What does “winning the war” look like to you?

Can’t join NATO with an existing territorial dispute. “Agreeing and joining NATO anyways” would be an official admission by the Ukrainian government that the territories currently held by Russia are not part of Ukraine anymore.

While I agree that the ANC has deserved to lose an election for a while, one must be very careful here. Without any viable opposition party ( the DA is not considered a viable opposition party by the majority of South Africans, as seen by them failing to grow their voter base this election), the “big tent” ANC is splitting along racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious lines, in a reactionary manner. Jacob Zuma’s MK party is the most obvious example of this, their manifesto calls for scrapping the constitution.

They will lose their majority. Votes are 99% counted and the ANC is barely above 40% of the vote. The ANC have screwed themselves with rampant corruption and a failure to deliver government services reliably, the most obvious example being the rolling electricity blackouts (loadshedding) that South Africans regularly experience. Having no electricity for 8+ hours a day at worst due to government incompetence, corruption, and austerity is not workable.

So cute, you want to join an adult conversation. Come on pal, let’s see your work. Gotta back up your claims with evidence if you want to continue sitting at the adult table.

This was you two hours ago. I thought you wanted an “adult conversation” with “evidence”? I provided that.

Okay then, why is the solution of making sleeping outdoors illegal bring debated by the highest court in the land? Why is the supreme court of the US even entertaining such an unethical proposition? Doing so is just the US abdicating responsibility for it’s people, and intensifying and welcoming inequality. Why not debate starting housing programmes for people instead, so that people do not have to sleep outside in the first place?

Okay then. What solution do even the most egalitarian or radical progressives/liberals, who you call the “adults”, have to solve capitalism’s contradictions and crises, with capitalism’s inherent unequal division of private property, leading to rising inequality and homelessness, being one of them? Because everything I’ve heard from just sounds like they are talking around the problem and avoiding the elephant in the room, the capitalistic system. In fact, many progressives when talking about issues such as homelessness, do not challenge the notion of private property and accept the inequality inherent to such a system, and then explain it away through bogus reasoning. I do not think that this way of avoiding about talking about how the modern capitalistic system works is adult behaviour. In fact, I’d say that it is childish behaviour, and does not deserve to be called progressive. The right wing being more brazen with it’s lack of ethics does not excuse the failure of liberals to address current issues.

The contemporary version of bourgeois emancipating reason, egalitarian liberalism, made fashionable by an insistent media popularization, provides nothing new because it remains prisoner of the liberty, equality, and property triplet. Challenged by the conflict between liberty and equality, which the unequal division of property necessarily implies, so-called egalitarian liberalism is only very moderately egalitarian. Inequality is accepted and legitimized by a feat of acrobatics, which borrows its pseudo concept of “endowments” from popular economics. Egalitarian liberalism offers a highly platitudinous observation: individuals (society being the sum of individuals) are endowed with diverse standings in life (some are powerful heads of enterprise, others have nothing). These unequal endowments, nevertheless, remain legitimate as long as they are the product, inherited obviously, of the work and the savings of ancestors. So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism

Going to be honest back when I was in high school we drew penises on the fields in the dew/frost. It was an all boys school so yeah.

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The .opus audio format. People need to stop ripping everything to MP3, it’s inefficient and a flawed compression format. Opus is better than it and AAC.

It’s an American obsession.

Are you just going to pretend that there is no racism anywhere else? It was the Europeans that colonised half the planet and invented the concept of “whiteness”, and proceeded to divide and carve Africa up. Are you just going to pretend that this action has had no influence on modern European ideas around race and class? And I haven’t even mentioned the Roma people. Or the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which has a racial component. Or the rise of Hinduistic fascism in India. Or the issues around race in my own country in South Africa. Racism is a global issue.

Personally I see most of these prejudicial issues being an exclusively American problem that has been exported abroad

Have you forgotten who colonised most of the world, including America? This is in no way an American centric issue. Racism exists in most countries on earth.

A lot more tourism to Cuba from the US.

the most similar instance to reddit, culture-wise.

Why would anyone want that? The whole point of being on Lemmy is to get away from Reddit

While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn’t make for great optics

I’d argue otherwise. It is great optics to have a thriving piracy community. It keeps the corporate boot lickers out, and attracts the kind of crowd that we should want on Lemmy.

At home I have a set DML panel speakers set up in a 2.1 channel system with a subwoofer. The panels themselves are made of EPS polystyrene that has been sanded down and coated in wood glue, are about 1 meter tall, 30 centimetres wide and 2 centimetres thick (3 foot 3 inches tall, 1 foot wide and 4/5 inches thick) and have rounded edges and corners. Each panel has a Dayton Audio 10 watt exciter mounted to it on the location recommend on their website. The subwoofer is a ported down firing unit, which I have placed in the corner of the room for corner loading.

Also big vibes lol. Telling others to stop being ungrateful and disrespectful, while being ungrateful and disrespectful themselves.

Wow, when are you going to realize that you work for your users?

Do you pay their salary and have an employment contract with the developers of Lemmy? If not, they do not work for you.

And 2000€ per month is a ton of money. Most open source devs get nothing. Stop being so ungrateful and disrespectful to the community that you work for.

This is not a typical open source side project. The developers work full time on it, it’s basically their job. That 2000 Euros is their monthly gross salary. Average monthly salary in France is 2340 euros net as of 2022. The developers of Lemmy are earning well below average.

How lazy must the song writing be for the Eurovision people to think it’s too political? You can absolutely hide political messages in the lyrics, in a song about love, sex partying, etc, and the vast majority of people will not notice. Quite a few bands have made careers out of doing exactly that. I mean just from the song title, you know that they are going to be very heavy handed with it.

In other unrelated news, the Titanic still floats according to BBC Verify. They have obtained this image as proof: