You all know and love debunking. But have you heard of pre-bunking?
One approach is so-called “pre-bunking” - the targeted presentation of other perspectives and fact-based information. This involves being proactive instead of just reacting. In other words, not just trying to refute disinformation after the fact.
Check out the big brain on Mr. Osintguy. I spent way too much time looking at their sponsors. You can find the funniest shit in their mission statements:
PulseOfEurope: Defend the heart of Europe – with your vote.
iac Berlin: Understanding and developing relational approaches in the field of philanthropy
Relational approaches are increasingly recognized for their potential to support sustainable solutions and to nurture greater resilience while navigating complex challenges.
The good Lobby: We democratise lobbying
Toguna Leadership:
What do we see as the art of leading people? To be an invested sparring partner as those we lead wrestle with the most fundamental questions, we all bring to work and life: Does my contribution matter? Do I belong (here)? Will I stay relevant and have a future (here)?
Front Europjeski: Literally just "European Front", I guess Eastern Front was too on the nose?
Very clever puzzle game. Combines Sokoban-like block pushing with predicate logic. So for example, if you create a rule like "Walls is you", you now control the walls, or you can undo an existing "Walls is stop"-rule and the walls are now non-colliding. The rules themselves are created/destroyed by pushing three blocks together: object IS property.
https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2024/04/25/pro-israel-american-academic-cries-of-islamo-fascist-mob-claims-malaysia-unsafe-for-travellers-despite-spending-days-here/130755
KUALA LUMPUR, April 25 — Pro-Israel academic Bruce Gilley whose events were cancelled by the Ministry of Higher Education has now accused Malaysia of being an “unsafe”...
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm
So there is a report going around (originally by Der Spiegel and ZDF), based on "research" by Adrian Zenz, about German companies' involvement in Uyghur oppression. I couldn't find the document that Zenz is basing this on.
In this article, though not directly related to the allegations against BASF and VW, they put a face to Uyghur oppression: Gulpiya Qazybek, a Kazakh woman from Xinjiang (left for Almaty in 2019), confesses her involvement in spying on people and even helping detain them. She says her own mother was also imprisoned.
I read through a bunch of articles based on interviews with her, the first one I could find is from 2021 (see sources at the end).
I found some discrepancies:
None of the pre-2024 articles mention her being complicit. The older articles are just about her mother being in prison.
According to Der Spiegel, her mother was 65 in 2017, but according to Eurasianet, she was 78 in 2022.
According to Der Spiegel (Feb 2024), the mother was released and put under house arrest in autumn of 2023. The Telegraph article (Jan 2024) does not mention this, but says "Gulpyia campaigns relentlessly for the Chinese government to free her elderly mother", implying she is still imprisoned.
According to Der Spiegel, two of them were responsible for monitoring 12 families. The Telegraph article, however, says "she was ordered to monitor 60 families".
According to Der Spiegel, the mother was sentenced to 15 years. All the other articles say 12.
In 2021 New East Archive article, the timeline is: The mother gets detained more than 5 years ago, turns up in the hospital several months later. They get told that she was sentenced by a court 8 months after that. In the 2024 Telegraph story, the mother gets detained by the end of 2017, then, 8 months later, she is in the hospital, and then, the following year, they are told of her sentencing. So this "8 months" figure is after the hospital in story one, but before the hospital in story two. And the detention in story one cannot possibly take place by the end of 2017 (as in story two), because it is supposedly more than 5 years before Dec 2021, i.e. 2016 or earlier.
In the 2021 New East Archive article, she says she "know[s] of people who sleep in their clothes in case they are detained in the night." In the 2022 Meduza story, the people sleeping in their clothes are her relatives. In the 2024 Der Spiegel article, the people doing this are farmers, but she ("we") eventually did that also. This anecdote goes from basically hearsay to something that happened to her personally.
In the New East Archive story, her mother tells her she is in the hospital because she was kicked in the chest during interrogation, and there is no mention of any other health condition. In the Telegraph article, her mother "had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and her health was failing". Though the mother does does also tell her "they beat me."
https://nitter.cz/muenchen_bunt/status/1728689367416205507
Radlibs love this cursed French-German propaganda channel
arte ultras :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"
"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"
"How very intuitive are these menus!"
"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
@trompete
@hexbear.net