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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • So you replied to the first sentence and ignored the paragraphs in which I describe why supporting either is misguided to malicious.

    I understand the arguments that are constantly being spewed about the evil western imperialists, and they are of course true for the most part. Only that this doesn’t in turn validate or justify the human rights violations, atrocities or even genocides committed by either Russia or China; they cannot be guides or aides on the path to the desired egalitarian utopia.

    If either of them had their way, would that do us in the west any good? The answer is no.

    China desires a global hegemony under their sino-centric ideology, and to extend its control structures outside its own national borders. They employ the same imperialist strategies and methods to acquire influence and resource access in emerging countries as the west has or is doing. Russia currently displays its own imperial ambitions by its war of aggression on Ukraine. At least they don’t even bother with any greater good pretense, and are straight up about it.

    The only real option is to consolidate the west in ethical and ideological opposition to these totalitarian parodies of their former goals, to create a new economic system that works for the people and not the reverse, without sacrificing our freedoms and individuality in the process.

    One that truly represents what socialism is about.


  • Tankies are so fucking weird to me, and I would consider myself a progressive socialist as well.

    How can they so unapologetically support Russia and China, when both nations are objectively not socialist in any sense of the word.

    China does state capitalism, just because they have a one party state installed by the communist party doesn’t automatically mean they still are. All that is left is intense authoritarianism, with dystopian ambitions on global hegemony.

    Russia is a failed state in the grasp of a kleptocratic oligarchy, with an extreme degree of corruption and disturbing moral decay in all levels of society. The only thing communist about it today is the old soviet ordnance they make their conscripts die in at the ukranian front.

    Modern China and Russia are antithetical to actual leftist ideals, and any tankie supporting them just screams misinformed idiot or foreign propaganda shill and should be dismissed by default.



  • I don’t know much about it myself, but I would guess it is negligible. Maybe for small propeller machines with a fairly limited amount of fuel capacity; but larger planes, especially commercial ones, have reserve fuel for quite some time.

    Situations where landing at the destination is temporarily unavailable, air traffic requires the plane to circle for some time, or they are even rerouted to a different airport can always occur and are accounted for. A minor increase from rainfall shouldn’t make a dent. I would think.




  • I just yesterday saw a post how disabling downvotes for an instance that still acts as part of the greater fediverse causes issues and unfair advantages with posts being created there that can achieve a high score very easily, even on accident.

    I would expect Lemmy to rework that function to avoid these issues so that up- and downvotes are either mandatory or can only be disabled together. I would not recommend trying to find an instance based on if they practice this most likely not here to stay functionality.



  • While I agree that certain state sponsored actors and private interest groups are most definitely involved in discourse manipulation on reddit, Lemmy simply isn’t big enough for this yet.

    If we go by the numbers stated in the original post, the whole of Lemmy has less than 500k users at this point, whom are overwhelmingly <40 years old tech affine early adopter nerds from the United States and Western Europe.

    Too insignificant to spend resources on, and also largely sceptical of corporate interests and authoritarian governments (except the tankies of course); so by default critical of the two top potential manipulators.


  • German infrastructure has been neglected for several decades. In the past, the whole phone grid was nationalized under the Deutsche Telekom, which eventually got spun off into a regular company.

    For some insane reason the government basically let them keep almost all of the existing telecommunications infrastructure, giving them a quasi monopoly for many years and the lobbying power to delay upgrading the grid to modern fibre connections in favor of squeezing marginal improvements out of the old copper wires.

    Even today the upgrading is going slowly, but at least in cities the connections are reasonably fast, I have about 300 mbits in a fairly small town (about 200k people)




  • Thank you for enlightening me to my inner workings! It is always a revelation to have an internet armchair psychologist give you a diagnosis.

    For that matter, I am german myself and thus have a “passing” familiarity with the legal situation surrounding nazism. I am specifically referring to Christianity in the west, with an exception to America due to their own regression in that regard. You are of course right that certain re emerging right wing parties are sometimes tied to conservative Christianity like in Poland, but that doesn’t somehow negate the danger of allowing a new and radically violent religion to take hold and carve out space in a free society.

    Also, your paradox of tolerance is not actually a paradox, people just like to parrot that to not be made to change something.

    Tolerance is a social contract that says I accept you to live and be free as you are or want to be in this society, as long as you treat me with the same respect. Islam does not subscribe to this notion, there is no room for acceptance of LGBTQ people, the equal rights and opportunities of women, not even for non-Muslim beliefs (infidels) or atheists (apostates).

    Which in turn means Islam is not covered by the social contract of tolerance.



  • There cannot be topics forbidden to be made fun of in a free society. If we cannot make fun of Muslims and Islam in any way without causing religious riots and violence then current form Islam has no place in a free society. The difference between Islam and the other monotheistic abrahamic religions is that the older two of the three have had enough time to go through cycles of reformation and ideological modernization, making them somewhat compatible with a modern pluralist society. Islam still insists a bunch of fables from when the book was written are literally true and valid today, and not just apocryphal advice on how to be a decent person.

    And before someone brings up the inevitable American evangelicals as comparison, they are equally incompatible. Luckily that scourge is largely confined to the United States and not my problem.





  • Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.

    Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.

    The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”

    And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.

    It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.

    And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.