Harve

It might cause some conflict now but just like the split over things like migration policy libertarianism or the size of government/its debt, I imagine conservative consensus will always end up gravitating towards what its leader thinks when push comes to shove. I don't think a difference in opinion over something as remote as foreign policy will cause masses to break from MAGA.

The vibe certainly doesn't feel like merely 45% of Britain want to vote for right wing parties, although admittedly I am not actually in the UK. It's 10% higher than that here in France and yet we are not in our second consecutive summer of pogroms against ethnic minorities.

I only want to self-recycle one of two artists I sent last year atm so happy to stall out the opening till I discover something brand new.

Gosh. The US is losing its democracy quite fast.

ENDLESSLY fascinated by the opinions. Estonia's 2002 entry was a successful pop song sung by a blond woman whose dated cheesiness I thought would appeal to you and yet you rate it lower than their 2008 troll entry.

A bit of a grisly rabbit hole but there is a Wikipedia page for sole survivors of flight crashes. Vesna Vulovic is a sole survivor who notably fell 10km and survived which is the highest freefall survived after her plane was brought down by explosives planted by the Croatian far right.

The only country that uses it on our continent is Belarus. It's pretty fringe.

If I answer this much broader question entirely through the prism of UK Labour shenanigans then I disliked various aspects of Corbyn's leadership and felt quite centre-left then, even though I was still voting for the most leftwing mainstream party in the UK (Scottish Greens). But I hate Starmer. And Starmer's opposition leadership and now government has probably radicalised me leftwards.

The exceedingly rare Zanmatory-Skall silver medal swap 😭 Loved the winner but must admit I didn't expect it to do quite that well - congrats!!!

A rare occasion of giving my 18 to a song I already know!

Cody when he's about to finish 7-13th.

I am not sure about how these airlines are getting away with ditching safety protocols for style. We must have some lax civil aviation authorities!!

The Equestria flight experience tho

Hoping that Skall's image is indeed of an airship and not of a plane.

Omg Terra Avium throwback. Pretty sure that made my personal chart in like 2009 when it was already very retro. What's scary is that is now closer to the song's 1993 release than it is to today.

I work at Geneva Airport and since 2021 British people can easily end up queuing 1.5 hours going through passport control on landing the early afternoon. This routinely causes people to miss onward transport. It can be the same at Zurich. Split-second mild inconvenience? I can go through European gates and I've never queued more than 5 minutes.

(sorry for spoiling if you were still planning to watch a show that's two decades old)

The manifest of Oceanic Flight 815 have been through 6 seasons of TV sci-fi drama and its survivors have escaped their tropical island TWICE in the time that we've been waiting for this contest to start.

Skall have sent over a backup artist on their fastest airship.

I'd love to know the following: Total number of votes cast per entry, by country i.e. just the numerical breakdown of the result Total number of unique voters per entry Number of times a voter votes for a particular entry on average, which is just a function of the two values above When there is a surge of votes and how that differs by entry (when lines open/once song is performed/once all songs are performed and they play the recaps). Transparency would help!

No if you disagree with my love for passion fruit then that does not make you far right but there is obviously a context here. Some people just don't care about politics, or do care about politics but don't want it in Eurovision. Those two groups are probably the backbone of the entire contest. But if you are encouraged to vote for a country because you don't like that people are upset about the genocide that said country is carrying out then that is a political reaction. It's perfectly plausible that the song itself has legitimate fans (I loved Israel's 2021 entry! Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to vote for it today for explicitly political motivations), but other posts have explained why this doesn't explain its high score.

That top 3 sure is baller.

Getting maximum points is not necesssarily indicative of public opinion either. It's just that it's very easy for an entry like Israel's to be a lightningrod for the right wing bloc who have no reason to vote for any other entry, particularly if they are not actually interested in the contest as you admit, when the anti-Israel bloc - as well as those not interested in the political dimension which obviously is a huge number of people too - has their voting power split 25 (or 36) ways amongst everybody else. In a non-political sense getting maximum points doesn't suggest consensus - it's the reverse of the UK or Switzerland getting 0, which just means that they were few people's favourite when I doubt they were the most hated songs of many despite having the worst score. It would only explain majority opinion if there were two entries rather than 26, but with 26 you benefit from polarisation. If Israel had won it wouldn't have been a validation of public opinion regarding the song or the Palestinian genocide for that matter. It just confirms that there is a right wing voting bloc, which we already know. The existence of this bloc makes total sense when Israel sees the contest as a crucial tool to soften its image to the world and has invested so much into it/chosen blatent propaganda entries for the last two years.

Yeah, I do think that most of their televote is a quite an organic far right wing vote though, which exists in every country. Organic in the sense that they're not bought SIM cards but could still of course be for reasons entirely unrelated to the song. I don't think that part necessarily needs to be formally coerced by Israel and is just a consequence of their wider propaganda, although if there is an element of that for any single country's votes then I'd be interested in the investigation. I don't think there is a clean solution other than at a geopolitical level with a consensus established that Israel is a genocidal state and for the appropriate sanctions to follow on from that. But obviously that's bigger than this contest and we are nowhere near that. I do wonder what would happen if the contest was hosted in a country that formally recognises Palestine, which notably Sweden does.

I mean is this not the issue. Anyway enough about that fiasco from me. - Really surprised that Estonia did so well with the public - and ok with the jury - when San Marino/Iceland did terribly. I really thought they'd appeal similarly and was gutted for the latter in particular! - I see Italy as having a massively variable entry quality (I guess they do like to go for lots of different genres which is nice, but some are very much not appealing to me) but this does matter as they seem to do well every year. - Luxembourg jury flop oops, I thought it was an underdog for a really good jury score. - Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Portugal seem to have the strongest diaspora effect but I don't think their scores can be attributed entirely to that, nor can diasporas be relied on (= Switzerland has a huge Portuguese population especially in the French-speaking part but gave Portugal nothing).