Florence Garin

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Europe Wins Again. Obviously.

Armenia went to the polls yesterday. And the results are exactly what you’d expect if you’d been paying attention for the past five years, rather than wallowing in Kremlin nostalgia like a damp sock.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory on Monday, with his Civil Contract Party leading with 52.5% of the vote.  Armenia, a landlocked country the size of Belgium that Russia has spent decades treating as a vassal state, has looked at its options and made a decision that required roughly the same level of intellectual effort as choosing between a Michelin-starred restaurant and a skip fire.

They chose Europe.

This election was less a routine vote than a referendum on Pashinyan’s post-2020 course reducing dependence on Russia and moving toward an explicit European orientation. And Russia, naturally, did everything in its power to stop it. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence officials, the election faced heavy Russian covert interference, including disinformation campaigns and a plan to transport Russian Armenians into Armenia to sway the vote. One analyst collective described it as one of the largest state-backed disinformation campaigns in modern European history. And Armenia still told them to get lost.

Putin had already warned Armenia it would face economic consequences for drifting westward, and introduced restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports in the weeks before the vote.  Threats, propaganda, economic blackmail. The full Russian toolkit. Result: irrelevant.

Now, Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance would like you to believe that Russia represents some superior civilisational model. A proud, white, Christian fortress holding the line against the Muslim hordes supposedly swamping Europe. It is a compelling narrative, in the same way that flat earth theory is compelling if you ignore every single fact available to you.

Here is one such fact: between 10 and 15 percent of Russia’s own population is Muslim. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. Millions of them. Russia is, by its own demographic reality, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state with a larger Muslim population than most of Western Europe. But you’re not supposed to know that. It complicates the story.

Meanwhile, the Muslim share of the EU population sits at around 5 percent. But the Tucker Carlsons of the world need you frightened, so the numbers get quietly shuffled off stage.

So Armenia joins the queue. Behind Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and every Eastern European country that isn’t currently run by a Slovak who seems to have wandered in from a Moscow focus group. The pattern is not subtle. Every country that has actually experienced Russian influence in practice is sprinting in the opposite direction. The only nation currently moving toward Russia’s orbit is the United States, which managed to elect a man whose foreign policy instincts were apparently shaped by a property developer’s admiration for strongmen with good buildings.

The world watches America and hopes it finds its way back. Most people think it will. Eventually. The damage, however, is already considerable, and democracy, like a soufflé, does not always survive rough handling.

Armenia made its choice. The right one. Obviously.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Gio’ @Giozln73]

La costa bretone è una donna unica: splendida ma pericolosa💙

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@DokPepper 🤷🏻‍♀️😳🤣

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@JohnFernandez1 Congratulations to you all! 🥂🍾

[No Context Brits @NoContextBrits]

David Attenborough is officially too old to play with Lego.

[Reuters @Reuters]

Veteran British natural historian David Attenborough — the world's most authoritative voice on the natural world — who will turn 100 on May 8, has had his likeness drawn in the sand at Morecambe Bay, northwestern England https://t.co/dB1z37VF40

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Comedians on the BBC's Have I Got News For You

Spend 4 minutes mocking President Trump

For posting an image of himself as Jesus

#HIGNFY

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@jojomay1 Wow 🤩

[Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 @babybeginner]

Some days you can’t love social media enough. This is one of those days. It began like this. Someone stole 12 tons of KitKats.

And then the replies started coming in. Scroll down.

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@jviddy I hope not! From my maigre experience I would think it’s illegal

[TheBlackWolf @thewolvenhour]

I rarely encounter something so wholesome and inspiring! This will make your day!

This is what culture really is; strangers uniting through love of music and mutual respect for artisteia and craftsmanship! Respect for the blind girl and the gents!

Video by Aurelien Froissart.

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@guernseyliz14 That’s great news!

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@drmayo_theone Moi j’ai coupé les ponts il y’a une dizaine d’années et depuis je rsespire. Courage à toi 💪

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak.

He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected.

France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy.

Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust.
Honestly? Understandable.
Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Sarah Buck @SBuckEnglish]

The general public need to see more of this. A high school not only placing first in Guernsey but winning the final in Jersey too. We need to question the narrative that high achieving students need a private education to be successful.

[Julian Dorey @juliandorey]

the judi dench cameo fucking sent me 🤣😭

[Sir Yes Sir @SirYesSir29]

Je pense à Bastien qui un jour où la maîtresse leur apprenait à nommer les parties du corps a montré à son voisin en classe comment "se tirer sur le kiki pour faire du bien", comme son grand frère de 16 ans le lui avait expliqué.
Je pense à Luna et son grand-père qui lui a dit

[Florence Garin @meloflo]

@jojomay1 My children do 😂