flamingos

joined 2 years ago
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[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I’m not anti asylum seeker. I’m anti people taking advantage of the system for legitimate asylum seekers.

Unless you're from Ukraine or Hong Kong, there's no way to claim asylum in the UK that doesn't first involve entering the country illegally.

I can’t remember the statistic, but the majority of asylum seekers don’t even come over in small boats.

About half of asylum applicants come across in boats.

I’m talking about the widely condemned human trafficking industry that takes advantage of our system to make a business of bringing people across the channel.

I also want to stop the boats and the exploitative gangs doing this, but any approach that isn't opening up safe and legal routes for applications to be made is just advocating for everyone else to bear the burden of global instability the UK played a disproportionate role in creating.

Also in addition, there’s been attempted pogroms here.

I assume you mean there hasn't. I think it's a pretty apt way to describe a mob descending on a hotel to try and burn it down because asylum seekers are inside.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 6 points 2 days ago (4 children)

This is why people come over in small boats from France, because they see our empathy as something to be taken advantage of. And it works for them.

I don't know how you can see abysmal living conditions, hate crime and being subjected to attempted pogroms as 'works for them'. I've linked you stuff in the past telling about how bad conditions are for asylum seekers, I'm honestly getting sick of pushing back on your vibes based, callous anti-asylum seeker rhetoric for it to constantly fall on deaf ears.

 

In February 2020, far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg, giving interviews to Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT and meeting figures linked to Russian nationalist movements. Since then, questions have long swirled about his Russian connections and the sources of his funding amid mounting legal debts.

Byline Times can now reveal that years before that trip to Russia, Robinson was hired as a “goodwill ambassador” for an unregistered charity fronting a secretive Russian propaganda network that worked directly for President Vladimir Putin’s administration, and has ties to a sanctioned Russian state-linked oil giant.

The unregistered charity – the MMBF Trust – is part of a network centred around the London Post.

At first glance, the London Post resembles a local news website covering UK gambling regulations and London restaurant reviews. It has featured articles about Borough Market’s grocery ordering service, and good spots for ramen.

But sources who spoke to Byline Times described it as part of what intelligence analysts call a ‘black PR’ operation: coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion while concealing their true sponsors.

 

Paywall bypass

Lord Peter Mandelson leaked a sensitive UK government document to Jeffrey Epstein while he was business secretary that proposed £20bn of asset sales and revealed Labour’s tax policy plans.

The memo, dubbed “Business Issues”, was written on June 13 2009 by Nick Butler, who at the time was special adviser to the then prime minister Gordon Brown.

The confidential document, which was released by the US Department of Justice as part of a tranche of millions of files relating to Epstein, had been sent to British government officials including cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood.

The memo called for a boost to private sector investment in the wake of the financial crash via tax incentives.

“The only major device available to government is a further extension of the capital allowances announced in the Budget,” Butler argued. “We should consider raising the capital allowance on new investment to 75 per cent (or even more) for the remainder of this tax year.”

He also said Brown should authorise asset sales “of even £20bn” to relieve the debt burden, reduce borrowing costs and provide funds for new investment.

“It would also enable us to go into the election with a pledge not to make any further increase in corporate or top rate income taxes in the next parliament,” Butler wrote.

The highly sensitive document was forwarded by Mandelson to Epstein on the same day with the comment: “Interesting note that’s gone to the PM.”

Epstein replied: “What salable assets?”

“Land, property I guess,” Mandelson responded.

The Labour government announced the plans for the asset sale four months later, suggesting that £16bn could be raised through the disposals.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 26 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Why not point to both? Now that most of the tech crowd left Reddit after the 2023 API shutdown, the average Redditor isn’t ready to go through a lot of hoops to get to a new platform. See also https://lawsofux.com/choice-overload/

This! But it does draw into question Piefed's decision to an instance chooser into the registration page.

I going to stop engaging with this stuff now. I'm just so sick of this inane inter-software fighting. Piefed does some nice things, Lemmy does some nice things, both have questionable aspects. That's just software, baby!

Instead you should do something fun, like listen to this dope album out of Czechia.

 

Full clarity, I edited this so that the image wasn't miles long, full original can be seen here.

 
 
 
 

Early today, the Department of Justice released more than three million pages of files connected to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And as people have started digging into all the new emails and documents, we are learning a lot more about Epstein and his elite inner circle. Oh, and apparently, he would sometimes send people links to porn featuring characters from Five Nights at Freddy’s.

On May 4, 2017, Epstein sent a message to Karyna Shuliak, his last known girlfriend, that simply contained a link to an animated gif uploaded to 4chan that featured multiple characters from FNAF engaging in sexual activities. The animation was apparently made in Source Filmmaker and was shared on 4chan in April 2017. Epstein simply commented “amazing animations” in the subject line of the email.

 

The High Court has refused permission to the transphobic group Sex Matters, who wanted to challenge trans inclusion at Hampstead Heath ponds.

This decision is a major setback for Sex Matters, which raised more than £65,000 to try and force the pond to ban trans people, trying to go against regular swimmers. More than 32,000 people said they wanted the ponds to remain trans inclusive – 86% of the respondents to the consultation by the City of London, published today. This followed previous votes overwhelmingly supporting trans pond users, and a petition with over 14,000 signatures asking to keep the ponds inclusive.

Sex Matters were refused permission on the basis that their challenge was premature, given the ongoing consultation.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If you mean the episode that dropped yesterday, no. Season 2's final is next week.

 

The different regional channels have varing episodes up, by Prime Video Philippines has the whole season.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you sort by 'Top Month' Lemmy will rank it by MAUs.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I was curious to see how they handle this on the fedi side, because they obviously can't stop you from uploading images to other instances, so decided to do some digging myself.

The fedi code for this is here and looks like this:

# Alert regarding fascist meme content
if site.enable_chan_image_filter and toxic_community and img_width < 2000:  # images > 2000px tend to be real photos instead of 4chan screenshots.
    if os.environ.get('ALLOW_4CHAN', None) is None:
        try:
            image_text = pytesseract.image_to_string(
                Image.open(BytesIO(source_image)).convert('L'), timeout=30)
        except Exception:
            image_text = ''
        if 'Anonymous' in image_text and (
                'No.' in image_text or ' N0' in image_text):  # chan posts usually contain the text 'Anonymous' and ' No.12345'
            post = session.query(Post).filter_by(image_id=file.id).first()
            targets_data = {'gen': '0',
                            'post_id': post.id,
                            'orig_post_title': post.title,
                            'orig_post_body': post.body
                            }
            notification = Notification(title='Review this',
                                        user_id=1,
                                        author_id=post.user_id,
                                        url=post.slug,
                                        notif_type=NOTIF_REPORT,
                                        subtype='post_with_suspicious_image',
                                        targets=targets_data)
            session.add(notification)
            session.commit()

The curious thing here, apart from there being both an environmental variable and site setting for this, is the toxic_community variable. This seems to be a renaming of the low_quality field Piefed applies to communities, which are just communities with either memes or shitpost in their name.

You also don't get social credits docked for this.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sorry I misspoke, when I said it wouldn't work I was thinking of the negative knock-on effects that make this approach unworkable, not that it was entirely ineffective. What I'm trying to get at is that there were more effective options that the government for achieving it's stated goals, only allowing legal adults to access pornography, that didn't require you to send a picture of your ID or face to every website that happens to have nudes on it. But other, more privacy-friendly approaches wouldn't make adults hesitant to access porn websites and I think this quality of the current approach was a desirable effect.

Obviously it’s not the case that everything popular with the public is popular with politicians for the same reason, but if something is popular with the public you need quite a good reason to believe that politicians are in favour of it for some other motivation, and with all of that, we just don’t have that good reason.

I think politicians hating the concept of porn and liking the idea of having your real identity linked to your social media accounts are actually pretty good explanations for the government knowingly going with an inferior approach to all this.

Again, I think we're at an impasse, you're giving the former government a level charitably I can't. That's not to say prospective is unreasonable, I think it's perfectly reasonable, I just don't believe it.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is just getting into pure speculation now, neither of us knows for sure. It just lines up too perfectly with the Tories history of anti-porn stances for me to believe that it wasn't a motivating factor in choosing this approach to others that were pitched to the government (the lobbying from the age verification industry probably helped as well).

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 18 points 1 week ago

So wait, they pull in Tesseract and don't use it to make search better? Talk about missed opportunity.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

The government absolutely has access to people with the knowledge to tell them that this approach wouldn't work, Aylo (the company who owns Pornhub) has been advocating for device based age verification for years (Yes, Aylo are a shitty company, but they're right about this and have been vocal about it). But sure, a piece of Tory legislation, the same Tories who banned porn with bondage and even women ejaculating in 2014, didn't choose this approach because it'd discourage adults accessing porn.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nah, the woman below the wing mirror is totally gen AI, the text just screams it. Also, I'm not convinced by the Jesus below Trump.

 
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