This is such an incredible story. I cannot recommend it enough.
It's delightfully weird, mixed with the fact that it gets under the skin of the most repressive regime on earth. All conducted by some random Danish guy. Just amazing.
A great thing about the banners is that it's not immediately obvious to everyone that websites are trying to track their every step online. The banners are annoying, but at least it pushes the tech industry to play with open cards.
Love them! When the male has much more efficient camouflage than the female, is this because it has a greater responsibility for gathering food, while she stays in the nest more? Or is the red colour better camouflage for somewhere else outside the tree?
Which hinges, of course, on a free press. Not that it excuses the actions at all, but the democratic argument is sadly not entirely as straightforward as it should be in this case.
It has absolutely not, and it goes without saying (but is nevertheless worth repeating) that this is completely unacceptable. As long as you're free to demonstrate without risking your safety and the outcomes of elections matter, leaders should be chosen at the ballot.
It's an interesting question how bad the state of democracy needs to be before one is justified to stop playing by the rules. There is a breaking point somewhere, and politicians killing off scrutinizing journalists are clearly moving towards it in a dangerous way. But it is nevertheless clear that Slovakia remained far away from the breaking point of anything like this becoming necessary.
I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
I think a good approach could be to think about how you could reach users of different platforms.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility, might also help.
I think Kbin/Mbin might be better suited for this than Lemmy, as it integrates better with other federated networks. You can follow microbloggers and boost content, which in turn makes them likely to follow you back and creates a community beyond which Lemmy community you choose to post in. Your Mastodon followers will see your posts, but it won't matter to them which community you post it in.
It's hard for content to make the jump from Lemmy to Mastodon as Lemmy does not make itself discoverable, but as soon as content reaches Mastodon users nothing stops them from interacting with it (by boosting or replying).
Sadly Kbin.social lacks sufficiently active moderation these days, so you might be better off with an mbin instance. I also have no idea how accessible Mbin is to blind users.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don't want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don't value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
I've mentioned a number of times, it can be a challenge trying to look for awesome pictures for you all every day due to unlabeled, uncited, or just falsely presented pictures....
In an ideal world it would always be possible to credit the photographer, but I guess that's sadly unrealistic.
If there's an interest for fakes I guess the could be a "Fowl Friday" or something like that every month, where fake owls are allowed/encouraged if properly tagged. I guess the value would be educational, showing people how to tell that impressive-looking wildlife photography is fake. You're an expert of this, and it's very much appreciated that you share your insights. :)
Climate experts say the region is reeling from the effects of El Niño, the cyclical climate phenomenon that can bring heavy rains to Brazil’s southern regions while causing drought in the Amazon rainforest....
My family immigrated to the UK from Poland when I was six. I'm 20 now, speak much better English than Polish and feel like this is my land/culture. However I have a Polish first and last name, Polish passport and "unique" accent everyone picks up on, so despite this I'm usually perceived as an outsider. It makes me really sad...
Well, imagine you meet a guy travelling through the US. He's wearing lederhosen, has a freaking feather in his hat, and speaks with a heavy German accent. You ask where he's from, and he says he's American/Italian, as his maternal grandfather was born in the US and his grandmother on his father's side is Italian. However, this is his first time outside of Germany, and he speaks no Italian and hardly any English.
This is what Americans tend to look like to Europeans.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
If anything, this proves that forking Mastodon is a great idea. Not because any useful software would come out of it, but it would distract some of the annoying armchair managers out there.
The biggest problem with Mastodon isn't the lack of feature X or the presence of feature Y; it's those exact assholes, draining the energy and enthusiasm from anything that crosses their path while scaring away anyone looking for a meaningful conversation.
I hate to break it to you, but if you genuinely think you've figured it all out, chances are you're a fucking moron.
A police officer in riot gear swinging his baton over journalist Olga Fedorova after having pushed her to the ground, shortly before her arrest. Fedorova is staring defiantly back at the cop, still pointing her camera at him. Photo credit Alex Kent (alex-kent.com, via twitter @AlexKentTN)
Here's their website. I'm not entirely sure what makes people working for them deserving of being beaten up by cops, but I'm sure people with more time on their hands than me can come up with something.
I don't see how the outlet she represents is relevant at all. The cops shouldn't be violently arresting peaceful protesters, and they should not be violently arresting people with press credentials for pointing their camera in what they consider to be the wrong direction.
She has NYC press credentials, she's press. It doesn't matter that she's not from your personal favourite newspaper.
I'm not entirely sure how hashtags render in Lemmy, but I added that one because I think fundamentally it's what the picture is about: Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, press freedom, freedom from arbitrary violence.
Of course it's a case of freedom being infringed upon, but I nevertheless think it's a central theme.
I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying "woke", "critical race theory", ""grooming"", and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....
This. Conservatives tend to themselves be the victims of a failed system, hating them for failing to address it in a useful manner is hardly constructive. I reserve my hatred for billionaires.
I know Lemmy isn't normally the best place to search for this, but are there any high-quality right-wing explainers, or modern books, or media outlets?...
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia is a solid philosophical foundation for a lot of right wing thought. If you want to engage further you can follow up with Michael Otsuka's critique in Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation.
Nozick provides an underpinning for what many think of as traditional conservative American values, without basing it in Christianity.
Then of course there's the Chicago school of economics (Friedman et al), which is just a somewhat naive and more it less completely discredited take on how the economy works. It's fundamental for understanding American politics the previous half century, but their ideas are not really worth interacting with unless you're particularly interested in economics. It's not like the idiot politicians who push it in front of them understand the theories either.
Thsee theories is not far right; there's no salvaging the far right, and their ideological basis is mostly just bigotry. You could read Ayn Rand to try to understand which hole these idiots crawled from. Or better, don't waste your time.
Yeah, you're probably right it's worth reading if you want to understand the American right. I just don't think Atlas Shrugged is anywhere near as interesting as Anarchy, State and Utopia from a history of ideas perspective, but that might not be the relevant dimension. :)
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The source is full of red flags all over, and it's not reputable at all. Having a fancy header is not the same as "looking credible".
They cite two sources. One is behind a paywall in Swedish, the other is a politician they choose to label as conservative, but who is actually member of the Swedish extreme right (Sverigedemokraterna), not the conservative party (Moderaterna).
The Swedish BBC, SVT, has a better write up on this that can be ran through whatever translation service your heart desires.
The biggest lie the "European Conservative" is pushing seems to be that they are police staff: The concerned individuals are police students, yet "European Conservative" doesn't mention the word student even once. The students have since been expelled.
It seems at least some already associated with criminal networks when they applied for the police academy.
I'm the first to say that Swedish policing looks like amateur hour at times, but this is just disinformation. I suspect the "European Conservative" is neither European nor conservative.
Yeah, it's not that DN is not reputable, it's just that I couldn't actually check that they made the same claims as Conservative European. When I checked SVT it said something different, which didn't increase my confidence either.
Not an ad or anything but I got it from light.bio if you're curious. Super cool product, I've been waiting for a company to successfully bring a bioluminescent plant to the market for a decade and it finally happened!
I have posted some pictures I've taken from hikes, and check in now and then when I feel like posting something or looking at pictures.
My experience is very different from what other people here seem to report. I am just posting into the void, I have posted 11 pictures to date, and I never linked the account to anything or told anyone about it. Still I have more than 50 followers, only from people who stumbled over my content and decided to follow. I'm only following half of that number, so it's not a politeness thing.
I've also gotten a few comments, though mostly people just click like and/or boost. It seems every time I post something I gain at least a follower or two.
So overall I'm pretty impressed by PixlFed. If you have something to share it's a good platform to do so. And there's nice landscape photography on there, at least.
The EU interfering directly with domestic politics of member states by for example banning political parties would, safe to say, not be well received.
Leyen is completely correct, and for sure the EU needs to work to build resistance in Europe against foreign propaganda, but it's not so straightforward for the EU to intervene in these things. It remains the responsibility of the individual member states, and one might reasonably argue it is better left that way.
That said, when the EU considers banning vectors of foreign surveillance, that is one thing that they can do and that they seem to consider. It's just a fine line between taking action and overstepping. European countries tend to cling to some degree of sovereignity, especially in questions of national security.
For sure, but even then the EU needs to go through the democratic process it has in place. If you try to introduce a law guaranteeing press freedom it'll be vetoed by Hungary.
The question then becomes how much you can achieve with the laws on the books. Traditionally cases will be brought before the Court of Justice, which will then have to decide if it can or should interpret existing laws in an expansive manner in order to cover whatever issue is in front of them. Judicial independence in Poland is a good recent example.
While the Court of Justice could introduce democratic safeguards this way, there's also a certain irony to having democratic safeguards imposed by a supranational organ of 27 judges nobody knows with minimal democratic legitimacy. If the Court of Justice oversteps there's also no guarantee the affected member states will accept its authority, and enforcement mechanisms are limited.
The Court of Justice has generally been pretty successful of pushing an integrationist agenda, but it's only so much it can (and should) do. And if the political organs are deadlocked, the EU is basically a lame duck by design.
But the way Europe works today, that's a national issue.
Hungary and Poland had weak constitutions and lacked democratic guarantees because their constitutions were designed to be subject to change; the idea was that democratically elected officials would draft new and better conditions after a transition period, rather than having the communist parties at the table when drafting them. Unfortunately, the social democrats never bothered to change the constitution, leaving them unchanged until far right parties came to power.
In Italy there's a long tradition of election reforms from far right parties, and their politics has always been a mess. Italy has always worked in spite of, not thanks to, its political leadership, so having a de facto MSI member back in power is not such a radical change.
And bad actors have always taken part in democracy, people just need to have access to education and information to make them not vote for the Le Pens, Farages, Berlisconis, Melonis, and Orbans out there. They should be kept from controlling the media (like Berlusconi), and we need to do better to prevent foreign interference, but we cannot prevent them from participating.
Yeah, and social media makes them good subjects to foreign propaganda as they get older and they get more vulnerable. Education can only achieve so much.
I think there is absolutely a need to better regulate both traditional and social media. The EU is better positioned it the latter in the short term, and I think they're doing a decent job lately.
And for sure, there are many other areas where the EU could hypothetically play an important role. It's just that it cannot just decide to give itself the authority to do so, and if it did that would constitute a democratic problem of comparable magnitude. So I think we need to go to the national level to find politicians to criticise for not doing enough in this regard.
Not at all. New laws would have to be passed, which would need to be approved by the Council and Parliament.
It would be pretty far-fetched considering the current scope of the Union, and it's a political mine field with a not too obvious pay-off. It might, however, be necessary if there are developments towards an European defence pact.
What would be within the scope of the EU is to make the standards for entrance stricter, but this wouldn't really affect the countries already in the Union or prevent backsliding.
In orphanages, schools, and camps, the military teaches children how to handle weapons. The Telegram channels of military brigades explain who the enemy is: Poland and the Baltic states....
When trying to understand Belarusian politics, the main question to ask is "how does Lukasjenko stay alive and free".
He needs to stay in power, and he's only staying in power at the mercy of Putin. And he needs his subjects to have a perception of crisis in order for them to accept his bullshit.
If he allows things to get better he'll be removed from power, at which point he'll either be imprisoned or killed.
One of several portraits of the composer painted by Kelly at the end of his life. Vaughan Williams was influenced by by British Folk music in many of his pieces, including The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis - featured in the film Master and Commander, and Dives and Lazarus.
I remember in Revenge of the Sith, when the actor playing Vader yells "nooooooooo", at what is supposed to be the emotional climax of the trilogy, the theater roared in laughter....
I remember checking out Lemmy in December 2022, it was barely even a proof of concept. Now it's a whole ecosystem.
it's incredible how far it has gotten in a short time. And while commercial platforms will only get worse with time, open source platforms will only get better. Growth might not always be a linear process, but I'm feeling optimistic. :)
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Big Tech to EU: "Drop Dead" ( www.eff.org )
Sleepy Screech Family ( lemmy.world )
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c2c8c769-9b6b-4935-b5d3-b75c3210174b.webp...
Tom Waits - "Road To Peace" (2006, alternative folk rock) ( yewtu.be )
Tom Waits is not afraid of going dark places with his song writing, but it hardly gets darker than this....
Slovak PM Fico in hospital after shooting ( www.bbc.com )
For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?
I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
Greta Thunberg accuses Israel of ‘artwashing’ reputation through Eurovision ( www.independent.co.uk )
Things the "owl"-gorithm recommends to me... 😒 ( lemmy.world )
I've mentioned a number of times, it can be a challenge trying to look for awesome pictures for you all every day due to unlabeled, uncited, or just falsely presented pictures....
Images of a Brazilian City Underwater | Torrential rains have caused one of Brazil’s worst floods in modern history, leaving more than 100 dead and nearly an entire state submerged. ( www.nytimes.com )
Climate experts say the region is reeling from the effects of El Niño, the cyclical climate phenomenon that can bring heavy rains to Brazil’s southern regions while causing drought in the Amazon rainforest....
Ship on a Stormy Sea - Ivan Aivazovsky (18th century) ( upload.wikimedia.org )
Will I ever be seen as truly British?
My family immigrated to the UK from Poland when I was six. I'm 20 now, speak much better English than Polish and feel like this is my land/culture. However I have a Polish first and last name, Polish passport and "unique" accent everyone picks up on, so despite this I'm usually perceived as an outsider. It makes me really sad...
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon ( wedistribute.org )
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
Arrest of journalist Olga Fedorova (Alex Kent, New York, May 8 2024)
How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals
I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying "woke", "critical race theory", ""grooming"", and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....
Why does the government of the USA stand by the country of Israel?
That’s the question.
[Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers?
I know Lemmy isn't normally the best place to search for this, but are there any high-quality right-wing explainers, or modern books, or media outlets?...
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
If you or somebody you know ever fell for a romance scam, how did you or the person fall for it?
And when did you / the person you know realize he was scammed?...
My bioluminescent petunia ( mander.xyz )
Not an ad or anything but I got it from light.bio if you're curious. Super cool product, I've been waiting for a company to successfully bring a bioluminescent plant to the market for a decade and it finally happened!
Is anyone using PixelFed? How is your experience so far?
Should I remove the earthworm from my indoor potted plant? ( kbin.social )
It seems the compost I used was more lively than anticipated. There's an earthworm crawling around in there....
Von der Leyen criticises European far right for being ‘Putin’s proxies’ ( www.theguardian.com )
Belarusian authorities are preparing children for war with the EU ( texty.org.ua )
In orphanages, schools, and camps, the military teaches children how to handle weapons. The Telegram channels of military brigades explain who the enemy is: Poland and the Baltic states....
Sir Ralph Vaughan Williams - Gerald Festus Kelly (1959) ( 1.bp.blogspot.com )
One of several portraits of the composer painted by Kelly at the end of his life. Vaughan Williams was influenced by by British Folk music in many of his pieces, including The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis - featured in the film Master and Commander, and Dives and Lazarus.
Movie lines people laughed at in theaters despite not actually being intended to be funny?
I remember in Revenge of the Sith, when the actor playing Vader yells "nooooooooo", at what is supposed to be the emotional climax of the trilogy, the theater roared in laughter....
Happy 10 million! According to FediDB, we have hit 10 million users across the Fediverse! ( lemmy.world )
fedidb.org