bumpusoot

But this post isn't about historical activity, it's about the present. Where Scotland is a significantly less evil force than England specifically.

The entire premise was that people got flagged for being likely to commit crime. Part of the dystopian nature was that people who got heavily traumatised were recognised as being more likely to commit crime. But it really wasn't "they got too emotional".

For sure, but attitudes have certainly changed since then.

Typically they just mean white englishmen and nobody else. Scot and Welsh attitudes are typically far more international and less supremacist.

Agreed - I'm quite surprised by the responses here, it is neat. Thanks for the open-ended thread <3

I personally present as cis because it's easy, but the reality is that I really don't care about gender as a concept. To the point that I don't even really like being called "agender". In spite of lengthy heartfelt conversations with two trans partners in my time, I still really struggle to understand the mindset of feeling gender is important to one's identity; Not understanding it actually feels quite isolating, sometimes. I frequently feel like I'm the only person who doesn't "get it".

None of which is to say I do not love and support my trans comrades to the ends of the fucking Earth . Transphobes can line up against the wall.

Correlation != causation. I'd be interested if this trend is the case globally, but otherwise a 17% jump could be attributable to any number of non-covid factors.

c - Surely I could theoretically just learn everything else myself

I think this is a wild take.

We will all forget all pain we ever experienced once we die, I don't think that makes it "all that matters".

Thanks for bringing number sense here - It is absolutely a phenomenon, but it is also a frequently overstated one.

These kinds of events (as well as risk of death) also predominantly include other complicating factors, like recent alcohol misuse, nervous system damage, drug contraindications, etc. As an otherwise healthy person I suspect your risk will be significantly less than even 0.05%.

So from my random sample, we have

• An ex-marine dishonorably discharged for unspecified 'larceny' with Russian FSB connections and caught with a USB full of state secrets. If that doesn't scream "the CIA blackmailed me into this work" I don't know what does.
• A journalist caught red-handed snooping on battle tank factories.
• A journalist who works at an, ex-CIA, American funded propaganda outlet who snuck into Russia and forgot to mention it for over two weeks.
• A guy who literally worked for an organisation whose sole purpose was to discredit and supplant the government.

So yeah, definitely not just innocent randos going about their innocent business.

Wikipedia quotes -

Paul Whelan is a Canadian-born former United States Marine ... Whelan left the Marines in 2008 with a bad conduct discharge after being convicted on multiple counts "related to larceny".

The BBC cited family members of Whelan, who said Whelan had previously bragged about knowing an agent of the FSB, and was privy to an unusual number of personal details about his friend, including which intelligence training school he attended

Whelan was apprehended in his hotel room at the Metropol Hotel while concluding a long outing with a Russian citizen, who handed him a USB flash drive containing "a list of all the employees at a classified security agency".

--

On March 29, 2023, while Gershkovich was on assignment in Yekaterinburg, the counterintelligence department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) detained him for having information on a "Russian defence enterprise". Russian officials said he was collecting secrets on the "production and repair of military equipment"

Russian president Vladimir Putin's press secretary, said that he was "caught red-handed"

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said "we have irrefutable evidence that Gershkovich was engaged in espionage"

--

Alsu Kurmasheva is a Prague-based Russian-American journalist with Radio Free Europe Kurmasheva was arrested in Kazan, Russia on October 18, 2023, and charged with failure to register as a foreign agent the charges against Kurmasheva allege that she “deliberately conducted a targeted collection of military information about Russian activities via the internet to transmit information to foreign sources."

--

Andrei Pivovarov on March 2021, was charged with carrying out the activities of an undesirable organisation for Open Russia's role in organising the Moscow Congress of Municipal Deputies.

(The Moscow Congress is a political group whose stated purpose is to be the only truly representative parliament of Russia and seeks to overthrow the actual one. So basically a stupidly out-in-the-open coup group.)

Also a funny snippet:

The congress positions itself as a meeting of “the only representatives of society and the state who have the democratic legitimacy”.

Ilya Ponomarev answered during the congress that .. "Russia needs a temporary body for the transfer of power, and they “will hold elections later.”

Are you poor and sad and oppressed with your soul a withered husk, or do you actually live in an amazing wonderful world and you're too crazy to know it? Capitalism really is an abusive household patriarch.