👀

This is effectively saying, “This article is correct but for the wrong reasons”. People aren’t angry about why hundreds of migrants dying isn’t newsworthy. They’re angry that it’s not newsworthy.

I’m frankly surprised that not enough people find it disgusting that the EU passively killing hundreds of refugees is less interesting because the EU does so regularly.

I should emphasize that a lot of pro-Western outlets and commentators have recently weaponised the term to discredit any diverging points of view re-the Ukraine War. So someone like Cornel West would be a “tankie” by this point of view, which is actually kind of disgusting in how dishonest it is.

Sadly not!

Thanks – especially for the tip about them looking ‘leggy’! Thankfully I’ve got a good windowsill that gets a lot of sun, so I’m hoping they’ll thrive (over the summer, at least).

EDIT: And yep, strangely enough, there are only 3 comments here (6 now, including my replies to each of them), but the text below my post says there’s 20 comments in total…strange?

Cheers! Fwiw, here’s a list of compatible desktops from the libreboot website:

• Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L motherboard
• Acer G43T-AM3
• Intel D510MO and D410PT motherboards
• Apple iMac 5,2
• HP Elite 8200 SFF (HP 6200 Pro Business probably works too)

Does this require fiddling with software?

Depends. Libreboot replaces your processor’s firmware with fully libre software. Most importantly, it gets rid of Intel Management Engine, which is a firmware-level spyware that all modern laptops have. Almost all laptops are stuck with this firmware – the sole exception are ~10 machines, mostly Toshiba, from 2008-2012ish. With these, you can completely eliminate the Intel ME by flashing your firmware with libreboot.

Now, in most cases, this requires tinkering with hardware. If you’re lucky, you can find a ThinkPad model that you can flash without having to gut the whole machine first. So in most cases (to my understanding), librebooting a machine is heavy on having to disassemble your laptop.

Does it work out of the box?

If by ‘out of the box’ you mean ‘works without issue once installed’, then yes. Once you’ve done the fiddling and set everything up, you don’t even have to think of libreboot again.

Some motherboard bios will give overclocking(OC) options. Does Libreboot give OC options, RAID drivers, or boot security options (encrypted OS)?

This is mostly beyond my expertise, but I recommend going through libreboot’s extremely informative official website.

If i wanted to take my current Franken-desktop and switch out the BIOS/UEFI and keep the OS, could this do it gracefully?

Almost definitely no. Libreboot only works on a select few devices, all of which have been out of production for about a decade (usually more). It’s a great option if you’re 1) Willing to tinker, AND 2) Either have one of the compatible models lying around, OR 3) Are willing to find one off of eBay auctions or local marketplaces.

You can find the list of compatible laptops on the libreboot website – if you’re lucky, maybe you have/can find one of these. If not, I’m not fully sure this has been of much help to you :')

The main appeal of libreboot is that you can truly create a 100% libre laptop with it. No blobs, no proprietary software, no invasive surveillance even at the firmware level.

Umm I’d recommend getting your SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt so that we can access your website over HTTPS! Currently it only works via HTTP.

Great. I don’t know enough to use either but I think I’m going to try lean on podman from the get go. In any case, I know that all podman commands are exactly identical to Docker, such that you can replace, say, docker compose with podman compose and move on with ease.

Do you think Podman is ready to take over Docker? My understanding is that Podman is Docker without the root requirement.

Relieved to hear. I was just ticked off by a good number of people online coming to the Prince’s defence.

Hello!

My two cents: “being” vegan is overrated and subtly shifts the goalposts from reflecting and acting upon serious ethical questions to policing each others’ adherence to an imaginary pure ideal. I say this as a vegan btw.

So for example, I reject the idea of veganism as “avoiding animal-derived products as far as practicable” (paraphrasing the exact definition). I.e. if I’m stuck on an island with zero plant foraging skills, and I then catch some fish out of our necessity, I’m not vegan. It’s just that simple.

But I’m not going to feel bad about that fact and guilt-trip myself into inertia. Maybe the fish help me survive long enough to learn to identify edible plants, learn to climb trees to get coconuts etc. Over time, I’m able to completely eliminate my fish intake and rely on plants. So the initial fish helped keep me alive long enough…to protect scores of their fellow fish!

If I’d obsessed over being vegan everywhere and at all times, I’d ignore the ethical possibilities right before my own eyes, and possibly even conclude that the most ethical thing was to starve to death – all in the name of being recognized as “vegan”.

If you solely focus on individual acts of killing, you tend to forget that death is a part of life. It’s impossible not to kill, to be honest – just as it’s impossible not to be killed. We often forget that latter part. It goes both ways.

One notorious example I’ve encountered is when people go vegan for the “wrong reasons”. Say someone learns about the extremely morbid effects of meat & dairy, and then chooses to go vegan. I’ve heard people say that these people have no right to be “vegan” and should call themselves “plant-based”. In either case, the ethical effects on animals are basically the same, except that maybe the “plant-based” folk have a couple of animal-based non-food products around the house.

I’ll skip a few steps here to share my own broader position, which is that it’s consequently possible to have relations with animals that are reciprocal and not merely exploitative. People have practiced such relations all around the world for millennia.

Nothing’s easier than porridge! Just water, oats and fruits of your choice. Then chop up some dates and them to the mix. Microwave 2 min and top with cinnamon, nuts and seeds. Healthy, easy and delicious.

Also smoothies. Just get a banana, apple, nuts, chia seeds, flax seeds and blitz. Then add some water and a generous amount of frozen berries. Takes 10 min at the most.

For mains? Just set some rice to boil on the side. In the meantime, chop onions, garlic and tomatoes, fry 'em up and add your choice of spices. Then throw in a can of lentils/beans, maybe some chopped broccoli and sweet potatoes if you want. Let the whole thing simmer for 10-15 minutes. Ideally your rice and stew are ready at the same time!

For something truly quick – chop some broccoli and blanch for a minute. Transfer to a pan with olive oil, stir fry with some chopped garlic and chilli flakes. Meanwhile, use the blanching water to boil your spaghetti. Add the spaghetti (with some of the pasta water) to your pan and mix it all up good. Serve as you like! (Optionally you can top it off with grated vegan cheese, but I like to avoid processed foods as much as I can. Instead, you could chop up some nuts and sprinkle a generous amount of nutritional yeast).

Any good recommendations for FOSS keyboards with Swype-like functionality? Literally the only thing keeping me attached to GBoard…

Maybe something like a monthly prompt-basedwriting contest? On Reddit there’s a dedicated community for this (r/WritingPrompts) but it could be a fun addition here too.

I’ll take a stab, but please do bear with me as I’m also not an expert by any means :)

To understand the pre-war situation, you really need to bear in mind that Ukraine was a divided nation for years. The West and North were pro-Western: they wanted to join the EU, push for NATO membership and generally push for closer ties with the West. The East and the South, though, had deep economic dependencies on Russia since Soviet times, and worried that getting closer to the West would seriously damage their livelihood. Culturally, the East was more conservative (in terms of, say, religion) than the West.

Also bear in mind that Ukraine is a very centralised Republic, where most political power is concentrated in Kiev. And Kiev, for its part, was typically more pro-Western.

Such tensions erupted into the 2014 “Maidan” protests. Their immediate cause was that then-President Viktor Yanukovych backtracked on a deal to enter the EU that he’d announced in late 2013. This led to widespread anger and protests, which soon turned very ugly.

Now, bear in mind that Russian propaganda loves to claim that Maidan was a Nazi uprising. As with any good propaganda, there’s always a kernel of truth in the lie. The far-right was present in Maidan, and they did ally with the pro-West side. But they were far from the “leaders” of the protests. However, they did play an instrumental role in thwarting a peaceful resolution to the situation. Yanukovych was in the process of making a deal with the parliamentary pro-Western factions, but it was the violent elements of the extra-parliamentary pro-Western factions that stopped this from happening.

After Maidan came “anti-Maidan”, which were a string of movements throughout the South and East to maintain their ties with Russia. Bear in mind that 50% of Ukrainians speak Russian, and that most of these also live in the East and there South.

Soon enough, you had two declarations of independent republics in the Donbas region – the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).

Things get interesting here, because Western propaganda will have you believe that the DPR & LPR were fully Russia-backed and led by the Russian militant Igor Girkin. Again, there’s a kernel of truth in the lie: Russia did militarily support the new Republics, but this support would have had zero effect if the people of the Donbas didn’t already have a strong sense of disillusionment with Kiev. The Russians merely exploited this discontent to their benefit – just as they did with Crimea.

The issue is, all these divides became irrelevant once the Russians declared war. Just because the East was “pro-Russia” didn’t mean they were “pro-seceding into Russia’s”. Even if they spoke Russian, shared religious beliefs and had strong economic ties with Russia, they still saw themselves as Ukrainian.

Think of it this way: “Russian” is an international language just like English or French. Most Indians speak English. Most Quebecois speak French, as do a lot of Swiss. They’ll be up in arms if French was banned or if, say, the Swiss govt planned to cut off all ties with France. But that doesn’t mean they want France to conquer them.

Once you understand these nuances, you’ll see how Russian propaganda tries to polarise Eastern and Southern Ukrainians in favour of the invasion. But obviously, this has utterly failed. Most people here – as far as I know, that is – are as enraged as any Ukrainian by the invasion.

Western propaganda, though, has been exceptionally successful, since most Westerners assume that Ukrainians are a monolithic group, 100% of which wants to join the EU, NATO and embrace so-called “Western values” of freedom. Most Westerners are convinced that there was a negligible far-right presence at the 2014 Maidan protests, which is as much a lie as saying that the far-right dominated. The truth lies somewhere in between.

As such, personally, I exhort people to reflect on the possibility that Western propaganda is just as real as any Russian yarns, if not more. I mean, even the idea that the FSB is this highly efficient spy agency on par with the CIA is something of a joke.

Those in power love to weaponise the word “propaganda” to focus on their enemies’ lies. They count on our ignorance and unwillingness to think for ourselves.

The greatest power we can wield is to reclaim our ability to think for ourselves – that’s all it takes!

What’s the evidence that Lemmy’s developers are tankies?

Just to be very clear by the way, a “tankie” is, at the very least, someone who sincerely and unironically believes that Stalin was a heroic do-gooder, that North Korea’s “Juche” ideology will soon unleash utopia, and that China under the CCP is the very model of a communist society.

Furthermore, a tankie is someone whose gospel is Marxism-Leninism, i.e. Lenin’s extremely conservative spin on communism. A tankie will claim supreme knowledge about what Marc “really” said and boldly proclaim that dialectical materialism is pure science.

Organisationally, tankies tend to insist that all activist groups must be strictly hierarchical, with all decisions made by a Central Committee. “Activists” are merely the minions who’ll do the Committee’s bidding (btw, now how this is basically how Reddit is run). They’ll normally try to monopolize social movements into the banner of the local Communist Party of their region.

Socially, tankies also tend to actually be conservative, because their dialectical materialism dictates class reductionism. This means that, strictly speaking, queer issues are secondary to class issues (for example). There are definitive tropes of toxic masculinity, militarism, possibly even nationalism, in tankie discourses.

Now, in my opinion, a tankie is not someone who “merely” defends, say, the success of public health in Cuba, the fact that China has seen dramatic reductions in poverty since the 60s, or that India’s most literate state (which, btw, just announced free wi-fi for those in poverty) happens to be under Communist rule for a few decades now.

I’d also say (and this as someone who personally knows people involved with XJ) that “merely” questioning whether there’s an ongoing genocide in Xinjiang also doesn’t make you’re a tankie. Jeff Sachs, whatever else you think of him, has this position, and yet he’s as far from a tankie as you can get (the guy literally enforced hardcore capitalist “Washington Consensus” policies in Latin America).

Furthermore, a “tankie” is also not someone who talks about NATO’s role in the ongoing Ukrainian War. In fact, even the best Ukrainian scholars (e.g. Volodymyr Ishchenko) agree on this point, and again, they’re as far as you can get from tankies.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that these views aren’t problematic. China is obviously a totalitarian state (as is Cuba) and the situation in Xinjiang is obviously hideous, but this is nowhere near saying that China/DPRK/USSR are/were communist utopias. These are individual claims that many people hold.

Lately, the “tankie” label has been a gift for chiefly Western hawks who’ve used it to silence anyone who speaks of Western and non-Western war crimes in the same breath. They do so because it’s in their interest to paint themselves as honest, freedom-loving liberals.

I think it’s best if we wise up to this sleight of hand, and don’t do Western overlords’ biddings for them, for free.

And while we’re on the topic, I personally don’t think a Dev’s political beliefs matter when it comes to their platform, unless there’s clear evidence that they’re using their platform as a tool to attack those who don’t hold the same views. This is why I ask: could you share evidence that 1) Lemmy’s Devs are tankies and 2) Even if they are, that they’re throttling non/anti-tankie discourse on Lemmy?

To take another example, Alexandra Elbakyan is the creator of Sci-Hub, perhaps the single biggest gift to scholarship worldwidein the 21st century. She’s also a hardcore Stalinist. That doesn’t stop me from using her platform, since her platform benefits me everyday. I find her views loathsome, but I’m also grateful for her work.