Europe Pub

Image is the famous photograph Raising a Flag Over the Reichstag, taken during the Battle of Berlin.

On Friday is May 9th, which is the 80th anniversary of Victory Day, which Russia, among other places, celebrates as the day when the Soviets defeated the Nazis. Naturally, one of the current hotspots of fascism in the world today, Ukraine, is essentially threatening that they might strike Russia or even Moscow itself during that timeframe. Any such strike would almost certainly be symbolic and not aimed at anything too important, as I doubt even Zelensky and his American handlers would actually want to kill a world leader, not least somebody like Xi Jinping. But I would not be surprised if they tried something nonetheless, if only to disrupt the event in some way and not actually kill anybody.

And, as we're on this topic, @EllenKelly@hexbear.net has reminded me that Tuesday is the anniversary of the Nazis burning the Institut für Sexualwissenschaf in 1933, an early institute advocating for the rights of LGBT people, and which also provided early forms of gender-affirming surgeries, as well as hormone therapies. We are currently seeing a crackdown on LGBT rights throughout swathes of the imperial core (as well as countries in the periphery, to the extent that those rights existed there already), and this Nazi-inspired movement will be similarly defeated in the future.

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Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.

~~Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion~~

Edit2: IP= intellectal property

Edit3: sort by controversal

Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.

Among Marx's best-known texts are the "The Communist Manifesto" and the three-volume "Das Kapital", in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.

Marx's political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

Marx's critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labor power in return for wages.

Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Image is from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' recent article on Kashmir.

It looks like the spat between India and Pakistan could be dying down, due to a new ceasefire. As of the time of me writing this paragraph, it seems both sides want to maintain it (despite some reports of violations here and there).

Both sides have declared victory, which is completely expected given their mutual political parties and nationalist histories. It's a little harder to say which side has actually won, as both sides seem to have managed to shoot down aircraft and hit military bases. India has, in my opinion, had the more embarrassing moments, but international conflicts aren't cringe compilations. I feel no good-will towards Pakistan's comprador government, but it is at least nice to see Modi knocked down a few pegs. Regardless of the final technical victor, it's obvious that - if the ceasefire is maintained - who won are the hundreds of millions of people who won't have to live in fear of dying in nuclear hellfire.

This conflict is a good example of what multipolarity will truly entail. Countries that have been previously limited in their nationalist ambitions by American pressure will now take opportunities to revolt, sometimes against America itself, and sometimes against other countries in their regional neighbourhood. It's also why, as communists, our goals do not stop at multipolarity; it is merely the establishing act of a new era of agitation against peripheral and semi-peripheral capitalist countries that are forming powerful national bourgeoisie classes as the international American capitalists are forced away.

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Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.

The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America's largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the "true believers"; those that actually believe Trump's every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.

However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he's doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There's even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: "[...] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts."

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We're in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I'm sure we'll debate this for months to come here, though!

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What are we going to do about it?

Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.

Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639

I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That's it folks. I've been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.

They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.

I'll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I've been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it's time to make it production ready.

Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.

And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:

• YES I know I'm unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
• My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don't understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn't have to, that's why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
• Plex is still removing functionality. I don't care that "People should pay their fair share". If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that's completely okay. They are removing functionality.
  • "But they have cloud costs". Remote streaming is negligible to them. It's a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That's it.
  • "Good luck finding another remote streaming" - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that's a separate conversation). All "remote streaming" is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported "free" content that they're probably losing money on.

In short, I don't care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They're removing functionality that has been free for years. I'm not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.

We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.

Image is from the Britannica article on CECOT, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in English.

This megathread's topic is inspired by our lovely news regular, @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net, who talks often about the conditions inside El Salvador and gives nuanced and informative takes.

As the Trump administration continues to make foreign policy blunders that would make even the staunchest anti-imperialist accelerationist blush - and we are barely three months in! - it's interesting to compare and contrast his policies of incompetent imperialist and domestic management to the dictators in other countries.

Bukele is somewhat unique among fascists, in that he seems to not hide - and seems to even admit to - his evil, self-describing as the world's "coolest dictator". El Salvador has no particular shortage of prominent fascists in their history, but one major example is Maximiliano Martínez, who led the country over much of the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was responsible the deaths of many thousands of communists and indigneous people, and yet joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies and against the Nazis.

The comparisons between Martínez and Bukele - and, indeed, between Bukele and Trump - in terms of their impact on minority groups are slowly growing as world attention is being drawn to the country. The recent meeting between Bukele and Trump has shifted a spotlight onto El Salvador's crime policy; the internal conditions of El Salvador's prisons are genuinely monstrous. One gets a similar feeling as when reading descriptions of the conditions of Holocaust victims in German concentration camps. Trump has made statements to the effect that he want a similar crime crackdown inside the United States, and I certainly believe that he wants this (ICE is already just kidnapping people off the streets into vans), but his administration has been so chaotic and mismanaged that it's difficult to determine whether this will be an interest he rapidly drops in favor of some other hair-brained scheme.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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The Poor People's Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its key organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an "economic bill of rights" that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

"I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

When we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…"

-MLK Jr., in a 1967 planning meeting

• The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr.

• May 12, 1968: The Poor People’s Campaign Began

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• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube](https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies

• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread https://hexbear.net/post/4737618

• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread https://hexbear.net/post/4738774

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• 👊 New Weekly Improvement thread https://hexbear.net/post/4883919

• 🧡 Disabled comm megathread https://hexbear.net/post/4773155

• Parenting Chat https://hexbear.net/post/4880986

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Image is of Trump's initial set of reciprocal tariffs. Source is CNN and Reuters.

It's difficult to keep up with the news around the tariffs; they get instated, then dropped, then reinstated... for example, on Friday, Trump said that certain electronics like smartphones would be exempt, causing markets to rally a great deal, but now the Commerce Secretary has said that they might not be exempt? The state of play right now, if you haven't been keeping up this week, is that the US recently announced a 90-day global pause on implementing the tariffs he had planned (that is, 25% on certain Canadian and Mexican goods, and at least 10% on every other nation) but nonetheless increased tariffs on China to 145%.

Meanwhile, China has been - quite remarkably - standing their ground, increasing tariffs on the US to 125%, and putting restrictions on rare earths. Xi Jinping has been in Vietnam and has made statements against a tariff war there, saying that it would have no winners. Meanwhile, a Chinese spokesperson has essentially said that China can endure the tariff war due to the increasing demand from its domestic market in combination with its growing economic ties with other countries.

Last week's thread is here.
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Hello world,

as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won't start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.

All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We're currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it's certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.

We're looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.

You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

edit, as this was frequently brought up:

Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?

It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.

lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.

[source]

For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it's not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.

Image is sourced from this Guardian article.

The Pope's fucking dead.

He gave JD Vance three chocolate easter eggs, exchanged pleasantries for 17 minutes, and then keeled over and died.

What a way to go.

Last week's thread is here.
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source: @n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca

The fediverse is small, and thats both a blessing and a curse - one of its several blessings is that in a smaller space we all individually have a bigger impact on what the culture of this space is like.

On this comm (and on lemmy broadly) there's a lot of discussion about how to grow the fediverse, what to improve, but an easy thing you can do for the fediverse is right in front of us-

• Be kind

• Ask people what they think, and why

• Approach folks you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility (EDIT: no, this is not specifically referring to Nazis. I get it, they're the first thing that comes to mind. I'm not telling you to approve of Nazis I'm just saying be kind to your fellow lemmites)

• Engage sincerely

• Ask yourself if there's something nice you can say

• Make this small space worth being in

A platform lives or dies by what's available on said platform and often we have this conversation in the context of "content" or posts - and we may never have as much content as reddit does. But content and posts aren't the only thing this kind of platform offers- it also offers people. It offers community, and human interaction.

Culture and community is lemmy and the fediverse's biggest differentiator, and we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.

The biggest thing you can do to help the fediverse is make it a place worth being.

Hi! I've been extremely tired this week and nearly forgot that I was hosting one so I'm writing this last minute! I couldn't think of anything so I'm going to write about one of my hamsters who is not Biggs; Meredith

Meredith was another hamster of mine from a few years ago during the early days of COVID, and she was the absolute sweetest little creature I had ever met. Very friendly, very gentle. She loved exploring anywhere I put her into and never bit me ~~okay she did once ever~~. She was an absolute sweetheart and bundle of love and was with me during some of the rougher parts of my life

She unfortunately died very suddenly out of the blue one day at a terribly young age showing no symptoms of anything wrong with her prior, which breaks my heart to this very day

I never had her as long as any other hamster of mine but I don't think I had any other hamster touch my heart in quite the same way. I miss you, girl

Join our public Matrix server!

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As a reminder, please do not discuss current struggle sessions in the mega. We want this to be a little oasis for all of us and the best way to do that is not to feed into existing conflict on the site.

Also, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It's for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.

Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.

Image of destruction in Mandalay, Myanmar, from Al Jazeera.

As if the ongoing civil war wasn't enough, Myanmar has now been struck by a very powerful earthquake, resulting in 2000 deaths and thousands more injured as of the time of writing. Estimates are that the death toll could reach 10,000. Infrastructure like roads and bridges are damaged, and the hospitals are overwhelmed. The earthquake struck during Eid prayers, resulting in even higher casualties as several mosques collapsed. 20 million people already required humanitarian assistance in Myanmar, and now the situation there will be even worse. International rescue teams have rushed into the country, and aid is being raised, though with USAID experiencing the... changes that it is, the United States will be of even more limited help than usual. So far, China has sent $14 million, while USAID has supplied $2 million. In Thailand, the death toll seems considerably lower, though there has still been significant damage; a skyscraper under construction collapsed in Bangkok.

Myanmar is located very close to the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. In particular, the country is divided in two by the north-south oriented Sagaing fault. This fault is typically strike-slip; that is, each side of the fault moves horizontally past each other. The earthquake's depth was 10 kilometers, which is pretty shallow, and its proximity to the surface amplified the felt force of the earthquake. Additionally, the soft soil in this region tends to further amplify seismic waves through a process called liquefaction. Combine all this with the lackluster building codes due to many years of impoverishment and civil wars, and this explains why the death toll, and the expense to the country in general to repair damage, will probably be extremely high.

Last week's thread is here.
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Biden's office announced his illness Sunday afternoon.