Yeah. The article seems to almost be written as a propaganda piece, yet all I see is red flags.

“Her mission letter prioritises bolstering European competitiveness. It significantly varies from her predecessor’s bad-mouthing of tech billionaires.”

Launching a war against tech billionaires is exactly what the EU should be doing. If one genuinely loves tech, and not just the tools of oppression it can provide, one has no choice but to also hate tech billionaires. They are cancer on the planet, they are cancer on society, and they are cancer on technological developments.

I don’t know how the British or the Americans remember things, but as a citizen of another country of the allies, it’s not like we remember the bombing of Dresden as a moral high point of the war effort.

Mistakes are made in war. By all accounts the bombing of Dresden was one of them.

That said, I hate to give such a good faith response to your stupid-ass question.

She also said that EU sanctions against Russia should not be renewed every six months and should be permanent until the 27 member states decide to lift them. “It would be better if the situation was reversed,” Kallas said.

This would be a huge improvement.

As for the frozen assets, there’s simply no question whether it should go to Ukraine. The question is whether it should finance military aid or other types of causes. I would personally be happy to see my tax money fund the rebuilding of Ukraine - for now the priority needs to be to win the war while minimizing Ukrainian losses.

Brilliant, thanks! I’ve never given Euractiv much of a chance for some reason. Will do it now!

I’ve been using Arte before from France, but I somehow only now realized it’s available for free outside France and Germany as well. Great stuff.

True - I guess I just need to be able to safely trust their journalistic integrity, it doesn’t need to be completely independent in a strict sense.

I should absolutely start reading DW, thanks for the reminder! Though their coverage of the Amsterdam unrest does not seem immediately encouraging. I guess it is German after all. At least the Guardian did a decent job on that.

Does anyone have any recommendations where to find good independent journalism covering Europe, considering the increasing problems of both Politico and Euronews?

I’ve started listening to @[email protected], which is fantastic, but it would be nice to complement it with a newspaper of sorts.

Yeah, it’s the same in mbin. It’s pretty common for spam bots here to create their own magazines to post in, for some reason. It’s a bit weird, because generally nobody will see their posts at all. I guess it might have to do with SEO?

Anyway, I try to weed them out by sorting by new and local now and then, but other than that they’re hard to spot. Reports are much appreciated.

Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.

It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.

Out of curiosity, what made you change your mind and give it a chance? Any breaking point on Reddit’s side, or just boredom or a sense of adventure?

In regular migration studies there’s always talk of puah and pull factores; reasons for wanting to leave where you are, and reasons for wanting to go to the destination. While I personally like it here, I guess we are currently depending more on push factors than pull factors to attract people from Reddit.

It’s what happens when the idiots calculating your indicators of economic prosperity care only about aggregate levels of production, but don’t give a shit how many are homeless.

And now, the billionaires who were the only ones doing well already are in charge of things. My only hope is that they might finally be eaten, French revolution style.

A red flag for me, from an outside perspective, was how the #MastodonforHarris campaign was dealt with.

A completely grassroots organization led by ordinary Americans who care about democracy get together and collect hundreds of thousands for the campaign. Some are relatively well-connected and attempt to reach out. And, as far as I could see, the campaign couldn’t even be arsed to issue an official “thank you”.

If this is how far removed the campaign was from ordinary Americans, who in the world had any access? Who would feel like their voice is being heard, if fundraising half a million is not even enough to be recognized with a thank you from some low-ranking representative?

I’m not American, and I have no idea what the situation is like on the ground over there. I kind of hoped/assumed they put in their effort being available to steel workers in Pennsylvania rather than nerds on Mastodon. But seeing how it all went down I guess they were equally far removed from everyone.

Sanity will be in non-compliance.

Don’t comply with anything. Involve yourself in governance locally if you can. Work with your district or state. Disobey anything going against your principles.

If you cannot get involved, see what you can do as a private citizen. Who could you hide in your anttic, figuratively speaking (hopefully).

The US is not such a strong federal state. You make it real by believing in it.

Stop believing in it. It is dead.

Kudos for honourably backtracking and being reasonable. Mistakes are made, what matters is how they’re dealt with.

I see quite a bit boosted on Mastodon, but I’m not sure where they are all posting from. On Pixelfed I follow photographers, so I see photography.

If youwant to see more art, the first step is to follow artists. Try to search for hashtags related to art forms you’re interred in on a large Mastodon instance, and follow relevant users wherever you want to follow them from. Pixelfed might be good if you’re not interested in text posts, but make sure you display boosts. Lemmy is not good as most content is invisible.

Once you follow some, for example @[email protected], you’ll see what they boost from around the Fediverse. Artists generally have a decent overview over their sphere of interest, so once the ball starts rolling you’ll see content from all over.

I filled my feed up quite nicely with independent musicians very quickly after listening to RadioFreeFedi a little while and following a couple of artists. Their boosts creates a nice little window into the indie music scene.

Always happy to see Friendica users around - it seems to integrate impressively with huge parts of the Fediverse.

I remember reading about it in the early days of the project, and not giving it a shot because there’s just no way any of my social graph would come with me there. Checking in now and then through the years it always seemed like an odd corner of the Internet. It’s really cool to me that I suddenly find myself seamlessly interacting with its users, both anonymously here and with my full name on Mastodon.

Sadly not entirely accurate for Lemmy, as it does not display content from other platforms (except comments or posts from mbin, piefed, etc) unless a Lemmy community is explicitly tagged. You cannot follow mastodon or Pixelfed user from Lemmy in any meanjngful way.

What a cool freaking flag.

Time to show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!

One of the few new Ameircan Fords you’ll sometimes see on the roads in Europe is the electric Mustang. It’s kinda hilariously out of place - next to smaller European cars it looks more like they attempted to design a monster truck than a sports car.

Based on experience from American car manufacturing since the 1980s, even worse things will happen if we do buy their cars.