Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

I must say that it’s the rare case that I see an upvoted comment on the fediverse that, behind a veil of ignorance ( https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignorance ), agrees with Israel-supporting Jewish biologist and professor Jerry A. Coyne on anything. ( As per https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/15/a-few-thoughts-on-the-war/ he also no longer finds a two-state solution viable. )

With that in mind I’m deeply troubled by one of the comments made in the comments section of the linked article.

Tuvi Todd
A “2-State Solution” would be a step backwards, where now there are already 3 states:
- a peace-loving Jewish State of Israel,
- a terror sponsoring PA “state” in the “West Bank”, and
- a war criminal PA “state” in Gaza/

But this is completely wrong and bonkers. The middle comment is the most off, the West Bank is under Israeli military control and the nominal authority, the Palestine Authority, doesn’t exercise any actual control over the territory (as it should be).

The third comment is also off, as neither Gaza or Hamas are independently recognized by any country as a state, and unlike the Palestine Authority lack status or any sort of recognition in the UN. (Also Hamas explicitly rejects the authority of the PA from what I understand, so calling it a PA state is also too much of a stretch.)

Only the first comment is accurate in terms of statehood - but I can’t really agree with the peace-loving comment.

And, the last two should receive no international assistance, unless they end their support for
“The Palestinian Resistance” of murder, terrorism, and war crimes.

But the PA did - https://www.jfeed.com/news-israel/spzypn

{A} - The Jewish State of Israel targets only Islamic Jihadist militants in northern Gaza attacks, who
-2- Use schools, hospitals, cities, and civilians as human-shield, and thus {B} - Only Gaza’s Islamic Jihadist militants are responsible for all the subsequent -2- Killings of over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza attacks

I feel that this ignores a lot - in particular the recent news report of a hospital being mistakenly misidentified as hosting a hidden underground military base - because it got confused with a school that was next to the hospital that had some odd markings, https://news.sky.com/story/gaza-hospital-attack-analysis-contradicts-israels-evidence-justifying-airstrike-13367823

Or the concerns from Holocaust survivors such as Veronika Cohen about how the war is hurting innocent Gazan children, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza

So a couple of thoughts here.

First of all, the page itself just correctly warns that orcas can’t just be freed. It’s not like we should go ahead and literally dump them into the ocean and abandon them. No one is advocating for this. Doing this generally with most types of animals still causes all kinds of problems (see for example https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/23/snakehead.poison/index.html )

On the flip side, when a well prepared effort is launched, captive orcas have survived in the wild successfully. See https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/Vasilievna for a good example - and this is what folks are pushing for.

Finally, I have some concerns about the source itself. From https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental/_Literacy/_Council it seems that enviroliteracy.org is part of the George C. Marshall Institute.

In case you don’t know much about that institute, here’s the most important bits:

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a “non-profit” organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon’s Exxon Education Foundation.
Its nominal creators, aside from Exxon-related entities and others, were William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow. This industry and right-wing front group

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George%5C_C.%5C_Marshall%5C_Institute

The article doesn’t really explain why though.

Captive-born dolphins have been successfully released into the wild before, see for example: https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

“Annessa, a captive-born Atlantic bottle-nose dolphin held at the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, disappeared and was feared lost during a hurricane in August, 1992. Annessa survived the hurricane, however, and was adopted by a pod of wild dolphins. She has been sighted numerous times - healthy and foraging on her own. One dolphin; Captive since birth; followup successful.”

Edit: Oops https://whalescientists.com/captive-dolphins-release/ were still wild born. Replaced with a better example

They can be, albeit that it may require some serious $$$ to actually do it the right way, but it’s been done before, the most famous example being https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/story-keiko-first-captive-orca-returned-wild/

Edit: and for dolphins born in captivity, see https://www.thedodo.com/another-seaworld-myth-debunked-751539462.html

I hear what you’re saying. Just remember that Cygnus Solutions and Red Hat, both prominent commercial supporter of FOSS, were based in and headquartered in the US when they were independent companies. (Now they’re both part of IBM.)

Even the Linux Foundation and the Free Software Foundation have to obey US sanctions - LF is based in San Francisco and the FSF is based in Boston.

Going FOSS is good, but the US abusing their sanctions powers is a different kettle of fish.

The reponse is going balls deep on Foss but I don’t think your avg westoid regime is willing to open that Pandora’s box.

I mean, GMail is from Google who uses Linux/GNU extensively (as per https://www.computerworld.com/article/1612523/the-story-behind-google-s-in-house-desktop-linux.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175182 )

Even M$ supports using Outlook on Linux/GNU via the webapps (see https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-365-and-outlook-for-linux/0eeaef13-c337-4c92-8260-8ac7fdf4df9f ) and back in the day they ran Hotmail on FreeBSD ( see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31113296 )

The issue here isn’t the use of FOSS per se but that these folks aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to run things themselves - they’d rather pay someone else to do it. They want “enterprise customer support” and all that. And then whoever they pay might end up bailing out due to fear of US sanctions … which sadly even Swiss banks aren’t immune to.

Either EU can do it now or later

The sooner they stop/prevent/workaround the abuse of power by the US here, the better.

The US should no longer be allowed to lead the international banking system. Under the current administration, they’ve proven that they can’t be trusted with that kind of power anymore.

Unpopular opinion here but

The choice of M$ - made before the sanctions - was likely just a case of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”

I’m quite worried here actually - M$ did this not because they sided with Netanyahu or against Palestine, but because the US threw its might and compelled M$ to do so. The article says the chief had to move to Proton Mail which is a Swiss provider. While the Swiss have historically been independent and unyielding to foreign pressure, the US got them to agree to information sharing under FATCA (see https://international-adviser.com/us-and-switzerland-finally-seal-delayed-double-tax-deal/ and https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/switzerland-us-agree-exchange-financial-account-data-2024-06-27/ )

So, worried. How long before the US comes and tries to sanction Proton Mail? The free world needs to come up with a response to this and prevent the US from abusing it’s power here. Perhaps the free world needs to sanction the US and kick them out of our international banking system before it’s too late?

And in an alternate universe where Harris won and the US was using its sanction power responsibly, it’s not that unreasonable to go with M$. As per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/office-365-us-government/gcc-high-and-dod M$ actually has offerings tailored to highly classified and secure agencies. (Not that I’d go with M$. I’m just saying I get why a bunch of intelligent lawyers and prosecutors who aren’t particularly tech savvy would say yes to M$.)

It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

Agreed. This isn’t the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

Not the OP but - I’d agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

Now, while it’s definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an “administrative error” of some sort, there’s no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

They’re doing everything by the book.

I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver’s license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn’t have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?

They’re following the law.

Never stated otherwise.

They never saw the vote. They can’t count it,

I get what you’re saying, but it’s still disturbing that EC can cause a mistake of this nature and not have the ability to rectify it.

Certainly this isn’t the worst case of disenfranchisement by Elections Canada (see for example https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/this-is-unacceptable-polling-station-problems-prompt-calls-for-investigation/ )

it has to go to court.

Thinking it over, there’s a good counterargument here. Even if EC could directly order a by-election in this case (or even was given the power to just outright count the vote), someone would contest this and it’d likely end up before a judge at some point anyways. So might as well just go direct.

Then make an application to a judge to challenge the result and they will have to count it.

I’m not sure that I’m eligible to do this…

Truly, it should be the BQ that does it. I’m guessing they will in the coming days.

Agreed. This isn’t so bad, at least there’s a way forward.

Agreed. What an unfortunate finding by EC. As a matter of principle I believe every vote should have a chance to get counted.

What’s extra unfortunate about this is that in a slightly different set of circumstances (if she had been able to stay in Italy this whole time) she’d now be near the time where she’d qualify for permanent residence

https://italianvisa.it/residence-permits-italy/

Which would have allowed her the ability to live and work in another EU country legally (such as Germany)

https://www.mazzeschi.it/mobility-rights-of-third-country-nationals-in-the-european-union/

I’m not here to second guess her choices, it’s just sad to see that she’s being deported from a place that she should have been close to obtaining legitimate status in. But I believe that there’s a silver lining - correct me if I’m wrong but I believe she’s still able to use this pathway.

In other words, she’ll be back.

When we did drivers ed in Ontario, our class instructor introduced us to ratehub.ca for this sort of thing - that was for auto but it looks like they let you compare home insurance rates.

Agree 100%

I was having a discussion the other day with someone and it was pointed out that pp grew the number of seats for the CPC and strengthened their position in winning the next election. Thus, unlike Jagmeet Singh of the NDP or Peter Dutton of the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia (who oversaw massive losses in their party) Dutton deserves to win a seat back and remain the leader of the CPC as well as the opposition leader.

Actually, I’m looking for a good, well reasoned counterargument to this (for when I bring it up again tomorrow).

Makes me wonder how they started with Liberal in their name. Perhaps they were liberal from when they formed a hundred years ago and just never updated any of their positions or stances?

Love this idea. Yes, everyone should have a say and have representation of their choice!

This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.

Agree 100%, we definitely need to move to PR ASAP.

With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.

Elsewhere on the piefediverse I’ve seen the argument made that PR also generally leads to other benefits like better cooperation between candidates and less mudslinging.

The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.

I mean it does have it’s uses. The byelection for the two Georgia Senate seats back in 2020 (technically a pair of runoff elections) is what ensured the Dems senate majority back then.