SDF Chatter

Everyone's favorite PTB, @flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com banned me from multiple communities and an entire unrelated instance for showing people that they make up reasons to ban people and protect their in-group.

This is not surprising, since they are by far the most ban-happy instance on fedi, and @flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com likes to ingest comment histories into an LLM to confirm their biases.

Here's the fun:

My favorite part is when they asked why I keep discussing pointless drama in the pointless drama community.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/54688484

Archived

On June 16, between 18:00 and 21:00, the rights organization Safeguard Defenders (SD) releases its latest report: Behind Bars - A Survey on Detention Centre Conditions in China.

[...]

The event, at Grémio Literário in Chiado, Lisbon, features direct testimony from two former European detainees: Peter Dahlin (Sweden) and Peter Humphrey (United Kingdom). Joining them is Grace Chen (Canada), former legal adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

In recent days, there have been at least two attempts to cancel or disrupt the Lisbon event.

In a letter dated June 5, the Embassy urged the American Club of Lisbon to reconsider "offering a platform for actions that vilify China".

[...]

Days later, on June 12, one of the many X accounts impersonating Safeguard Defenders posted a doctored copy of the event poster. The fake changed the date, time, venue and location to mislead potential attendees. The same account pushed the false details to other users in the China human rights space by direct message.

[...]

The move against the Lisbon event is only the latest in a long line of PRC attempts - many of them successful - to suppress information that exposes widespread, systematic human rights abuse in China. Recent examples include pressure on German cities to drop their support for Tibet, and the cancellation of RightsCon in Zambia after sustained PRC pressure on the local government.

The CCP's "red line" on any public discussion of its rights record - anywhere - is the flip side of its propaganda and influence machine. To advance an increasingly aggressive agenda at home and abroad, the Party works to set and police every narrative about China. Anything that contradicts it must be silenced.

These efforts violate fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in international treaties, regional instruments, and democratic constitutions. When the PRC suppresses those rights on foreign soil, it commits transnational repression and an unacceptable breach of sovereignty.

[...]

The report

Behind Bars - A Survey on Detention Conditions in China draws on interviews with 84 former detainees. It finds that shocking abuses continue without relent across the country's 2,600-plus facilities, set for release June 16.

These include police beatings, the illegal denial of access to lawyers, and the use of inmate enforcers to keep order through intimidation and violence.

The report also compares domestic and international law and reviews legal commentary, tracing these abuses to the absence of clear protections for detention centers, exploitable legal loopholes, and weak oversight of detention-center police and practices.

As China's surveillance state shrinks the pool of public data and makes speaking out riskier, Behind Bars is a vital addition to the evidence on the systematic abuse of detainees - Chinese and foreign alike.

It is the first of two reports. A companion survey on prison conditions in China follows July 18.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/54690450

China has witnessed the greatest stretch of sustained growth and poverty alleviation in human history, made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions workers. A new book recounts the life of one of them offering a glimpse into the dark side of China’s success.

Archived

Behind the broader narrative of [China's] marvelous macroeconomic success lie the stories of hundreds of millions of exploited Chinese workers thrust into a new capitalist paradigm. Inseparable from China’s growth was the largest urbanization project in world history. As China developed its manufacturing ecosystem, hundreds of millions of rural peasants flooded into coastal cities, chasing the economic opportunities brought by new factory jobs. In the cities, they searched for an escape from rural poverty but encountered the horrors of industrial capitalism.

[...]

A drift in the South is the memoir of one of these workers, Xiao Hai, a poet who has spent much of his adolescence and twenties toiling in the harshest jobs available to Chinese workers.

Like many rural Chinese, his parents covertly circumvented the one-child policy, making him an “over-quota child.” This meant that he would have to be given away to another family for five years to avoid harsh government punishment for having multiple children. While his parents managed to avoid being reprimanded, the cost of supporting two children to study past working age was too heavy to bear, so at fifteen, Xiao left school to become a child laborer.

[...]

Appropriately, Xiao’s journey through the South begins there. His first job is at a large factory on an assembly line putting together battery boxes with a screwdriver. There he works fifteen hours a day and takes one day off each month. For his long hours, he enjoys a meager monthly salary of ¥400, approximately $48. One day, exhausted at work, he dozes off during an overnight shift and is woken by a blade that slices open his index finger, creating a painful wound that gushes blood. His manager comes over, wraps his finger with gauze, and tells him to finish his shift.

At the end of his day, he notices that a fragment of poisonous plastic from the blade has gone into his bleeding wound and has created an infection. Without access to medical services, Xiao must rely on makeshift treatment from a coworker who disinfects the wound with a lighter and a sewing needle.

[...]

Stories like this are often lost in breathless accounts of China’s development that rightly point out how extraordinarily successful Shenzhen and other manufacturing hubs have been. Xiao reminds us that this success was built on the backs of millions of workers who felt the worst of capitalist exploitation.

[...]

Commentators on China often reject comparisons between China and the West by pointing to cultural differences like those between Confucian thought and Protestantism. But Xiao’s autobiography shows that, under capitalism, our cultures are increasingly similar. Xiao’s accounts of factory life tap into something universal within capitalism: the degradation and alienation of work. But alongside universal suffering there is, Xiao insists, also the universal desire for freedom from exploitation. The book ends with these lines: “I have but one humble wish: to live like a human, with dignity. That’s all I can ask for. That’s all.” In a better world beyond capitalism, Xiao’s wish wouldn’t be “humble,” but a basic right guaranteed for everyone.

[...]

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/world/europe/uk-russia-shadow-fleet-oil-tanker-channel.html

Britain’s armed forces have for the first time intercepted and seized control of a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker sailing in the English Channel, the British Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

Royal Marine Commandos and specially trained law enforcement officers boarded the vessel early Sunday in a military operation that lasted six hours and that was supported by British military ships and aircraft, the ministry said in a statement.

The intercepted tanker, the Smyrtos, will be held and monitored off the southern coast of England, the ministry added.

The interception of the Smyrtos was the first time that British forces had acted alone to stop a ship in the shadow fleet and the first such operation in the English Channel, the Defense Ministry said.

This year, the British military assisted the United States in seizing an oil tanker, the Marinera, in the waters between Iceland and Scotland. American officials said the ship had violated sanctions by carrying oil for Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

After that operation, the British government had said it was exploring how British forces could take similar action against sanctioned vessels traveling through its waters. In March, Mr. Starmer decided British armed forces and law enforcement officers could board shadow fleet vessels in accordance with international law, the Defense Ministry said.

This month, President Emmanuel Macron of France said his country had intercepted an oil tanker thought to be part of the Russian shadow fleet. That vessel, the Tagor, was detained with British support in the Atlantic Ocean, around 400 nautical miles west of Brittany. It was the fourth suspected shadow fleet vessel that France has boarded since September 2025, according to the French authorities.

In a statement issued this year, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that European countries had come up “with the notion of a ‘shadow fleet,’ which does not exist in international maritime law and is being used as a cover for acts of piracy on maritime routes.”

Around $90 million per year in additional funding will bolster King County's roads division thanks to the 5-4 vote, with a small pass-through program providing a slice of the pie to local cities and towns. A provision capping Seattle's cut of that funding was ultimately defeated.

https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/world/middleeast/oman-iran-trump-threat.html

As the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran inflames tensions across the Middle East, the sleepy sultanate of Oman has found itself in the cross hairs of the Trump administration and at odds with its Gulf Arab neighbors — perceived by some as too sympathetic to Iran, according to analysts.

“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up,” Mr. Trump told reporters on in late May. “They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Oman has facilitated talks between the United States and Iran for years and maintains that it is still playing its traditional role as a neutral mediator, advocating regional stability.

In the lead-up to the current war, Oman was mediating between the United States and Iran.

It became clear that Oman had a different view of those talks from Mr. Trump in late February, when Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, gave an unusually frank interview to CBS. He argued that a peace deal was “within our reach, if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there.”

The Omani foreign minister’s remarks ruffled feathers, said Marc Sievers, who was the American ambassador from 2016 until 2019.

“He depicted the Iranian position as quite reasonable — and I think that made a lot of people in Washington angry,” he said.

Soon after, Mr. al-Busaidi held a meeting with Omani journalists in which he told them that the war lacked legal legitimacy, the Oman Daily newspaper reported.

In March, while other Gulf states that host American military bases were getting pummeled by Iranian missiles and drones, Oman’s leader, Sultan Haitham, sent a message of congratulations to Iran’s newly selected supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.

“There is the questioning, has Oman gone rogue?” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University.

The Strait of Hormuz, a crucial global waterway, has been effectively blocked during the war, impeding the ability of fossil fuel-rich Gulf countries to export oil and gas and sending global energy prices skyrocketing. But because Oman has ports on the Arabian Sea, hundreds of miles outside the strait, it can still export oil without impediment.

Then last month, it emerged that Oman had discussed partnering with Iran to charge service fees for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz — ignoring the Trump administration’s warnings against this.

After a fatal strike on Kuwait’s international airport last week, Oman condemned the attack, though it did not name Iran. Instead, the government expressed its “rejection of all military acts that undermine the region’s security” — a veiled reference to not only Iran, but also to Israel and the United States.

Oman’s experience is just one example of how the conflict has often widened fractures between countries.

On Jun. 12, 2026, 11 A-10C Thunderbolt II aircraft, belonging to the 75th Fighter Squadron of the 23rd Wing, from Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, arrived at RAF Lakenheath, UK, from Aviano Air Base, Italy, on their way back to the U.S. following their deployment to the CENTCOM AOR (Area Of Responsibility). During the deployment, they took part in Operation Epic Fury and also carried out missions over Iraq and Syria.

As per tradition, during their stay at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, the Warthogs received nose art along with bomb markings. For what deals the nicknames, based on the photos taken by our contributor and friend Stewart Jack, most appear to follow a Nintendo/Super Smash Bros. theme we had already identified from photos released by CENTCOM, with references including King Dedede, Fox, Diddy Kong, Samus, Sephiroth, Little Mac, Kirby and Ridley. Macho Man, Reaper” and Doc Holiday seem to be possible outliers from the video-games theme.

One notable missing A-10C is the one nicknamed “Toad” (#78-0614), that was depicted in the official Operation Epic Fury imagery in March. Its fate is currently unknown so we can’t rule out it is the Thunderbolt II aircraft lost during the air war in Iran..

Sorry, I'm high, I don't know if this is going to make any sense

I have a board game called Disney villainous and most of its expansions. My aunt told me the only reason they make expansions is to make more money.

She's right, Disney's primary goal in making board games is to make money. But my question is so what? Seriously, as opposed to what? What would be the non-cynical reason they would make more board games? Each expansion does add new elements, creativity and fun are also goals of the makers. But yeah, the primary goal is money. I just don't get why my aunt felt a need to point that out. Yes, they're doing it for money. What is the alternative reason you're suggesting they should be doing it? I think it was that she thought they were claiming the expansions were necessary when they're really optional.

ive been using the following

tuba: gui mastodon client interstellar: lemmy client signal: Private messaging riff: spotify client alligator : rss feed rnote : note taking & sketching

Sigma SD14 (Foveon X3®), Sigma AF 100-300mm f/4.5-6.7 DL, ƒ/5.6, 1/20s handheld, 168mm, ISO 21, 4.7Mpx, ☀, P, AF-S, multi-segment pattern metered, Sigma Photo Pro 5.5.3, Foveon X3® Fill Light +0.2, Eastman Kodak ProPhoto RGB. © All rights reserved.

More and more stores are putting in those stupid turnstyles or electronic gates so you can't just go back the way you came. Leaving the only way out via the tills, that are closed and gated so you have to push through the self checkout, lord help you if you stuck a coin in the trolley, they don't have what you came in for and now you got to get through a till with an empty trolley so you can get it back.

It's even worse with the shops that have an opticians or chemist in them that you can't get to thanks to the one way exit gates.

Aarrgghhh.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/61745853

The reasons of his departure? Military AI, surveillance of Europeans, ethical principles erased.

René Mayrhofer has been protecting the security of your Android smartphone for nine years. He just quit Google for a reason that directly concerns you: the company signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its AI for classified operations, and the man who secured your smartphone believes these tools will “probably be used against” European citizens.

Here is the rest of article in French: https://www.lesnumeriques.com/societe-numerique/la-direction-a-perdu-toute-boussole-morale-le-chef-de-la-securite-d-android-claque-la-porte-de-google-n257431.html

What's the hurry?

Wow! What a great idea!

Leave a comment below with a content prompt! You decide what it is! It could be anything!

See a prompt you like? Create a content with it as inspiration! Drawing, video, poetry, whatever! You decide the content type!

I'm excited to see your content prompts and the contents they inspire!

Found an adorable pair. Baby is under mom in the first pic but I got one of them both escaping my gaze.