ICE’s surveillance technology goes beyond facial recognition
ICE isn’t just tracking your phone. The surveillance technology goes further than that.
Federal immigration agencies are using a vast surveillance network in Minnesota – from facial recognition technology to ‘stingrays’ that collect data by impersonating cell phone towers.Shubhanjana Das (Sahan Journal)
blog.zaramis.se/2026/01/30/kok…
Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU
Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU
I’ve been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is …Techdirt
like this
dandi8 and deliriousdreams like this.
Yah it will get you Tankiepoints™ out the wazoo to say you pray for the collapse of the USA but with every other country's economy tied to the US dollar, that outcome will be less than ideal when you want to go to your local market and buy food or medicine.
I get downvotes when I remind people of this fact like I'm making an argument for something. Talk to your local leaders about why they have invested so much in the US, not me.
Can’t do that without revolution.
Which is still about a century away.
The vast, vast majority of this country who are only marginally invested in politics combined the needs of capital to secure that stability will override whatever political ambitions any leadership has in the long-term. All of the current crisis is still just a flash in the pan, it will pass, the pendulum will swing the other way and the cycle will continue. I've been watching it a long ass time, I have seen nothing yet that makes me believe the country will experience wide-scale change.
It's going to get more authoritarian broadly, it's going to have more unrest and reduced rights, particularly as the climate changes and the immigration situation gets a lot more inflamed as refugees start piling up to get in, but right now, unless a LOT of people make a lot of huge changes to their media consumption habits, we're going to see a rougher, nastier status-quo for decades to come.
The USA is a HUGE boat that turns slowly, it's not one country, it's 50. And because of that, small changes have huge consequences but only decades down the line. Few people who haven't actually traveled the nation really get the scale involved and what has to change before we see lasting change.
With every crisis, with every bit of imperilism that dies, the Statesian public becomes more aware of their chains. Media is only useful for giving people narratives they want to agree with, not for convincing people outright. The Empire is dying, and with it comes dramatic radicalization. Even looking at younger generations over time, communism is rapidly rising in popularity:
Quantitative buildup is reaching qualitative leaps, like heating water until it boils. It looks like nothing's happening until suddenly everything is.
like this
NoneOfUrBusiness likes this.
Nah, not really. A different (not necessarily better or worse, just different) world hegemony will just emerge
Aslo the transition gonna be painful (see: yugoslav war)
that's weird, they tell me that they are leftists and that if I disagree with them at all them I'm not a leftist.
Then they lecture me about how privileged I am and I should just shut up and listen to them because my any thoughts or opinions of my own are automatically wrong because they come from a position of privileged rather than oppression. And I point out I grew up working class from a low income family. Then they tell me to go fuck myself how dare I even talk to them since I'm clearly a MAGA supporter if I am working class, and I shouldn't have been allowed to go to college because clearly I'm so stupid for not being a 'real leftist' like them.
then i'm sorry that you've had that experience.
maybe try to organise a directory of local businesses/services/shared resources etc without discussing politics at all, if it's something that gets people in your locality upset.
if your area has to deal with some extreme weather & gets flooded, for example, ensuring that everyone can stay fed & have access to medical care will be a lot easier if the groundwork has already been done in advance.
Tankiepoints™
Can I redeem my Tankiepoints at a participating retailers whenever I want, or do they expire eventually?
Except that's bullshit. What China is actually doing is taking out land and resource leases for flat fees, and then moving their own people into the Africa country to extract the resources for pennies on the yuan.
USA wasn't doing any of that. They were mostly trying to tell African governments to stop being so corrupt and putting all sorts of limits and terms on aid service. But the leaders in the governments didn't like that. They liked getting big fat checks from China for resources they had no ability to extract themselves. China is more than happy to support corrupt and dictatorial governments, because well, that's what they are. They are also more than happy to sell them weapons systems and technology for lower costs and without the restrictions that come on the US/European ones.
It's colonialism. it's just the Chinese version of it. If you are support of authoritarian colonialism and exporting dictatorial governments over democratic ones, of course you'd see China as the preferred power.
The Saudis and other rising middle powers are also trying to get in on this game. Every nation to be a hegemonic power to the extent that they can.
The US Empire (and Europe as well) is the one installing compradors. No, the US Empire isn't trying to tell people to "not be corrupt," they want that so the comoradors sell out their countries and force austerity, privatization of nationalized industries, etc. This is how imperialism works, and is why the US Empire has hundreds of overseas millitary bases while the PRC has ~3. If you nationalize your resources, the US Empire tries to destroy you, because the US Empire depends entirely on this system of super-exploiting for super-profits.
BRI and the PRC's presence in Africa and the global south in general isn't imperialist. The PRC is expanding trade, but not dominance, nor does its trade deals come at the barrel of a gun. They trade with pretty much everyone, and support their allies, but this is not imperialism. To the contrary, the PRC is acting against imperialism.
- The CPC punishing Chinese landlords for improper treatment of Africans, mass arresting the landlords, passing reforms, and apologizing to the African Union
- China has forgiven over 10 billion in foreign debt
- Belt-Road Initiative: An Anti-thesis of Colonialism
- Evo Morales speaks on claims of "Chinese imperialism
- Five Imperialist Myths About China's Role in Africa
- Is China a Better Partner for Africa than Europe and the West?
- Challenging US Imperialism with Chinese Multilateralism
- The Fallacy of Denouncing Both Sides of the US-China Conflict
And many, many more sources back this up. It's no secret that imperialists have been trying to smear China into being "no better" than the west, but the reality on the ground is that partnering with China results in mutual development and cooperation, while partnering with the west results in stripped autonomy, underdevelopment, and exploitation.
As for China's democracy, it's actually better than the US Empire by a wide margin. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, and we can see the strong perceptions around this democracy:
This is despite the Three Represents system. Overall, this system has resulted in over 90% of the population approving the government, which is shown to be consistent and accurate.
Overall, you have a deeply confused notion of what's going on in the global south. The US is the world's largest empire and is colonizing the world, China is focusing on win-win economic development.
Support for government in China: is the data accurate?
Some have questioned the survey results. Are the skeptics right?Jason Hickel
Of the half billion or so actual joined-an-org-and-doing-work communists, the number who are fans of such a niche videogame category is basically a rounding error, and being a furry is even less common.
But I think I know every one of them.
Me too, but I also believe that collapse is a fundamental part of the natural cycles that govern everything in the universe. It’s hubris to think humans can exempt themselves from this natural system, and the belief that we can is a large driver of why we find ourselves here.
We can’t just skip collapse, nor can avoid it. Embrace its coming and celebrate what will grow from it.
Thats my fear. Imagine of the ppl that got trump in power got some nukes or like corpos?
Walmart or Amazon now a nuclear power is a terrible thought.
Yeah, bourgeois states would never ever develop infrastructure for market expansion and capital accumulation purposes (e.g. building up infrastructure in colonial states to facilitate exports + extract resources or undertaking massive projects such as the Suez and Panama canals), they would never ever nationalize nor have dominant national ownership of their industry for national bourgeois benefit or capital stability (like in Saudi Arabia, fascist Italy, various national oil companies), nor they would have high approval rates like seen in fascist regimes and economic boom periods (entrenched superstructures also make workers "approve" things that go against their interests). Maybe there's more DOTP's out there than I thought....
The idea that development of the productive forces is bad because it implies exploitation is inherently flawed, highly developed productive forces are the basis of socialized production to begin with
Productive forces by themselves are neutral, what matters is the underlying social relations of production. Capitalist mode of production presupposes exploitation via extraction of surplus value and market constrains, which is not only exploitative but also conflicts with the long-term worker interest that is production-for-use. Expansion of exploitation goes against working class interests, that much is hopefully obvious - you're not gonna find anyone but bourgeois or workers deep in nationalist superstructure being happy about their nation state having GDP growth.
On the other hand, a society that produces for use rather than for profit that doesn't have the exploitative surplus extraction mechanism - now that and it's growth is inherently in the interests of the working class.
China hasn't made even the most gradual of shifts towards this, it's a full on market economy that maintains the exploitative relation and sometimes merely transfers ownership around, but this doesn't materially affect the relationship between the worker and means of production.
Mere promises for the "future plans" do not alter the bourgeois essence of the economy as it stands now in China, and I highly doubt that a state maintaining this essence that is in it's national material interests will one day just do a 180, completely go against those interests and abolish the current state of things.
All of the actual benefits are being given to the working classes on a steady and constant basis. Their quality of life has steadily gone up dramatically year over year, in a fundamentally far greater degree than social democracies offer by ratio, without bribery from imperialism.
This is true for literally most capitalist countries during its active development, or after WW2. It is also a blatantly anti-marxist socdem narrative, as the marxist goal is abolishment of current state of things rather than merely making things temporarily better until capitalist contradictions inevitably catch up and result in crisis.
Yeah, bourgeois states would never ever develop infrastructure for market expansion and capital accumulation purposes (e.g. building up infrastructure in colonial states to facilitate exports + extract resources or undertaking massive projects such as the Suez and Panama canals),
Except in the PRC, infrastructure projects are explicitly made to service both the overall socialist economy, and the lives of the working classes, at the expense of the domestic bourgeoisie. Your argument is essentially "the PRC has infrastructure projects, therefore it's capitalist," and considering I already demonstrated that public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the state run by the working classes, we need to re-examine these infrastructure projects. You are, again, confusing form for essence, and focusing on similarities while turning a blind eye towards stark differences. Again, making a mockery of dialectical materialism.
they would never ever nationalize nor have dominant national ownership of their industry for national bourgeois benefit or capital stability (like in Saudi Arabia, fascist Italy, various national oil companies),
Except in those economies, private ownership still remained principle. This is why I brought up Bismark earlier, and that I agree that nationalized industry isn't inherently a sign of socialism. That's why, as Marxists, we need to take the dialectical materialist approach and analyze not just individual elements, but the nature of the economy as a whole. Nationalization in the context of an economy where private ownership is principle ultimately is in service of the bourgeoisie. The Republic of Korea is dominated by giant megacorps like Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc, despite having a strong bourgeois state, while the PRC is dominated by public ownership and SOEs with a proletarian state, despite having bourgeois ownership over small and medium secondary industries.
Again, since you seem to ignore your critical lack of dialectical analysis, I'll keep pointing it out every time it comes up. You are, again, confusing form for essence, and focusing on similarities while turning a blind eye towards stark differences.
nor they would have high approval rates like seen in fascist regimes and economic boom periods (entrenched superstructures also make workers “approve” things that go against their interests). Maybe there’s more DOTP’s out there than I thought…
Except the PRC's "boom period" seems to persist even in times of instability, and for many decades at a time, while fascist regimes have been flashes in the pan and boom/bust cycles in capitalist economies are regular. The highest approval rates in capitalist economies come in times of war, yet the PRC has been at peace for many decades and still retains this approval rate.
Again, since you seem to ignore your critical lack of dialectical analysis, I'll keep pointing it out every time it comes up. You are, again, confusing form for essence, and focusing on similarities while turning a blind eye towards stark differences.
Productive forces by themselves are neutral, what matters is the underlying social relations of production. Capitalist mode of production presupposes exploitation via extraction of surplus value and market constrains, which is not only exploitative but also conflicts with the long-term worker interest that is production-for-use. Expansion of exploitation goes against working class interests, that much is hopefully obvious - you’re not gonna find anyone but bourgeois or workers deep in nationalist superstructure being happy about their nation state having GDP growth.
This is a deeply confused analysis. The PRC has public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy, not private. Growth in production is essential for actually being capable of production-for-use, and this very problem was what caused instability under the Gang of Four. The idea that the small proprietors, the secondary, small industries, and the agricultural cooperatives need to be nationalized overnight is anti-Marxist analysis. You're using phrasemongering to try to paint increased industrial capacity as something contrary to worker interests.
On the other hand, a society that produces for use rather than for profit that doesn’t have the exploitative surplus extraction mechanism - now that and it’s growth is inherently in the interests of the working class.
The backbone of China's economy is production for use, though. Exploitation is a contradiction, correct, but trying to nationalize industry before it actually socializes is unnecessary from Marxist analysis, and delays productivity. You're making the argument of the Gang of Four, that being that it's better to be working in a fully nationalized economy as a poor worker than working in partially privatized yet ultimately socialist economy with more productive capacity and access to goods and services. Marxism doesn't posit that dogmatically nationalizing is inherently better because it gets rid of exploitation, but instead takes a scientific approach to analyzing production and distribution.
China hasn’t made even the most gradual of shifts towards this, it’s a full on market economy that maintains the exploitative relation and sometimes merely transfers ownership around, but this doesn’t materially affect the relationship between the worker and means of production
Utterly baseless claims, when the economy is dominated by the public sector and Five Year Plans guide the development of the economy. I've given you multiple examples backing this up, while you return with unbacked claims counter to reality.
Mere promises for the “future plans” do not alter the bourgeois essence of the economy as it stands now in China, and I highly doubt that a state maintaining this essence that is in it’s national material interests will one day just do a 180, completely go against those interests and abolish the current state of things.
China doesn't need to pull a 180, it's already a socialist economy gradually nationalizing the small and medium secondary industries as they develop and socialize. This isn't about "future plans," they are already socialist and already in the long and protracted process of transition between capitalism and communism, ie socialism. Nowhere in my comments thus far have I stated that they need to pull a 180, they need to continue their process of folding socialized production into the public sector and maintain the DotP.
This is true for literally most capitalist countries during its active development, or after WW2. It is also a blatantly anti-marxist socdem narrative, as the marxist goal is abolishment of current state of things rather than merely making things temporarily better until capitalist contradictions inevitably catch up and result in crisis.
Except this is entirely false. The capitalist countries during active devevelopment have not directed their gains towards the benefits of the working classes, and post-WWII the capitalist countries entered an era of even greater imperialism. This, in the context of a post about the US Empire (which you batted hard to defend under the guise of worry about the labor aristocracy there), is clear social chauvanism. Further, the idea that the PRC is only making things temporarily better until "capitalist contradictions inevitably catch up and result in crisis" is entirely unfounded, as I explained earlier the PRC has been in a period of stable growth without a boom/bust cycle for decades, far longer than the capitalist world.
Repeating it because you ignored this, and accused me of being anti-Marxist and a "socdem:" you confuse form for essence. You utterly ignore the principle aspect of the economy, and see presence of contradiction as evidence of subservient aspects as dominant. This error in thinking is derived from purely looking at similarities, and ignoring differences. Only seeing the general, while ignoring the particular. In other words, utterly maiming the dialectical half of dialectical materialism.
Yes! Noe that its collapsing, surely someone will sell me their house for $300! So they can buy someone else's house for $300?
How's that gonna work?
It cannot. The housing market needs houses that are affordable without ripping people off. I propose that corporations be given "tokens" in exchange for forcibly removing their ownership from all the houses they own.
By collapsing the housing market, the price for housing would also collapse.
Walmart or Amazon now a nuclear power is a terrible thought.
Given that the US government exists to make megacorps like that as powerful as possible, they already effectively are, they're just saved the inconvenience/expense of directly maintaining their own military and nuclear stockpile.
My bigger concern tbh is a post-balkanization Texas or Utah. Evangelicals and Mormons are a whole lot more likely to let the nukes fly to bring about the end times imo.
Support for government in China: is the data accurate?
Some have questioned the survey results. Are the skeptics right?Jason Hickel
your source is an opinion column.
opinions aren't facts. polls aren't truth.
fair enough, it's just a suggestion or jumping off point, what works in one area won't necessarily work everywhere.
best of luck organising some way to make sure people in your community stay fed etc in emergencies, however you do so!
I think the point is that OP (rightfully in my opinion) realizes that that is not possible without a collapse that results in a revolution.
Our entire government and wealthy are wrapped up in defending their pedophilia. Invading US cities and kidnapping people (and foreign leaders). I think if you're not praying for a collapse at this point you are still comfortable enough to believe the lie that this system just needs "fixing" instead of a complete replacement. There is comfort in believing that. I held onto that belief for a long long time. Even knowing history was against that belief in every similar case. But it would only be for my own comfort to believe that at this point.
Careful what you wish for.
There be crooks wishing the same.
Ready with their next, worse, rigged game.
"Any other option will be just like me or worse" is the line that abusers use to keep others subjected to them.
I'm terrified of no longer being able to travel across the country without being hunted down, but I also know that the integral existence of the country is actively accelerating the polycrisis and making the world a worse place.
I would be willing to shift the burdens of risk from the whole world to just my country.
Putin also won the last election with 88% of the vote. That is a fact.
If you think that fact is truth, however, you're an idiot. Facts and statistics are often lies. I'm glad you believe in lies and the 'superiority' of the Xi's dictatorship. Go move to China then. See how that goes for you.
Putin did recieve 88% of the vote, the nationalists are popular in Russia. This is largely due to the nationalists kicking out western imperialists plundering Russia in the 90s, after the dissolution of the USSR. The CPRF is rising in popularity, though, especially as capitalism proves to be failing Russians.
You don't have any evidence backing up why you think the CPC is secretly unpopular. I've spoken to Chinese people, both currently living there and ex-pats, and they all have backed up that the Chinese government enjoys legitimate support. It's due to dramatically improving the lives of the working classes. You only have insults and vibes.
If I beat the shit out of you until you claim you love me, is that legit love?
According to you, it is.
You're right, but the other groups are usually actually actively working towards and succeeding at saboating the US's entire social discourse and putting oligarchs in power.
Tankies on the other hand don't really want to work that hard, or get it all out of their system posting AI-written manifestos on lemmy.
Within the empire itself, younger generations are increasingly in favor of communism.
As long as MLs don't hijack the revolution and betray the working class again, this is good news but the sharks are circling.
nor do they “betray the working classes.”
Are you suggesting they never expressed solidarity to the working class to begin with?
Oh it is, when we ask with bigger guns. The EU is ramping up, all those delusions about to fall appart.
Just need to get rid of the Quislings.
Ah, gotcha. When I hear "argument," I hear "debate culture," the kind of liberal bloodsports that focus mostly on rhetorical wins than finding a fundamental truth. I'm not quite using dialectics the way they were first formalized in ancient society, but instead more as a dialectical materialist. We can't come to a better understanding purely through the realm of ideas, such is the strategy of dialectical idealists, but instead we can be more cooperative in education.
As for my style, I do try to emulate the dialectical method of Marx, but I absolutely do not compare to him in skill. Practicing dialectical materialism as a method of analysis is a skill like any other, it takes repitition and intention to become more accurate. Regarding disposition, I mostly take from Liu Shaoqi's How to be a Good Communist, which helps me maintain revolutionary optimism!
Read How to Be a Good Communist(Liu Shaoqi) on ProleWiki
July 1939 , Comrades, The question I shall discuss is how members of the Communist Party should cultivate and temper themselves. It may not be unprofitable to the...ProleWiki
I'm sure the Tibetans and the Uyghurs agree with you too. The CPC enjoys their popular support too, even as it genocides their cultures in favor of the Han Chinese.
All that evidence of violence, oppression, and sterilization is just fake news bro! CPC is clearly just doing them a huge favor!
Uyghurs are not being tortured, sterilized, genocided, etc. Neither are Tibetans. Those claims originate entirely from Adrian Zenz, a US State Department-funded Christian Nationalist for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, itself a propaganda org.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective's Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report and China's response to it. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time, as well. You can watch , though it obviously isn't going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this.
Tibet was a feudal slave society backed by the CIA. The PLA liberated Tibet.
Two excerpts from Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”[12]Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.
[18]As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.
[20]The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.
[21]The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs.[22]Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.
[24]In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who wasremovedd and then had her nose sliced away.
[25]Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. […] The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.” [26] As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri-La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.
-Dr. Michael Parenti
Overall, again, you have no evidence here either. You have blood libel, and don't dare link any of it because you want plausible deniability. You're doing the same thing the west does in saying there's "white genocide" in South Africa, or "christian genocide" in Nigeria, or that Saddam's forces took babies out of incubators and left them on the floor, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies. You're repeating western atrocity proaganda.
Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation
Western governments have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China’s anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.Qiao Collective
everything is propaganda if it disagrees with your narrative. nobody's reality other than the reality the CPC tells you is real, is real.
I fully understand. thank you for re-educating me. I will now move to china and be liberated from my evil democratic notions that are oppressing me.
No? The CPC isn't committing genocide. I quite clearly gave you an example of a fundamental error by the CPC to disprove your notion that I accept whatever the CPC does, and now you're saying that that's more evidence of only accepting the CPC?
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
- Dr. Michael Parenti (RIP), Blackshirts and Reds | Audiobook
according to you any evidence i present is false because i present it. and according to you any evidence you present is true because you present it.
weird how that works.
you are just quoting propaganda. repeatedly. and claiming it's evidence.
then when i claim something as evidence, you claim it's propaganda, not evidence.
and around and around we go.
No no, see, they did make a bunch of claims as evidence. They may not have provided any sources for those claims and haven't proven those claims true. But they did provide a lot of claims and say that it is evidence of something.
That we require it to be more rigorous than that is not their problem
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While east civilization is kept under oligarchs and imperialistic assholes pretending to be "socjalist", exploited people in the east are pretending to be happy, that working class in the west will be in the same shit very soon?
Not nice :\
We should work together against imperialism, oligarchs, and exploitation.
You won't ever get it from schumer or Jeffries, but that doesn't mean the D is not still better than the R.
And if you can see that difference and didn't vote that way then I'm sorry for your learning disability.
It is thr joh of the democratic party to resist this. If they cant even get their own people to resist, it is either incompetence or it is willful and purposeful.
In either case, they are failures and should not be voted for until they actually fight for the people
I can also remember Joe Lieberman the villian and Al Gore the pre-eminent inventor of the internet and hanging chads and all that fun. I also developed a cool skill called appreciation for nuance which let's me see that having a break away group is still better than wholesale support of roving gestapo in major cities. Luckily, that's a thing we now have thanks in part to the "both sides are the same" heroic lefty crowd. I would even consider myself a lefty person except I can get my old ass up of the couch to vote once year and protest even a few more times.
The couch troglodytes of this com who post memes like this are lucky to have nothing to lose. You can rotate villains in a party, but that's still way better than a whole party of villains.
Maybe you can check your old ass perspective.
Sir, this is dbzero.
Were a bunch of "lefties" that constantly parrot right-wing talking points. Your extremely obvious harm reduction has no say here.
There's such a thing as progressing
Which we don’t fucking get with democrats. At best, we get the status quo. At worst, we get Nazi collaboration, which is what the current democrat party is. Nazi collaborators.
Shut the fuck up with this lesser of two evils bullshit. The democrats are fascists as well, they just aren’t honest about it like the republicans are.
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This is the system you have. If you don’t vote you’re part of the problem
Only voting you can ask to elected people to change things. Maybe ranked elections would allow more parties and candidates
Only [by] voting you can ask to elected people to change things.
How about we replace that system with one where we don't have to ask nicely to change things for the better?
So, add a recall election mechanism and let everything else play out the same?
Because most parts of the US would probably reelect the same candidate if an election was held tomorrow (literally the standard polling question).
Renaming things doesn't make them work better.
So, add a recall election mechanism and let everything else play out the same?
No, that's not what I said. I want to abolish rulers completely.
Council democracy isn't based on electoral parliament, but on general assemblies.
Council democracy isn’t based on electoral parliament, but on general assemblies.
Oh yes, so different.
I'm all about a federated commune of communes, seriously, but at scale how is that really much different? You can't have billions of people living on the planet, or hundreds of millions in a country, without some kind of coordination. It's not practical for millions of people to vote on every little detail, you've still got to have focused representatives to, at minimum, collect information into policy that can be voted on in the first place.
Really the only two options, barring authoritarianism, are direct democracy or some kind of elected representatives. Direct democracy doesn't really work for most considerable topics (agricultural production, electric grid installation, hospital equipment, etc.). Even if people knew enough about the subject to make informed decisions, most people won't bother engaging. So we're inevitably left with some kind of representative democracy, councils don't really eliminate the fact of electing representatives, or the consequences when certain demographics over or underperform at the polls.
Maybe you have gone last chance on midterms, maybe it’s too late and the system will only make the controlling party to win. Not sure. But if people refuse to vote, I don’t think they ever have the chance.
You don’t get it. Lefties didn’t vote and helped to speed up and increase the genocide. They helped the plan a lot by not voting and their hands has blood too, they can lie to themselves when they “washed their hands” but they had a choice and they prefer to let MAGA choose for them.
MAGA is voting, like it or not, and not voting only help them
Trying to Get Through the Day
Not every struggle announces itself loudly.
Some arrive quietly, asking only for a chance to get through the day with dignity.
We’re a family in Gaza, navigating life with very limited means.
Any support—no matter how small—can make a real difference.
Even reading or sharing this means more than you know.
Trying to Get Through the Day
نُشر تبادليًا من: hexbear.net/post/7496504
Not every struggle announces itself loudly.
Some arrive quietly, asking only for a chance to get through the day with dignity.We’re a family in Gaza, navigating life with very limited means.
Any support—no matter how small—can make a real difference.Even reading or sharing this means more than you know.
Trying to Get Through the Day
Not every struggle announces itself loudly.
Some arrive quietly, asking only for a chance to get through the day with dignity.We’re a family in Gaza, navigating life with very limited means.
Any support—no matter how small—can make a real difference.Even reading or sharing this means more than you know.
Archive.is/today down?
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Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺, Fitik and deliriousdreams like this.
Works for me. Is the domain blocked where you are? Or is your browser/vpn/etc making the page fail to load?
I don't know of anything that comes close to archive. today. Web.archive.org if you're lucky will work for your site.
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Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺 and deliriousdreams like this.
Are you using a VPN?
It's always been sketchy for me but it almost never works when I use VPN.
Just a heads up: according to this post, Archive[.]is/.today/.ph is currently serving up malware to visitors, essentially using your traffic to DDoS another target.
From the linked thread:
The DDoS attack runs as JavaScript code in the browser of visitors of archive[.]today websites. Effectively this abuses the devices and abuses the devices of visitors for the attack. Effectively this abuses the devices of visitors for the cyberattack, which makes it a lot more challenging to block on the recipient’s side. Someone knowingly participating in a botnet may also be guilty of Computer sabotage" according to § 303b StGB in Germany or similar laws.This is currently still ongoing, as visiting the CAPTCHA sites still delivers JavaScript code for the DDoS, to access the targeted site many times. Most commonly used content and ad blockers like uBlock Origin should already be filtering this by default, but we can’t expect everyone to use them, especially on mobile devices.
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I guess forking is an easy way to benefit from others' work.
I'm wondering if there is any game developer that chooses this fork knowing that it will likely not keep up with upstream features and fixes.
I am a godot user and it seems to me that Godot it pretty much under heavy development and so...
Just some Foss drama, I stay away from that.
I've never heard of this before. Nice to have other variations. redotengine.org/ I wonder why they forked Godot. Also they don't like to mention it at all it seems: docs.redotengine.org/en/stable… only at the bottom as
© Copyright 2024-present by the Redot community, modified from an original work by Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur and the Godot community (CC BY 3.0).
If I were a game developer, I would probably stick to Godot unless there is a really good reason for relying on this fork. One has to trust them fully.
Redot Engine – Home
Redot Engine is an open-source game engine that enables developers to create stunning games with ease, offering powerful features, an active community, and a seamless development experience.www.redotengine.org
Some nob on twitter was having a whinge about all these "woke games" that use game engines because they're too lazy/unable to code them themselves.
Godot vague-posted a response saying, "apparently game engines are woke now?" And asked people to share their "wokot games." Ensue further whingefest, complaining about discord mods, yadda yadda. Long story short, a project created out of anti-woke spite isn't one I'd rely on.
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
Godot Engine User Blocking Controversy / #Wokot
Godot Engine Blocking Controversy refers to a controversy surrounding the community manager for the game engine Godot blocking users on X / Twitter and, reportedly, GitHub over negative reactions to a social media post in support of indie games with …Philipp (Know Your Meme)
Should I grap the 1000th star?
GitHub - lumen-oss/rocks.nvim: 🌒 Neovim plugin management inspired by Cargo, powered by luarocks
🌒 Neovim plugin management inspired by Cargo, powered by luarocks - lumen-oss/rocks.nvimGitHub
I'm being hyperbolic but I do genuinely dislike Luarocks.
Everywhere I've used them I'm met with issues. May they be incorrect versions being downloaded, Luarocks just not doing anything but giving no error, or the worse problem none of the packages working correctly. Client using luarocks for windows and it not working or the correct Luarocks just having a fit on windows too. Glad for wsl2 when a client needs me to use windows
Lua can be quite hyper specific to each usecase too. It's supposed to be. This leads to a disconnect between the generic packages and the Lua code used for neovim, the love engine, Warcraft and Roblox Moding, or whatever.
Lua does have inherit issues that make package management difficult. Each version of Lua is intended to be its own segregated ecosystem. This is a major strongsuut for Lua as it can change wildly while devs can know their version will be supported, and stay stagnant (on purpose). However, this hurts the package ecosystem as it can be difficult to support each Lua leading to an even smaller number of packages.
I've never had a good experience when using luarocks or anything that requires Luarocks.
There are few things more infuriating to me than when a package manager doesn’t work well.
Like, that’s the job. That’s why you’re here. I get why dependencies are hard to calculate but that doesn’t make it less annoying when the software is bad at it.
I haven’t used Luarocks but I feel like Ruby had some serious package management issues before RubyGems became more stable (a long time ago), and it was so annoying.
Guitar technology
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This doesn't surprise me. It's pretty clear that a whole foods plant based diet is the way to go if you're serious about your health. (I'm not. I'm vegan, so I get some of the benefits, but I also eat like crap, lots of processed meals and other such garbage, so I'm not super healthy)
But yeah, if you want your cholesterol to decrease, the easiest way is to switch to a whole foods plant based diet!!
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The problem with a lot of these papers is they use intermediate endpoints rather than actual hard end points. They're making the assumption that decreasing LDL is a good thing. That's an intermediate endpoint, nobody actually cares about their LDL, they care about their health span and lifespan.
Spoiler: LDL and Cholesterol in general is not a disease, it's poor metabolic health that is the actual cardiovascular problem.
I.e. doi.org/10.3390/metabo14010073 Oreo cookie treatment lowers LDL cholesterol more than high-intensity statin therapy in a lean mass hyper-responder on a ketogenic diet: a curious crossover experiment
This stunt paper illustrates how silly it is to focus on a intermediate metric. Oreos are not health food, I should hope that is obvious
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Bf-Tree is a modern read-write-optimized concurrent larger-than-memory range index in Rust
GitHub - microsoft/bf-tree: Bf-Tree is a modern read-write-optimized concurrent larger-than-memory range index in Rust from MS Research.
Bf-Tree is a modern read-write-optimized concurrent larger-than-memory range index in Rust from MS Research. - microsoft/bf-treeGitHub
Iran, China and Russia sign trilateral strategic pact
In a dramatic geopolitical development this afternoon, Iran, China and Russia formally signed a comprehensive strategic pact, marking one of the most consequential shifts in 21st-century international relations. While the full text of the agreement is being released in stages by the three governments, state media in Tehran, Beijing and Moscow have acknowledged the ceremony and described it as a cornerstone for a new multipolar order.The pact comes against the backdrop of decades of growing cooperation between these three states. Iran and Russia earlier concluded a 20-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty designed to deepen economic, political, and defence ties, and to blunt the impact of Western sanctions — a treaty that was signed in January 2025 and entered into force last year. Meanwhile, Iran and China have been bound by a 25-year cooperation agreement first signed in 2021, aimed at expanding trade, infrastructure, and energy integration.
What makes today’s signing significantly different, and newsworthy, is that it explicitly combines the three powers in a coordinated framework, aligning them on issues ranging from nuclear sovereignty and economic cooperation to military coordination and diplomatic strategy.
This agreement does not – at least from the initial public texts – constitute a formal mutual defence treaty akin to NATO’s Article 5, obligating one to defend the others militarily. Past pacts between Iran and Russia always carefully stopped short of a binding defence guarantee. Instead, the pact appears to link three major powers in a broader geopolitical coalition defined by shared opposition to Western military dominance and economic coercion.
Central to the agreement is a unified stance against reimposition of sanctions on Iran tied to its nuclear programme under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Tehran, Beijing and Moscow have previously issued joint statements rejecting European attempts to trigger “snapback” sanctions, and have declared the UN Security Council’s considerations of the nuclear deal terminated.
This trilateral pact is therefore as much about diplomatic leverage and strategic narrative as it is about concrete defence or economic mechanisms.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260129-iran-china-and-russia-sign-trilateral-strategic-pact/
Matt
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