Sigh. Indeed.

Sigh. I don’t know. We brought that up often that day.

We are so fucked. There is no escaping this global rush of extremism.

I am originally from the states, but was lucky enough to move to Australia 11 years ago.

I thought I escaped the growing right wing crazy, and watched from afar as Trump was elected the first time, and my country descended into fascism.

Then here in Australia there was a white supremacist rally. Then another.

Then in my city there was a “March for Australia” organised by known white supremacists, but claiming not to be racist.

“They just don’t want all this immigration”.

Their website also said they wanted remigration.

Remigration is an originally European far-right proposal for ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants, sometimes including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry.

Sounds pretty racist to me.

This march was planned for the final day of the state multicultural festival. Its planned start and end point was the park where the festival was being held.

My family and I decided we would go. I haven’t been to a protest since I was a teenager, but I felt it was our duty to show that not everyone agrees with this.

The day before the march our best friend said their friends were afraid to go out to lunch with them that day, because their parents were verbally assaulted in a grocery store on Friday for being immigrants.

They later said people came to their parents house and were beating on the door and yelling about them being immigrants.

My husband stood there in his suit, I stood in my pretty dress with flowers, our daughters held signs that said things like “so bad even the introverts are here”.

The March was not peaceful and was definitely racist. We started off to the side, sitting with flags my daughters and I made with hundreds of countries on them, and eventually we were swarmed as the crowd veered to come right past us.

They screamed obscenities at us, pushed into me, pushed my husband, tried to rip the sign from his hands. They ripped down the flags we made. Blew an air horn in our faces.

Many claimed they were not racist but my husband got called a f-ing Jew multiple times??? Maybe it was the beard and the hat, I don’t know.

Seemed pretty racist to me.

Eventually police came and stood in front of us while we packed our things and left. We would do it again, in a heartbeat.

Before the rowdy crowd came looking for trouble we had immigrants come up and thank us, hug us, and we want them to know that not everyone agrees with this march.

Not wanting immigration is not what this march was about. This march was about fear and racism.

I urge all of you, show up, make signs, show that not everyone agrees.

I’m not sure I follow all the information you have given, but it is interesting and led me down a few rabbit holes of reading.

The famine is an interesting one, your first article seems to cast doubt on it, but later on you mention a journalist who risked his career to report it. In any case, the famine is historical fact, though both the US and Russia did try to dispute it.

You mentioned the allegations of genocide in Donbas which appear to have been false allegations, I cannot find any reputable sources that the Azov brigade did anything of the sort.

The article mentioning Stepan Bandera is interesting, it seems he was another figure “seen as a symbol of a revolutionary who fought for Ukrainian independence.” Though he had facist beliefs, at the time, I can see an impoverished people (and their later descendants) clinging on to any symbol of hope.

The information about Lebed and his later contributions to the Prologue Research and Publishing Association.

I admit I am not 100% sure where you were going with all this information, but it made for an interesting read with my morning coffee! <3

Archived link for the curious: https://archive.md/TzJBp

The article mentions this sort of thing happens with Russian soldiers as well, with a solder on video receiving a medal while wearing the totenkopf: https://archive.md/I4QGG

_The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators.

Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians. Later in the war, though, some of the groups fought against the Nazis._

Not everything is as it seems, there is a lot of nuance and history here and I think it would be silly to say that Ukraine was a nazi country.

I have seen actual nazi rallies in the US and Australia, there are probably more across the world. White supremacists are a thing, the vocal disgusting minority.

Yeah… My daughter is in uni for bachelor of science, and first year classes required her to use ai for various tasks. It’s a strange world out there.

Thank you! Is there an android client for it? It looks neat!

Aah, ok. Sad. ❤️

Really?? Christ, people need to advertise it there, Imgur has been imploding and the community has no idea where to go. It’s been sad.

What is cat box?

Beautiful!

The homeless were some of the first in the camps, as well as the disabled. Then the gays, other minorities, and the Jews.

Absolutely. There is a movie about a housekeeper during the holocaust who hid Jews in the basement of the commander’s house she worked in. When he eventually found out, she bargained with him, said she would be his mistress if he would say nothing and let them live.

After the war, when the dust settled, the commander was turned away by his wife and children for sheltering the Jews, and it was the Jews themselves he had allowed to live who took him in.

There were many people living everyday lives that had drank the coolaid and saw the extermination of the Jews as absolutely necessary and considered anyone who disagreed a traitor. Those people went on to raise children and teach them that sick way of thinking.

Because we are the product…

Oh yeah, they can get around it, but not without me knowing about it. If I find out, they lose the devices, simple as that.

You are right that parents who aren’t technical will have a hard time, but it’s not insurmountable. No devices in the bedrooms, ever. No downloading apps without permission ever. Google the app and give a yes or no.

When it came to it, wifi off at night and she got the basic Nokia phone. It’s a constant battle, sure but one we must win.

Also reminded her that no matter what, if she’s on our network, I will know what she’s up to. Instilling a healthy sense of fear is good. Router logs do not lie.

I highly recommend Qustudio. It works on phone and PC, and allows you to customise exactly what is monitored or blocked so you can keep an eye on things in an age appropriate way.

We started monitoring after we found out our 12 year old daughter was catfishing a 19 year old boy. He had no idea and after we explained that she could literally ruin his life, and made her tell him her age he noped out of there. (Wisely.)

At first we had it set to monitor everything, report all searches, all app downloads, block porn, etc.

Yes she was able to get around certain features, like when she was young we had the phone locked past midnight… But it logs when it’s in use, so we then had a talk the next day and took away the phone or PC if needed.

As she got older we removed the block on all websites, and stopped monitoring any messages. We kept the software on to let us know when she was using her devices because she would often be up until 3am on her phone on a school night and we would then have a conversation about it.

We removed it when she was 17 or 18.

I used to have a demonoid account too! Back then I could just torrent anything without a care…

Now I would need a VPN and a ton of reading to even begin. Sad times.

I unfortunately am a victim of this. My Sense was great. Then a forced update pushed despite never allowing the Fitbit app to update. Now the battery life is horrible and I am of course encouraged to buy a new one and move my Fitbit information to Google.

Wait, this is going to be a Funcom game?? Oh man, Funcom has made some of our favourite games! We adored Anarchy Online, and The Secret World is still one of the mmo’s I would recommend to anyone who wants to try a really unique modern mmo with an amazing story.

Unfortunately when they were developing TSW and Age of Conan, someone made the call to go all in on AOC which was just… not unique in a space saturated with that kind of WoW clone.

TSW ended up not having the cashflow (devs) it needed to release updates and expansions and it fell into disfavour once the player base reached end game. Which is really sad, because even as a “dead” game the story and gameplay are so good.

I really hope they have retained the devs that worked on TSW and have enough cash to push everything into this game. Make it unique like TSW and AO were, push a couple expansions, and there will be players.

The loyalty thing is what kept me.

I was wary of another gaming platform, there were so many and they all seemed the same, I never liked one over the other - they were just means to an end.

A few years back I really wanted to play RDR2 with my friends. It was expensive and I never pre-order, but as soon as it came out on (a small) sale I bought it for all 4 of us.

It was a lot of money for me, but I really wanted the story to play with everyone.

All was well at first, until we had each completed the tutorial and met up in open world. That’s when we learned that the game was based on GTA and the devs do not care about hackers.

We had one fucking with us for over an hour, teleporting us into the air and dropping us, setting us randomly on fire, spawning space ships and so on.

I begged in voice for them to just leave us be, to no avail.

We are all older, we rarely have time to play together. I was crushed.

I was an hour over the return time on Steam, one of the other friends took a bit longer exploring and was even more than that.

I contacted steam anyway and tried to get a refund, and they granted it for all of us.

Later I learned this was a thing in RDR2 and there was now the ability to create private lobbies, but I just can’t make myself try it and give Rockstar any money.

Steam however, won a lifelong fan. They didn’t have to honour the refund, and they don’t have to provide personal support that offers more than just the canned responses, but they do.

I hope Gabe lives forever, or finds another like him to carry the torch after he’s gone.