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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Russia wrote it for a reason. Think for a few seconds on why that might be.

    Because NATO put a bunch of Nazis in its command structure and the U.S. has backed various fascists countless times in the last 80 years, so it would put the western alliance in an embarrassing spot.

    That’s like half of politics: trying to embarass your opponents into backing off various positions.



  • Recently:

    The case of Smart Shirts Limited vs Sheffield Hallam University was heard in the High Court, King’s Bench Division, Media and Communications List. The judgment was delivered by Deputy High Court Judge Susie Alegre on December 17, 2024. The dispute centered around a libel claim brought by Smart Shirts Limited, a Hong Kong-based garment supplier, against Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) over a report and emails alleging connections to forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)…

    The court determined that both the email and the report were defamatory at common law, as they could adversely affect the attitude of others towards Smart Shirts. The judgment emphasized that the publications were presented as factual findings based on extensive research, thereby influencing their perceived credibility.

    Notably, the truth is a defense in defamation cases. If I publish an article saying my extensive research shows you cheated on your taxes, you won’t win a libel case against me if my research actually shows you did cheat on your taxes. That the university couldn’t win by simply showing that their accusations were truthful is damning.

    See also:

    The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts in the confused hours and days after the crackdown. Human rights experts George Black and Robin Munro, both outspoken critics of the Chinese government, trace many of the rumor’s roots in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness. Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred.

    This should also be viewed in context of the U.S. directly funding anti-China media. If you aren’t real interested in factual reporting to begin with and you add a heap of intentionally negative propaganda on top, the only reasonable conclusion is that most of your accusations range from grossly exaggerated to bullshit.




  • https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-military-human-shields.html

    After Israeli soldiers found Mohammed Shubeir hiding with his family in early March, they detained him for roughly 10 days before releasing him without charge, he said.

    During that time, Mr. Shubeir said, the soldiers used him as a human shield.

    Mr. Shubeir, then 17, said he was forced to walk handcuffed through the empty ruins of his hometown, Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, searching for explosives set by Hamas. To avoid being blown up themselves, the soldiers made him go ahead, Mr. Shubeir said.

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-human-shields-investigation-intl/index.html

    In an interview with CNN late last year, an Israeli soldier said his unit had forced a Palestinian man to enter a building ahead of troops…

    The exact scale and scope of the practice by the Israeli military is not known. But the testimony of both the soldier and five civilians last year indicated that it was widespread across the territory: in northern Gaza, Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.

    One of the civilians, Mohammad Saad, age 20, told CNN that IDF soldiers had detained him in Rafah.

    “They would ask us to do things like, ‘move this carpet,’ saying they were looking for tunnels,” he said. “‘Film under the stairs,’ they would say. If they found something, they would tell us to bring it outside. For example, they would ask us to remove belongings from the house, clean here, move the sofa, open the fridge, and open the cupboard.”

    https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-human-shields-gaza/

    Tommy [an anonymized name] said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs…

    Breaking the Silence has acted as a watchdog body over the Israeli military for more than 20 years. It said it had corroborated Tommy’s account with other soldiers.


    Multiple eyewitness accounts from both sides, and stories from anonymous sources match up with each other, as well as with stories of named sources.






  • you can have a bit of capitalism and a bit of socialism in a healthy mix of free trade economy with regulations

    I used to believe this, and I also used to argue against socialists on the same exact grounds.

    At some point I noticed that all those nice little bits of socialism that rounded off the edges of capitalism kept getting rolled back. Then I read more about how those safety nets were put up in the first place – I found out they were all bought with the blood of people much farther left than me, and I saw how violently capitalists opposed them. I found that a lot of the reason those safety nets were so nice for so long in the Global North was that our countries were slaughtering people by the millions (again, a lot of leftists) elsewhere in the world to prop capitalism up.

    At that point I stopped just nodding along to all the campfire stories about socialist countries. Maybe, like my standard U.S. education had missed a lot of pretty important things about how capitalism works, it had similarly missed some important things about how socialism works.