cool thing about the beehaw feed
@remington Hey, don't keep it all to yourself. Give us some, too!
@BevelGear That's a tough question, but I think this is achievable, even in the current times. Top of my head come two things that make me think this would be doable, based on historical events:
- Fear (generaly of WMD) and cost: As cynical as it could sound, if people get too afraid, they might not resort to war in order to solve their problems. The Cold War showed this: two hostile superpowers, owning the bulk of nuclear weapons on Earth, never got to war directly one against the other. India and Pakistan are both nuclear states, yet they did not escalate any skirmish to a full-blown conflict. Same as India and China. As for Ukraine, well, you can see what happened after the Budapest Memorandum - none of the signing parts managed to properly and adequately protect it from aggression, one being the aggressor itself. While it is true that Ukraine also invaded parts of Russia in the meanwhile, as a retaliation, we're not sure to which extent the nuclear arsenal of the latter is still working, and the West has been very reluctant on allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia using their weapons, due to this exact same reason, so the point still stands. Basically, if the aggressor has to pay a high price for invading another country and suffer retaliatory measures coming up from the aggressed country, the aggressor will be deterred.
- Democracy (the true one, not the Russia style one): This also fits into cost, but it also lowers the level to which the cost of an invasion is acceptable. All military actions are decided by the leaders of the various countries. In a dictatorship, the cost the dictators have to face is pretty low by their standards. True democracies are less warmongering. You'll never see a democratic country being at risk of waging war against others. That is because the cost that a leader can suffer due to war can be pretty high: they can lose their seat, their party might lose power, and they can even be jailed if various misdemeanors can happen (civilian casualties, war crimes etc.). That's one of the reasons why Western made weapons are in such a low number and so high-tech and so precise, compared to the older Soviet-style weapons manufactured in my part of the world (who are more designed to be used en-masse to achieve the same efficiency) - the cost of using them by the militaries has to be lower. More importantly, democracies rarely, if ever, wage wars against one another. I cannot really explain this situation, but all I know is that it just happens. Democracies however have a chance of waging war against autocracies, out of fear that the democratic system might be threatened by them. They are more commonly seen as a way to defend themselves.
While I do not know, this makes you feel better, I do hope you now know where to look if you want to find a better answer 😁 And no, I did not use ChatGPT or any AI for this (although I think it will now know the answer itself), I'm just an International Relations graduate. At least there's some place where I can put my knowledge to good use, hurray!
@shortwavesurfer people have been using gold for way longer during our existence and it's been way worse before.
@tanakian both Moldova and Transnistria hold parts of their territory on each other's side of the Dniester river. I think that's where the elections were held by Moldova. Otherwise, I don't know.
@tanakian afaik they do. Transnistria is still a territory internationally recognized as part of Moldova so elections were held there as well. What was curious is that Maia Sandu and the pro-EU camp got more votes than Găgăuzia, which is just an autonomous territory.
@remington The edit to my previous comment doesn't seem to appear on Beehaw, but here are a few snippets of what Georgescu said in all his glory:
@iii He really was unknown, and I can tell you that as a Romanian. He was actually more known by some parts of our political establishment (or should I say, our former political establishment now) than the public. Literally every single person I spoke with was like, "who is this guy? I don't know him. I only read about him a few days ago". So no, it's not like he had any public notoriety at all. Many people said online that they voted for him especially because he was unknown and wanted to "waste"/"cancel" their vote. I personally barely heard about him, I remember I heard about him when he was proposed by AUR as a prime minister a few years ago and that was it, I completely forgot about him again.
I only heard about him a few weeks prior to the election, but I always thought it was some weird ass candidate who thinks he'll win the elections, but will barely gather 5% at best (we have these types across all the political spectrum). Then I also Googled a bit to find more info about him and found who he actually is. But I still thought he won't reach the mainstream. Again, there are people that were more vocal during the campaigns, and they didn't even reach 10%.
For reference, Trump had appeared in various TV shows like Fox&Friends or The Celebrity Apprentice, he appeared in the Home Alone series, he even got the Trump Tower. And overall, he was a really notorious and successful businessman. Georgescu had none of these. So even if the people were justified to vote for him (hell, I'm not denying this, vote for whoever you want, we're a democracy after all), given this fact and declarations like the chance of Romania is the Russian wisdom and others like that, this is something that should be investigated.
@iii Nobody said that. It is not about not liking the outcome of an election. It is about the unchecked active disinformation happening there that literally brought a schizo who practices pseudoscience in the 1st place.
And it is also about DSA.
@remington Yea, I do. And I did as well. However, I kinda feel this guy is actually worse, lol. Like, the dude is almost a schizo, hardly has any idea how tech and social media actually works and looks like he was backed by whatever secret intelligence or anything. There's no way this guy would jump from total irrelevance with almost no public exposure as well (orange guy did appear in various TV shows fwiw). For example, he said he doesn't use his phone because he fears 5G, yet he uses the headsets instead.
@remington Romanian here. It's all just so surreal...
Key takeaways after the election results (it's 10:28 now and the votes are still counted, but I will edit/update this as necessary):
- The Romanian democracy still works! Despite Iohannis, Ciolacu and other influent politicians' best efforts, despite the intelligence increased inference in the politics, there is still room for surprise. Whether Georgescu was supported by the Romanian intelligence in a bid to get a runoff between Ciolacu and him (to the advantage of the latter) or by the Russian intelligence to get a pro-Russian president in one of the most important Eastern flanc members, that remains to be seen. The thing is that, politically, neither Georgescu nor Lasconi were widely known on a national level before the elections. Georgescu has been previously proposed by AUR as a prime minister while a member of it and Lasconi previously won the City Hall of a small mountain town called Câmpulung Muscel (after this summer, she was now at her 2nd term). But both were pretty much no-namers in the national politics.
- Lasconi showed herself unprepared in the debate and it showed. Now she has to prepare herself a lot more than she should have done before if she wants to win the race. I do not think it's enough for her to pose as the more democratic candidate. Also, any democratic party (or at least that calls itself democratic - looking at your PSD and PNL) should back her and support her with all their power. PSD should give its entire apparatus to her in these elections, or else it has much to lose after these elections. These are the first ever elections after 1989, where none of the established parties made it to the 2nd round. I don't think however that Lasconi will get unconditional support from them, as she would do in an ideal world. This leads us to...
- This will be the first ideological battle for the seat of the president after a long time. I'm not sure if in the 1990s the situation was different, with Iliescu running against Ion Rațiu, or Radu Câmpeanu, or even Emil Constantinescu for that matter. Probably in the 2000s when Iliescu ran against Vadim. But as of late, the discussion shifted a lot towards corruption or administrative related issues. Nonetheless, despite her conservative past, Lasconi called herself Kamala Harris of Romania (which was a bit cringe for me tbh, in this regard), so we will pretty much have a re-run of the US elections on a smaller scale, as Georgescu is an open fan of Ion Antonescu and the legionnaires, and had a court decision of him abusing his wife.
- I'm sorry, Andrew, the Matrix did not break today.
@SnokenKeekaGuard I was looking for an AI generated answer by the bot that I tagged. But thanks!
@Thorry84 Well, at least we now have 43 more people who joined Lemmy. And the pigeons.
@SnokenKeekaGuard @gpt what's the best mojito recipe?
@dragonfucker Have you tried looking for a gay answer?
@OpenStars bro, Chile the fk down!
@Kit Sorry for being late to this thread. As someone else said, if it's also getting cold where you live, you can put things outside, in the shade. Here there are 12 degrees Celsius, but in the night it will be 1. Either way, in my country, if there is any vegetable out there we pickle it (we're mostly doing this with cucumbers, green tomatoes carrots and cabbage, but you're free to experiment). Here's a simple recipe for that:
youtube.com/watch?v=Ql1sCw00Zz…
You're basically putting these vegetables into salty water, or in a mix with water and vinegar, along with other stuff. If it's not that cold, it's even better, as the vegetables will become pickled faster.
You can also search for Romanian pickles or reteta muraturi on YouTube (if you're okay with not understanding the language).
Another thing that we do is polenta. We usually eat it with cheese and sour cream, but as these require a fridge to keep, you're free not to use them.
youtube.com/watch?v=WUmbtQu1eL…
This video is in Romanian, but the steps seem pretty clear. Here's what you need:
- hominy
- 2 teaspoons of salt
- water
- butter/olive oil (optionally, for a more creamy consistency)
The rest should be self-explainatory.
@UngodlyAudrey Whatever you do, don't plan on moving to Eastern Europe. Trump will leave us all at the mercy of Russians.
That is, if you think the situation under the Russian influence will still be worse than under Trump
@ErsatzCoalButter too bad. Here's a Romanian Pepe
(Context, so you don't throw rocks at me)