Aceticon

For the first part, let's just say that when I was a member of lemmy.world and commonly made posts critical of the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, I started receiving e-mails on the e-mail address I used to register in that instance, in my native language, from a Tel-Aviv based organisation inviting me for an online "Learn about Israel" course. I never make my e-mail public and as far as I know only instance Admins have access to that data about users, not moderators.

Another example: you can find a ton of pro-Israel posts by gedaliyah@lemmy.world, a !news@lemmy.world moderator who also "strangely" seems to specialize in opinating about other Middle Eastern nations (mind you, this is so overt I actually doubt they're a paid state actor - probably just an amateur far-right Israeli).

I've also seen and received some weird moderation actions in lemmy.world forums - for example like a post where I pointed out somemebody else's link to an article about something in China was to a think tank which gets funding from the Australian Defense Department, was moderated as "misinformation" when the "About Us" page in that site says exactly that they're funded by the Australian Defense Department. More broadly, posts in lemmy.world forums that relate to geostrategical "adversaries" and "allies" of countries like the US seem to attract way more moderation actions than pretty much anything else but outright spam and trolling.

Hardly proof of an abundance of state actors there, I know, but definitelly strange.

Also, purely from a "good management" point of view, it makes sense for state actors to concentrate their efforts on the largest instance and the larger forums in Lemmy, especially in terms of getting positions with power such as Admin and Moderator.

--

As for the rest, yeah, I should probably check votes when I spot a weird voting pattern.

I'm averse to checking people's voting because I feel like I should treat voting as a way for people to anonymously signal their opinion, but it does make sense to check it if I see what I think is an abnormal pattern.

This being posted in a Lemmy.world forum is especially poignant given that it seems to be by far the instance most riddled with state and political actors trying to manipulate opinions, with quite a number of those being actual instance admins or moderators of large forums there.

Beyond that and more in general, on certain subjects it's pretty obvious that there are people going around using either bots, multiple accounts or working in synchrony with others to "juice" the impact of their posts - you post something well thought and reasoned which is critical of one of such people's posts and when they respond to it with their own post, within a few minutes their post has 5 or 10 upvotes and yours the same downvotes, yet when you come back and check it hours later, unless it's deep down in a tread, everybody since has been upvoting your post with no upvotes for the other one.

In some things there's also this funny effect that might be due to bot/propaganda farms or geographical: for example, as an European with an European point of view, I'll often in Politics forums point out the hypocrisy of some things said and done by US Democrats and the tribalist types over here pretty much parroting the party propaganda line, because for me who have a far broader political culture than if had only experience American Politics, it's painfully obvious, and if I do that during the afternoon and night here (so morning and midday in the US), it quickly attracts a lot of downvotes, yet often if I check it out later, that post is slowly attracting more upvotes than downvotes and ends up with a slightly (or at times strongly) positive net vote, which I believe is either because there are actual organised propaganda activities on major Lemmy Political forums by the US Democrat Party and they focus on going after fresh posts in such forums and move on after a while (so their impact on votes is front-loaded) or people from geographical locations other than the US are far more likely to have a view on US politics similar to mine than Americans (so I'm getting more downvotes during US prime Lemmy-usage time and more upvotes the rest of the time).

Mind you, this is all self assessed "strange" observed patterns, so take it with a pinch and expect it to be heavily tainted with things like Confirmation Bias.

London Metropolitan Police, so the general police for most of London (not the City Of London, as that part has its own police force).

I say "general police" because there are specialist forces with police powers and London HQs, such as the Scotland Yard and the Serious Fraud Office.

I lived for over a decade in Britain as an immigrant and find it hilarious when Brits online tell me Britain has much less Racism that the rest of Europe.

The entire "anti"-Discrimination legislation over there is about punishing the overtly voicing of discriminatory statements not about stopping discriminatory practices: managing appearences, not "doing the right thing", mirroring the dominant social practices amongst the middle and upper class English (who control modern day British politics) of favoring heavilly managing appearences instead of behaving morally.

My impression has always been that this approach to discrimination - basically, swipe it under the rug by cracking down of what is said rather than what is done - just make acting in racist and mysogynistic ways be more common rather than less.

It's already known since WWII and the Battle Of Britain that bombing civilian populations doesn't decrease their resolve, quite the contrary.

Whilst some of Russia bombing (such as that of power generation) does make military sense, for the last year or so it looks like strategically Ukraine is way more effective at damaging Russian war efforts with long range attacks than the other way around.

Further, it also looks like Ukraine, with it's proportionally much smaller territory, is much more effective at AA defense.

It's funny that since Ukraine started making their own weaponry for in-depth attacks (as, shamelessly, Western powers did not provide them from the start with cruise missiles), Russia's "Big Country" advantage is being turned into a disadvantage.

Mate, I've lived and worked in several countries in Europe and come from a country - Portugal - which in many ways is culturally very similar to Greece, at least judging by conversations I had with Greek friends and colleagues over the years.

In my experience and view, Politics in general, including government, are definitelly the result of what a society considers "normal" and this doesn't apply to just the Southern European countries but also in my own experience to Western and Northern European ones.

Strictly speaking and as you say they are not the same, it's more of one being a reflection of the other: what politicians get away with reflects society's idea of "normal" and things like the cultural view on how strictly people should follow rules: in a country where the idea that "following rules is for suckers" is widespread, Politicians too will not tend to "stay within the rules" with the powers they've been entrusted with.

So for example, Corruption is Portugal is IMHO the natural reflection of a culture where Cronyism is widespread and pretty much standard all over the place (and, if you think about it, the Moral distance from "trading favours with paying strangers using the power entrusted to you" to "trading favours with friends using the power entrusted to you" is a lot less than the Moral distance to "thinking one has the responsability to not abuse power entrusted to oneself for one's own gain directly or indirectly") and the Law is seen as indicative rather than a set of boundaries that shouldn't be crossed (except when it comes to violence).

Interestingly and paradoxically, when things do start to change, acceptance of Corruption falls and and the fight against Corruption improves, the Perception of Corruption goes up because there are many more people being caught and convicted for Corruption and that ends up in the News, so it looks like there is more Corruption than before due to more News about it, when it's actually the opposite.

I'm Portuguese, working in IT.

Started my career in Portugal, were in Service domains it's so common for people to work 10h/day (with no overtime pay) that it's just seen as "the way thing are".

From Greek friends and colleagues I've had over the years, I've heard that Greek work culture is pretty similar to the Portuguese one.

After my first job, I moved to The Netherlands to work in the same area, were people have way better work-life balance, working longer hours is actually seen as a reflection of management incompetence (it means management is bad at planning and resourcing) and people tend to be strict about doing precisely 8h a day (to the point of me, working as a freelancer in Banking - which from my experience in several countries tends to fall towards working long hours - being told by a manager at 6:05 PM on a Friday whilst staying there of my own initiative to just finish something, to "go home, you're not supposed to be here").

Anyway, my weekly productivity measured in terms of actual results (software requirements implemented that actually worked as specified) in The Netherlands working 8h/day completelly blew out of the water my productivity in Portugal working 10h/day.

Even better, some years later I moved to Finance in Britain (typically a long-hours environment) and kept working like in The Netherlands (both in terms of doing exactly 8h/day and of the way I worked) and my productivity was well above that of my colleagues doing the whole long hours thing, plus I was way more reliable in terms of the quality of deliverables and fullfilling estimated deadlines.

At least in areas where you have to actually use your brain a lot to do your work, long hours is about the most idiotic thing imaginable and, IMHO, a reflection of a management culture were incompetence is a systemic problem.

I bet that in Greece, like in my own country, Politicians are the worst of all managers (sales-oriented people tend to be horrible managers, and politicians are ideas salesmen) from a management culture which itself is already total crap, hence it makes absolute sense for them to think that 13h work days is a good thing.

What I'm waiting for here is the reaction of Italian dockworkers to the Italian frigate doing absolutelly nothing when the Sumud Flotilla was attacked by an Israeli force in International Waters, which is literally an act of Piracy.

I am massivelly curious about what the reaction of Italian dockworkers to the Italian frigate doing jack-shit nothing will be ...

Portmanteau!

They actually showed bits of both speeches on TV news around here (I'm not in the US) and these guys are like a clown version of the Nazis.

I strongly suspect the Israelis were running OPs in Europe similar to the one they ran with Epstein in the US and have a ton of blackmail material on ruling European politicians.