Interesting that the BBC article omits the words of Christopher Staker entirely when he spoke at length on behalf of Israel as well.

I guess too much of that was too reminiscent of his defence of Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya.

Putting aside all the issues with any foreign national fighting on behalf of other nations in the least complicated scenarios, in the current Pacific context and with Australia’s position against China’s growing involvement in the region I find it hard to believe the entanglements this would potentially produce aren’t considered a fringe benefit.

A country is in a pretty dismal state when the two largest factions are simply arguing between ethnic cleansing and genocide.

“CPJ is deeply alarmed by the pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “The killing of the family members of journalists in Gaza is making it almost impossible for the journalists to continue reporting, as the risk now extends beyond them also to include their beloved ones.”

Bombing civilians is not a trait of Jewish people. Using access to humanitarian aid and water as a weapon of war is not a trait of Jewish people. Destroying the healthcare systems supporting 2 million people is not a trait of Jewish people.

The US has a major party that is stuffed to the gills with Ur-fascists, Christian nationalists and white supremacists. Do you really think there’s no understanding from those elements of the Republican Party of what’s being done in attempting to cast opposition to the crimes of the Israeli government as opposition to Jewish people in general?

If you’re carrying sensitive data on your person across international borders, regardless of whose, you’re doing it wrong.

Apartheid as a regime is never the victim by definition.

In binding them by law, in making non-participation in that regime of apartheid the act of a true outlaw, the unwilling and the unaware within the oppressor group are victims. But of the regime, not the oppressed.

Choose who you lash out at carefully lest you find yourself acting for the regime rather than against it.

Ethnonationalists sure love DARVO.

Considering the US far right’s evident interest in insurrection it’s almost a little surprising this wasn’t the lead case. The more non-white military officers the more difficult it would be for US fascists to put together an openly white supremacist coup.

Stop using Google services and products in general ideally. They’ve become a fundamental threat to a functional web.

My experience of Epic exclusives is that most become things that are never on my radar again, even after the exclusive period.

I take it from this increase in rates that I’m far from alone in that regard.

Mastodon’s search is restricted to hashtags and users only as a design choice. Full text search isn’t implemented on all instances and where it is only searches your own content, not that of others. The first impression I’ve seen from people not already familiar with the choice is that Mastodon’s search is simply broken, such is the expectation for true full text search across information systems generally.

The restriction means you’re absolutely dependent on conversations centring around a hashtag that is both consistently used by participants and that you know to look for. In practice a lot of conversations don’t work that way.

Content goes untagged, crucially because an originator has no reason to expect a post to turn into a thread when they start it. It not always possible to deduce what the hashtag might be on a topic you’re interested in, particularly when we’re talking about events occurring in real time. It gets even worse when we add regional dialects and different languages to the mix.

Some of this is addressable by having specific, disciplinary based scientific instances and hoping people use them. A planned structure of some sort so you could know where to look. There’s elements of that now.

Contrast this with Bluesky’s very powerful (if currently extremely painful to set up) published feeds system and I think Mastodon’s going to struggle a bit in this space. In my orbit (primarily social policy and support) Bluesky already seems to be winning out even behind the invite wall primarily because conversations and their participants are more discoverable and the control offered over their presentation at both an individual and community level.

The search limitations on Mastodon are unfortunately a major issue in science / research orbits.

The search paradigm on Mastodon greatly reduces the platform’s usefulness and I expect presents to many users as simply being broken rather than an intentional choice.

Google still does some specific things better, coding searches for instance, but if you haven’t tried DuckDuckGo as your daily driver it’s well worth a shot.

It’s perhaps not what Google once was, but it’s far more than Google is. Plus if you need to fallback to Google for something specific it’s only a !g away.

Hopefully the remasters do well enough to demonstrate an interested market.

It’s the X from AGFA Monotype Special Alphabets 4.

https://catalog.monotype.com/font/monotype/special-alphabets/4

The @ is also being dropped and all usernames are now in the format “xXusernameXx”

For any question the number of incorrect answers is larger than the number of correct answers.

This is a fundamental problem, constrained by energy costs, and one that will only be exacerbated as training datasets becomes more and more tainted by generated content.