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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Just to illustrate the nature of that campaign, at one point and in order to accuse Corbyn of being anti-semitic, they said that he had sat on a panel in a conference where one of the members of the same panel compared the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis, “hence” (by association) Corbyn was an anti-semite.

    The thing is, said member of the panel who compared the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis was a Jewish Holocaust Survivor.

    If such words made Corbyn an anti-semite by association then, having said such words, said panel member would even more so have to be an anti-semite.

    In other words, the anti-Corbyn campaign was so rabid ragingly extremist and sleazy that they were accused a Jewish Holocaus Survivor of being an anti-semite in order to try to taint Corbyn by association.

    PS: And, by the way, this very newspaper - The Guardian - was an active participant in that campaign and published this slander, amongst others.


  • Sorry, but Russia has no legimitate grievances on anything that takes place inside of Ukraine.

    Ditto on the NATO expansion and all that “argumentation” line you’re parroting: Russia and Ukraine are different soverign nations and none of them has any right to force the other to do anything, which does mean that it’s not up to Russia and never was the way Ukraine runs their government including which alliances they join, same as, for example, it was never up to the United States how Iraq was run (and why the American invasion of Iraq was just as immoral as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “Saddam was a murderous dictator” is a totally bollocks excuse).

    Up and until the point one of those nations actually harms the other, none of the has any right to do anything to the other and as it so happens, it was Russia that harmed Ukraine by invading it, so the only nation there with any legitimate grievances is Ukraine.

    In fact since the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, Ukraine and Ukraine alone is the one nation of the two with legitimate grivances against the other.

    Your whole “argument” is predicated on the notion that Russia as the large neighbouring nation has a say in the affairs of its smaller neighbouring nation Ukraine, which is just a nakedly imperialist view of the relations between states straight out of XIX century political thinking.




  • Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.

    And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.

    Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.

    As it so happens my banking app works fine.

    That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.



  • Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.

    Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.

    So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.

    Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.





  • Around here, Portugal, were every Summer the temperature exceeds 40 C for at least some days in August, we have outside rollup shades on every window, so one of the tricks is to keep the shades down and and the windows closed during the hottest and sunniest parts of the day, at the very least the afternoon.

    Then at night you open the windows and let the cooler night air in (even better if you do it early morning, around sunrise, which is the coolest time of the day).

    Note that this doesn’t work well with curtains or internal shades, because with those any conversion of light into heat when the light heats the shades/curtains (as they’re not mirrors and don’t reflect all light back) happens inside the house and thus that heat gets trapped indoors.


  • I’m sorry but unwaveringly supporting a nation ruled by ethno-Fascists when they’re committing Genocide because of the ethnicity of the majority and the leaders there is the same old extreme racism as in the old days and passing laws to punish anybody who criticizes that ethno-Fascist nation is the same authoritarianism in defense of Fascists claiming to represent an ethnicity as in the old days.

    If the mindset that was the foundation of Nazism had changed in Germany we would neither be seeing such an extreme version of supporting a regime that claimes to be supporting some people because of their ethnicity (even against the will of many of those very people, who again and again point out that Israel and the dominant ideology there does not represent them), nor would be we be seeing the use of the Law to force everybody else to either go along with it or shut up.

    A Germany where the power elites had learned the Humanitarian take of “never again” (i.e. “never again shall this be done to anybody”) rather kept the racism going and hence using a racist version of it (i.e. “never again shall Germans do this to Jews”), would not be doing this, not even close.

    What’s going on in Germany is not merely “crushing guilt of what happened in WWII”, it’s the racism and authoritarianism coming out of hiding with the excuse that “It’s for the Jews rather than for the Arian Race, so it’s alright”.



  • Also a lot of the late Soviet Union military technology came from Ukraine, plus their military were also trained in the same kind of school of thought as Russia and still know it.

    So it makes sense that, when push came to shove, the Ukranians would fast come up with asymetric war solutions against Russia, that Russia wouldn’t be as fast in effectivelly countering them and Ukraine would be quicker at developing new or adjusted solutions once Russia found a counter (or, more generally, that Ukraine would remain ahead of Russian in the cycle were each side develops a counter to the other side’s counters).

    Had Russia’s initial blietzkrieg attack worked, it would’ve been a different story, but at this stage it makes sense that Ukraine has the technological edge, not just in the weaponry it gets from the West but also in their own weapons development, especially now that it has much better AA to protect the installations far away from the frontlines working on weapons tech.



  • Clearly the profound racism never disappeared, otherwise the German power elites wouldn’t “unwaveringly support” a nation because of the ethnicity of the majority of its people and its leaders: the more visible artifacts of ancient germanic symbols, goose stepping and the brown shirts might be gone but the thinking that some people are more worthy than others purelly because of their ethnicity is still just as strong.

    Additionally, that the German authorities are now going so far as shown in this and other news in support of the ethno-Fascists of a specific ethnicity, also indicates that the authoritarian tendencies too are alive and well in the mindset of the German power elites.

    It looks a lot like the foundations of Nazism are alive, well and returning to prominence, with a different symbology and façade, but still the same view of humans as ethnics and the same authoritarian forceful imposition of a race-based view of the worth of human beings on others.

    It’s actually quite scary to watch from the outside as Germany goes back to overtly using force to suppress dissent on its power elite’s racial supremacist views for the benefit of an extreme form of ethno-Fascism, even if this time around it’s not the Arian Race that’s being “supported”.