taipan

joined 1 year ago
[–] taipan@lemmy.world 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

They're referencing what the second protester (Vaniya Agrawal) mentioned in her email:

Know that Microsoft’s human rights statement prohibits retaliation against anyone who raises a human rights-related concern: Human rights statement | Microsoft CSR

The Microsoft Global Human Rights Statement has a "Foundational principles" section that says:

Our commitment to human rights defenders: Our commitment to respecting and advancing human rights includes respect and support for the work of human rights defenders around the world. Human rights defenders are people who, individually or with others, engage in activities and advocacy that contribute to the protection of human rights and the rule of law, good governance, tolerance, and diversity and inclusion. Human rights defenders face persistent physical, social, economic, and psychological threats. Microsoft does not tolerate threats, intimidation, retaliation, physical, legal or cyber-attacks against human rights defenders. This commitment extends to all human rights defenders, including those working on issues related to Microsoft and those exercising their rights of freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, including to challenge or protest aspects of our own business.

Microsoft is clearly declining to fulfill its commitment as it is written in its statement.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

Definitely not using or recommending Zorin OS after this. I don't appreciate Brave's integrated cryptocurrency bloatware or the fact that Brave was founded as a competitor to Firefox by a homophobe who was ousted from Mozilla for his anti-LGBT political contributions.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Protests are effective at establishing support for progressive reforms and at restraining governments from taking unpopular actions, even if the protesters don't achieve all their goals as quickly as they would like.

See: Why protest if it doesn't make a difference?

Protests do work

This is surprising, given that we constantly see examples where protest has made a difference. We have, already in 2024, seen blockades and protests by French farmers prompt the government to offer concessions. Likewise, in India, the renewed farmers movement marching towards Delhi has already prompted an offer from the government of improved prices for crops.

Mass street protests over a child sex abuse scandal in Budapest recently led Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to introduce legislation to address the scandal. Late last year, mass protests and street blockades in Panama led to the government closing one of the world’s largest copper mines.

Academic research also shows that protest can be influential. Workers’ protest and strike action was crucial in prompting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as part of the creation of the US welfare state. And disruptive protests have also slowed down the adoption of the austerity measures which have eroded welfare states across the high-income democracies for the past 40 years.

Colonialism was met with ongoing resistance and protest in almost every instance, including Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience, as well as more militant campaigns. This grew throughout the 20th century, until maintaining occupation ultimately proved unmanageable for the colonial powers.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

These far-right white nationalists are so afraid of being a minority that they will breed additional idiots to reduce the amount of representation afforded to progressives and people of color.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago

Exactly. Some of these vigilantes are using this act as a cover to conduct violence against LGBT people.

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

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

As written in 411 BCE by Aristophanes as Lysistrata

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Kevin Rose (Digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit co-founder) just acquired Digg together, so we'll have to see how it goes. But I don't need to wait for Digg to resurrect itself when Lemmy is already right here.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I found the headline misleading because the phrase Signal security failure (with no quotes) could be incorrectly interpreted as Signal's security failure instead of what it actually is, the Trump administration's security failure. It's not Signal's fault that the Trump administration is incompetent, and the headline writer should have been more careful to make this clear.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The difference between Wikipedia and Facebook is that Wikipedia content is under a Creative Commons license which allows the entire encyclopedia to be forked and the underlying software (MediaWiki) is free and open source. The entire Wikipedia database is continuously mirrored to servers in countries outside of the US, so Wikipedia can be resurrected in any other country if the situation you describe happens. In contrast, any Facebook content would be lost due to adverse government action.

Asking people to stop using Wikipedia is like asking people to stop using Linux because the Linux Kernel Organization is based in the US (California), despite Windows and macOS also being US-based. There's no comparable non-US alternative to either Wikipedia or Linux, and the projects can be forked to different countries by their contributors without any action from the projects' managing organizations. If you boycott Wikipedia, you also play into the hands of Elon Musk and other agitators who are attacking Wikipedia in an effort to redirect the public to right-wing US media sources.

Finally, part of my point was that Britannica is not an improvement over Wikipedia, because Britannica is also US-based. This is the reason I mentioned that Wikipedia editors are mostly from outside the US.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, you have it reversed. The red (2020-24) is more recent than the blue (2015-19).

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The author claims to be vegan, but also says that they will "stick to eating eggs" (which are not a vegan food) because they consider starvation a form of (non-vegan) self-cannibalism, which is absurd.

68
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by taipan@lemmy.world to c/uspolitics@lemmy.world
 

At 78 years, 4 months and 22 days of age, Donald Trump is the oldest major-party presidential nominee in history, after President Joe Biden withdrew from contention prior to becoming the nominee of his own party in the 2024 United States presidential election. If elected, by the end of his term he would become the oldest person ever to hold the office, sparking renewed discussion of his fitness to assume the presidency. Since the early days of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, his physical and mental health have been a subject of public debate. Trump was 70 years old when he first took office, surpassing Ronald Reagan as the oldest person to assume the presidency to that date. During Trump's presidency, comments on his age, weight, lifestyle, and history of heart disease raised questions about his physical health. In addition, numerous public figures, media sources, and mental health professionals have speculated that Trump may have mental health impairments, ranging from narcissistic personality disorder to some form of dementia, which runs in his family.

 
 
 
 

As the deadline expired yesterday for the Maduro government in Venezuela to show detailed poll-by-poll voting records, opposition candidate Edmundo González was recognized as president-elect of Venezuela by the governments of Argentina, the United States and Uruguay. (Peru already recognized him on Tuesday).

But on the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, there was no sign this week that the Maduro government was reconsidering its strategy of claiming victory and seeking to crush dissent through force.

On Friday, the opposition reported that its headquarters, El Bejucal in the Caracas district of Altamira, was raided and vandalized overnight by a group of six armed and hooded men wearing camouflage.

Arrests of volunteer poll workers continued across the country, as the government sought to prevent the opposition from uploading digitized receipts from individual polls that show the opposition with a margin of victory of more than two-to-one.

Venezuelan social media is full of videos of raids showing opposition volunteers being dragged from their homes. In some cases, angry crowds have attempted to prevent the arrests.

Venezuelans have also been posting videos of uniformed foreigners on the streets of Caracas, including Cubans and a soldier wearing the insignia of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary group linked to the Kremlin that has played a major role in wars in Ukraine and various parts of Africa.

Others have tracked flights arriving from Cuba, or photographed Russian aircraft landing in Caracas.

view more: next ›