US market not worth the risk, says one of India's biggest solar companies
Saatvik Green Energy, one of India's biggest solar module makers by capacity, said on Thursday it is shunning the once-promising U.S. export market as it is no longer "worth the risk" due to the thorny tariff issue
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4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act
If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23 million or 10 percent of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or "imprisonment for a term of up to two years," the lawsuit said.
4chan fined $26K for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act
4chan fine may test if US will intervene to block UK’s Online Safety Act.Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)
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Then 4chan shouldn't do business in the UK by selling 4chan passes there.
4chan should just block UK IPs. They already ban VPN IPs from posting, so obviously they have some infrastructure there to support that.
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"allow"
Seems to me as if the people in the UK sign up with an american company.
4chan has not disabled accepting payments from UK residents through their Coinbase portal. Therefore they are allowing UK residents to pay them.
4chan is not geo blocking UK visitors in their Cloudflare portal, so they are allowing UK residents to visit their site.
4chan wants all the benefits of UK business without obeying their laws.
4chan isn't in the UK and has no reason to figure out what laws apply there.
When you made this post, did you first check which countries your post ended up in?
4chan agreed to the terms of service agreement here:
coinbase.com/legal/user_agreem…
- Legislative and regulatory changes or actions at the state, federal, or international level may adversely affect the use, transfer, exchange, and value of virtual currency.
That means they agree their business can be affected by international regulations.
I know, its hard to believe your eyes, but it does say they can be adversely affected by international legislation and regulations if they want to do business there.
They could always opt to use a US-based payment processor that doesn't deal with international payments.
Your company’s policies, procedures, and activities which relate to the Services, in each case to the extent reasonably necessary for Coinbase to comply with any applicable laws, rules, and regulations (including money laundering statutes, regulations and conventions of the United States or other jurisdictions), or the guidance or direction of, or request from, any regulatory authority or financial institution.
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4Chan doesn’t have their own personal payment processor that they’re responsible for. They’re tied into processors like stripe and accept all payments that make it to them on the US side. So long as it is legal, which is typically the only way that a payment actually goes through as processors refuse the obviously illegal cases like encompassing embargoes. If the UK doesn’t want payments going to 4chan through a processor that operates in their country, it’s on them to stop the payment processor on their end.
The UK knows this, the fines are just one step towards them petitioning processors.
Imagine for a moment that 4chan is a business that sells alcoholic beverages in the US. Now imagine the UK has instituted prohibition and banned the consumption of alcohol.
now, some enterprising individuals have taken it upon themselves to buy, smuggle, and then sell those beverages inside the UK.
Clearly, the government has intended to ban the consumption of alcohol, not the sale of it.
Now the UK government is trying to shackle hefty fines against an American company for having the "audacity" of selling a product to an individual within the confines of the US.
again, the UK banned the consumption of alcohol, not the sale of. 4Chan isn't forcing UK citizens to drink the alcohol. They are simply selling the product, within their country of origin, to individuals who want to purchase it.
now, do you still think the UK government has a right to fine 4chan or do you think maybe the UK government should elaborate on their prohibition regulations to ensure their citizens are properly "protected"?
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Okkkkkay so I'll play your hypothetical game.
So in your scenario here, some enterprising individuals start off by smuggling alcohol into the UK. By definition according to Merriam-Webster, smuggling is: "to import or export secretly contrary to the law and especially without paying duties imposed by law".
According to UK laws, this has the following consequences:
Penalties for Drug Smuggling
The legal consequences of drug smuggling in the United Kingdom are robust and intricate. These penalties are designed to deter and punish those involved in the illicit trade of controlled substances, and they vary significantly depending on the nature and scale of the offense.Prison Sentences
Convictions for drug smuggling can result in substantial prison sentences. The duration of imprisonment varies based on factors such as the type and quantity of drugs involved, the defendant’s role in the operation, and any previous criminal history.
For Class A drugs like heroin or cocaine, sentences can range from several years to life imprisonment. The courts take a particularly stern stance on those involved in large-scale drug trafficking operations, often imposing the harshest sentences.Fines
In addition to imprisonment, courts may impose hefty fines on individuals convicted of drug smuggling. These financial penalties are meant to act as both a punishment and a deterrent. Fines can be substantial and are typically proportional to the severity of the offense and the defendant’s financial means.Confiscation Orders
The UK’s legal system has mechanisms to prevent criminals from profiting from their drug smuggling activities. Courts can issue confiscation orders requiring the defendant to surrender any assets or wealth acquired through drug smuggling. This means that criminals face prison time and fines and risk losing ill-gotten gains.Forfeiture of Assets
In cases where assets such as vehicles, boats, properties, or other possessions were used to commission drug smuggling offenses, law enforcement agencies can seize these assets through forfeiture proceedings. This serves as a punishment for the offender and a means to disrupt criminal enterprises.Travel Restrictions
Convictions related to drug smuggling can result in travel restrictions imposed on the individual. These restrictions may include bans on leaving the country to prevent the convicted person from continuing their criminal activities abroad. Such measures are implemented to ensure that those involved in drug smuggling cannot easily evade justice by fleeing the country.
Lets move to the selling of the illegally imported alcohol:
You can be stopped, fined or arrested by police if you’re under 18 and drinking alcohol in public.If you’re under 18, it’s against the law:
- for someone to sell you alcohol
- to buy or try to buy alcohol
- for an adult to buy or try to buy alcohol for you
- to drink alcohol in licensed premises (such as a pub or restaurant)However, if you’re 16 or 17 and accompanied by an adult, you can drink (but not buy) beer, wine or cider with a meal.
If you’re 16 or under, you may be able to go to a pub (or premises primarily used to sell alcohol) if you’re accompanied by an adult. However, this isn’t always the case. It can also depend on the specific conditions for that premises.
It’s illegal to give alcohol to children under 5.
For the sake of your argument, we'll remove the law that says its illegal to sell alcohol to children, I guess? Regardless, it might be some enterprising individuals that are selling it, but they are selling the alcohol in the UK. In UK currency, To UK residents. In the UK. We are getting into possibly exchanging UK currency for US currency, which is a whole new can of worms, but we can save that for later.
Now to your question:
now, do you still think the UK government has a right to fine 4chan or do you think maybe the UK government should elaborate on their prohibition regulations to ensure their citizens are properly “protected”?
Easy answer is yes. They should be fined for smuggling alcohol into the UK, which is what the current law calls for.
Now hypothetical for you.
Imagine for a moment that the UK has banned looking at alcohol if you are under 18. Doesn't matter if you look at alcohol if you are over the age of 18, but you just can't legally look at alcohol if you are under 18.
Now someone comes along named 4chan and builds a giant building in the UK that has a ton of alcohol inside of it. There isn't anything outside of the building. Its only inside where the alcohol is. They don't have protections in place that prevent anyone under 18 from going inside the building. Anyone can come in and look. You can be 5 years old, or 100 years old. As a matter of fact, tons of people from all over the UK come and visit this building daily, even children.
Now the UK government comes along and says, "Hey 4chan, you need to verify that anyone that goes into your building is at least 18 years old, because if someone under 18 looks at the alcohol in there, thats against the law."
4chan ignores the UK and continues letting anyone inside, not verifying anyone's age. Not only that, but they're actually selling alcohol to children in there, and letting children make their own alcohol as well.
Should the UK be allowed to fine/arrest 4chan until they meet the demands?
gonna be honest, I didn't read anything past this part.
So in your scenario here, 4chan starts off by smuggling alcohol into the UK.
I didn't read any of it because you clearly didn't read what I said.
here's the part you conveniently forgot and it literally changes the entire argument.
some enterprising individuals have taken it upon themselves to buy, smuggle, and then sell those beverages inside the UK.
next time you want to argue your point don't employ the use of bad faith tactics and try to argue your point without manufacturing flaws.
LOL okay but you said:
now, do you still think the UK government has a right to fine 4chan or do you think maybe the UK government should elaborate on their prohibition regulations to ensure their citizens are properly “protected”?
I went ahead and edited it for you so it says enterprising individuals.... which you end up asking about 4chan anyways
now, some enterprising individuals have taken it upon themselves to buy, smuggle, and then sell those beverages inside the UK
Wouldn't it be more akin to those individuals putting the alcohol into 4chan's trucks that are taking other stuff to the UK? (and worse with 4chan's knowledge)
In that case do you think it's unreasonable that the uk government imposes penalties for 4chan refusing to remove the alcohol that they know is there from the trucks.
And then if 4chan then refuses to pay said penalties start to not allow them to bring any trucks into the uk at all?
the "trucks" in your example are the users computers/phones.
the highways are the Internet, which is owned and maintained by the UK government after their "gate".
the alcohol is the content.
4chans trucks deliver to the UKs "gate" and the UK user does the rest from there on the UK highways.
if the UK doesn't want the alcohol in their country, they need to stop their citizens from purchasing it and block it from entering their country at their "gate".
this is what any reasonable country would do. they (UK) already do it for actual physical products like potassium bromate, azodicarbonamide, and certain artificial food dyes like Yellow 5 and Yellow 6.
Are they going to sue or fine the companies that manufacture those products? no. They're going to ban the products that use them and then go after the individuals that smuggle them in.
the "trucks" in your example are the users computers/phones.
No it's the packets being sent from the 4chan server.
Stopping every single packet (or in the real world truck) to check it isn't feasible, do that and you get 20 mile queues up the m20 (and the digital version of that). Plus any government trying to so it like that would get accused of tax payers money due to the insane amount of resources that would be needed.
Placing the responsibility on the company makes sense, so does issuing penalties for non compliance. The company that has a fine issued against them can of course ignore it if they're set up outside the country that issues the fine. But they should then expect the country issuing the fine to escalate. If they don't pay and don't comply they can expect to have any assets in the uk seized and eventually get blocked from operating entirely. And probably have any executives arrested of they enter the country. Ofcom can't just jump to getting a court order though because they need to be fair and give 4chan a chance to comply if they want to.
The problem with the online safety act is that it exists at all, and that they expect people to use third party authentication services many of which are operating from countries with poor data protection regulations. That said, as iit does exist the logic of saying that companies are the ones responsible for what people access from their servers does make sense.
What? No it doesn’t, not as long as the people responsible don’t step foot in the UK.
If they do - yes they’ll be arrested for having broken UK law.
You have to obey the law of whatever country you are currently occupying, even if the rule is bad shit crazy, actually especially if the rule is bat shit crazy. There are plenty of people who have done nothing wrong who would be arrested if they step foot in China, but that doesn't really bother anyone because they don't step foot in China.
Also it would be interesting to see what they would even be charged with, since offcom don't really have authority to issue arrest warrants. Ofcom barely have the authority to enforce UK law in the UK. Otherwise the likes of GB news wouldn't exist.
You have to obey the law of whatever country you are currently occupying.
They're not "occupying" or even operating here. all the servers have been in Texas since 2008. The British gov are attempting to legislate feature implementations for companies that aren't operating in britain. it's ridiculous.
Well, they are operating in britain, their website is accessible in britain and as such the UK can decide whether the website is accessible or not. The uk can't really punish them other than blocking their site if they don't comply, though.
I agree the law is stupid but them not having servers in britain is mostly irrelevant.
It's an interesting idea that countries could only fine websites that operate in said country. Could get away with a lot by finding a permissive country to do what would otherwise be illegal and worth of fines.
"Selling user's private information illegally? Buddy, Tuvalo don't care"
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.
You don't want to be locked in a small cell with 4chan for two years.
Imagine running a website for 20 years, changing absolutely nothing, and one day you're being targeted because someone else on the other side of the planet changed something at their end.
Tell them to piss off.
They'll come after your phpbb instance next.
If they operate in China then it seems legit. If they don't operate in China it's a non issue.
This might be stupid, but the corollary of your statement is that a sovereign nation can't impose laws on foreign business....
That what you want?
Unironically yes. Otherwise the internet as we know it is very much over, and what we have instead is a mesh of country-nets.
I mean, what is actually "doing business" when it comes a simple web page or a forum for example? Merely existing and being reachable.
Yeah, and a county could say "you can't do business in our county anymore" and block them
A country can ban dildos, but they don't get to tell a foreign factory they can't make dildos. If an importer orders dildos anyways, that's between the importer and customs. Which in this case the importer is the ISP
Otherwise the internet as we know it is very much over, and what we have instead is a mesh of country-nets.
which, TBH, doesn't seem so bad to me. as an european, i'm personally sick of all the sick (as in, unwell) culture from america swapping over via the internet and poisoning people's minds.
i mean, all the culture war is literally instigated by american capitalists to disrupt society and to disrupt the people's coherence, to make them weaker and therefore easier to exploit.
If it wasn't for continuous exposure to american influence, europe would long have drastic left-wing political reforms, i guess.
Yes. You can impose as much laws as you can enforce them. Don't want your citizens to buy anything from me, stop shipments at your border. Want to stop payments, talk to your banks. Want to stop access to my servers, block them at your routers.
Why the fuck should I enforce your rules for you? You made them, you figure out how you will make them work.
you being the UK government, in this case.
GDPR can only be enforced if the business wants to continue to do business in Europe. There are lots of non-European businesses that do not enforce GDPR rules but they can't sell products or services in Europe.
But of course 4chan doesn't sell any products or services anywhere, it's not a business, so it's a bit hard to see exactly how this could be enforced.
This is a case of stupid laws that still don't understand the internet (35+ years in to wide use, mofos)
If an http GET request initiated from country A traverses routers and wires around the globe to grab some data from a server in country B, then we have to accept that the owners of the server are not "operating in country A" and in fact the user in country A is responsible for import.
If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.
All that is tongue in cheek to say they can fuck right off.
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Yeah it's a stupid law and they were told it wouldn't work by industry experts. But the politicians that were in power when all this was first been decided were Conservatives and therefore arrogant and of the opinion that if they don't like something, it's realities responsibility to reconfigure itself.
Then Labour got in and for some reason implemented the stupid law anyway despite having heard none of the consultations, and of course now it turns out that the consultations told them not to do it. Now I'm sure the industry experts would have been ignored anyway but Labour look really daft now.
They have basically accepted that this law is unworkable and is basically going to be ignored by everyone, but they still have to go through all of the pantomime of trying to enforce it. I'm sure eventually they'll quietly kill it because the whole thing has been such an embarrassment for them.
were Conservatives and therefore arrogant and of the opinion that if they don’t like something, it’s realities responsibility to reconfigure itself.
Which is exactly what they have done with tariffs in the US.
Th US has taken it to step further. Somehow they've managed to convince a significant junk of the population that a tariff is not a tax, and that the tariff is paid by the importing country, even though that's not how tariffs work. They don't require reality to actually do anything, they just require the populace to be mind numbingly stupid. Fortunately, they are.
It's pretty ironic, the United States was founded on the back of unfair taxation, and yet financial literacy is probably lower in the US than it is in any other country in the world.
I think it's well established by now that this bunch of Labour politicians too are "arrogant and of the opinion that if they don’t like something, it’s realities responsibility to reconfigure itself".
That would amongst other things neatly explain why they went around and implemented the stupid law.
Yeah it’s a stupid law and they were told it wouldn’t work by industry experts.
You mean lobbyists?
If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.
What used to be called The Great Firewall of China. It used to be unthinkable for western countries.
You can't blame this on old people. This is only happening now that the Boomers are on the way out. People who sent international letters or made international phone calls were aware that they were communicating with a different country with different laws. I think we are seeing this now, because now we have people who experience the internet as something happening on their own phone, at their location.
They’re retiring
Retirement is when it's about time to get into big politics. Most politicians on higher levels are 60+ y.o.
Tell that to the corpse of Diane Feinstein that they puppeted weekend at Bernie's style for months after she died.
I'm barely exaggerating
UK cabinet is mainly GenXers. I didn't count exactly, but Boomers still seem to outnumber Millennials. Definitely on the way out, though.
I wouldn't mind the politicians from 30 years ago, who stayed away from this bullshit.
The UK didn't ban leaded petrol until 1999 meaning most millenials will suffer from the boomer-loony disease as they were poisoned during their childhood.
Let's also not forget that fuel for light aircraft still contains lead :/
Funnily enough the CIA (yes, the CIA) was largely involved in keeping the internet a free and open space for all, heck they even contributed encryption algorithms to keep data private and such ...
The reason why the free internet existed for so long was because it was a big ideological project for the US. (the internet is the space of all ideas and as such represents the platonic/christian concept of heaven). It's only now ending because it's served its purpose. The people have exchanged ideas worldwide, and that only needs to happen twice, similarly to how you can only infect yourself with the same virus once (because the second infection does way less impact), you can only infect yourself with the same idea once. So, once the worldwide ideas are exchanged, the internet serves very little purpose anymore.
If 4chan make revenue by advertising UK goods and services to UK users, then they are very much operating in the UK. It's not reasonable to make the argument that you should be able to do business with a country and opt out of its laws simply by running the physical servers abroad. We don't tolerate it for wire fraud or CSAM, but nobody's rushing out to defend the sovereign rights of child abusers and scammers.
I don't agree with the Online Safety Act on its own terms, but this is a dud of an argument.
With wire fraud and csam, the activity is illegal in the host country as well as the target country, which is not the case here.
If 4chan make revenue by advertising UK goods and services to UK users, then they are very much operating in the UK.
By your logic, any website with advertising is operating in EVERY country worldwide.
By your logic, any website with advertising is operating in EVERY country worldwide.
No. Every ad platform out there has the advertiser choose what region to advertise in. Nobody wants to pay to advertise in countries where they don’t sell their products. Likewise websites have the option not to serve countries they don’t want to comply with the laws of, and indeed many do this exact thing.
The whole argument being presented is being intentionally naive about both the technology and the law. Y’all are arguing based on how you WANT the world to be rather than how it is.
Again you’re just factually wrong. The website operator has a wide degree of control over what can appear on their site in the admin panel. They even have the choice of which platform to go with if they don’t. And even if they didn’t, it’s still an argument that relies on “everyone does it ergo it must be ok”, which wouldn’t stand on its own terms either.
To repeat, I'm not supporting the Online Safety Act, but this whole argument seems to rely on the fictional notion that innocent website operators don't know where their data packets are being sent, which hasn't been true since the 1990s.
it’s still an argument that relies on “everyone does it ergo it must be ok”, which wouldn’t stand on its own terms either.
Given that's how the entire Internet works, it does stand on its own terms. The UK isn't influential enough to force the entire Internet to follow suit. They can take it or leave it.
At least a little?
According to this article they pull in 230 million a year. For a shitty forum that looks like it's run on 1995 tech
> be me
> mfw
The defense rests.
be meAmerican't social mediatard
Britbongs demand money
Notmyproblem.png
It works the same way they can fine domestic businesses: Pay up or we'll stop you from doing any more business in this country.
In the context of a website like 4chan that means pay the fine or get blocked by every UK based ISP.
Oh no! That one country out of all the other ones will be the biggest loss ever!
Anyway, about these things called VPNs.
I think this sentiment is common but misses some important things. First: the UK is a big market of internet users, so losing it is not insignificant. Second: most people will not bother with a VPN because it's annoying or costs money. Third: from the UK's perspective, banning non-compliant sites is a good thing.
Recognising all this is important, because it's part of resisting such censorious laws.
The population of internet users is tiny compared to the total population of internet users in the Western world.
Nothing great or significant is lost.
I just dint think any of it matters. UK is a big market for Internet users... Yes, like any other developed country.
It is only the 4th largest country for 4chan... Which isn't even in the top 3.
The UK not having access to 4chan is of no consequence, and the kinds of people that still hang out there would probably know their way around a VPN.
There is no further thing that's worth addressing.
The argument 4chan uses is laughable. "Freedom of speech of every American?" Tere is no such protection in the US right now.
No one is watching the news? Trump is killing freedom of speech. Anyone dares to advocate equality is getting fired or estorcised. All rainbow, trans or minority rights signs are being eliminated. Our rainbow sidewalk in my city was repainted. Diversity programs are dismantled. Any minority names program is being renamed. Less black people are being hired in the white house than ever.
Even now som states require you to prove your identity before your can log into Internet.
American invention? American right? Lol.
British government fines an American company, based in America, for serving data from American servers that was compliant with American law.
This whole law is complete overreach. It's like banning a book and then getting mad at the author when one of your citizens buys one on holiday and brings it back with them
I think Iran should fine the UK just as much for allowing the Satanic verses to be sold since that novel are banned in Iran.
Any argument they give is the same argument why the 4chan shit is laughable.
You probably don't want Iran to have jurisdiction over your dot-com.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_…
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Iran.[2] The list of crimes punishable by death includes murder; rape; child molestation; homosexuality; drug trafficking; armed robbery; kidnapping; terrorism; burglary; incest; fornication; adultery; sodomy; sexual misconduct; prostitution;[3][4] plotting to overthrow the Islamic government; political dissidence; sabotage; arson; rebellion; apostasy; blasphemy; extortion; counterfeiting; smuggling; recidivist consumption of alcohol; producing or preparing food, drink, cosmetics, or sanitary items that lead to death when consumed or used; producing and publishing pornography; using pornographic materials to solicit sex; capital perjury; recidivist theft; certain military offences (e. g., cowardice, assisting the enemy); "waging war against God"; "spreading corruption on Earth"; espionage; and treason.[5][6] Iran carried out at least 977 executions in 2015, at least 567 executions in 2016,[7] and at least 507 executions in 2017.[8] In 2018 there were at least 249 executions, at least 273 in 2019, at least 246 in 2020, at least 290 in 2021, at least 553 in 2022, at least 834 in 2023,[9] and at least 901 executions in 2024.[10] In 2023, Iran was responsible for 74% of all recorded executions in the world, with the UN confirming that at least 40 people were executed in one week in 2024.
Frankly, 4chan users or operators would probably have violated some of those, were they under jurisdiction of Iranian law.
Its probably a parent company situation.
Lots of corpo structures are just large parent companies that actually just own a bunch of smaller companies so that the parent company gets the profits while the smaller companies make the risky products and can be bankrupted at any minute.
The company I work for does that. We just bought a couple companies that were competitors in a risky but profitable market. The full idea is that if one company gets sued to oblivion, we let that company die, move all the employees and customers to the backup company, and call it a day.
Capitalism baby!
4chan also faces potential arrest and/or "imprisonment for a term of up to two years," the lawsuit said.
I wanna see how a website would be sent to jail.
Which they would laugh at. Even the Chinese government would laugh at such a request. It isn't something that is considered universally a crime, like robbery and murder, but the type of shit they are asking for is so fucking unprecedented and unreasonable it's stupid.
It would be like if the UK demanded that France immediately extradite all legal handgun owners in France (where handguns are legal) because it is a crime to possess one in Great Britain and therefore they are criminals. Makes no sense.
Damn fucking straight. I hope it starts an privacy movement so big they realize that all the laws passed since 2000 against terrorism were abject failures and repeal all of them.
Canada is trying to pass major surveillance shit on par with the patriot act on steroids and effectively nullify the need for warrants, all in the name of 'strong borders' and anti terrorism even though it literally gives many US owned and operated companies full and complete access to digital information on Canadians, ironically weakening borders in every way.
And for what? What is the terrorism threat? Al-Qaeda was a always a joke, and the fact that 9/11 happened was far more due to a monumental failure of all intelligence services combined and not due to a lack of resources. Terrorist schemes have been thwarted in the past without the need for extensive surveillance... and most plots are still thwarted primarily by informants and insiders speaking to authorities. The whole 'we need to be super proactive ' has yielded shit results.
Most of the stuff that they claim was 'prevented proactively ' was literally entrapment. They found some mentally ill and/or lonely people who would have done nothing on their own, but ended up being goaded into stupid crap when undercover agents flirted with them, encouraged them, and even offered weapons and explosives for them to use, and if they agreed... well, that's when they nabbed them. No terrorism would have occurred if agents didn't do shit.
Have you ever wondered why so many people are highly distrustful of people talking about doing violent shit? Fed posting? Its because agents have such a long ass history of doing that that you cannot tell who is and who isn't a Fed.
Offcom has been drinking, came home in a blackout and committed domestic abuse of 4chan. Does Offcom even internet? Alternative plot twist, Offcom is trolling 4chan.
I wanna say that Offcom is doing a good job and trying to protect British people in good faith but I feel like they are being used as a cudgel by the British ruling class to advance an anachronistic agenda. Don't forget, they fired their expert drugs advisor for telling them that MDMA is comparable to horse riding in terms of safety. They want certain things to be true, regardless of the scientific accuracy.
Jacqui Smith slaps down drugs adviser for comparing ecstasy to horse riding
Professor David Nutt 'trivialising' dangers of drugs, claims home secretaryGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
Probably why they didn't do it in the first place.
They barely pay for moderation. Who is going to pay for that survey? And also why would they? Obviously most of the people on that site are under 18. That's when I used it.
What other demographic clicks the horny ads they run?
Afghanistan restricts access to social media on smartphones
When they say access to social media on smartphones does that mean restricting connectivity to certain sites on devices using mobile IP addresses?
I assume they have no mechanism to remove apps from individual devices.
Surge in domestic violence feared during long Chuseok holiday in South Korea
According to police data, domestic violence reports rose 62.3 per cent and dating violence, 30.5 per cent, during 2024’s holiday compared to non-holiday periods.
Surge in domestic violence feared during long Chuseok holiday in South Korea
Statistics show such cases tend to rise during traditional holidays when relatives gather for extended periods. Read more at straitstimes.com.ST
Ms Song Ran-hee, representative of the Korea Women’s Hot Line, said that entrenched patriarchal customs also heighten tensions during the holiday. “Family rituals such as ancestral rites remain male-centred in many households, with women shouldering most of the preparations. Even trivial criticisms over food or ingredients can trigger disputes,” she noted.
^^ Ah, there it is, folks.
“In some homes, men and women still eat at separate tables, with men served comfortably while women eat in the kitchen.
Quite disgusting, really.
There are patriarchal customs found in many cultures. We need to be progressive and take them all down.
Down with the patriarchy.
Yeah let's all" civilize" all those other barbaric " non-progressive" countries and cultures, by using and imposing ours via imperialistic agendas/s.
Add: Maybe just maybe, let them find their own way, and just focus on what you can do in your own country first.
And also, just to be clear, I'm against domestic violence ofc.
unfortunately, there is a consistent harmonic of male-bullying-female among babboons, chimps, & humans, throughout known history.
unfortunately, "waiting until prejudice decides, of its own volition, to cease to exist", as the people who push that ALL cultural-alternatives are equally-valid, .. well, the evidence is that prejudice fights for its perpetual dominion instead.
I don't find it "disgusting" that such prejudice is still normal in the majority of the world's population: I find it DEPRESSING, instead.
Apparently male-bullying-female ( while gaslighting: pretending that male-"protects"-female ) has right to perpetuate itself, instead of equal-validity having the right to break/displace such male-bullying-female?
You have your position, I've got mine.
Because I've had it with karma: & I want to chop my continuum/soul out from getting-caught-in-any-more-lives, I'm sticking to mine.
I once came across a blog what was only photo-images of the 1920's..
Eventually I noticed that nearly none of the women in the images were happy.
They all looked either depressed, worn-down, fearful, infringed-from-having-validity, or otherwise harmed.
I don't care that some cultures have "established" that kind of asymmetry of human condition: it isn't a right to do that to any entire-category of humankind, & it especially isn't male right to do that to female-lives, while gaslighting about it.
The more competent one becomes at seeing through appearances, the more clear it is that it's still normal, among North American celebrities, too..
Finally, the adulteration of the story in the book of Genesis probably sets the standard for machiavelianism/dishonesty/gaslighting..
It's plainly visible even now that the text states that women "ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good & evil" WHICH MEANS MORAL-UNDERSTANDING, & then shared that with men.
That is rooted in hard fact: altruism is generalized mothering .. in wasps, in mammals, in anything we've found it in.
A Western philosopher has noted that nihilism's more common among men-philosphers: mothers can't afford to sell-out their children's lives that way, can they?
That the Judeo-Christian tradition twisted "women earned moral-understanding & shared it with men" to the perversion/prejudice-basis "women committed original-sin, downfalling our entire race" .. is unconscionable, yet established.
No matter: IF humankind WON'T get upright, THEN humankind won't survive The Great Filter, & next-century this world will be silent of our dishonesty/abuse/gaslighting, permanently.
This-century, our kind gets cornered into either growing-all-the-way-up XOR force-exterminating-our-species.
All the ideologies/prejudices/"religions" fighting for exclusive supremacism, still-accelerating-ClimatePunctuation, food-insecurity-migrations, war-produced-migrations, accelerationism, mass-shootings, civil-wars, every kind of machiavellianism imaginable, all of it, all together, until there's no rationality left, & only rampaging-ideological-BUTCHERING-tantrum is going-on, that's what it looks like humankind's epitaph is going to be.
But that's every-bit as fine as other-cultures-have-the-right-to-their-prejudices, isn't it?
There's no objective standard for judging anything, is there?
Maybe there isn't to you, but there is to me: objective-morality is a valid-concept, though only for a subset of questions ( not cultural-stuff, but things like equal-validity, yes )
_ /\ _
Yes, I get your point , though you make some colorful extrapolations. I'm not saying I'd be agreeing to others morality or condoning differences in our own morality, because they are all different, everybody has their own views.
What I don't like is when people claim the higher moral ground, without understanding any of the other's cultural context and by proclaiming their culture should be like ours. Other cultures are other cultures. You can disagree with (some) of their practices, and equally other cultures will probably say similar things of yours.
But when femicide. and domestic abuse in the West is on the rise it's an increasing problem. So, that's why I said; maybe lets focus first on fixing our own shit, before pointing the finger on someone else.
One woman killed every 10 minutes: The harrowing global reality of femicide
A sobering report released by UN Women and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Monday reveals that in 2023, 140 women and girls died every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative, which means one woman killed every 10 minutes.UN News
A ( metaphoric ) point that I find humankind is ignoring/denying:
WHEN you're on a bus that's being driven by 1 or another gang, & those gangs are fighting each-other for supremacism/dominion, & they don't care whether anyone survives, because it is their ruling that is the only thing that matters to them,
AND THE PATH THEY'RE TAKING IS FATAL TO THE WORLD,
it doesn't matter "who" drives the bus when it leaves the cliff: the "stampeding off the cliff" is fatal to the whole herd, see?
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is something that needs to be having ALL gov't policies tied to it, when judging what is authorized, & what isn't.
AND it needs to be the test for moralities, too.
Does something amplify the still-accelerating ClimatePunctuation?
IF so, THEN it has to have sooo much benefits that it's worth it.
Does it protect the millenia-established male-bullying-female?
THEN it costs both current & future lives, and rights, and our species' real-viability.
As many have pointed-out, male-bullying-female automatically shuts-down 50% of our brains being allowed to contribute to our surviving this-century, & that is idiotic or worse.
ALL the problems have to be seen, & balanced against each-other.
What Russia's doing to Ukraine ( & soon to the EU as a whole ), what Trump will shortly be doing to Canada ( same as Russia->Ukraine, for the same colonial-imperial motivations ) are survival-grade problems.
Different election-systems/processes have long-term-morality consequences.. making particular-futures more or less likely..
There's an English mathematician ( redhead, kinda roundish, moved to Glasgow for professional reason, it was a yt video of his, aweful video, stupendous insight ) who identified that there is exactly 1 thing that all the most-successful complex-projects do, that none of the unsuccessful ones do:
create a functionally-complete visual-spacial model of the required system, leaving no kind of function out,
and only then begin the scaling of that model into implimentation.
Even questions of morality can be dealt-with this way, identifying that some choices extinguish us, & when people can SEE that, then our thinking changes.
It isn't hearing-about this-issue, or that-issue, or whatever, it isn't being reminded and holding-everything-in-our-heads,
it is SEEing it, as a visual-spacial model, so that the consequences become implied in how the representation looks, and then we can begin judging things objectively.
Now consider 2 allowed-futures, 1 where 50% of the human-lives have their life-potential stomped-on by male-supremacism, & the other where ALL humans are allowed contributing to our viability..
Which is more-likely to survive this-century's Great Filter ( when a species that won't grow-up has nuclear-level technologies, & does a multi-stage global tantrum-pogrom to beat/break/smash "god" into obeying unconscious-ignorances "godly" ENTITLEMENT, as the tantrum-toddler it is, that OUR OWN unconscious-mind is now enacting )?
That's objective, not mere-opinion/cultural-opinion.
Here's an example of competing-moralities:
Some want all internal-combustion-engines killed, today, no matter the cost.
Others want a phased switch.
I'm with the phased, but aggressive switchover people, simply because I know that if you kill all of them, immediately, then you've just executed the economic-viability of remote-regions, & their people.
City people don't have a problem with policies which butcher rural lives: this is consistently proven..
& the remote lives of people who live .. say in the Aussie outback, or in Canada's north, or offshore .. why should international-policy respect/value them, when they're not where the money is, right?
But to me, you have to look at the whole overall, & consider all the effects, & balance the whole.
You can't hold that women's lifeworth "isn't important enough to count in the world's balance-sheet, because men never counted it in the past" .. that isn't good-enough.
Here's another example of competing-moralities:
Which should we do?
Oppose the genociding of Palestinians, XOR oppose the genociding of Ukranians, XOR oppose genociding in Sudan, XOR oppose genociding in the Congo region, XOR oppose femicide in either China, XOR India, XOR here in the West?
The framing is the problem: it presumes that only 1 can be chosen.
Caving on ANY of these is .. disintegrity, to be polite.
& caving on any of these will have strategic-survival consequences for our future.
The leaving-Somalia-to-piracy, and not providing them with any alternative, meant that they did convert to piracy, & now that piracy-economy can't be removed: it's now a whole world shipping problem.
The leaving-northern-Mexico-to-the-drug-cartels and not breaking that from ruling that country's civilization, means that now those drug-cartels can't be removed.
What we allow to set-deep-roots bites our future in the face, with venom, consistently..
All this to say, that .. yeah, sometimes morality is objective, in spite of what the absolute-relativists pretend.
Red-meat based diet isn't only economically strategic-suicide, & health ( yes, the heart-attack-rate is increased by eating red meat, no matter which country one is from ), but it's also ecologically-suicide.
Opposing those facts is ideological/moral for some factions.
But objectivity must override ideology, XOR we, as a species, are .. finished, this-century.
In Science there is a fundamental-principle: IF the experiment contradicts the theory, robustly, & it isn't some confounding-factor, THEN the theory's falsified.
Feynman was big on that.
Ideology-based "science" IS NOT Science, see?
All who hold that all questions of morality are only-cultural-opinion, & that there is no objective-standard that can validly be applied.. the evidence contradicts that.
"it's all relative" is an ideological position, but the fact that some choices produce greater-slaughter whereas other choices reduce harm .. is real, is objective, is fact.
So, no, I do not accept that morality is only opinion/culture-habit, and is not in any way objectively-testable or objectively-measurable..
The problem is in finding which values are long-term, vs which aren't,
in finding which values are concentration-of-benefits-to-few/eradication-of-benefits-from-many & forcing the measurement-system to correctly-identify that as narcissism, as it objectively is ( instead of the propaganda-is-"journalism" system we now have, brainwashing all the discussions )
in finding which values uphold the LivingPotential in all lives, vs the values which only value some lives' potential..
etc..
Eventually patterns of bias become visible, & then one has to remember that universe's Natural Selection law is going to be the final judge.
Our opinion isn't what kills us when we stampede-off-a-cliff, right?
It's the fact that we indulged in making-believing & now our bones & body-lives are broken, right?
The question of whether incompetence/intentional-ignorance is a socially valid decision, however: certainly it's socially valid.
Stupid, but socially valid.
Humankind has every right to force its own extinguishment, while making-believing in ego-games, all it wants!
But there is "morality" in that snuffing-of-all-future-generations, too, isn't there?
No, I do not stand with the "it's all relative: no objective-standard for any moral-question exist, nor can it ever exist, & we ought just accommodate prejudice until it ceases perpetuating-itself, that's the proper moral stand".
Exactly as Martin Luther King, Jr, stated: accommodating injustice anywhere, is a moral crime: it means that fundamentally, one is accommodating injustice, & that has consequences everywhere.
Our world's in a survival-of-the-fittest stage, natural for this level of population-saturating-the-planet, & which morality survives this-century will be decided by questions of moral-darwinism AND by questions of did-humankind-survive-or-not.
Women having equal-validity increases the odds of humankind-surviving this-century.
Women not being allowed equal-vality decreases the odds of humankind-surviving this-century.
The same is true of the question about oligarchy/corporate-feudalism/monarchy/etc .. various concentration-of-rights-and-exclusion-from-rights paradigms.
Objective-morality requires that civil-rights stand against such privilege-rules-exclusively paradigms.
This, itself, is objective morality, in action.
( everybody, feel free to block me, as all logged-in people can do .. see only what you want to be seeing, right? )
_ /\ _
Uyghur Scholar-Activist faces charges in France for criticizing Beijing: Rights group urges authorities to drop the Case against Dr. Dilnur Reyhan
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/43763364
On October 13, a court outside Paris will put on trial Dr. Dilnur Reyhan, a prominent French-Uyghur scholar and activist, and the president of the European Uyghur Institute, for the criminal offense of “degradation of property belonging to others.”Three employees of China’s embassy in Paris had filed a complaint against Dilnur Reyhan for her participation in a protest against the Chinese government at a Paris-area music festival in September 2022. During the festival, she allegedly threw red paint on an embassy banner, which, one plaintiff reported, resulted in a €25 shoe-cleaning fee.
The Chinese government alleged that Dilnur Reyhan had caused “damage to property” and that it was a “racist attack” -- a charge later dropped. Dilnur Reyhan was publicly protesting Chinese government crimes against the Uyghurs in northwest China, including mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, separation of families, and forced labor. Human Rights Watch and others have concluded that some of these acts amount to crimes against humanity.
“For the Chinese embassy, the aim is not to win or lose the case, but to impose a psychological and financial cost [on me] to silence [my] criticism,” Dilnur Reyhan said during a hearing in March. “I should not be prosecuted by the French courts but, instead, protected against China’s attempts to silence me.”
[...]
The prosecutor initially dismissed the Chinese government’s complaint in 2023. But the prosecutor reopened it on appeal a month after Chinese President Xi Jinping made an official visit to France in May 2024 and hundreds of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others protested. A hearing scheduled for March 2025 was postponed until October when neither the Chinese embassy representatives nor its employees showed up.
In recent years the Chinese government has escalated its harassment of critics abroad and members of the diaspora, acts of abuse beyond China’s borders known as “transnational repression.” For instance, in July Chinese authorities arrested a Chinese student, Tara Zhang Yadi, for the grave crime of “inciting separatism,” all because she advocated for Tibetan rights while studying in Paris.
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A hearing scheduled for March 2025 was postponed until October when neither the Chinese embassy representatives nor its employees showed up.
What? Wouldn't that normally mean they default the case?
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Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services
Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services
Update October 25: Accounts are still being created (571 observed so far), and a number of servers are either unwilling or unresponsive in removing these accounts. A list of servers recommended for limiting or defederating is now available at about.iftas.org/library/known-…Update October 14: Accounts are still being created, and unused accounts registered earlier are being activated.
Since 15 September, IFTAS has been tracking a coordinated network of over 300 accounts operating across Mastodon. These accounts are engaged in a high-volume propaganda campaign, promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations.
We became aware of a related investigation by the Antibot4Navalny research team that observed these accounts bridging to Bluesky, and we have since collaborated to enhance our investigations and share our findings. Their public post provides further context.Antibot4Navalny’s observations identified additional impacted services we were unaware of, and highlighted that accounts were still being created. Furthermore, thanks to their specific expertise in this area, this helped clarify and confirm that what we were seeing was indeed the work of a coordinated campaign with an increased likelihood of it being a state-sponsored or state-approved campaign.
We have been contacting affected Mastodon administrators, and are now moving to a public advisory to inform the broader network.
The network includes accounts impersonating reputable news outlets such as BBC News, Euronews, and Meduza, designed to give credibility to Telegram propaganda links. We believe it may be connected to the “Pravda/Portal Kombat” pro-Russia propaganda network.
Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes more clearly than across decentralised Mastodon services.
This campaign appears to mimic tactics observed in earlier influence operations, blending low-cost automation with impersonation and volume-based amplification.
We are sharing data with participants of the Social Web ISAC, and we issued a public advisory along with a list of observed usernames.
We are aware of accounts hosted on abandoned or unmanaged services, we may issue a Limit recommendation for those domains at a later date.
If you provide or can link to tools that may benefit administrators in identifying and/or managing these accounts, please let us know.
Further Reading:
- PORTAL KOMBAT A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network
- PORTAL KOMBAT A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network (Part 2)
- “Pravda” Network: Worldwide Expansion and LLM, Wikipedia Pollution
- Russian propaganda may be flooding AI models
NEW REPORT: Russian propaganda may be flooding AI models
Click here to read the report. Click here to read the press release. Click here to access the database.JP (The American Sunlight Project)
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Remember every time we find Putin backed propaganda outside of Russia in the wild, it's nearly always boosting predominantly conservative viewpoints versus anything else.
Outside of their borders they're more interested in people fighting with each other than anything like coming together. Right wing politics is how they do that
Sorry, but this is wrong. They're also actively sponsoring "left wing" propaganda, to further sow discord. Depending on which group you yourself belong to, it's just easier to spot "the others".
bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39…
The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news
Following the results of the US presidential race, has fake news from the left seen a surge in popularity?BBC Trending (BBC News)
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Oh you think they just stopped? Did you bother to verify for yourself?
Over 2 million tweets from these accounts were collected from 24 February 2021 to 31 January 2023Russian influence operations are weaponizing Canada's far right and the far left
Primary sources tend to disagree
Here's a study from 2019 about it that backs up my assertion that more is conservative academic.oup.com/joc/article/6…
And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can't find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.
The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don't really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they're the ones that fall for it.
Primary sources tend to agree
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11…
Might it be that you're commenting based on what you want to be true?
Your assertion that more is conservative is a meaningless assertion in the context of this discussion.
More can be conservative on average but you don't see an average view of the internet, you see your filter bubble, and that source backs up the original assertion that yes, Russia is targeting leftists too.
Your article doesn't seem to mention Russia once.
Rumors and smears are part of free speech. To the extent that right-wing trolls and their audience are actual voters, it's essentially just a coarse form of ordinary political speech.
The extent to which a foreign government acting coverly is either creating or artificially boosting such content is scandalous.
True enough. But even a tyrannical government at least has a presumable intent of working for the betterment of its country. (Albeit through wrongheaded and small-minded means )
A.foreijgn power, especially a historical adversary and bad actor, is instead presumably working to harm or diminish us.
Your article doesn't seem to mention Russia once.
Feel free to read any other article that does, if you somehow have managed to avoid learning about russian influence campaigns over the last decade.
You presented it as proof that Russia is supporting misinformation on the left. To be that, it has to both include all three parts of the claim -- that there is disinformation on the left, that Russia is covertly supporting disinformation, and that some of the disinformation on the left was supported by Russia.
If your wife sleeps around, and I engage in casual sex, it does not necessarily follow that I slept with your wife.
A common suspicion in America is that Vladimir Putin believes that Trump as POTUS is good for Russia, and that Putin interferes with US politics with a specific goal of helping Trump.
If you have some reporting that directly links Russia to left-wing disinformation I'd love to read it. But the BBC article I read after following your link didn't have any such link.
This is the third time I post this paper in this thread: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11…
There are plenty more. You spent more time writing your post than it takes to find them.
Better. That actually supports the assertion that Russia does engage in left-targeted disinformation (in Canada, on Twitter.)
It also supports the original point you dismissed as "wrong" -- of the 90 "most influential" accounts, only 9 were subjectively identified as "Canadian far left".
Maybe you should spend more time reading the actual articles, and not just their headlines?
Absolutely and utterly false. They try and promote fighting, anger, and distrust of government to everyone.
They target leftists with things that will upset them, make them angry at the right and the government and other leftists and sow further discord and polarization.
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A source for my lived experience? Or do you mean an example?
I have been banned from .ml twice for stating that Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine - a matter of incontrovertible fact which has absolutely nothing to do with any leftist theory, as far as my masters degree in political science can discern.
Tankies have literally adopted the same rhetoric as MAGA.
The wild claims you made.
.ml is moderated to be ideologically one sided. Pro-capitalism is literally not allowed and will deleted. Making a pro-west or anti-China or Russia comment is like a bat signal for .ml admins and users alike to dogpile on your comment.
It’s their right to moderate their instance how they see fit, but removing content on ideological grounds is going to result in people thinking what’s left is propaganda.
For the most part I like .ml users, I don’t care for the admin team and moderator decisions and that’s why I’m not on that instance. I could care less about the fact my instance is defederated from hexbear users or grad users. They do want to be polarizing and live in a propaganda bubble
I wouldn't call them that. Most if not all of them are genuine people with some having accs for many years before Reddit crossed the line for most of us and them becoming anyhow relevant to interfere. In a recent hexbearean post about fediverse negativity I've read a couple of opinions with a notion that federating with others wasn't that great, and they were pretty happy just by themselves. I assume, it's the same for other two too. That's a game too long and effortful to be a psyop imho. Their positions and where they get their info are things to argue, but let's not get as far as dehumanizing them.
Almost everywhere I soundly proclaim that I am a russian dummy anarchist, that I live in that state for I have no options, and I angrily disagree with their fascination, mystification of what it is, I hold a grudge with anyone who wants that russki mir to be the model the whole world should share.
I, nevertheless, find a lot of points, like personal stuff and grieveancies, theoretical things, sympathy to protesters, to Gazan survivors that I share with them. Unlike transparently racist/fascist troll comms that were there, unlike their campaigns I've noticed, there is a huge population of real people worthy of talking, arguing with.
Call me any names and ban me, but as long as any person or community is supportive of basic pillar causes like body autonomy, you, like, can at least talk to them and find something in common.
What I missed though, is that Diva said the same, but misleadingly doubted the existence of russian bot networks. Them and state suppression ruined the rusophonic space to that degree I dropped it altogether. I don't know how their actions affected other countries, but as a nolifer shitposting addict trying to trust them just a bit, I came through fire, water and copper tubes before dropping them altogether. They are like current Twitter, but worse. And, well, fuck, I wasn't abandoning that to find the next option already corrupted.
You don't have to be aware that you are a Russian asset/propagandist to be one. A couple useful definitions
You've ignored whatever I said to drop a one-line generalized response, not an organic one, and didn't elaborate why it relates to what I said.
Isn't that a behavior of a useful tool you alert others against? I don't assume you are one. But I get some vibes you don't act in a good faith there.
Drunktexting and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
The main point why I wrote it was that I don't find them either bots or artifical influencers. They do probably want to have some reach or fresh blood, but don't want their local culture to be spread too thin like it's reddit 2.0. They are anything but cancer that I've met seeing real botfaming ops.
And, although I don't share many of their thoughts, most of the posts I see in my feed discuss common issues where we aren't that far from each other. Closer, than to maga/zionist/z-crowd. And in that context I find it alright to not draw any lines and just talk.
When things start to get overly political, well, that's a whole another thing, where different bestest solutions are incompatible, historical betrayals are dugged up and the internet infighting ensues. It's exhausting and pointless with just 2mil mostly irrelevant nerds on Fediverse. It's easier to just scroll through some amuzing takes, and instead focus on things where we can cooperate.
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"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says."Thank you," the KGB agent says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
True, the existence of US propaganda means Russian propaganda doesn't exist.
GOOD point
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The network includes accounts impersonating reputable news outlets such as BBC News, Euronews, and Meduza, designed to give credibility to Telegram propaganda links. We believe it may be connected to the “Pravda/Portal Kombat” pro-Russia propaganda network.Accounts are hosted across numerous Mastodon instances and bridged into Bluesky, creating the appearance of independent sources. Activity on Bluesky helped reveal aggregate patterns, identical usernames, posting schedules, and content themes more clearly than across decentralised Mastodon services.
If your first reaction was to post "posts I dislike are Russian bots", then you haven't actually grasped the argument. It has nothing to do with anyone disagreeing with specific posts.
It's also very telling that you're reflexively posting that when it says nothing about the data being presented.
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Most effortless and effective blame offloading "news" of the century.
I guess I'm ruzzian now.
Secret Israeli military bunker located under Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows [Jack Poulson and Wyatt Reed | October 13, 2025]
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/37318213
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/37318212
The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as ‘Site 81,’ the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road.
That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”
Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the specific location remained unknown...
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– a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law.
Humanitarian law doesn't apply to Israelis, they are inhuman
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Social media content restricted in Afghanistan, Taliban sources confirm
Social media content restricted in Afghanistan, Taliban sources confirm
It comes just over a week after a two-day total internet shutdown across the country ended.Hafizullah Maroof (BBC News)
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Starmer meets Modi on his first visit to India
Keir Starmer hails India trade deal as 'launchpad' after meeting Narendra Modi
The two leaders met in India's financial capital Mumbai to discuss ways to strengthen trade and business ties.Jennifer McKiernan (BBC News)
ttbomk, India did an official execution/hit/assassination of a Canadian Sikh man, sometime in the last couple of years..
it isn't "just Muslims" that Modi's modeled-on-Republican-religious-polarization is cutting: it's everybody not-Hindutva, apparently.
No matter: His fake-protection against China is going to get his Hindutva-India butchered by China, when Russia refuses to lift a finger against its puppetmaster China, .. perhaps as soon as next-year.
( ever seen an addict fighting against their own unconscious-mind's addiction, for their own life & losing?
The whole world looks like that, to me, now.
Addicted-to-ideologies, "no time for" things like still-accelerating-ClimatePunctuation, or strategically-required quality-of-education & child-nutrition, or absolute-epidemic-mitigation, or international-state-backed-terrorism..
ideology's always 1st..
it will be, until there's nobody left, apparently.
shrug )
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Tears of joy and celebratory gunfire: how Gaza and Israel reacted to news of ceasefire deal
Tears of joy and celebratory gunfire: how Gaza and Israel reacted to news of ceasefire deal
An initially improbable peace plan put forward by US president Donald Trump was on Thursday agreed to in its ‘initial phase’ by Israel and HamasKate Lamb (The Guardian)
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Gunfire to celebrate a ceasefire... Nicely shows in what crazy kind of world we are living in...
But also: Phantastic news!
A really positive start into my day for a change!
I now just hope that actually works out as planned.
I believe it's common there to celebrate with gunfire. It probably wasn't especially chosen to celebrate ceasefire with gunfire. I could be midtown though.
When I visited Jerusalem with my wife several years ago we were also standing upright in our hotel room when we suddenly heard yelling and gunfire and when we spoke to the hotel guys they told us we shouldn't worry, it was just a wedding celebration.
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That is some of the crazy part.
Guns being so common and widespread that they are routinely used in everyday civil life events without anyone bashing an eyelid.
I have the slight fear that it will take a very long time until the Middle East won't regularily erupt into violant outbursts any more...
Bro it's a fucking war zone. Get a grip for fuck sake!
Not everyone live your comfortable life in a "first world" country.
Bro it's a fucking war zone.
Wouldn't that not be just another reason to not fire weapons randomly in populated areas?
But what you are saying is basically exactly what I am trying to get at:
War has become so much normalized in the region, that people just don't know otherwise any more.
Quoting the somewhat fitting Cranberries song:
"In your head, they're still fighting".
Even while a glimmer of peace is shining across the horizon.
This gives me some hope. Maybe the connection to actual violence is weaker than I think.
Still a crazy form of behaviour, though. People regularily get killed by it (I just now read the mentioned Wikipedia article).
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Perhaps this time it is different...
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Even as initial celebrations unfolded, details of the agreement remained unclear on Thursday, including whether the parties in Egypt had made any progress on thornier questions about the future of the conflict, such as whether Hamas will demilitarise, as Trump has demanded, and how the war-torn territory will be governed in future.
So it isn't even conclusive. There's no way to make sure Israel won't break the cease fire. There's only hostage trade. Hopefully there's more detail coming out soon.
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I don't see Israel adhering to this, they've violated every single one thus far
They'll probably wait until the hostages are exchanged and return to annihilation
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They'll probably wait until the hostages are exchanged and return to annihilation
Probably won't even wait that long.
While the broader population seem to genuinely consider the hostages extremely important, the decision makers in the government don't care about them except as a convenient excuse for doing what they've always wanted to do.
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Anyone but him, to keep it short.
I mean, I can see that some people are easily fooled by him when he speaks like an idiot, makes silly faces and tells all the possible lies he can, but yeah, he didn't do shit.
If Harris has won and took the exact same actions as Trump as it relates to Israel, which doesn't seem too unlikely given the way all of Washington on both sides kowtows to Israel, would you be taking the same stance that "she didn't do anything to help bring this about?"
Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but I find it unlikely people would be coming out of the woodwork to slam Harris, even if she did the exact same things.
Just because someone is a villain, it doesn't mean that literally every single thing they do is villainous. I'm not gonna stop drinking Coke, just because Donald Trump drinks Coke. And I can recognize the the US was positively involved in this ceasefire negotiation, even if I hate the guy heading the US.
Trump can still be evil, even if he's right sometimes, and even if he does the right thing sometimes. He's not a comic book character. He's a very real, human kind of evil. And just because he's not stomping on puppies every day doesn't mean he's not bad.
And if you're not willing to admit when he does a good thing, your hatred isn't founded in reality, it's founded on purest tribalism.
Some of those gathered in the city’s hostage square said Trump should be recognised for his role in brokering the deal, calling for a “Nobel prize to Trump” as they gathered in the early hours of the morning to celebrate.
Oh, he'll love to hear that. I, for one, find it hard to give him any credit beyond 'he was there'. Then again, Biden was so incredibly weak stopping Israel, fighting under him might have dragged on for longer.
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Celebratory gunfire aimed at the nearest Palestinian.
This is a lunch break in preparation for the next wave of attacks.
The world's oldest president seeks an eighth term in Cameroon as youth grumble
The world's oldest president seeks an eighth term in Cameroon as youth grumble
Cameroon's Paul Biya is the world's oldest president at age 92NALOVA AKUA Associated Press (ABC News)
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I really loved when, a few years ago, he fell ill and flew to France (IIRC) for medical treatment. His family was so sure he wouldn't make it, they filled a commercial airliner with people ready to flee the country.
Then he bounced back! GD Methusala over here. And they all had to go home and pretend like nothing happened.
As the central African country prepares for Sunday's presidential election, he said he would not be heading out to vote.
[... ]
“He is already too old to govern, and it’s boring knowing only him as president," Nghobo told The Associated Press
Dumb people everywhere
Collapse of China spy case shows ‘UK can be bullied’, says trial witness
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/43755829
cross-posted from: lemmy.sdf.org/post/43755776
ArchivedThe British government’s refusal to testify that China is a national security threat in a major espionage trial has signalled to Beijing that “the UK can be bullied”, according to a former senior diplomat who was due to be a prosecution witness in the now-collapsed case.
The warning comes after Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions (DPP), revealed that his team had repeatedly tried and failed to obtain witness statements from the government that said China was a threat to UK national security.
Prosecutors had to abandon the trial of two British men charged with spying on parliamentarians for China, just weeks before it was due to start, because of the government’s refusal to provide the evidence, Parkinson said in a letter to MPs on Tuesday.
Charles Parton, a former UK diplomat who spent more than two decades working on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, had been due to appear as a prosecution witness in the trial.
“In broad fashion, this [collapse] says to the Chinese, ‘yes, we can bully the British, they will crumble if we play hard ball in whatever the negotiation is’ — that’s the worrying thing to me”, he told the Financial Times.
The failed prosecution was, he added, “a missed opportunity to demonstrate clearly China’s espionage efforts, and to say to anyone thinking of betraying our national interest, that you will be caught and punished”.
Parton, now an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “There is absolutely no doubt China is a threat, and it’s a common sense point. A threat equals hostility, intent and capability. Well, each of those is very easy to prove.”
[...]
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UK: Welp, our child has turned into a fascist cunt, so now we seek a new overlord to bend over for.
China: You rang?
France: Our child became a cunt because you used gentle parenting, UK.
Qilin cybercrime gang claims hack on Japan’s Asahi Group
Qilin cybercrime gang claims hack on Japan’s Asahi Group
The ransomware group says it stole more than 9,300 files, or roughly 27GB of data. Read more at straitstimes.com.ST
A deep dive into the rss feed reader landscape
Lighthouse - The feed reader for finding actionable content
A reimagined RSS feed reader, optimized for people who are serious, intentional, and proactive about their content consumption.lighthouseapp.io
Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content from various sources in one place.
Uh, no? RSS/Atom only contains a summary. It's to inform you about news, a alternative to E-Mail newsletters. Website scraping is extra functionality some clients do.
RSS is a nice idea. Unfortunately too many websites want you to use email "newsletters" instead.
Even Ghost has no mechanism to add an RSS link. You have to inspect the page code or use a dedicated extension.
How to convert any newsletter into a personal RSS feed?
In a world dominated by algorithmic content, RSS feeds offer a way to reclaim control over your digital consumption.Piotrek Bodera (Nerd on Tour)
Am I the only person to find it easier just to go to the site than reading hacked-up versions in some archaic email-wannabe dedicated client?
I have never understood the appeal of RSS.
Sounds like you tried one bad feed. All the sites on my feed render perfectly fine.
AP, NPR, Political Wire, Al Jazeera, Ars Technical to name just a few.
The sites can be full of cookie popups, slower rendering, ads, etc.
I have tried all sorts of RSS feeds. All the same painful to navigate through a painful, outdated email-like interface that makes it vastly inferior to, you know, scrolling through a website.
FFS, RSS people must have grown up on being desk jockeys stuck in Outlook all day and they don't know how to navigate anything else.
I don't know if it's Lemmy not standing different opinions than:
A) some opinions don't add much value to any conversation except to say "I disagree" and that's both not super helpful and in a small community I'd argue it's healthy for positive engagement to be more prevalent than negative engagement.
B) some comments disagree or tear down a solution without offering up a good alternative - which leaves the people with solutions feeling worse for their solution, the problem unaddressed in a different way, and if someone likes their solution or even knows it's superior to alternatives it becomes very easy to down vote a subjectively wrong opinion.
In this instance "going to the website" is not a helpful alternative for a tool who's purpose is to aggregate many desired websites into one location only when they have new content. "Going to the website" would be less efficient both in time and effort. This person saying they don't get them, while being on Lemmy - a site aggregator - is to me very funny.
My instinct was to down vote because it was already down voted and for the reasons above, but your comment gave me pause so now I won't down vote but I also won't upvote because it's not content I think anyone should waste their time reading.
Should there be a neutral response on site aggregators for this very circumstance? Never thought about that before.
I think that's a very common and logical instinct/bias. I'm fairly confident you and everyone else does this as well. If someone told you two compare two drinks and that one was expensive, the expensive one gets a statistical boon. If someone says this book sucks and the author is an asshole, you're primed to take previously neutral statements and skew them towards a negative understanding.
I always read before voting but ya, we have bias my guy and talking about them is good.
I’ve liked using FreshRSS in the past, but has the developer finally capitulated and allowed users to sort entries by publication date?
It was probably the most requested feature and they always insisted it didn’t make sense or wasn’t possible despite being a common feature among other RSS feed readers.
my problem with these was that id have one website filling up the feed with a lot of posts and another interesting website that only makes a post every once in awhile and i almost never see it
is there a solution to this?
I’ve been using FeedBin after Google Reader sunset… so, a long time now. Every year I say I’ll bring it in-house, then I get billed for another year and say fuck it. It works fine. And now they have a minimalist podcast app called Airshow that lets me use my FeedBin account to synch my podcasts across devices. So, whatever… take my money. 25$ a year isn’t going to break me.
Edit: want to add that I use Netnewswire (free) to read my feeds. Integrates Feedbin and isn’t overkill on ridiculous feature that turn it into a p.o.s. subscription app.
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/37507267
Abdel Qader Sabbah
and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Oct 13, 2025
In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
Abdel Qader Sabbah
and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Oct 13, 2025In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
“My message to the people of Gaza: Do not lose hope, do not despair,” a freed Palestinian prisoner said.Abdel Qader Sabbah (Drop Site News)
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
Abdel Qader Sabbah
and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Oct 13, 2025
In Khan Younis, thousands of people gathered to greet the freed detainees, who arrived in dozens of buses operated by the Red Cross and in Red Crescent ambulances. The crowds gathered in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital and on rooftops and balconies overlooking the medical complex where the freed captives were taken for medical checks. Nasser hospital, which has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, is one of only 13 out of 38 hospitals still partially functioning in Gaza.Freed detainees wearing gray jumpsuits leaned out of bus windows and waved to the crowds. Family members and friends embraced them through the windows as they drove by.
VIDEO: Hundreds of Palestinian Captives Released in Khan Younis From Israeli Detention
“My message to the people of Gaza: Do not lose hope, do not despair,” a freed Palestinian prisoner said.Abdel Qader Sabbah (Drop Site News)
CNN to host town hall with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders | CNN Politics
CNN will host a live town hall with progressive lawmakers Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday, October 15, the network announced Friday.
The town hall will air at 9 p.m. ET and will be moderated by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from Washington, DC.
The event comes as the government shutdown is set to enter a third week, leaving roughly 1.4 million federal employees furloughed or working without pay. The funding lapse has already affected travel, and its impact could soon be seen on food assistance programs and the economy overall.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/10/politics/cnn-aoc-bernie-sanders-town-hall
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Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge, provides a good analysis on Starmer's comments.
The Prime Minister insists that the dropping of China-related espionage charges occurred for reasons entirely outwith the control of his government — but his argument that his hands were tied by the previous government’s position on China is, at best, highly contestable ...The reality is that it is open to the government today to say that it considers that China was a threat to national security in 2021–23 and to offer that view as evidence for the purpose of criminal proceedings ...
The entire comment makes a good read: publiclawforeveryone.com/2025/…
On China, the Official Secrets Act and ‘enemies’: Is the Prime Minister wrong?
The Prime Minister has claimed that his government’s hands are tied in relation to whether China constituted an ‘enemy’ for the purpose of a now-dropped criminal prosecution under…Public Law for Everyone
Pro-Palestinian protest threat racks up tension for Italy's World Cup qualifier with Israel
During Friday's massive strike action in support of the Palestinians, demonstrators went to the Italian national team's training centre in Florence to demand the match against Israel be called off.As of Tuesday only around 4,000 tickets had been sold for the game in Udine, a small city in Italy's far north-east, which was picked specifically to help limit the potential for disorder.
Pro-Palestinian protest threat racks up tension for Italy's World Cup qualifier with Israel
Italy are struggling to qualify automatically for next year's World Cup finals and the pressure on the team is exacerbated by the tension surrounding next Tuesday's qualifier with Israel in Udine.France 24 (FRANCE 24)
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How Israel denies the right to play for Palestinian children (25min Video)
How Israel denies the right to play for Palestinian children
We look at Palestinian children's right to play in war-ravaged Gaza and in the occupied West Bank.Al Jazeera
Israel and Hamas agree to 'first phase' of plan to end fighting and release hostages, Trump says
WASHINGTON (AP) — Israel and Hamas have agreed to the “first phase” of his peace plan to pause fighting and release at least some hostages and prisoners, U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday in announcing the outlines of the biggest breakthrough in months in the two-year-old war.
“This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” Trump wrote on social media. “All Parties will be treated fairly!”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on social media, “With God’s help we will bring them all home.” Hamas said separately that the deal would ensure the withdrawal of Israeli troops as well as allow for the entry of aid and exchange of hostages and prisoners.
Hamas plans to release all 20 living hostages this weekend, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press, while the Israeli military will begin a withdrawal from the majority of Gaza.
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He seems pretty pissed off at Putin right now, and is now talking about Ukraine retaking all its territories.
I don't think it would go well for Israel if this deal fell through.
A nation like North Korea, for example, has good relations with one neighbour, and their relations with the other entirely depend on how much they've pissed them off lately.
Israel isn't so fortunate. Without support from countries like the US, they'd likely cease to exist, given how they've systematically pissed off every neighbour they have.
It's not an exact analogy, though, because they're actually stronger than their neighbors, who don't really have superpower allies of their own. If Israel were to take that path, they'd start by expanding (more), and rely on the weakening of the world order to get away with it. The economics would be straight out of the historical empires.
I think that's plausible just because of how deep into the hate Israeli society has gotten, and how they've already set up economic and legal mechanisms like that on a small scale, through their settlement movement.
The other option is basically that, however it shakes out through domestic politics, they give up and do whatever the US makes them. Which would be less frightening, but leaves another chapter to be written whenever the US fully loses interest in having anything to do with them, since the shift away from Zionism crosses party lines there.
and is now talking about Ukraine retaking all its territories
Talk's cheap, and no talk is cheaper than Trump's. See if there's any action before drawing any conclusion.
Yeah! The us will probably sanction their ass back to BC.
Just like the last time.
yeah
Aipac is funded by American Zionists and Israel is funded by the USA. The USA is the one who control Israel and will always be
Who the fk does he think he is (Netanyahu)? Who's the fking superpower here? - Bill Clinton
Everything Trump and the other presidents done was always to serve the USA imperialism
If a sentence or headline ends with "Trump Says" you can disregard it
Edit: at best you can infer the opposite. But mostly they are information-free.
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Germany investigating Temu on price-fixing suspicions
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Price fixing? How?
Dumping, possibly.
Abusing the International Postage Union, definitely.
but Price Fixing!?
Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar
Some people have the audacity to say that Trump's policies don't lead to misery and death.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program. Rubio also insisted: “No children are dying on my watch.”
But the data says and projects otherwise.
A study published in The Lancet journal in June said the U.S. funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030.
The United States could have been a beacon of hope and a model to look up to. For many years, that was the case for people and immigrants all around the world.
In a matter of months, that has all crumbled to its foundation. It's so hard to watch.
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-usaid-thailand-trump-rubio-aid-7f6919a1863ceea2ddf6708e47bb88f0
My use of 'all' was a generalization, not literal. Historically, many people around the world did view the U.S. as a model and a place to aspire to, even as others rightly criticized its actions. My point is that the MAGA slogan claims to be trying restore (something like) that old image, yet their actions only deepen global resentment.
It would be great to see the US genuinely become a beacon of hope again (and atone for their sins), but I'm not holding my breath. Honestly, I've been cheering on other nations to fill that role. I'm not a US nationalist or patriot.
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I'm afraid that you aren't seeing just how bad it really is:
There are specific dimensions to human-evil:
- narcissism
- machiavellianism
- sociopathy-psychopathy
- nihilism
- sadism
- systemic-dishonesty
- eradication-of-objectivity
- eradication-of-considered-reasoning
( and possibly others I haven't found, yet )
The problem is that MAGA is pushing-the-envelope on ALL these dimensions, simultaneously, & less than 1/4 way through Trump's 2nd term, he's got about 1/2 of "Project 2025" implimented.
People don't underrstand: there's a tipping-point" when it becomes totalitarian-dictatorship, & that point is *fast approaching.
The manufacturing of homelessness, combined with the criminalization of homelessness,
The law he got enacted that exempts him & his appointees from court-injunctions & related court actions,
The law he used to de-register Democrat voters, just before the Trump/Harris election,
The law that allows him to simply remove citizenship from everybody he doesn't like, "denaturalization",
There is NO limit to the evil that they will bee allowed to "legally" enforce, shortly.
As I tried explaining to the USMC, some time before Sept 11, 2001, "the USMC obeys any LEGAL order" does NOTHING to protect the USMC's heart/spirit once the law has been rewritten so that murdering babies is now a legal order.
The reason he's throwing-around the National Guard sooo much, now, is simply because it's part of how he's going to be enforcing his removal-of-rights-from-the-"woke", from the non-Republican, from the non-White, obviously too, in his enforcement of his confederate-kingdom..
The only saving-grace is that he'll be waging war on 3 fronts: war against Canada, because it's intolerable to him that he doesn't possess the entire-continent ( that's why he wants Greenland: to seal-off Canada from Europe, to quicken our butchery )
war against the US itself, Civil War Part2,
AND war against the countries to the US's south, basically all of Central America & much of South America,
WHILE picking fights with China whenever he can, offshore ( the navy )..
This is going to be the worst 6-7y that the Americas EVER had, once that tipping-point is crossed.
( & anybody who thinks that Russia isn't going to launch all-out war against Europe once NATO's butchered, is foolish: China'll be backing them, North Korea'll be backing them, & Canada'll be looking like Ukraine does, right now, if not like the way Mariupol did..
& China'll be rampaging Asia, with impunity..
etc.
IOW, regional-conquering will be the only thing the world is orienting-to for literally years, until Putin & Trump implode )
Tipping-points are violations of status-quo, & we're all unconsciously-wired to ignore violations-of-status-quo, unfortunately..
IF you're not with Trump, & you're in the Americas, please consider arming yourself significantly better than you are now..
( I've spent my life trying to find the Himilayan-Buddhist-monastery HOME that my soul remembers, from a previous-incarnation/life..
it is depressing-as-hell to have to say what I just told you, but it is dishonest to even think-of not telling you that.
I expect that there will be a couple hundred million dead in North America by the early 2030's, in Trump's rampaging of our world.
I expect that there will be a similar percentage dead in Europe then, too.
Even if I'm wrong by over-estimating-by-factor-of-2, that'd still be .. unimaginable for us, now, right?
US's Civil War Part2 .. civil wars are BAD: the most intense hatred-enforcement of any kind of war.
I hope that Canada's Carney finds somebody who can think in the proper frame-of-knowing that CAN stand, systematically, against Trump, because as European journalism has identified, he's spineless against Trump in the longer-term, & that isn't strategy: we're deadmeat, if that remains ruling Canada.
Financially, he's got no equal, that I know-of, anywhere near Canadian politics, but .. as a war leader??
As the war-leader in Canada's Armageddon? )
_ /\ _
reading that article is heart wrenching
there is such desperation - something has to be done
EDIT: trying to find a group that is helping with the famine, but in the meantime this might be a place where donations could be sent and well used:
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The Right's Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections
J.D. Vance and the Right's Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections
J.D. Vance and other MAGA interests are working to get the Supreme Court to end restrictions on campaign spending limits.David Sirota (Rolling Stone)
Israeli Soldiers Torched Food, Homes, and a Critical Sewage Treatment Plant in the Wake of Ceasefire Announcement
Israeli Soldiers Torched Food, Homes, and a Critical Sewage Treatment Plant in the Wake of Ceasefire Announcement
Soldiers called the mass arson of Gaza City their “final touches.”Younis Tirawi (Drop Site News)
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- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Not true. The sign up bonuses go to their next of kin. Russia is legitimately paying it out.
There are entire regions that have regeared their local economies to depend on these payouts. Because it's mostly underdeveloped regions signing up, this has become the most bizarre and macabre investment program in the world. Here's an excellent video on the topic.
typo: "that's why SO many Russian casualties" .. "do" changes the meaning to incomprehensible, & I suspect that many who don't have English as their primary language might not understand how to fix the meaning..
You're spot-on, of course: this is the point I'd been going to make!
Those mobile-crematoriums that Russia uses, to avoid paying-out the death-amount for fallen soldiers: machiavellianism taken to a degree I'd never have imagined..
_ /\ _
They have conscription, but Russia can't send conscripts abroad unless they're at war, and this is a special military operation, not a war. The real question is "Why don't they go to war, and send the conscripts?" And the answer why people don't understand why Russia doesn't is because they think Russia is a single country. That's a very normal thought to have when you live in the west, because say, France or Poland, are a single country.
But Russia is basically two countries. You've got Moscow, which has 20 million people and is slightly bigger than the Netherlands, and Saint Petersburg which has 6 million people but is also somewhat smaller. Those two cities are where the government sits, it's where all the decisions are made, where all the companies are, where all the capital sits and all the investements get made. Moscow has technology, internet, plumbing, subways, etc etc.
And then there's the entire rest of Russia, which you can sorta-kinda view as a massive colonial empire of Moscow. They get to decide nothing, they exist to provide labour for all of Moscow's capital and to have resources that can be exploited. It's where all the GDP comes from, yet they have no money because all that mineral wealth immediately goes back to Moscow.
Declaring war and sending in the conscripts would mean people from Moscow (read: People who actually matter) would get send to war, as opposed to the "colonial troops". Literally nobody in Russia cares about what happens to the 4 million people living in de Federal Republic of Bashkortostan (it's a real place, I promise), but everyone cares what happens to the people in 140.000 people in Kolpino, because it's part of St. Petersburg.
India bets big on drones in push for military dominance
India bets big on drones in push for military dominance
With a new school for "drone commandos," the massive "Cold Start" drone war games, and an ambitious air defense reform, India is rewriting its military playbook amid challenges from Pakistan and China.Murali Krishnan (Deutsche Welle)
Both Sunzi ( Sun Tzu, in the old way of naming him: it means Master Sun ) & Clausewitz would have a bit to say about that..
You aren't going to have military dominance, unless you've significantly out-invested your competitors/opponents.
Pretending that India's competitors/opponents are significantly out-invested by Modi's India .. is a pathetic joke.
< digging >
LMAO
India's next-year budget is around $80B, whereas China's is around $300B.
( that AND the fact that Modi has "bet the farm" on Russia's aiding India against China, when Russia's now an economic-vassal-state of China: they won't lift a finger against their new puppetmasters )
"Dominance", MY ASS.
_ /\ _
German parliament votes to get rid of fast-track citizenship
German parliament votes to get rid of fast-track citizenship
Crossing fast-track citizenship off the books was a key migration-related election campaign promise from Chancellor Merz's CDU. Critics argue that this will deter highly qualified immigrants from coming to Germany.Elizabeth Schumacher (Deutsche Welle)
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Dubai ports giant pushes for Somaliland recognition
Momentum grows for new country of Somaliland
DP World, the biggest investor in Somaliland, is lobbying to get the self-governing territory recognized.Mohammed Sergie (www.semafor.com)
Poland hit by unprecedented disinformation attack following Russian drone incursion
Poland hit by unprecedented disinformation attack following Russian drone incursion
The provocation on September 10 triggered a wave of social media messages in Poland, originating from Russian and Belarusian accounts, in part blaming Ukraine or NATO for the incident.Jakub Iwaniuk (Le Monde)
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The complete article identifies that the platforms, like Facebook, won't deplatform disinformation, even enemy-of-country disinformation, because it is profitable.
They won't comply.
& .. you will notice that the national-governments therefore are .. capitulating to the platforms, .. not wielding any law, any fines, any jailtime, an ANYthing, to coerce platform-compliance with national-law.
So, the "responsible" authorities are "helpless", then, .. while our countries are intentionally misrailed ( not identical with "derailed", but deliberately put on wrong rails ) by Russia: our governments, due to not having any spine, are "unable" to make that stop.
Enjoy the consequences of that, a few years down the road, when Trump has declared open war on NATO ( using Greenland to seal-off & butcher Canada, for his "continental kingdom" ), ditching Europe to Putin's Russia ( China backed, because of how that'll benefit China once Europe is butchered, in a few years .. "The destruction of the West is the midwife of Chinese dominion" )..
it's fucking inevitable, & it's unfolding as blatently/obviously as it can.
WHEN we have no spine to enforce integrity in our own institutions, AND "our" institutions have no spine to enforce integrity in their domains, AND everybody just accommodates the true-enemy-of-our-viability rewriting our owncountries .. while "wringing their hands", *displacing national-integrity..
it is our population that will be butchered, exactly as the Ukrainian population is currently being butchered because we accommodated Russia's invasion, after promising Ukraine that we'd protect them if Russia ever attacked them, when we got Ukraine to give-up their nukes..
Maybe our-race NEEDS to be butchered from existence, so that our souls might, someday, on some other world, have a speck of motivation to have integrity, then, instead of having any now..
The appeasers-of-Hitler certainly made many others pay for their non-responsibility..
Why would this-generation be any different?
This makes me wonder: when Trump's goons are literally murdering people willy-nilly, anybody who won't insta-grovel to their authority's "lordhood", will the Democrats THEN admit that they aren't going to be taking back the US of A through election??
WHAT THE FSCK DEGREE OF EVIDENCE IS REQUIRED TO CAUSE AUTHORITY TO SOMEHOW BEGIN EMBODYING INTEGRITY??
Infinite?
Species-wide DarwinAward's inevitable, then, & this is our kind's final century.
An organism's immune-system only has actual chance of breaking an infection IF IT IS FIGHTING infection.
If it's accommodating, instead-of fighting, then .. there is ZERO chance of breaking the infection, & the pathogen then OWNS the fate of the organism.
This is true of countries, as well as of individual-organisms.
_ /\ _
Sabag Montiel sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted assassination of Cristina Kirchner
Sabag Montiel sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempted assassination of Cristina Kirchner
The perpetrator of the attack will serve a total of 14 years, having also been handed a concurrent sentence for distributing child pornographyMar Centenera (Ediciones EL PAÍS S.L.)
Brazilian governor apologies after joking about deadly methanol poisoning crisis
Brazilian governor apologies after joking about deadly methanol poisoning crisis
São Paulo’s teetotal governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, says of scandal that has killed three that he would only worry when ‘they start faking Coca-Cola’Tom Phillips (The Guardian)
Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of preparing for war as Red Sea tensions rise
Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of preparing for war as Red Sea tensions rise
Ethiopia has written to the UN, accusing Eritrea of "funding, mobilizing and directing armed groups" on its soil.Teklemariam Bekit (BBC News)
Ethiopia has a better relationship with Russia than Eritrea and because, weirdly, Eritrea and Israel have a fairly good relationship, so my friends enemy is not necessarily my enemy, in this case, but a good contact to sell weapons to while I look for money to find my special military operation, and take my skim for you know, war effort. Also noted is that Ethiopia and Israel are fairly good friends, but I believe Israel operates some military out of Eritrea.
However, Russia will flip weapons to Ethiopia and Eritrea and watch them shoot it out. That being said, Ethiopia is the bigger monster when it comes to equipment because of its licensed manufacturing deal for old Soviet hardware, up to large field guns, I think, but is battle fatigued. Eritrea has far greater manpower of highly trained but poorly motivated and poorly equipped soldiers. Null sum game.
Also, they aren't going to fight. Aferwerki has enough problems at home, and his own tenure is at risk. Age has caught up and younger upstarts are sensing blood in the water. So while his avenue is to distract with a ports war, conveniently, it is again, a null sum game.
All hail Somaliland. The new powerbroker and infrastructure operator in the region.
Excuse me?
You have seen the massive amounts of weapons going to Ukraine?
Help is going there. Saying nobody wants to help Ukraine is disingenuous at best, and just a flat lie at, well, not even worst, just normal.
Look, I know that it would have been awesome if Europe would send soldiers but there is this thing where you try not to make things worse. Putting European soldiers there might very well escalate the Ukraine invasion to something we will all regret
You have seen the massive amounts of weapons going to Ukraine?
No, I haven't. But I am an engineer and therefore am capable to count to 100. I know even bigger numbers, so, let's say, 15, doesn't impress me at all. I wouldn't call it "massive".
Aaahhh, the previous wars haven't settled yet, the bodies aren't cold yet and here we already are preparing the next one.
The sheer joys of living!
Illegal gold mining clears 140,000 hectares of Peruvian Amazon
Illegal gold mining clears 140,000 hectares of Peruvian Amazon
Armed criminal groups tear down precious rainforest to capitalise on record gold prices, report findsLuke Taylor (The Guardian)
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Tesla's Full Self-Driving software under investigation after railroad incidents
Tesla Full Self-Driving under investigation after train incidents
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that it would investigate how Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving software handles railroad crossings.David Ingram (NBC News)
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WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE STILL EXPECTING THIS GARBAGE TO WORK? Tesla’s “full self driving” crashes have been widely covered. Is it simple ignorance? Are they not aware of the news? Is it stubbornness? Laziness? Thinking that “it won’t happen to me”? Do they sincerely believe Musk’s lies?
I know that victim blaming isn’t the answer, and that’s not what I’m doing. I just want to know what’s going on in their heads.
People don't know about the unreliability of such systems. They also don't know how simple Tesla's autopilot is compared to other systems.
As a person who has used OpenCV before, I would never trust a computer vision system. I maybe could trust LiDAR based systems as those can see 3 dimensionally but that's a big "maybe".
The weirdest part to me is that one apple engineer who died in a tesla crash. I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing
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Some of the stupidest people I've ever known were brilliant engineers.
Same could be said for many people with very specific doctorates.
As the popular band Smashmouth once sang: 'Your brain gets smart, but your head gets dumb'.
I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing
Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid's head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).
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That's like saying that they're going to cut the engine out of a car because it makes the car more expensive. Yeah but it also makes the car work.
Self-driving without lidar is never going to work, and it's likely to get them sued for releasing it like that.
Elon Musk is best friends with Tony Stark. He's a jeanius.
These people locked inside and burning to death are just crashing it wrong.
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I still personally know multiple people who still think those are awesome cars.
They're otherwise educated, intelligent people!
I really don't comprehend.
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Tesla should be fined and forced to change when saying or responding with "despite its name self driving is not self driving". They continue to lie. With continued consequences. At the cost of others and the public.
Them responding as such is absurd. Them getting away with that even more so.
It's because during (boasting?) exaggerated claims are often made, so it's totally fiiiine and legal!
Consumer protection is such a sham.
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Pretty sure he got public funding for that stunt, too.
Vegas people love getting conned.
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We don't look at car features in isolation. e.g. seatbelt or airbag could cause injuries too in a crash, but we have them because it's better than not having them.
In the same token self driving doesn't have to be perfect, it just need to be better than humans. I don't know what Tesla's number looks like, just speaking generally.
As a motorcyclist and bicyclist, I am not afraid of getting hurt by failures of other people's seatbelts and airbags.
I know what you're getting at, but there's more at stake here.
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I hated working for target 20 years ago. They aren't guests, they're customers. It's not a guest experience, it's shopping. And if I don't want to smile, fuck off and quit trying to say I should smile more.
And I'm a guy. I hear women get told they should smile more WAY more often than I did when I worked at target. Those people saying that can fuck all the way off onto a cactus dildo.
German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email
German state replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email
Digital sovereignty isn't a phrase you often hear in the US, but it's a big deal in Europe. Here's why.Steven Vaughan-Nichols (ZDNET)
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Kudos to Germany for pulling it off. Was also happy to see them mention
Last year [...] the government began rolling out LibreOffice as the default office suite to replace Microsoft Office.
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Earlier switches were primarily about cost-savings, so Microsoft would just swoop in with discounts and backroom deal$, or offer discounts to anyone considering copy-catting, isolating the early-adopters.
This case is not about cost but data sovereignty, and it's also a smaller switch (keeping the Windows OS), so we can have hopes for better success.
Did you know horses were the only way to move around before cars?
Did you know the US airline industry, and AT&T phone system were a monopoly situation?
Do you remember when Dropbox, Docker were the only product that filled their niche spot?
So, no, monopoly does not always win.
Of course I remember. There is no too big to fail, too.
But that does not mean it's not getting replaced by another one. That's also a pattern. Or maybe the meta game changes, someone else has money and invests and holds a lot of smaller players. Still.
For docker it would be Kubernetes and that's Google.
Future headline:
Microsoft's Windows update will eliminate "side loading" unauthorized programs.
givesomefucks
in reply to schizoidman • • •This good overall....
Places like I did and China still have in home coal burning, which is fucking terrible for the whole planet.
Getting them onto solar helps a lot more than getting Americans on solar.
Not only does at home coal use require more coal, there's zero pollution mitigation. At a plant at least there's some and there's inspectionz.
FishFace
in reply to givesomefucks • • •jubilationtcornpone
in reply to schizoidman • • •There's the tarrifs and theres the bizarre anti-renewable energy sentiment harbored by the current administration.
Personally, I think that's just coming from power utilities pushing the idea that, "it's cool if WE build a solar array but it's not cool if YOU do it."
rainwall
in reply to jubilationtcornpone • • •No, it's stupidier and more nakedly corrupt. Fossil fuel companies gave Trump over a billion dollars in political donations, and fossil fuel jobs look "manly" and have "big trucks."
That's about it. He can appeal to rural voters in rural states working dying jobs while the companies he gives trillions in subsides to give him billions in donations back. For that, he'll kill the planet faster and trap millions in low wage, dangerous jobs instead of just letting solar and wind naturally ramp up.