It’s total propaganda, but viewing it now, I see it as a picture of the story Americans tell. Their shitty ideas of progress are highlighted - pollution, cars, use and abuse of the land.

In the shadow of all this, hidden in the dark on the corner of the painting that they’re all moving towards, is genocide, murder, killing of buffalos, and the eradication of wildlife.

“American Progress” sounds like a dark joke - like a greasy canteen pizza being labeleld “American vegetable”.

Of course, this was not the intention of the painter, and generations of white Americans have looked at this painting and completely ignored the story that is really being told. But it’s all there, laid bare, and there’s no use pretending they weren’t aware of what they were doing.

And for that, at least it has some value. It’s like gathering evidence of war crimes from the offenders bragging about their atrocities. Anyone who proudly hung this on their wall you know what they knew, and you know where they stood.

That said, what a shitty piece of work. It’s a crime against good taste depicting a crime against humanity.

Would this be a scalable solution to help mitigate climate change and to give room to wildlife?

It’s fantastic that they can produce food, and I can see why also for political reasons food aid would be the first priority here. But it seems strange to me that companies never talk about this when they want to greenwash - replacing the Sahara with foreat seems like a potential game changer, and it seems to be something where money can really make an impact.

Seems like the timing is just about right for a final cut.

The last few hours it seems like the fall has declined a little, though the Ruble is still doing incredibly poorly. Fingers crossed it continues to fall again soon enough.

In case you’re European, and genuinely wonder.

Having children leave the house is a re-defining moment, just like establishing a family in the first place. It’s scary, but it comes with all kinds of possibilities as well.

It sounds like you did a good job on reinventing yourself as a parent, of course trusting your judgment that your kid is indeed wonderful. But the fact that you love him enough that it keeps you going probably counts as further evidence that you’re not doing so bad.

You’ll manage to reinvent yourself again. And if you can’t do it in your marriage, there’s no shame in doing it outside it.

Brilliant fucking argument - just make sure mass murderers in charge leave international conventions, and then the rules won’t apply to them. Christ.

There’s still a bunch of kindness around. There’s good food to be eaten and culture to be consumed. There’s drinks to be had and friends to be made. Dances to learn and skills to master.

There’s a lot of things to be hopeful about, aside from the whole everything going to shit thing. And if you can brighten up people’s lives by doing it, you might even contribute to the world going slightly less to shit.

I think it’s time to recalibrate and focus more on the closer things. Doesn’t mean one should ignore the world, but we’re not fixing it by stressing out, doom-scrolling, and posting about it online either. We tried.

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 @europeanspodcast@mastodon.social, 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.

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 @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org, 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.