taipan

joined 4 months ago
[–] taipan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They're nothing special. Look up "shredded memory foam pillow" on your favorite big retailer's website and you'll find a better deal, especially when you add the shipping fee.

 

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.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It is lemmy.ml's fault that their moderators have been blocking users who criticize China or Russia from unrelated communities like the Linux one. A user's ability to participate in a Linux community should not depend on them refraining from posting criticism about China or Russia. Defederation protects lemmy.world users from having to self-censor themselves politically to participate in general interest communities.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Your conspiracy theory accusing Meta of being responsible for lemmy.world users wanting to defederate from lemmy.ml is ridiculous. Nobody forced lemmy.ml moderators to block people who criticize China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism from all of their communities.

These lemmy.ml moderators made these bad choices all by themselves without Meta's help, and lemmy.world has the right to exclude those communities through defederation so that no lemmy.world user has to worry about whether their comment to a front page post goes against a lemmy.ml moderator's political ideology.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

lemmy.ml has changed their level of transparency about their political leanings twice. Look at the history of their home page description:

April 2021 to June 2021:

The flagship instance of lemmy.

June 2021 to November 2022:

A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

November 2022 to now:

A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Nobody is saying that there should be no moderation at all. What we are saying is that lemmy.ml moderators tend to remove users and content that are seen as even mildly critical of China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism, and then sometimes hide the evidence of the removals from the modlog. That's not acceptable to many people, including me.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

I know that and that's why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.

[–] taipan@lemmy.world 45 points 4 months ago (6 children)

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn't obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it's unmistakable that the ".ml" in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.