What do those NGOs have to say about Julian Assange or Steven Donziger

“RSF defends Assange because of his contributions to journalism” https://rsf.org/en/rsf-dispels-common-misconceptions-case-against-julian-assange

“CPJ welcomes reports that Assange will be released in plea deal” https://cpj.org/2024/06/cpj-welcomes-reports-that-assange-will-be-released-in-plea-deal/

“USA must drop charges against Julian Assange” https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/julian-assange-usa-justice/

“Biden Should Pardon Steven Donziger” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/01/biden-should-pardon-steven-donziger-before-leaving-office/

I’m getting the distinct impression you have no idea wtf you are talking about

the stories that come out first tend to be most biased

I honestly think the concept of news is actually harmful, because it’s about reporting what happened, not about making the audience understand the subject. It puts a premium on getting the report out as quickly as possible, and favours the most shocking events and interpretations that draw people’s attention.

Ultimately most news are “empty calories” of information that mostly give an illusion of knowledge. “Explosion in Herptown, dozens wounded” does not meaningfully increase your understanding of the world, it mostly just makes you scared. It will take weeks until the cause and consequences of the explosion can be fully understood, and a lot of research to put that into perspective.

If you do not know the extent of pressure asserted on Chinese media that is willful ignorance.

Of course “our media” (whatever you mean by that) is the only media that can report on it as Chinese media is heavily censored.

If you want to know the extent the information easy to find.

Here’s some of what Reporters Without Borders have to say

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”

“The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party sends a detailed notice to all media every day that includes editorial guidelines and censored topics.”

“Independent journalists and bloggers who dare to report “sensitive” information are often placed under surveillance, harassed, detained, and, in some cases, tortured.”

Source: https://rsf.org/en/country/china

This is from The Committee to Protect Journalists

“China has long ranked as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Censorship makes the exact number of journalists jailed there notoriously difficult to determine, but Beijing’s media crackdown has widened in recent years”

Source: https://cpj.org/reports/2024/01/2023-prison-census-jailed-journalist-numbers-near-record-high-israel-imprisonments-spike/

Here’s Amnesty International

“Chinese authorities continued to severely curtail rights to freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, including through the abusive application of laws often under the pretext of preserving national security.”

Source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/

Don Lumo is in with them!

This is just untrue. There is plenty of legal press in the US of any persuasion, from anarchist to fascist.

The major US news outlets are in bed with capitalists because that’s where the money is, but there are lots of smaller outlets with other views. In China all news outlets kowtow to the government because anything else is illegal.

AFAIK often on Chinese services you’ll get an error like “your message could not be delivered”. Posts managing to discuss forbidden topics might be removed without warning, or just be silently hidden so they don’t reach new people.

The goal is not so much to prevent anyone from ever talking shit about the government, but to make those conversations difficult and to stop them from reaching a wide audience.

I tend to write guthub.com and then chuckle to myself imagining a social network where people have beer bellies as their profile pictures

Yup, just like a library

I’ve never seen a place selling books not have them organized alphabetically! They might not be libraries but they have an interest in their customers being able to find what they’re looking for

Another important point is the flexibility of wind and solar. The minimum investment to get some power out of them is very low, and a park can start generating power before fully completed and can easily be scaled up or down in capacity during construction if estimates change.

Nuclear on the other hand is a huge up-front cost with little flexibility and no returns until completion, which could take a decade or more.

Even if it wasn’t more expensive, nuclear would still be financially risky. Many things can happen that effect power consumption and prices during the time it takes to build a nuclear plant. It can still be valuable for diversification though.

We have! Thermoelectric generators that make electricity directly from heat exist, they’re just often not very good compared to the spinny wheel.

We even use them to make nuclear reactors with no moving parts, which I think is really neat. They’re used in places where maintenance or refueling is difficult or impossible, like space probes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

May I suggest you spend more effort understanding the situation, and less coming up with wild speculations?

I’m sorry but that is absolutely not “the whole point of open source”.

The point of open source is the ability to read, modify, keep and share the source code of the software you use.

It’s a good thing that no one is beholden to anyone then. Which is the entire point of free software.

2024 is the year of Red Star Linux on the desktop

You might be surprised to learn that Sweden also has sanctions against Russia, together with the rest of the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, South Korea and a bunch of other countries. Because this is not about the US being an ass, it’s about Russia being an ass.

The massive negative outcry over this fairly uninteresting change certainly seems oddly overblown, almost as if there are parties trying to turn it into a big political issue to paint Russia as a victim. But idk, nerds freak out over stuff all the time completely on their own.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think the Linux Foundation has a hard time being clear on the matter because it just isn’t clear. These are new laws and a global open source cooperation run by a non-profit is likely a corner case that the lawmakers did not think about at all when making them.

Yes, the sanctions against Russia, as mentioned by Linus. The change also said the maintainers “can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided”.

My guess is that the Linux Foundation must ensure that none of the people they work with are in any way associated with any organisation, person or activity on the sanctions list. And that they preemptively removed all maintainers that might risk violating the sanctions while they work with them to establish whether they might be covered by the sanctions or not.

Regardless of what you or they think of the sanctions, they are the law, and I don’t think anyone wants the Linux Foundation to have to spend their money on lawyers and fines because they had a maintainer who also worked on a research project funded by a sanctioned entity. (If that is how it works, IANAL)

I’d say the “exchanges” they had with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland etc. were quite unequal. Expanding your territory through force is the purest form of imperialism, no matter what color your flag is.

That declaration wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, as the USSR immediately turned around and tried to forcefully annex these newly independent states (and when it failed tried again some years later).

Yes Finland joined forces with the nazis after the winter war, but the USSR started the winter war attempting to conquer Finland. To blame them for joining forces with the enemy of their enemy after being invaded and losing territory is just wild.

So the argument is that the USSR was so scared of Poland joining the nazis that they made a deal with the nazis to invade it together and divide it between them? How does that make any sense?

The USSR didn’t withdraw their troops from the baltic states until the 90s, a good 45 years after the end of WWII.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a deal between the USSR and nazi Germany detailing who would get what parts of eastern Europe. The existence of other deals and treaties that you think are worse does not change that reality.

If the USSR had been the staunch defender of the slavic peoples from nazis aggression that you claim they were, they would have entered into a defensive pact with the eastern states, not invaded them.

Talk of freedom and brotherhood means nothing when cooperation is gained at the barrel of a gun.

So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?

To be clear I don’t fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.

But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you’re not really interested in a discussion.