#european statistics

[hometoursandotherstuff]

What every European country is the worst at.

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/what-every-european-country-is-the-worst-at/?

[emperornorton47]

I'm waiting for you to notice.

[bluishfrog]

dnf fuck raw

- 🎧

and they probably track it in a dataset. That's how you gather raw data

[gamer2002]

What happened to Western Europe?

[gemsofgreece]

Okay… 👀 I told you a few days ago I felt something was off, or up, with what I was seeing in the news. I feel like this is a proof of sorts for what I was sensing. I will explain this in English because there is a bunch of blogs here on tumblr that might care about that stuff.

This is an official poll by the statistics company MRB Hellas, asking what the opinion of the Greeks about the recently deceased ex King of Greece Constantine II is. 31.6% of the respondents have a positive / mostly positive opinion. 45.2 % have a negative / mostly negative opinion. 23.2 % haven’t decided / won’t answer.

For context, constitutional monarchy was abolished in Greece with a referendum in 1974, in which 69.2% of the Greeks voted against the return of the then exiled king and 30.8% voted in favour. Constantine remained ín exile for almost another forty years.

While the recent poll of course is not about the re-establishment of constitutional monarchy, it’s nevertheless interesting to make some comparisons. If we make the assumption that the percentage of people that voted in favour of the constitutional monarchy in 1974 also had a mostly positive opinion about the king’s person, then we see a remarkably unchanged portion of the population to retain that positive perception of him, where the elder death losses have been replenished by young supporters (30.8 to 31.6%). But the key here is the percentage of those who aren’t sure / won’t answer. We see a dramatic drop since the clear negative stance in 1974 (69.2 to 45.2 %) and a deficit that migrated to the percentage of those who are uncertain about the former king. In this group, I speculate the most common types of people must be:

those who are too young and not politically inquisitive enough in order to learn more about monarchy in Greece and Constantine’s reign in specific, so they are unsure of what to think

those who have read about him with a clearer judgement, since they are removed from the passions and turbulent times of the 70s and thus don’t have equally strong opinions

those who are very disappointed in the politicians and presidents of the last decades - their incompetence and corruption might have ruined the image of parliamentary republic for some people and therefore not feel as strongly for the referendum of 1974 anymore

those who are inclining towards a positive answer anyway but aren’t willing to state it openly because Constantine is still considered a sensitive topic in Greece up to this point

The reason I am not including a group secretly inclining towards a negative stance in the indecisive percentage is the exact same: the open, standard policy of Greece is to be very much against Constantine and everything he represented. Therefore people who inclined even slightly towards the negative stance would probably profess their opinion more boldly, encouraged by the popularity and acceptance of this stance. With this reasoning, I believe the indecisive inclined towards a negative stance are actually fewer.

In any case, it seems that according to this poll, the conviction that two thirds of the population loathe Constantine (and his institution?) and that this percentage can only grow larger as time passes might not represent the people anymore. Of course, we should not forget that this is simply a representative sample, so there is room for statistical error.

This poll is one of many conducted by MRB Hellas during the last days and they have been published as a group. Most newspapers include this poll with all the rest but they keep it towards the end of their article, without making any comment about it. The only exception I noticed was a newspaper that called the result of this poll “surprising”.

Tagging @greek-mythologies and @royaland who might find this interesting.

[enbycrip]

“Stone also discusses the phenomenon of what appears to be a trend towards waning interpersonal violence in England, at least, as the early modern era moved towards the modern. He discusses how the gendered practice of nobles and gentlemen habitually wearing swords as a mark of wealth and status in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both reflected and enabled the fact that interpersonal violence was common amongst the upper classes as amongst the lower in this period, quoting the case of the seventeenth century gentleman John Aubrey who was nearly killed due to sword attacks three times in his life; once by a drunk stranger in a London street, once during an argument amongst friends in legal chambers, and once “by the Earl of Pembroke during a disorderly election in Salisbury” .”

This is an excerpt from a postgrad essay I wrote last year about trends in interpersonal violence during the early modern into the modern period in the UK and Ireland. What I realised as I wrote; as a Scot; the society described reminded me intensely of how the modern US reads to me in the 21st century, minus the clear delineation of types of weapons as class signifiers. And ofc it’s not swords; it’s weapons that can kill multiple people in moments.

I *do* absolutely understand why trans folk, BIPOC folk and other marginalised and intersectionally-marginalised folk might want to own guns *in* that society ; when bigoted assholes are likely to target you I can entirely understand the feeling of safety in reciprocal arming. It’s the society where the idea that guns are desirable and glorified, and that an amount of interpersonal violence - not to mention state-on-marginalised-citizen violence - is acceptable that seems thoroughly difficult to understand - to me at least.

It’s not even gun laws that seem to be the issue, or at least not the entire issue; while the UK gun laws are unusually restrictive, gun deaths in both homicide and suicide seem to be considerably lower in most parts of the world that are not engaged in active armed hostilities than in the US, including states with reasonably lax gun laws.

In my essay, I noted a reduction in interpersonal violence throughout Europe during the period in question which was not due to weapon restrictions; not only were more destructive personal weapons being invented and becoming more affordable during that period, but the majority of interpersonal killings outside armed conflicts that took place during that time were not perpetrated by the more sophisticated weapons that were available then, but with sticks, stones and other improvised weapons. Not to mention that the reduction in interpersonal violence seemed to take place quite a bit earlier in northern than southern Europe; Stone particularly noted that the Italian states didn’t seem to see the reduction that had began in places like the Germanic states in the 17th century until well into the 19th. IIRC he was leaning towards vendetta culture as explanation for that, but the evidence for reasons is always much more open to interpretation that even early modern statistics. I prefer his explanation over some earlier authors’ racist ideas about “hot-blooded Italians”, at least.

(I can dig out the references here if anyone is interested in reading further. Stone is dry AF but very worth reading.)

[heikeee]

i won't lie i do like our new house and our new life but the fact that europeans don't have Air Conditioner Culture hurts me deeply. i'm a sweaty bitch specially on my hands and it's 30ºC indoors, i literally can't draw because the pen keeps slipping out of my hand

[adhdo5]

Do people realize every time they are annoying about Chinese people who live in China saying things about their living situation that aren't complaining the tankies get stronger

[pebblegalaxy]

The Belarus Border Crisis: Unraveling the Humanitarian and Geopolitical Challenge Testing the EU

In the harsh landscapes of Eastern Europe, a humanitarian and geopolitical storm is brewing at the border between Belarus and the European Union, revealing a crisis that transcends mere physical boundaries. Thousands of migrants, caught in a perilous struggle for survival, are entangled in a web of political maneuvers orchestrated by the authoritarian regime of Belarusian President Alexander…

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[mishkakagehishka]

Yknow for a while i've been noticing how often i'll see eastern europeans creating fucked up gore and i always wanted to say smth like "i guess that's just what being ee is like" but i feel like saying that would be equal to furthering stereotypes💀

[imaharrie]

I mean WC winners being usually European teams is a fact so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and? the current champion is South American so like it or not he had to eat his own words

[localbabygirl]

reading up on possible reasons for all this bullshit and i found out that as of 2024, 21% of US-americans are considered functionally illiterate. huh.

[metamatar]

some of you are being outflanked from the left by the jacobin. lol.

For many loyal Democrats, this will not compute. The Biden economy, party-loyal pundits have said over and over again, is tremendous — low unemployment, strong GDP growth, slowing inflation, a booming stock market — and anyone unhappy about it must simply be brainwashed. Out of view in this self-congratulatory hall of mirrors were the constant statistics that said otherwise: evictions up past pre-pandemic levels, record-high homelessness, cost-burdened renters at an all-time high, median household income lower than the last pre-pandemic year, inequality returning to pre-pandemic levels, and food insecurity and poverty growing by large double digits since 2021, including a historic spike in child poverty. Here’s another thing you might not have heard. Largely due to a trick of history, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a Democratic-controlled Congress, Trump was partly responsible for the creation of what the New York Times called “something akin to a European-style welfare state” in 2020 that reduced inequality and even helped some Americans improve their finances for a short spell — and under Biden, all of it went away. Sometimes that happened due to factors outside Biden’s control and sometimes because of his own decisions, but it always took place with little fight from the president, and it contributed to the ominous rise in hardship under his tenure. That meant not only adding to people’s already onerous monthly expenses — in one case in a self-imposed October surprise that made student loan repayment much more unforgiving for tens of millions of borrowers just before voting. It also saw twenty-five million people being thrown off their public health insurance, many of them in some of the battleground states Harris lost last night. Recall that one of Biden’s attack lines against Trump four years ago was that Trump was going to strip twenty million people of their health insurance. This might have been mitigated had the president passed the flagship policies on his agenda, helping people weather the storm of rising living costs. Those that he did enact he sometimes self-sabotaged. (...)

As a result, Harris’s run was a major downgrade from the 2020 Democratic effort. Biden’s never-passed ambitions to historically expand the social safety net became firmly relegated to distant memory, never to be revived; only the child tax credit and a modest expansion of Medicare benefits survived. The campaign combined a sharp rightward lurch on foreign policy and immigration with a handful of laudable populist proposals to ban price gouging and help out first-time homebuyers (while largely avoiding the national 5 percent rent cap that Biden desperately took on before dropping out and that had earlier made its way into the Democratic platform). Beyond the Medicare proposal and vague promises to protect and strengthen Obamacare, the idea of reforming the broken US health care system — one of Americans’ biggest and most anxiety-inducing costs — was almost entirely absent from the campaign. When voters in a Univision town hall came to Harris with their bleak personal stories of suffering under the health care system and asked how she would solve them, she could give them nothing, because her only real major health care policy was for those over sixty-five and already insured under Medicare.

[nervous-jester]

"sky why are you, a fandom blog, reblogging volleyball posts?"

because misogynists and islamo-fascist and homophobes in my country have been talking down, disrespecting, mocking, insulting, cursing our volleyball team because a) there are teo openly lesbian players in the team and b) 'volleyball shorts are too short they shouldn't represent a muslim country like that'(turkey is NOT muslim. its a secular country, even if it seems to be only on paper these days)

so this win was not just a sports victory, it was a big fuck you to everyone who tried to bring them down and shame them for who they are.