-related politics and administration locally. It was also decided that parents are allowed to choose more freely where to send their kids. This weakened public schools. Moreover, legislation was introduced (in the 00’s I think but I’m not sure) that allows for-profit private schools, which historically AFAIK had been prohibited.

Parents usually don’t have to pay anything extra to send their kids to private schools, and for each private school pupil more tax money flows into the private instead of public schools. The private schools are of course incentivized to attract children from families that are well off, since they tend to perform better (boosting the school’s score and thus reputation), have parents that can e.g. drive them from a longer distance, and just generally have less issues and so cost and complain less. For instance, it’s been reported that some private schools refuse (openly or through loopholes) e.g. special needs pupils since the tax money paid to the school for them isn’t worth the cost (and “bad PR”, no doubt) of actually giving them a proper education.

Sweden has also had a high rate of immigration the last decades. Immigrant parents understandably tend to not be as savvy about the school system and have less time/resources for getting their kids to “nicer” schools further away. Immigrant kids also tend to require more attention, both due to needing to learn Swedish and because psychological problems, e.g PTSD, are more common among many immigrant groups. Also I haven’t seen any studies on this, but IMO the private schools’ advertisements (on billboards etc) tend to be very geared towards “white” kids/parents with no immigrant background.

In 2007 a tax benefit for “homework help” among other things was introduced, halving the price parents have to pay for private tutors at home. This again benefits families that are well off and lets private companies in education siphon tax money.

All this means a cycle of segregation seen in so many countries. Public schools are burdened with students that require more resources, while private schools do everything they can to snatch up low-maintenance pupils. This makes private schools seem to perform better and gives public schools bad reputations. Racism and class discrimination also plays into all this of course.

It also doesn’t help that teachers’ salaries and social standing have decreased, partly due to the same general patterns.

This degradation of the public school system has continued during both left-wing and right-wing governments, though it’s often accelerated during right-wing governance. For instance, the social democrats party was the one to push in the 90’s for shifting responsibilities from the state to municipalities. There is an ever growing issue with corruption across the political spectrum (but worst/most blatant on the right), where it’s become quite common for politicians to push for decisions that benefit private companies, then retiring from politics and joining said companies’ boards etc.

Do you mean you rigorously went through a hundred articles, asking DeepSeek to summarise them and then got relevant experts in the subject of the articles to rate the quality of answers? Could you tell us what percentage of the summaries that were found to introduce errors then? Literally 0?

Or do you mean that you tried having DeepSeek summarise a couple of articles, didn’t see anything obviously problematic, and figured it is doing fine? Replacing rigorous research and journalism by humans with a couple of quick AI prompts, which is the core of the issue that the article is getting at. Because if so, please reconsider how you evaluate (or trust others’ evaluations of) information tools which might help or help destroy democracy.

I am not from the USA (or any other part of the American continent for that matter). In a thread about protests against fascism in the US, taking place in the US, I think it’s fair to assume the “you” refers to US citizens. If there was a thread about Brazilian politics I would assume a similar post refers to Brazilians and that’s fine IMO. US exceptionalism is real and no doubt many US Lemmy users also fall into that trap, but this particular post just doesn’t seem problematic to me.

Well, a considerable proportion of these users are likely trolls/propagandists trying to fracture the non-fascists even more. It’s worth remembering that many people who protested against the Democratic Party’s approach to Israel voted for them anyway because they thought it was still the better alternative. There are true assholes in the world too of course, including pro-palestine ones, there are in any movement, but there is a risk that they are exaggerated and made to seem more common through the work of propagandists.

What would you then consider to be a “reliable source of information”? It sounds like your criteria for that are so high that it’s unlikely anything would reach up to that level. After all, should we ever trust any source as “the ultimate source of facts”? If all you wanted to point out was that noone can absolutely trust all of Wikipedia then fine I guess, but I would hope and doubt almost anyone here would have that mindset.

I would also say that many Wiki pages have a mix of overall neutral or positive-leaning text about the subject while e.g. a criticism section includes very good negative-leaning info. As an example, the Disney page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company) has mostly neutral or positive information about the company, no doubt much of which is written by Disney fans. But it also has a good and sometimes savage criticism and controversies section. I have of course seen Wiki articles that are very skewed, but I’ve also seen very skewed research articles, lexicon entries etc. Wikipedia’s rules and the community of moderators trying to apply them as best as they can gives it a better chance than many other sources to correct in time at least.

Another point is that less and less counts as “the most generic of things”. The basic facts of biological development, evolution, even meteorology and chemistry are being increasingly questioned with nonsense. There is an immense value in all the hard work poured into improving, spreading and preserving that “generic” information. Wikipedia is a collective treasure shared with all the world. It shouldn’t be taken as gospel, nothing should like you point out, but despite its imperfections it’s worth so, so much.