OP I have a vague opinion against Strange Planet just because it has such a different feel than a lot of the other long-form comics that usually feature here. I'm not bothered but it does seem a little out of place.
Would you mind switching the Lemmy / Piefed community links in the sidebar to be the more federation friendly ! based links though?
the sheer audacity for OP to believe that they and they alone get to determine what is and isn’t European?
Yeah, imagine the audacity for someone to decide what they want to host in their own community and why, write in the sidebar that it is allowed, and then solicit feedback from the community in case other people disagree and hear them out.
Literally this stuff is how Hitler got started
Q: What about that massive photo of Trump and the backpack checks for DEI literature
A: That's fine why do you ask
7 always 7
Taking away freedoms has been part of the US since the inception.
We got lucky, some of us of the right color and socioeconomic background, to be in the US during one of its freedom stages. But black people, gay people, women, people who want to be able to join a union or have a weekend have been fighting in some kind of realm rhetorical or life-and-death physical for the right to have any kind of democracy stuff for themselves, against the US government, for centuries.
It's coming true in unusually systematic and horrifying form right now. But it's not new.
You can just read the article.
ICE was doing their thing as they do, a group of people were doing something outside the facility, ICE called the local cops, and then someone from the group shot at the local cops when they came up to investigate.
That's the official statement right now. Who knows whether it's accurate, but if it is accurate, then no, he wasn't acting as an ICE officer.
I read this with a hell of a lot of scrutiny.
For one thing, they're not wrong. Ukraine has been a puppet of conflicting massive powers for so many decades it's hardly worth counting, and this new thing is obviously a corrupt continuation (although its actual negative impact on Ukraine may be limited, since Ukraine doesn't have as many valuable minerals as the people who engineered this deal seem to think it does) but not really that surprising.
The anomalously intense scrutiny they're giving to Hunter Biden in the story, while memory-holing the much more egregious corrupt pressure Trump got impeached for putting them under, is a little weird. And the coverage of Ukraine's internal politics being messed around with by great powers that doesn't see fit to talk about any of it happening from the Russian side gets into "very weird" territory. But whatever, even after reading it I still wasn't really sure if it was a legit thing that just happened to be similar to some propaganda I've seen in the past, or it was as it appeared to be, a planted story to spread around pro-Russian and Trump-friendly talking points ("nothing to see here, this kind of thing is perfectly normal, don't worry"). So I went to the author's Substack.
infamously corrupt Security Services (SBU)
The OCCRP’s reporting also played a major role in Russiagate. ‘OCCRP’s reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s political work in Ukraine was cited four times in the whistleblower letter that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.’
I have written here in detail about how USAID-funded media cooperated with the SBU back in 2016 to ‘spark’ the ‘Russiagate’ saga. Naturally, many in Ukraine believe that these ‘independent journalists’ were simply given orders to set such a fire by their handlers in the Democrat Party.
Journalists at MintPress
Bellingcat was founded in 2014 after the start of the war in Ukraine. It is well known for its role in attempting to prove that pro-Russian forces were responsible for the downing of Dutch passenger plane MH-17 in July of that year.
I was apprehended by a loud young man from the nationalist svoboda party
in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on the platform of a peacemaker with Russia
And so on. That's all from https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/bellingcat-and-the-occrp-regime-change. There are also stories about how Ukraine's military is collapsing, and they're about to lose the war, any day now.
I am pretty confident at this point in calling this person a Russian stooge. I am accustomed to seeing this stuff on blogs and in the European press but I am sad to see it has now infiltrated Al Jazeera.
Honestly this is a great and perfectly realistic outcome. Of course, assuming ICE doesn't just seize all the voting machines for the next election and Trump wins by 104% (which I think is a lot to ask at this point).
If, somehow, we have free and fair elections coming up, then a splintered right from the bullshit Musk and Joe Rogan put together or whatever, and a splintered left because their constituents want them to stop making it legal to hunt Palestinians for sport, makes it perfectly sensible that the dinosaurs who run our government could declare that some form of post-19th-century voting system that would enable a little bit fairer outcome than FPTP is what's needed. And, when the dinosaurs want something to happen, it usually actually happens, without all this molasses speed when it is merely because of people dying or whatever the problem the regular people are having is.
Him who mountain crush him no
Him who sun him stop him no
Him who hammer him break him no
Him who fire him fear him no
Him who raise him head above him heart
Him diamond
Oh... yeah, you're right. No idea then.
It's just a one-off fetching script I made. Hosting for it and ponder.cat together is just on a super basic $30/mo VPS, I think it is 4 CPUs and 16 GB memory.