Yeah, they aren’t unbiased, they are more hesitant perhaps than other outlets on the other end of the bias spectrum - but not covering? Covering up? The biggest headline result when I just visited bbc.co.uk was about the starvation campaign.

Their bias can actually be somewhat helpful - it lends legitimacy to what they are reporting on, and makes it harder to claim that it’s “just biased pro-palestine pseudo-journalism” or some crap like that.

A conscience really is a goddamn hindrance in this world rather than a net positive.

Sort of. People without a conscience and without the power, privilege and/or social tools to abuse that often also end up pretty badly. Like how narcissism can lead both to (unwanted) social isolation, or even prison time, and then also sometimes to a successful business/political career or creating your own adoring cult, depending on other factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the person.

I don’t believe that people should be forced to “stay in their lane”, but if you’re going to go wading into waters that are not your own, you gotta stay humble.

Yes. And I can even sympathise with that being hard. It’s genuinely hard to do so and takes work and emotional stress, people potentially dogpiling on you from both sides doesn’t help either. But it sadly is the only way to arrive at something approximating truth. Influencer culture, atomised society and increasing isolation and social media in the context of a “presenting the most interesting you” culture sadly make this even harder. And even without that, there is always, and will always be, the danger of getting caught up in defending a point that is just wrong, because our psyche as humans latched onto it for reasons of identity/ego preservation or otherwise emotional wellbeing. Discourse culture ideally has to account for that with respectful arguing in good faith, even when the other side is wrong. Of course, that is an ideal that cannot always be reached, especially with more fuzzy, non-empirically provable points, or discourse that has very direct and tangible effects on our lives (politics, mainly, which is one reason it can be so draining).

Your perspective is valid as your perspective in the discourse, as long as it can be viewed as authoritative where you can rightfully claim you have knowledge and expertise (and even then, of course, it can be contradicted with proper arguments or newly emerging facts), as well as an outsider estimate where you just have an educated guess. And the latter isn’t worthless, but should be distinguished from more confident takes for the sake of discourse. Even just vibes-based perspectives are valid as a part of a discourse, but they have to clearly be able to be put into context and qualified, and have to stomach being superseded.

I had appreciated her having a different perspective than my own, still rooted in scientific thinking. Then I started noticing her commenting on things authoritatively, where she had no expertise here and there (especially outside of STEM, where my special interests lie).

And then I stopped watching her after I had noticed more and more hints of that, where she seemingly acted like a high IQ and knowledge in her own field means she is qualified to disregard other perspectives outside her field. I am sad it got that bad, but I am not too surprised.

I guess the engagement bait “please contradict the headline”-title is working well, I always want to keep editorialising to a minimum when sharing videos like this, but this was one of those “what they meant could have been made a little bit clearer, and they knew it”-things.

Really the stuff he is talking about concerning that - mainly initial cost vs long term savings and lack of existing infrastructure/expertise - are just realities that are important to address in the political process. He could have gone into more detail considering Munich’s attempt at Linux (LiMux) - where to my knowledge the reason it failed was a combination of lobbying by Microsoft, Conservatives (CSU) winning the local elections, and costs (as well as employee complaints) from having processes be more complicated, the latter mostly thanks to Microsoft’s outright obstructionism concerning document format standards, as well as expertise being relatively costly (whereas finding MS-certified anyones in the office space was relatively easy). Those are considerations to have, but I think more and more, the advantages of Linux and Open Source clearly outweigh that stuff in the face of rising costs and enshittification, and he does talk about all the good stuff pretty well in the video.

As just a personal thing, the original mute watching was so surreal and unique, I enjoyed it more - solving the mystery of what is happening from what’s shown visually alone (and some subdued music) - but that is a deeply subjective thing.

you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it.

Oh no, I couldn’t do that to her, she definitely deserved better.

That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.

So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.

Thank you for the answer! I just came back home to all the answers, yours strikes me as the best summary of the situation. I had signed the petition myself a while ago, but after that, never looked into further coverage, so all this whizzed right past me. Seems like, no matter if he genuinely misunderstood it or maliciously misrepresented it - he handled the situation pretty horribly overall. Explains the hate I have been seeing.

Also, one can lead to the other. If you catch the right fish with a scam, they may just unwittingly give you a way in to an institution. Only the latter would make the news, though.

One large problem there: All the people that are “stupid” in the way you describe think exactly the same way you do here. It’s why I think arrogance and the inability to stand being humiliated by deferring to other people’s expertise, as well as a feeling of being privileged to be above the needs of other people, as well as a paranoid fear of others intruding on your space is the more pressing problem.

I have lived with and worked with people with actual learning disabilities, thanks to my own different disability, and “stupidity” is not the problem, it’s okay to be stupid. It’s not okay to demand the whole world submit to your emotional wellbeing and feelings of superiority and privilege.

Looks good, and should remain visible that way on other instances after lemm.ee goes down!

Try fetching them again - speaking only from experience with my own (Lemmy) server, when fetching a community not yet “visible” to it, reloading the link twice does the trick.

That being said, I just checked - I’m getting a server outage notice when trying to go on piefed.social.

So, the gambit of authoritarian regimes in those situations is: If you see an opposition leaving controlled status and gaining popularity, and you know that suppressing that popularity (at their home) is hard, the main course of action is beating it down, brutally. Thought you could put hope into a candidate of your own choosing as people? Well, we will just put him into a prison and/or deport him, and/or terrorise you with blunt force, while telling everyone outside your group, that you are part of the evil to be defeated.

If that works or backfires on them heavily depends on conviction and organisation of the (working class) people of New York. So if you are part of that, don’t let yourself be intimidated, and be prepared for some fucked up suppression attempts. (best way of preparing is joining with organisations and networking with friends and neighbours for mutual aid and independent communication/info networks when shit hits the fan.)

[email protected] for people from other instances as an easy link.

Piefed has a lot of cool mod and admin tools (and other features), hope you will be happy with the new home! I moved my subscription.

They do have a tourism industry, composed of ideological “true believers” (not that big of a group), tourists wanting to experience the unique culture out of curiosity (or - in the more recent years - also to produce social media content), and tourists interested in the unique architecture.

In the overwhelming amount of cases, it also goes well enough, because it is a welcome avenue to get foreign currency for them, and despite what some may believe, the state is still fully within the dynamics of capital accumulation. (Other examples are: contractors in construction, where they have unique know-how in monumental constructions, which is also one of the places where the exploitation of their populace as wage labourers can become visible to the outside world - and selling stamps and other collectibles in demand for being “exotic” as they are from NK.)

But then, every now and again, you have cases like Otto Warmbier.

“To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.”

Not just him, but others in different ways. The German car manufacturing lobby, for example, has also slept on their market control and oligopoly, missed important developments, and is now complaining that the “Chinese are not playing fair”, after they lobbied politics and manipulated data to stifle the move to EVs (e.g. the big VW diesel emissions fraud scandal as probably the biggest story there).

Are the Chinese “playing fair”? Well, they are not playing more crooked than what we already had, at least. And they provide something necessary (affordable EVs) for the current transition, and that transition was already direly needed yesterday. (Although of course, more broadly, favouring transit and reducing car-centered infrastructure is even more important, EVs are still a part of the equation.)

As per the article: Oleksandr Merezhko. Without knowing more about him, he does seem genuinely far from being on Russia’s payroll or part of the proto-fascist elements (beyond potentially the usual accidentally being a useful idiot like many centrist liberals end up being, sadly). Seems more like an old school centrist out of his depth, but with genuine convictions for liberalism, for what it’s worth.

My guess is that he either completely misestimated what Trump really is about - or maybe put forth the nomination to bait his narcissist side into doing more, with the prize serving as a carrot on a stick. Either way, he was quite wrong in hoping for Trump doing much to end the war.

Right? Remember when “Bushisms” were a thing, they feel almost sensible now, just silly little mistakes in speech. Or how the media discussed that his calls for a fight of “good vs evil” were crossing a line, and people were still concerned abotu that. Or how there was a real discourse that warned, that debating if torture is “sometimes justified” would lead to a descend into barbarism…