AlteredEgo

Germany no, not directly. Indirectly they are collaborating with their ally and shielding their foreign policy. Like saying only those US rivals are dangerous. Indicating we need to invest in more weapons to defend ourselves against the bad guys. Europe probably should create their own military alliance to decouple from US military aggression, and stop supporting US sanctions / economic aggression.

I'm curious how that will play out. They removed the carrot but kept the stick.

All we can really agree on is that the country is ontologically evil and must be stopped at all costs.

But at what cost?

Oh no, I was the russian bot all along?

ONLY if you ignore "soft" power, "regime change" economic imperialism and meddling in foreign democracies.

You are responsible for your own actions, and the actions of your own country. Don't allow yourself to be blinded by the propaganda pointing to the "shithole" countries. Look at the numbers and the effects of the wars in recent decades. Follow the money.

Can you point to the comment you suspect of being a russian bot?

Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.

Oh a tooltip, thanks. Couldn't see it. I use Imagus addon which creates an overlay of the image in large, but doesn't wrap the alt text by default. Just found hotkey C.

It's become strawman arguments to create different tribes. The issue isn't about China or what they do well or do badly. The "facts" and accusations against "tankies" are just taken as given.

Prejudice has become mainstream and a serious problem because people are just fed up with actually arguing. I think it started with the global warming denial. we learned that it's not just fringe groups that are simply immune to arguing, but that you can have half of the people be immune to political discourse. And of course Russia propaganda played a major role in that, but much less than the climate denial or religious or libertarian propaganda that comes from think tanks and the Koch brothers and Murdock and other plutocrats.

As a radical and dissenter myself, I'm not pro Russia or pro China but I see them as a country of human beings and see how the propaganda against them is used to deflect both blame and attention away from the dominant world order, "US centric imperialism". The "leftists" and "progressives" point their finger to Iran or China or Russia about the LGBTQ or whatever issues over there using mainstream media or memes, instead of primarily focusing on the responsibility of their own actions, the actions of their own countries. The effects of soft power, the effects of "economic imperialism" on other countries, and their ignorance of what regime change actually means for the actual quality of life of those people living in "shithole" countries. Liberals don't realize how redpilled they are, how "unwoke". Hate sells really well in the attention economy.

Almost nobody on "those instances" believes Russia or China is socialist. It's simply that a unipolar instead of a multipolar world will mean much less hope for any socialist projects to succeed. Constantly painting them as "evil" and threatening them with military expansion is also just wrong.

Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.

If you'd want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you'd need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.

Don't worry about the AI companies, they can afford it and then make a profit (eventually).

Worry about the open source AI models that you can run locally using solar panels. They will become defacto illegal piracy. Affordable hardware to run large models without too much power is finally appearing (Ryzen AI max), but the software will become proprietary intellectual property of those who own the world. Which is the worst case scenario.

Can someone decipher the color coding for me?