I still use Invidious and Piped for searches and looking at comments, but they are currently broken (as far as I’ve seen).

(Conditionally) journals, studies and some books. And, for that matter, most television, film and music.

Particularly when paying is not supporting the creator, only the publisher.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Strictly speaking, states cannot be friends; only people. Therefore, the comments by @PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works and @seejur@lemmy.world must be understood figuratively.

Of course, which I would interpret as, say, allies, or perhaps ideological siblings. The two states were clearly neither. They were enemies on both counts, even well before the war, despite any trade or pacts. I’d say they were no more friendly than the US and the PRC.

You’re right that the treaty was not merely non-aggression and had major implications with spheres of influence in the space between the two powers, it was only non-aggression between the signing states (the two being called ‘friends’ in this context). I don’t really know if there was any good ending possible for the countries between the two, because I believe war there was inevitable given the Nazi regime’s ideology, expansionist policy and military strength. Those countries, unfortunately, were either going to be occupied by the Nazis or the USSR in the inevitable war, so the USSR made a choice in its self-preservation interest to gain power. Given that the alternative was further expansion of the Nazi regime, it’s hard for me to realistically criticize it, despite the horrible implications for the occupied territories.

First, it is not and was not at the time clear that the entire West wanted the Soviet Union and the Third Reich to wear each other out; instead, it was a Soviet belief […] That belief was questionable. The fact is that the West allied with the Soviet Union and supported it, through Lend-Lease and other means, after it was betrayed by the Third Reich. Of course, hindsight is hindsight, and Soviet leadership did have reasons to believe the West wanted them to fight against the Third Reich, but their assessment was fatally flawed and led to much suffering, not least amongst their own citizenry.

While I say this naively, Western support of the USSR doesn’t contradict the theory that the Western powers wanted the two to wear each other out. Supporting the weaker side wears out the stronger side more, this is an established tactic in proxy warfare.

Second, you ignore Soviet agency and deflect Soviet responsibility to the West when you describe the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as “realpolitik compromise resulting from the Western powers wanting the two countries to destroy each other”.

That wasn’t the point of the line, I was emphasizing that the Soviet’s first choice was to ally with the West. It’s misleading for the poster to consider the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a signal of the USSR’s alignment without acknowledging that they first tried to create pacts with the Western powers against the Nazi regime. They were rejected, and the USSR compromised and created a neutrality pact with the Nazis because the alternative was to be invaded first. At that point, what agency remained? To me, it seems like the options were ‘form a neutrality pact and gain an opportunity to build your defenses’ or ‘get invaded first and probably die’. The first option was horrible too, but I don’t know of a better choice they could have reasonably taken after being rejected by their first choice of allies.

These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.

Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don’t exist. The government isn’t neutral, but that’s not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I’m using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it’s easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it’s ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It’s not a fluke, it’s the power of capital.

We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don’t have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don’t have enough money to be picky.

So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don’t represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won’t be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.

But that’s just it - it’s not a useful heuristic, it’s a delusional framework, even more than the geocentric model was. We were mapping the planets onto that, but that didn’t make it useful.

2. There appears to be a lack of “centrist”, non-political, or right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions).

I see plenty of them. They’re just mostly on other instances to me (like your home instance).

Furthermore, while it’s tempting to see the so-called ‘left’ and ‘right’ as equivalent mirrors needing to be balanced for diversity, the reality is far from it. After seeing Wolfballs in action (that instance died before the reddit API fiasco), I can tell you we don’t need to be balanced out by ‘white genocide’ discussions and more open anti-semitism. I know that’s not what you proposed, but it’s to illustrate that sometimes there isn’t value in arbitrary balancing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ on these websites.

is it a natural result of Lemmy’s community-driven nature?

It’s also a result of Lemmy’s history and appeal. When reddit went on sprees of deleting subreddits, the right-wing hate groups made their own reddit clones, anarchists typically went to Raddle, and when GenZedong and ChapoTrapHouse went down, they went to Lemmygrad.ml (as a result, it became the largest instance) and created Hexbear respectively. So there is a long history of larger communist communities from day one which was the status quo until the reddit API fiasco.

The Fediverse also tends to attract anarchists and other socialists by the appeal of its decentralized nature, along with a few right-libertarians who see it as an anti-censorship tool. So one could say there’s a bias there.

How might we encourage more diverse political perspectives while still maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment?

That’s tough, because you inherently limit which political perspectives you can encourage.

Joan is making some good points, and I’d also like to go another step and say that superheros are alienated from the masses like you and me; we also need Jimmy Olsen to punch out nazis, with Superman cheering Jimmy on.

If Lil Kim can’t handle us making estimated guesses based on the limited facts we receive

Well, it’s a bit of a problem when the media’s widely-reported ‘estimated guesses’ are comically ridiculous and easily disproven, like that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy (and that having that haircut is also illegal), or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they’re alive.

North Korea is open to tourists who film the place. They have websites you can visit. Despite the relative isolation, there’s plenty of footage and information freely available. So I can’t even consider half of this junk ‘limited facts’, it’s just absurd claims made about a designated acceptable target. Look, here’s some tourists who just got whatever haircut they asked for in response to that mass media frenzy.

What are we expecting the state to say, “hello world, we denounce the western media claims that you can’t buy hotdogs here” every time some ridiculous claim is made? I can’t imagine any of our leaders wasting time doing that, and DPRK’s definitely got bigger problems to worry about than what we think of them.

Best of luck to you, comrade.

STAT is their new nickname.

Are you suggesting Hitler manned the gas chambers himself? As far as direct murder goes, Hitler probably never killed a socialist, Roma, Jew or homosexual. The policies under his leadership resulted in the mass extermination of millions. That’s why we charge him with genocides. Likewise, Joe Biden’s policies enabled and continue to enable a preventable genocide.

Yep, tankies will probably disagree when someone claims the country that invaded the USSR was a ‘friend’ due to a diplomatic treaty of non-aggression. The USSR had already tried making pacts with the UK and France first, which were rejected, as referenced in the second paragraph in the link you gave:

The treaty was the culmination of negotiations around the 1938–1939 deal discussions, after tripartite discussions with the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France had broken down

As pointed out in the Munich Conference section:

The Soviet leadership believed that the West wanted to encourage German aggression in the East and to stay neutral in a war initiated by Germany in the hope that Germany and the Soviet Union would wear each other out and put an end to both regimes.

Obviously the USSR didn’t want to be friends with the most anti-communist regime in the continent who invented terms like ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’. So tankies will consider it either ignorant or bad faith to bring up the Ribbentrop Pact to pretend it was anything more than realpolitik compromise resulting from the Western powers wanting the two countries to destroy each other. The alternative was being invaded sooner, which we know in hindsight was a real threat.

Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.

which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring?

Another perspective on the Lemmy situation is that, for example, I can sincerely say I believe free speech has merits while creating a book club where political discussion isn’t allowed. Some would call that censorship, but restricting a certain community doesn’t mean I approve of unconditional societal censorship. “Censorship”, like many abstract concepts in the liberalist worldview, doesn’t make sense to think of as a universal value, but rather in contexts, like you pointed out with hate speech removal being in line with the beliefs of most people on the main Lemmy instances.

There are some concepts, for example, that I think are fine to discuss in an academic situation but should be censored in public spaces, especially when it comes to explicitly genocidal ideologies like Nazism, or bigoted hate speech.

Yeah, same when I came across it. I’d assumed it was just some recent hyperbole, but it’s a long-used term with serious theoretical backing.

I imagine the only way out of this would be a non poverty level UBI?

UBI is one of the suggestions, one in the reformist category. However, looking at the little progress made by most countries in reforming capitalism over many decades, and in light of the control that the owning class have over politics and economics, many instead propose revolutionary solutions. Obviously, the richest of the rich would prefer to avoid either, and use the mass media to promote UBI as a bandage for capitalism, while using their influence over politicians to avoid even that happening. Unless citizens can gain real power, the promise of UBI is a long road to nowhere. If we ever see it, it will probably only be used as a last compromise to avoid revolution.

The alternative to reformism, the revolutionary solutions, demand a major reorganization of society to control or replace the capitalist wage system. Now, that’s the simply summary, but the details stretch across about a century of theoretical and practical discussion and experience, from a broad range of worldviews and circumstances, from partyless direct-democracy anarchist communes to one-party states and everything in-between. I couldn’t hope to do it justice here.

Hi, please consider editing the post title to briefly mention the camera model and the issue. This will help the people who might know the answer to find your post instead of skimming over it. :)

Something like “Canon EOS R50 is unexpectedly zooming back out”

Thanks for bringing up that program site (link, for convenience)

Like you said, it’s hard to know the internal situation in the prison, so it’s reasonable to want to avoid labeling this specific case as slavery or not without further evidence. The title is ultimately subjective, rather than the objective titles a news community typically encourages (by ‘subjective’, I’m referring to the fact that different worldviews have different interpretations of slavery, even up to the point where many through history consider regular work to be wage slavery based on a holistic analysis of labor in society)

These prisoners are supposedly doing this specific job voluntarily, with pay.

• Being voluntary doesn’t contradict slavery. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery

• Being paid $0.50 an hour, as opposed to $0.00 an hour, is trivial. If the slave-owners of old societies gave their slaves a penny a day, they would still be slaves for all intents and purposes.

While I personally haven’t looked into this specific case, there is a very consistent and ongoing history of forced prison labor in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Prison_labor

Inmates who refuse to work may be indefinitely remanded into solitary confinement, or have family visitation revoked. From 2010 to 2015 and again in 2016 and in 2018, some prisoners in the US refused to work, protesting for better pay, better conditions, and for the end of forced labor. Strike leaders were punished with indefinite solitary confinement.

That is forced work on an imprisoned person upon threat of punishment, even if they can theoretically decline it. This is a form of slavery, even if they get paid a dollar an hour.

I’m glad you mentioned the open infrastructure projects. For example, I use some of the few remaining nitter/invidious/etc. servers.

As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions.

Definitely. I’m already spending much of my spare time doing this.

“Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere?” is more-or-less asking “Which FOSS projects are overfunded?”, making it almost the opposite of “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?”

Plenty of projects I rely on are underfunded or adequately funded, and there are many thousands of underfunded projects. So I’ll have no shortage of projects to consider. By instead asking for the overfunded projects, I can simply cross them off my list of projects to donate to.